Новости за 20.11.2015

French Mirage Fighter Jet. “They who put out people’s eyes reproach them of their blindness.” — John Milton Just months after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, Parisians are again coping with urban terrorism. Again there is shock, incomprehension, and finally, postures of defiance. No doubt any nation’s population would respond in like fashion. The world watches More

If you're one of the millions of Americans who think Hillary Clinton would make a lousy president, then pat yourself on the back because she pretty much proved it yesterday. In a presentation to the Council on Foreign Relations, Clinton made it clear that if she's elected in 2016, she's going to drag the country straight to war. Invoking the same imagery as her ideological twin, George W. Bush, Clinton fulminated for more than an hour and a half on Syria, war, terrorism, war, no-fly zones, war, radical jihadism... Читать дальше...

I received a message from one of my friends in Lebanon who asked with feigned curiosity why the U.S. media only gave a passing reference to the bombing in Beirut before turning to non-stop coverage of the attacks in Paris. Of course, like many of us she already knew the answer – that in the consciousness of the White West there is a premium on the value of White life. Acknowledging this fact is neither new nor should it be particularly controversial. Its obviousness is apparent to anyone who is honest. Читать дальше...

A Post-Mortem of the 2016 Elections It has been clear for some time that next year’s Presidential election would finally relieve the world of the Bushes or the Clintons or both. That was the good news. Better still: because Jeb Bush’s campaign is faltering, the Bushes could be finished sooner than anyone, a month or More

Few remember that a high level delegation from India, Brazil and South Africa visited Damascus in August 2011 with a plea for peace. Several respected diplomats made the trip. Dilip Sinha (recently retired as India’s ambassador to the UN in Geneva), Paulo Cordeiro de Andrade Pinto (Undersecretary of Foreign Affairs, Brazil), and Ebrahim Ebrahim (Deputy More

In politics as in medicine, excessively mild remedies are typically based on overly placid diagnoses. Look, for example, at the highly esteemed Columbia University historian Eric Foner’s recent letter of congratulations and advice to Democratic Party presidential candidate Bernie Sanders in The Nation. As I have argued in a previous CounterPunch essay, Foner’s missive failed More

Paris. The mass bombing in Paris points out the inconsistencies in French Middle East diplomacy. In September 2007, President Nicolas Sarkozy received Muammar Gaddafi lavishly for a five-day visit, graciously allowing the Libyan leader to set up his tent in the gardens of the official residence in Marigny when he visited Paris in December 2007 More

The terrorist threat posed by the barbarians of Islamic State is clearly of most serious concern to much of the world — but there are other threats of equal immediacy, not the least being the determination of Washington to continue confronting Russia and China. The US Navy Times headline of November 5 summed up Washington’s More

In 2004, when I was working at the Union of Concerned Scientists, I had an interesting email exchange with my fellow countryman and ardent climate change columnist, George Monbiot. This was before he went to the dark side and became a nuclear power apologist.  We were discussing climate skeptics and, as we did so, I More

Montpellier, France.   Faced with the shock of the bloody attacks in Paris on Friday the 13th, the overall reaction of the French people (and media) was humane and peaceful, in a spirit of unity and solidarity. Muslim religious leaders gathered at the Grand Mosque in Paris to denounce the attacks and disown the jihadist More

Targeting Earth First! More

Paris. ‘Islam – this is the enemy!’ Doesn’t this remind you of something? [Léon] Gambetta, the man who in 1870 left a besieged Paris in a hot-air balloon to organize resistance from the provinces declared in 1877 a war on clericalism “Le cléricalisme, voila l’ennemi!”. Gambetta subverted the catch cry (a ‘moral order’) of the More

Jeb Bush and Donald Trump, both very wealthy men who made their fortunes from real estate and other business endeavors, and were born into positions of great privilege, do not think much of American wage earners. When questioned at the last debate whether he sympathizes with protesters demanding an increase in minimum wage, which is significantly below More

In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, some of us tried to raise questions of U.S. foreign policy. I got my mic cut on O’Reilly’s show. Others got far worse — a friend basically felt he had to move out of his neighborhood he was so reviled for criticizing the U.S.’s militarism. Oh, yeah, and More

The week of Obama’s visit: 35,000 walruses haul out onto an Alaskan beach due to missing sea ice. Source: canadajournal.net. Rolling Stone reporter Jeff Goodell tagged along on President Obama’s recent climate-change themed trip to Alaska. Goodell’s report included an interview with the President. The interview provides a window into central features of Barack Obama’s More

The recent surge in U.S. arms transfers to the Middle East is part of an unprecedented boom in major U.S. arms sales that has been presided over by the Obama administration. The majority of the Obama administration’s major arms sales have gone to the Middle East and Persian Gulf, with Saudi Arabia topping the list More

A jury trial is underway in Detroit for human rights activists arrested for blocking trucks which were going to cutoff water to low-income families. On July 18, 2014, dozens of people successfully blocked the trucks of the Homrich Inc., a private wrecking company that the City of Detroit contracts with to carry out water shutoffs. More

People in Paris are still leery of large crowds; think twice before walking into a department store or museum or taking the metro. But now, as I write, we look in shock at live TV coverage of yet another savage attack by Islamic jihadists. Today it’s Mali’s turn. The outcome there will certainly stoke the More

Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo (1958) is a film about obsession that is itself an object of obsession. Its fans are legion, from big name filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and auteurs like Chris Marker to blogosphere cinephiles and the British Film Institute, which in 2012 declared it the greatest film ever made. Vertigo, which was received mostly More

Remember those old ads showing a senior couple lounging on a warm beach, captioned “Let your money work for you”? Or the scene in Mary Poppins where young Michael is being advised to put his tuppence in the bank, so that it can compound into “all manner of private enterprise,” including “bonds, chattels, dividends, shares, More

The present wave of arrests and mistreatment of detainees in today’s Egypt is nothing new for the country’s Islamists. Indeed it might be said that takfiri thought itself [a violent form of Salafi Islamism] was born in Egyptian prisons in the 1960s under the blows of extreme torture, years when state repression against the Muslim Brothers More

The European Union this week issued its long-awaited guidelines to label settlement products produced in the illegal settlements Israel has built in the territory it occupied in 1967. Even before the guidelines were issued, the Israeli government blasted the move, claiming it undermined peace and discriminated against Israel. It even claimed labelling would hurt Palestinian workers More

When it comes to politics, Americans are idiots. Because American voters are political ignoramuses, Bernie Sanders found it necessary to take the stage at Georgetown University yesterday to explain what socialism, and democratic socialism are. The point being that too many Democratic primary voters plan to cast their ballots for Hillary Clinton, not because they More

Following the June 6, 1982 Yawm an-Naksa (‘day of the setback’) of the Israeli aggression against the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, I began to notice that youngsters in the camps in Lebanon, and in the Palestinian diaspora, specifically in Washington DC where I worked, were identifying more with scholars from Egypt’s Al-Azhar University and with Political More

It is essential that we get off the chemical treadmill that the modern industrial urban-centric food and agriculture system is based on. It is essential in terms of our health, the environment and sustainability and not least in terms of food security and supporting rural economies and smallholder farmers, who comprise the backbone of global More