Exclusive: For months, Israeli hardliners and their neocon allies in the United States have been beating the war drums over Iran. But apparent resistance to war from President Obama has brought a softening of rhetoric in Israel, as ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern reports.
American history can be described as an endless tension between the nation’s ideals and its practices, with hypocrisy often winning out over principle – and those contradictions are most obvious when the nation celebrates its liberties while betraying them, both today and in the past, William Loren Katz notes.
Exclusive: An unprecedented protest is sweeping the Internet against proposed U.S. legislation that critics contend goes too far in punishing Web sites where copyrighted content might get posted. Wikipedia and other major Internet sites have blacked out pages as a warning of what the laws might cause, Lisa Pease reports.
The last two American presidents who pressured Israel (Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush) lost reelection. Though the reasons for their defeats varied, their strained relations with Israel surely didn’t help, a dilemma now facing Barack Obama as Israel demands U.S. backing against Iran, as Marjorie Cohn describes.
Mitt Romney, who wants talk of income inequality confined to “quiet rooms,” admits he’s spent the last decade living mostly on investments and paying less than half the taxes that would apply to a salary, just one more example of why the rich keep getting richer, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship observe.
President Obama postponed a military exercise with Israel out of concern that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was drawing the U.S. into war with Iran, Gareth Porter and Jim Lobe reported. Obama took the step despite pressure from Republicans and Congress to line up behind Israel’s desires.
Mitt Romney and other Republican presidential hopefuls (with the exception of Ron Paul) are touting tough-guy global strategies that sound like George W. Bush, circa 2002. But recent public opinion polls suggest that Americans are leery of new neocon adventures, Lawrence S. Wittner reports.
Despite the growing power of right-wing extremists, some Israelis are speaking out against legislation and attitudes that target both Arabs and the core principles of democracy. They represent a movement of conscience seeking to salvage Jewish ideals of justice, as Lawrence Davidson reports.
From the Archive: Though it remains risky in U.S. media and political circles to criticize Israel, there is a growing alarm even at the New York Times about the extremist trends of Israel’s ultra-Orthodox who are demanding segregation by sex, ethnicity and religious practices, as Robert Parry noted in this 2010 article.
Still under powerful neocon influence – and fearing the old “soft on terror” label – Congress has blocked President Obama’s efforts to close “the gulag at Guantánamo,” forcing Obama to retreat from his promise to Americans and an outraged world, as Marjorie Cohn notes.
Help Us Pay Our Writers -- We rely on your donations to pay our writers a modest sum for their original content.
