Exclusive: The U.S. press corps is lathered up over the “tone” of Campaign 2012, insisting on a more high-minded discourse. But these journalists are unwilling to make distinctions between legitimate questions about the presidential candidates and distortions in some of…
Category: Human Rights
The Twin Existential Threats
The twin existential threats of nuclear weapons and global warming may work together to end life on Earth because climate dislocations will make desperate national confrontations more likely. But the world’s politicians are doing little about either, writes Robert Dodge.
The Threat from the Right
The United States finds itself facing an extraordinary political development with the rise of a far-right Tea Party movement that has largely taken over one of the country’s two major political parties, the Republicans. That development makes Election 2012 especially…
A Map’s Inconvenient Truth
The charge “anti-Semitism” is thrown around loosely by defenders of Israel as a way to discredit legitimate criticism and sometimes even the expression of inconvenient facts as happened recently regarding a map showing the steady erosion of Palestinian land, writes Lawrence…
Why Romney Insulted the Palestinians
Exclusive: A favorite neocon theme is that the superiority of Western culture explains the world’s wealth disparities, not the accident of natural resources and the aggressive use of military force. Mitt Romney echoed those neocon sentiments in touting Israel and…
Romney’s Clueless Remark on Palestine
Republican Mitt Romney pandered to a right-wing pro-Israeli audience by claiming Israel’s economic success, relative to the widespread poverty in Palestine, reflected superior cultural values and possibly divine preference, a statement that ignored the impact of the longtime occupation, says…
The Deep Mystery of American Murders
The mystery of why America suffers so many murders both in small numbers and large continues to defy an easy answer. But the diverse explanations may themselves be a clue, since the United States has a certain mix of factors…
The Vanity of Perfectionism
Exclusive: As President Obama faces a tough reelection fight, some on the Left vow to sit it out or vote for a third party, saying support for Obama would dirty them. But there is another moral imperative, to mitigate the harm a U.S.…
Kafkaesque Legacy of Gitmo/Bagram
More than a decade after the 9/11 attacks and George W. Bush’s “war on terror,” U.S. justice remains mired in Kafkaesque legal swamps at Guantanamo Bay and Bagram, places where murky theories about “unlawful combatants” mean detainees have no real…
Israel Wants EU to Decry Hezbollah
Sweeping assertions by Israeli officials regarding their certainty about the authorship of a bus bombing in Bulgaria last week pinning it first on Iran and then Hezbollah may not be backed up by solid intelligence, but it may help rally…