For many Americans, Thanksgiving is a time of family get-togethers around a traditional turkey dinner, with vague recollections of Pilgrims sharing a meal with Native Americans in eastern Massachusetts nearly four centuries ago. But for the remnants of those indigenous…
Category: Human Rights
Muzzling an Anti-Nuke Trial Defense
Federal prosecutors, who are seeking long prison terms for three anti-nuclear-bomb activists as punishment for entering the government’s Oak Ridge bomb-making complex, want all moral and legal questions about nuclear weapons excluded from the trial, reports John LaForge.
FBI Snooping on the CIA’s Petraeus
The U.S. news media pretends to shy away from sex scandals but actually looks for any excuse to cover them. A case in point has been the ouster of CIA Director David Petraeus, but the press may have missed the…
Corrupting US Democracy
The United States tends to view itself as the gold standard for democracy and bristles at international criticism of its electoral flaws. But recent corrosion of democratic principles, caused mostly by Republicans, has lowered the quality of U.S. democracy, writes ex-CIA…
How Israel Out-Foxed US Presidents
From the Archive: Just days after President Obama’s reelection, Israel launched a punishing bombing campaign against Palestinians in Gaza much as Israel did shortly after his election in 2008. Obama again is put in a tight spot, but other U.S.…
Israeli Scholar Disputes Founding Myth
From the Archive: As Israel again “mows the grass” in Gaza taking revenge on Palestinians for firing crude missiles into Israeli territory the myth upon which the Jewish government stakes its claim to the land is front and center. But the myth…
Challenging Israel’s Myths
A carefully cultivated mythology sustains Israel’s territorial claims to Palestine and rationalizes Israel’s ethnic cleansing of millions of Palestinians from the land. Challenges to those myths are typically met with fierce counterattacks, as Lawrence Davidson discovered.
Likening Palestinians to Blades of Grass
Exclusive: Israeli hardliners joke about the periodic need to decimate each new generation of Palestinian militants as “mowing the grass,” a process underway again in new bombardments of Gaza. This ugly metaphor has also penetrated the think-tank world of Official Washington, as ex-CIA analyst…
Death Knell for a Failing Paradigm
The death and destruction from Super Storm Sandy this time inflicted near the U.S. power center of New York City are warnings of what’s in store if the global-warming deniers continue to obstruct action. Future devastation will shatter the creaky…
A Closer Look at New Gaza Conflict
The new round of violence between Israel and Palestinians in Gaza is receiving the typical U.S. media treatment, blaming Hamas and absolving Israel. But the origins of the latest clashes are much more complex than that simplistic and one-sided version,…