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…
Category: Human Rights
Web Sites Protest ‘Anti-Piracy’ Bills
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…
Israelis Who Speak for Justice
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…
Israel’s Troubling Tilt Toward Apartheid
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…
The Gulag That Is Gitmo
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…
Silencing Donahue and Anti-War Voices
Amid the war fever over Iraq in 2002, legendary talk show host Phil Donahue returned to television with an MSNBC program that allowed antiwar voices to speak but his corporate chieftains soon pulled the plug, a shameful moment in U.S.…
Muscling What’s Left of Democracy
The Standard & Poor’s rating agency has downgraded European countries in a move that may force the governments to crack down more on their populations and divert more money to wealthy investors, thus helping the super-rich short-circuit what’s left of democracy,…
America, a Land Made for the 1 Percent
Over the past three decades, right-wing policies have diverted the wealth of America into fewer and fewer hands, and a right-wing Supreme Court has let money dominate U.S. politics like never before, challenging Woody Guthrie’s idea that “this land was made…
Herding Americans to War with Iran
Exclusive: The murder of a fifth Iranian scientist on the streets of Tehran had all the earmarks of an Israeli-sponsored assassination. The killing also worsened tensions at a moment when the momentum toward war with Iran seems unstoppable, reports Robert…
Genesis Myth: God Doing Good
Many Christian fundamentalists impose a literal interpretation on Biblical myth, thus missing the larger moral messages and rejecting later scientific discoveries, a mistake most apparent in their reading of the Genesis creation story, as the Rev. Howard Bess explains.