Ted Cruz’s unusual strategy

It is not uncommon for political neophytes who once raged against the system to, once they get into office, temper their rhetoric in order to get things done, since governance usually requires compromise and not alienating those one needs to work with. But what begins as a tactical maneuver to get others to go along with your plans can often end up with you going along with their plans and eventually changing your own views to theirs. This process is what George Orwell satirized in his Animal Farm where the pigs who overthrew the human farmers on the slogan of “Four legs good, two legs bad” and took charge of running the farm eventually became indistinguishable in attitude, actions, and even appearance from the humans they once despised.
[Read more…]

Barack Obama – master drone killer

The Daily Show looks at how the US government’s war on language increases along with its desire to break laws and violate the constitution. The latest trial balloon being floated is about how the Obama administration is once again ‘agonizing’ (translation: trying to find the best way to justify to the public) about its desire to summarily kill yet another American.
[Read more…]

Consociational democracy as a solution to the the Israel-Palestine conflict

While the two-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict may have been viable at one time, most serious observers are now abandoning it because it is clear that it and the never-ending ‘peace-process’ seem to be merely stalling tactics for time as Israel increases its steady encroachment of Palestinian land.

So what might be the solution to this seemingly intractable problem?
[Read more…]

How the Palestinians were expelled from their homes

In the west and especially in the US, one of the least known elements of the story of the Israel-Palestinian conflict is the ugly story of how the Palestinians were uprooted from their land and homes leading up to and through the creation of the state of Israel in 1948. The heroic story of how the Jews, ‘a people without a land’ came to occupy ‘a land without a people’, was always based on a false premise. Palestine, far from being a largely unoccupied wasteland, was a bustling place, home to many people whose ancestors had lived there for millennia.
[Read more…]

Why the two-state solution is (almost) dead

Those who advocated for a one-state solution to the Israel-Palestine conflict under the slogan of ‘One land, two peoples’ took what was always the more principled stand, saying that was the only way to reconcile the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people to the land they were living in with the need of the Jews who also wanted a homeland, was to have both groups live there together and work out a modus vivendi. It was idealistic no doubt, but made sense since the two groups shared so much in common, except for allegiances to their different tribal gods.
[Read more…]

Introducing the ‘inhibited persons list’

We are all aware, or should be aware, of the infamous secret ‘no-fly list’ that the US government maintains that can result in people being abruptly told that they cannot board a plane without being told why or any means of getting off the list, short of going to court. It appears that the government also maintains another secret list called an ‘inhibited persons list’ that flags people for harassment.
[Read more…]

How the NSA and GCHQ targeted WikiLeaks and its supporters

The latest revelations from the Edward Snowden trove of documents says that the NSA and GCHQ kept track of the people who visited the Wikileaks site, as part of its international campaign to put pressure on WikiLeaks and Julian Assange. This appeared in an article by Glenn Greenwald and Ryan Gallagher in their new news medium The Intercept.
[Read more…]

The Israel lobby’s rearguard actions

The Israel lobby in the US has had its hands full recently trying to get its agenda of total US support of hardline Israeli government policies implemented, and is fighting back rising criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinians as well as of its own role in influencing US foreign policy. In doing so it has become much more visible than it once was and has been subjected to much more criticism.
[Read more…]

Israel, South Africa, and the Boycott-Divestment-Sanctions movement

There has recently been a rise in criticism of the way that Israel is acting in the Occupied Territories and the fact that its treatment of Palestinians that has been getting increasingly worse. An Israeli human rights group Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) has published a report “which claimed that children suspected of minor crimes were subjected to “public caging”, threats and acts of sexual violence and military trials without representation” and “accused the government of torturing children after it emerged some were kept in outdoor cages during winter.”
[Read more…]