Global

Love thy enemy? I get a chance to do so on a regular basis, thanks to the email (or nasty-mail) I sometimes get in response to my column, e.g.:

“Must be a dearth of anyone with anything intelligent to say for the News to put your drivel out for us to chew on. Not going to go over ridiculous points you made . . .  not worth my time. Next time offer a cure. Otherwise it’s just reportage that we already know.”

I have an advantage here. When I get a communique like this, I know the writer read my column in a regular newspaper, not a progressive site on the Internet — and that’s a good thing for multiple reasons. One: The mainstream media is often fearful of a viewpoint like mine, which is critical of war and nukes and nationalism and border cages and such, so I always feel delight on learning I’ve made it into mainstream print. Two: Hearing from someone who hates what I’ve written is the essence of across-the-aisle communication. So what if the letter hits me like a verbal bullet? The writer exposed himself to a counter-viewpoint, expanding his awareness of the world. Let me do the same.

An article by Gideon Rachman in the Financial Times last July is a prime example of western intelligentsia’s limited understanding of China’s unhindered rise as a superpower. “Becoming a superpower is a complicated business. It poses a series of connected questions about capabilities, intentions and will,” Rachman wrote.

To help us understand what this claim precisely means, the FT writer uses an analogy. “To use a sporting analogy, you can be an extremely gifted tennis player and genuinely want to be world champion, but still be unwilling to make the sacrifices to turn the dream into reality.”

At least, in Rachman’s thinking, China is capable of being a political actor, though it remains incapable of vying for the superpower status, as it supposedly lacks ‘the will’ to make the required ‘sacrifices’.

Propaganda is most impactful when people don’t think it’s propaganda, and most decisive when it’s censorship you never knew happened. When we imagine that the U.S. military only occasionally and slightly influences U.S. movies, we are extremely badly deceived. The actual impact is on thousands of movies made, and thousands of others never made. And television shows of every variety. The military guests and celebrations of the U.S. military on game shows and cooking shows are no more spontaneous or civilian in origin than the ceremonies glorifying members of the U.S. military at professional sports games — ceremonies that have been paid for and choreographed by U.S. tax dollars and the U.S. military. The “entertainment” content carefully shaped by the “entertainment” offices of the Pentagon and the CIA doesn’t just insidiously prepare people to react differently to news about war and peace in the world.

At the outset, the Israeli military decision to revise its open-fire policies in the occupied West Bank seems puzzling. What would be the logic of giving Israeli soldiers the space to shoot more Palestinians when existing army manuals had already granted them near-total immunity and little legal accountability? 

 The military’s new rules now allow Isreali soldiers to shoot, even kill, fleeing Palestinian youngsters with live ammunition for allegedly throwing rocks at Israeli ‘civilian’ cars. This also applies to situations where the alleged Palestinian ‘attackers’ are not holding rocks at the time of the shooting.

There are two top things about my profession. For me personally, a great benefit is being able to cover in person and even have access to great newsmakers who’d I’d probably never have the opportunity to meet and even talk to if I wasn’t a journalist. This ranges from seeing beauties such as Jennifer Lopez, Kerry Washington and Rosario Dawson in the flesh, reporting on Nobel Laureates the Dali Lama and Maria Ressa and interviewing geniuses like directors Oliver Stone and Alex Gibney. At the top of this list of notables who I’ve had the privilege, luck and honor to encounter is Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who died Dec. 26, prompting his homeland of South Africa to observe seven days of mourning this week.

Those Americans who dare to challenge the strangle-hold that Israel and its friends have over US foreign policy will likely find themselves targeted even more aggressively in the upcoming year. Two weeks ago the American Israeli Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), widely reckoned to be the largest and most powerful component of the Jewish state’s lobby, declared that it will now begin directly funding political candidates who are perceived as pro-Israel. Up until now, AIPAC has preferred to operate somewhat in the shadows, representing itself as a organization that is in part “educational” to justify its 501(c)3 tax exempt status which it uses to send all new congressmen on propaganda trips to Israel.

The result of a vote, on December 14, in the US House of Representatives regarding the combating of Islamophobia, may, possibly, appear to be a positive sign of change, that Washington is finally confronting this socio-political evil. However, conclusions must not be too hasty. 

 Disquietingly, Congress was nearly split on the vote. While 219 voted in favor of the resolution, 212 voted against it. What is so objectionable about the resolution, which was introduced by Rep. Ilhan Omar, that prompted a ‘nay’ vote by such a large number of American representatives?

What’s your story?

We tell stories, which evolve into myths — and myths are what hold us together. They create the collective entity known as the human race.

And myths evolve.

At least, good God, I hope they do.

We’re stuck, right now, in the myth of collective suicide, more generally known as the myth of the conquest of good over evil. And since history is told by the winners of humanity’s wars, those currently in power are always — always! — the good guys.

David Suzuki puts it this way: “As dictators have shown throughout history, collective narratives are often successful when they have a bad guy, someone or something that is ‘other.’”

Haaretz’s investigative report - ‘Classified Docs Reveal Massacres of Palestinians in '48 – and What Israeli Leaders Knew’ - is a must-read. It should be particularly read by any person who considers himself a ‘Zionist’ and also by people who, for whatever reason, support Israel, anywhere in the world.

Former President Barack Obama recently tweeted that the day of a school shooting was the worst day of his presidency. Well, it certainly shouldn’t have been a good day, but, seriously, what the filibuster? Was it a bad day because children were killed and he didn’t order their killing?

It’s bad enough having a drone murder program, but do we also have to go along with the pretense that it doesn’t exist, or the pretense that it’s been stopped? Until this week, the U.S. government was hiding this data for much of 2020 and 2021 on Afghanistan, Iraq, and Syria, leading some to imagine that drone strikes had stopped. Now that the data is available, we see a decrease but still massive bombings.