Dear President Obama, We must confess, when you became President, some of us were a little worried that America’s "special relationship" with Israel would come to an end. We were concerned that the United States would no longer provide money, weapons, and most importantly, diplomatic cover to Israel. After all, Jimmy Carter – a former …
Continue reading “Thank You, President Obama. Love, Israel”
Bombs are falling and people are dying in Gaza. It’s headline news in America’s mass media. As usual, though, we get only today’s events, with no historical context to explain what’s really going on and why. The crucial piece of history our mass media ignore is that one basic principle has always guided Israel’s foreign …
Continue reading “Israel’s Strategy and America’s Mythology”
President Obama recently sent a small contingent of American troops back into Iraq in order to support a weak and corrupt Iraqi regime that has been losing territory to a group of rebel fighters known as the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS). The ISIS is a spin-off of the rebel fighters that …
Continue reading “Iraq Will Solve Itself When We Leave It Alone”
On June 28, two events marked the centenary of the fateful shots which ended the lives of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife, Sophie von Hohenberg. In Sarajevo, the Bosnian Muslim authorities hosted the Vienna Philharmonic, which performed at the same old City Hall where the angry Archduke had impatiently scowled through the sycophantic speech …
Continue reading “Russia’s Choice, in 1914 and Now”
Human Rights Watch has documented the illegal executions of 255 Sunni prisoners in northern Iraq. Another 96 people were killed today, and 68 more were wounded.
Originally posted at TomDispatch. It sounded like the beginning of a bad joke: a CIA agent and a U.S. Special Operations commando walked into a barbershop in Sana… That’s the capital of Yemen in case you didn’t remember and not the sort of place where armed Americans usually wander out alone just to get a …
Continue reading “A Nation of Cowards?”
Poor Diane Sawyer – recently kicked upstairs by ABC News, she started off her Wednesday report on the Israeli assault on Gaza by giving us the Bizarro World version of the latest news. In a conflict where as of this moment 86 Palestinians have been killed – nearly all civilians, mostly women and children – and as …
Continue reading “Pro-Israel Media Bias: It’s As Easy As ABC”
It’s not often you can point to something written by Dick Cheney and praise it for not only its accuracy, but its insights into American foreign policy. Yet reading the recent Wall Street Journal op-ed written by the former Vice President and his daughter, one has to admit he has a point, if for the …
Continue reading “ISIS and the Futility of a Military Solution to Terrorism”
The human tragedy of scores of thousands of immigrant kids from south of the border streaming into the US is distracting enough for most people not to notice how damned creepy it is that the press has been completely restricted from touring these overcrowded immigrant detention centers or actually asking these kids some questions firsthand. …
Continue reading “The Problem With the American Press”
Tensions between Baghdad and Arbil continued to escalate as 151 people were killed and 86 more were wounded. The number of dead is likely higher because the bodies of dozens of fighters are arriving at the Najaf cemetery on a daily basis now. Baghdad has been tight with casualty numbers concerning its fighting troops.
