Twenty years ago, one day in June 2005, I talked with an Iranian man who was selling underwear at the Tehran Grand Bazaar. People all over the world want peace, he said, but governments won’t let them have it. I thought of that conversation on Saturday night after the...
The Vietnam and Gaza Wars Shattered Young Illusions About US Leaders
Eight years before the U.S.-backed regime in South Vietnam collapsed, I stood with high school friends at Manhattan’s Penn Station on the night of April 15, 1967, waiting for a train back to Washington after attending the era’s largest antiwar protest so far. An early...
Why ‘Pro-Israel, Pro-Peace’ Advocates Cling to Genocide Denial
Israel’s renewed assault on Gaza comes several months after both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch issued reports concluding without equivocation that Israel was engaged in genocide. But very few members of Congress dare to acknowledge that reality, while...
How US Media Hide Truths About the Gaza War
A few days before the end of 2024, the independent magazine +972 reported that “Israeli army forces stormed the Kamal Adwan Hospital compound in Beit Lahiya, culminating a nearly week-long siege of the last functioning hospital in northern Gaza.” While fire spread...
Genocidal President, Genocidal Politics
When news broke over the weekend that President Biden just approved an $8 billion deal for shipping weapons to Israel, a nameless official vowed that “we will continue to provide the capabilities necessary for Israel's defense.” Following the reports last month from...
Why Congress Members Face a Lawsuit for Funding Israel’s War on Gaza
On the last day of 2024, the deputy general counsel for the House of Representatives formally accepted delivery of a civil summons for two congressmembers from Northern California. More than 600 constituents of Jared Huffman and Mike Thompson have signed on as...
Omnicide Joe?
President Biden has never wavered from approving huge arms shipments to Israel during more than 13 months of mass murder and deliberate starvation of Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Biden’s crucial role earned him the name “Genocide Joe.” That nickname might seem...
‘Escalation Dominance’ and the Prospect of More Than 1,000 Holocausts
Everything is at stake. Everything is at stake with nuclear weapons. While working as a nuclear war planner for the Kennedy administration, Daniel Ellsberg was shown a document calculating that a U.S. nuclear attack on communist countries would result in 600 million...
Undebatable: What Harris and Trump Could Not Say About Israel and Gaza
Kamala Harris won the debate. People being bombed in Gaza did not. The banner headline across the top of the New York Times home page – “Harris Puts Trump on Defensive in Fierce Debate” – was accurate enough. But despite the good news for people understandably eager...
60 Years After Lyndon Johnson’s ‘Daisy Ad,’ the Silence on Nuclear War Is Dangerous
One evening in early September 1964, a frightening commercial jolted 50 million Americans who were partway through watching “Monday Night at the Movies” on NBC. The ad began with an adorable three-year-old girl counting petals as she pulled them from a daisy. Then...