Israeli Terror in Gaza
April 28, 2008
Four siblings and their mother have been killed in an Israeli raid in Beit Hanoun, northern Gaza.
What did Israel bomb in Syria?
April 28, 2008
Pepe Escobar: Real story behind September air strike has never been investigated
This is what happens when an Arab regime is so afraid of its own people that it covers up the crimes others commit against it lest it expose its weakness. But the story behind the story should be of higher relevance. With the rise in belligerent rhetoric in recent days, Jim Lobe — one of the world’s finest investigative journalists — raises the pertinent question: ‘Hawks Resurgent?’
Are the latest accusations and tough language leveled against Iran, Syria, and North Korea evidence of a resurgence by the remaining hawks in the administration of President George W. Bush hoping for a final confrontation against one or more members of the revised “axis of evil” before his term next January?
That’s the big question here this week, particularly following Thursday’s long-awaited intelligence briefings to Congress about alleged North Korean involvement in the construction of a “covert nuclear reactor” in Syria that was destroyed in a raid by Israeli warplanes in September last year.
Clueless in Latin America
April 28, 2008
Today’s guest editorial is another installment in my friend toni solo’s Globalization and terror series.
Corporate globalization and its equally misshapen twin, the fake “war on terror”, look like the Western Bloc’s last crooked chance to sustain a few decades longer its member countries’ habitual global power and privilege. John Pilger has noted that seven months after the attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, Condoleezza Rice spoke of the “opportunity” that outrage presented. She and her Bush regime cronies subsequently imposed their imperialist agenda abroad and their fascist agenda at home.
Globally, corporate consumer capitalism now cannot even deliver minimal subsistence food security, let alone broader economic stability. The global crisis presents another opportunity for suave barbarian advocates of mass murder like Rice and similar-minded me-too’s like Hilary Clinton to help provoke and exploit conflict around the world in the service of their corporate plutocracy’s narcissistic greed. Accordingly, G7 leaders have recently gamed a streamlined variant of their endless hypocritical sadistic war on the world’s impoverished majority.
Patrick Cockburn on Iraq
April 28, 2008
Media Matters with Bob McChesney has been an important source of my political education. Back when I was living in Dubai, I would escape the intellectual aridity of the place by downloading an episode to my mp3 player and going for a walks or a drive. I would highly recommend going through the archive and listening to interviews past and present. McChesney is the world’s leading media scholar, and his interviewees are all the top names in their respective fields.
Cockburn’s reply to one of the questions about sanctions is a bit convoluted so let me address it here. First of all, the Kurdish region fared better under the sanctions because it was receiving a far higher proportion of the Oil-for-Food money than South Central Iraq. Secondly, unlike south central, the Kurdish region did not face the kind of crippling embargo that devastated Iraqi society. Thirdly, Kurds were trading with Iran, Turkey and Syria throughout the period of the sanctions. But lastly — and most importantly — the money was not handled by Saddam; it was deposited in a UN escrow account and much of it was going to service the reparation claims not just from Kuwait, but even entities such as British Bird-watchers Society, KFC, etc. Here I would highly recommend Hans Von Sponeck’s A Different Kind of War: The UN Sanctions Regime in Iraq.
And here Pepe Escobar of the excellent Real News continues his discussion with Patrick Cockburn on Muqtada al-Sadr.
Meeting Resistance
April 28, 2008
Meeting Resistance is now available on DVD. This is not a big commercial release. Please honour the rare courage of these journalists and assist their work by purchasing it here.
The Neoconning of a Nation
April 28, 2008
‘Vice-President, shilling troupe of retired generals, deliver fantastic tales for their cause’ writes Eric Margolis.
U.S. intelligence released a dramatic video last Thursday, supposedly taken by an Israeli spy, that purportedly showed North Korean technicians helping build a nuclear reactor in Syria.
The reactor was destroyed seven months ago by Israeli warplanes.
Until now Israel and the U.S. have remained silent about the attack. Syria claimed a warehouse was hit, but curiously said nothing more about what was an act of war. Washington offered no proof the reactor, if it was one, would have produced weapons rather than electric power. U.S. and Israeli intelligence have long stated Syria had no nuclear weapons capabilities.
Vice-President Dick Cheney and fellow neocons forced the CIA to release the James Bondish video in an effort to sabotage an impending six-nation agreement to end North Korea’s nuclear program. They bitterly oppose the deal for being too soft on Pyongyang. Neocons long have worried the possibility of North Korea selling nuclear technology to Arab states posed a potential threat to Israel.
Media Control
April 27, 2008
In the following lecture Media Control Chomsky examines the history and nature of PR. Tracing its roots back to a British propaganda campaign to bring the United States into the First World War; he then explains how the ripple effect of their success led to not only the Nazi propaganda machine but also the modern day PR industry. He argues that this industry and its new theories of “engineering consent” rest on a philosophy that is profoundly anti-democratic famously saying ‘propaganda is to democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state.’
Read Noam Chomsky Media Control (pdf)
