Today's Stories

January 15, 2009

Pam Martens
Wall Street Powerhouses Invested Alongside Madoff

January 14, 2009

Henry A. Giroux
Killing Children With Impunity

Kathy Kelly
Cease Fire, Cease Siege

Franklin Lamb
A Second Front? Hezbollah Militants Chafe as Gaza Burns

Mike Whitney
The Big Contraction: Why the Stimulus Alone Won't Work

Paul Craig Roberts
The Humiliation of America

Glen Ford
Sullying Dr. King's Legacy: the Congressional Black Caucus and Israel

Aditya Chakrabortty
The End of Property Porn

Dave Lindorff
Fattening the Rats: Feeding at the Bailout Trough

Jonathan Cook
Israel Bars Arab Parties From Elections

David Swanson
Conyers Explains Why He Didn't Push Impeachment

Martha Rosenberg
Fragile: Handle with Risperdal

Website of the Day
Report of a Red Cross Worker in Gaza

January 13, 2009

Norman Finkelstein
The Facts About Hamas and the War on Gaza

Jonathan Cook
Is Israel Using Experimental Weapons in Gaza?

Michael Neumann
Hamas and Gaza: Slave Revolts and Passionate Evasions

Coleen Rowley /
William John Cox
No Victors in the War on Dissent

Robert Sandels
Cuba and the Obama Administration: Subversion Through Trade?

Saul Landau
The Changeling: an Obama Nightmare

David Swanson
What to Ask Eric Holder

Wajahat Ali
Waltzing with War Crimes

Sam Bahour
No Other Option? A View From the West Bank

Stanley Heller
Why It's Useless to Lobby Congress on Gaza

Robert Jensen
Beyond Grief and Rage

Robin Mittenthal
Eating Away at the Land That Feeds Us

Website of the Day
The 50 Most Loathsome People in America

January 12, 2009

Uri Avnery
The Blood-Stained Monster Enters Gaza

Paul Craig Roberts
Our Collapsing Economy

Mike Whitney
Israel's Moral and Political Insanity

Ewa Jasiewicz
Oh, Quiet Night: Only Six Homes Were Bombed

Bill Quigley
A Day in Gaza

Dave Lindorff
From Vietnam to Gaza

Bill and Kathleen Christison
Blowback From a Tragic Error: a Message to Barack Obama

Jonathan Cook
Israel Ponders the Third Stage

Andy Worthington
Seven Years of Guantánamo

Kara N. Tina
Oakland on Fire

Brenda Norrell
Palestinians and American Indians: Russell Means Breaks the Silence on Obama

Nour Kharma
A Plea From a Teen in Gaza: "Will I Die, Too?"

Website of the Day
The Villages Group: an Antiwar Alliance in Sderot

January 9/11, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Israel's Onslaught on Gaza: Criminal, for Sure; But Also Stupid

Kathy Kelly
Tunnel Vision: Report from Arish, Egypt

Bill Quigley
Report From Rafah: Doctors Stopped at the Border

George Ciccariello-Maher
Oakland's Not for Burning?

Elaine C. Hagopian
Gaza: History Matters

Mike Roselle
Drowning in a Toxic River: What Can be Done to Save Appalachia?

Steve Hendricks
The Torturer-Elect?

Gary Leupp
Revisiting the Tale of Samson

Jonathan Cook
Outcry Over Israel's War Crimes

Karim Makdisi
The Ceasefire Plan: the UN Finally Acts, But Does It Mean Anything?

Rannie Amiri
Livni's Big Lie

Peter Morici
In the Jaws of a Depression

Peter Montague
Can Chemicals be Regulated?

Ralph Nader
Move Fast to Restore the Rule of Law

Andy Worthington
The Dying Days of the Guantánamo Trials

Nadia Hijab
A Music School Silenced in Gaza

Dan Bacher
Unholy Alliance: Nature Conservancy Backs Schwarzenegger's Big Ditch

Catherine Fenton
The American Peace Movement and Israel

David Macaray
Wal-Mart Caught Stealing

Valia Kaimaki
Why Greek Youths Took to the Streets

Richard Morse
Haiti's Gas Gang

David Yearsley
To Gotham City with Dexter Gordon

Charles R. Larson
The Horror, the Horror

Richard Rhames
Gaza and the Goon Squad Meet the Wizard

Stephen Martin
Meltdown Memo to Come?

Lorenzo Wolff
What They Sing About When They Sing About Love

Poets' Basement
Anderson, Beatty and Valentine

Website of the Weekend
Gaza Protest

January 8, 2009

Jean Bricmont /
Diana Johnstone
Gaza Seen From Paris

Franklin Lamb
How Dershowitz Misstates, Misrepresents and Misapplies the Law

Paul Craig Roberts
The Difficulty of Being an Informed American

Kevin Alexander Gray
Give Burris His Seat

Chris Floyd
The Enduring Priorities in Obama's Time of Change

Ewa Jasiewicz
Riding on Fire in Gaza

Steve Conn
Sanjay Gupta and Obama

Harvey Wasserman
Kill the Nuclear Stimulus!

Wayne S. Smith
An Opening to Cuba?

Linda Mamoun
Re-settling Gaza: the Real Goal of the Israeli Invasion?

Adam Turl
Unions and Young Workers

Chris Papaleonardos
Mourning Maria Dimitriadi

Website of the Day
On the Wing

January 7, 2009

Saree Makdisi
What Kind of Security Will This Barbarism Bring Israel?

Franklin Lamb
Bend Over Professor Dershowitz, It's Time for Your Check Up

William Blum
America's Other Glorious War

Belén Fernández
The Trauma Vortex: Israel's Monopoly on Psychological Suffering

Lawrence Davidson
What is New About Gaza?

Allan Nairn
Adm. Dennis Blair and the Church Killings in East Timor

Jonathan Cook
What is Israel's Objective?

Muhammad Idrees Ahmad
Watching the War on BBC

Deepak Tripathi
Bush, as He Leaves

Cal Winslow
Now is the Hour to Defend Democracy in the Labor Movement!

Manuel Garcia, Jr.
To Students Planning Careers: Be Mindful

Dr. Hannah Safran
No More Recycled Military Solutions

Website of the Day
CNN: Israel Broke the Ceasefire First

January 6, 2009

Pam Martens
It's All One Big Lie

Victoria Buch
Real Estate War in Gaza: the History and "Morals" of Ethnic Cleansing

Neve Gordon
Israel's New War Ethic

Tami Sarfatti /
Yonatan Mendel
What Silence Says: Gaza is Still Waiting on Obama

Mike Whitney
The Gaza Bloodbath

Alan Farago
After the Fall

Gary Leupp
A Hamas Coup d'Etat in 2007?

Larry Everest
Silent Partner: the US-Backed War on Gaza

Ron Jacobs
The New Iraqi Sovereignty

David Macaray
Union-Busting is Alive and Well

Stephanie Basile
Where's Anna's Money?

Stacey Warde
An Uncle's Unrest

Website of the Day
Israeli Refusenik on Gaza

January 5, 2009

Paul Craig Roberts
Will There be a Recovery?

Sousan Hammad
Phoning Home to Gaza

Wajahat Ali
Flying While Brown

Mats Svensson
Longing in Gaza

Jen Marlowe
Abeer's Baby

Muhammad Ali Khalidi
Gaza Phone Tag

Brian Cloughley
Israel is Immune From Criticism

Faheem Hussain
Gaza and India: a View From Pakistan

William Cook
Consider the Realities of Gaza

Dr. Trudy Bond
The Madness Among Us

Christopher Ketcham
The Revenge of the Blogger at the National Press Club: a Rotten Washington Interlude

Steve Early
Who Rules SEIU?

Dave Lindorff
When It Comes to Terrorism and POW Cases, Equal Justice Under Law is a Joke

Website of the Day
The Endangered Fish of the Colorado River Basin

January 2 - 4, 2009

Alexander Cockburn
Diary of 2008: an Incredible, Hope-Filled Year

Uri Avnery
Molten Lead in Gaza

Jonathan Cook
The Real Goal of the Gaza Assault

Paul Craig Roberts
Whatever Happened to Western Morality?

Brian Eno
Stealing Gaza: an Experiment in Provocation

Ralph Nader
America Must Stop Shirking Its Responsibility on Gaza

Omar Barghouti
UN Complicity in Israel's Massacre in Gaza

Graham Usher
Where Pakistan's Generals and the ISI Draw Their Lines

P. Sainath
The Economy is Worse Than It Appears

Belén Fernández
Pardon Our Dust: Israel's PR Campaign for Gaza

Deb Reich
Shiv'a in Gaza, December 2008

Gary Leupp
Defacing Mr. Jefferson's Wall: Preachers and the Inauguration

Michael Yates
Top Chef or Top Wage Thief? Tom Colicchio and the Economics of Restaurants

Joanne Mariner
How to Close Guantánamo

Seth Sandronsky
Funding the Israeli Military: the US Pipeline

Cynthia McKinney
We Lived to Tell the Story

Sonja Karkar
Israel's Dogs of War

Deepak Tripathi
Gaza in Perspective

Robert Fantina
Obama, Afghanistan and Israel

John Ross
The Year No One Can Remember

Norm Kent
The Heat on Duval Street: Why Head Shop Raids are Unfair and Unjust

Larry Portis
Syria and the Arab Barbie Doll--Before the Deluge

Richard Rhames
Is Conscience Dead?

Dee C. Lubell
We Come From the Sun: Zora Neale Hurston and Richard Wright

David Yearsley
A Gay German at the Courts of the Medici and Hanover, and of Course the BBC

Lorenzo Wolff
Joe Ely, the Fighting Rooster of Rock

Marc Catone
Looting Lennon's Legacy

Poets' Basement
Five Poems by Grzegorz Wróblewski

Website of the Weekend
Earth in High Rez

January 1, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
If Hamas Did Not Exist

Oren Ben-Dor
The Self-Defense of Suicide

Wajahat Ali
The U.S. Response to the Gaza Crisis: Unfair and Unbalanced

Saul Landau
In Cuba No One Man Could Steal $50 Billion From Other People

David Michael Green
What to Expect While We're Expecting

Website of the Day
Morbid Anatomy

December 31, 2008

Pam Martens
Wall Street's Collapse and the Ownership Society

Neve Gordon /
Jeff Halper
Where's the Academic Outrage Over the Bombing of a University in Gaza?

Ted Honderich
The First Casualty of Israel's War

Brian Cloughley
Five Little Girls on a Sofa: Gaza's One-Sided Images

Ron Jacobs
What is Hamas, Really?

Vijay Prashad
Hot Rod and His Sikh Warrior: Blago's Indian Connections

Franklin Lamb
Mr. Mubarak, Tear Down That Wall!

Mike Whitney
My Brilliant Career

David Macaray
What Really Killed the Auto Bailout

Richard Thieme
The Betrayal of the Commons

Mary Lynn Cramer
Who Wins What in Gaza?

Stephen Lendman
The Troubling Case of the Fort Dix Five

Worthy Group of the Day
Western Shoshone Defense Project

December 30, 2008

Paul Craig Roberts
May We No Longer Be Silent

Tariq Ali
The Gaza Ghetto and Western Cant

Robert Bryce
The $775,000-a-Year GI

Jonathan Cook
Electioneering with Bombs

Gary Leupp
The Fishbarrel War

Dave Lindorff
Tough Guys Don't Walk: Will Cheney Seek a Pardon?

Brian McKenna
Ted Downing and Troublemaker Anthropology

John Walsh
The End of the Green Party

Ramzy Baroud
Gaza and the World

Bob Sommer
The Education of David Frost

Worthy Activist of the Day
Support Marie Mason

December 29, 2008

Jennifer Loewenstein
Israel's Attempted Endgame in Gaza

Neve Gordon
What, Exactly, is Israel's Mission?

Joshua Frank
Obama and the "Special Relationship"

George Salzman /
Manuel Garcia, Jr.
The War Against Palestine: Exception From Humanity

Norman Solomon
A Hundred Eyes for an Eye

Ewa Jasiewicz
Gaza Today: "This is Just the Beginning"

Rob Larson
The Banks Laugh All the Way to the Bank

Kenneth Libby
Arne Duncan's Dark Years in Chicago

Robert Weissman
The 10 Worst Corporations of 2008

Elsa Johnson
High Noon at Black Mesa: Bush's Farewell Gift to Peabody Coal

Nicola Nasser
Resolution 1850: Bush's Parting Gift

Belén Fernández
Hanukkah Games

Worthy Group of the Day
Nuclear Information and Resource Service

December 26-28, 2008

Alexander Cockburn
The Medusa's Head

Dr Eyad Al Serraj
The Boming of Gaza: "An Earthquake on Top of Your Head"

Jeffrey St. Clair
Cancerous Air

Bradley Simpson
Obama's New Intel Chief, Dennis Blair, Ran Interference for Indonesia's Butchers

Ralph Nader
Government Without Laws

Gary Leupp
Obama and the Graveyard of Empires

Ellen Cantarow
Richard Falk, Israel and the NYT

Matt Landon
The Great Coal Ash Flood: a Report From Swan Pond Road

David Macaray
SAG's Terrible Dilemma

Patrick Bond
End of Neoliberalism? Sorry, Not Yet

Norm Kent
Invoking Bigotry: Obama and Rick Warren

Brian T. Ketcham
Fuel Efficiency is Easy--Just Don't Let Detroit Tell You How to Do It

Rannie Amiri
War Clouds Over Gaza

Larry Portis
Changing the Ethnic Vocabulary

Richard Rhames
Welcome to Soup Kitchen America

Stephen Lendman
29 Red Flags: Early Suspicions About Bernard Madoff

James L. Secor
Unheralded Coup

Ramzy Baroud
Iraq, the Plot Thickens

Harold Pinter
Art, Truth and Politics: the Nobel Lecture

Cpt. Paul Watson
Tracking the Cetacean Death Star

Howard Lisnoff
Nixon's Cambodian Shock Treatment

Michael Dee
The Bill of Rights, Killed in Action by the War on Drugs

Steve Conn
Eight Predictions for 2009

Poets' Basement
Valentine, Kaung, Moser and Graham

Worthy Group of the Weekend
United Mountain Defense

December 25, 2008

Judy Gumbo Albert
What Were Those 1960s Terrorists Thinking, Anyway?

Rev. William E. Alberts
The Sole of Christmas

Hannah Mermelstein
Caution: Settlers Ahead

Worthy Group of the Day
Citizens' Coal Council

December 24, 2008

Bill Quigley
Five Bailout Lessons From Katrina

Saul Landau
Then and Now: Venezuela and Cuba, 1960-2008

Sam Smith
Evangelism and Politics

Brian Cloughley
Torture, Slaughter and Lies

John Ross
Where's al-Zaidi's Pulitzer?

Eric Walberg
Cold War Shivers

Norm Kent
What Will Obama Do About Marijuana?

Stephen Martin
Reasons for Cheerfulness

Worthy Group of the Day
Collateral Repair Project

December 23, 2008

Michael Hudson
The Ponzi Paradigm

Michael Yates
The Tombstone Economy

Chuck Spinney
The New York Times Flames Out in Defense Dogfight

Vijay Prashad
India's Reckless Road to Washington, Through Tel Aviv

Brian Horejsi
Interior Decorating: Obama, Salazar and the Future of America's Public Lands

David Macaray
Obama's Best Pick?

Neil Watkins /
Sarah Anderson
Ecuador's Conscientious Default

David Michael Green
Hey, Reagan Democrats! Now Do You Get It?

Worthy Group of the Day
Focus on the Corporation

January 15, 2009

Rough Pedagogy

Gaza Besieged, Gaza Mauled

By JULES RABIN

First, a story—a true one. On February 28, 1994, in a funeral eulogy for an American-born Israeli who had been beaten to death by a Palestinian mob a few days before, a certain Rabbi Perin declared, “A million Arabs are not worth one Jewish fingernail.” The world was shocked by the statement when it was reported in the New York Times, and the Israeli prime minister himself denounced it. The murdered Israeli was Baruch Goldstein, who, on February 25, 1994, had stepped into a mosque carrying an assault rifle and killed 29 Palestinian men and boys bowed in prayer before his gun jammed. He was then killed with iron bars by surviving worshipers.

Now in Gaza, a more modest version of the stunning ratio suggested by Rabbi Perin, the worth of the million and the worth of the one, is being enacted. The tally to this date in the mutual killing taking place in Gaza and the adjoining Israeli territory since the end of December is 979 Palestinian dead and 13 Israeli dead, a proportion of 75 to 1. Of the Palestinian dead, 292 were children and approximately 75 were women. In one Palestinian family, five sisters, ages 4 to 17, were killed; in another, two sisters, ages 5 and 12 were killed. A 2,000 pound bomb dropped on the home of a Hamas leader killed not only him but his four wives and 13 of his 17 children.

Of the total of 13 Israeli dead in the current phase of the decades-long conflict, three were civilians, killed by rockets fired from Gaza into Israeli territory beginning December 19, when a six-month cease-fire agreed to by Israel and the Hamas government of Gaza expired. To “teach Israel a lesson,” Hamas had summoned up the heaviest weaponry in its arsenal: an assortment of crude rockets with notoriously wild aim. To “teach Hamas a lesson” in turn, Israel launched day and night bombing attacks on all of Gaza, of less than pinpoint accuracy, starting two weeks ago, on December 27. In the first four days of the new lesson, those aerial attacks killed more than 400 Palestinians, of all sizes and all places in Gaza society, and made rubble a familiar sight throughout the city. Those 400 and more Palestinian deaths stood as first payment for the three Israelis who had been killed by Palestinian rockets.

Gaza, be it noted, with three times the population of Vermont and 1.5 percent of Vermont's land area, is one of the most densely populated regions of the world. The people of Gaza are most of them refugees of the 1967 war, and their descendants. They don’t merely live and survive as best they can in Gaza. As life-long refuges, they are locked in place by the Israeli military, who since decades past have exercised total control over what persons and what goods will enter and leave the territory.

Especially since the imposition of the stricter blockade of the last 18 months, Gaza has come to resemble an open-air prison where a million-and-a-half virtual inmates, cut off from the rest of the world, struggle to piece together an existence.

The effect of the blockade on the health of the population of Gaza has been severe in the extreme. In the period before the new outbreak of violence a couple of weeks ago, investigators found that 75 percent of Gazans were undernourished. The children of Gaza, who number 58 percent of the population and whose bodies persist in wanting to grow, have been the greatest sufferers: 46 percent suffer from acute anemia, 45 percent have an iron deficiency, and 18 percent have been stunted in their growth. Because of lack of fuel, provision of electricity and water has been sketchy and scarce. And now, since the assault by Israel, beginning on December 27, the condition of Gaza has gone from calamitous to catastrophic: a humanitarian disaster, in the view of both the International Red Cross and the United Nations Relief Agency, who have a certain expertise in these matters.

With such punishing effects on the civilian population, the continuing Israeli blockade of Gaza, now of 18 months duration, constitutes “collective punishment,” a belligerent action that besides being abhorrent to most people is expressly forbidden under Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Convention, the controlling international law on the conduct of war.

So who started it? Who first violated the six-month cease-fire between Israel and the Hamas government of Gaza, that began on June 19, 2008?

Was it Gaza and Hamas? During the period of the cease-fire, from June 19 to December 19, 2008, rockets continued to be fired from Gaza into neighboring Israeli communities, with their usual vague aim and murderous intent. But their numbers had dropped dramatically, even according to the Israeli military. Hamas claims that those rockets were fired by rogue parties over whom it had no control.

Whoever fired them, there were no deaths resulting from them in the period of the cease-fire. But whether deaths resulted or not, all Israelis within range of Gaza’s rockets have lived for months in states of daily anxiety.

Hamas, for its part, accuses Israel of violating the cease-fire in two different ways. It claims that the tight blockade of Gaza maintained by Israel for the past year and a half, and including the period of the cease-fire, had become unendurable. It has claimed that the protracted blockade, with its punishing effects on the health of the population at-large, was in itself an illegal action both under the rules of the Fourth Geneva Convention and under the terms of the Egyptian-brokered cease-fire of June 2008, and that of itself it constituted a casus belli that gave Hamas the right to pick up arms in its own defense.
Hamas makes also the more punctuated claim that Israel had openly violated the mutual cease-fire on November 4, 2008, 50 days before Hamas formally declared an end to its own observance of it, when Israeli troops broke into Gaza, killing six Palestinians and carting off six others.

With its back to the wall because of the blockade, and lacking planes, helicopters, and tanks of its own, Hamas resumed the only form of warfare it was capable of, the frank terror of rockets aimed in the direction of nearby Israeli communities.

It is these current rocket attacks from Gaza which, taken together with similar attacks carried out over the last eight years have inflicted a total of 28 Israeli civilian deaths, that Israel has cited as grounds for attacking Gaza now, from the air and sea and ultimately by land, with overwhelming force. The death counts are eloquent of a great moral equation that I leave it to the reader to judge: those 28 Israeli deaths in eight years of on-and-off Palestinian rocket attack on the one hand; and 979 Palestinian deaths, suddenly, in the little more than two weeks of the blitzkrieg that Israel is currently waging on Gaza.

Enter also into the moral equation also the enormous damage done to the housing and civic structures of Gaza—schools, hospitals, university buildings—and the psychological effects on the children of Gaza who, while enduring cold and hunger, have been witnessing death all around them, and are emotionally petrified by the mayhem raining down on them, from which there is no escape within the confines of crammed, crowded, and locked down Gaza.

Will the people of Gaza and the Hamas government they saw fit to elect two years ago, now under day and night attack of breathtaking severity, “learn the lesson” that Israel seeks to teach them? While at the same time and in the same spirit of rough pedagogy, Hamas tries to teach Israel a parallel lesson with its scatter-shot of rockets.? So far, not. Neither side, in its outrage, chooses to understand the rough “lesson” the other side is teaching. It is as though the human brute had lost its tongue and its power of reason.

Gaza under punishment, I submit, locked down, sealed in, half starved, terrified, and overpowered as it is now, with elements still resisting, is acquiring an eerie resemblance to the Warsaw ghetto of the 1940s: a resemblance still small, but increasing.

In a comment on the current bombing of Gaza, Titus North, an American professor of political science, called attention to the anomaly of Israel. “A state founded by Holocaust survivors,” he wrote, “should be a beacon of morality, not a black hole for it.”

That terrible loop the course of history has taken, with descendants of the historic victims of the Holocaust now wearing the jackboots of the dominant warrior, is a bitter thing for a Jew like myself to contemplate.

Postscript: A few days ago, Congress  pledged its “unwavering support for Israel” in this hottest of little wars. While at the same time, in capital cities throughout the world, people have been demonstrating in the tens and hundreds of thousands, to express their outrage at the violent disproportion of Israel’s response to the provocation of the rocket attacks that keep coming from Gaza.

My word to our representatives in Washington: By making the United States Israel’s Siamese twin in this affair, joined to it at hip, and ankle, you not only fail to reflect the views of a great part of your constituency, but also expose us to the kinds of international anger and hatred that Israel is incurring throughout the world, with the lord knows what consequences for our own safety and standing in the world.

Jules Rabin is a writer, political critic, and longtime resident of Marshfield, Vermont.

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