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Saturday, May 10, 2008 Lebanon: frozen in the headlamps of history
Watching the events in Lebanon from a safe distance provides a frustrating sense of deja vu. It happened in 1938 in Czechoslovakia, but that was before my time. It happened in Hungary again in 1956, and in Czechoslovakia again in 1968, and in Iran in 1979, and now it is happening in Lebanon. A people is being crushed, and the world looks on helpless. Never mind that nobody cares about the Lebanese people. Foreign relations and foreign policy are never really based on humanitarian sentiments and affection. That is just bumf to be written in speeches and schoolbooks. But it is shocking that nobody seems to care that Lebanon has taken one more step on the road it began to travel with the foundation of Hezbollah: the road to becoming an Islamic Republic. The Lebanese government itself, and those who should care about Lebanon, did not seem to have the sense to stop playing with the fire of Hezbollah when it was still possible to do so. by Moderator @ May 10, 2008: 12:23 PM CST [Link] [1 Comment] Wednesday, May 7, 2008 Rights for Palestinian refugeesWe all agree - every person should have the right to a decent job, good housing, health care and education. Every person should also be the responsibility of some nation state, whether or not that state represents the national feelings they hold in their heart of hearts. There are ethnic Greeks and Jews and Sudanese with American or French or British citizenship, and they are permitted to feel any way they wish about about it. These are fundamental rights, aren't they? [more] by Moderator @ May 7, 2008: 06:10 PM CST [Link] [No Comments] Israel-Palestinian negotiations muddleA great mystery surrounds the Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. These negotiations are supposed to give hope to supporters of peace, and particularly to Palestinian moderates, who need to show some accomplishments in the face of extremism represented by Hamas supporters. [more] by Moderator @ May 7, 2008: 01:35 PM CST [Link] [1 Comment] Tuesday, May 6, 2008 Durban Conference: Pushing the World's Battle against Racism
Pushing the World's Battle against Racism
Planning is underway for next year's Durban Review Conference -- the follow-up to the United Nations World Conference Against Racism (WCAR) held in Durban in August/September 2001. The Preparatory Committee ended a two-week meeting in Geneva last week after much negotiating behind the scenes, but with little to show in public. It failed to agree on the venue, length and date for the Durban Review Conference. by Moderator @ May 6, 2008: 10:41 AM CST [Link] [No Comments] Friday, May 2, 2008 Perverting the language of dialogue and peace makingYours truly has received of late some very different communications that are united by their common cynical abuse of the highest aspirations of the human race. They are all waging war, and attempting to perpetuate hatred and racism. They are all the more odious because they use and abuse the language of "peace," "solutions," "justice" and "reconciliation." [more] by Moderator @ May 2, 2008: 12:27 AM CST [Link] [No Comments] Monday, April 21, 2008 Arab World: Who's the leader of the club?Remember Rami Khouri's tribute to the nonviolent dear hearts and gentle people who live in the Middle East? I expressed some skepticism about that, but maybe Rami is right. All us Middle East folks mind our own business. We read the good book from Fri 'till Monday, as the old song says - that's how the weekend goes, right, Rami? [more] by Moderator @ April 21, 2008: 12:11 PM CST [Link] [4 comments] Saturday, April 19, 2008 Human Rights and Jimmy CarterJimmy Carter made his presidency synonymous with the struggle for human rights. Who can forget his call to boycott the Olympic games in Moscow because of Soviet rights violations in Afghanistan? Around the world, Carter tried to pressure US supported regimes into respecting human rights, sometimes taking extreme measures. When Iranian generals wanted to suppress the Khomeini uprising, Carter administration officials were sent to warn them to respect human rights. [more] by Moderator @ April 19, 2008: 11:05 AM CST [Link] [2 comments] Saturday, April 12, 2008 The self image of the Middle East - Terrorists or just plain folks?Image disparity is one of the greatest barriers to communication between groups and individuals. What you think of me probably has no relation to what I think of myself, and what your country thinks of my country or my people may have little relation to how we view ourselves. [more] by Moderator @ April 12, 2008: 01:17 AM CST [Link] [6 comments] Wednesday, April 9, 2008 Descending to a Summit: Understanding the New Arab Cold WarAs Arab summits go, the recent one in Damascus surely rates as the lowest ever. In fact, despite the attendance of a few leaders from the Gulf States and the Maghreb, it could barely be dignified by the elevated term "summit," given that the key figures in Arab affairs--President Hosni Mubarak of Egypt, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, King Abdullah II of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, President Massoud Barzani of the Kurdistan regional government in Iraq, and even the prime minister of what the Syrians condescendingly call "sisterly Lebanon"--made their absence conspicuously obvious. (External meddling has created the sad limbo in which there is no president of Lebanon at the present--which is precisely the reason why the host, President Bashar al-Assad of Syria, is in the doghouse as far as the Saudis and the Egyptians are concerned.) [more] by Moderator @ April 9, 2008: 07:36 PM CST [Link] [No Comments] Tuesday, April 8, 2008 Why is there no Israeli-Palestinian peace?
Jailed Palestinian Marwan Barghouti has sent a message to an Israeli Peace Now demonstration. It reads in part: "I, Marwan Barghouti, am telling you that I and the majority of the Palestinian people are ready for a historic agreement based on international decisions that will allow a Palestinian and Israeli state to coexist, side by side, in peace and stability," Nobody should assume however, that peace is about to break out between Israel and the Palestinians. [more]
by Moderator @ April 8, 2008: 09:15 PM CST [Link] [4 comments]
Tuesday, April 1, 2008
Periodically, we are victimized by headlines that insist that the United States is about to attack Iran. The attack has been in preparation for a long time. Here's Seymour Hersh predicting the attack in 2005. Seymour Hersh reported again that it was about to go down in the New Yorker on April 17, 2006. There's another such story here from February 2007. Here's a story from March 29, 2007, that insists that an attack is imminent. And here's another, closer to he source of the "information" - Russian intelligence. The indefatigable Hersh was at it again in October of 2007, with the same arguments and rumors. And the Russians are back at it again too. Now, almost a year to the day after the last Russian-inspired Iran attack fiction, they have once again published "intelligence" about U.S. military moves that are supposedly preparatory to an attack on Iran. [more]
by Moderator @ April 1, 2008: 05:06 PM CST [Link] [1 Comment]
Monday, March 31, 2008
The Middle East still has many poor and needy people, so I think governments and civil society should pay close attention to my money saving proposition, especially in view of the looming recession.
Each year there is an Arab League summit, which decides almost nothing at all. Each year, all the newspapers in the Arab countries of the Middle East write editorials bewailing the inaction and powerlessness of the Arab League. Of course, each set of editorial writers wanted the summit to take a different and opposed action. The Syrians do not understand why the summit did not agree to their plan. The Saudis bewail the fact that the summit did not adopt their plan, and the Egyptians complain that the summit did not serve Arab interests by adopting their proposals. Muammar Qaddafi,
by Moderator @ March 31, 2008: 01:36 PM CST [Link] [No Comments]
Monday, March 24, 2008
German Chancellor Merkel's visit to Israel and Knesset speech were far from routine. They were symbolic of the miraculous transformation of German-Jewish relations following the horror of the Holocaust.. [more]
by Moderator @ March 24, 2008: 10:38 AM CST [Link] [1 Comment]
Sunday, March 23, 2008
Those who do not study history, are condemned to relive it. Those who do study it, are also condemned to relive it. While the former are saved a great deal of boredom, the latter at least can see what is coming.
In a year or two, there will be a war of mutual recriminations over who killed the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, accompanying an actual war of guns and bombs. [more]
by Moderator @ March 23, 2008: 06:37 PM CST [Link] [1 Comment]
Saturday, March 15, 2008
U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice meekly observed: "I have not hidden the fact that I think that there is a lot of room for improvement on both sides concerning road map obligations," [more]
by Moderator @ March 15, 2008: 03:38 PM CST [Link] [3 comments]
Wednesday, March 12, 2008
"The Gates of Gaza were too heavy for his shoulders, and they overcame him," mourned General Moshe Dayan, then Israel's chief of staff, in the last line of one of our best-known funeral perorations. It was given on April 29 1956, over the grave of an idealistic young man from Kibbutz Nahal Oz, Ro'i Rotberg, abducted, killed, and mutilated by Palestinians penetrating from the Gaza Strip. More than fifty years have passed; the last seven--and, in particular the thirty months since the Disengagement from the Gaza Strip--marked by a steady escalation in rocket attacks on the town of Sderot, the neighboring kibbutzim and moshavim, and now the city of Ashkelon. The Gates of Gaza still lie heavy on our shoulders, and the terrible dilemmas posed by Palestinian realities are still unresolved. When a problem of such persistent proportions and tragic implications remains at a boil, under these conditions--when all around, advice of many sorts is being freely proffered to Israeli decision-makers--it should be obvious that the broader context in which it is mired makes this Israel's most intractable dilemma. [more]
by Moderator @ March 12, 2008: 04:41 PM CST [Link] [6 comments]
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