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Elimination Round II: Mocking the Perfumes of Love

As a follow-up to the two previous posts, John Pilger reports on the treatment meted out to a young Palestinian journalist, Mohammed Omer, who, despite seeing family members killed and maimed by Israeli forces, “is a moderating voice, urging Palestinian youth not to court hatred but seek peace with Israel.”

Here’s what Israel’s security organ, Shin Bet, does with moderating voices who seek peace with Israel.

(Continued after the jump.)

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A Note on “Willing Executioners”

Yesterday’s post on the rise of racism in Israel drew this comment:

I don’t think it affects your larger point, but “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” is, at best, controversial. (Personally I think it’s mostly crap.) Check out “A Nation on Trial” by Finkelstein and Birn in English or “Ein Volk von Moerdern” in German while Goldhagen is still fresh in your mind.


I don’t speak German, but I am aware of the work by Norman Finkelstein and Ruth

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Elimination Round: Hurtling Down History’s Dark Roads

With the backing and the blessing of local government and the police, the anti-Semitic organization takes its program into the local schools, to hammer home its stern, unyielding message: Girls, do not give your bodies to the racial enemy! Do not let them seduce and defile your innocence with their devious ways!

The city’s own welfare representative heads up the program of the “Anti-Assimilation Department.” He shows the schoolgirls a film — “Sleeping with the Enemy” — which dramatizes how the filthy Semite worms his way into the affections of an innocent

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Invisible Hand: Washington Role in Iraq Oil Deal Revealed

(Bad link corrected.)

I.
Here’s a follow-up to yesterday’s post on the sham sovereignty of the American client state in Iraq. The New York Times reports – in a story of the “Sun Rises in the East” variety – that  Bush Administration has admitted that American government officials and selected corporate cronies “helped” the Iraqis draw up the sweetheart contracts that will bring the original exploiters of Iraqi oil back to their old stomping grounds.

This admission comes

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Operation Horse’s Head: U.S. Raid Sends Message on Iraq “Agreement”

As we know from The Godfather — that seminal work of American political philosophy which serves as the Bible for policy-making in the Bush Administration — a horse’s head in the bed can be highly effective tool in difficult contract negotiations. Last Friday, Bush went his fictional mentors one better in the “negotiations” over an agreement setting out the public terms of a de facto permanent American occupation of the conquered land: he laid the corpse of a kinsman on the doorstep of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

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Big Dog, Little Tail: The American Elite Resolves on War With Iran

I.
Let’s be clear
about one thing: Israel will not attack Iran without the full knowledge
and approval of the United States government. The trigger of the
“warning shot” of Israel’s long-range air-strike exercise last week was
actually pulled in Washington. The Israelis will not force or deceive
the U.S. government into an attack on Iran; that attack – which grows
more certain by the hour – will take place because America’s bipartisan
foreign policy establishment and military-industrial complex (to the
extent that there is any real difference between the

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Fun in the Sun: Gitmo Gets Makeover as R&R Resort

Flowers, fishies, frogs and dolphins, and the most precious, cutesy color printing you ever saw: “Someone who loved me got me this t-shirt in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba!”

You can pick up one of these sparkly items for the kids – along with stuffed iguanas, decorated coffee mugs (“Kisses from Guantanamo Bay!”), snazzy keyrings (“It don’t GITMO better than this!”) and all manner of bric-a-brac from the sun-drenched heaven that bills itself as “Taliban Towers, the Caribbean’s Newest 5-star Resort.”  Yes, the Pentagon has turned

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Critical Malfunction: Misreading Gore Vidal

In a review of a new selection of Gore Vidal’s essays, Lou Bayard unwittingly proves the truth of Vidal’s recent observation about literary critics: “they don’t know how to read.”

Before finally getting around to discussing the essays, Bayard — who writes thrillers based on someone else’s literary characters (Tiny Tim grows up and hunts killers in London!) or other writers (young Edgar Allen Poe finds murder afoot at West Point!) — goes to great lengths to downgrade Vidal’s

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Mad Men: Pathology, Pretense and Power

We don’t say too much about John McCain around here, for the same basic reason that we don’t talk a lot about Osama bin Laden: a dislike of wasting people’s time by belaboring the obvious.

Bin Laden is a murderous, pompous rich boy with a third-rate mind — which, of course, made him excellent front-man fodder first for the CIA and then for the extremists created by the torture factories of American-backed tyrannies. (Those personal qualities would have also made bin Laden an excellent candidate for President of the United States,

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Surprise Party

A Competely Totally Shocking Headline That Leaves One Slack-Jawed in Disbelief:

Democrats to back down on Iraq war conditions (Reuters)

My god, could mind of man ever conceive of such a thing? Democrats? Caving in? On Iraq? Have we fallen into some kind of alternative universe? Nancy and Steny and Harry throwing in the towel, giving Bush everything he wants to keep the war booty flowing to his cronies? Who dast suggest such a base calumny of our

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