Three straws in the wind: –Last night on National Public Radio’s “Marketplace”, Kai Ryssdal did a wonderful interview with Palestinian economist Youssef Dauod about prices in Rafah, in which Dauod was allowed to say that the Israelis had created a…
Dan Sisken of Mideast Brief has corrected my spelling of the Arabic word “nakba,” referring to the disaster of ’48. I spelled it “naqba.” I think it’s important to try to use accurate transliterations of Arabic. It should be “Nakba”…
Some time back I reported that Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff to Colin Powell, said at the Middle East Institute (responding to Jim Lobe actually) that Walt and Mearsheimer’s paper contained the “blinding flash of the obvious,”…
The boast by settlement czar and diamond dealer Lev Leviev that he gave money to Oxfam, which Oxfam says is not true– “To the best of our knowledge Mr. Leviev has not been a donor to Oxfam or any of…
Another thing historian Ilan Pappe said is that the “elites” of the world have made a mess of Israel/Palestine. He meant the American elite too, the political establishment, the Israel lobby. I went for a walk today and got thinking…
I keep thinking about things that the historian Ilan Pappe said in a forum on Israel/Palestine at Oxford last summer. He said that peace could not be achieved in the Middle East until the three A’s occur: Acknowledgement, Accountability, and…
One of the most important reporters on neoconservatism, Jim Lobe of IPS, has an item on Freedom’s Watch in which he notes the mainstream press’s lazy and fearful shorthand re neoconservatism–“strong supporters of Israel.” Why don’t those reporters spell out…
I don’t think Obama misspoke when he praised Ronald Reagan over the weekend and was then attacked by the Clintons, of course, for doing so. He’s on to something. Reagan himself won in part by invoking great Democratic presidents, FDR…
This weekend I had my first houseguest, a critic of U.S. policy in the Middle East, and he passed on a rumor that he had picked up from an academic, that John Mearsheimer had said privately, or in so many…