Hypocrisy

Any time bombs are used to target innocent civilians it is an act of terrorism.
— Barack Obama, February 15, 2013.

When my book Searching Jenin was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word ‘massacre’ on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based ‘terrorists’.
The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a discussion regarding possible war crimes into a technical dispute over the application of language. For them, the evidence of Israel’s violations of human rights mattered little.

Here is the US changing its story for the FOURTH time of why it launched an air strike on the Doctors without Borders hospital in the Afghan town of Kunduz at the weekend, massacring at least 22 patients and hospital staff.

When you hear someone mentioning Lindsey Graham's hypocrisy, you immediately think it's about his sordid existence as a furtive, dishonest closet case. After all, even the local papers have been laughing at his pretense for years.

I was a bit surprised as well as appalled at the reported reaction of U.S. military personnel who had participated in the November 2004 destruction of Fallujah under Operation Phantom Fury, to the January 2014 taking control of the city by Sunni insurgents.

Oh what a tangled web we weave,
When first we practice to deceive.
— Walter Scott, 1771-1832, “Marmion.”

Ever since Russian President Vladimir Putin addressed the UN General Assembly on 28 September, the spokespersons for the US regime and its propaganda apparatus have tried to present Russia as a nostalgic power seething with envy. Such misrepresentations of current Russian policy and Russian history in the US are not unusual.  In fact, they have been the rule since 1917. Unlike the US, Russia is not an island whose ignorance and idiocy have been preserved by two oceans separating it from the rest of humanity (except the non-whites and half-whites south of Miami and the Rio Bravo).

Key leaders from around the world are present at the United Nations this week to discuss critical issues; one of the most pressing is Syria. How did we get to this point with half the Syrian population (almost 12 million) displaced and under-populated but huge areas of Syria now controlled by ISIS, Al Qaeda (Nusra) and other fanatical fundamentalist groups?

The Photo that went Round the World
Around 3:30 am September 2, Aylan Kurdi, his brother, mother and nine others drowned trying to reach a Greek island from Bodrum Turkey.

Rosa Clemente, who ran for Vice President with Cynthia McKinney in 2008, reminds us that Cornel West and many other notable left activists and intellectuals who have given lip-service to the need for an independent left politics in the U.S., dutifully lined-up to give their support to Barack Obama.