Roundup: Media's Take

Norman Finkelstein: Distorting Camp David

This article, excerpted from a longer essay deconstructing Dennis Ross's book on the Palestinian-Israeli peace process from 1993 to 2000, focuses on the Camp David summit. In particular, it examines the assumptions informing Ross's account of what happened during the negotiations and why, and the distortions that spring from these assumptions. The article demonstrates that, judged from the perspective of Palestinians' and Israelis' respective rights under international law, all the concession

Martha Burk and Eleanor Smeal: U.S. Needs a Women’s Equality Amendment

[Martha Burk directs the Corporate Accountability Project for the National Council of Women’s Organizations <http://www.womensorganizations.org/> . Eleanor Smeal is president of the Feminist Majority <http://www.feminist.org/> . ] Some members of Congress are looking to do something long overdue: pass the Equal Rights Amendment. Recently renamed the Women’s Equality Amendment a

Tim McGirk: The end of Israel's oldest kibbutz

When Israel's oldest kibbutz, Degania, announced that it was giving up its socialist ideals and going private--members could own homes and earn salaries based on how hard they worked--few other than the kibbutzniks themselves were happy. For many Israelis, Degania was a symbol of rosier days, a Zionist idyll of honest work and camaraderie. But for those who called it home, the kibbutz had become an anachronism as rusty as the battered farm tools on display for tourists. Today, the younger genera

Tim Weiner: Walling off your enemies

.... The British are the prime example of success in modern times. At the close of their colonial era, after World War II, they isolated the ethnic Chinese population in Malaya, building “new villages” and herding hundreds of thousands of people into them. In doing so, they controlled the population within the walls — actually, fences that included barbed wire — and attacked Chinese insurgents outside them. “If the insurgency is countrywide,” wrote Sir Robert Thompson, the architect

Scott McConnell: Algeria ... The Model

When contemplating Iraq, Americans look into a murky crystal ball. History naturally presents itself as a tool to clarify the choices and possibilities that lie before us. But what history? Before the invasion, neoconservatives soaked the capital in the rhetoric of Winston Churchill and the “lessons” of the 1930s. Later, after Saddam was found to have no weapons of mass destruction, they sought to rebrand the Iraq War as a part of the long struggle against totalitarian “Islamofascism” and thus a

James Castagnera: Tuning in to Terrorism

[Jim Castagnera is a Philadelphia lawyer and writer, and the Associate Provost/Associate Counsel at Rider University, Lawrenceville/Princeton, NJ.] I’m a coward. And I’m not afraid to admit it. In Catholic grade school I was one of the weenies the class bully picked on. My high school letter is in “newspaper.” You jocks out there didn’t know a guy could letter in something as wimpy as that, did you? When my 2-S (college-student) deferment ran out, I enlisted in the Coast Gua

Nat Hentoff: J. Edgar Bloomberg ... COINTELPRO in NY

On May 2, 1972, when news suddenly broke that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover had died in his sleep, the Savannah (Georgia) Morning News spoke for many Americans, some of us much relieved: "It was a shocker. If anyone on this earth seemed immortal, it was Mr. Hoover." He had molded the FBI into the most fearsome official investigative presence in American history, creating far more apprehension—not only among lawbreakers—than the fabled, relentless national 19th-century Pinke

Alvaro Vargas Llosa: The Return of the Idiot (leftist, populist leaders in Latin America)

[Alvaro Vargas Llosa is director of the Center on Global Prosperity at the Independent Institute. Ten years ago, Colombian writer Plinio Apuleyo Mendoza, Cuban writer Carlos Alberto Montaner, and I wrote Guide to the Perfect Latin American Idiot, a book criticizing opinion and political leaders who clung to ill-conceived political myths despite evidence to the contrary. The “Idiot” species, we suggested, bore responsibility for Latin America’s underdevelopment. Its beliefs—revolutio

Max Boot: Name That 'War'

Admiral William Fallon has just made his first major move as Central Command chief. He's begun his tenure by ostentatiously banning the term "Long War" that was coined by his predecessor, Gen. John Abizaid. Yet, so far at least, he has not offered up any superior alternative to describe the "whatchamacallit" that we're in the middle of. The change of nomenclature was first reported by the Tampa Tribune, Centcom's hometown newspaper, which quoted an email from a s

Daniel A. Farber: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment Gives Americans Rights They Don't Know They Have

[Daniel A. Farber is Sho Sato Professor of Law and Director of the Environmental Law Program at California University at Berkeley and author of many books, including most recently, Retained by the People: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know They Have" (Perseus Books, 2007).] The following is an excerpt from Daniel A. Farber's forthcoming "Retained by the People: The 'Silent' Ninth Amendment and the Constitutional Rights Americans Don't Know

Conn Hallinan: Is the US trying to exploit differences between Sunnis and Shia?

[Conn Hallinan is a Foreign Policy In Focus columnist.] In 1609, a terrible thing happened: not terrible in the manner that great wars are terrible but in the way that opening Pandora’s Box was terrible. King James I of England discovered that dividing people on the basis of religion worked like a charm, thus sentencing the Irish to almost four centuries of blood and pain. If the Bush administration is successful in its current efforts to divide Islam by pitting Shiit

Todd Crowell: Australian Psycho

[For fourteen years (1987-2001) Todd Crowell worked as a Senior Writer for Asiaweek, the leading English-language newsmagazine, published in Hong Kong by Time Warner. This position gave him a perch from which to observe the tumultuous events of modern history in East Asia, from the Tiananmen Massacre of 1989 to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. He has published three books: Farewell, My Colony: Last Years in the Life of British Hong Kong (1998); Tokyo: City on the Edge (2001) and Discover Macau

Aaron Hanscom: Confronting Worldwide Jew-Hatred

[Mr. Hanscom is a freelance writer in LA.] Shortly before his death in 2005, Holocaust survivor Simon Wiesenthal expressed a deep foreboding about the resurgent anti-Semitism spreading across the world. But even Wiesenthal, a man who helped track down Nazi war criminals, would have been surprised to learn that some teachers in Britain are dropping Holocaust lessons because they fear the anti-Semitic sentiments of their Muslim students. Stories like this prove the importance of Holo

R. Emmett Tyrrell: On What Clinton's Been Doing Since He Left Office

Conservative columnist and author R. Emmett Tyrrell has not really spent half his career reporting scandals about Bill and Hillary Clinton. It just seems that way. The American Spectator, the conservative monthly magazine he founded in 1967, broke some of the earliest stories about "Troopergate," "Travelgate," and "Filegate" in the early 1990s. And two of his books, 1997's Boy Clinton and 2003's Madam Hillary, were unflattering but best-selling biographies of his fa

Michiko Kakutani: What books by presidential aspirants tell us

BARACK OBAMA wrote “very bad poetry” in college. John McCain once contemplated joining the French Foreign Legion. John Edwards wanted to become a lawyer so he could defend the likes of the wrongfully accused Dr. Richard Kimble on “The Fugitive.” Rudolph W. Giuliani found the boxing skills his father taught him useful as a young Yankee fan, growing up blocks from the Dodgers’ stadium in Brooklyn. Hillary Rodham Clinton was a Brownie, a Girl Scout and a Paul McCartney girl, and wanted to grow up t

Media Matters for America: Vegans, transsexuals, and "fake Holocaust survivors," oh my

In an April 18 weblog entry, right-wing pundit Debbie Schlussel responded to a Media Matters for Americaitem that highlighted her"speculat[ion]" in an April 16 post (since

Brian Wesbury: The Bush boom vs. the Clinton expansion

[Mr. Wesbury is chief economist at First Trust Advisors L.P. in Lisle, Ill.] The Misery Index was first employed by Jimmy Carter in 1976 to unseat President Gerald Ford. That year, the index, which is calculated by adding the unemployment rate to the inflation rate, averaged 13.2%. Four years later it had climbed to 18.2%, and Ronald Reagan used it to unseat Mr. Carter. Today the Misery Index isn't revealing much misery. As of February 2007, it was only 6.8% (4.5% unemp

Bob Herbert: A Volatile Young Man, Humiliation and a Gun

In the predawn hours of Monday, Aug. 1, 1966, Charles Whitman, a former marine and Eagle Scout in Austin, Tex., stabbed his wife to death in their bed. The night before he had driven to his mother’s apartment in another part of town and killed her. Later that Monday morning, Whitman gathered together food, water, a supply of ammunition, two rifles, a couple of pistols, a carbine and a shotgun and climbed the landmark 30-story tower on the campus of the University of Texas.

Michael Eliot: Britain's Shame--The 15 Captured Marines

There's stiff competition ˜ the handling of mad cow disease, the royal family's years of dysfunction ˜ but it is hard to think of anything in modern times that has held Britain up to such, and such richly deserved, international contempt as the case of the 15 captured mariners in the Shatt al Arab. There was the original sin; messing about in lightly armed little boats in a waterway contested by Iran ˜ a bit like poking a mad dog in the eye without being prepared to clobber it with a big stick i

Jim Lobe: Elliott Abrams' Repeat Performance

[Jim Lobe is the Washington bureau chief of the Inter Press Service and a contributor to Right Web (rightweb.irc-online.org).] It has an all too familiar ring to it. A crisis area—in this case, the Middle East—finds itself in desperate need of a peace process capable of tamping down the forces of violence and destabilization that the United States itself has played a central role in unleashing. Regional efforts at diplomacy—in this case, led by Saudi Arabia—gain some mo