Summer Reading, 2009
I recently found this in an old file… CHINA Annping Chin, The Authentic Confucius: A Life of Thought and Politics David Hinton, Selected Poems of Wang Wei D.C. Lau, trans. Mencius Andrew Plaks, trans.,…
Category: Middle East
Share the Wealth with Jason Makansi: Writing the Journey to the Center: Ethnic Delinquency, Young Adult Activism, Professional and Fiction Writing, and the Lifelong Struggle to Get What’s on the Inside to the Outside
It’s a great time to be half-Greek and half-Syrian! Never has my heritage been so aligned with the headlines. One country is the poster child for global economic failure, the other for geopolitical failure. Every…
The Way It Looked in 1996
The main intellectual task is to confront the Israeli conscience with the serious human and political claims of the Palestinians: these require moral, intellectual, cultural attention of the most profound kind, and cannot easily be…
Our Gifts to the World (A Very Partial List)
Please remember Victor Jara, In the Santiago Stadium, Es verdad – those Washington Bullets again —The Clash Washington Bullets (We’re still making the world safe for democracy) Washington Little Boy and Fat Man (We stand…
What You Understand Depends on Where You Stand/2
Overcoming Speechlessness is a short book on poet and novelist Alice Walker’s travels to Rwanda, Congo, and Palestine where she bears witness and attends to heartbreaking tales of atrocity, devastation, and cruelty. Yet, she is…
Sara Roy Challenges Elie Wiesel
This is a must-read prophetic address by researcher Sara Roy to Nobel laureate Elie Wiesel on the latter’s contribution to Israel’s destruction of Gaza.
Two Epigraphs from Neve Gordon’s Book, “Israel’s Occupation”
The PLO struck a political bargain with the Israeli government: In return for recognition and permission to return to the occupied territories, the Palestinians would police the local population and refrain from insisting that Israel…
With the Gazans
Palestinians in short do not deserve anything like a narrative or collective actuality, and so they must be transmuted and dissolved into essentially negative images. —Edward Said, From Oslo to Iraq and the Road Map:…
Boeing/Gaza (“It’s Not Personal; It’s Strictly Business”)
The Boeing Company must have been thrilled this past month Its warplanes performing so expertly in front of the world And Boeing is proud of its “products” and its customers Conflicts, massacres, wars They’re all…
Corporate Citizen/2 (Products/3)
Dear Carla What’s it to the CEOs of the corporations happily ensconced in the Military-Industrial Complex If their “products” are used to burn flesh To burn it to a crisp Specifically 34 year-old father flesh…