A Prayer
1. The following prayer was composed by Dr. Gordon Livingston, who graduated from West Point and did three tours in Vietnam as a surgeon with the 11th Armored Calvary Regiment. At a 1968 ceremony for…
Category: Power and Ideology
“Why did the Americans come here to destroy everything?”
1. In War without Fronts: The USA in Vietnam, German historian Bernd Greiner explains his focus: “At the heart of this book are the wartime atrocities and war crimes committed by the ground troops. To…
A Counter Friction To Stop the Machine
The case of Bradley Manning matters. The reason is simple: He touched a nerve. Before releasing over 250,000 diplomatic cables to Wikileaks, Manning commented, “Hilary Clinton, and several thousand diplomats around the world are going…
Responsibility to Our “Unworthy Victims”
On Edward S. Herman and David Peterson, The Politics of Genocide. Many years ago, I wrote a critical study of acclaimed moralist Elie Wiesel in which I tried to account for his trajectory from being…
Accuplacer Prep
Reading Overview (9:30 minutes) 1. Information and Ideas Reading Closely Determining Central Ideas and Themes Understanding Relationships 2. Rhetoric Analyzing Text Structure Analyzing Point of View Analyzing Arguments 3. Synthesis Analyzing Multiple Texts 4….
The Price is Worth It*
For Brooke Adams Large nations do what they wish, while small nations accept what they must. –Thucydides Imperialism says it wants to make us happy! –Ernesto Cardenal One does not become revolutionary from science, but…
The Demise of the Double Standard in the Middle East?
Double standard, noun. Any code or set of principles containing different provisions for one group of people than for another. Hopes are being raised for President Obama’s approach to the Israel-Palestine conflict. To many, the…
Change You Can Audaciously Put Your Hope In
From today’s New York Times, on Israel and Gaza… In the campaign, Mr. Obama made statements that sounded similar to those issued by the Bush administration on Saturday. “If somebody was sending rockets into my…
Journalists (Monitoring Power)
Thought of the day from journalist Robert Fisk from his The Great War for Civilisation: “I suppose, in the end, we journalists try–or should try–to be the first impartial witnesses to history. If we have any…
Mobilizing the Bible
The following review is forthcoming in the summer edition of the Journal of Palestine Studies. The Bible and Zionism: Invented Traditions, Archaeology and Post-Colonialism in Israel-Palestine, by Nur Masalha. New York and London: Zed Books, 2007….