Category: People Power

Leah and Wangari

In this morning’s class, we read the passages below from Wangari Maathai’s memoir, Unbowed. Leah then spoke about her country of Kenya and answered our many questions. She told us that when she was a…

Appeal for Gaza

Norman Finkelstein has been calling on people to make a donation to al-Awda Hospital in Gaza in the hopes of raising $100,000. Please consider making a donation of $10 if you can. One of the…

Finkelstein’s Pessimism and Optimism

Philosopher Paul Ricoeur identified Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche as three masters of suspicion in the modern West.  Over the last three decades, Norman Finkelstein has shown himself to be a contemporary  maven of suspicion when…

An Option for “Unworthy Victims”

On Norman G. Finkelstein, The Rise and Fall of Palestine: A Personal Account of the Intifada Year First published in the National Catholic Reporter, fall 1997 Some years back, the political critics Noam Chomsky and…

Living in Truth

“… every attempt to live within the truth, must necessarily  appear as a threat to the system and, thus, as something which is political par excellence. Any eventual political articulation of the movements that grow…

Lexicon/21

Sumud, Arabic, noun, state of perseverance; samid (masculine form): the steadfast, the persevering, samdeh, feminine form; samidin, plural. Sumud is watching your home turned into a prison. You, Samid, choose to stay in that prison…

The Summons

We refuse to be strangled by the wall in silence. In a famous Palestinian short story by Ghassan Kanafani, “Men in the Sun,” Palestinian workers suffocate inside a tanker truck. Upon discovering them, the driver…

A Strategic Vulnerability

Many of those demonstrating for noble causes are discourteous, vilify their opponents, and are often filled with hate.  In practical terms, if you do not have the spirit of nonviolence, you create a strategic vulnerability:…