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…
Category: Power and Ideology
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….
No Salvation outside the Palestinians
A Reflection on Jon Sobrino, No Salvation outside the Poor: Prophetic-Utopian Essays When I was in graduate school at Maryknoll, I recall a description of theology offered by my teacher Marc Ellis: “Theology ought to nurture…
A Preferential Option for the Iraqi People
Here is the last paragraph of Dahr Jamail’s book, Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq: If the people of the United States had the real story about what their government…
Towards a Post-Civilizational Praxis
For Jim Flynn and Pat Geier A Reflection on John Dominic Crossan God & Empire: Jesus against Rome, Then and Now [2007] In the past few awful, maleficent years of the Bush Administration, a spate of books has appeared…