dev
A. Roy and the Naxalites, postscript
Hate to keep beating up on left activist/author Arundhati Roy, but this story in the Monitor struck me as important. Not long ago I criticized Roy’s claim that she is “doomed” to support violent resistance movements, including the Maoist “Naxalites” of rural India. In Anuj Chopra’s account for the Monitor, we learn of villagers’ efforts to create social change through
Spike Lee: a final note
Acts 3 and 4 of Spike Lee’s masterly Katrina documentary “When the Levees Broke” did not disappoint. The emphasis in this half was the political economy of disaster and the long-term impact of the government’s outright negligence. Act 3 begins with harrowing images of destruction and grief, set against a breathtaking piece of music by trumpeter/composer Terence Blanchard. Last year,
Counterpunch: your source for fake news
Alexander Cockburn’s far-left Counterpunch has published what appears to be a fraudulent “interview” with Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah, in which the sheikh proclaims solidarity with left anti-imperialists and so forth. The disclaimer is a classic: Editors’ Note: The authenticity of this interview has been challenged, maybe because Nasrallah doesn’t speak entirely according to Orientalist expectations of what a Shi’a leader should
The “we” of Jewish nationalism
Since I’ve taken the anti-zionist left to task again here, I’d like to add a comment on the lamentable state of affairs within the Jewish community. Last week sometime on PBS’s Newshour, there was a segment airing the responses of American Jews to the Israel/Hezbollah war. For one young woman on an organized “Birthright Israel” tour, the matter was quite
Spike Lee’s triumph
I’m with Troy Patterson of Slate — Spike Lee’s “When the Levees Broke” is superb, so far. (Part 2 airs tonight.) Going in I had misgivings about Lee’s take on the levee conspiracy theory. But this plays a short and pretty much insignificant role; author Doug Brinkley calls it an “urban myth” and that view isn’t really challenged. Lee’s visual
The “liquidation” letter returns
The Nation has published “A Letter from 18 Writers” on the Israel/Palestine conflict — the signatures were far fewer when I first mentioned this document, some weeks ago. The initial signers were Noam Chomsky, Arundhati Roy, Howard Zinn and a few others, who declared that Israel’s “political aim is nothing less than the liquidation of the Palestinian nation.” The Nation
Tom Terrell
My fellow music journalist Tom Terrell, a delightful presence on the New York scene, has been diagnosed with cancer. There is a benefit concert planned for September 11 (handbill attached). We’re pulling for you, Tom.
Mideast mystification
In the letters section of this week’s NY Times Magazine, Carol Haskill of San Francisco writes of the Middle East as …a strange, timeless place where nothing has changed for thousands of years, where fierce hatreds are as ancient as the deserts and cannot be tamed or reasoned with in Western terms. We will never understand it. She’s right about