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Clarification on a quote
On August 10 I expressed annoyance with a quote from a story in the Forward about “zero dissent” within the Jewish community on Israel/Lebanon. I’m grateful to the person quoted, Hadar Susskind of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, for taking the trouble to get in touch with me: I was not happy with the original quote in the Forward.
“Hezbollah’s Other War”
Michael Young, opinion editor of Beirut’s Daily Star, has an excellent primer on Lebanese sectarian politics in today’s NY Times Magazine. While Young doesn’t address it directly, his piece underscores the absolute intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the far-left embrace of Hezbollah. Detailing the Siniora government’s tense and fragile efforts to deal with Hezbollah and secure a hopeful future for
Halliday’s new column
Fred Halliday has a new column at openDemocracy, calling us back to the universalist ethos of Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt:What Isaac Deutscher and Hannah Arendt noted contains truths that the contemporary middle east, and the world, sorely need. Their relevance is to much more than the Arab-Israeli question; it applies in principle to any of the numerous other national
Iraqi Kurdistan troubles
There are reports of spreading anti-corruption demonstrations and government crackdowns in Iraqi Kurdistan. (In March I visited the autonomous northern region and wrote about it on this blog.) Bill Weinberg at WW4 Report has links, including a statement from Houzan Mahmoud of the Worker Communist Party of Iraq, and this piece in Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. The RFE page contains
More music video greatness
Late last year I linked to a fantastic video by the group OK Go. Here’s another. Wow these guys have a lot of time on their hands. Apparently they sustained minor injuries while making the clip. (Hat tip: Phil DiPietro)
Calling foul
Hawks, the birds of prey, are known for their extraordinarily keen vision. Hawks of the human variety, not so much. Oliver Kamm has been blogging only sporadically this summer, but the last couple of posts have been teeth-clenching. Here he reprimands the voters of Connecticut for handing a primary victory to Ned Lamont; he also wishes Joe Lieberman luck in
Finkelstein: “We are all Hezbollah now”
This is quite a bandwagon. The famed anti-zionist author Norman Finkelstein has laid bare the depthless poverty of his political and moral judgment: …for those who believe in freedom and dignity, We are all Hezbollah now. So he proclaims, as he distributes a screed from Samah Idriss, editor-in-chief of the magazine Al-Adab. Idriss’s statement, a model of unvarnished and unyielding
An editorial change
Readers are advised that I have enabled the “moderate comments” function on this blog. Open comments are one of several options available to bloggers. All the options have their pluses and minuses; many blogs don’t permit comments at all. I’ve chosen the intermediate course, and will select comments to publish on a case-by-case basis. Factual inaccuracies will of course be