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George Allen’s racism no “mistake”
Max Blumenthal has a detailed piece in The Nation concerning Senator George Allen of “macaca” fame. Allen has had dealings with the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white supremacist organization; in his statements of support for neo-Confederate groups he has described the Civil War as “the War Between the States” and “a four-year struggle for independence and sovereign rights.” He
JFA: Helping musicians in need
One great way to aid post-Katrina New Orleans is through the Jazz Foundation of America. Check out their website and give if you can, or spread the word.
Cockburn responds
Alexander Cockburn has responded to charges that he picked up and reprinted a fraudulent interview with Hezbollah’s Hassan Nasrallah. He refers to the original source, Evrensel, as “a serious newspaper.” [Insert laugh track.] He also cites a philosophy professor, Idris Samawi Hamid of Colorado State University, who argues: Instead of shouting “fake!” we should be encouraging the kind of broad
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