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Journalistic integrity
I have argued, and will continue until blue in the face, that the Iraqi insurgency is preying on Iraqis and is not the legit anti-imperialist force some on the left (Galloway, Arundhati Roy, etc.) take it for. Today, courtesy of David T at Harry’s Place, we have three news items: The BBC — About 26,000 Iraqis have been either killed
“World Can’t Wait”
A brief word on tomorrow’s Union Square demonstration, organized by The World Can’t Wait. Cornel West, Eve Ensler, Tom Duane and other well-known figures have signed on to the group’s campaign. I’ve written about WCW before, when the group held a New Orleans-style jazz funeral march in the wake of Katrina. Anti-Bush street demonstrations are justified and necessary. But why
Balkan revisionism postscript
Via Bill Weinberg, and following up on my previous Chomsky post, here is an in-depth piece by Marko Attila Hoare on the fallacies of “left revisionism” on the Balkans. Hoare’s conclusion: The bitterness of the left-revisionist campaign to deny the genocide in the former Yugoslavia carried out by Milosevic and the Serb nationalists reflects a neo-Stalinist determination to champion Europe’s
Anti-racism against antisemitism
David Hirsh makes the progressive case in the right-leaning Jerusalem Post. And he doesn’t shy away from uncomfortable truths. Responding to an earlier JPost op-ed by Isi Leibler, Hirsh writes: [T]he Israeli government has, since the collapse of the peace process, been acting in an indefensible way in its relations with Palestinians.…Demonizing Arabs or Palestinians or Muslims is not the
Chomsky’s standards
One more bit of fallout from Chomsky’s victory in the recent Prospect magazine poll. Oliver Kamm muses here on Emma Brockes’s laudably tough-minded interview with Chomsky in today’s Guardian. It’s not news that Chomsky, like some others on the far left, is a Bosnia revisionist, supporting dubious claims that the 1995 Srebrenica massacre was exaggerated. But in this particular interview,
Liberal hawks, continued
Further thoughts… for my previous post go here. First, an analytically and morally serious critique of liberal hawkism by Stephen Holmes at The Nation. Holmes reviews Paul Berman’s Power and the Idealists and David Rieff’s At the Point of a Gun: Democratic Dreams and Armed Intervention. Here he is on Rieff: Faced with the “appalling and degrading” conditions in postwar
Galloway update
Bad news for Galloway: GEORGE Galloway, the staunchly anti-war British MP, will be investigated by the United States Department of Justice for claims he lied to the Senate over Iraq oil money, The Business can reveal. The Charities Commission in England and Wales has also requested documents which the US Senate permanent sub-committee for investigations says prove that illegal Iraqi
An ironclad defense
From Slate comes this: Seven months after being sued by Ashley Olsen for running the cover headline “Ashley Olsen Caught In A Drug Scandal,” the Enquirer has issued the following bogus “Clarification”: “The National Enquirer wants to make clear to its readers that, by its cover and headlines, it did not intend to accuse Ms. Olsen of being involved in