Prophylactic Spin on Iraq

Mindful of the American public’s sharply declining enthusiasm for squandering more blood and treasure on his failed Iraq enterprise, President Bush is once again adopting his administration’s preferred prophylactic strategy for spinning the slow moving disaster. Thus, his warning on Wednesday that insurgent violence will increase ahead of next month’s constitutional referendum. Just as [...]

U.S.-Iran: Here We Go Again

Tempting as it is, I shall avoid invoking my all time favorite lede in discussing the U.S. effort to get UN sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program. That — my all time favorite lede — would be the observation by a certain 19th century German journalist that all the great events in history occur [...]

Abu Ghraib as America

New allegations of prisoner abuse in Iraq not only give the lie to the administration’s claims that the Abu Ghraib torture was just the work of “bad apples” like Lindie England, it also reminded me of a column I wrote back then for TIME.com about how these abuses are not at all out of [...]

What Makes Food Jewish?

Originally published in the Anglo-Japanese magazine Eat in August 2000
There’s nothing more Jewish than fish on Fridays. Or so I thought, growing up in a household that tucked into pedestrian fried hake and chips every week after blessing the meal with the Sabbath “kiddush” prayer, wine and challah bread. If we were lucky, of course, [...]

Musharraf’s Balancing Act

Mary Anne Weaver’s typically excellent (I’ve been a fan since 1999, when I read her book Egypt and militant Islam, which remains the best analysis of al-Qaeda’s history I’ve seen) chronicle of the Tora Bora debacle raises the key question in U.S.-Pakistan relations in a little aside towards the end: Is it [...]

Social Darwinism and New Orleans

I’m probably still way too angry about what we’ve seen in New Orleans over the past two weeks to be writing about it. But a piece by Timothy Garton-Ash in the Guardian, of all places, has finally forced me to say something.
Garton-Ash is a very clever chap, and he tells us that what we [...]

Catering Camp David

Only Clinton had an appetite for a deal
Published in the Tokyo-based magazine Eat in September 2000
Just what were those crafty Americans up to? The only soupcon of information tossed out to a ravenous pack of journalists after the first day of July’s failed Camp David peace summit was this: The previous evening, President Clinton, [...]

Judaism, Zionism and the Gaza Grotesquerie

Settlers cynically appropriate the Holocaust: Jews can’t claim the support of other Jews when they violate Judaism’s fundamental ethics. Expelling Jews when they occupy other people’s land seems to me to be a very Jewish idea
We’ve already discussed why Israel’s withdrawal of its Gaza settlements is unlikely to move forward any kind [...]

Whose Coke Is It, Anyway?

Published in the Cape Times, July 1998

The Mayan church at St. Juan Chamula, in Chiapas: When
Pepsi arrived here, it was simply incorporated into indigenous rituals
The revolution will not be televised, not in Afghanistan, any way. The country’s ruling Taliban militia have banned television and given Afghans two weeks to destroy all TV sets, VCRs [...]

East Village Chimurenga

Sunday August 28
St. Mark’s Place is packed solid with traffic, hardly moving, which is all the more frustrating since we’ve been driving for three hours, hungry, from upstate New York, where Gabe had been at a swords-and-sorcery day camp. The sight of familiar faces from our old East Village neighborhood leading their children clad in [...]