Archive for June, 2007

A Playground Lesson for Bush

How a spontaneous alliance of jocks, do-gooders and lesser bullies against the biggest bully at the school changed the balance of power at Milnerton Primary


Cracks in the Anti-Hamas Front

It’s all very well getting Egypt, Jordan and Israel together with Mahmoud Abbas to scold Hamas and talk about “strengthening Abbas,” but the problem is that the U.S. and Israel, on the one hand, and the Arabs and Abbas, on the other, want very different outcomes in the Palestinian territories. Olmert and Bush stress that [...]


Cracks in the Anti-Hamas Facade

In a fashion typical of its strategic and tactical ineptitude, the Bush Administration has responded to Hamas’s ouster of Fatah security forces from Gaza by madly rushing to cobble together an anti-Hamas alliance through a series of high profile gestures — the high-point of which was Monday’s Sharm el-Sheikh summit between the leaders of Israel, [...]


The Long March of General Tso

Don’t Try This At Home: (No Chinese chef would dare!)
Chicken chop suey is an American creation
I’ll freely admit to being a sucker, at least occasionally, for the sweet and starchy Hunan/Canton/Sichuan fare — cooked by people who were not chefs in their home country — that we know as “Chinese” on these shores. But now [...]


The 8 Fallacies of Bush’s Abbastan Plan

“Hello, Condoleezza Rice,” the Hamas gunman joked, speaking into the President Mahmoud Abbas (a.k.a. Abu Mazen)’s phone from the Palestinian Authority president’s chair in his abandoned Gaza office. “You have to deal with me now, there is no Abu Mazen anymore.”
Never a truer word spoken in jest, and all that…
But the Bush administration doesn’t get [...]


Bono’s Vanity: Showcasing Africa, or its Glamorous Patrons?

Can anyone explain Queen Rania’s presence?
It with great pleasure that I introduce guest columnist Sean Jacobs, a fellow Capetonian who these days divides his time between Brooklyn and Ann Arbor, where he is an assistant professor of Communication Studies and African Studies at the University of Michigan. He describes himself as “a frustrated [...]


Gaza: Another Mess Made in U.S.

Coming, as he does, from Fox News, Tony Snow is obviously a deeply cynical fellow, but this takes some beating: Asked to comment Wednesday on the bloodbath in Gaza, he answered: “Ultimately, the Palestinians are going to have to sort out their politics and figure out which pathway they want to pursue — the pathway [...]


Equality, Not Zionism, Will Save Israel

On the same day that we learn that Norman Finkelstein has been denied tenure at De Paul University largely because of an aggressive campaign by Israel supporters to silence the (to them) menacing figure of a Jew, son of a Holocaust survivor, as combatively anti-Zionist as Finkelstein is, it is with great pleasure that [...]


Putin Calls Bush’s Bluff

Throughout this mawkish missile-defense saga, President Bush has been talking to the Russians as if they were born yesterday. “Don’t worry, Vladimir, the Cold War is over,” Bush urged. And then he proceeded to bash Putin over Russia’s backsliding on democracy — as if Russian democracy was an issue when Boris Yeltsin was shelling [...]


How the 1967 War Doomed Israel

I.
Avir harim kalul ba’yayin, ve reach oranim…
The opening lines of Naomi Shemer’s legendary Yerushalayim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold) can still bring goosebumps to my flesh, even decades after I deconstructed and relinquished the mythology connoted by the old Basque lullaby she repurposed as an ode to Israel’s conquest of East Jerusalem in June of [...]


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    A Playground Lesson for Bush
    How a spontaneous alliance of jocks, do-gooders and lesser bullies against the biggest bully at the school changed the balance of power at Milnerton Primary
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