Author Archives: Tony

Strange Liberators

You can be sure that Dr. Martin Luther King’s politics will be scrubbed clean of most of its content when President George W. Bush celebrates the public holiday named in his honor on Monday. In order to honor Dr. King’s … Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 5 Comments

Bush’s New Iraq Plan: Bomb Tehran

Critics are right to label President Bush’s new Iraq plan an “escalation,” but what was most clear from his speech announcing it is that the object of this escalation is not Iraq, but Iran. For all the smarmy talk about … Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 89 Comments

Condi’s Savage War on the Palestinians

In the coming weeks, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice will cluck regretfully about the violence unfolding in the Palestinian territories as if the chaos in Gaza has as little to do with her as, say, the bizarrely warm winter weather … Continue reading

Posted in Featured Analysis, Situation Report, Unholy War | 27 Comments

What the Saddam Lynching Tells Us About Iraq

You have to wonder what President Bush would have made of the image — had he been shown the tape — of Saddam Hussein being strung up by a bunch of masked toughs, while all around the small crowd in … Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report, Unholy War | 24 Comments

Dead at the Apollo

If I had the time, I’d build James Brown a proper online shrine, with “Night Train” welcoming you and Tom Tom Club’s exquisite JB tribute song “Pleasures of Love” bidding him farewell… (“What you gonna do when you get out … Continue reading

Posted in New York Moments, The Whole World's Africa | 10 Comments

Saddam is But a Footnote, Now

No one should cry any tears for Saddam Hussein, who will no doubt be executed within a matter of days. He was a vicious butcher who terrorized his own people, and ran a regime of fear in which arbitrary execution … Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report | 12 Comments

Israel and Apartheid: In Defense of Jimmy Carter

Nothing makes liberal American supporters of Israel more uncomfortable than the comparison between the circumstances it has imposed on the Palestinians and those that the apartheid regime imposed on black South Africans. That’s precisely why it is so important and … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 78 Comments

Cricket’s Coded Conversation

It is with unrestrained joy that I introduce my friend Balaji, a Madras-born scientist currently teaching at Princeton, who, in agreeing some months ago to write an analysis on the cultural and political subtexts of Australian umpire Darryl Hair falsely … Continue reading

Posted in Annals of Globalization, Glancing Headers, Guest Columns | 37 Comments

What Arab Holocaust-Deniers Should Learn from Mandela

Haganah fighters take aim: Survivors of the camps arriving in Israel in 1948 having been denied anywhere else to go weren’t going to see the war as anything but a matter of physical survival No, this is not another one … Continue reading

Posted in A Wondering Jew, Situation Report | 86 Comments

Gracias, Pinochet — For Proving That Your Victims Are Better Than You

Milton Friedman comes to Chile General Augusto Pinochet died, Sunday, shamed as a butcher and human rights abuser — even an international terrorist, given the CIA’s finding of his complicity in the 1976 Washington, D.C. car bombing that killed Orlando … Continue reading

Posted in Situation Report | 10 Comments