Category: Foreign Policy

RE: Does anyone remember Guernica?

 A dear Palestinian friend (ooh, he has Palestinian friends?!) responded with this: —–Original Message—– Sent: Sunday, December 28, 2008 10:19 AM Subject: RE: Does anyone remember Guernica? The Palestinian conflict under Bush is like two bookends: It started out with his buddy Sharon bombing the hell out of Palestinians, and is ending in the same manner. …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/12/28/re-does-anyone-remember-guernica/

Does anyone remember Guernica?

 If anyone is wondering how much damage a lame-duck administration can manage on its way to historical infamy (or at best, oblivion), here’s what our Secretary of State had to say in response to the IAF attacks on Gaza (reminiscent, to this poor student of history, of the Stuka dive-bomber attacks on civilian populations in Spain …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/12/27/does-anyone-remember-guernica/

My mother’s kid brother

 From Ray Close: Eddy and the Mideast Joseph C. Goulden  OP-ED:  Middle East veterans of a certain era – the World War II era into the 1950s – speak with respectful awe of William A. Eddy. Soldier, scholar, statesman, spy, Arabist – of him a colleague said, “Bill Eddy was probably the nearest thing that …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/10/28/my-mothers-kid-brother/

Trophy Vice

 Maureen Dowd’s column today calls her a “Trophy Vice.”  If anyone harbors the fantasy that Sarah Palin is a self-made political success, they need to read a piece in the NYT titled “Palin’s Start in Alaska: Not Politics as Usual.”  Perhaps I’m guilty of seeing a Rovian/Gingrichian conspiracy behind every rising Republican star, but it …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/09/03/questions-for-sarah-palin/

Layers (part 2)

 For me, this is probably the work that got the Israeli PR thinkers to seeing the possibilities for a beautiful friendship between Zionism and fundamentalism:  Hal Lindsey’s 1970 “The Late, Great Planet Earth.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Late_Great_Planet_Earth I remember hearing about this while we were still in high school, and wondering what in the hell kind of foolishness …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/24/layers-part-2/

Layers

 There is another, deeper, emotional/spiritual layer to this entire problem.  I used to try to explain it but it falls on secular ears, and is largely ignored as insignificant.  It is anything but, and anyone who cares about justice and dignity in the Middle East would do well to try to understand it better.  Back in …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/24/layers/

If Americans only knew

 What do we really cherish?  America absolves itself the same way a smoker convinces himself he’ll never get cancer.  In both cases, there is plenty of available information from which the truth of the matter can be gleaned, but that requires more introspection than most of us are willing to endure.  Less than a minute …

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Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2008/08/20/if-americans-only-knew/