Jul 27 2010
Politics & US foreign policy: Pakistan (or Mollywood On My Mind) It seems to me that the keystone to present (=Obama) policy in ‘Af-Pak’ is the very nature of politics in Pakistan. And the question there is … which linguistic groups/tribes/ethnic groups are being sacrificed when attacking the Pushtun tribal structure on the ground … …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/27/mollywood-on-my-mind/
Jul 24 2010
Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘worse than Hiroshima’ By Patrick Cockburn, Saturday, 24 July 2010: Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/24/hiroshima-ii/
Jul 21 2010
Bad translation makes fundamentalists of us all By Marie Dhumières, guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 20 July 2010 16.00 BST http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/belief/2010/jul/20/translation-arabic-language-fundamentalist-muslim or http://bit.ly/a2gGGW or http://tinyurl.com/2fjebba I was recently watching the Spanish documentary To Shoot an Elephant, about the Israeli attacks on Gaza in January 2009. The documentary is good, but the subtitles in English struck me as strange: “For the sake …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/21/lost-in-translation/
Jul 17 2010
Robert Fisk on Fadlallah again, this time on our present season of grovelling whenever “anything might offend you know who.” http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/fisk/robert-fisk-theyre-all-grovelling-and-you-can-guess-the-reason-2028720.html or http://bit.ly/d9tSpU or http://tinyurl.com/32lxjd8 Last paragraph: Looking back, the Obama grovelling started in that famous Cairo reach-out-to-the-Muslim-world speech, when he referred to the Palestinian “relocation” of 1948 (as if the Palestinian Arabs got up one morning on …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/17/you-know-who/
Jul 16 2010
She Who Must Be Obeyed and I drove to Little Rock last night to see Robert Plant and the Band of Joy perform at Robinson Center Music Hall. Great Show! The latest incarnation of Band of Joy is Robert Plant, Patty Griffin (wow!), Buddy Miller, Darrell Scott, Byron House, and Marco Giovino. The show opened …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/16/robert-plant-and-the-band-of-joy/
Jul 11 2010
Friends: Over the past few days, there has been some interesting debate going on about the relative merits of the ‘spy swap’ concluded with the Russians. I have my own views of the case, and thought I’d share them with you. I’ve already sent these views to a number of former CIA colleagues and to …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/11/we-did-it-right/
Jul 10 2010
Robert Fisk’s commentary on CNN’s firing of Octavia Nasr for a tweet praising Grand Ayatollah Sayyed Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah (who died this week): Poor old CNN goes on getting more cowardly by the hour. That’s why no one cares about it any more. That can’t be said about Fadlallah. The Americans put it about that he had blessed …
Permanent link to this article: https://levantium.com/2010/07/10/fisk-on-fadlallah/
