The other day, just after the terrorist attack in Mumbai got underway, I thought about writing a very brief post along the lines of “How long will we have to wait before the first op-ed piece that tries to pin at least some of the ultimate blame for this on Israel?”. The answer turns out to be “Only a couple of days”.
Continue reading ‘The Mumbai Massacres And Imperialist States of Mind’
With Canada and Israel now having formally withdrawn from the UN’s 2009 Durban II conference, serious questions are emerging over the attendance of other democratic states.
Any doubts about the antisemitic nature of the Iranian regime should be thoroughly squashed by news of a row at an international book fair in Zagreb, Croatia.
Karl Pfeifer has written an insightful and penetrating essay for Z Word in which he dissects the unwillingness of Austrian social democrats to confront antisemitism - and their willingness to deploy it.
Continue reading ‘New on Z Word: Antisemitism and the Austrian Left’
With every episode of unremitting terror, there invariably is a story of remarkable courage. Sandra Samuel, nanny to toddler Moshe Holtzberg, whose parents Gavriel and Rivka were killed during the siege of Chabad’s center in Mumbai, is someone who should make the rest of us feel very humble.
The news from Mumbai is grim: five hostages have been killed at Nariman House, the Chabad center in the city, and battles continue at the Taj Hotel.
As it’s still too soon to say with any degree of certainty who the Mumbai terrorists are, or who sent them, I’ll confine myself to making a couple of really obvious points.
Have a listen to our latest podcast, in which I interview author Joel Pollak about his new book The Kasrils Affair: Jews and Minority Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa“.
As the death toll continues to rise from today’s terrorist carnage in Mumbai, several news reports, invariably using the qualifier “previously unknown group,” have identified the Deccan Mujahideen as being responsible for the slaughter.
The trend in Iran for outing networks of Israeli “spies” and executing them continues. A few days after the execution of Ali Ashtari, a 45 year old salesman, the regime has announced the cracking of “spy ring” involving three suspects - and it is seeking the death penalty for them.
I’ve already written a post about why the Palestinians must have their own state. To this I’d now like to add that one of the few things worse than the Palestinians not getting a state of their own soon would be them getting some kind of emaciated ghost of a state instead, an autonomous polity with a flag and an anthem but shorn of many of the basic rights and prerogatives of states.
Just a note to alert readers to this.
Hot on the heels of Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann comes South African President Kgalema Motlanthe, who has attached his name to an advertisement decrying alleged “apartheid-style” brutality meted out by the Israeli government.
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