Gustavo Faverón Patriau is a Peruvian academic and literary critic who teaches in the United States. His blog mainly focuses on literature and culture. We’ve commented on it here once before.
Archive for January, 2009
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
Last October, Z Word published my detailed report on the scandal of a member of the extreme right wing Olympia student fraternity, Dr. Martin Graf of the FPÖ, being elected as deputy president of the Austrian parliament.
Here ’s a report from the Associated Press which yet again demonstrates that Israel is a proper democracy, with proper separation of powers between the legislature, executive and judiciary:
Continue reading ‘Israel’s Supreme Court Rules in Favor of Arab Nationalist Parties’
Norman Geras has an excellent post here in which he deals with two of the typical arguments offered for negotiating with Hamas. These are his conclusions.
Last March, the right-wing Dutch MP Geert Wilders released a film about Islam entitled Fitna, an Arabic term which refers to civil strife. Unable to find a broadcaster because of the film’s blanket condemnation of Islam, Wilders ended up posting it on the internet. As Elif Kayi reported at the time, there were angry demonstrations around the world, including in Afghanistan, where Dutch troops were stationed with the NATO force. But the apocalypse did not come.
Writing about the recent conflict in Gaza, Martin Shaw says that,
In military terms it more resembles the pulverising of the cities of Germany and Japan in the Second World War that was intended to shatter the morale of the civilian population and destroy the political basis of the regime. But the lesson of the period is that such violence - utterly immoral and outside the laws of war - “works” in political terms only when it is used without limit and with a view to unconditional surrender. These circumstances cannot be made to apply in Gaza.
Below are excerpts from the agenda of the new Obama-Biden Administration on Pakistan and Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
This is a guest post by Karl Pfeifer, a veteran anti-fascist and journalist based in Vienna.
I first met Paula Abrams at the “Republikanischer Klub,” a club founded in 1986 by Austrian intellectuals to fight the antisemitic campaign of Kurt Waldheim, who became president of Austria.
“We will not apologize for our way of life, nor will we waver in its defense, and for those who seek to advance their aims by inducing terror and slaughtering innocents, we say to you now that our spirit is stronger and cannot be broken; you cannot outlast us, and we will defeat you.”
Daniel Levy has a lengthy piece here in which he analyzes the situation in Gaza after the ceasefire. The prospects for the break in hostilities holding, the general state of internal Palestinian politics, the consequences of the campaign for Israel and other regional actors as well as the agenda for the incoming US administration are all looked at.
Continue reading ‘Gaza After the Ceasefire: Unargued Affirmations and Wishful Thinking’
He may have been singing slightly off-key, but U2 frontman Bono - who played at the Obama inauguration celebrations yesterday - got the politics absolutely right. In the middle of “Pride,” U2’s epic tribute to Dr. Martin Luther King, whose memory is being honored across the US today, Bono, clearly loving the moment, told the crowd: “Not just an American dream - also an Irish dream, a European dream, African dream, Israeli dream, and also a Palestinian dream.” Brian Eno, who produced the U2 album “The Joshua Tree,” should take note. He - and you - can watch the clip of U2 here.
I’ve never thought that the academic boycott campaign would catch on in any meaningful way on North American campuses. Even against the background of campus anti-Israel demonstrations which have occasionally turned violent, Israel apartheid weeks, divestment campaigns and the foaming pronouncements of certain faculty members, the idea that US academics would boycott their Israeli colleagues along similar lines proposed by the UCU in Britain has seemed about as probable as a Hamas fundraiser headlined by Jackie Mason.
Eduardo Galeano is a Uruguayan writer, probably best known for The Open Veins of Latin America, a vaporous whinge of a book that pins the blame for each and every woe that besets this continent on the Spanish colonizers, British and American imperialism and foreigners in general.
A chastened Hamas has announced a one-week ceasefire which the smaller Islamist factions in Gaza, like Islamic Jihad, have also signed up to. We can now expect adherents of the “fluffy Hamas” thesis to loudly advocate for the group’s inclusion in whatever remains of the negotiating process.
