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Atlantic Free Press Book Reviews
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Book Reviews from Atlantic Free Press Writers and Bloggers
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Wed 01 Sep 2010 |
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Palestine Betrayed - Book Review by Jim Miles |
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Wednesday, 01 September 2010 06:05 |
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 by Jim Miles
Palestine Betrayed. Efraim Karsh. Yale University Press, London, 2010.
Was Palestine betrayed? Of course it was, by the British, the United States,
France, the League of Nations, the United Nations, the remnants of the Ottoman
empire, all of the regional Arab countries, and by certain elites and powerful
of Palestine itself. Efraim Karsh makes the latter two the main if not the sole
responsible for the nakba - the disaster - that occurred in 1947-48 with the
announced partition of Palestine followed by the declaration of the state of
Israel. “Palestine Betrayed,” as portrayed by Karsh, is the story
of the connivances of the Arab leaders in the region along with the elites of
Palestine while the Jewish population continually offered peace and coexistence
with their brethren and encouraged them to stay in their villages and towns to
become partners in the new state enterprise.
Karsh is both right…
Karsh is right in that, yes, the Palestinians were in essence betrayed by the
Arab leaders at the time more concerned about their own scenarios and power
bases than that of a nascent Palestinian nationality. Further he is correct in
that some of the local Palestinian leadership - or what remained of it after the
British military violently dealt with them in the previous ‘Arab revolt’ - told
the people of the towns and villages to evacuate and retreat away from the
advancing Jewish forces. He presents many quotes from Jewish leaders, Ben Gurion
in particular, that attempt to show that the Jewish people wished to live in
peaceful coexistence with their Arab neighbours.
…and horribly wrong.
His approach and methodology of trying to reconstruct the arguments around
the nakba are horribly wrong in several ways.
In the introduction he writes, “It is understandable for leaders and
politicians, culpable for their nation’s greatest ever disaster, to revert to
hyperbole and lies in their quest for personal and collective exoneration, it is
inexcusable for future generations of scholars and intellectuals to substitute
propaganda for incontrovertible facts.” In other words, “These politicized
historians have turned the saga of Israel’s birth upside down, with the
aggressors transformed in hapless victims and vice versa.”
His main historical criticism is directed at the “new historians” - who have
“total unfamiliarity…with the Arab world…and their condescending treatment of
the Palestinians as passive objects.” He says that, “rather than unearth new
facts or offer novel interpretations”, they have “recycled the standard
Palestinian Arab narrative of the conflict.” Karsh then continues to announce
that “the recent declassification of millions of documents from the period of
the British mandate and Israel’s early days, documents untapped by earlier
generations of writer and ignored or distorted by the “new historians.”
The result is that the new documents reveal “that there was nothing
inevitable about the Palestinian-Jewish confrontation….that the claim of
premeditated dispossession is not only baseless but the inverse of the truth,”
and that it was the Arab leaders “against the wishes of their own constituents,
launched a relentless campaign to obliterate the Jewish national revival.”
“It is to reclaim this historical truth that this book has been written.”
Karsh succeeds, and he fails.
If the reader is unfamiliar with any other writings on Israel, the “new
historians” that Karsh so disparages (and to the uninitiated, the new historians
are predominantly if not solely Israeli academics), and if the reader is
unfamiliar with the larger historical contexts of the world’s empires during the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Century and their impacts within the Middle East, the
reclamation of historical truth works. That is, it does present a picture of a
peaceful Jewish population betrayed by a greedy, backwards, ineffective, and
self-serving Arab leadership.
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Sun 15 Aug 2010 |
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The Global Economic Crisis: The Great Depression of the XXI Century - Book Review by Kellia Ramares |
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Sunday, 15 August 2010 00:35 |
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 by Kéllia Ramares
Orthodox economic theory does not acknowledge the amply documented fact that financial actors can not only influence but actually manipulate the market, make it move in a particular direction…. Economic theory does not address the structural causes of economic collapse…. We are not dealing with a cyclical process; what is at stake is a major dislocation in the financial, trading and productive structures of the global economy.
--Michel Chossudovsky, The Global Economic Crisis, p16 (emphasis in original).
Earlier this summer, I was invited to attend a brown bag lunch in Berkeley, California, hosted by the Sustainable Economies Law Center. SELC helps urban farmers, worker-owned co-ops, and other social enterprises sort through legal gray areas. The lunch was a discussion about money that had a diverse group of participants who wished to do various things such as “reboot” the financial system, promote individual investments in local food systems (Slow Money Alliance) or abolish monetary systems altogether (The End of Money, my contribution to the discussion). Although most of the discussion was focused on the future, one man was concerned with teaching people how the current system worked.
As he made his point, I drew from my bag a copy of The Global Economic Crisis, and soon was telling the group that this book would do just what that gentleman had just said needed to be done.
But this is not a ordinary book on financial literacy that will tell people about the differences between banks and credit unions, the role credit scores play in our personal lives, or how to access small business financing. This book is a compilation of essays by some of the most socially conscious political and economic minds of our time, including James Petras, Bartle Professor (Emeritus) of Sociology at Binghamton University, New York, and the author of more than 60 books published in 29 languages, Peter Phillips, Professor of Sociology at California State University—Sonoma and director of the Project Censored Awards program, Peter Dale Scott, a former Canadian diplomat and English Professor at the University of California—Berkeley, and renowned researcher of the New World Order, Ellen Brown, author of the best selling book Web of Debt, which examines the inner workings of the Federal Reserve, and Mike Whitney, an independent writer in Washington State who analyzes the inner workings of Wall Street.
The Global Economic Crisis describes the big picture, the global macroeconomics that translate into high unemployment, massive foreclosures, drastic cuts in local governmental services, and bankruptcy for millions of individuals, and businesses large and small, worldwide. And the understanding of economics at the global level, not how to open a checking account or how to shop for an auto loan, is the financial literacy the public needs most.
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Fri 06 Aug 2010 |
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Start-Up Nation - The Story of Israel’s Economic Miracle - Book Review by Jim Miles |
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Friday, 06 August 2010 04:57 |
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 by Jim Miles
There are no Palestinians….
Israel is an amazing place as one puts together the implications from Start-Up Nation. It is a fount of free enterprise can-do entrepreneurial spirit. There are no resistances, although something called an Intifada concerned the authors somewhat, without being specified as to what it is/was. There are no freedom fighters nor insurgents, no guerrillas nor rebellions. For that matter there are no Palestinians as the word has been expunged from the authors’ vocabulary completely (unless it was in a boring anecdotal section that I skim read and missed - not likely). Israel, except for a few wandering Arabs, was “largely a barren wasteland.”
The only people - other than Jews, Zionists, and various other national entrepreneurs - to people this book are the terrorists, obviously dealt with very effectively by somebody within the Israeli Defence Forces (IDF). The authors use the media presumption that anyone against the state of Israel must be a terrorist and they are there for seemingly no reason at all, other than that ‘they are against us and hate us for what we are,’ an attitude one could expect from writers with Council on Foreign Relations background. Without these contextual placements, this work fails completely. Even accepting these contextual failures, the ‘miracle’ that is Israel is not very miraculous at all, but is based on what are normal means of establishing national wealth.
Questions
I knew before I read the book that I expected certain elements to be addressed in order for it to be a complete contextual presentation on this supposed miracle. The questions I asked, and that I wrote on the front fly-leaf of the book before reading even the cover flap were:
Does the book discuss the U.S. foreign aid of about $3 billion dollars annually and an etimated 114 billion dollars since inception?
Does it mention the historical period before the war, before the UN Resolution, and immediately following the declaration of the state of Israel, when financial support from the U.K. and the U.S. had already become common place?
Is there a discussion of the occupation and settlements of prime agricultural land and the control of natural resources (the most important being water)?
Is there any effect of the hostage population of Palestinians in creating cheap labour markets and a captive sales market?
Is the technology trade with the U.S. discussed, and in its entirety of state of the art military technology and not just the run of the mill, out of date stuff sold to other countries?
….and answers.
Well no, there are no answers to these questions, except for the one on U.S. technology imports, answered only partially and perhaps inadvertently in a single line in the concluding section of the work. Shimon Peres is cited as saying, “Every technology that arrives in Israel from America, it comes to the army and in five minutes, they change it.” The technology Israel receives is state of the art technology in military and security hardware and software.
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Thu 08 Jul 2010 |
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Letters from Palestine - Palestinians Speak Out about Their Lives, Their Country, and the power of Nonviolence - Book Review by Jim Miles |
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Thursday, 08 July 2010 06:37 |
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by Jim Miles
 Letters from Palestine - Palestinians Speak Out about
Their Lives, Their
Country, and the power of Nonviolence. Kenneth Ring and Ghassan Abdullah
Kenneth Ring’s writing on Palestine has already
received just praise, as it
is another in a series of recently published works that cry from the
heart of
Palestine.[1] And while I have read many other books on Palestine, “Letters
from Palestine”, as with others that are set within a personal
context,
brings forth the undying hope and resilience of the Palestinian people
in the
face of severe hostility from Israel and a careless disregard from most
of the
western media and governments. What come through uniquely from this work
is that
of hope combined with youthfulness, that the Palestinian story will
surely go on
and on as long as there are Palestinians to relate it.
The injustices perpetrated by the Zionists of Israel, supported by
the
awkward and embarrassing sycophantic participation of the U.S.
government (read
also military and corporations), cannot endure forever. It is from these
letters
from Palestine that spring the message that the Palestinians will not
grow old
and die off and there will be no one left to remember that there was a
Palestine. There is life, there is hope, there is memory.
What really impressed me as I read was the general youthfulness of
the
writers, second and third generation refugees and residents who carried
the
memories forward. Not just memories of their own horrible experiences
but the
memories of their parents and their parents before them. Combined with
that
youthfulness is an eagerness for education, recognizing that education
is a
means to escape the misery of the occupation, to better one’s own life,
but also
to contribute back to their people, their ancestors, and the land they
lived and
worked on over thousands of years, “Palestine lives in its children.”
Dear America
Most ‘Americans’, if one truly includes the Americas of the central
and
southern geographies are well aware of the violent nature and ill
intentions of
governments backed by the government of the United States. They are also
well
aware of the manner in which the United States ignores international law
in any
area that gets in the way of its ideological desires. Further, they are
aware of
the covert, subversive, and torturous methods that they promulgate in
order to
achieve their ends.
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Sun 27 Jun 2010 |
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War Without Context: Restrepo and the Korengal Valley - Film Review by Hannah Gurman |
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Sunday, 27 June 2010 06:12 |
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 by Hannah Gurman Ph.D.
“The reaches opened
before us and closed behind, as if the forest had stepped leisurely
across the water to bar the way for our return. We
penetrated deeper and deeper into the heart of darkness.”
—Joseph Conrad,
Heart of Darkness
Sebastian
Junger’s documentary, Restrepo, which premiered at the Human Rights
Watch Film Festival in New York last Friday and opens commercially on
June 25, has been racking up the superlatives. It won the
Grand Jury Prize at Sundance. The New York Times surmised
it just might be the “most frightening” of the many recent films that takes a hard-nosed
look at the daily experience of war. And according to Slug
Magazine, Restrepo “may be the finest
documentary created about war in our time”.
The film, which traces
the second battalion in the Korengal Valley over the course of their
deployment in 2006-2007, gives us the raw experience of war in this
dangerous region of Afghanistan. We hear the snap snap and
see the smoke of the machine guns and rocket fire during the daily
firefights. We feel the loss of “Doc” Restrepo, who bled out on the
helicopter after being shot in the legs in the first months of the
mission, but whose death did not prevent the group from penetrating
deeper into the steep mountainside to build an operating base named
after the fallen. We witness and vicariously feel the
shock of being ambushed on the mission to keep pushing the boundary
farther and, in the midst of battle, we see the young men turn behind
them, where the body of their friend, who has just caught enemy fire,
lies. We are with the men in quieter moments too, playing
the guitar, dancing arm in arm to the tune of “Touch Me,” and joking
about their sex lives. Basically being “normal guys.”
These scenes are
powerful
and worth documenting. In a time when most Americans are
so divorced from the experience or sacrifice of war, Restrepo drives
these realities home. Individually and collectively, the
men in the film have an important story to tell—from Captain Dan
Kearney, the no-holds-barred leader who needs to keep the mission and
his soldiers moving forward, to specialist Misha Pemble-Belkin who
reflects fondly on his hippie pacifist upbringing as he fires a machine
gun across the valley into the opposite ridge.
As illuminating as the
American soldier’s perspective may be, it is only one vantage point onto
the experience of war. Especially when it comes to
feature films, this angle generally gets more emphasis than any other,
partly because it makes for good drama and partly because of relative
institutional, cultural, and logistical ease. Embedded
journalism and film have so dominated our window onto the wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan, however, that they threaten to marginalize the larger
context of these wars.
The Korengal valley, or
“valley of death,” as it
has been dubbed by Americans, is a small region in eastern Afghanistan
near the Pakistan border. Most of the fighting occurred
around its population cluster, which consists of a handful of villages
and several hundred houses. The remoteness of the valley
lends itself to a sense of Korengal as a timeless region in “the middle
of nowhere” and “away from everything.” This, combined
with the heavy fighting and high casualties in the region, has made
Korengal the subject of many a returning soldier’s nightmares. As
Michael Cummings recounts in his blog about
the war, “In my dream, I had returned
to the Korengal
Valley, later nicknamed the "Valley of Death." I only spent a couple
months in the Korengal, but it felt much longer. The place haunted me
before I arrived in Afghanistan; it still haunts me.”
Like the river in
Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and Kubrick’s Apocalypse Now, the
valley is not so much a place in itself. Rather, it
represents the deepest and darkest recesses of the soldier’s emotional
experience. As the soldier gets deeper and deeper into the
terrain, he digs deeper and deeper into his own psyche. The
soldiers in Restrepo rarely see the man firing gunshots and
rockets at them. To the extent that he exists, the actual
human enemy, as timeless as the rocks that shape this terrain, is merely
an outgrowth of the valley itself. Here, in this alien
terrain, the soldier faces war pure and simple.
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Sat 19 Jun 2010 |
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Quicksand: America's Pursuit of Power in the Middle East - Book Review by Jim Miles |
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Saturday, 19 June 2010 15:50 |
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From first impression to last impression this book,
like its title Quicksand, is deceptive. Even the first physical impression, the
physical
structure of the book itself - its glossy pages and high quality binding
- is
designed to impress the reader. Initially the history is written
powerfully and
revealingly, highlighting information that I have not encountered within
other
histories of U.S. imperial adventures in the Middle East.
However as the story unfolds, particularly in the final third of the
book, a
different sense akin to déjà vu surfaces, as the history becomes more of
a
current events crisis without the in-depth analysis and critique that
should
have accompanied it. The end result is that instead of discussing the
general
Middle East geopolitical context and the power of the Israeli lobby
within the
U.S. - not to mention the lack of global context within the over-riding
imperial
intent of the United States since its inception - and there are many
texts that
support that analysis - the history ends leaving a feeling that, well,
yes, the
U.S. has made some mistakes in their relationships in the Middle East,
but their
intentions were good.
As well, the book ends with the Iraq war and only the briefest of
mention of
post Iraq war events (of course the war continues, a downgraded
insurgency
struggle) that should have been covered in a work with a 2010
publication date.
The final section “Conclusion” provides very little in the way of
substantive
answers and only reinforces the déjà vu sensation of too little analysis
of
supposedly good intentions.
Conclusion
The last impression of the work is of a poorly analysed position, or
more
correctly, one viewed through the rose coloured lenses of U.S.
beneficence and
magnanimity towards the world in general. It begins by reviewing the
Iranian
situation, using language with either an obvious bias or an obvious
ignorance -
perhaps both - as the “Iranian security forces are taking their cues
from the
shah and SAVAK; because the shah was so gentle, he fell.” Oh…really!??
From that
interesting and singular interpretation, Wawro then goes briefly into
Iran’s
nuclear program and “Iran’s curious animosity toward Israel,” as it
makes
“Israeli pre-emption or massive retaliation inevitable.” Yet there is no
reminder at this point of U.S. machinations in the region, nor the
U.S.’s
strange ‘alliance’ with Israel, nor the double standard that allows
Israel to
have all the nuclear power in the region outside of the Nuclear
Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) while Iran is working legally within the
NPT.
Then there is a quick turn to the AfPak war where “polls reveal (at
last!)
that al-Queda and the Taliban are unpopular,” without revealing the
polls in
Pakistan that the U.S. influence and presence are well below ‘unpopular’
and
considered by the vast majority to be at the root of many of the regions
problems.
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Fri 04 Jun 2010 |
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Beyond Fundamentalism - Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization - Book Review by Jim Miles |
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Friday, 04 June 2010 06:32 |
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by Jim Miles
Beyond Fundamentalism - Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. Reza Aslan. Random House, New York.
I first encountered Reza Aslan on the Jon Stewart Show and was somewhat perturbed by his interview - unfortunately I have not been able to retrieve that reference on the internet, but it did intrigue me and led me to purchasing his book Beyond Fundamentalism. More than likely that was what his intentions originally were for, to promote purchase and readership of his latest book, originally published as “How to Win a Cosmic War.”
At first appearances the writing seemed highly sensationalized, presenting definitions about the differences between holy wars and ‘cosmic’ wars as if there was a substantial difference between the two. That a “cosmic war is a religious war,” does not seem to offer much differentiation to that of a holy war. That cosmic warriors “are fighting a war of the imagination,” seems all too obvious, either from a secular perspective without a god, or from a religious perspective in which the image and reality of god are often described as unknown realities to mere humans.
However, as the introduction develops it becomes more grounded in reality than philosophy, and discusses the 9/11 attacks as being a “declaration of war” for a “war already in progress…raging between the forces of good and evil…It was an invitation that America’s own cosmic warriors were more than willing to accept.” Aslan accepts the validity of the Muslim grievances, that the “Palestinians really are suffering under Israeli occupation. Arab dictators are in fact propped up by U.S. policies. The Muslim world truly does have reason to feel under attack….” His ultimate statement, one that unfortunately is not reiterated in the rest of the book, is “there is only one way to win a cosmic war: refuse to fight in it.”
Jihadists and Judaism.
The concept of jihad is presented in the first chapter, its various attributes and definitions concerning lesser and greater jihad, leads into a discussion of the development of the “near enemy” and the “far enemy.”
Following that, Aslan very briefly discusses the development of Jewish fundamentalism and the Zionist movement originating in nineteenth century Europe where the rise of nationalism coincided with the rise of anti-Semitism, where the Jews represented an “alien culture” that had “yet to sufficiently assimilate into European society.” Aslan does not identify that Zionism also developed in this milieu of proto-nationalism and Christian identity of the Jews as the ‘other’, outcasts from their society.
His brief history is generally accurate and leads to a concluding statement that “There remains today no more potent symbol of injustice in the Muslim imagination than the suffering of Palestinians under Israeli occupation.” He emphasizes however that the real grievance for the jihadists is between the forces of good and evil, to be enjoined by “all Muslims, Jews, and Christians - three faith communities with long and deeply ingrained traditions of cosmic warfare.”
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Fri 14 May 2010 |
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My Stroke of Insight - A brain scientist's personal journey - Book Review by Kéllia Ramares |
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Friday, 14 May 2010 06:56 |
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by Kéllia Ramares
I have heard doctors say, “If you don't have your abilities back by six months after your stroke, then you won't get them back!” Believe me, this is not true. I noticed significant improvement in my brain's ability to learn and function for eight full years post-stroke, at which point I decided my mind and body were totally recovered.
- Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, My Stroke of Insight, p. 116.
This short book is the amazing first person account of Dr. Taylor's stroke and eight-year path of recovery. In December of 1996, the then-37-year-old neuroanatomist suffered a hemorrhagic stroke from an arteriovenous malformation, a congenital disorder. The hemorrhage flooded the left hemisphere of her brain with blood and created a golfball-sized clot that had to be removed surgically. The stroke left her without the faculties of language, calculation and memory, basically returning her to an infantile state.
The book begins with a short description of her early years, including her brother's diagnosis of schizophrenia, which first got her interested in the workings of the brain. She goes on to describe her education and her associations with NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) and Harvard University's Brain Bank, a facility that dispenses donated brain tissue to researchers. It was the combination of Dr. Taylor's background in brain science and the fact that the stroke did not render her unconscious that she was able to later record both her brain trauma and its immediate aftermath.
Just before the chapters describing her ordeal, Dr. Taylor presents two chapters of basic brain anatomy to help people understand the various functions of the brain and how they were impaired by her stroke. These chapters are easy and interesting for a layperson to read and although they may be skipped, they shouldn't be. She then describes what happened the morning of the stroke, when she realized what was happening and tried to get help as her cognitive functions were deteriorating.
I learned from reading those chapters two big things: the first was how important it is to be able to reach other people in an emergency. (Dr. Taylor was single and the circumstances of her illness had deprived her of the awareness that her landlady was home, or that 911 could be called for an ambulance). The second was what a shameful excuse for a health care system we have in the United States. As she struggled to get help during this life threatening emergency, Dr. Taylor also worried about where she would get care and how much it would cost:
[E]ven in this discombobulated state, I felt a nagging obligation to contact my doctor. It was obvious that I would need emergency treatment that would probably be very expensive, and what a sad commentary that even in this disjointed mentality, I knew enough to be worried that my HMO might not cover my costs in the event that I went to the wrong health center for care. (her emphasis) p. 58.
Unfortunately, after having raised this important issue, Dr. Taylor does not resolve it. We never find out to what extent her HMO covered her.
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Sat 08 May 2010 |
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Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World - Book Review by David Swanson |
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Saturday, 08 May 2010 18:34 |
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 by David Swanson
Tad Daley writes, in his new book, "Apocalypse Never: Forging the Path to a Nuclear Weapon-Free World," that he would like his book to have the impact of "Common Sense," "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or "The Jungle." Yeah, buddy, what author wouldn't? But Daley has a unique argument for the moral necessity of sharing his goal and promoting either his book or others like it: our only alternative is the annihilation of all life on earth.
By the time you've read this book, you will in fact be persuaded that if others do not grasp its central points, not just tyranny or slavery or unsafe workplaces will continue, but all trace of humanity and every other life form in the world will be eliminated.
One of those central points is this: we can either eliminate all nuclear weapons or we can watch them proliferate. There's no middle way. We can either have no nuclear weapons states, or we can have many. This is not a moral or a logical point, but a practical observation backed up with enough specifics to convince you of its certainty. As long as some states have nuclear weapons others will desire them, and the more that have them the more easily they will spread to others still. The number of nuclear states has jumped from six to nine since the end of the Cold War, and more are likely.
A second central point is that if nuclear weapons continue to exist, there will very likely be a nuclear catastrophe, and the more the weapons have proliferated, the sooner it will come. Once Daley recounts some of the incidents (there have been hundreds) that have nearly destroyed our world through accident, confusion, misunderstanding, and extremely irrational machismo, you will be amazed that you are currently alive and that anyone else is. And then you'll want to eliminate the chance of such a tragedy playing out in the future, not increase it to the point of near certainty, which is what proliferation does. And when you add in the quite real and increasing possibility of non-state terrorists acquiring and using nuclear weapons, the danger grows dramatically -- and is only increased by the policies of nuclear states that react to terrorism in ways that seem designed to recruit more terrorists.
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Sat 01 May 2010 |
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Tales of the Taliban in their own words - My life with the Taliban - Book Review by Ehsan Azari Ph.D. |
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Saturday, 01 May 2010 07:11 |
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by Ehsan Azari Ph.D.
My life with the Taliban
By Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef
Scribe Publications, Melbourne, Australia
 Like genies of the tales of the Arabian Nights they sprang forth from the wasteland of the post-Russian Afghan civil war. Early one morning in the autumn of 1994 about forty long-bearded mullahs gathered in a tiny mosque in Sangisar of Kandahar known as the White Mosque to found a new religious movement. They had no car or money. An old and noisy Russian motorbike with no exhaust-pipe was their only means of transport. The bike was nicknamed ‘Tank of Islam’ as a reward for its service. Then an unknown man barged into their checkpoint and donated a sack filled with 90 million Afghanis (about A$2 million). “I have donated this money for the sake of God alone. I don’t need anyone to know about it,” this man insisted, “there is no need for a receipt, or for my name to be known.” The following evening the BBC spread the word around the world about the birth of the Taliban in Afghanistan.
With the rise of the Taliban in deeply conservative rural Afghanistan the world’s political map suddenly has changed. The fire-brand religious movement soon began roaming about in swarms, flogging women in bazaars, burning schools, killing musicians, destroying TV sets, cameras and tape recorders. They unleashed a reign of fear in most of the country. The Taliban regime fell in a few weeks, when in the wake of the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, the US-led forces invaded Afghanistan in 2001. But in less than one year, the Taliban re-incarnated into an insurgency that is now tenaciously fighting Western and NATO forces in Afghanistan.
This messianic religious movement blended a puritanical spiritual belief with fanatical devotion and thus turned religion into a violent ideology closed in on itself, which has so far failed to find a normal and acceptable presence in the world today. But Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef sets out to present a counter-narrative about the Taliban in his autobiographical book, My Life with the Taliban. The ex-Taliban ambassador in Pakistan remains unrepentant for working with the Taliban after spending four years in Guantánamo Bay, even though he now is living in Kabul far from Taliban. “I was a Talib (singular of plural Taliban), I am a Talib and I will always be a Talib”.
Zaeef (Arabic word meaning weak and humble) trawls through his past, picking up stories from his childhood, his life in the Islamic maddrassas (Islamic schools), his schooling in the Pakistani spy agency ISI (Inter-Service Intelligence), his participation in anti-Russian Jihad, his life during the rise and fall of the Taliban and beyond.
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Wed 21 Apr 2010 |
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Proving Election Fraud - Book Review by Michael Collins |
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Wednesday, 21 April 2010 07:41 |
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| by Michael Collins
 Stock deals are rigged for insiders. Big money runs Congress. And we've gone to war based on a series of calculated lies.
Are you willing to accept the fact that our elections are subject to the same type of corruption?
If you are, then Proving Election Fraud by Richard Charnin pulls back the curtain and exposes the pattern of election fraud over the past four decades. It's not a mystery when your look at the numbers and check them against multiple public sources. The information is all there - if the experts care to look.
Charnin is the widely known internet poster using the name TruthIsAll. He was the first to discover the glaring discrepancies in the 2004 election results shortly after the polls closed. His internet posts on the mathematical impossibility of a Bush victory were critical in fueling the doubts about that election and those that followed.
His many posts are the basis for a consistent narrative and argument using a clearly outlined and heavily quantified analysis. The result is a wealth of information about how elections really work and a methodology (the True Vote Model) that allows the interested reader to check the official results of any national or state election.
Charnin's straightforward style fits his subject matter. For example, early on he makes a powerful point, one of many that appear throughout the book:
"Simple mathematics proves that the 1968, 1988, 2004 and 2008 elections were fraudulent. The returning voter mix required for the Final Exit Poll to match the recorded vote was not just implausible -- it was impossible. In each election, more voters from the prior election returned to vote than were alive. The fact that they were returning Nixon, Bush 1 and Bush 2 voters cannot just be a coincidence. The statistical anomaly has no rational explanation other than election fraud." (p.52)
When the official victory margin includes dead voters and excludes uncounted votes, it's more than reasonable to assume election fraud.
How does Charnin know this? He took the time to correlate pre-election polls, historical (Census) votes cast and recorded, voter mortality, returning voter turnout and national exit poll vote shares. Using this basic information, he calculates the True Vote for each presidential election since 1968. And he debunks the arguments designed to convince us that Bush actually won while the exit polls "behaved badly," including "reluctant Bush responder," "swing/red shift," and "false recall."
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Wed 21 Apr 2010 |
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Belén Fernández "Coffee with Hezbollah" - Book Review by Mary Rizzo |
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Wednesday, 21 April 2010 06:16 |
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 by Mary Rizzo
You can purchase Coffee with Hezbollah through Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/Coffee-Hezbollah-Belen-Fernandez/dp/0982531478
Before reading the wonderful book by Belén Fernández “Coffee with Hezbollah”, I never would have imagined it possible to read about the post-destruction aftermath of Lebanon and smile at the same time. The pretext alone, a hitchhiking trip from Turkey to southern Lebanon simply “feels” dramatic, especially when the memory of Brides on Tour, was still fresh. Would two young, attractive, independent women meet a better fate than the raped and assassinated Pippa Bacca, travelling in the same way, with each new step being not only a test of their own wits and good fortune, but also a constant surrender to trust in a world wracked by its encounter with the ultimate violence?
Belén and her friend and travelling partner Amelia Opalinska were on the road in much the same way as Che Guevara and Alberto Granata, and it’s not incidental that they recount moments from their adventures in Latin America and Cuba in “Coffee with Hezbollah”. In a similar way to the historically relevant on the road experiences of the revolutionary, conversations described and rapid changes in plan (or even in mood) allowed the reader to feel a sincere interest in the persons they encountered as well as a way to describe the larger paradigm of Lebanon. The people who populate this book, with their idiosyncrasies, their habits, beliefs and expressions, are part of the story, an exchange that appears to these eyes only slightly hampered by needing to resort to “pidgin English” (however, the fact that many of these people spoke some English at all is testament to their desire to reach out to the world). Nevertheless, each conversation and encounter left up to fate brought a new insight, a new interpretation of a fragmented reality.
Reading this book, I often reminded myself that this endeavour, simple on the surface of things, is actually quite complicated if one is a creature of habit or seeks a modicum of security. I kept thinking, “how brave they are,” and “I’d never let my daughter do that,” much in the way Belén describes her own family, Americans who admire the great revolutionary spirit of they find in many people’s struggles. Her parents would boast about this exciting feat to their friends, but exhibit particular paternal worry to her. There is indeed a dynamic of the contradictions, the paradox of wanting something and also wanting something entirely different that the author detects in many of those she describes. It is a description of compassion and love that never, even for five seconds, sinks into banal sentimentalism. There is one moment in the book, where actually, the tragedy of what evil has hit the innocent Lebanese people is all brought home in an admirable piece of narrative journalism. It is an encounter with a family in the south of Lebanon where only the strongest readers might be able to hold back the tears. It is an encounter with Maryam, a young girl whose family could have been “evacuated” with others escaping the bombing raids of Israel, but chose to remain because the elderly members would not be allowed to join them. It is an encounter of such exquisite beauty, innocence, sadness and love that it was well on its way to breaking my heart. Yet, the manner in which this story is told does not tip the hat to cheap emotion, but captures the essence of the kind of suffering, and the “love of life” that is never abandoned by the Lebanese people.
And, as artfully as the drama of this story was told, the author throws us a life-saver and the bittersweet irony of a post-war survival period, with its fears, hopes, black humour and tedium have us back in the passenger seat, waiting to see the next thing, with a few expectations, but not many demands made. In Italy, they would say, “very easy”, and this way of going with the flow of things, looking at the surface but also below it and not imposing one’s own literal or figurative baggage on those who let you hop a ride, keep the unexpected always close at hand, making for absolutely entertaining reading.
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Tue 20 Apr 2010 |
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My Father Was A Freedom Fighter - Book Review by Jim Miles |
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Tuesday, 20 April 2010 05:31 |
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by Jim Miles
My Father Was A Freedom Fighter - Gaza’s Untold Story. Ramzy Baroud. Pluto Press, London, 2010.
 Ramzy Baroud has written what should become an icon of historical-cultural writing for the people of Palestine. My Father Was a Freedom Fighter is an amazingly powerful and wonderfully well written tapestry of the modern history of Palestine, combining a family history focussed on the individual of Ramzy’s father Mohammed with the overall history of the Jewish-Zionist/Palestinian-Arabic conflict in the area. The latter evolves at two levels: the first as was most visibly seen and understood by Mohammed Ramzy; the second encompasses the larger view of the ‘near’ Middle East as revealed by historical records.
It is a highly emotional read, ranging from bitterness and anger to outright laughter - and books seldom if ever make me laugh. The bitterness and anger is obvious from Mohammed’s personal history of dispossession, poverty, the anxiety for his family and the losses they suffered and endured. It carries over into the larger geopolitical scene where the callousness of the Arabic elites and the Israeli military and political system strikes hard against the resident and dispossessed populations. The humour comes suddenly, revealing the essential spirit of the Baroud family and the people of Gaza in general in face of the violence perpetrated against them on a daily basis. The humour is both subtle and obvious, a combination of the macabre pathos of the situation combined with the undying spirit and resilience of the Palestinian people and Gazans in particular. Simply existing in the face of the imposed hardships becomes a supreme act of defiance in itself.
The Baroud family lived in Beit Daras, a small village north of Gaza, west of Jerusalem, just south of Jaffa. It provided a peaceful and comfortable living for the families that lived there not without the usual travails of life in general. When Mohammed was nine years old, “the Zionist military campaign to take over Palestine rolled into action. No one…was to foresee the atrocities that followed: the uneven war, the dispossession, the massacres, the betrayal, and the lifelong suffering.” Through all this, while everyone suffered, the “children hardly understood why their lives would be forever altered.”
From the brief historical introduction that leads up to that point, the story proceeds through the events that devastated the lives of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians. It is a family story, of births, deaths, murders, weddings, love, humour, arguments, anger, and frustration. The story of Mohammed is as unique as his personality that is revealed through the actions he undertakes in order to try and survive, to one day be able to return to the village and home that he had known as a child, a village that was destroyed after a strong yet hopeless resistance against the attacking Zionist military.
The story is also a history of the Palestinian people in general, all of whom suffered similar fates of dispossession and the imposed military law of the Israelis people. The two aspects cannot be separated, one intertwined with the other. Nor is one story larger than the other as the life of Mohammed is an integral part of the overall fabric of Palestine - to follow that one thread is to be woven deeply into the anxieties, frustrations, anger, fear, loves, and humour of the larger view.
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