Call for International Solidarity against War in Rojava
An emergency call to all women struggling for peace! Take action against the massacre in Rojava.
Women's Initiative for Peace urges ALL women’s organizations struggling for peace worldwide to launch actions and organize demonstrations on Sunday, September 28th (and if this date is too early, any time before or on October 1st) wherever you are located.
<p dir="ltr" style="color: ...Kobanê Under Siege
Kurds resist fierce Islamic State attack
Öcalan calls for mass mobilization as suspicions of Turkey’s support for the Islamic State rise and attacks on Kobane in Syrian Kurdistan continue.
For over a week the Kurdish town of Kobanê in Rojava (Syrian Kurdistan) has been under severe attack from the Islamic State (IS). The attack commenced on September ...
Manufacturing Victory
A review essay on A. J. Blaime’s The Arsenal of Democracy
These days people generally think of Detroit -- with its vast expanses of abandoned real estate that have given rise to the photographic genre known as ruins porn -- as the place where modernity went to die. But for a good chunk of the twentieth century, Detroit was the ...
Can I be a Pragmatic Pacifist?
This is a gently updated version of a post I originally published in Deliberately Considered. I post it now, thinking about the latest chapter of the never ending story of the war on terrorism.
I remember struggling with this question as a young man. Subjected to the draft during ...
Palestinian Cinema and the Lived Experience of Occupation
“One thought alone preoccupies the submerged mind of Empire: how not to end, how not to die, how to prolong its era. By day it pursues its enemies. It is cunning and ruthless, it sends its bloodhounds everywhere. By night it feeds on images of disaster: the sack of cities, ...
Israel and the Jewish Diaspora
In 1990 the scholar David Vital wrote how Jews in the Diaspora and Jews in Israel were heading in different directions. For better or for worse, this observation is proving to be increasingly accurate. For many Diaspora Jews, however, this direction of travel is undesirable. There exists a strong bond ...
9/11: A Most Restless Event
The video below was produced between the Fall of 2001 and the Spring of 2002. It was first screened as a final project for the class Semiotics for Digital Producers, taught by professor Paul Ryan, as part of the graduate program in Media Studies of the New School ...
How to Deal with Extremists? Post European Election Reflections
Considering the dilemmas of dealing with parties suspected of wanting to undermine core elements of liberal democracy
In the wake of this past spring’s European elections, in which far-right parties did very well, an old conundrum for liberal democrats is posed with renewed urgency: how to deal with extremists? Should one talk with them? Or should one only talk about them? Or not even that -- in ...
Obama Channels Reagan in Estonia
In the days leading up to President Obama’s state visit to Estonia on September 3rd, the eve before the NATO summit meeting in Wales, details of his schedule, travel plans and meetings were meticulously scrutinized. As streets closed and helicopters circled, the contrast between the heavy security surrounding the Commander ...
Israel’s Culture of Violence
In contrast to the old image of the Jew who was led to his death in Europe without fighting back, the Israeli military has played a vital role in creating a new model, in which the Jewish soldier is a strong man who fights and kills for survival. ...
Are We Really Such Beasts?
There is a relentless barrage of narratives about our supposed beastly nature and conduct. Since childhood, we have all watched animals routinely tear off each others' limbs in countless nature documentaries meant to show us that survival at any cost is the natural order of life. We are fascinated by House ...