Analysis

By Sheldon Richman

In 1967, Michigan Governor George W. Romney, a potential contender for the 1968 Republican presidential nomination, abandoned his earlier support for the war in Vietnam, which he had called “morally right and necessary.” Asked why he changed his position, Romney said, “When I came back from Viet Nam [in November 1965], I’d just had the greatest brainwashing that anybody can get.” That remark indicating the U.S. military had lied to him was widely interpreted as a fatal gaffe, and Romney pulled out of the race two weeks before the New Hampshire primary.

Read more: Obama Administration 'Brainwashes' Public on Afghanistan

By Ludwig Watzal

Liberal Zionism and the Struggle for Palestine, Haymarket Books, Chicago, Ill. 2011, 262 pp., $ 20.

This book explores the Israeli Zionist Left´s discourse regarding the „Jewish and democratic“State of Israel and all its ramifications that comes with it. Such undertaking was overdue because it exposes Zionist left-wing intellectuals as hypocrites. It was not the Israeli right that did the „dirty“ work of legitimatizing colonization, oppression, expulsion, discrimination and dispossession of the original owners of the land, the Palestinians, but left-wing „liberal“ intellectuals, especially those of the Zionist Labor movement. They provided not only the political, legal and military establishment with ideological legitimacy but also with a „scientific“one. Through their intellectual twists and turns, they laid the foundations for governmental policies that „have made possible Zionist colonialism in the Apartheid settler state of Israel“ (193), writes Tikva Honig-Parnass in her unique book.

Read more: Tikva Honig-Parnass, False Prophets of Peace

By MWC News

by Ellen Brown

In an article titled “Still No End to ‘Too Big to Fail,’” William Greider wrote in The Nation on February 15th:

Financial market cynics have assumed all along that Dodd-Frank did not end "too big to fail" but instead created a charmed circle of protected banks labeled "systemically important" that will not be allowed to fail, no matter how badly they behave.

Read more: How Greece Could Take Down Wall Street

By Stephen Lendman

The Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PACTI) "believes that torture and ill-treatment of any kind and under all circumstances is incompatible with the moral values of democracy and the rule of law."

Yet it's systematically practiced by Israel's Police, Israel Securities Authority (ISA), Israeli Prison Service (IPS), and Israeli Defense Forces (IDF).

Read more: Israeli Torture: Accountability Denied

By Franklin Lamb

“My friends and I like Iran. Maybe they will ask their friends in Lebanon to help baba (daddy) to be allowed to work and our family allowed to own a home outside the camps.” Hanadi, a precocious youngster at Shatila Camp’s Shabiba center on learning last week from her teacher that Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad warmly welcomed Palestinian leaders to Tehran during the33rd anniversary celebrations of the 1979 Islamic Revolution and that both committed Iran to a “religious and moral duty to alleviate the effects on Palestinian refugees of the Nakba’s ethnic cleansing.”

Read more: What Iran Can Do for Lebanon’s Palestinians