Editorial

By William A. Cook

Alice Walker’s new book, The Cushion in the Road, spends over eighty pages on the Israeli state and its treatment of Palestinians. Apparently the ADL took umbrage to her free expression of ideas about the Zionist ideology that has managed to imprison the Palestinians in their own land while stealing most of it. This they call Anti-Semitism. Freedom of speech is only for those who do not criticize Israel or for Zionists and their supporters who criticize anyone that criticizes Israel.

Read more: Walker Tells the Truth, the ADL Avoids It

By Lawrence Davidson

Shifting Historical Context

Context One: It is 1971 and the United States is mired in a losing war in Vietnam. Thousands of young American soldiers are coming back to the U.S. in coffins or physically and psychologically maimed. Scenes of war can be witnessed nightly on the evening news. In the midst of this mayhem the American military analyst Daniel Ellsberg gives the New York Times a copy of a classified analysis of the war entitled, “United States - Vietnam Relations, 1945-1967” aka the “Pentagon Papers.”

Read more: Perspectiv​es on the Surveillan​ce Scandal

By William A. Cook

The Power of Deceit

Little in this world is new but the means to do it; our actions and our behaviors are but regurgitations of our heritage. Our Western world gorges on its past and glorifies in it. Our children memorize and are mesmerized by the deeds of heroic figures the likes of Achilles and Oedipus, glorified by the great chronicler Homer, deeds done with power and deceit. Our children and our adults flock even now in 2004 to witness the fall of Troy with Brad Pitt extolling the virtues of Achilles and Sean Bean acting the sly Odysseus. Our hearts and our desires throb to theirs; we faint and flutter at their heroics as we witness the carnage of their exploits and the splendor of their victories.

Read more: From the Trojan Horse to the Golden Calf

By Richard Falk

End game or Intermission?

From many sources there is a widespread effort to resume a peace process that has in the past led to failure, frustration, and anger, and often to renewed violence. The newly appointed American Secretary of State, John Kerry, is about to make his fifth trip to Israel since the beginning of 2013, insisting that the two sides try once more to seek peace, and warning if this doesn’t happen very soon, the prospects for an agreed upon solution will be postponed not for just a year or two, but for decades. Kerry says if this current effort does not succeed, he will turn his attention elsewhere, and that the United States will make no further effort.

Read more: Whose ‘Two State’ Solution?

By Ben Tanosborn

And the beat goes on! More studies, more surveys, more statistics, more data to feed the ongoing fires in present day American cultural wars. Apparently, it isn’t enough to have the constant bickering between the three conservative factions in American politics – ultra-right Tea-partiers, old-guard Republicans and Democrats – so we are now witnessing an attempt to bring forth a fight along gender lines; if not a fight, to add confusion to a situation that should be apolitical and crystal clear to everyone in America, but which, whether by art or design, it is not.

Read more: Multiple Breadwinners: An American Household Imperative