Media Monitors Network - Mobile Edition

"It is up to the believers of any religion to pick from their holy texts the passages they want to act upon. Once I saw a Nazi book composed entirely of quotations from the Talmud – hundreds of them. I was certain that they were all false and was shocked to the core when a friendly rabbi assured me that they were all authentic, only taken out of context."

"At a time of international support for the Arab Spring and its core message of democratic freedoms, the Israeli actions are one more example of why its decades-long occupation is not only violating Palestinian rights but also eroding the values of what the world still believes is the "Middle East's only democracy."

"Base opponents in Okinawa work with others in Korea, Guam, and Hawaii, and with former residents of Diego Garcia, as well as others around the world. An international conference called "Dialogue Under Occupation" was held in Okinawa last summer. In fact, people are working extremely hard in cities around the world to shut down or prevent the construction of giant military bases that we in the United States pay for and are endangered by but have very little awareness of."

"Joined together, public opinion and the reality on the ground are creating conditions that preclude the two-state possibility. And, there is no reason to believe that these will be reversed in the foreseeable future. That is leaving many analysts to conclude that, if the two-state solution is not already impossible, it is only a matter of time before it is a thing of the past."

"Discussing options like these is where we should be. Yet we--Israel, the Palestinians and the international community--are not seriously engaging in any sort of reevaluation process of the kind envisaged here. Virtually everyone seems to understand that Oslo has reached the end of the road, yet no one is doing anything about it. That, and not the abstract discussion of whether a two-state solution is still feasible, is the real problem."

"Terror generally kills innocent people, something no decent-minded person can accept, but what is always forgotten in the press and government treatment of terror as something alien and unimaginably bad is that war in the contemporary world does precisely the same thing."

"The American international structure carefully built up after World War II is beginning to crumble, although it is not always obvious yet since good appearances are carefully maintained. A prime example is the crumbling of NATO. The grass is still kept well-trimmed at headquarters, but America’s insistence on making unnatural demands on this alliance, such as those it has made in Afghanistan, are surely destroying what was once a powerful international organization."

"If Israel had spent half the resources it has spent on war over the last fifty years instead on helping its neighbors and building up their economies, the region would be a far better place today. And if Israel had been willing to make reasonable concessions to the needs of others in the region, there might well be lasting peace today."

"For the United States, the broader goal is to strangle the axis of Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria and Iran, which the Bush administration believes is pooling resources to change the strategic playing field in the Middle East..."

"...1979, the year that international terrorism found a new incarnation through consolidation of converging interests and the “war on terror" was conceived. (Its conception was necessarily followed by a process of maturation: first applied to the Cold War and in rhetoric within limited theaters, such as the Palestine-Israel situation; second in the post-Cold War formulation of a “war on terror” plan during the 1990s; and third in its implementation after 9-11.)"

"This year's presidential contest started out being quite civil. But a combination of desperate candidates, the fervent desire of some hardliners to block Romney's bid for the nomination, and the explosion of "super PAC's" awash with money, have all contributed to changing this primary's political dynamic."

"Israel, too, should listen, but given that country's hard-line direction, they have become increasingly tone deaf to Arab and world opinion. Our polls show that the Arab public still supports the Arab League's peace initiative for a two state solution, but a majority of Arabs in every country no longer believe that Israel has any interest in making peace. Prime Minister Netanyahu's behavior and U.S. acquiescence to Israel's policies are radicalizing Arab opinion creating a more dangerous and volatile environment with every passing day."

"Western wire services generally drink from the same Kool-Aid® pitcher, so you get no useful alternative to the official pro-U.S./pro-Israel perspective. Only rarely, in the case of a major gaffe that becomes too big to ignore, does a newspaper report an inconvenient truth." -- Professor Joseph Howe, Director of the Centre for Media Integrity

"Lichtman is no crystal ball gazer. His predictions are based on a formula he developed in 1981 in collaboration with a Russian geophysicist, who had previously specialized in creating models used to forecast earthquakes. Their approach was based on a thorough analysis of the forces at work in shaping the political landscape in every U.S. presidential elections from 1860 to 1980. From this examination they developed their predictive model. And since then, Lichtman has used it to correctly forecast the outcome of every election from 1984 through 2008."

"In an effort to avoid disaster, the Republican Party’s leadership is making an effort to mobilize support for former Governor Mitt Romney. But the establishment alone can't close the deal for Romney, whose conversion to conservatism is not convincing to the Tea Party and whose Mormon faith is a deal-breaker for many born-again Christians. And so Romney, who cannot get above 25% support from Republican voters, is not assured victory. And should he win the nomination, cannot be assured the support of the party's base....Add to this, the chaos in Congress where the House Republican leadership is unable to control the rebellious Tea Party-backed caucus and you have a recipe for disaster for the party and the country....The lesson in all this is clear: the GOP played with fire, and they are getting their hands burned. They unleashed a monster they hoped to turn against Democrats, but it has turned on them first."

"It is up to the believers of any religion to pick from their holy texts the passages they want to act upon. Once I saw a Nazi book composed entirely of quotations from the Talmud – hundreds of them. I was certain that they were all false and was shocked to the core when a friendly rabbi assured me that they were all authentic, only taken out of context."

"At a time of international support for the Arab Spring and its core message of democratic freedoms, the Israeli actions are one more example of why its decades-long occupation is not only violating Palestinian rights but also eroding the values of what the world still believes is the "Middle East's only democracy."

"Base opponents in Okinawa work with others in Korea, Guam, and Hawaii, and with former residents of Diego Garcia, as well as others around the world. An international conference called "Dialogue Under Occupation" was held in Okinawa last summer. In fact, people are working extremely hard in cities around the world to shut down or prevent the construction of giant military bases that we in the United States pay for and are endangered by but have very little awareness of."

"Joined together, public opinion and the reality on the ground are creating conditions that preclude the two-state possibility. And, there is no reason to believe that these will be reversed in the foreseeable future. That is leaving many analysts to conclude that, if the two-state solution is not already impossible, it is only a matter of time before it is a thing of the past."

"Discussing options like these is where we should be. Yet we--Israel, the Palestinians and the international community--are not seriously engaging in any sort of reevaluation process of the kind envisaged here. Virtually everyone seems to understand that Oslo has reached the end of the road, yet no one is doing anything about it. That, and not the abstract discussion of whether a two-state solution is still feasible, is the real problem."

"A quick review of the racist Western perspective of what is happening in occupied Palestine explains the failure of all previous attempts to reach real solutions and just and comprehensive peace. It is because such a peace should be based on fair and balanced solutions....For negotiations to succeed, the sponsors of the process should be convinced that the life of the Palestinians is at least equal to the life of a criminal settler living on a land not his own in order to steal this land and kill the people living on it. Only then, there might be some hope of achieving peace based on justice and not on killing one party and giving the occupying killing party everything it wants. When Obama, Clinton and the European Union condemn killing the Palestinians with the same strength they condemn the killing of settlers, there might be hope of a real peace in our region."

No credible analysis of the situation envisions a scenario in which Iran would use nuclear weapons against the Jewish state. But proponents of Israel's colonial enterprise, who support maintaining a Jewish majority by the force of walls and soldiers in occupied territory, want everyone to believe that the focus should be on Iran, not on the occupation, and that Israel's security policies are justifiable against "existential threats."

"We are not told how Karim Hassan came to acquire this ‘vision’ of American soldiers as blond giants with good blood. Was it based on hearsay? Who had furnished him with this description of an army that now included many blacks, Hispanics, Asians and women? Or was this villager in remote Halaichiya a history buff – as Anthony Shadid claims – who relied for his ‘vision’ on Arab historians of the Crusades?"

"...his screed on Gore Vidal is merely yet another example of Hitchens’s escalating propensity to project his own increasingly vast distance from reality onto those who object to his war-mongering. It is not Gore who has ‘taken a graceless lurch toward the crackpot’, in the unabashed words of Vanity Fair’s introduction to Hitchens’s outburst. Rather, it is Hitchens who has become after 9/11 an unhinged and deranged cheerleader for Total War. After Gore, Hitchens would have himself anointed ‘emperor’. But it is Hitchens, not the indefatigable Gore Vidal, who staggers and stumbles, shamelessly exposed, screaming nonsensically, through the streets of the American capital."

"Technological prowess will not save Jewish apartheid – nothing will. But Jews can shore their lives and build a more promising future for themselves by discovering their common humanity with the Arabs, by making amends to the Palestinians, and learning to give back to the Palestinians what they have taken from them over the past nine decades."