Media Monitors Network - Mobile Edition

"He has, if he wishes, the numbers within and still outside of his coalition to make peace. But sadly, the Israeli pundits who know him best also have it right, he is a maneuverer who uses his wiles to promote paralysis in order to avoid peace at all cost. The best evidence is that his response to the court decision to evacuate the illagal settlement is to propose new legislation to "legalize" what is illegal. So do not hold your breath expecting big things, either bad or good, from this big new government. That was not what brought it into being. Expect, instead, business as usual."

"All is not lost, as many skeptical Palestinian observers of the political scene may believe. There are so many among us – the prisoners, the people in the streets every day in solidarity with them, and the refugees who continue to say the names of their original villages when asked where they are from – who still keep Palestine whole in our hearts and minds. This is our chance to overcome this ridiculous state of affairs and see our struggle for what it is: simple and pure, it is the struggle for Palestine."

"What may have irked Israeli lobbyists in America is that South Africa’s crude oil imports from Iran have increased to $434.8 million in March from $364 million in February. Instead of a reduction, imports from the Islamic Republic represent 32% of the country’s total crude oil supplies, suggesting that the ANC-led government is reluctant to have America dictate its economic policy."

"The tale of Israel's nuclear weapons program is a painfully sad one and the fact that some European countries secretly catapulted this regime into a nuclear nightmare is a shame. However, it is more than a shame when one contemplates that during all these years the US has been aware of these clandestine illegal activities and even supported them....The worst is yet to come....With over 300 to 400 nuclear bombs, Israel has been translated into an image of apocalyptic horror for the entire Middle East if not for the world."

"The agreement requires that all "entities" involved in a peace process renounce violence, but the Taliban will no more do that while under foreign occupation than the United States will do so while occupying.  This is not a serious plan to leave.  Nor is it a plan based on Afghan sovereignty, numerous claims to the contrary notwithstanding.  This is a treaty for more years of war, on the model of the Bush-Maliki treaty for Iraq, but with the difference that theirs included an end date."

"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.)"

"He has, if he wishes, the numbers within and still outside of his coalition to make peace. But sadly, the Israeli pundits who know him best also have it right, he is a maneuverer who uses his wiles to promote paralysis in order to avoid peace at all cost. The best evidence is that his response to the court decision to evacuate the illagal settlement is to propose new legislation to "legalize" what is illegal. So do not hold your breath expecting big things, either bad or good, from this big new government. That was not what brought it into being. Expect, instead, business as usual."

"It is not clear to me how anyone could review the NYPD materials and conclude that the tactics of massive surveillance and ethnic and religious profiling employed have not crossed that line or that they have in any way contributed to making New Yorkers "safe.” What they have done is waste precious law enforcement resources. And as an exercise in heavy-handed police power, they have compromised the very security and basic rights of New York's large Arab immigrant communities."

"A battered Romney held on a short leash by his party's right wing should be good news for President Obama, but with the electorate as deeply divided as it is, national polls are telling a different story. The President, it appears, may also have trouble re-energizing parts of his base and convincing some independent voters. As a result, most polls show this Obama-Romney match-up may be as close and as bitterly contested as any in recent history."

Whether or not [Ali] Abuminah wants to admit it, [Gilad] Atzmon and he are on the same side, but such dogmatic hostility suggests strongly that the motive for the attack goes deeper than a squabble over activist orthodoxy.

"There are those who say that while Arab civilization had a great past, it has no present or future. They also question whether Arab immigrants to America have made any contribution to the U.S. In response to this slight to Arab culture, the Gibran awards recognized the work of the Arab Thought Foundation—an example of an Arab institution that promotes learning, cultural pride, and self-reflection. The Arab Thought Foundation is a center for the dissemination of learning and a beacon of enlightenment."

"All is not lost, as many skeptical Palestinian observers of the political scene may believe. There are so many among us – the prisoners, the people in the streets every day in solidarity with them, and the refugees who continue to say the names of their original villages when asked where they are from – who still keep Palestine whole in our hearts and minds. This is our chance to overcome this ridiculous state of affairs and see our struggle for what it is: simple and pure, it is the struggle for Palestine."

"What may have irked Israeli lobbyists in America is that South Africa’s crude oil imports from Iran have increased to $434.8 million in March from $364 million in February. Instead of a reduction, imports from the Islamic Republic represent 32% of the country’s total crude oil supplies, suggesting that the ANC-led government is reluctant to have America dictate its economic policy."

"The tale of Israel's nuclear weapons program is a painfully sad one and the fact that some European countries secretly catapulted this regime into a nuclear nightmare is a shame. However, it is more than a shame when one contemplates that during all these years the US has been aware of these clandestine illegal activities and even supported them....The worst is yet to come....With over 300 to 400 nuclear bombs, Israel has been translated into an image of apocalyptic horror for the entire Middle East if not for the world."

"The agreement requires that all "entities" involved in a peace process renounce violence, but the Taliban will no more do that while under foreign occupation than the United States will do so while occupying.  This is not a serious plan to leave.  Nor is it a plan based on Afghan sovereignty, numerous claims to the contrary notwithstanding.  This is a treaty for more years of war, on the model of the Bush-Maliki treaty for Iraq, but with the difference that theirs included an end date."

"I began to think that humans have fear, and that lacking fear is what makes drones like me better warriors than humans. But that idea had to be revised when I was told that one of my pilots had been fearless. I was told that, right after he disappeared. I was told that he had ended his own life. He had made himself cease to exist. If he'd had no fear, then it was something else that had been causing him to malfunction in certain circumstances. What was it?"

"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."