Media Monitors Network - Mobile Edition

"Leadership in Muslim societies is occupied by those who have no educational upbringing or interest in living Islam and lead nobody, mostly seen as being ignorant, corrupt, and subservient to the neo-colonialism and committed to secularism as a system of life."

"The main importance of the Fayyad plan is that it allows Palestinians to move toward achieving the objectives of ending the Israeli occupation and establishing their state on two parallel tracks. The first is in actual developments on the ground where the Palestinian government has been taking positive steps readying Palestinians for statehood, not only in their own eyes but also in the eyes of the international community, which has been financing these efforts."

"...international recognition of the Fayyad plan effectively ends the Oslo accords, which require that neither side take such unilateral measures. A truly irresponsible Israeli government could respond by annexing those areas of the West Bank, some 60 percent, that lie beyond the autonomy borders. That's why it behooves the international community to embrace this issue now and point out to Netanyahu that this is the best deal he will ever get."

"Many well-informed and insightful people are now hoping that the current healthcare bill will become law and then lead to something better. But few backers want to dwell on its requirement that everyone get health coverage from the private insurance industry -- a stunning, deeply structural transfer of humongous power and wealth that would greatly boost the leverage of an already autocratic corporate state."

"...are Professors Mearsheimer and Walt engaged in hate propaganda by documenting the harmful influence of the Israel lobby over US foreign policy? Or is former US President Jimmy Carter a “bigot” for comparing the Israeli occupation of Palestine to apartheid South Africa? Are the survivors of the USS Liberty who refuse to remain silent about Israel’s deliberate attack on their ship merely motivated by hatred of Jews? Is Professor Norman Finkelstein a “self-hating Jew” for exposing the Holocaust Industry’s corruption of history and memory in the service of an extortion racket? And is UN special rapporteur Richard Falk also “self-hating” for likening Israel’s actions against the besieged Gazans to what the Nazis did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?"

"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.)"

"Many well-informed and insightful people are now hoping that the current healthcare bill will become law and then lead to something better. But few backers want to dwell on its requirement that everyone get health coverage from the private insurance industry -- a stunning, deeply structural transfer of humongous power and wealth that would greatly boost the leverage of an already autocratic corporate state."

"...I draw the line at dual citizenship, voting and running for office in another country. If someone wants to do that, they can. But not from here. You make a choice and live with the consequences. To repeat: You cast your vote where you cast your lot. Anything else degrades the meaning of citizenship and rights of citizens here and there."

"Martin Luther King Jr. aptly likened the Vietnam War to a “demonic suction tube.” And demonic suction tubes can’t be boxed. In the real world, war’s ripple effects lead to a kaleidoscope of terrible consequences, near and far. You can’t keep a war in a box any more than you can deliver a government in a box."

The 2010 Winter Olympics was like a huge economic and public relations prize carrot that the organizers dangled in front of us and expected us to chase after. The games was not so much a 17-day sports event that happened to take place in my corner of the world as it was the climax of an enervating four-year sensory assault of cheerleading, advertising and sloganeering.

"...we should have learned from the Oslo period, if the daily life experiences of people are worsening, negotiations will be negatively impacted. Throughout the 1990’s as settlements in the West Bank doubled in size and a network of Jewish-only roads were being constructed, carving the area into pieces, severely constricting Palestinian mobility; and Israel’s closure had caused economic stagnation, a doubling of Palestinian unemployment and a severe decline in personal income – I warned U.S. negotiators not to ignore these troubling facts."

"Leadership in Muslim societies is occupied by those who have no educational upbringing or interest in living Islam and lead nobody, mostly seen as being ignorant, corrupt, and subservient to the neo-colonialism and committed to secularism as a system of life."

"The main importance of the Fayyad plan is that it allows Palestinians to move toward achieving the objectives of ending the Israeli occupation and establishing their state on two parallel tracks. The first is in actual developments on the ground where the Palestinian government has been taking positive steps readying Palestinians for statehood, not only in their own eyes but also in the eyes of the international community, which has been financing these efforts."

"...international recognition of the Fayyad plan effectively ends the Oslo accords, which require that neither side take such unilateral measures. A truly irresponsible Israeli government could respond by annexing those areas of the West Bank, some 60 percent, that lie beyond the autonomy borders. That's why it behooves the international community to embrace this issue now and point out to Netanyahu that this is the best deal he will ever get."

"...are Professors Mearsheimer and Walt engaged in hate propaganda by documenting the harmful influence of the Israel lobby over US foreign policy? Or is former US President Jimmy Carter a “bigot” for comparing the Israeli occupation of Palestine to apartheid South Africa? Are the survivors of the USS Liberty who refuse to remain silent about Israel’s deliberate attack on their ship merely motivated by hatred of Jews? Is Professor Norman Finkelstein a “self-hating Jew” for exposing the Holocaust Industry’s corruption of history and memory in the service of an extortion racket? And is UN special rapporteur Richard Falk also “self-hating” for likening Israel’s actions against the besieged Gazans to what the Nazis did to Jews in the Warsaw Ghetto?"

"If the Obama administration is serious about a peaceful resolution to the crisis, much in common with the wishes of the vast majority in the Middle East, it is high time for it to wake up to the troubling realities of Israeli actions which undermine its stated objectives and goals for the region and get its acts together."

"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."

"No government in Afghanistan or Pakistan was threatened until the U.S. became involved. Yes, they are poor regions with much backward fundamentalism, but those governments knew how to handle the difficulties of their own affairs before the U.S. bombed and machine-gunned its way in."

"History before Islam was a jumble of conjectures, myths and rumors."