Ask a conservative what the biggest problem in America is today, and you’ll get answers like overtaxation, a sexualized culture, lack of respect for authority, insufficient church-going or big government running amok.

But if you then asked the conservative what the real source of the problem was—the beating heart pumping blood to each and all of these socio-politico-cultural wounds—you’d get the same answer: liberalism.

On the other hand, you could ask a liberal a hundred questions about the problems facing our country before you’d get to an answer that placed conservatism at the heart of the nation’s ills.

And conservatives learn these messages when still young. What does a “campus liberal” do? Well, it depends what his or her issue is: fighting sweatshop labor, or environmental degradation, or the Iraq war, or any of a dozen other problems about which liberals are concerned.

What, on the other hand, does a “campus conservative” do? Fight liberals and liberalism.   more »

It's terror, terror, terror again and Lebanon is again depicted as the mythic terror centre of the Middle East along, I suppose with Gaza. And the West Bank. And Syria. And, of course, Iraq. And Iran. And Afghanistan. And who knows where next?

Day Two of Israel's latest "war on terror", a conflict that uses some of the same language - and a few of the same lies - as George Bush's larger "war on terror".

For just as we "degraded" Iraq - in 1991 as well as 2003 - so yesterday it was Lebanon's turn to be "degraded".

That means not only physical death but economic death and it arrived at Beirut's gleaming new £300m international airport just before 6am as passengers prepared to board flights to London and Paris.

From my home, I heard the F-16 which suddenly appeared over the newest runway and fired a spread of rockets into it, ripping up 20 metres of tarmac and blasting tons of concrete into the air in a massive explosion before a Hetz-class Israeli gunboat fired on to the other runways.   more »

“There's an obligation on the part of the left to critically evaluate American intervention abroad. During the 1980s, the left was quite vocal and active in [opposing] intervention in South Africa and Latin America.

Compare that with its cowardly, weak and perfunctory expressions on the Arab-Israeli conflict. You hear people saying things like ‘why can't the Palestinians just compromise’ and ‘why can't everyone just get along.’”

The attitudes of the left, said AbuKhalil, reflect American popular and political culture, which he sees as anti-Arab and pro-Israel.

A depressing example, he said, came in 1982 when he was 22 years old and living in Beirut.

“The city,” he told me, “was being bombed and attacked [by Israel] and I read in the newspaper that Tom Hayden and Jane Fonda were on an Israeli warship entertaining Israeli troops.”

AbuKhalil believes that the media is also biased against the Arab viewpoint and shows “more than a tinge of racism” in its coverage of the Middle East.   more »

The rape and murder of a young Iraqi girl by US soldiers is exemplar of the fate of the Iraqi nation at the hands of its imperial tormentors

In early 2003, an Arabic-language newspaper ran a cartoon depicting the nation of Iraq as a young girl being raped by a US soldier while several Arabs in traditional garb enthusiastically egged the soldier on.

The message was simple: Iraq was about to be plundered of its wealth, stripped of its manpower, its expertise, its middle and educated classes, its infrastructure and its knowledge base. Like a rape victim, the country would be scarred, mutilated and contorted, never again to appear fully sovereign.

This vision became horrific reality in the town of Mahmoudiya in March 2006 when 16-year-old Abeer Qassem Hamza Al-Janabi was raped, shot and burned by a team of US soldiers who allegedly had been planning for a week to perpetrate their crime.

Their plan included discarding their military uniforms and donning dark clothes (resembling that of militia or fedayeen) to avoid identification as US military personnel.   more »

Reading the headline of Beirut's Daily Star of July 13, "Lebanon Under Attack", one is reminded of another military campaign, the US invasion of Iraq.

The chief similarity between the two was the tremendous power asymmetry that existed between the US and Iraq then - and between Israel and Lebanon now.

Lebanon's "crime", according to Israel, is that it cannot control Hezbollah, an organization that has sowed ample fear in the minds of the Israeli leadership through its military skirmishes with the powerful defense forces of the Jewish state during its occupation of a portion of southern Lebanon in the 1990s.

Israel is also involved in a "war" against the Palestinian nation. The enormous power asymmetry of that situation is also equally apparent.

We know well where the asymmetric war between the US and Iraq is heading: an unmitigated disaster.

The question now is where will the asymmetric war between Israel and the Arabs (Palestinians and Lebanese) lead? It seems like another disaster in the making.   more »

14 JULY

Bush Unleashes America's Doberman in the Middle East

Bob Herbert: The Law Gets a Toehold - America's Barbarism at Guantanamo

All-Out War Across the Middle East?

Paul Krugman: Left Behind Economics...Inequality in America

America's Racist Media Always Support Israel's War on Arab Resistance

Bush Under Siege in Germany

What If Israel Had Never Been Created?