Apart from anything else, he has single-handedly hugely increased the audience for documentary films in the USA, filling a gap that American television has left wide open.

He should be thanked for that. What he produces (however he does it) is agitprop and he makes no bones about it.

He deserves a lot of commendation for opening doors and pushing the boundaries of what can be covered in a documentary and reach a wide audience. Whatever his failings are, tomorrow's documentary makers will owe him a lot.

So, he is a self-publicist and may be difficult to work with. So, big deal. Would there were more of him, with a similar agenda.   more »

A few months ago I heard a British diplomat in Washington bemoan the horrors of the current administration. We must just somehow stagger through to the end, he muttered.

I said that it seemed rash to assume the next US president would be perfectly to the taste of Britain, or the world, because few people elected to the White House ever are.

He said: "Nothing, absolutely nothing, could be worse than what we have got now."

This has become hard to dispute. Whatever happens between now and January 2009, America's next president will inherit a legacy of global mistrust, alienation and loss of respect unknown in modern times.   more »

What was striking about this latest conference was the growing cooperation both within the Muslim world and between the anti-global left and Muslims.

This should come as no surprise, considering the traditional focus of the left on defending victims of torture.

Who are the biggest victims of torture in the world today? Of course, Muslims, primarily in Iraq and Palestine, but everywhere in the West, and just about in every country that is predominantly Muslim.

The left realises this and is finally overcoming its traditional resistance to the cultural conservatism of Islam, and likewise Muslims are reaching out to the left -- clear examples are Egypt with the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) prominent role in this conference and Lebanon, where Hizbullah was prominent at a similar anti-imperialism conference last November in Beirut.   more »

In their mad race for money, the front-running Democratic presidential candidates might be selling themselves to the devil.

That is, in words more familiar to political debate, they might be delivering themselves into the hands of rich and powerful opponents of progressive policies.

That’s the natural consequence of soliciting the huge sums required by the campaign.

We’ll see what happens if a Democratic president takes office and tries to make progress on universal health insurance, child care, greedy loan practices and all the other parts of a domestic agenda shelved during the Bush presidency and compromised in the Clinton years.   more »

The new outbreak of violence in Lebanon should remind us again that the Palestinian problem is the real problem of the Middle East, the origin of all the other ones.

Tens of thousands of Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon. They started arriving in 1948, when they lost their territories due to the creation of the State of Israel, and mainly in 1967, when Israel conquered the West Bank and Gaza.

They settled in refugee camps that became little cities, as houses substituted the tents. Actually twelve camps are situated in Lebanon.

They form a kind of State within the Lebanese State. Palestinians administer the camps and have their own militia. The Lebanese army never enters the camps.   more »