Just as female circumcision was advocated

in some Muslim and African countries

to control women's sexuality,

so too was male circumcision introduced

into English-speaking countries

in the late 1800s as a method of

treating and preventing masturbation

   more »

Keywords: mutilation, circumcision, male, genital, sex, pleasure

For yet another consecutive year since 9/11 Americans are fed the fiery rhetoric of imminent danger, a cocktail of fear, terror and warmongering to satisfy enemy-addicted knee-jerks.

The State media are hard at work concocting the trigger-happy bogeyman Americans are always too eager to declare war upon.

They are working overtime, using their control of the print, radio and television media, to condition us into accepting their version of reality.

Staying on message, the big lie is repeated over and over by this army of manipulators, attacking the airwaves, and thus our brains, in a constant stream of appearances.   more »

In the past month, the Roberts court has lived up to predictions that the worst case scenario has come to full fruition.

In the Uttecht v. Brown decision, the Supreme Court ruled that potential jurors who express any reservations about the death penalty can be excluded from death penalty eligible cases.

That means mostly black and Latino defendants have the deck stacked against them from the beginning with prejudiced, partial and almost always white jurors.

These jurors are predisposed to see people of color behind bars and they are no more generous when the matter is life or death.   more »

The fundamental cause is, of course, well known. Israel, aided by the US, was not prepared to accept Hamas's victory in last year's Palestinian elections.

Backed by a supine EU, the two governments decided to boycott their new Palestinian counterparts politically and punish Palestinian voters by blocking economic aid.

Their policies had a dramatic effect, turning Gaza even more starkly into an open prison and creating human misery on a massive scale.

The aim was to turn voters against Hamas - a strategy of stupidity as well as cynicism, since outside pressure usually produces resistance rather than surrender.   more »

1. The criminal nature of the invasion, which involved (in the words of the 2005 Istanbul Declaration) “planning, preparing, and waging the supreme crime of a war of aggression in contravention of the United Nations Charter and the Nuremberg Principles.”

2. The imperialist and colonial nature of the occupation, which is richly continuous with earlier U.S. behavior within the beyond the Middle East and provides critical context for understanding why U.S. soldiers die on a regular basis in Iraq (where Americans are understandably seen as unlawful invaders).

3. The racist nature of the occupation, richly enabled by the false conflation between al Qaeda and a small group of predominantly Saudi hijackers on one hand and the broad Arab and Muslim worlds on the other hand.   more »