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POPSUri Avnery: 1948 At the time, the Jews constituted only a third of the population. The hundreds of Arab villages throughout the country dominated the main arteries that were crucial to our survival. We suffered heavy casualties in our efforts to open them, especially the road to Jerusalem. We honestly felt that we were "the few against the many". Our side was preparing for the massive attack of the Arab armies and we could not possibly leave a large hostile population at our rear. This military necessity was, of course, intertwined with the more or less conscious desire to create a homogeneous Jewish territory. ccording to the UN resolution, the "Jewish state" was to include more than half of Palestine (as it existed in 1947 under the British Mandate). In this territory, more than 40% of the population was Arab. In the second half of the war, after the advance of the Arab armies was halted, a deliberate policy of expelling the Arabs became a war aim on its own.
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POPSSlavery By Another Name I saw Douglas Blackmon, Wall Street Journal reporter and author of "Slavery by Another Name", on the Tavis Smiley Show tonight. I had never before heard about neo-slavery. According to Blackmon, the South was culpable; the North was complicit. Modern companies, including US Steel, profited. The system didn't come to an end until the 1940s, "partly due to fears of enemy propaganda about American racial abuse at the beginning of World War II." 13th Amendment be damned, this sale of "convicts" to private enterprises to pay of "debts" was perfectly legal until 1951.
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POPSAmerica Defeated: How Terrorists Turned a Superpower's Strengths Against Itself
President Bush announced this virtual war three days after September 11, 2001, in the National Cathedral in Washington, appropriately enough, when he told Americans that "our responsibility to history is already clear: to answer these attacks and rid the world of evil." Astonishing words from a world leader -- declaring that he would "rid the world of evil." is National Security Strategy, issued a few months later, was careful to specify that "the enemy is not a single political regime or person or religion or ideology. The enemy is terrorism -- premeditated, politically motivated violence perpetrated against innocents." Again, a remarkable statement, as many commentators were quick to point out; for declaring war on "terrorism" -- a technique of war, not an identifiable group or target -- was simply unprecedented, and, indeed, bewildering in its implications. Declaring war on terrorism is like declaring war on air power.
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POPSWW1 Kid Soldiers: B&W pics "After the WW2 very young boys were still able to enlist in the American services. This went on until the early fifties. Nowadays the USA is the only country where an association called Veterans of Underage Military Service (VUMS) exists. It was formed in 1991." "Buckles enlisted in the American army at age 16 in 1917. During his summer vacation from school he went to the Marine Corps recruiting office to enlist, told them he was 21, but he was turned down: too small. He tried the Navy: too flatfooted. He then went to the Army and they accepted him. "The old sergeant advised me that the Ambulance Service was the quickest way to get to France because the French were begging for ambulance services". In France he served at several locations. After Armistice Day he was assigned to a POW escort company to return prisoners back to Germany. In WW2 while working in the Philippines, the Japanese army seized him and he stayed in a POW camp for more than 3 years.
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POPSWill there be a Dolchstoßlegende (stab-in-the-back myth) on the Iraq war? Warnings about a new stab-in-the-back myth may seem premature or overheated at this moment in the Iraq War. Yet, if the history of the original version of this myth is any guide, the opposite is true. They are timely precisely because the Dolchstoßlegende was not a post-war concoction, but an explanation cunningly, even cynically, hatched by Rightists in Germany before the failure of the desperate, final "victory offensive" of 1918 became fully apparent. Although Hindenburg's dramatic testimony in November 1919 popularized the myth in Germany, it caught fire precisely because the tinder had been laid to dry two years earlier. It may seem farfetched to compare a Prussian military dictatorship and its self-serving lies to the current Bush administration. Yet I'm not the first person to express concern about the emergence of our very own Iraqi Dolchstoßlegende. Is an American version of this myth really emerging then?
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POPSBush's Response to 9/11 Was Deadlier Than the Attacks Themselves * Did Islamic religious extremism cause 9/11? * Why did American military preeminence breed delusions of omnipotence ? * How was the war lost ? * How did a tiny group of individuals, with eccentric theories and reflexes, recklessly compound the country's post-9/11 security nightmare? * What roles did Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld play in the Bush administration ? * Why did the U.S. decide to search for a new enemy after the Cold War, as argued by an old cold warrior, Samuel Huntington, in The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (Simon and Schuster, 1996)? * What role did left-wing ideology play in legitimating the war on terror ? * How did pro-war liberals help stifle national debate on the wisdom of the Iraq war ? * Why is the contemporary American antiwar movement so anemic ?
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POPSWomen (and little girls) facing war Mah-Bibi at ten years old is destitute and begs for food to support herself and her younger brothers. Women tell their own individual stories of how their lives have been affected by war. Coping with displacement, physical and sexual violence, missing relatives, widowhood, detention... challenges and difficulties that these and thousands of other women must face in their daily lives.
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POPSUri Avnery: Frieden in Israel und Palästina - Krieg mit Syrien? (War Israel/Syria?) Why do the media, in Israel and throughout the world, report "tension on the Northern border of Israel"? Why is the Israeli army frantically conducting maneuvers on the Golan? Why are there reports about a rapid upgrading of Syrian weaponry and the hectic building of fortifications against Israel? Why is the Turkish government offering urgent mediation between Israel and Syria? All very mysterious. It seems that the key to this mystery is not to be found in Jerusalem or Damascus, but in Washington. When Ehud Olmert refuses to respond to the serenades of Bashar al-Assad, he hints that President Bush is forbidding any contact with the Syrians. Last year, America pushed Israel into the war in Lebanon, obstructed an early cease-fire and, so it seemed, was interested in extending the war into Syria. Syria belongs, of course, to the "Axis of Evil" that exists in Bush's mind. Avnery: Miss C. (Media Monitors Network)
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POPSConfessions from U.S. Soldiers in Iraq on the Brutal Treatment of Civilians Continuing, same source : Some participated in such killings; others treated or investigated civilian casualties after the fact. Many also heard such stories, in detail, from members of their unit. The soldiers, sailors and marines emphasized that not all troops took part in indiscriminate killings. Many said that these acts were perpetrated by a minority. But they nevertheless described such acts as common and said they often go unreported -- and almost always go unpunished.
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