12
November
2009
This is one among many realities that we wish would be too bad to be true. Rabbi Yitzhak Shapira, the prominent right-wing spiritual leader in the Israeli-occupied West Bank, has openly condoned Jews killing any non-Jews, including children and babies, who pose a threat to Israel. In his new book, the warmongering Rabbi asserts: “If a gentile endangers the existence of Israel, it is allowed to kill him. Also if he is completely not to blame for the situation that has been created.” He might have well said that a genocide of non-Jews (no doubt referring primarily to Arabs) along Holocaust lines is kosher too…
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10
November
2009
Where is a Third World War most likely to be sparked? For at least a decade before World War One began, those most concerned knew that the ongoing arms race was leading to disaster, as did those who sat on the sidelines and watched Germany and Japan build up to World War Two. World policy wonks have taken a long sigh of relief after the Cold War ended some twenty years ago yesterday, but in so doing have been all too lax at identifying– and diffusing– actual “hotspots” that are likely to trigger a global conflict on the scale of the World Wars, or bigger if you consider the nuclear capabilities of the countries involved. Here are three possibilities…
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5
November
2009
When an insect only seven people have ever seen goes extinct in a place you need a government grant to get to, more than just environmentalists feel a part of our world has gone forever. Understandably so. But what about when a language once used by thousands is down to its last speaker, and the universe of relations and ideas that language conveys will not survive them? Who protests, who runs worldwide campaigns or passes legislation against hazardous, toxic notions like “official languages” and “world languages” that creep onto and kill ways of understanding what it means to be human? A group of fifty linguists meeting at the first-ever Endangered Languages Information and Infrastructure Workshop, funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation, realize the tragedy but aren’t superheroes…
oneworldmanypeaces Culture, Critical Theory, Current Events, History, International, Middle East, Asia, Environment, Europe, Africa, Multilingualism, Science, U.S., Americas 2 Comments » |
20
October
2009
The “comprehensive strategy to confront the serious and urgent situation in Sudan” President Obama outlined yesterday was far from anything new in American diplomatic affairs, which is not to say ineffective. Actually, the shift in policy marks a sharp return to diplomatic tactics the U.S. perfected during its expansionist phase in the 19th and early 20th centuries: ‘big stick’ and ‘dollar’ diplomacy. Here is how the two policies worked then and are intended to now…
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22
September
2009
The benevolent boulder that was President Obama’s momentous announcement last week that the U.S. will abandon George W. Bush’s planned missile shield in Eastern Europe has already begun a massive series of ripples across all the globe’s oceans…
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3
September
2009
Non-violent demonstrations in Israel by once warmly welcomed Jewish Ethiopian immigrants were shut down by police while political leaders sought an 11th hour deal to allow black students into schools, reminding many of the anti-segregation struggles in the U.S. in the 1950s and 60s…
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17
July
2009
The Non-Aligned Movement of over 115 nations was once a historically unique and periodically powerful vehicle in which the weakest and poorest could stand up to the superpowers, then the US and USSR, and their ideological clubs. Their two-day summit in Egypt wrapping up makes clear not only that the non-aligned need to realign themselves vis-à-vis each other and the post-Cold War world. Above all, the summit’s important if limited outcomes showed why they should and how the world would benefit…
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9
July
2009
Members of the G5 (Mexico, Brazil, China, India and South Africa ) are making their differences with the G8 (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Russia, the United Kingdom and the US) clearer at their summit in Italy than ever before. However…
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30
June
2009
The dramatic increase in court-won elections worldwide in recent years is proving to be a pivotal issue in deciding who is and stays in power, and in this sense Al Franken and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad have a lot in common…
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23
June
2009
Foreign police forces confronting teenage-like rebelliousness apparently makes for more advertizing revenue and moral posturing than starving babies, children and parents. With world news fixated on the Iranian protests more for their dramatic than political value, much too little attention is being paid to the announcement late last week that over one billion people worldwide are hungry. One billion, or a seventh of our species, more than ever previously recorded. One billion…
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