Author Archives: Editors

“THE HARDHAT RIOT” Book review by David Paul Kuhn

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(Worth reading historic account of 1970 NYC riots when anti-Vietnam war protesters were beaten up by white blue-collar workers. It was a moment when white blue-collar workers became Republicans. f.sheikh)

Kuhn, who has written before about white working-class Americans, builds his book on long-ago police records and witness statements to recreate in painful detail a May day of rage, menace and blood. Antiwar demonstrators had massed at Federal Hall and other Lower Manhattan locations, only to be set upon brutally, and cravenly, by hundreds of steamfitters, ironworkers, plumbers and other laborers from nearby construction sites like the nascent World Trade Center. Many of those men had served in past wars and viscerally despised the protesters as a bunch of pampered, longhaired, draft-dodging, flag-desecrating snotnoses.

It was a clash of irreconcilable tribes and battle cries: “We don’t want your war” versus “America, love it or leave it.” And it was bewildering to millions of other Americans, including my younger self, newly back home after a two-year Army stretch, most of it in West Germany. My sympathies were with the demonstrators. But I also understood the working stiffs and why they felt held in contempt by the youngsters and popular culture.

New social policies like affirmative action and school busing affected white blue-collar families far more than they did the more privileged classes that spawned many antiwar activists. For Hollywood, the workingman seemed barely a step above a Neanderthal, as in the 1970 movies “Joe,” about a brutish factory worker, and “Five Easy Pieces,” in which a diner waitress is set up to be the target of audience scorn. (Come 1971, we also had “All in the Family” and television’s avatar of working-class bigotry, Archie Bunker.)

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The Beinart Controversy over the End of the Two-State Solution and Juan Cole On Palestinian Statelessness-By Juan Cole

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(Worth reading article on Palestinian issue. f.sheikh)

Hannah Arendt points out that with regard to the Nazis this policy of denaturalizing people, or leaving them without citizenship rights, was a demonstration project. That is to say the Nazis began by thinking that Gypsies and Jews and other groups are flotsam and the scum of the earth and a kind of infection in the body politic, and by taking away their citizenship, they demonstrated that they’re scum. So Goebbels said that depriving the Jews of citizenship made the Jews the scum of the earth and he said, you know, let’s see – everybody’s criticizing us how we treat our Jews, but will they take them? Does America want them? Does Britain want them? And of course they didn’t once they were stateless. So by marking them as non-German as taking away German Jews’ citizenship, the Nazis were then demonstrating the wothlessness of their Jews….

I want to make an argument about the character of the Palestine issue. I’m not going to argue that it’s a unique problem but I am going to argue that it’s almost unique in contemporary affairs, and that there are some aspects of it that explain why it is so seemingly intractable. I’m going to start with an increasingly important field of study, citizenship studies. There are journals now devoted to it; it’s become a big thing in academia. My colleague at the University of Michigan, Margaret Somers, wrote an important book on citizenship not so long ago. And as she points out, Chief Justice Earl Warren of the U.S. Supreme Court in 1958 wrote: “Citizenship is man’s basic right, for it is nothing less than the right to have rights. Remove this priceless possession and there remains a stateless person disgraced and degraded in the eyes of his countrymen.” So Warren is drawing here implicitly on the work of Hannah Arendt but this is the key point that I want to make today. Citizenship is the right to have rights. People who lack citizenship in a state ipso facto have no right to have rights ….

If we came to the Palestinians, their situation of citizenship is obviously deformed. There’s no state. They’re lacking an entire section of the column. And then their market is not very robust and of course in Gaza there is no market to speak of, the Israelis have Gaza under siege. There’s no airport, there’s no harbor, and the Israelis don’t permit the Palestinians in Gaza to export most of what they make, some strawberries, off of which the Israelis take a cut. But mostly the export market doesn’t exist in Gaza. So the market and the separation wall and the politics of the neighboring states are such that the Palestinians don’t have a strong relationship to the market, they don’t have a state at all, there are a lot of NGOS, and so for the Palestinians, the NGO sector is the one place where there’s a little glimmer maybe of some citizenship. But that’s weird. And that’s unexampled in the world. There’s no other group of people that look like that. In the world, right now…

So when you’re stateless, you don’t have the right to have rights. So everything is unstable. It’s a little bit like being a child of an alcoholic abusive family. They suffer from everything always being interrupted. You never know what’s going to happen, you can’t make plans, let’s go for a picnic today but then the picnic doesn’t happen because the parent got drunk. Well, if you’re stateless you don’t really know what’s going to happen to you. Your property is unstable, your rights are unstable. Even if you were stateless and you get citizenship, your citizenship is unstable. So Jordan gave citizenship to the West Bank Palestinians at one point and then because of the Rabat Accords after Israel conquered it, they took the Jordanian citizenship back away. They just denaturalized about 30 or 40 thousand Palestinians from Gaza in Jordan.

I don’t think that the world will put up with Apartheid forever. So there will be increasing boycotts, increasing pressure, increasing economic problems. Ultimately it seems to me very likely that you end up with a single state. I’m not arguing for it, I’m not saying it’s desirable, I’m not saying it’s the best outcome but I think somebody has to give citizenship to the Palestinians. Increasingly, the only one that could plausibly do that is the Israelis and the Israelis increasingly own all of Palestinian territory so they’re responsible for the people that live on that territory even though they don’t think they are. I don’t really care how this problem is solved, from my point of view, it’s all the same to me. The important thing, as you can tell is that I insist, the Palestinians must end up with the right to have rights.

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Why do people believe in conspiracy theories?

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Are we genetically inclined for superstition or just fearful of the truth?

From secret societies to faked moon landings, one thing that humanity seems to have an endless supply of is conspiracy theories. In this compilation, physicist Michio Kaku, science communicator Bill Nye, psychologist Sarah Rose Cavanagh, skeptic Michael Shermer, and actor and playwright John Cameron Mitchell consider the nature of truth and why some groups believe the things they do.

  • I think there’s a gene for superstition, a gene for hearsay, a gene for magic, a gene for magical thinking,” argues Kaku. The theoretical physicist says that science goes against “natural thinking,” and that the superstition gene persists because, one out of ten times, it actually worked and saved us.
  • Other theories shared include the idea of cognitive dissonance, the dangerous power of fear to inhibit critical thinking, and Hollywood’s romanticization of conspiracies. Because conspiracy theories are so diverse and multifaceted, combating them has not been an easy task for science.

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I No Longer Believe in a Jewish State-By Peter Beinart

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(it was obvious for long time that two state solution is dead as dictated by reality on the ground. Palestinians and their leaders are still in denials. Palestinians will be better of demanding equal rights as citizens of state of Israel rather then wasting blood and resources on two state solution. Peter Beinart is a journalist, supporter of Palestinian rights and two state solution-f.sheikh)

For decades I argued for separation between Israelis and Palestinians. Now, I can imagine a Jewish home in an equal state

I was 22 in 1993 when Yitzhak Rabin and Yasir Arafat shook hands on the White House lawn to officially begin the peace process that many hoped would create a Palestinian state alongside Israel. I’ve been arguing for a two-state solution — first in late-night bull sessions, then in articles and speeches — ever since.

I believed in Israel as a Jewish state because I grew up in a family that had hopscotched from continent to continent as diaspora Jewish communities crumbled. I saw Israel’s impact on my grandfather and father, who were never as happy or secure as when enveloped in a society of Jews. And I knew that Israel was a source of comfort and pride to millions of other Jews, some of whose families had experienced traumas greater than my own.

One day in early adulthood, I walked through Jerusalem, reading street names that catalog Jewish history, and felt that comfort and pride myself. I knew Israel was wrong to deny Palestinians in the West Bank citizenship, due process, free movement and the right to vote in the country in which they lived. But the dream of a two-state solution that would give Palestinians a country of their own let me hope that I could remain a liberal and a supporter of Jewish statehood at the same time.

Events have now extinguished that hope.

About 640,000 Jewish settlers now live in East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and the Israeli and American governments have divested Palestinian statehood of any real meaning. The Trump administration’s peace plan envisions an archipelago of Palestinian towns, scattered across as little as 70 percent of the West Bank, under Israeli control. Even the leaders of Israel’s supposedly center-left parties don’t support a viable, sovereign Palestinian state. The West Bank hosts Israel’s newest medical school.

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