January 21, 2008 by Jay Taber.

I remember the shocking real-time film from the siege of Sarajevo, as well as the attendant world outrage that led to UN and NATO engagement with Serbia. Reading yesterday’s post by Palestinian Red Crescent physician Mona El-Farra about the siege of Gaza by the State of Israel, I couldn’t help comparing the senseless brutality of ethnic cleansing in the two countries. As Dr. El-Farra observes, the collective punishment of denying food, water, medicine, and electricity to 1.5 million civilians does not create an atmosphere for constructive negotiation.

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January 19, 2008 by Jay Taber.

In Living the Brand, a new article from the International Journal of Communication, Melissa Aronczyk of NYU offers an account of the strategies involved in the production of culture through the particular phenomenon of nation branding.

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January 15, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Presently reading The Heart of the Sky, Peter Canby’s account of his travels among the Maya of Chiapas and Guatemala, I was disturbed this morning to read in the news of the stepped up violence by military and paramilitary forces in Chiapas against Zapatista communities and sympathizers. I wonder if an international human shield can be mobilized in time to prevent new massacres?

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January 9, 2008 by Jay Taber.

Wampum recounts how Israel began 61 years ago by bombing hotels—long before it advanced to bombing refugee camps and other civilian terrain.

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December 30, 2007 by Jay Taber.

While we’re taking some time with family and friends, here are some unusual photos from daily life in Palestine.

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December 22, 2007 by Jay Taber.

As a writer, I often find the limitations of language too restrictive for my sensibilities. I found these Sebastiao Salgado photo essays on human migrations particularly engaging.

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December 19, 2007 by Jay Taber.

Training death squads at Fort Benning, Georgia that commit atrocities against indigenous peoples throughout Latin America is but one aspect of the US war against the Fourth World. Another aspect is supplying armaments to dictators that suppress the world indigenous movement.

According to Himal magazine, a new report has found that, out of the world’s top three weapons purchasers, two, once again, are Southasian. Both India and Pakistan again made the ignominious list, despite the warming of relations between the two countries in recent years. The third on the list is also unchanged: Saudi Arabia.

The report, by the non-partisan US-based Congressional Research Group, a division of the Library of Congress, found that, all in all, 60 percent of weapons sales last year went to developing countries, about USD 28.8 billion worth. This was a decline of about nine percent below 2005 levels, though the rankings of the top three purchasers remained the same.

Pakistan led the list off, having bought around USD 5.1 billion worth of weapons last year, followed by Saudi Arabia (USD 3.5 billion) and India (USD 3.2 billion). The study also reported that, yet again, the US was the world’s largest arms supplier, having sold around 36 percent of those weapons destined for developing countries, with a total worth of around USD 10.3 billion.

As the indigenous peoples of these countries — like those in Israel, Indonesia, and the Phillipines — struggle for basic human rights under international law, it is worth remembering that the United States of America has formally identified itself as an opponent of indigenous liberation.

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December 15, 2007 by Jay Taber.

I have gradually stopped trying to understand the reason for any particular wall, or road, or fence. In reality they have no precise logic. This does not mean that the whole arrangement is irrational: the loops of the wall, the roads reserved for settlers and the occupation troops, the fences surrounding the twenty-five settlements in the region form a network of control over the landscape. This network is not a way to protect the settlements. It has a different purpose, to snare the Palestinians in its coils, to trap them within enclaves where there lives will not be — already are not — possible. As you travel around the region, you see before your eyes the advanced development of the three phases of the annexation: isolate, enclose, clear out.

—Notes on the Occupation by Eric Hazan

(Learn more at Breaking the Silence.)

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December 7, 2007 by Jay Taber.

Three recent news items caught my eye this week. One on Canadian mining corporations supporting murderous dictators around the globe, another on Yahoo selling the IDs of four dissident writers to the Chinese government, and a third on India’s plans to clear indigenous people from the landscape. While none of this is especially surprising or unusual, the fact that one of the most consistent and vociferous voices against international human rights has been the US Chamber of Commerce, reveals a systemic lesson that is often lost in the plethora of isolated incidents.

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November 24, 2007 by Jay Taber.

In his December 1990 report Right Woos Left, Chip Berlet of Political Research Associates examined neo-fascist overtures to antiwar activists, and the need to confront rightist ideologies and bigotry by discussing the dilemmas posed by the transfusion of right-wing theories and research into progressive circles. Based on these discussions, Mr. Berlet wrote the book Right-Wing Populism in America, which focuses on the roots of scapegoating conspiracism in the U.S. and how it is used to mobilize social and political movements. In November of 1993, he developed an analysis of the relationship between various forms of populism and fascism and the relevance of these movements to the candidacies of Buchanan, Perot & Le Pen.

A decade later, these same problems resurfaced in American antiwar circles whose academic discussions had been penetrated by poisonous ideas promulgated by LaRouchians and other anti-Jewish groups. More recently, organizations like Sierra Club went through soul-searching shakedowns as a result of White Christian Nationalist infiltration attempting to subvert their board into supporting anti-immigrant legislation. All of which points up the need for greater academic rigor and integrity in the face of the ongoing onslaught of fascist propositions promoted by nativists such as Pat Buchanan and the bastions of pseudo scholars that support him.

As author Sara Diamond observed, “After years of living as an anti-administration anti-establishment subculture, many in the progressive movement know what they are against, but have lost sight of what they stand for. This leaves persons susceptible to allying with anyone else that attacks the government. This happened against a backdrop of political illiteracy.”

By exposing irrationalist philosophies, racialist aesthetics, and anti-capitalist demagogy, writers like Berlet and Diamond assert we can have this discussion without uncritically circulating the conspiratorial scapegoating fantasies of the far right. As Monique Doryland of the Bay Area Pledge of Resistance noted, “We have to be clear as progressive people that fascists, no matter what their camouflage, are not our friends.”

“The dilemma for left activists,” says Berlet, “is to sort out the various strains of fascist ideology circulating in the United States and the world. It is a dangerous folly to ignore the threat to democracy posed by critics of the current administration who also promote fascism.”

(Jay Taber — recipient of the Defender of Democracy award — is an author, columnist, and research analyst at Public Good Project.)

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