Politics

NOVANEWS '' The word ' Slut, didn't speak for Muslim Woman Did my shameless Muslim 'sister' Salma Yaqoob understand that she should not march with sloppy dirty servant girls or Sipcy Latina '' Shoah SlutWalk protests have been critiqued for their focus on white women. One woman of color explains how she came around to the cause.   A sign at the Boston Slutwalk Photo Credit: facebook.com-- Mitch Lewis You could have colored me unsupportive of SlutWalk. Even though I have jokingly called myself a slut (as in “I’m a handbag slut”), as an African American woman I was rather uncomfortable with the protest’s racial dynamics, at least how it was shaping up in the US and Canada. I felt the word “slut” didn’t speak to me; I found the word “ho” more damaging. Of course, I also th...

NOVANEWS One of WikiLeaks' greatest achievements has been to expose the exorbitant amount of influence that multinational corporations have over Washington's diplomacy. June 21, 2011 The Guardian       One of the most significant scourges paralyzing our democracy is the merger of corporate power with elected and appointed government officials at the highest levels of office.  Influence has a steep price-tag in American politics where politicians are bought and paid for with ever increasing campaign contributions from big business, essentially drowning out any and all voices advocating on behalf of the public interest.   Millions of dollars in campaign funding flooding Washington's halls of power combined with tens of thousands of high-paid corporate lobbyists a...

Portrait of Qadhdhafi The best portrait of Qadhdhafi that I have read is a chapter in Ghazi Al-Qusaybi's Al-Wazir Al-Murafiq.  Qusaybi (who died recently) was a talented Saudi intellectual with great literary skills.  He received a PhD in sociology in the 1960s and then started a career of serving House of Saud.  He held several ministerial posts and felt strongly about Palestine.  He was mistreated by the royal family and yet he remained loyal.  When you server House of Saud (or any of those lousy governments) you squander your talents and then you lose them. International Muslim Clerical Cooks  Aljazeera is now hosting the secretary-general of the International `Ulama' Union, which is a clerical organization headed and controlled by Yusuf Qaradawi, who in turn is cont...

NOVANEWS I mentioned that I was not going to post the interview with MacMaster but then a reader convinced me otherwise.  He said that I am rather obligated because I asked him to respond to questions.  So my questions are on top followed by his answers. My questions: 1) Why should I now believe what you say? How do we know that you are not now posing as somebody else, in Tartus perhaps? 2) On the Zionism question. You say (in the email) that you have never been a Zionist or an apologist for Israel. Why did you then decide to post from last may that you fictional inventions dream is to be posted in Israel in a state of peace between Israel and Syria? And what is the story of the Hebrew site of Amina Arraf? 3) I was incensed that you took shots against Orientalism when your own act smac...

NOVANEWS Live in fragments no longer. Only connect! –E.M. Forster We’re living in fragments. by Paul J Balles It’s a smaller world with people further apart than ever. We travel to different cultures; we fight other cultures. We want to control cultures we don’t understand. Different cultures think differently. If you believe that doesn’t matter, try crossing a road in England or Australia if you come from America or the Middle East. You’ll be looking left when you should be looking right as you begin to cross. If you automatically look in the wrong direction, you’ll be lucky not to get run over. If you speak English, you may look at and refer to a red house. If you speak Arabic, you’ll refer to the same house as al beit hamar (the house red). The linguistic differences reveal differen...

NOVANEWS   By Captain Eric H. May, Iconoclast Intelligence WEDNESDAY, 6/22/11 — German Attorney Torsten van Geest has submitted a provisional order to force the German government into action in light of what he claims are multiple indicators of an impending nuclear terror attack at Berlin’s Olympic Stadium on June 26, 2011, during the opening ceremony of the Women’s World Soccer Championship. U.S. officials knew about similar indicators before the September 11, 2001 attacks, but did nothing to prevent them, he says, adding that this time such indicators should be publicized to help prevent an attack. The 400-page provisional order states that many nations have conducted so-called “false-flag” terror attacks, blaming them on unpopular ethnic groups or countries to create conflict and ...

NOVANEWS By Eric Walberg Global Research As the Western elite gathered in picturesque St Moritz to grapple with pressing world crises, the outsiders met in the bleak steppes of Central Asia. Last week’s 10th Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO) summit in the Kazakh capital Astana highlighted how the major rivals to empire, led by Russia and China -- themselves rivals, are trying to fashion an alternative to US hegemony. The SCO is the only major international organisation that has neither the US nor any close US ally among its members, and its influence is growing across Eurasia. Leaders of member states Russia, China, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, and Uzbekistan were joined by leaders from observers Iran, Pakistan, India, Afghanistan and Mongolia. Belarus and S...

NOVANEWS     President Obama was tonight preparing to defend his decision to order thousands of US troops home from Afghanistan in defiance of the wishes of senior military commanders. In a primetime speech to a war-weary American public, Mr Obama was to argue that the 18-month-old surge strategy had worked, putting the US military in a “position of strength” that would allow up to 10,000 of those troops to come home by the end of the year. The remainder of the 30,000 extra surge troops are expected to be withdrawn by the end of 2012, leaving 68,000 in place. Mr Obama’s announcement was due as the number of Americans advocating an immediate withdrawal reached a record high of 56 per cent. Political pressure to bring the troops home has been mounting among Republicans and Demo...

NOVANEWS by Philip Giraldi The issue of Israel is of critical importance to the antiwar movement, as frequenters of this website are surely aware. This is because Israel and its lobby in the United States have succeeded in so intertwining their interests with those of the United States that whenever Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sneezes four hundred congressmen say “Gesundheit!” What Israel does has consequences for every American citizen, and not only because Tel Aviv is the largest recipient of US economic and military assistance. It is indisputable that Israel and its friends in the White House and Defense Department played a major role in creating the lies and generating the momentum in the drive to war against Iraq in 2002, a conflict that continues to claim American casualtie...

NOVANEWS Global Research, The Globalization of Poverty and the New World Order by Michel Chossudovsky In this expanded edition of Chossudovsky’s international best-seller, the author outlines the contours of a New World Order which feeds on human poverty and the destruction of the environment, generates social apartheid, encourages racism and ethnic strife and undermines the rights of women. The result as his detailed examples from all parts of the world show so convincingly, is a globalization of poverty. This book is a skillful combination of lucid explanation and cogently argued critique of the fundamental directions in which our world is moving financially and economically. In this new enlarged edition – which includes ten new chapters and a new introduction - the autho...