‘There are no innocent civilians in this area’: Capt. Ernest Medina officer commanding the units that entered My Lai village; the day before the murder of 350 to 500 Vietnamese civilians on March 15, 1968 ‘There are no innocent civilians in Gaza’: Israeli President Isaac Herzog, October 13, 2023 By Simeon Man March 16 marks… Read More ‘No innocent civilians’: the Violent Legacies of the U.S. War in Vietnam
No one could accuse the U.S. of double standards. What it is vulnerable to is the accusation that it no longer has any standards at all… Modern Germany needs to believe that Israel’s creation was a “happy ending” to the horrors of the gas chambers… For Germany, its commitment to Israel is offered as a… Read More Gaza and the End of Western Fantasy
Malcolm H. Kerr Carnegie Middle East Center In her evocative book, Drinking the Sea at Gaza, the Israeli journalist Amira Hass writes, “To me, Gaza embodies the entire saga of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict; it represents the central contradiction of the state of Israel—democracy for some, dispossession for others; it is our exposed nerve.” The conflict in… Read More The Gaza War and the Rest of the World
‘I return often to Albert Camus’s Letters to a German Friend, written clandestinely during the occupation of France in 1943–44… published after the liberation, despite Camus’s initial opposition… His opening plea hangs in the air: “I should like to be able to love my country and still love justice.” ‘ On November 9 the NYR Online published an essay… Read More Seth Anziska on Dominant Orthodoxies
NB: If religious texts sanctify hatred and cruelty towards others, there is something wrong with them, and especially with us, for taking such injunctions literally. There is no such thing as my god versus your god, because the creator of the universe cannot possibly have chosen a small fragment of humanity to be regardful of,… Read More Reading the Bible with the eyes of the Canaanites: Neo-Zionism, political theology and the Land Traditions of the Bible (1967 to Gaza 2009)
NB: Jit Singh Uberoi was beloved of many of us who were not students of sociology. My personal link with him was not slight: he was on the interview committee which appointed me to a teaching position in Ramjas College, in August 1974. Thereafter we met and interacted in academic seminars as well as on… Read More Remembering Professor J.P.S. Uberoi: Scholar, Mentor, and Teacher (1934-2024) / Antim Ardas for Professor Jit Pal Singh Uberoi
First posted December 12, 2011 How to describe Kafka, the man? Like this, perhaps: It is as if he had spent his entire life wondering what he looked like, without ever discovering there are such things as mirrors A naked man among a multitude who are dressed A mind living in sin with the soul… Read More The Tremendous World I Have Inside My Head: Franz Kafka: A Biographical Essay
China feels the country isn’t patriotic enough. A new law aims to change that Hong KongCNN — On a brisk December day, junior high school students in Fuzhou, southeast China, converged at a country park to study the thoughts of Chinese leader Xi Jinping. Unfurling a red banner that declared their outing a “walking classroom of politics and… Read More Nationalism = Enforced patriotism
Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd was born in Quhafa, some 120 km from Cairo, near Tanta, Egypt on July 10, 1945. He died on 5 July 2010 in Cairo as a result of an unidentified virus infection and was buried in his birthplace, on the same day. He was 67. At the age of 12, Abu Zayd was imprisoned for allegedly sympathising with the Muslim Brotherhood. After receiving… Read More The religious persecution of Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd (1945-2010) / Mahmoud Mohammed Taha & the Second Message of Islam
The intrepid logician Kurt Gödel believed in the afterlife. In four heartfelt letters to his mother he explained why Alexander T Englert As the foremost logician of the 20th century, Kurt Gödel is well known for his incompleteness theorems and contributions to set theory, the publications of which changed the course of mathematics, logic and… Read More Kurt Gödel to his mother: We’ll meet again
After the truth-shower 