The elephant in the room

Probably not surprisingly, Robert Fisk, veteran Middle East journalist and author, raises a critical issue ignored in the Us election campaign. The Independent reports:

"A feisty debate between Robert Fisk and the author Professor Sir Lawrence Freedman brought The Independent Woodstock Literary Festival to a close on a high note last night.

The absence of a debate on the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians in the US presidential elections was "shocking", Fisk told a packed hall at Blenheim Palace, the grand 18th-century home in Woodstock, Oxfordshire, which hosted the festival.

"America must pull its military forces out of Iraq and the Middle East, leaving the peoples of the region to decide their own future," said Fisk, an author and Middle East correspondent for The Independent. He said the US and its allies had "built a new Iron Curtain from the ice cap to the equator", and added that the result of the elections on 4 November "would not make the slightest bit of difference in the Middle East".

"America's uncritical support for Israel is going to continue," he said."

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Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives? In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

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#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas stopped him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed behind his back into their patrol car, where they say he shot himself in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story, says in an interview that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?

Mahler's Prodigal Son

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