Mahler's Prodigal Son

Who can forget the rhetoric of the Bush Administration proclaiming that those held at Gitmo were "the worst of the worst?" The facts, of course, were always different - as this piece from Harper's Magazine makes so very clear: "For seven years, the Bush Administration told us that the prisoners held at Guantánamo were the “worst of the worst.” These are the kind of people who would chew through the hydraulic cables of a jet to try to bring it down, a breathless General Richard Myers once noted at a 2002 press conference. No one ever disputed that there were some dangerous figures at Guantánamo, particularly after President Bush decided on the eve of the 2006 midterm elections to move those held in CIA black sites to the naval station in Cuba. But was this true of the majority of the prisoners? There was an odd discord between the rhetoric of the Bush Administration and their conduct. They continued to talk about the “worst of the worst,” and they relaunched it as a ...

The Independent reports: "Palestinian schoolchildren should learn about the Nazis' slaughter of Europe's Jewish population during the Second World War as part of a curriculum component based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the UNRWA says The United Nations' refugee agency is planning to include the Holocaust in a new human-rights curriculum for Gaza's secondary-school pupils, despite strident opposition to the idea from within Hamas. John Ging, the UN Relief and Works Agency's (UNRWA) director of operations in Gaza, told The Independent that he was "confident and determined" that the Holocaust would feature for the first time in a wide-ranging curriculum that is being drafted. Mr Ging, a passionate advocate for Palestinian civilians in Gaza who has recently faced increasingly personal criticism and even threats by elements in the Islamic faction, added: "No human-rights curriculum is complete without the inclusion of the facts of t...

The NY Times reports on a man not often written about - but, unquestionably, commands great respect. The death of one of the Commanders of the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto uprising. "Marek Edelman, a cardiologist who was the last surviving commander of the 1943 Warsaw ghetto uprising against the Germans, died Friday in Warsaw. He was 90. Dr. Edelman was one of a handful of young leaders who in April 1943 led a force of 220 poorly armed young Jewish men and women in a desperate and hopeless struggle against the Germans. He was 20 when the Germans overran Poland in 1939, and in the months that followed he watched as they turned his Warsaw neighborhood into a ghetto, cutting it off from the rest of the city with brick walls, barbed wire and armed sentries. By early 1942, as many as 500,000 Jews had been herded into the area. In worsening conditions of hunger and brutality, the ghetto residents, wearing the obligatory Star of David armbands, were forced to sew military uniforms and produce o...

Juan Cole, writing on Salon , addresses 10 things we don't know about Iran. Note that the piece is dated 1 October, before the agreement reached with the Iranians: "Thursday is a fateful day for the world, as the U.S., other members of the United Nations Security Council, and Germany meet in Geneva with Iran in a bid to resolve outstanding issues. Although Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad had earlier attempted to put the nuclear issue off the bargaining table, this rhetorical flourish was a mere opening gambit and nuclear issues will certainly dominate the talks. As Henry Kissinger pointed out, these talks are just beginning and there are highly unlikely to be any breakthroughs for a very long time. Diplomacy is a marathon, not a sprint. But on this occasion, I thought I'd take the opportunity to list some things that people tend to think they know about Iran, but for which the evidence is shaky." Continue reading here .

The Atlantic Monthly , after an interview with the CEO of Google, provides a valuable insight into where the ubiquitous search engine sees things going : "For the last few years, Google has not only taken over the Internet and become synonymous the search for information, but also the company has become a not-insignificant obsession for The Atlantic, and the subject of binary feature pieces -- "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" and "Is Google Making Us Smart?" In an interview with Google CEO Eric Schmidt, James Fallows didn't ask him to choose between the headlines, but rather to elaborate on how Google was changing our lives. And elaborate Schmidt did. In the calm and fluent tone of a philosophy professor delivering a well-recited lecture, Schmidt explained how the Internet and computer revolution had only just begun. According to Moore's Law, Schmidt began, "in 10 years every computer device you use will be 100 times cheaper or 100 times faster."...

Puzzling on one level, but not on another - the Palestinians agreeing to the Goldstone Report on the Gaza War not going forward at the UN until March next year. The suggestion is that Israel pressured the Palestinians [Fatah that is - the corrupt and ineffectual organisation that it is] that the Israelis would withhold communications equipment the Palestinians want. The Americans also wanted agreement to deferment. Stephen Walt, professor of international relations at Harvard, does an analysis on FP of the so-called peace process - and ponders whether Obama isn't just going to be seen as making speeches [witness the Cairo one so widely hailed at the time] without delivering anything tangible as a US President - or worse, being seen as a partisan supporter of Israel and its positions. "While everyone else is welcoming the hopeful signs from the nuclear negotiations with Iran -- and I'm cautiously encouraged too --I'm going back to the less-than-hopeful news from e...

Credit to Cameron [Cam] Cardow in The Ottowa Citizen