My community of Qira, like many others, cannot survive in a Palestinian state divided by Israel's settlement blocs. The settlement blocs are built on Palestinian agricultural land and water resources and carve the West Bank into disconnected Palestinian bantustans. read more »

One may well think that the struggle inside the Jewish community of Israel is between those of the political right, who want to maintain the settlements in East Jerusalem and the West Bank so as to "redeem" the Greater Land of Israel as a Jewish country, and those of the left who seek a two-state solution with the Palestinians and are thus willing to relinquish enough of the "territories", if not at all, in order that a viable Palestinian state may emerge. read more »

Israeli Jews call the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 a "war of liberation." Palestinians call it the Naqba — the Catastrophe. read more »

1917—Great Britain gains control of all of historic Palestine at the end of World War 1 and issues the Balfour Declaration committing the British government to supporting a "Jewish national home" in Palestine. At the time, Jews make up less than 10 percent of Palenstine's population and own about 2 percent of its own land. read more »

Israel is frequently cited as "the only democracy in the Middle East." The 1.2 million Palestinians living inside Israel's borders, would beg to differ. read more »

Kevin Rudd can ratify all the Kyoto Protocols he likes, but if he doesn't quit coal, we're screwed. The election of Rudd's new Labor government here in Australia is being hailed as a watershed moment for this country's approach to climate change and indeed for global climate change politics. read more »

As early as Dec. 15, bulldozers could destroy four of New Orleans' largest public housing developments, resulting in the loss of almost 4,000 units of low-income housing. read more »

Real-estate developers are heading uptown in swarms to take advantage of the new housing market in Harlem, the southernmost neighborhood in Manhattan that is still predominantly working-class. "The land property here in Harlem has gone up drastically," says Dolina Duzant, who was raised in Brooklyn and has lived in Delano Village since 1985. read more »

In early November, protesters in Olympia, Wash., were attacked and arrested by police as they put their bodies in the path of military convoys returning from Iraq. read more »

In protest of the Iraq War and military recruitment in their schools, an estimated 1,000 high school students walked out of classrooms in at least a dozen towns and cities across western Washington state Nov. 16. read more »

The presidential race is about many things: money, branding, celebrity, the media and theatrics. The one thing it's not about is politics. read more »

Out of some combination of morbid curiosity, depressive masochism, and journalism as forensic scatology, I watched the Republican CNN/ YouTube debate Nov. 28. read more »

"We're allowing a field based in commerce—marketing—to preserve something of vital cultural importance—a space to analyze our culture. Why aren't the rest of us freaking out about it?" Anne Elizabeth Moore talks about the work behind her latest book, Unmarketable, and corporate threats to the underground. read more »

As the year draws to a close Jane Jacobs, Moses' greatest political antagonist, finally gets her chance to reply in the form of a museum exhibit. Given the current wave of Moses-mania, what might the woman who consistently counseled activists "not to feel helpless," say to us today? - A review of "Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York" at the Municipal Arts Society of New York, 457 Madison Ave at East 50th Street, through Jan. 5, 2008.) read more »

Review of My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love by Kara Walker The exhibit is on view at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave at East 75th Street through Feb. 3, 2008. read more »

Perhaps someone in your circle of friends or family is looking forward to receiving a Burns film box set on DVD this holiday season. If so, consider the following an alternative gift guide for documentaries, wherein a much-loved but thoroughly overrated film from the genre is rejected in favor of a less-loved, underrated choice by yours truly. read more »

France's new conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy is having a tough time. "Sarko American," as he dubs himself, rode into power in May promising a "rupture" with the past. read more »

This holiday season shed your consumerism and put your money towards building a more sustainable world with an economy based on quality of life. read more »

In the materialistic, militaristic desert of America in the 1980s, the hardcore punk scene was one of the few subcultures that was screaming "fuck you, Ronald Reagan and the greedy warmonger horse you rode in on!" It was a radical, do-it-yourself network, created almost entirely by people in their teens and 20s on very low budgets, yet it had international reach, and its influence is still felt in today's radical movements. read more »

Every Saturday afternoon amid shoppers, skaters, tourists and passers-by at Union Square, a small group supporting Palestinian self-determination an even smaller pro-Israel group face off on a small patch of land across from Virgin Megastore on 14th Street. read more »

COLUMBUS, Georgia–Roughly 15,000 people marched on the entrance to Fort Benning Sunday calling for the closure of the School of the Americas (SOA). Many of the protesters carried aloft small white crosses inscribed with the names of the victims of Latin American soldiers who have been trained at the school. Eleven people were arrested for illegally [...] read more »

Under the guise of a bill that calls for the study of "homegrown terrorism," Congress is apparently trying to broaden the definition of terrorism to encompass both First Amendment political activity and traditional forms of protest such as nonviolent civil disobedience, according to civil liberties advocates, scholars and historians. Many observers fear that the proposed law will be used against U.S.-based groups engaged in legal but unpopular political activism, ranging from political Islamists to animal-rights and environmental campaigners to radical right-wing organizations. read more »

"They know that we are people with little resources and they take advantage of us. They wouldn't do this to people who have lots of money. They just want to kick us out so that they can fix these apartments up a little, bring in new richer people, and charge higher rents," says Josefina Salazar, a Dawnay, Day tenant and MJB member. read more »

Movement for Justice in El Barrio (MJB) began in 2004 with informal meetings in the lobbies of five apartment buildings where the group's 20 original members lived. It has grown steadily over the past three years and now has almost 400 members sprinkled across 26 buildings in East Harlem. Inspired by the Zapatistas, a grassroots rebel group in southern Mexico, MJB engages in a consensual politics of listening and dialogue where leaders are expected to do as the membership tells them to. "As an organization that works for the community, it has to do what the community says," said Oscar Dominguez, who has been a member since 2005. read more »

Geo TV continued to air outside the country. Hamid Mir, one of its sharpest journalists, said yesterday that he believed the U.S. Embassy had green-lighted the coup because Washington regarded the chief justice as a nuisance and "a Taliban sympathizer." The regime has been confronted with a severe crisis of legitimacy that came to a head earlier this year when Musharraf's decision to suspend the chief justice, Iftikhar Hussain Chaudhry, provoked a six-month-long mass movement that forced a government retreat. Some of Chaudhry's judgments had challenged the government on key issues such as "disappeared" prisoners, harassment of women and rushed privatizations. It was feared that he might declare a president in military uniform illegal. read more »

When 13-year-old Chelsea Fraser wrote the word "okay" on her desk at Kyker Heights Intermediate School in April, she was arrested, handcuffed and placed in the back of a police car, according to news reports. read more »

$11,282 Average annual funding per pupil at high schools citywide $9,601 Average annual funding per pupil at high schools with permanent metal detectors read more »

Despite the disaster of the invasion and occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration wants not just to deter Iran's nuclear ambitions but "regime change" in the Islamic Republic. Bush has already authorised 'non-lethal' action within Iran, and helps separatist groups. Instead of supporting the country's democratic opposition, US meddling has encouraged hardline leaders to reinforce their positions. read more »

Martin Luther King Jr. and the Civil Rights Movement: Although King and others in the early Civil Rights movement are lauded today as "apostles of nonviolence," their tactics were more than just symbolic. read more »

Assembly Speaker Sheldon Silver said he supported the bill purely to show bipartisan support for the executive in the aftermath of the attacks. "Is it overkill?," he was asked after the bill passed in 2001. "It may very well be overkill, but at this time I think it's important to show the unity of our purpose and not question political motives." read more »

If the city government devoted as much energy to enforcing the laws against rent-gouging as it does to arresting 40,000 pot-smokers a year, New Yorkers would have a much easier time finding housing they can afford. read more »

For the third time in two years, dozens of members of the Olympia Port Militarization Resistance put their bodies in front of trucks in order to halt the traffic of military equipment between the United States and Iraq. read more »

In a victory for grassroots antiwar forces, administration officials at a suburban Chicago high school dropped expulsion threats leveled against students who staged an on-campus antiwar demonstration. The turnaround by Morton West High School Superintendent Ben Nowakowski came on Nov. 13, following two weeks of protest by Chicago peace, social justice and civil rights organizations. read more »

TUCSON, Ariz.—Two Catholic priests received five-month prison sentences Oct. 17 for illegally entering a U.S. Army base in southern Arizona to protest the military's use of torture. During a Nov. 19, 2006 demonstration at Fort Huachuca, Ariz., home to the U.S. Army Intelligence Center, the Rev. Steve Kelly, 58, and the Rev. Louis Vitale, 75, entered the base to deliver a letter to Maj. Gen. Barbara Fast denouncing the use of torture, which they believe is being taught at the base. Kelly and Vitale had gathered with more than 100 people at the base in solidarity with the annual U.S. School of the Americas (SOA) protest at Fort Benning, Ga. read more »

The delicacy and refinement, defiant expression and presence of poetry are piercing qualities in the extremity of contemporary events. Lawrence Ferlinghetti speaks for poetry in his new book, Poetry as Insurgent Art. He offers poetry as an instrument of rebellion, as a means to invent a new language, a new truth. "I am signaling you through the flames," he writes encouragingly. " … You are Whitman, you are Poe … you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay … " Of poetry itself, he says, "Poetry is the ultimate inner refuge" (accurate) and "it is Helen's straw hair in sunlight" (lovely). read more »

"Why does a fetus make a better patient than a pregnant woman?" he asks. "Among other things, a fetus never asks if it can bring cameras, video recorders or partners into the delivery room." read more »

Faced with months of tough bargaining, members of the City University of New York Professional Staff Congress (PSC), convened an Oct. 30 meeting at Cooper Union that drew 900 participants. PSC, which represents CUNY's nearly 20,000 faculty and professional staff members, saw its current contract expire on Sept. 19 without CUNY's administration making a financial offer. read more »

It's frustrating, since some of these ideas could be shaped into something provocative within a different context. At several moments, the characters mention how the founding fathers were essentially radical insurgents and that what's needed now is a new Revolutionary War from within—an inspired, if not terribly original, conceit that the film isn't up to following through on. At least the failure of the film to integrate its politics into its narrative does address how difficult it is for a screenwriter to work this kind of debate into a believable scenario, dialogue and characters. This seems especially to be the case in post-9/11 filmmaking, at all levels (see Lions for Lambs for a similar disaster). Of course, it helps to populate your movie with real people — maybe that's why the well-regarded politically engaged films of the past six years are almost all documentaries. read more »

Numerous films pointed to a fear of waning morality (The Fifth, Sheepskin, The Strain), especially in the face of rising consumerism (Foet, Hostel). Many horror films are modern fairy tales, serving as a moral compass, complete with fairy tales' traditional use of brutality. As Stephen Prince wrote in The Horror Film, "Like other genre movies, any given horror film will convey ... ideological and social messages that are part of a certain period or historical moment." But the continued success of now-classic films (Psycho, The Exorcist) shows us that some horror is perennial, reflecting unresolved dread. Moving from distant locales and monsters (Dracula, Frankenstein and King Kong) to more domestic terrors (Rabid, Scream) the genre seems to parallel America's growing uncertainty with itself. read more »

Residents of West Harlem were joined by the Student Coalition on Expansion and Gentrification Nov. 10 to protest Columbia University's plan to expand into the nearby neighborhood. The rally began with remarks from members of Develop Don't Destroy Brooklyn, the Mirabal Sisters and the Harlem Tenants Council, who all face threats of losing their homes. Brooklyn's Rude Mechanical Orchestra led more than 80 protesters across campus to the front steps of Columbia President Lee Bollinger's residence where the crowd cheered,"Harlem is not for sale!" read more »

A real hazard of preoccupations with Blackwater is that it will become a scapegoat for what is profoundly and fundamentally wrong with the U.S. effort and mission. Condemnation of Blackwater, however justified, can easily be syphoned into a political whirlpool that demands a cleanup of the U.S. war effort — as though a relentless war of occupation based on lies could be redeemed by better management, as if the occupying troops in Army and Marine uniforms are incarnations of restraint and accountability. read more »

When asked by a community member whether his experience in the Army caused emotional problems, Harmon admitted to becoming addicted to drugs and alcohol after his tour of duty and revealed that he is currently on five different medications. He said he often goes into "funks," but that the work he does speaking out against joining the military gets him out of "funks a lot quicker." read more »

Although I first started considering tax resistance in 2003, I didn't take any immediate action. I'm basically a law-abiding person who doesn't want a lot of headaches — and tax resistance sounded like a major headache. But I also kept reading about the war. Finally, in 2005, instead of sending a check to the IRS, I sent a note explaining that I cannot send them money knowing what the money would be used for. read more »

Since President Clinton promised that the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) would help stem the tide of migrant workers illegally entering the country along the U.S.-Mexico border, "because more Mexicans will be able to support their children by staying home," the number of immigrants living without legal status in the United States has skyrocketed. read more »

When the governor of the Mexican state of Oaxaca ordered riot police to shut down an encampment of striking teachers on the morning of June 14, 2006, years of frustration with poverty and government corruption exploded into the streets.Thousands of locals joined the teachers, and by the end of the morning, the police had been run off. Ignoring Oaxacan Governor Ulisses Ruiz and his rubber-stamp legislature, the people of Oaxaca took control of the capital city and governed themselves over the next four months. read more »

How much do you pay for electricity every month? $50? $70? Maybe $100 or more if you have a huge refrigerator or use a lot of air conditioning in the summer? How much do you think a family living in a wooden hut in the jungle in Chiapas should pay? The Mexican federal government thinks they should be handing over between $100 to $400 per month. read more »

Chiapas' abundant rivers provide about 50 percent of Mexico's hydroelectric power. These dams provide electricity primarily to wealthy urban centers and tourist resorts, while many poor indigenous Chiapans have no electricity or must pay inflated prices. Meanwhile, hydroelectric dams flood rural communities, costing local farmers and fishermen their homes and livelihoods. read more »

If Khari Kill is music for Brooklyn Rastafarians, then Rising Appalachia's Scale Down (UnWound Records) might be music for dreadlocked white people in Asheville, North Carolina. It's spacy, medium-slow rhythmic acoustica, reedy female harmonies over ragaesque banjo picking and low djimbe thumps. I like the texture and mood a lot, but they don't vary very much. Though the album is occasionally leavened by an Irish-lament fiddle or a ragtimey-blues or churchy feel, over 60 minutes it gets samey. The most memorable melodies are on the traditional material, most notably a remake of "Give Me That Old-Time Religion" as "Old Fashioned Morphine." read more »

My husband tells me that when heterosexual men talk about women in the locker room, the conversation reeks of sexism. His largely middle-aged comrades reject their intellectual and social equals — they argue that females over 30 are universally unattractive — and, instead, fixate on hot 20- somethings. South End Press, 2007 read more »

"A value is an enduring belief," it declares, "that a specific mode of conduct or end state of existence is preferable to an opposite or converse mode of conduct or end state of existence." For the U.S. soldier or officer that is a dead end. In two paragraphs on "Airpower in the Strike Role," it mentions that "bombing, even with the most precise weapons, can cause unintended civilian casualties" — a casual reference to a fearful consequence of contemporary U.S. aggression in Iraq and Afghanistan. Petraeus, John A. Nagl, James F. Amos. Introduction by Sarah Sewall University of Chicago Press, 2007 read more »

Vergès defended Nazi Klaus Barbie, "the Butcher of Lyon," in 1987, and proposed to defend Saddam Hussein in 2003. Now 82, and widely regarded by his peers as one of the foremost criminal lawyers of all time, Vergès is the subject of a new documentary by Barbet Schroeder. read more »

A Film Review of Meeting Resistance Directed by Steve Connors and Molly Bingham Nine Lines Documentary Productions, 2007 read more »

Brad Will was a New York-based independent journalist who was killed on Oct. 27, 2006, while covering a teacher-led social uprising in the impoverished southern Mexican state of Oaxaca. read more »

In the first days after your killing, there were dozens of protests and vigils held all over the world including here in New York. Since then, Friends of Brad Will has evolved into a national network of activists demanding accountability through the arrest and prosecution of the people responsible for your murder. Jail may not be a solution, but something must be done. read more »

Over the past five years, perhaps no college campus has been the scene of as much controversy over academic "freedom of speech" as Columbia University in New York City. The reasons for this are partly geographical — Columbia is an Ivy League school in the heart of the media capital of the world, which inherently magnifies events there. Columbia can also be seen as an early-stage testing ground for the right's campaign to cleanse the academy of "pernicious" influences. More than abstract principles are at stake in these recent Columbia free-speech dust-ups. Universities represent one the last institutional bastions of independent thinking in the face of a post-9/11 conservative ascendancy, and their subordination to a narrow political ideology would mark yet another victory for the right. read more »

What is a border? First off, it's war. Literally, the border is a relic of the Mexican-American War of 1848, when America "bought" half of Mexico's territory (about 500,000- square miles) at gunpoint. read more »

Six men sit in a row on wooden benches, their feet badly blistered after spending four days walking through the Arizona desert to enter the United States. Although they paid thousands of dollars for a guide, U.S. Border Patrol agents were able to find their group, apprehend them and deport them to Mexico. read more »

I have been an active duty Marine for the past 10 years, and based on my experience, I can say that your article is completely dishonest. I can respect the fact that you are opposed to the war, but I cannot respect the fact that you are using lies and deceit to harm those who are serving their country and protecting your freedom. You should be ashamed of yourselves. —Ricardo M. Mellot read more »

THU NOV 1 6:30-8:30pm • Free FILM SCREENING: "A LITTLE BIT OF SO MUCH TRUTH (UN POQUITO DE TANTA VERDAD)." The NYC premiere of this film on the summer 2006 popular uprising in Oaxaca. A collaboration between Corrugated Films and Mal de Ojo TV. The movie documents the people's takeover of various media outlets in order to coordinate the movement. Filmmaker Jill Freidberg will be present. St. Marks Church, 131 E 10th St (at Second Ave), info@corrugate.org • corrugate.org read more »

Arivaca, Arizona—The border is not just a place; it is the thinnest line between the lives of human beings who are subject to different laws, yet share a culture that has blended together across a geographic landscape and a heritage which has intertwined for generations. In a quest to document "the last American frontier as it vanishes before our eyes," I moved to Arivaca, a small town seven miles north of the Arizona-Mexico border, in 2004. For the last three years, I have explored border communities and ventured into the vast desert on horseback, on foot and by 4-wheel drive, over some of the roughest terrain in the Sonoran Desert. read more »

There is a simple rule that defines the U.S. occupation of Iraq: no matter how bad a situation may seem the reality is far worse. Take torture. Individual accounts began surfacing in the fall of 2003 at U.S.-run prisons, but the Abu Ghraib scandal that erupted the following spring unmasked a regime of industrial-scale torture. read more »

THU OCT 11 7pm • $15-$35 Sliding Scale FILM/BENEFIT: PAPER TIGER TV 25TH ANNIVERSARY with Amy Goodman, Bill Tabb and Joan Braderman. Opening reception, video installation, live performance and the premiere of the documentary, Paper Tiger Reads Paper Tiger Television. Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Ave 212-420-9045 • papertiger.org read more »

Sabieh Fayhaa walks half a kilometer to a nearby hose to fill empty bottles and then walks back to the building she squats on the edge of Chikook, a neighborhood in northwest Baghdad that is now home to approximately 650 families who have been driven from their homes in villages and cities around Baghdad by sectarian violence. But her greatest concern is the lack of medical care — she suffers from asthma and one of her daughters has epilepsy. Like many of the children of families that have been displaced, neither of her daughters attends school. "I have nothing. I've lost everything. I have no money to buy medicine." read more »

For the counter-recruiting movement to make a serious dent in the military's recruiting efforts, it would need far more resources and committed organizers on the ground building youth-led, grassroots networks that would reach deep into the schools and other community institutions. This would need to happen not just in big cities or liberal college towns (which provide most of the success stories in the book), but in the small, forgotten towns in the interior of the country that are steeped in pro-military culture and provide a disproportionate number of the troops. While this may seem implausible, these are exactly the parts of the country that have been the most betrayed by the Bush administration and the war and to which countless disillusioned soldiers are returning. read more »

More than four years after massive protests preceded the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, a divided antiwar movement finds itself hard-pressed to put large numbers of people in the streets. Roughly 50,000 people turned out for a Sept. 15 antiwar demo in Washington, D.C. sponsored by International ANSWER (Act Now to Stop War and End Racism) and scattered, decentralized protests took place across the country during the Sept. 21 "Iraq Moratorium." On Sept. 29, the Troops Out Now Coalition (TONC) drew a much smaller crowd to the nation's capital to participate in its march to "Stop the War and Fight Racism at Home." read more »

On the Troops Out Now bus from New York, we were told how important the day was, but the speakers at the rally outside the Capital repeated the same old things while we called out the same old chants and got back the same old responses. Souvenir guys hawked protest t-shirts (dated Sept. 29!) just like at a serious basketball game or Disney World. Other than an extended detour on a lost bus, it was a protest like any other: speeches no one listened to, marching and chanting for two hours and requests for money. read more »

The first city we came upon was Hilla, 60 miles south of Baghdad. We pulled off the paved highway onto a bumpy road. Leaving a growing plume of dust behind us, we slowly approached a crumbling farmhouse situated amid vegetable fields and date palms. An old man with a weathered face that bore the attrition of exhaustion met us in front of his home. His first words to us were a plea for help — for drinking water, for some work, for anything that could ease his struggle. As we spoke with him, he walked us to a scrappy water pump that sat lifeless near an empty container. A rubber hose cracked from the blistering sun was coiled limply on the dirt, near a hole that he said he tried to fill with water with his pump whenever their two hours of electricity appeared. Essentially, they had no electricity, and what little water they did get was loaded with salt from the region, and left those who used it sick with nausea, diarrhea, kidney stones, cramps and cholera. Besides apprising us of the desperate water situation, the old man asked us if we could help him find his cousin. "We just want to know if he's dead so we can bury the body." In a village just outside of Hilla, several men told a similar story. There was no running water to speak of and barely two to four hours of electricity per day, during which they tried to run their feeble pumps to draw contaminated water from a polluted stream for their families to use. An old man named Hussin Hamsa Nagem bemoaned, "We are all sick with stomach problems and kidney stones. Our crops are dying." read more »

"The approach of making people buy coverage, but not actually changing the health care system to make it affordable, doesn't work. It leaves the health-care insurance companies in the middle of the health care system, continuing to waste billions of dollars," said David Himmelstein, associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and cofounder of Physicians for a National Health Program. "Criminalizing the uninsured is not really a reasonable approach to solving the health care issue." read more »

"They are not homeless they are houseless," Alex Lamey says of the evacuees of New Orleans. It's a thought out phrase, designed to cut the stigma of exile before it becomes a permanent stain. He does this careful sifting in his conversation and his cinematic work. Raised by radical parents, both professors, Lemay grew up with a clear moral compass that guided him to the crisis in New Orleans. His first documentary was The Bulls of Suburbia about suburban kids learning Spanish style bullfighting. Honing his skills on commercial work he made his second film on the evacuees of New Orleans. read more »

Toyota is in GM's rearview mirror and is closer than it appears. Toyota is poised to be the top-selling carmaker in the world (over GM). Its non-union employees do not bargain for contracts and have salaries, health care and other benefits inferior to Detroit's UAW members. Toyota's non-union workforce was the 800-pound gorilla at the UAWGM contract negotiations, as GM seeks to bring UAW members down to the level of Toyota workers. read more »

As those opposed to abortion see it, once a woman views the fetus, she will be unable to end its life. Richard Land, Ethics and Religious Liberty Commissioner of the conservative Southern Baptist Convention, is widely credited for popularizing this idea. "If wombs had windows," he says, "people would be much more reticent to abort babies because they would be forced to confront the evident humanity of the baby from very early gestation onward. Pregnant mothers who see their babies on sonograms are far more likely to carry their babies to term."