Free Speech Quagmire

The supposed hallowed hallmark of free societies, free speech, has been sorely tested these past few weeks.

First there were the Mohammed cartoons - originally published in a Danish newspaper - which have infuriated Islam and sparked world-wide riots and demonstrations. Then there was the guilty verdict handed down to David Irving, the British historian who is internationally vilified for his revisionist views on the Holocaust. And looked at together they present a confused and contradictory message.

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Chernus and Hilfiker on the Other Christian Activists

History can be mind-boggling. Only by reading Andrew J. Bacevich's superb book, The New American Militarism (excerpted at Tomdispatch last year), would I ever have known that, into the Cold War era, Christian evangelicals still nurtured, as he puts it, a generations-old "robust anti-war tradition."

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Is It Political  Conjunctivitis, Lack Of Humanity… Or Both?

Here we go again, resorting to America’s weapon of choice in foreign policy: economic sanctions!  A powerful weapon that while intending [or pretending] to fight dictators, rogue nations and terrorists, it ultimately ends up being anti-people; a robotic peddler of punishment against the innocent, the poor and the weak: a neutron bomb of sorts that does not have to answer anti-nuclear criticism. US government leaders have done it (still do it) to Cuba; to Iraq, after the Gulf War… and the sights are now set on those “unruly” Palestinians – undoubtedly, as payback for their impudence in democratically electing a Hamas leadership.

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Outsourcing National Security

President Bush has approved a deal selling control of six major U.S. Ports to an Arab company, Dubai Ports World, for $6.8bn. DP World, a state-owned business based in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), bought out London-based Peninsular & Oriental Steam Navigation Co. which runs major commercial operations in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia

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