Analysis

By Stephen Lendman

Throughout decades of brutal rule, Mubarak remained a steadfast US ally. As a result, Washington rewarded him generously. US administrations also ignored his crimes, corruption, and lawlessness, as late January released WikiLeaks cables reveal, showing Obama knew he kept power through ruthless state terror.

Read more: Mubarak's Thirty-Year Dictatorship

By Richard Falk

by Richard Falk

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, four transformative events have reshaped the global setting in enduring ways. When the Soviet empire collapsed two years later, the way was opened for the triumphalist pursuit of the American imperial project, seizing the opportunity for geopolitical expansion provided by its self-anointed global leadership - as 'the sole surviving superpower'.

Read more: Egypt's Berlin Wall moment

By MWC News

by Mya Guarnieri

As Egyptians demand their freedom, I ask a Muslim in Jaffa if we will see the same in Israel. "I don't think so," he answers. "Even with all the mess here, we have democracy."

But, do we? And for how much longer?

Read more: The death of Israeli democracy

By Ludwig Watzal

Ilan Pappé, Out of the Frame. The Struggle for Academic Freedom in Israel, Pluto Press, London-New York 2010, 246 pp, L 13.

In this intellectual autobiography, Ilan Pappé, Professor in the Institute for Arab and Islamic Studies at the University of Exeter, tells his story of conversion from an Israeli Zionist to an anti-Zionist. For him, it was an act of liberation or even a kind of revelation which religious people sometimes experience. The author does not recall the precise moment of his awakening, but there was a moment when the un-Jewishness and immorality of the Zionist project became clear to him. He still does equate Jewishness and morality, not as superior to any other position, but rather as a comfortable heritage to which he belongs and on which he can rely on when making moral judgments. In his own words: “(F)rom this perspective, the Zionist project abused this kind of Judaism and this kind of morality. Worst of all was the Zionist and later Israeli abuse of the Holocaust memory to justify the dispossession of Palestine that disconcerted and outraged me. The abuse is obvious and yet so many today can still not see it. It was this departure point human and Jewish that recently led so many Jews to oppose crimes and policies done in the name of the state.”

Read more: Ilan Pappé - 'Out of the Frame'

By Stephen Lendman

Perhaps George Bernard Shaw was thinking of Obama's administration when he said, "Democracy is a form of government that substitutes election by the incompetent many for the appointment of the corrupt few."

Read more: Field Notes on American-Style Democracy