The Anti-Empire Report
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Issue #40 — December 17th, 2006
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is a man seemingly custom-made for the White House in its endless quest for enemies with whom to scare Congress, the American people, and the world, in order to justify the unseemly behavior of the empire. The Iranian president has declared that he wants to “wipe Israel off the map”. He’s said that “the Holocaust is a myth”. He recently held a conference in Iran for “Holocaust deniers”. And his government passed a new law requiring Jews to wear a yellow insignia, ˆ la the Nazis. On top of all that, he’s aiming to build nuclear bombs, one of which would surely be aimed at Israel. What right-thinking person would not be scared by such a man? Keep reading →
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Issue #39 — November 24th, 2006
A clear majority of Americans are opposed to the war and almost all of them would be very happy if the US military began the process of leaving Iraq tomorrow, if not today. The rest of the world would breathe a great sigh of relief and their long-running love affair with the storybook place called “America” could begin to come back to life. Keep reading →
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Issue #38 — October 19th, 2006
Imagine that following North Korea’s recent underground nuclear test neither the United States nor any other government cried out that the sky was falling. No threat to world peace and security was declared by the White House or any other house. It was thus not the lead story on every radio and TV broadcast and newspaper page one. The UN Security Council did not unanimously condemn it. Nor did NATO. “What should we do about him?” was not America Online’s plaintive all-day headline alongside a photo of North Korean leader Kim Jong-il. Keep reading →
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Issue #37 — September 25th, 2006
Hand-in-hand with his threat warnings, Bush keeps telling us how his War on Terror has made us so much safer, bragging that there hasn’t been a terrorist attack in the United States in the five years since the one of September 11, 2001. Marvelous. There wasn’t a terrorist attack in the United States in the five years before that day either. But thanks to the War on Terror—particularly the bombing, invasion, occupation, and torture of Afghanistan and Iraq—numerous new anti-American terrorists have been created since that historic day. Keep reading →
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Issue #36 — August 18th, 2006
So now we’ve (choke) just been (gasp) saved from the simultaneous blowing up of as many as ten airplanes headed toward the United States from the UK. Wow, thank you Brits, thank you Homeland Security. Well done, lads. And thanks for preventing the destruction of the Sears Tower in Chicago, saving lower Manhattan from a terrorist-unleashed flood, smashing the frightful Canadian “terror plot” with 17 arrested, ditto the three Toledo terrorists, and squashing the Los Angeles al Qaeda plot to fly a hijacked airliner into a skyscraper. Keep reading →
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Issue #35 — July 22nd, 2006
There are times when I think that this tired old world has gone on a few years too long. What’s happening in the Middle East is so depressing. Most discussions of the eternal Israel-Palestine conflict are variations on the child’s eternal defense for misbehavior—“He started it!” Within a few minutes of discussing/arguing the latest manifestation of the conflict the participants are back to 1967, then 1948, then biblical times. I don’t wish to get entangled in who started the current mess. I would like instead to first express what I see as two essential underlying facts of life which remain from one conflict to the next… Keep reading →
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Issue #35 — July 22nd, 2006
There are times when I think that this tired old world has gone on a few years too long. What’s happening in the Middle East is so depressing. Most discussions of the eternal Israel-Palestine conflict are variations on the child’s eternal defense for misbehavior—“He started it!” Within a few minutes of discussing/arguing the latest manifestation of the conflict the participants are back to 1967, then 1948, then biblical times. Keep reading →
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Issue #34 — June 21st, 2006
National Public Radio foreign correspondent Loren Jenkins, serving in NPR’s Baghdad bureau, met earlier this month with a senior Shiite cleric, a man who was described in the NPR report as “a moderate” and as a person trying to lead his Shiite followers into practicing peace and reconciliation. He had been jailed by Saddam Hussein and forced into exile. Jenkins asked him: “What would you think if you had to go back to Saddam Hussein?” The cleric replied that he’d “rather see Iraq under Saddam Hussein than the way it is now.” Keep reading →
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Issue #33 — May 21st, 2006
“I used to be called brother, John, Daddy, uncle, friend,” John Allen Muhammad said at his trial in Maryland earlier this month. “Now I’m called evil.” Muhammad, formerly known as “the DC Sniper”, was on trial for six slayings in Maryland in 2002. Already sentenced to die in Virginia for several other murders, he insisted that he was innocent despite the evidence against him—including DNA, fingerprints, and ballistics analysis of a rifle found in his car. Keep reading →
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Issue #32 — April 22nd, 2006
The recent paper by two prominent academics, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, on “The Israel Lobby”, has spurred considerable discussion both in the mainstream media and on the Internet about the significance of the role played by this lobby in instigating the US invasion and occupation of Iraq. The answer to this question may reside ultimately, and solely, in the minds of the neo-conservatives, in or close to official government positions, who lobbied for years to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein; an early instance of this being their now-famous letter to President Clinton in January 1998, which, in no uncertain terms, called for an American strategy that “should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein’s regime from power”. Keep reading →
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Issue #31 — March 22nd, 2006
I’m often told by readers of their encounters with Americans who support the outrages of US foreign policy no matter what facts are presented to them, no matter what arguments are made, no matter how much the government’s statements are shown to be false. Included amongst their number are those who still believe that Iraq had a direct involvement in the events of September 11, that Saddam Hussein had close ties to al Qaeda, and/or that weapons of mass destruction were indeed found in Iraq after the 2003 invasion. My advice is to forget such people. Keep reading →
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Issue #30 — February 14th, 2006
In case you don’t know, on January 19 the latest audiotape from Osama bin Laden was released and in it he declared: “If you [Americans] are sincere in your desire for peace and security, we have answered you. And if Bush decides to carry on with his lies and oppression, then it would be useful for you to read the book ‘Rogue State’, which states in its introduction ... ” Keep reading →