Outcry over violence in Israel ignoring occupation, The Obama Slide, Marketing Strategy, Ziauddin Sardar,

Even when there are no Palestinian casualties and fatalities at the hands of the Israel Defense Forces, there is no letup in the everyday bullying by the occupation regime. Many Israelis are complicit in every travel restriction and expropriation order, from the cabinet ministers responsible, to the jurists who legitimize and codify, to the officers who implement and the typists and translators. Every soldier who guards a Jewish settlement, every rabbi who serves it and every kindergarten teacher there is partner to the primal act of the established violence that built it on Palestinian land (public or private, that makes no difference). This is violence that replicates and reproduces at every moment, because the initial theft is still doing damage. The military judiciary system, which tries only Palestinian inhabitants of the West Bank, has an important role in the reproduction of violence. Outcry over violence in Israel ignoring occupation By Amira Hass,

By force of circumstances and by design, the president has promoted one policy after another that increases spending and centralizes power in Washington. The result is the Obama slide, the most important feature of the current moment. The number of Americans who trust President Obama to make the right decisions has fallen by roughly 17 percentage points. Obama’s job approval is down to about 50 percent. All presidents fall from their honeymoon highs, but in the history of polling, no newly elected American president has fallen this far this fast.The Obama Slide

The document, “Lexapro Fiscal 2004 Marketing Plan,” is an outline of the many steps Forest used to make Lexapro a success. Because of concerns from Forest, the Senate committee released only 88 pages of the document, which may have originally run longer than 270 pages. “Confidential” is stamped on every page. But those 88 pages make clear that one of the principal means by which Forest hoped to persuade psychiatrists, primary care doctors and other medical specialists to prescribe Lexapro was by finding many ways to put money into doctors’ pockets and food into their mouths. A Drug Maker’s Playbook Reveals a Marketing Strategy

The Enlightenment legacy that Islam and Europe have nothing in common, that Islam is only a darker shadow of the West, that liberal secularism is the destiny of all human cultures, is much in evidence in our newspapers and television, literature and scholarship, as well as in our politics and foreign policies. It is the bedrock of Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” hypothesis, Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilisation” thesis, and the neo-conservative “Project for the New American Century”. Voltaire’s Bastards, to use the title of John Ralston Saul’s brilliant 1992 book, are busy rationalizing torture, military interventions, and western supremacy, and demonising Islam and Muslims. The Enlightenment may have been big on reason but it was, as Saul shows so convincingly, bereft of both meaning and morality.
Forgive me if I don’t stand up and salute the Enlightenment.The erasure of Islam
Written by: Ziauddin Sardar

It is now commonplace to argue that al-Qaeda is better understood as an idea rather than as an organisation. In contrast to the sophisticated global super-network that haunted the West’s imagination after the 11 September 2001 terror attacks, al-Qaeda is now more realistically discussed as a ‘brand’ with small-time franchise-operators and amateurish freelance imitators. Yet the attempt to comprehend the ‘idea’ of al-Qaeda has given rise to its own delusions. Phillip Hammond