Robin Yassin-Kassab on the Israeli-Palestine conflict, Clueless in Canada,

Robin Yassin-Kassab on

The Israel-Palestine conflict - In response to recent attacks, Israel closed the Nahal Oz crossing into Gaza this week, severing Gaza’s access to the area’s only oil and gas terminal. Author and political blogger Robin Yassin-Kassab compares the Palestinians to the Jews in diaspora – as the land disappears under their feet, their identity as a nation paradoxically grows stronger. He chooses FiveBooks on the Israel-Palestine conflict.

Meet the Billionaire Brothers Funding the Right-Wing War on Obama: Billionaire brothers David and Charles Koch are the wealthiest, and perhaps most effective, opponents of President Obama's progressive agenda... David and Charles are also responsible for a vicious attack campaign aimed directly at obstructing and killing progressive reform. Over the years, millions of dollars in Koch money has flowed to various right-wing think tanks, front groups, and publications. At the dawn of the Obama presidency, Koch groups quickly maneuvered to try to stop his first piece of signature legislation: the stimulus. The Koch-funded group "No Stimulus" launched television and radio ads deriding the recovery package as simply "pork" spending. The Cato Institute -- founded by Charles -- as well as other Koch-funded think tanks like the Heritage Foundation, produced a blizzard of reports distorting the stimulus and calling for a return to Bush-style tax cuts to combat the recession. As their fronts were battling the stimulus, David's Americans for Prosperity (AFP) spent the opening months of the Obama presidency placing calls and helping to organize the very first "tea party" protests. AFP, founded in 1984 by David and managed day to day by the astroturf lobbyist Tim Phillips, has spent much of the year mobilizing "tea party" opposition to health reform, clean energy legislation, and financial regulations.

Clueless in Canada - Someone just pointed me in the direction of the worst article by a Non-Resident Pakistani (NRP) in the Western press. What is it about NRPs? I mean, if you're going to immigrate, must you pretend to still be clued in to what's going on back home? And what is the deal with the Western press, which is willing to accept all kinds of libelous statements from NRPs - which they would never from Westerners about their own countries - presumably simply because of the authors' "credibility", defined only by their ...

Israeli prisons as revolutionary universities - As a Palestinian political prisoner who has spent the past 20 years in Israeli jails I would like to highlight some of the general characteristics of the prisoners' movement's struggle to build a system of self and collective education as a central part of developing a patriotic and revolutionary culture that can be a pillar of the liberation movement. Khaled al-Azraq writes from Nafha prison.