
By Philip Giraldi. The American Conservative, 2/12/14 – The connection between America’s wars in the Middle East—and its wars more generally—with the more fundamentalist forms of Christianity in the United States is striking. Opinion polls suggest that the more religiously conservative one is, the more one will support overseas wars or even what many might describe as […]

By Philip Giraldi. AntiWar.com, 2/18/14 – Why is the United States so reluctant to negotiate with other countries and so prone to leap immediately to the option of using force or chicanery in lieu of a more deliberative foreign policy? It might partly be because we Americans are not very good at the subtlety and […]

Everyone remembers the Israeli athletes murdered during the 1972 Olympic games, but no one commemorates the hundreds of people (mostly civilians) killed by Israel’s heavy air attacks in Syria and Lebanon launched the following day. By Alison Weir. Counterpunch, 2/11/14 – The Washington Post has published a moving article, “Russian Jews remember Israeli athletes murdered at 1972 […]

“SodaStream makes some dispensers in the biggest of Israel’s West Bank settlements, illegal under international law. It is disingenuous to romanticise settlement enterprises. The occupation imprisons thousands of the Palestinians’ young men, gives their land and water to settlers, demolishes their houses and partitions the remaining territory with scores of checkpoints and segregated roads…” John Whitbeck’s commentary: […]

By Philip Giraldi. The American Conservative, 1/28/14 – The last time the Olympic Games were confronted with a serious, capable, and active terrorist movement was at the 1992 Barcelona Games, when the Euskadi ta Akatasuna (ETA) threatened to stage attacks to highlight its demands for an independent Basque homeland. Currently, the Russian Olympic sponsors of […]

John Whitbeck’s commentary: In the article transmitted below, Philip Giraldi considers the national embarrassment to Canada posed by its prime minister Stephen Harper and warns against the risk and threat of putting in charge of a country’s foreign policy an individual in the grip of “nuttier-than-fruitcake” superstition. This threat is, obviously, not unique to Canada. […]

John Whitbeck’s commentary: On January 24, I wrote at the end of my introduction to an article on Iraq that the Obama administration’s impulse to maintain an American military presence in Afghanistan for another ten years “can be explained only by a self-interested concern of American political and military ‘leaders’ to kick the can down […]

John Whitbeck’s commentary: While polls show that more than three-quarters of the French people view their president’s erratic love life as a private affair, it appears from the AP news report, published by the International New York Times, transmitted below that the love life of the Israeli prime minister’s son is widely viewed in the […]

John Whitbeck’s commentary: Transmitted below is a link to an article in the TIMES OF ISRAEL on a clarification of Bibi Netanyahu’s vision for Israeli-Palestinian “peace” which should have attracted more attention in the Western media than it has so far. http://www.timesofisrael.com/pm-would-let-settlers-remain-in-west-bank-official-says/#.UuZQYRs4wkg.email Perhaps the prime minister is worried that his two carefully carefully crafted poison […]

John Whitbeck’s commentary: In the article transmitted below, HAARETZ columnist Amira Hass considers, with considerable help from Nabeel Shaath, Bibi Netanyahu’s diversionary tactic of demanding that Palestine must formally recognize Israel as a “Jewish State”, a demand unfortunately “swallowed” by John Kerry, who, in accordance with a decades-old tradition, appears to be adopting Israel’s goals, […]