By Rami Khouri, Arab Media Watch adviser, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

31 March 2010

These are dramatic days in the Arab-Israeli war-and-peace department, but will they prove to be truly historic, or only transiently tumultuous?

26 March 2010
The Times

Omar Pound was a gifted poet and an internationally recognised translator of Persian and Arabic poetry.

Anshel Pfeffer interviews Matthew Seaton, editor of the Guardian's Comment is Free section.

25 March 2010
Haaretz

By Rami Khouri, Arab Media Watch adviser, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

24 March 2010

The important relationship between the United States and Israel is evolving in unpredictable ways. Their recent tensions are important for what they reveal about a more sophisticated and integrated American view of its Middle East policies, one which balances a firm commitment to Israel’s security against the problems Washington suffers from its excessive pro-Israel tilt and continued Zionist colonialism in occupied Arab lands.

By Susan Youssef
22 March 2010
Electronic Intifada

I am on a plane, on the way back from Palestine to my apartment -- a quiet, private place set in rainy Amsterdam. It is there where I will edit my film Habibi Rasak Kharban (Darling, There's Something Wrong with Your Head), a love story set in the Gaza Strip. I have just finished shooting it, the first dramatic feature to be made about Gaza in more than ten years. And it took me seven years of continuous development and fundraising to shoot it.

By Rami Khouri, Arab Media Watch adviser, director of the Issam Fares Institute at the American University of Beirut, editor-at-large of the Beirut-based Daily Star, and co-laureate of the 2006 Pax Christi International Peace Award.

17 March 2010

I have been in Boston and New York City following the dust-up in American-Israeli relations after the Israeli government - during the official visit of US Vice President Joseph Biden - made two announcements approving the construction of nearly 1800 new housing units in the occupied Jerusalem and West Bank areas. The controversy has been immense, as far as US-Israeli relations ago. Rarely do senior American officials say in public or private, as they did in the past week, that Israel has “insulted” the United States, accuse it of deliberately undermining US-mediated talks, “condemn” Israel’s actions, or demand that Israel take action to prove its commitment to the Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiations just getting underway with US mediation.

All of this is quite new, but it will also be quite meaningless if the controversy turns out to be just another bump in the road in an otherwise solid bilateral American-Israeli relationship in which Israeli right-wing interests and Washington lobbyists have shaped US policy in the Middle East for decades. The serious tone of the current controversy is clear; its potential consequences are not.

By Max Blumenthal
15 March 2010
Electronic Intifada

One night about two weeks ago, while I was walking down Bleecker Street in New York City's West Village, I crossed paths with Norman Finkelstein. He was wearing a light jacket and eating a banana, seemingly impervious to the bitter wind and heavy snowfall pouring from the sky. I told Finkelstein that a YouTube clip of him parrying attacks from Zionist student activists during a speech he gave at the University of Waterloo was gaining popularity online. "Well, that scene hasn't been very good for me," he remarked in a near whisper.

The YouTube clip was an excerpt from American Radical: The Trials of Norman Finkelstein, a riveting 2009 documentary that has just opened in US theaters. In the scene, a female student tells Finkelstein that his comparisons of the Israeli government to the Nazis are "extremely hurtful" before she breaks down in tears. Instead of offering the demonstrative young woman a token gesture of empathy, Finkelstein grows indignant, angrily dismissing what he called her "crocodile tears." He then launches into a stentorian tirade about "the lessons of the Holocaust" he learned from his Holocaust survivor parents, booming above a chorus of heckles from pro-Israel students, "If you had any heart in you, you would be crying for the Palestinians!" While the young woman holds her head in hands as though she was bracing for an air raid, a substantial portion of the crowd leaps to its feet with wild cheers. Finkelstein may have regretted the spectacle he generates later on, but he seemed to be enjoying himself at the time.

With unfettered access to Finkelstein during the most dramatic stage of his career, American Radical directors David Ridgen and Nicolas Rossier provide a compelling look at one of the most roundly vilified academics in recent American history. If the film had simply rehashed the tale of Finkelstein as a rabble-rousing iconoclast who defied the Jewish-American consensus to agitate for Palestinian civil rights, it would have been prosaic at best. But by giving equal time to Finkelstein's critics, who proved unable to conceal their visceral disdain for him even though they have succeeded in isolating him from the intellectual mainstream, the film offers a devastating portrait of an academic establishment that will go to extraordinary lengths not only to rebut but destroy potent critics of Israel, even obviously idiosyncratic characters like Finkelstein. Even with his excessive tendencies and strident style on bold display, when seen in the shadow of his adversaries, Finkelstein appears more than odd -- he becomes utterly sympathetic.