In marking Israel’s 60th anniversary, I think it’s prudent to acknowledge some of its most glaring accomplishments.
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“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance; it is the illusion of knowledge.”
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The Wachowski Bros.
The Wachowski brothers’ first film since the Matrix Trilogy, Speed Racer, comes out this Friday (It’s also Emile Hirsch’s first film since Into the Wild). Be excited. See the trailer here. And Hillary was spanked yesterday creating more pressure for her to quit her bid. She insists on carrying on but I wonder if people will continue to donate to her campaign when so many consider it a lost cause. She’s already lent her campaign more than $11 million.
In any case, it’s been a decent day. Now if only Israel would stop celebrating its 60th anniversary and admit that its only real milestone is that it has succeeded in 60 years of ethnic cleansing, then I would be complete for the day. I just had to add that bit because I went to a lecture by Daniel Pipes yesterday on campus and I was floored by the revisionism.
Posted in Trailers
6 Comments
Michael Moore Endorses Obama
I’m not going to lie, Michael Moore endorsing Obama’s candidacy greatly legitimizes his campaign even further in my book. Michael Moore has so much credibility in my eyes that any endorsement from him is as good as gold. See his interview on Larry King Live here.
Posted in Elections '08
9 Comments
Poll: More disapprove of Bush than any other president
A CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey released Thursday indicates that 71 percent of the American public disapprove of how Bush is handling his job as president. “No president has ever had a higher disapproval rating in any CNN or Gallup Poll; in fact, this is the first time that any president’s disapproval rating has cracked the 70 percent mark,” said Keating Holland, CNN’s polling director. “Bush’s approval rating, which stands at 28 percent in our new poll, remains better than the all-time lows set by Harry Truman and Richard Nixon [22 percent and 24 percent, respectively], but even those two presidents never got a disapproval rating in the 70s,” Holland said. “The previous all-time record in CNN or Gallup polling was set by Truman, 67 percent disapproval in January 1952.” While Gallup polling goes back to the 1930s, it wasn’t until the Truman years that they began surveying monthly approval ratings. CNN Senior Political Analyst Bill Schneider adds, “He is more unpopular than Richard Nixon was just before he resigned from the presidency in August 1974.” he poll also indicates that support for the war in Iraq has never been lower. Thirty percent of those questioned favored the war, while 68 percent opposed it. “Americans are growing more pessimistic about the war,” Holland said. “In January, nearly half believed that things were going well for the U.S. in Iraq; now that figure has dropped to 39 percent.” The numbers on the Iraq war come on the five-year anniversary of Bush’s “Mission Accomplished” moment on board the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln, when he proclaimed that “major combat operations in Iraq have ended.” The record-low support for the war in a CNN poll could be one reason behind the president’s unpopularity, but it probably is not the only one. “Support for the war, the assessment of the economy and approval of Mr. Bush are all about the same — bad,” Schneider said. The CNN/Opinion Research Corp. poll was conducted by telephone from Monday through Wednesday among 1,008 adult Americans.The poll’s sampling error is plus or minus 3 percentage points.
New Addition to the Blog: “Favorite Films” Page
The new “Favorite Films” section on the right is a work-in-progress and I will continuously be adding to it and updating it. Each title is linked to the film’s trailer. In marking the new addition to the site, I’d like to cut tape with the greatest trailer ever made.
Posted in Film, Trailers
8 Comments
Charles Kurzman “The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran”
I just finished reading Charles Kurzman’s The Unthinkable Revolution in Iran. It is much like Stephen Kinzer’s All the Shah’s Men in that the entire book focuses on the unfolding of a major historical event. Kurzman’s book is devoted to the play-by-play unfolding of the Iranian Revolution, which as far as I know, is the first book to look at the revolution with such an approach. It’s definitely worth your while. Here’s an excerpt I thought was noteworthy: “It is almost unheard of for a revolution to involve as much as 1 percent of a country’s population. The French Revolution of 1789, the Russian Revolution of 1917, perhaps the Romanian Revolution of 1989 – these may have passed the 1 percent mark. Yet in Iran, more than 10 percent of the country marched in anti-shah demonstrations on December 10 and 11, 1978. Photographs of these events showed massive avenues filled for miles, not just in Tehran but throughout Iran. So many people marched, according to the French reporters Paul Balta and Claudine Rulleau in Tehran, that ‘there is no one at the windows to watch the processions pass.” The British ambassador Anthony Parsons, looking out his office window – apparently unseen by Balta and Rulleau – said that the processions took all morning to pass by: ‘The street is wide but it was filled from pavement to pavement and from top to bottom as far as the eye could see for a period of three or four hours. And it was only one of the many feeder roads to the main procession route.’
Foreign journalists estimated the crowd in Tehran at 500,000 to 1 million strong on December 10, and 500,000 to more than 1 million the next day. Opposition publications estimated 2 to 4 million in Tehran on the 11th, plush 700,000 to 1 million each in Isfahan and Mashhad, 500,000 to 700,000 in Tabriz, 400,000 in Rasht, 300,000 in Ahwaz, 250,000 to 300,000 in Shiraz, 200,000-300,000 in Abadan, 200,000 in Qom, 150,000 in Khorramshahr, more than 100,000 in Arak and Kermanshah, and tens of thousands in each of a dozen more cities – a total of 6 to 9 million. Even discounting for exaggeration, these figures may represent the largest protest event in history.” (Kurzman, 122)
Posted in Books, Iranian Revolution
5 Comments
Vali Nasr on the Colbert Report
The good thing about going to school in the New England area is that in addition to our home school’s schedule of classes, we’re also allowed to take classes at Tufts University and MIT, both of which are very close to Harvard. This semester I had the good fortune of taking a class at Tufts with Professor Vali Nasr. I think he’s a brilliant professor and I thoroughly enjoyed his most recent book, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future. Here he is on the Colbert Report.
Posted in Books
2 Comments
Blog’s 3rd Anniversary
This month marks my weblog’s 3rd anniversary. I hope you’ve found this blog useful and thank you for sharing your thoughts with me. I hope you’ve learned as much from me as I have from you. To mark the occasion, I’d like to present a delicious clip on Norman Finkelstein. My posting this clip is not an endorsement of everything he has said in his lifetime, so please don’t associate my blog and I indirectly with anything other than what’s in this delicious video 🙂 Enjoy and try not to drool over its content.
Posted in Academics, Hezbollah, Islamism, Lebanon
7 Comments
Iraq Violence in Numbers
BBC: Tens of thousands of people have died in Iraq since the US-led invasion of March 2003. But it is unclear how many Iraqi lives have been lost. More than 4,300 coalition soldiers have died – 4,000 of them Americans [this figure does not include the deaths of “security contractors” which some estimates put at more than 800]. US forces do not keep complete records of civilians killed. The Iraqi government does not keep precise records. Health ministry estimates in November 2006 ranged from 100,000 to 150,000 dead. This contrasts with a survey of Iraqi households in the Lancet, which suggested about 655,000 Iraqis had died in the war by July 2006. A survey published by a UK-based polling agency Opinion Research Business in September 2007 suggested up to 1.2m people might have died because of the conflict. The campaign group, Iraq Body Count, says the civilian death toll by October 2007 was between 74,000 and 81,000, although it warns many deaths may have gone unreported. Another survey, published by the New England Journal of Medicine in January 2008, says that about 151,000 civilians died between March 2003 and June 2006. The study for the World Health Organization was based on 9,000 interviews across Iraq.
Posted in "War on Terror", Iraq
7 Comments
Israel Wants Peace
which, of course, translates into the continued construction of Jewish-only colonies on occupied Palestinian land and the collective punishment of those who oppose such policies. Take the latest peace building headline for example, “Israel to build 100 settler homes.” Now if only the Palestinians could love Israel for such peace initiatives and toss scented rice at the settlers, everything would be okay.
Posted in Palestine, Settlements, The Conflict
2 Comments
“No End in Sight”
Two nights ago I watched “No End in Sight,” a documentary film on the Iraq War in which I had posted its trailer here long ago. It was an outstanding film and a burning critique of the war in Iraq. It was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary film in 2007. Here’s the wikipedia synopsis: “No End in Sight is a documentary film that focuses on alleged serious mistakes made by the Bush administration in the two year period following the invasion of Iraq in March 2003. The film portrays these errors as the cause of ensuing problems in Iraq, such as the rise of the insurgency, a lack of security and basic utilities for many Iraqis, sectarian violence and, at one point, the risk of complete civil war.” See the trailer here.
Posted in "War on Terror", Documentary, Iraq, Trailers, US Foreign Policy
2 Comments
War is Politics by Other Means
[Although a bit dated, I find this piece on Hizbullah and the aftermath of the ’06 war very relevant.]
Excerpt: It was this culture of resistance that led to Hizballah’s surprise victory in what is now being called in Lebanon “the Sixth War†with Israel . (A note on my usage of “surprise victoryâ€: If war is politics by other means, then Israel failed to achieve its stated political goals of disarming Hizballah and pushing it north of the Litani River; so too did it fail to achieve its unstated goals of cleansing the south of all Shias and intimidating Lebanese and Palestinian resistance— two failures that even Israel’s own generals are beginning to admit. Hizballah, on the other hand, not only survived the war intact, and with relatively few casualties, but it inflicted relatively heavy casualties on the Israeli military and achieved greater popularity than it ever had—winning the hearts of Muslims around the world, and many non-Muslims in Lebanon.)
Posted in Hezbollah, Islamism
6 Comments
Iranian Support for Palestine
Every so often I hear Iranians whine about the Iranian government’s support for Palestine saying that Palestine is an Arab problem which has nothing to do with Iran. Please. On the contrary, I think that it shouldn’t just be Iran supporting the Palestinians but the entire world. Israel’s decades long occupation and colonization transcends Arab or Islamic politics. It is a human issue that warrants the attention and support of the entire world.
A Third American War in the Making?
I think the most noteworthy points to take away from this article are:
1. “…Iran is perched like a sitting duck in denial even as the US and its Iraqi puppet Maliki move to eliminate Al Sadr’s Iraqi Shi’ite militia in order to avoid supply disruptions and a Shi’ite rebellion in Iraq when the US attack on Iran comes.”
2. “And Admiral William ‘there will be no attack on Iran on my watch’ Fallon has been removed as US chief of Central Command, thus clearing the way for Cheney’s planned attack on Iran.”
Posted in Iran, US Foreign Policy
3 Comments
No Ruz Parades
This weekend saw New York’s 5th annual Persian Parade and San Jose’s 1st annual No Ruz Parade. Given that there are countless more Iranians in So Cal, I’m still trying to figure out why there hasn’t been one there. In any case, judging from the pictures of the New York parade, it seemed spectacular. Despite it’s ultra-nationalism, which is a little too much for me to consume, my three favorite pictures are posted below. To see the whole photo essay go here.
Posted in Iranian Diaspora, Iranian Identity
14 Comments