The Israel lobby

Two years ago the BBC World Discussion programme The Doha Debates held a special session at the Oxford Union on the question of whether or not the pro-Israel lobby has succesfully stifled the debate about Israel’s actions. Defending the motion are Norman Finkelstein and Andrew Cockburn. Opposing the motion are David Aaaaronovitch and Martin Indyk, former US Ambassador to Israel and research director for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee. It’s now up on Youtube.

UPDATE: so it seems I got this post up just in time for Ehud Olmert to claim he could order Bush around like a busboy:

WASHINGTON — In an unusually public rebuke, Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel said Monday that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice had been forced to abstain from a United Nations resolution on Gaza that she helped draft, after Mr. Olmert placed a phone call to President Bush.

“I said, ‘Get me President Bush on the phone,’”Mr. Olmert said in a speech in the southern Israeli city of Ashkelon, according to The Associated Press. “They said he was in the middle of giving a speech in Philadelphia. I said I didn’t care: ‘I need to talk to him now,’ ” Mr. Olmert continued. “He got off the podium and spoke to me.”

Israel opposed the resolution, which called for a halt to the fighting in Gaza, because the government said it did not provide for Israel’s security. It passed 14 to 0, with the United States abstaining.

But remember: believing in the Israel lobby is anti-semitic…

Simple pleasures: Bear Hunt

Part one in an occassional series when it all gets a bit too much.

Michael Rosen. Poet, writer of childrens books, public intellectual in the best meaning of the word, socialist. And not too embarrassed to act out his own stories on Youtube…

Hurra Hurra…



Just because some poor sod searching for the lyrics of CODO reminded me I hand’t put any Neue Deutsche Welle on for a long time. Yes, there was a time during the late seventies and early eighties when alll over Europe new generations of musicians took the punk 2-tone ans ska influences coming from Britain, embraced the d.i.y. spirit infusing the punk movement and made it their own. There had always been a certain cultural cringe in European pop music, but when punk hit the continent a whole generation of bands decided to make music in their own language as a conscious, political choice, because you could make real pop music in Dutch, or French or even German. Hence the Neue Deutsche Welle, which started in the underground but soon broke out and became incredibly popular, not just in Germany, but all over the continent. The video I opened with was one of the more succesful NDW bands, Extrabreit, with their greatest hit.



The Spider Murphy Gang with their greatest hit, Skandal im Sperrbezirk. Once heard, it stays in your head forever.



No. I can’t say I knew Geier Sturzflug either, but they turn out to have been a Bochum band, with this being their sole hit. But you’ll probably know Opus. Not quite NDW, certainly not in this version:



Solicitere

It’s back to the eighties again, considering the complete and utter collapse of the Anglo-American financial world and the sombre news from the budget in Den Haag: can mass unemployment be far behind? If so, this old classic by the Janse Bagge Bend is shockingly relevant again.