terror

"[Neoconservatives] always continue to sort of lurk in the framework and look for opportunities to animate their crowd and bring in their fellow travelers.." - Steve Clemons, head of the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation in The Nation, March 18, 2010

As a native of Maine, Scott Hamann's account of the Gaza aid flotilla debacle immediately caught my eye when scanning the news. Hamman, a South Portland video producer, describes his experience in harrowing terms, leaving his audience of readers in little doubt that Israeli soldiers are no better than the Hamas terrorists who fire rockets at Israel's civilian communities.

Back in 1948, liberals were excited when President Harry Truman took to whistle-stopping and scorching the "do nothing 80th Congress" run by Republicans. "Give 'em hell, Harry," they cried. They loved it, too, when Harry recognized the State of Israel, just eleven minutes after it proclaimed independence. Liberals cared a lot about Israel's precarious existence back then.

The Israeli attack on the Gaza-bound "Freedom Flotilla" has put the United States in a difficult position. But it has also given Washington an opening for a game-changing action. When ships on a humanitarian mission to the besieged Gaza Strip were violently confronted in international waters, the Obama administration was faced with a choice between one strategic ally, Israel, and a larger international community centered on a key NATO ally, Turkey. The United States also has to be careful to protect fragile Palestinian-Israeli proximity talks that took U.S.

On Thursday, Fox News' Glenn Beck devoted a segment of his television program to attacking me for condemning the Israeli raid on the Gaza-bound relief flotilla.

In the aftermath of Israel's violent seizure of the Free Gaza flotilla early this week, it's important to emphasize that leading elements of the international community set the circumstances which resulted in this massacre. Monday's raid -- like the 2008-9 military assault on Gaza ("Operation Cast Lead"), and like the further atrocities that almost certainly lie ahead -- are the predictable outcome of established international policy towards the Gaza Strip.

Four American comedians are here to support the Koby Mandell Foundation and victims of terror.

A new exhibition in Berlin documents the role of the top echelon of the Nazi regime in a metallic gray building called the "Topography of Terror."

In the late 1980s, during what came to be known as the Second Palestinian Intifada, I was out on the road south of Jerusalem one day, on my way to cover the afternoon's rioting. Just outside Bethlehem I noticed a group of Palestinian teenaged girls coming out of their school. The girls began hurling angry insults at a nearby unit of Israeli troops and then started throwing stones at them from a carefully prepared ammunition pile.

Torture and terror, two terms peppered across the pages of newspapers, spouted from the mouths of news-anchors and stamped across countless websites throughout the first decade of the 21st century, but rarely used to describe the Israeli government's policies towards Palestinians over the last six decades.