William T. Hathaway

Terrorists, serial killers, domestic murderers — their ghoulish deeds fill our news and popular entertainment, interspersed with wars, riots, and brutal repressions. Violence surrounds us.

Where does it come from?

The answer propagated by the mass media is that violence is human nature. It's just the way people are.

This view ignores anthropological evidence about societies that have lived in relative peace, and it also contradicts our knowledge of ourselves as human beings. In certain situations we may feel violent impulses, but we can control them; we know they are only a small part of our make-up.

The Norwegian peace researcher Johan Galtung denies that human nature condemns us to violence; instead he gives another explanation of its etiology based on three interacting forces: structural, cultural, and direct.

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Gilad Atzmon

In the last few days blogger M. Jay Rosenberg came to the conclusion that Electronic Ali Abunimah is an anti-semite. Rosenberg's accusation is clearly unsubstantiated. Ali Abunimah is not an anti-semite. Dishonest? More likely.

Rosenberg writes, “let me explain why I consider Ali Abunimah to be anti-semitic…Ali Abunimah refers to Israelis as Zionists,.. but then he makes clear, over and over again, that Zionists are all bad people. Just go to his twitter feed and read the labels he uses for Zionists..’

Rosenberg is obviously uninformed. More and more commentators and scholars accept that Israelis are not Zionists, they are actually the product of the Zionist project. Most Israelis do not even understand what Zionism stands for. Zionism is the promise to bring about a Jewish national home. Once the Jewish State was founded (1948) Zionism finished its role as far as Israeli Jews are concerned. Thus, Zionism is now largely a Jewish Diaspora discourse. Accordingly, the debate between Zionists and the so-called ‘anti-’ has little relevance to Israeli politics or practice. In short, Rosenberg is wrong, yet why Abunimah misleads his readers, referring to Israelis as Zionists, remains unclear.

Abunimah may not be the most sophisticated theoretical commentator around, but he certainly monitors Israeli society and understands its politics. Abunimah refers to ‘Israelis’ as ‘Zionists’ only because his operation is sustained financially and politically by Jewish ‘anti-Zionists’ and the Jewish Left. Abunimah refers to Israelis as ‘Zionists’ only because he knows that telling the truth, uttering the ‘J’ word, may cost him dearly.

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Paul Craig Roberts

Not that long ago government and free market proponents were at sword’s point, but no more. With little left in the private sector to rip off, the financial gangsters have turned to the public sector and put to work for them the free market economists’ advocacy of privatization. Governments themselves became part of the conspiracy once the politicians realized that looting public assets was an efficient way to reward their private benefactors.

We can see the entire picture in the David Cameron government’s privatization of the British Royal Mail. The prime minister has described the looting as “popular capitalism” even though the British public overwhelmingly opposes turning over the mail service to a profit-making enterprise.

The British government’s pursuit of policies opposed by the public shows the absence in Britain of the very democracy that British prime ministers, such as Blair and Cameron, are so anxious to help Washington spread with invasions, cluster bombs, and depleted uranium to Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Iran.

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