Sometimes all Salon has for weeks is dreck, but there are a handful of interesting articles, essays and interviews today (forgive me for the multiple links to a site some of you visit every day; this is for those of you that don't):
» B.Z. Goldberg and Justine Shapiro (yes, the host of "Lonely Planet") were interviewed about their documentary "Promises" on the children of Jerusalem (both Jewish and Arab), widely tipped to win Best Documentary at this years Oscars.
» "A Mother Without Child" by Robin Wallace, on the heartache of miscarrying her baby the day after her due date. (I almost cried reading this)
» "Faith No More" is about Joel Shalit and his new book Jerusalem Calling, in which he talks about religious fundamentalism in Israel, Palestine and the U.S (where Shalit, an Israeli citizen, now lives). Most interesting to me was this paragraph:
According to Schalit, the American left, both scornful of the religious right and overly deferential to it, simply doesn't take this community seriously. When President Bush repeatedly invokes the word "evil," with obvious religious connotations, too many Americans, especially journalists and liberals afraid of insulting someone else's faith, don't bat an eye. As a result, the left fails both to understand the doctrine of the religious right, and to challenge it. To fully understand the religious right's worldview, Schalit suggests, might mean taking a hard look at the Bible. But rather than offering the left or the Democratic Party a method of counterattack, "America the Enchanted" is more of a wake-up call.
» Karl Auerbach, one of the few ICANN board members elected by the people, explains how ICANN is like Enron and why he's suing it. If you want to learn more about just how screwed up the non-profit entity that controls domain names is, check out ICANNwatch.
» Last but not the least, Salon interviewed Denis Halliday, former head of the U.N.'s oil for peace program in Iraq, who says:
In the U.S., there are a number of issues not being discussed. One of those is international law. The U.S. somehow doesn't believe that international law applies to this great democracy, to this great empire. We've seen Mr. Bush reject various aspects of international law in the past year. That's a failure on the part of Washington to understand that the U.S. is in fact subordinate to the charter, to the declaration of human rights, to the Geneva Conventions and protocols -- all of which would protect Iraq, a sovereign state and member of the United Nations -- from further harassment, attacks and killings by the United States.
[What's missing is] respect for international law and an awareness that this is not an empire -- that "might" is no longer "right" in the year 2002, and that Mr. Bush does not have any God-given right to attack Iraq or its people without consultation with the Security Council. There is no legitimate way for the U.S. to wage war again on the people of Iraq. That's one huge issue that's missing, in my view.
Another would be the fact that American foreign policy is not understood by the vast majority of American people. And that this is due to a media that in this country is suppressed by Washington and by the owners of this media, who often tend to be corporate entities close to the [White House] and very often are arms manufacturers with a vested interest in chaos [in] the Middle East. And as a result Americans do not actually get both sides of the story.
I believe that Americans are basically decent people. If they understood that Iraq is not made up of 22 million Saddam Husseins but made up of 22 million people -- of families, of children, of elderly parents, families with dreams and hopes and expectations for their children and themselves -- they would be horrified to realize that the current killing of innocent Iraqi civilians by the U.S. Air Force, or what happened in the Gulf War, is being done in their name.
