Violence has always been a useful term for governments and their allied establishment figures in media and punditry. Key to that utility is a very specialized use of the term as a descriptor for actions that don’t originate with the establishment or authorities. Police, armies, presidents and city administrators do not engage in violence. They use strategies, protocols, plans of action, deployments, operations and strikes. The people that are injured and die in those acts are not actively killed by violence. Rather, they suffer only in the passive voice. Read more about Two Kinds of Non-Violence 

Its possible that there is a name more well-known than Gilad Shalit this week, but not likely. For the last two days, media of all kinds have been tripping over themselves trying to describe, explain, hagiographize, and contextualize Shalit, who is to be released soon after a five year detention by Hamas in a prisoner swap. Read more about The Most Important Prisoner in the Whole Wide World 

Nicolas Kristof, the venerable New York Times columnist and champion of foreign policy liberalism, wrote a pretty middling article a couple of days ago, called “Is Israel its Own Worst Enemy?” Kristof has a sort of Groundhog Day dynamic with the Palestine-Israel conflict; every once in a while, he wakes up and rattles off an anguished column, mourning the radicals on both sides that make “pe Read more about Dire Consequences for Backing the US State Department's Consensus on the Two State Solution 

I had to admit, it was hard to shift gears for the Alice Walker/Ali Abunimah talk yesterday. Just a few hours earlier, the Occupy Wall Street protests were hitting their apogee, where I’m told some 15 to 50 thousand people took to the streets in numbers so great that they swelled at the seams and burst into the streets at times, challenging the right of the city and police to control popular expression. Read more about Leaving the Shore: Reflections on a Night with Alice Walker, Ali Abunimah and Historic Occupy Wall Street Protests 

Several months ago, the GOP made a legislative three-ring circus out of the immigration issue. Branding President Barack Obama an addict to extreme leftism, Republicans staged an intervention-performance to prevent him from compulsive granting of amnesty to undocumented immigrants. Read more about A Fake Partisan Fight Over a Fake Palestinian State, Updated 

Mainstream media published hundreds of articles on the Palestinian Authority’s UN statehood bid from the point coverage began in earnest in the summer to the day of Abbas’ historic speech in the UN. But where were the Palestinian voices? Read more about Searching for Palestinian voices in the UN bid media coverage