Innehållsförteckning för Sep-29-14 från The Nation

Stats for Our Times
 I was drawn to two statistics on page 4 of your August 18/25 issue. The first was in “DC by the Numbers”: the deplorable 23 percent of US children living below the poverty line. As if that isn’t bad enough, I choked at the other number on the same page, in your editorial “Justice for Gaza”: the annual $3 billion in military aid to Israel. If we withheld those military dollars, which strengthen the so-called Iron Dome that makes the bully less likely to stop the bullying, we could use that money to alleviate the very sad state of some of our vulnerable citizens. Then American kids would not have to go to bed hungry, and we could save the lives of some of Gaza’s children…

If not for the cannon fire, the pond might be a tranquil sight: its rippling surface reflects the blue of the sky, diffusing the harsh midday light. But the cannon fire sporadically pierces the air, a warning to migrating ducks not to land in this toxic soup of arsenic, mercury and carcinogenic hydrocarbons—1,600 died after landing in one of these tailings ponds in 2008. 
 The Athabasca Tar Sands operation in northeastern Alberta, Canada, just outside the oil boomtown of Fort McMurray, is the third-largest proven deposit of crude oil and the largest industrial project on earth, so costly and environmentally destructive that it is considered a frontier resource, viable only because conventional oil sources are in decline. I visited in late June as part of the Tar Sands Healing…

The death of Joan Rivers sent me back to Christopher Hitchens’s notorious 2007 Vanity Fair piece, “Why Women Aren’t Funny.” I had forgotten how idiotic it was. Women aren’t funny, Christopher argued—barring a few who are “hefty or dykey or Jewish”—because they don’t need to attract men by making them laugh. Women already have men’s attention, because they control sex. Look, boys, breasts! Also, women give birth to babies, and that makes them serious. Just ask Rudyard Kipling and Dr. Johnson, those noted experts on female psychology. 
 Joan Rivers contended with that mentality her whole life: like so many other things valued by society, comedy had a big No Girls
Allowed sign on the door for most of her career. (Incredibly, she is still the only woman to have had…

The Tayba Islamic Center is a small storefront mosque on the southern tip of Coney Island Avenue in Brooklyn. Sandwiched between a kitchen- cabinet shop and a Jewish daycare center, its main identifying feature is a miniature dome that juts out of the green awning. This modest house of worship has a congregation that mainly consists of Pakistani New Yorkers—including Abdul Manaf, the mosque’s spokesman. 
 On the evening of July 18, during the final ten days of Ramadan, Manaf received a call summoning him to the center. Three elderly men, all in native Pakistani dress and each on his way to Tayba, had been pelted with eggs by people driving around in a white Lexus and yelling, “This is for your Allah!” The attack stunned the old men and…

1941 The Year That Keeps Returning. By Slavko Goldstein. Introduction by Charles Simic. Translated from the Croatian by Michael Gable. New York Review Books. 604 pp. $35. The Racial Idea in the Independent State of Croatia Origins and Theory. By Nevenko Bartulin. Brill. 244 pp. $128. In 1941, genocide broke out in Croatia and Bosnia, and we still cannot explain why. During the spring of that year, Croatian fascists—the Ustasha—burst into Serbian homes, abducting hundreds of males over the age of 16 and executing them, usually in mass shootings. Weeks earlier, Hitler’s Germany had broken up the (Royal) Yugoslav
 state and given control of the new Independent State of Croatia (NDH) to the Ustasha, but the Nazis did not order its members to kill anyone. As it was, Serbs and…

I said okay okay and then it was altogether right to say all right, I said. Though on the other hand, I said. Just that you understand how this is, I said at least twice. And considering, taking fully into account the matter of could be, soon a might have been, it seems at least partly wise to upend or refigure. Oh second thought! Last minute to relish! Sound of heating duct, printer not printing, my own temporal artery in the nothing they said. Right. Or it was what else I blurted at the table. Something like: I imaginev it’s possible though we may need more time, what with and as it happens, whoever and beyond that aren’t there other means to other ways to pledge ourselves one starry planet…

In 1968, after the Vietnamese village of Ben Tre was demolished by the US military, a US Army officer infamously said, “It became necessary to destroy the town to save it.” Recently President Obama reminded me of this famous lesson in Orwellian logic while explaining his decision to break his promise to stop the deportation crisis by taking executive action at the end of the summer. According to the president’s logic, the best way to keep immigrant families together is to continue the deportations for another two months.
 The idea that immigration reform will be better off if it’s delayed, and immigrant families are made to suffer longer, has not been well received. Latino and immigrant communities, which could see up to 60,000 families torn apart in the coming months,…

Buffalo, New York, ranks as one of the most segregated metropolitan areas in the country. On September 2, New York’s attorney general accused Evans National Bank of exacerbating that situation through redlining, or denying the predominantly African-American residents of East Buffalo access to mortgage credit. The charge comes as African-American and Hispanic communities nationwide—which 
were disproportionately sold high-­interest mortgage loans prior to 2008—now face a credit drought. As a result of these significant systemic hurdles, many people of color are still prevented from building wealth for their families and communities. —Carla Murphy Colorlines.com…

In August, Los Angeles County’s School Police Department announced that it would no longer give students criminal citations for minor offenses like on-campus fighting and possession of tobacco. Students will now be referred to school officials rather than the juvenile justice system.
 A recent study by the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights found that school disciplinary action is racially biased, and that those who are suspended are less likely to graduate on time and more likely to drop out completely.
 The announcement is a “huge victory,” writes youth activist Delona Washington at TheNation.com. “For seven years, young people have taken direct action and organized around the plan [to decriminalize school discipline]. We see this as our moment to build the world we want and step closer to…

In the spring of 1978, a professor at Florida
State University gave the students in his seminar on experimental social psychology an unusual assignment. For the next few weeks, they were to approach undergraduates of the opposite sex and compliment them: “I’ve been noticing you around campus lately and find you very attractive.” Then they would ask one of the following questions:
 (a) “Would you go out with me tonight?”
 (b) “Would you come over to my apartment tonight?”
 (c) “Would you go to bed with me tonight?
 Roughly equal numbers of men and women on the FSU campus accepted invitations for dates from strangers: in response to question (a), 50 percent of men and 56 percent of women said yes. However, the responses to (b) revealed a dramatic split, which…

It is possible to say with reasonable certainty that Mosab Hassan Yousef is the eldest son of Sheikh Hassan Yousef, a founder of Hamas and one of its most prominent leaders in the West Bank. We also know that Yousef has denounced Hamas publicly since 2008, when he declared that he had converted to Christianity. He subsequently announced that he had willingly collaborated for a decade with Shin Bet, Israel’s domestic security service, starting in the mid-1990s. Yousef first made this claim in a book published in 2010, Son of Hamas: A Gripping Account of Terror, Betrayal, Political Intrigue, and Unthinkable Choices. He repeats his story, under a calmer title, in The Green Prince, a film that won an audience award at the 2014 Sundance festival and is now going…

Do not be misled by White House double-­talk: the United States is embarking on another Long War in the Middle East. This one will belong to Barack Obama, and it may extend beyond his presidency. Secretary of State John Kerry said as much. “It may take a year. It may take two years. It may take three years. But we’re determined it has to happen,” Kerry vowed. 
 Actually, it may take ten years, or longer. Americans have heard this bold, brave talk before. It has led to costly failure for our country and horrendous losses for humanity. The United States went to war in Afghanistan in 2001 and finally intends to withdraw in 2016—making it the longest war in US history. The Taliban, though, are almost as strong as…

Bernard Baran died on September 1. Suddenly. A stroke perhaps, suffered while at home with his boyfriend and niece. Baran had had a short life of freedom. In the annals of sex panic, Volume 1984, the chapter on daycare child abuse madness, his name is not as well known as some. And yet he was the first daycare worker to be falsely accused, prosecuted, convicted and put away as a dangerous pervert. He was 18 years old when he came out of the closet in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; 19 when he was convicted; 19 when he suffered the first of dozens of rapes and physical assaults in prison; 41 when—thanks to the dedication of what would become the National Center for Reason and Justice (NCRJ), his lawyer John Swomley and a…

The October 20, 1997, issue of The Nation featured a ten-page cover story, “The Case Against NATO Enlargement: Clinton’s Fateful Gamble,” by Sherle R. Schwenninger, now at the New America Foundation.
 “NATO expansion opens the door for future geopolitical rivalry by in effect legitimizing Moscow’s efforts to create its own alliance…. What is worse, NATO expansion threatens to create tensions and conflicts in the heart of Central and Eastern Europe that would otherwise not exist. For example, expansion puts back into geopolitical play most of the nations that are to be excluded from the first round of enlargement, making them again potential objects of renewed East-West rivalry…. As NATO expands to include Poland, the Czech Republic and Hungary, the exclusion of the Baltic states from NATO membership and Ukraine from…

Suppose an insurgent movement with a
sharp critique of Wall Street and a determination to end the Democratic Party’s compromises on core economic issues was taking shape across the country. Suppose the candidates associated with this movement were winning tough primaries and developing the outlines of a fifty-state strategy that rejects the self-interested calculations of party elites. Would that count as big news? Not yet, perhaps, since most mainstream pundits are still obsessed with the wrangling over which extremes the Republican Party will embrace. But while GOP insiders were busy beating back their Tea Party wing, the progressive populist tendency within the Democratic Party was going from strength to strength. 
 This developing movement, now often referred to as “the Elizabeth Warren wing of the Democratic Party” (a variation on the…

The highway leading from the airport to town is new, or at least has been recently upgraded: four lanes of smooth blacktop running north-south and bordered by broad sidewalks empty under the blistering summer sun. The surrounding area is sparsely populated scrubland, but new businesses hug the edge of the road. There are car dealerships for Citroën, Fiat and Renault, and their big-box showrooms are adorned with logos that gleam as brightly as the latest models in their oversize lots. Gas stations outfitted with enough pumps to fuel a fleet of taxis are scattered along the route; several double as parking lots for idle backhoes and bulldozers. Like the airport, an elegant and airy structure where just two of the eighteen check-in windows are in use, the road is a…