Roundup

This page features brief excerpts of stories published by the mainstream media and, less frequently, blogs, alternative media, and even obviously biased sources. The excerpts are taken directly from the websites cited in each source note. Quotation marks are not used.

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• 
• SOURCE: Middle East Forum
  2-26-15
  

  Empowering Jihad: The Deadly Myth of a 'Root Cause'

  by Phyllis Chesler

  Blaming Islamist horrors on poverty only obscures the true problem: Jihadists are driven by an ideology — one that yearns to "restore" a mythical caliphate, one governed by the most austere version of Sharia law.

• 
• SOURCE: The Washington Post
  2-26-15
  

  Putin’s war of words, decoded

  by Elizabeth Wood

  The current Russian mythologizing of World War II contains a number of outright falsifications and dangerous tendencies.

• 
• 2-27-15
  

  Roundup Top 10!

  This week's broad sampling of opinion pieces found on the Internet, as selected by the editors of HNN.

• 
• SOURCE: Counterpunch
  2-11-15
  

  The Warmongering Record of Hillary Clinton

  by Gary Leupp

  Clinton’s record of her tenure in the State Department is entitled Hard Choices, but it has never been hard for Hillary to choose brute force in the service of U.S. imperialism and its controlling 1%.

• 
• SOURCE: Counterpunch
  2-16-15
  

  Haunted by Vietnam

  by Staughton Lynd

  How the Vietnam War Shattered the American Identity

• 
• SOURCE: Daniel Pipes Blog
  2-26-15
  

  Syria's Civil War Could Stabilize Its Region

  by Daniel Pipes

  Amid tragedy and horror, as populations adapt to the brutal imperatives of modern nationalism, all four countries are becoming a bit more stable.

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  2-26-15
  

  The Great Game in the Holy Land

  by Michael Schwartz

  How Gazan Natural Gas Became the Epicenter of An International Power Struggle

• 
• SOURCE: Boston Globe
  2-8-15
  

  Can teaching patriotism protect France?

  by Robert Zaretsky

  After the Charlie Hebdo massacre, a country recommits to promoting national values in schools—a tradition that has flagged in the United States

• 
• SOURCE: Counterpunch
  2-24-15
  

  Fidel Castro and Apartheid

  by Matt Peppe

  Cuba’s intervention in Angola managed to change the course of that country and reverberate throughout Africa.

• 
• SOURCE: Digg
  2-18-15
  

  What The Invention Of Clocks Did To Change Humanity

  Adam Westbrook delves into the story of the clock, and discovers that when we learned to mechanize time, we accidentally mechanized something else.

• 
• SOURCE: Salon
  2-25-15
  

  “He got intimidated by the right”: Orlando Patterson on President Obama, race & black culture

  by Ian Blair

  50 years after the Moynihan report, renowned Harvard sociologist talks Ferguson, respectability politics and Cosby

• 
• SOURCE: We're History
  2-24-15
  

  Sticks, Stones, and American Exceptionalism

  by R. B. Bernstein

  How are we to take polemicists’ rhetoric seriously, when it celebrates a past and a nation that never was?

• 
• SOURCE: The Atlantic
  2-16-15
  

  The Hero Europe Needed

  by Michael Ignatieff

  A quarter century after the Velvet Revolution, Václav Havel's legacy is in disarray. His life illuminates a dissident generation's dreams and the revenge that history has taken on them.

• 
• SOURCE: Gizmodo
  2-24-15
  

  The Troubled History of the Foreskin

  by Jessica Wapner

  Why Americans adopted circumcision and when.

• 
• SOURCE: The American Interest
  2-23-15
  

  One Standard, Not Two, for Christianity and Islam

  by Jeffrey Herf

  The President spoke the truth recently when he said “terrible deeds” have been committed in the name of Christianity. We should be equally frank in saying that terrible deeds are now being committed in the name of Islam.

• 
• SOURCE: Sandbox (blog)
  2-24-15
  

  Slate’s Michael Kinsley fell for the false claim that Israelis massacred Palestinians in Lydda in 1948

  by Martin Kramer

  To read his account you would think that the Yiftah Brigade of the Palmah conducted itself like a gang of roving génocidaires.

• 
• SOURCE: TomDispatch
  2-24-15
  

  The Real American Exceptionalism

  by Alfred W. McCoy

  From Torture to Drone Assassination, How Washington Gave Itself a Global Get-Out-of-Jail-Free Card

• 
• SOURCE: Not Even Past -- The website of the University of Texas at Austin
  2-18-15
  

  Boomtown, USA: An Historical Look at Fracking

  by Henry Wiencek

  What boom towns need to do to protect themselves from the inevitable busts.

• 
• SOURCE: The American Conservative
  2-18-15
  

  What Ike Can Teach Obama

  by Scott McConnell

  In the 1956 Suez Crisis, Eisenhower recognized that America's interests did not lie with blind and unconditional support of an ally.

• 
• SOURCE: The Asia-Pacific Journal: Japan Focus
  2-23-15
  

  The harrowing story of Masako Shinjo Summers Robbins

  by Masako Shinjo Summers Robinson

  How a child born in Osaka, sold by her father into slavery, ended up in America