Norman Finkelstein’s new book on the American Jewish community has been both widely praised and criticized by influential writers. So is the American-Jewish romance with Israel coming to an end? Are the American Jews known for their liberal views distancing themselves from Israel? Or is it simply an overstatement? Do they support the current Israeli policies? Does the Israeli lobby represent their views? And do they have a strong connection to the Holy Land? CT-ing with Norman Finkelstein, Daniel Pollak and Mouin Rabbani on May 16.

See the interview on CrossTalk

Over the summer and fall of 2011, I drove across the country from southern California to New York City. I made the trip with filmmaker MJ Sieber, playwright Mallery Avidon, and — when she could escape her job — my wife, Tasha Garcia Gibson.

We occupied blistering hot sidewalks, trying to catch people outside unemployment offices; we attended church services where congregations provided guidance for the unemployed; we stalked business reporters, distant relatives, and recognizable Facebook friends, trying to find those who were laid off in the five-year span from 2007 to 2011, those who would be willing to tell the story of the day they lost that job, the circumstances that led up to it, and the consequences that followed.

Read more on CNN

As if the peace movement hasn’t enough on its plate already, the military-industrial complex invents a new and easier way to wage war: the unmanned drone.

For the busy activist trying to grapple with the growing development of the drone wars, what’s needed is a well-written, easy-to-read book, coming from a committed nonviolent perspective, that lays out the issues in an accessible but not simplistic way. Thankfully, long- time Us peace activist, Medea Benjamin, has written the very thing: Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control.

Benjamin teases apart the varying overlapping issues connected with the growing use of drones (or Unmanned Aerial vehicles as the military insists on calling them).

Individual chapters explore the birth and growth of the industry as well as their spreading use in armed conflicts from Gaza
and Afghanistan to Yemen and somalia. The legality of their use is also investigated, in particular their use for so-called ‘targeted killings’ and their impact
on civilians in Pakistan and elsewhere.

Read the full review in Peace News

American Presidents have long been criticised for being too in thrall to the Jewish lobby. That American Jews influence US foreign policy and that explains America’s unwavering support for Israel.

So what happens if American Jews fall out of love with Israel? That’s what the Jewish American academic Norman Finkelstein claims is happening. He says they are now so unhappy with what Israel is doing that they want to distance themselves from the country. But then he is nothing if not controversial. He, after all, is famous for accusing Jews of exploiting the Holocaust. And his actions have so incensed Israel it’s banned him from entering the country. Could he be right and if he is what does that mean for Middle East policy?

See the interview on HARDtalk

Pakistani lawyer Shahzad Akbar, who represents families of civilians killed in U.S. drone strikes, was finally granted a visa to enter the U.S. this week after a long effort by the State Department to block his visit. He has just arrived in Washington, D.C., to attend the “Drone Summit: Killing and Spying by Remote Control,” organized by human rights groups to call attention to the lethal rise in the number of drone strikes under the Obama administration. Obama argues U.S. drone strikes are focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists and have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. “Either President Obama is lying to the nation, or he is too naive, to believe on the reports which CIA is presenting to [him],” responds Akbar. The summit comes as the United States pursues a radical expansion of how it carries out drone strikes inside Yemen. The so-called “signature” strike policy went into effect earlier this month, allowing the U.S. to strike without knowing the identity of targets.

See the full coverage on Democracy Now!

The human cost of the US government’s clandestine drone strikes strategy, including the deaths of young children in Pakistan and Yemen, will be highlighted this weekend as campaigners attempt to challenge domestic support for the Obama administration’s controversial policy.

A conference in Washington, at which new video testimony will be shown from the relatives of victims, is the first step in a collaborative campaign to challenge Barack Obama’s claim in February that the strikes, aimed at terror suspects, were kept on a “tight leash” and had not inflicted huge civilian casualties.

The summit’s organisers – the Center for Constitutional Rights, Reprieve and the peace group Code Pin – hope it will increase awareness of how the CIA-controlled programme is operating in secret, without a clear legal framework and without any accountability to Congress.

Earlier this month, the US government announced it was expanding its controversial use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists in Yemen.

Chris Woods, a journalist at the British-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, who exposed CIA drone attacks on rescuers and funeralgoers in Pakistan, described the summit as an “extraordinary heavyweight gathering”. He said: “Washington has not seen anything like this before.”

Woods criticised the US media for not widely reporting civilian casualties of US drone strikes abroad, which he said give a “warped understanding of what is taking place.”

Read the full article in the Guardian

At Fort Meade in Maryland, a pretrial hearing is underway in the government’s case against Private Bradley Manning, the soldier who allegedly turned over hundreds of thousands of secret reports and cables to Wikileaks. This month, an important new book on the 24-year-old has been published. In The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in U.S. History, Chase Madar says that Manning deserves the Presidential medal of Freedom for opening up our secretive foreign policy to public discussion. I talked to the author this morning.

Tell us what’s happening in the case:

Chase Madar: It’s absolutely a given that Manning is going to be convicted and sentenced to at least 50 years. It’s inexorable. That said, I don’t think the case itself is one of the major injustices that’s colliding here. There’s some unfairness in the way the prosecution is taking liberties, but the real and major injustices are laws that encourage extreme secrecy and punish transparency and everything that goes long with that, like the Iraq war.

One good development– in yesterday’s pretrial hearing, the judge did require the prosecution to provide all the internal damage reports– what damage was done or really not done by these leaks. I think what you’re going to see is that even by the government’s own estimates, these disclosures did not harm national security or national interests, broadly defined.

Read the full interview on Mondoweiss

Fethiye, Turkey – When American civil rights attorney Chase Madar told me he was writing a book entitled The Passion of Bradley Manning: The Story of the Suspect Behind the Largest Security Breach in US History, I knew right away that Madar was mentally ill, abusing a range of pharmaceuticals and possibly also epileptic.

My diagnosis was confirmed with the book’s release this month. What else would compel a lawyer to suggest that there is “an injustice hardwired within the system of laws itself”?

A studious ignorance

As Madar demonstrates in The Passion, similarly scientific methods of diagnosis have been employed in the case against Manning, the 24-year-old Army intelligence analyst from Crescent, Oklahoma who is accused of transferring hundreds of thousands of documents to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

As a result of the leaks, the world has learned more about topics ranging from the etiquette of US soldiers operating Apache gunships in Iraq to US State Department machinations to prevent an increase in the hourly minimum wage in Haiti, the poorest country in the western hemisphere, from 22 to 61 cents.

Read the full article in Al Jazeera

Street smarts: Can a new book on tactics used by the Occupy Wall Street movement and other activists, written with Google Docs and funded on Kickstarter, offer the corporate world important lessons about leadership and collaboration? Fast Company’s Neil Ungerleider thinks so.

Winners and losers: Contests are a great way to motivate a business team, but without boundaries that prevent favoritism, or awards that are achievable by all, they can become a hotbed of rivalry and frustration. Inc.com’s John Treace offers five tips for inter-office competitions.

Read the full article in The Wall Street Journal< /a>

Is it possible to learn leadership secrets from Occupy Wall Street and other activist movements worldwide? Beautiful Trouble: A Toolbox for Revolution, a new book edited by Andrew Boyd (of political pranksters Billionaires for Bush) and Dave Oswald Mitchell (Briarpatch magazine), is a dense and highly readable guide to activist tactics and principles … that came to market via a highly unusual publishing model.

OR Books, the publishers of Beautiful Trouble, have embraced a post-print business model that centers on non-returnable books printed on demand or distributed via e-book. Boyd and Mitchell raised $12,000 for the book via Kickstarter, with the money covering research, editing, production, design, and administration costs. The book’s content–written by a host of activists and left-wing organizations–was published under a Creative Commons license which gives authors the right to republish their contributions elsewhere for nonprofit purposes.

Read the full article in Fast Company