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<p>If someone had told me a few months ago that I’d be writing a piece for Front Page on this theme, I would’ve dismissed him as a lunatic. After all, then I was supporting the positions expected from those on the so-called antiwar right. I was harshly critical of Israeli defense initiatives, more willing to talk up for Noam Chomsky than the sitting President, and insistent upon baiting “neo-conservative” Michael Ledeen of National Review into admitting that he sought to see the regime in Tehran overthrown by any means necessary, including US Military involvement.</p>

A pair of activists in the state of Washington are promoting an anti-Israel curriculum that high school social studies teachers are considering adopting. Ed Mast and Linda Bevis, of the Palestine Solidarity Committee, have developed “The Palestine Teaching Trunk.” Bevis gave a presentation on it in October at the Washington State Council for the Social Studies annual meeting, Edward Alexander reported in The Weekly Standard on November 10, 2014. “In 1967, Israel seized control of the West Bank and Gaza from Egypt and Jordan,” the “Teaching Trunk curriculum reads. “Israel instituted a military occupation in Gaza and the West Bank—which...

It has been announced that Alexander Cockburn, a columnist for The Nation and co-editor of CounterPunch, died yesterday. Although Cockburn reflected a leftist viewpoint (mandatory if you write for The Nation) he displayed a refreshing iconoclasm on one topic sacred to the left: global warming. Cockburn didn't merely lightly criticize the global warming dogma worshipped by the left, he absolutely savaged it. Cockburn's "heresy" has been noted in the past here at NewsBusters by both Matthew Sheffield and Noel Sheppard. As a tribute to Cockburn's willingness to smash certain idols of the left, here are some of his selected quotes...

It's known that Julian Assange, the Wikileaks chief, has Guantanamo files, however this sounds fairly explosive. Reuters (via The Nation): WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, jailed in Britain this week, has told media contacts he has a large cache of U.S. government reports about inmates at the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, known as GITMO, the last of four major tranches of U.S. government documents which WikiLeaks had acquired and at some point would make public. "He's got the personal files of every prisoner in GITMO," said one person who was in contact with Assange earlier this year.

The two Swedish women who have brought sex charges against WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange boasted about their relationship with him days before going to cops. Based on information available on various websites quoting police and court papers, here's an account of what happened. The story goes back to August this year, when Assange was in Stockholm to speak at the invitation of Sweden's Social Democratic Party. The event organizer was 31-year-old Anna Ardin, who has been described as a feminist, leftist, social democrat and opponent of abortion. She has worked at the Uppsala University, handling equality issues for the students'...

In a couple of hundred years historians will be comparing the frenzies over our supposed human contribution to global warming to the tumults at the latter end of the tenth century as the Christian millennium approached. Then as now, the doomsters identified human sinfulness as the propulsive factor in the planet's rapid downward slide. Then as now, a buoyant market throve on fear. The Roman Catholic Church sold indulgences like checks. The sinners established a line of credit against bad behavior and could go on sinning. Today a world market in "carbon credits" is in formation. Those whose "carbon footprint"...

Although the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in carbon dioxide levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy. In magazine articles and essays I have described in fairly considerable detail, with input from the scientist Martin Hertzberg, that you can account for the current warming by a number of well-known factors having to do with the elliptical course of the Earth in its relationship to the sun, the axis of the Earth in the current period, and possibly the...

Friday 25 January 2008I am an intellectual blasphemerWhen Alexander Cockburn, author of the forthcoming book A Short History of Fear, dared to question the climate change consensus, he was punished by a tsunami of self-righteous fury. It is time for a free and open ‘battle of ideas’, he says.Alexander Cockburn While the world’s climate is on a warming trend, there is zero evidence that the rise in CO2 levels has anthropogenic origins. For daring to say this I have been treated as if I have committed intellectual blasphemy. Cover illustration byJan Bowman In magazine articles and essays I have...

beat the devil by Alexander Cockburn We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism. Alas for their illusions. Capitalism is ingesting global warming as happily...

No response is more predictable than the reflexive squawk of the greenhouse fearmongers that anyone questioning their claims is in the pay of the energy companies. A second, equally predictable retort contrasts the ever-diminishing number of agnostics with the growing legions of scientists now born again to the "truth" that anthropogenic CO2 is responsible for the earth's warming trend. Actually, the energy companies have long since adapted to prevailing fantasies, dutifully reciting the whole catechism about carbon neutrality, repositioning themselves as eager pioneers in the search for alternative fuels, settling comfortably into new homes, such as British Petroleum's Energy Biosciences...

The left in the United States remains distracted by fantastic stories about conpiracies hatched by the Bush administration: in many of these, even the 9/11 attacks are believed to have been an inside job. (...) I am therefore sure that the Bush gang, and all the real conspirators of Washington, are delighted at the obsessions of the 9/11 conspiracists. It’s a distraction from the 1,001 real plots of capitalism that demand exposure and political challenge. As Theodore Adorno wrote: “The tendency to occultism is a symptom of regression in consciousness” (5).

WASHINGTON (Talon News) -- In 1996, Jim Jordan, campaign manager for Democrat presidential contender Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), was press secretary for Tim Johnson during his challenge to then-incumbent Sen. Larry Pressler (R-SD). The long, negative campaign resulted in the end of the South Dakota Republican's 22 years in Congress. During the campaign, Pressler was dogged by questions about his health, since his father suffered with Alzheimer's disease. But the most damaging attack was delivered by James Abourezk, the man Pressler replaced in the Senate in 1978. Abourezk brought Alexander Cockburn, author of "Washington Babylon" to speak to a Sioux...

William A. Cook is a far-leftist professor of English at the University of La Verne in southern California. He is a regular correspondent for Counterpunch, and most of the drivel that he writes there is anti-Israel and anti-Jewish, although some is also anti-Christian. A professor of English literature with a highly-dubious academic record (in fact with none at all that we could uncover) at a third-rate college, he sees himself as having the credentials and expertise to make pontifical pronouncements on everything from the workings of capitalism to the history of the Middle East. La Verne "University" is a small...

Publication of The Case for Israel has made me the target of vicious personal attacks. A systematic effort to discredit the book, and me, has been undertaken by a well-organized group of Israel bashers led by Noam Chomsky, Norman Finkelstein, and Alexander Cockburn. As soon as the book reached the bestseller lists and began to get good reviews around the country, this triumvirate went to work. They had a model for their attack going back 20 years. The mode of attack is consistent. Chomsky selects the target and directs Finkelstein to probe the writings in minute detail and conclude that...

Alexander Cockburn, in his essay, "Who Beat Hitler", writes, "Monday, May 9, brings us the sixtieth anniversary of the defeat of Nazism in Europe. I remember the first Victory in Europe (VE) Day in 1945, sitting on my father's shoulders on the side of some London street, watching the tanks rumble by and a soldier in a tin hat popping up and down in the hatch." Cockburn continues, "Each time May 9 rolls around Americans have to be reminded who did most of the fighting and who bore most of the losses.  In 1944 the Allied forces commanded by...

In the wink, wink nudge nudge tradition of Pat Buchanan, here is idiosyncratic leftist Alexander Cockburn spreading anti-Semitic bilge while affecting a journalistic, just the facts tone to get in some good old Jew-bashing: "There are a number of stories sloshing around the news now that have raised discussion of Israel and of the posture of American Jews to an acrid level." The purveyor of anthrax may have been a former government scientist of Jewish ethnic extraction with a record of baiting a colleague of Arab origins, acting with the intent to blame the anthrax on Muslim terrorists. Rocketing around...

From where I was sitting, John Kerry's performance at last week's Democratic Convention was the most powerful argument yet offered for voting for Ralph Nader. And the fact that Michael Moore dropped to his knees over the weekend in the company of Bill Maher begging Nader to withdraw only fuels my certainty. Across this year Moore has swiveled from Wesley Clark to Kerry, denied to Jay Leno that he supports the Democrats and fibbed about his advice to Nader in 2000, so who wants to be in the same corner as him, assuming he stayed in one corner long...

What's the big deal about Jayson Blair?Alexander Cockburn - Creators Syndicate 05.14.03 - There are so many smellier corpses in the New York Times' mausoleum, not to mention that larger graveyard of truth known as the Fourth Estate, that it's hard to get too upset about what Jayson Blair did. Oh, to be sure, he made up a bunch of not very important stuff, and he's embarrassed the hell out of his former colleagues and publisher. But from all the editorial hand-wringing you'd think he'd undermined the very foundations of the Republic. It reminds me of a New York Times...

For education and discussion only. Not for commercial use. House-to-house fighting looms; meanwhile, will world follow U.S. lead in treatment of POWs? Suddenly the sky is dark with chickens coming home to roost. Start with the amazed discovery of the White House, the Defense Department and the U.S. press corps that nations don't care to be invaded, even if they have been misgoverned by a tyrant for decades. How many Russians died defending the Soviet Union from German invasion after enduring famine and Stalin's terror? This isn't 1991, when Iraqis asked themselves, "Why die for Kuwait?" Basra? "Military officials," ran...