Interesting Times

"Deep down within themselves the peoples of the East and the West are alike. They are two branches of the same tree. And when man, regardless of whence he comes, seeks deep in his heart, he will feel the longing for the root of the tree."

A Danish journalist and convert to Islam who revealed fascist Italy's mistreatment of Muslims in Albania and Libya. In 1931, when he was 29 years old, he was murdered by members of a Bedouin tribe known to work for Italian officers in the area as he was traveling by camel between al-Haql and Humayda. He was the author of  Poems, Between the Devil and the Deep Sea--a dash by plane to seething Morocco and  Desert Encounter.

Knud Holmboe:
A Martyr of Freedom of Expression

“No people ever recognize their dictator in advance.  He never stands for election on the platform of dictatorship.  He always represents himself as the instrument [of] the Incorporated National Will. ... When our dictator turns up you can depend on it that he will be one of the boys, and he will stand for everything traditionally American.  And nobody will ever say `Heil' to him, nor will they call him `Führer' or `Duce.' But they will greet him with one great big, universal, democratic, sheeplike bleat of `O.K., Chief! Fix it like you wanna, Chief! Oh Kaaaay!'" (1937)                           

“Dorothy Thompson!” the reporter George Seldes cried to me one day – “What a woman!”  They had been cub reporters together in Berlin in the 1920s.  Both had chronicled the rise of the Nazis for American newspapers, but it was Thompson, not Seldes, who was the first to be kicked out of Germany when Hitler came to power.  Indeed, she was the first foreign correspondent in Europe to whom any such thing had happened.  The German Foreign Ministry, on Hitler’s order, actually established something called “The Dorothy Thompson Emergency Squad,” whose job it was to translate and monitor every word she wrote against the Nazi regime.

...Thompson had met and interviewed Hitler for the first time in 1931, in Munich, where she was so bowled over by his “utter insignificance” that she “considered taking smelling salts” to keep from fainting.

...Dorothy, at the end of World War II, threw her lot with the Palestinians, as against Israel.... The creation of the Israeli state, she feared, was “a recipe for perpetual war.”

 ...She was “the most influential woman” in the United States after Eleanor Roosevelt – “and it may be said of Miss Thompson,” Time observed, “that she came up over a rockier path.” 

Remembering Dorothy Thompson
by Peter Kurth

"It is impossible for capitalism to survive, primarily because the system of capitalism needs some blood to suck. Capitalism used to be like an eagle, but now it's more like a vulture. It used to be strong enough to go and suck anybody's blood whether they were strong or not. But now it has become more cowardly, like the vulture, and it can only suck the blood of the helpless. As the nations of the world free themselves, the capitalism has less victims, less to suck, and it becomes weaker and weaker. It's only a matter of time in my opinion before it will collapse completely."

"I might point out here that colonialism or imperialism, as the slave system of the West is called, is not something that is just confined to England or France or the United States. The interests in this country are in cahoots with the interests in France and the interests in Britain. It's one huge complex or combine, and it creates what's known not as the American power structure or the French power structure, but an international power structure. This international power structure is used to suppress the masses of dark-skinned people all over the world and exploit them of their natural resources."

 "I could spend the rest of my life reading,
 just satisfying my curiosity."

From Triumph to Torture
by John Pilger

"Every day, he reports from a war zone, where he is also a prisoner. His homeland, Gaza, is surrounded, starved, attacked, forgotten. He is a profoundly humane witness to one of the great injustices of our time. He is the voice of the voiceless."

...June, 2008. Mohammed has recently received word that he is to be a co-recipient of the Martha Gellhorn Prize. For this, he must get to London, but, as you know, it is not easy for any Gazan to leave the prison that Gaza has become under the unrelenting Israeli siege. Only after strenuous diplomatic efforts over several weeks by Dutch officials and a prize-winning Australian journalist living in England was it possible for Mohammed to leave Gaza to receive his award.

...The return to Gaza was, however, also fraught with difficulties. According to various reports in the press, as soon as Mohammed had arrived in Amman, the Dutch diplomats who had facilitated his trip informed him that the Israelis did not want him to return. However, after further negotiations by his Dutch sponsors, Mohammed was finally allowed to enter Israel via the Allenby Bridge on the morning of June 26th....there he was interrogated, strip-searched and brutalized by agents of the Shin Bet for several hours.

The Ordeal of Mohammed Omer by Kenneth Ring