Portside

This week 43 veterans of Israeli military intelligence publicly denounced Israeli surveillance of innocent Palestinian civilians and announced their refusal to participate in operations in the occupied territories. The veterans charge much of the intelligence gathering is directed at creating "divisions in Palestinian society" in order to maintain the occupation, using intelligence to "extort/blackmail" Palestinians into collaborating with Israel.

Abdullah Ibrahim: Cape Town Flowers. James Foley on War. Neil deGrasse Tyson on Finding Krypton. Keith Olbermann on the Ray Rice Situation. Demand A Plan to End Gun Violence.

ISIS is something quite new. It wants to destroy all states, especially the Muslim states carved out by Western imperialists from Islamic land. With horrible savagery, elevated to a religious symbol, it sets out on its way to conquer the Muslim world, and then the globe. It expresses the Muslim longing for restoring ancient glory, their hatred of all those who have humiliated Islam, a thirst for spiritual values.

Colleges and universities, which receive enormous tax benefits to serve the public interest, should be held to a minimum level of effort to enroll and graduate low-income and working-class students eligible for Pell grants. Governments could also provide financial rewards targeted to universities that commit to increasing socioeconomic diversity and that shift their funds from non-need merit grants to students in actual need.

In Spain this past May, the elections to the European Parliament produced a shock. A two-month-old party led by a 35-year-old, pony-tailed political scientist appeared out of nowhere—but clearly from the Left—to win 8 percent of the votes and five seats, transforming the infant organization into the country’s 4th largest political force. One of the party's founders, political scientist Juan Carlos Monedero, spoke with us in late August.