Portside

Nixon's announcement, which came ahead of the grand jury's decision in the police shooting death of 18-year-old Michael Brown, is "both premature in its application and presumptuous in [its] intention to the hundreds of peaceful demonstrators who have embraced their Constitutional right to protest," said NAACP president William Brooks.

Francisco Goldman writes that we might be witnessing the beginning of a second Mexican Revolution. Laura Carlsen says that the disappearances might take the “historic struggle between Mexico’s student left and the federal government, one that has been brewing for years if not decades” (at least since 1968’s Tlatelolco massacre) and generalize it “into the rest of the country.” Protests and civil disobedience are spreading throughout Mexico.

The so-called, undeclared "war" we have been dragged into is the product of self-righteous, panicky people with an exaggerated sense of persecution and no ability to look objectively at history. That is, they are paranoid. Because of their bizarre views, paranoid people cause trouble, then they deny responsibility and use the victim's defensive reaction to justify further aggression. That is exactly the position of the West vis-a-vis the Muslim world.