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Media Bits and Bytes - March 19, 2019

Portside
Jane Mayer on Fox's Friends; Murdoch Oversteps in NZ; Huawei Stoops to Conquer; Google's DC Clout; Netflex Cancels "One Day"; Media vs Bernie

books

Distant Early Warning of Worse to Come

Scott McLemee Inside Higher Ed
Masterpiece or not, William S. Burroughs' "The Revised Boy Scout Manual": An Electronic Revolution fills a puzzling lacuna in the Beat author's bibliography, and offers an foretaste of the viperous Age of Trump.

How Israel’s Secret Services Built the Most Robust Assassination Machine in History

Glenn Frankel Washington Post
Since World War II Israel and its pre-state paramilitary organizations have assassinated more people than any other country in the Western world - some 2,300 "targeted killing operations," most of them against Palestinians, but also aimed at Egyptians, Syrians, Iranians and others. In the name of state security, Israeli officials didn't just walk the line of legality, they trampled it.

Hezbollah Takes Journalists in Lebanon on a Tour to Prove Trump Wrong

Liz Sly and Suzan Haidamous Washington Post
“The current American president is ignorant of the region,” said Hezbollah spokesman Mohammed Afif, speaking to reporters in a cave until recently occupied by Nusra. “We are the force that fights terrorism while the United States continues to support terrorism in many forms.”

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Terror in the French Revolution and Today

Samuel Farber International Socialist Review
The author argues that the Terror of the French Revolution was a price worth paying, and that the lessons from overthrowing the old regime should temper today's trend of maligning oppressed people's resort to violence as itself a rationale for ongoing class injustices. The reviewer, no critic of revolutionary struggle, argues that the author overemphasizes the pursuit of vengeance then and now involved at the expense of politics and a weighing of class forces.

Terror and Geopolitics: Manchester 2017 and 1996

Juan Cole Common Dreams
The attack in Manchester was likely by Sunni radicals (ISIL has claimed it), and came two days after President Trump blamed all terrorism on Shiite Iran at a speech in Saudi Arabia, the proponent of a form of extreme Sunni supremacism. In 1996, Manchester had also been victimized by a bomb at a civillian center; in that instance left by the Provisional IRA. The question is: can anything be learned from looking at 1996 and 2017 in the same historical frame?

Why It's So Hard to Understand That the Violence Your Country Exports Is Terrorism

Vijay Prashad Jadaliyya/AlterNet
Rather than evaluate one’s own behavior in a bad situation, one tends to blame others and to disregard the constraints that others operate under. This is typically considered to be a “self-serving bias”. The character of the man of the West always surmounts the character of the man of the East. The violence of the West is prophylactic, while the violence of the East is destructive.
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