TGIF: Smells like Genocide

TGIF: Smells like Genocide

If it looks like genocide, sounds like genocide, and smells like genocide, chances are it's genocide. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) will rule provisionally on whether that is what Israel is committing against the Palestinian people in the Gaza Strip. The Republic of South Africa filed the complaint, which is ironic because Israel was a staunch ally of South Africa's former apartheid regime. The official complaint is welcome, but thanks to social media, each of us already has ample evidence from a large variety of sources showing Israel's assault on the Gazans. Just watch the...

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TGIF: The Right to Move

TGIF: The Right to Move

If people individually own themselves and have a right to be free of aggressive force, then they have a right to change their location in ways consistent with other people's rights. Whether you call this moving around relocating, emigrating, or immigrating, doesn't much matter. The default position is that each individual may rightfully move to somewhere else permanently or temporarily. Inside the United States, nobody questions this. People freely move from state to state, etc., sometimes temporarily, sometimes permanently. They need no one's permission. Why should things be different when...

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TGIF: Beware Elitists in Populist Clothing

TGIF: Beware Elitists in Populist Clothing

We're led to believe that today's political struggles are largely a contest between populists and elitists. But something besides libertarians is missing from that simple tale: the elitists in populist clothing, or elitist populists. We have no better example than a conversation the other day between the leading "right" populist Tucker Carlson and the leading "left" populist Glenn Greenwald. (The quotation marks are to indicate that these tribal labels are seriously problematic.) To their credit, Carlson and Greenwald consistently defend a noninterventionist foreign policy and free speech....

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TGIF: Ahad Ha’Am’s Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism

TGIF: Ahad Ha’Am’s Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism

Ukrainian-born Asher Zvi Hirsch Ginsberg (1856-1927), whose pen name was Ahad Ha'Am (Hebrew for one of the people), was a proponent of Spiritual, or Cultural, Zionism, which made him a rival to Theodor Herzl and Political Zionism, the movement dedicated to creating a nation-state in Palestine for all Jewish people worldwide. Ahad Ha'Am remains relevant to understanding the roots of the conflict in Palestine and Israel that has cost so many innocent lives. Hans Kohn, a Bohemian-born American writer, shed light on Ahad Ha'Am's thinking about the "Arab problem" for Herzl's movement in "Zion and...

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TGIF: Inspiration for the Nakba?

TGIF: Inspiration for the Nakba?

The unspeakable violence that plagues Israel and Palestine daily relates in part to the assertion of an ancient, ancestral, and even divinely bestowed property right to a parcel of land, which is often called "holy" and "promised." For background, here are a few influential -- which is not to say factual -- passages from a perennially bestselling book (or set of books) deemed important by the three Abrahamic religions. From the Book of Genesis: [15:18]In that day [the Lord] made a covenant with Abram, saying: 'Unto thy seed have I given this land, from the river of Egypt [Nile] unto the...

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Sheldon Richman

Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of The Libertarian Institute and a contributing editor at Antiwar.com. He is the former senior editor at the Cato Institute and Institute for Humane Studies; former editor of The Freeman, published by the Foundation for Economic Education; and former vice president at the Future of Freedom Foundation. His latest books are Coming to Palestine and What Social Animals Owe to Each Other.

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