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"We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak....there is such a thing as being too late....Life often leaves us standing bare, naked, and dejected with lost opportunity....Over the bleached bones of numerous civilizations are written the pathetic words: ‘Too late.’" Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

"The real difficulty is with the vast wealth and power in the hands of the few and the unscrupulous who represent or control capital. Hundreds of laws of Congress and the state legislatures are in the interest of these men and against the interests of workingmen. These need to be exposed and repealed. All laws on corporations, on taxation, on trusts, wills, descent, and the like, need examination and extensive change. This is a government of the people, by the people, and for the people no longer. It is a government of corporations, by corporations, and for corporations. — How is this?"

Ohio President, Rutherford B. Hayes (October 4, 1822 – January 17, 1893)

Join us in Albany, New York, July 23-25, 2010!

Issued by the United National Antiwar Conference (UNAC) Planning Committee

For more information, write UNAC2010@aol.com or UNAC at P.O. Box 21675, Cleveland, OH 44121 or call (518) 227-6947 or visit our website at www.nationalpeaceconference.org

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Book Review

Francis Robinson on ‘The Arabs’

Posted on Apr 16, 2010

By Francis Robinson

This review originally appeared in The TLS, whose website is www.the-tls.co.uk, and is reposted with permission.

“It is not pleasant being Arab these days”, declared Samir Kassir, a Lebanese intellectual and supporter of Rafiq Hariri, after the Prime Minister was assassinated in Beirut on February 14, 2005. Just over three months later, as if to make the point, Kassir was blown up in his Alfa Romeo. Eugene Rogan tells this story early on in his excellent book, setting its tone in two ways: it is about the Arabs in recent centuries when they had lost control of their history; it is also a story told not, for the most part, out of the archives of Western governments but by Arab voices; Rogan believes that Westerners might view Arab history differently if they saw it through Arab eyes. So Rogan’s history begins not, as some notable histories of the past, for instance, those of Philip Hitti, Bernard Lewis and Albert Hourani, with the birth of the Prophet Muhammad and the five centuries of glory that followed—the time when, in Hitti’s words, “around the name of the Arabs gleams that halo which belongs to world-conquerors”—but with the Ottoman conquest of Mamluk Egypt, and subsequently the rest of the Arab world, from 1517. (MORE)

Why the West is still suffering the bitter fruits of its colonial past and it meddling present. At one time, the Arab world was much more secular, but in the political vacuum the West has created, the rise of Muslim fundamentalism as a force filling the vacuum became inevitable. Things are always much more complex than at first perceived.

Cleveland Grassroots Leadership Conference--Early Bird Special

Please join us for the next Grassroots Leadership Conference in Cleveland, Ohio

July 23-25

The conference provides time to meet with and learn from each other, where to find and how to use the tools and resources available to you, and plotting our course for the rest of the year.

Participants will meet with special guests Rep. Dennis Kucinich, John Nichols, Daniel Ellsberg, Wendell Potter and Jo Comerford; Healthcare NOT Warfare campaign co-chairs Norman Solomon and Donna Smith; and current and former Advisory Board members Mimi Kennedy, Michael Lighty, Jeff Cohen, Steve Cobble and Jim Hightower!

Attendees will stay at the Sheraton Cleveland Airport hotel. We've arranged a special discount for participants--just $69/night (plus tax). Click here to reserve your room. (No extra charges to share a room.)