Accountability and the Court

An Absurd Rite of Passage – Ta-Nehisi Coates – National – The Atlantic. I wanted to make sure I linked to this excellent op-ed from a young black man, experiencing what all too many of us learn to basically tolerate in New York. 

So I’m reading Jeff Jacoby’s op-ed in the Boston Globe today and he’s talking about anti-American sentiment in the Arab world, (I’m ignoring the fact for a second that the idea of an Arab world, like Arab street, is Orientalist, and that using Egypt as an example for over two dozen countries is just bad writing.) when I run across this paragraph: It was Al-Akhbar, another regime-sponsored daily, that declared in August: “The Statue of Liberty . . . must be destroyed because of the idiotic American policy that goes from disgrace to disgrace in the swamp of bias and…

Cornell West has a brave op-ed piece on the moral disaster that is the Middle East: As we witness another sad chapter in the Middle East — the loss of precious human beings, the presence of deep hatred and revenge, and the absence of Socratic questioning and empathy for all — the spirit of Spinoza haunts us. Where are the courageous thinkers who ask the hard questions that shatter our simplistic and sentimental frameworks of pure Israeli heroes and impure Arab villains (or vice versa) in the conflict? Is it possible for Jews to reject the ugly Israeli subjugation of…