Like South Africa twenty-five years ago, Israel today portrays itself as a progressive liberal democracy, an endangered island of modernity in a backward and hostile region. The existence of a gay rights movement in Israel is deployed as another example of this modernity. I think that these similarities tell us a great deal, that they actually reveal the underlying process that they are designed to obscure—a common colonial project.

At the time of writing we were informed that Pride Toronto had banned Queers Against Israeli Apartheid from participating in this summer’s Toronto Pride March. Capitulating to Israel lobby groups and to City Hall threats to withdraw funding if the group marched, the board of Toronto Pride has chosen to set a dangerous precedent by censoring a community human rights group. We are thinking about the impact of QuAIA on queer movements, queer politics, and where the “movement” is now.

Ecosystems have remarkable regenerative powers, but at the relentless rate at which humankind is assaulting them, they cannot recover. And for the most part, corporations and governments simply don’t care: nothing is allowed to stand in the way of profits, pressure from lobbyists, or popularity with voters.

On April 22, a mass international assembly in Cochabamba, Bolivia, adopted a charter for action to protect our planet from ecological devastation. Together, they drafted a People’s Agreement that places responsibility for the climate crisis on the capitalist system and on the rich countries that “have a carbon footprint five times larger than the planet can bear.”

After Israeli commandos murdered nine people and wounded scores of others in international waters, I concluded that Israel continues to give Jews a bad name. “How did the latest fiasco happen?” ask incredulous Jews. I present my inside-the-brain-of-the-beast explanation.

Despite almost a decade of warfare, including an invasion and occupation, the US military and its allies and client state armed forces are losing the war in Afghanistan. Outside of the central districts of a few cities and the military fortresses, the Afghan national resistance forces, in all of their complex local, regional and national alliances, are in control, of territory, people and administration.

The chattering classes are making much of what some claim to be a mooted prospective Liberal-NDP merger. The story is making its way onto editorial and front pages and into the priority news lineup. Is there any virtue in exploring the idea?

The maintenance of the hierarchical structures that control our lives depends on a “vast tapestry of lies upon which we feed.” Therefore the main institutions that embed us into the hierarchy, such as schools, universities, and mass media and entertainment corporations, have a primary function to create and maintain this tapestry. This includes establishment scientists and all service intellectuals in charge of “interpreting” reality.

Using the pretext that technical training requires “discipline” (read: mindless repetition) and “standardization” (read: demonstration of loyalty to imposed doctrine) the institutions of “higher learning” impose a regime of obedience training followed by professional and graduate school indoctrination.

The Cochabamba Conference on Climate Change has issued a call to build “a global peoples movement for climate justice”. A novel feature of this call is that it is supported by progressive countries, mainly those of the Alba Alliance (Bolivia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Cuba, etc), as well as by social movements, primarily but not exclusively, from Latin America.