This video shot last year is appalling.

Footage showing Irish Noble Peace Prize recipient, Mairead Maguire getting shot by Israeli army who opened fire at peaceful demonstrators in the West Bank village of Bilin on April 20, 2007, following the international conference on popular resistance (April 18-20, 2007). Maguire was shot by a rubber-coated-metal bullet in the leg. Maguire speaks after she received first aid. [Footage by Ana Nogueira]

Thousands of innocent Palestinians getting shot, imprisoned and killed is appalling.

I read Norman G. Finkelstein's preface, an angry challenge to Barack Obama, and then watched the video.

We need more, not less anger at what Israel (with American complicity) has now become, and what we have all become. What a travesty.

American progressives often fret that the Israel-militarism issue will split the Democratic Party, parting the way for radical Neocon dominance of American politics for generations.

But do we add our voices of condemnation and challange Israeli-American aggression and human rights violations, or ought we be silent?

Update II: Read Jon Wiener's Arguing About Gitmo in The Nation.  

Update: The transcript of today’s consolidated argument in Boumediene v. Bush (06-1195) and Al Odah v. United States (06-1196) is available at U.S. Oral Arguments Transcripts.

Scott Horton continues in excellence in human rights reporting.

I’m not particularly impressed with the recent debates in YouTube format hosted by CNN. The cable network’s management of the process has involved too many serious errors in judgment for that to go unnoticed. But in the end it’s the candidates’ responses which mark the low point. Even so, these debates have their moments, and I find on occasion there are passages that are truly inspirational. Last night, John McCain’s response to a question about waterboarding was just that. He found the right pitch and the right moral voice on the question, and his words lifted the debate up for a few minutes on what continues to emerge, just as John McCain says, as the defining issue in the 2008 campaign. This is the not-to-be-missed exchange from the debate. The moral clarity and vision of McCain’s answer was perfectly balanced by the bankruptcy of Romney’s.

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Bush and his gay-hating pigs can always be counted on to if not lead, at least emulate, the worst of the world's bigotries.

from Doug Ireland at Z-Net:

President George W. Bush and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad may not agree on much, but tragically they may find common ground about the disposability of Hassan Parhizkar's life.

Since November 7, a mild-mannered 40-year-old gay Iranian businessman from Rockville, Maryland has been sitting in jail in the Frederick County, Maryland Detention Center, housed with common criminals, in the living hell of limbo between the freedom he has known since he came to the United States as a young man 17 years ago and the certain persecution, imprisonment, or worse that will be his fate as a gay man if he is sent back to Iran.

A deportation order to send him back to Iran has been issued, and any day he could be put on a plane back to Tehran, where he was born.

"I am very afraid, and so very frustrated," Hassan Parhizkar told me in a truncated, collect telephone call from jail.