"Are You There God? It's Me, Monica"

How Nice Girls Got So Casual About Oral Sex

Caitlin Flanagan,

Atlantic Monthly

The first time I heard a mother of girls talk about the teenage oral-sex craze,
I made her cry. The story she told me — about a bar mitzvah dinner dance on the
North Shore of Chicago, where the girls serviced all the boys on the chartered
bus from the temple to the reception hall — was so preposterous that I burst out
laughing. The thought of thirteen-year-old girls in party dresses performing a
sex act once considered the province of prostitutes (we are talking here about
the on-your-knees variety given to a series of near strangers) was so ludicrous
that all I could do was giggle.

It was as though I had taken lightly the news that a pedophile had moved into my
friend's neighborhood. It was as though I had laughed about a leukemia cluster
or a lethal stretch of freeway. I apologized profusely; I told her I hadn't
known.

The moms in my set are convinced — they're certain; they know for a fact — that
all over the city, in the very best schools, in the nicest families, in the
leafiest neighborhoods, twelve- and thirteen-year-old girls are performing oral
sex on as many boys as they can. They're ducking into janitors' closets between
classes to do it; they're doing it on school buses, and in bathrooms, libraries,
and stairwells. They're making bar mitzvah presents of the act, and performing
it at "train parties": boys lined up on one side of the room, girls working
their way down the row.

"Real Threat Is From Imperial Fundamentalism"

Tariq Ali Inteviewd by Marcus Dam, The Hindu

Writer and political activist Tariq Ali describes himself as a "person of the Left." In a recent interview in Kolkata, he talked about his concerns over an Asia which is "politically undetermined and economically over-determined," and of an Indian political leadership "obsessed with money and markets."

Q: You were initiated into political activism during the Vietnam War and have been engaged in it ever since. How has the world changed since the late sixties? What has become of the human condition and the dignity of man?

We are living in a different epoch than we were 40 years ago. There has been a sea change since then. We have seen a big triumph of global capitalism, the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have collapsed, and China is today the most dynamic capitalist state in the world. What we are seeing now are problems of a different sort and a growing opposition in some parts of the world to the American Empire... History never progresses in a straight line, it moves forward, backwards, it zig-zags, and there is no guarantee of progress — it has to be fought for and maintained.

"Why an Economic Boycott of Israel is Justified"

Norman G. Finkelstein

The recent proposal that Norway boycott Israeli goods has provoked passionate debate. In my view, a rational examination of this issue would pose two questions:

1) Do Israeli human rights violations warrant an economic boycott? and

2) Can such a boycott make a meaningful contribution toward ending these violations? I would argue that both these questions should be answered in the affirmative.

Although the subject of many reports by human rights organizations, Israel's real human rights record in the Occupied Palestinian Territory is generally not well known abroad. This is primarily due to the formidable public relations industry of Israel's defenders as well as the effectiveness of their tactics of intimidation, such as labeling critics of Israeli policy anti-Semitic.

Yet, it is an incontestable fact that Israel has committed a broad range of human rights violations, many rising to the level of war crimes and crimes against humanity.

An anonymous coward writes:

"The Anti-Semitism of the 68ers"
Philipp Gessler and Stefan Reinecke Talk with Tilman Fichter

On November 9, 1969, on the anniversary of "Kristallnacht", over two hundred people were gathered in Berlin's Jewish Community Centre in commemoration of the victims of Nazi Germany. Unbeknownst to them, a member of the radical Left student movement "Tupamaros West Berlin" planted a bomb in the building. The device failed to explode because the clock meant to trigger it off was connected by a rusty wire.

The Tupamaros saw themselves as Germany's first urban guerillas, inspired by the Latin American role model. The brains behind the plot was Dieter Kunzelmann, a leftist radical political clown, founder of the "Kommune 1" and self-proclaimed "Kingpin of Chaos". In the wake of the six-day war of 1967, Kunzelmann saw Israel as an imperial state and oppressor of the Palestinians, which must be resisted with force. His opponents inside the Left, who maintained a more nuanced view of the situation in the Middle East, accused him of having a "Jew complex".

This summer, Wolfgang Kraushaar published Die Bombe im Jüdischen Gemeindehaus (The Bomb in the Jewish Community Centre). The book reveals previously unknown information on the 1969 plot, and sparked a heated debate about anti-Semitism in the German Left in general and in the 68er movement specifically.