War Stories

Some reflections on Abraham Foxman's recent comments on NPR.

I say all this with a bit of self experience. I’ve been in the authors’ shoes. When I protested the Iraq war, I was called both anti-American and anti-Semitic. I remember going to synagogue around the time of the Iraq war and hearing a sermon on why Saddam was our generation’s Hitler and so we needed to invade. I went to the Rabbi to express my disagreement on the substantive merits of whether we could succeed in Iraq after Saddam was toppled. The Rabbi told me that I was not a loyal Jew.

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Read more from this blogger: Foxman Full of Hot Air

How the left and right look at the war in Vietnam.

One of the interesting revelations from that brief flurry of commentary on the president's attempt to frame an Iraq-Vietnam analogy of his own was that the rightish and leftish segments of the American commentariate have fundamentally differing historical meta-narratives of the Vietnam War and its progression. They agree on names and dates, but little else and they are weighted very differently.

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Read more from this blogger: Council Catch Up

From a post about William Apes, some history of Native American land rights before the Revolutionary War.

Eighteenth century petitions to Boston produced few results, prompting the local Wampanoags to send one of their own - Reuben Cognehew - across to England to speak directly to King George III about the plight of the Mashpee Indians. Though the King granted them some degree of autonomy, Mashpee's right to self-government was rescinded with the American Revolutionary War.

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Read more from this blogger: A Man Named Apes