Glenn Greenwald's Blog, page 40

The Anti-Muslim Controversies of the Last Week, Reimagined

(updated below)

On his Friday night HBO program, Bill Maher argued that suspicion of young Jewish men was appropriate,saying: “Someone look me in the eye right here and tell me if so many young Jewish men … hasn’t blown a lot of shit up around the world. … Forthe last 30 years it’s been one culture [Jews] blowing shit up over and over.”

At a rally for the leading GOP presidential candidate, Donald Trump, one of hissupporters stood up and said: “We have a problem in this country — it’s called...

Arrest of 14-Year-Old Student for Making a Clock: the Fruits of Sustained Fearmongering and Anti-Muslim Animus

There are sprawlingindustries and self-proclaimedcareer“terrorism experts” in the U.S. thatprofit greatlybydeliberately exaggerating the threat of TerrorismandkeepingAmericans in a state of abject fear of “radical Islam.”There are all sorts of polemicists who build their public platformsby demonizing Muslims and scoffing at concerns over“Islamaphobia,” with the most toxic ones insisting that such a thingdoes not even exist, even as the mere presence of mosques is opposed across the country, o...

Hostile BBC Interview of a Saudi Loyalist Shows Prime Journalistic Duty: Scrutiny of One’s Own Side

The ongoing atrocities by Saudi Arabia and its “coalition partners” in Yemen reflect powerfully — and horribly — on both the U.S. and U.K. That’s true not only because those two countries in general are among the closest allies of the Saudi regime, but also because they are specifically lavishing Saudi despotswith the very arms and intelligence being used to kill large numbers ofYemeni civilians.

Photo: Gerald Herbert/AP

The American and British governments have long beenoverflowing with loy...

Two Short Paragraphs That Summarize the U.S. Approach to Human Rights Advocacy

In hisexcellentarticle on the unique guilt-by-association standard being imposed on newly elected Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn,my colleague Jon Schwarzreferences a passage from a 2013Washington Post article that I want to highlight because of how illuminating it is. That Postarticle describesthe Obama administration’s growingalliance with human-rights-abusing regimes in Africa, which allow the U.S.to expand its drone operations there, and contains this unusually blunt admission from a “senior...

Do Adults Have a Privacy Right to Use Drugs? Brazil’s Supreme Court Decides

The past decade has witnessed a remarkable transformation in the global debate over drug policy. As recently as the mid-2000s, drug legalization or even decriminalization was a fringe idea, something almost no politician would get near.That’s all changed. That the War on Drugs is a fundamental failure is a widely accepted fact among experts and even policy-makers. Multiple nations no longer treat personaldrug usage as a criminal problembut rather as one of public health. Many of them are acti...

Hillary Clinton Goes to Militaristic, Hawkish Think Tank, Gives Militaristic, Hawkish Speech

Leading Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton this morning delivered a foreign policy speech at the Brookings Institution in Washington. By itself, the choice of the venue was revealing.

Brookings served as Ground Zero for centrist think tank advocacy of the Iraq War, which Clinton (along with potential rival Joe Biden) notoriously and vehemently advocated. Brookings’two leading “scholar”-stars — Kenneth Pollack and Michael O’Hanlon — spent all of 2002 and 2003 insisting that inva...

NYT Claims U.S. Abides by Cluster Bomb Treaty: The Exact Opposite of Reality

The New York Times today has a truly bizarre article regarding the U.S. and cluster bombs. The advocacy groupCluster Munition Coalitionjustissued its annual report finding that cluster bombs had been used in five countries this year: Syria, Libya, Yemen, Ukraine and Sudan. This is what The Paper of Record, in its reportby Rick Gladstone, said this morning about the international reaction to that report (emphasis added):

The use of these weapons was criticized by all 117 countries that have jo...

Jorge Ramos Commits Journalism, Gets Immediately Attacked by Journalists

(updated below)

The Republican presidential candidate leading every poll, Donald Trump, recently unveiled his plan to forcibly deport all 11 million human beings residing in the U.S. without proper documentation, roughly half of whom have children born in the U.S. (andwho are thus American citizens). As George Will noted last week, “Trump’s roundup would be about 94 times larger than thewartime internment of 117,000 persons of Japanese descent.” It would require a massive expansion of the mos...

Email from a Married, Female Ashley Madison User

Ever since I wrote on Thursday about the Ashley Madison hack and resulting reactions and consequences, I’ve heard from dozens of people who usedthe site.They offera remarkably wide range of reasons for having done so. I’m posting below oneemail I received that I find particularly illuminating, which I very lightly edited to correct a few obvious typographical errors:

Dear Glenn,

Thank you for the kindness and humanity you have manifested to those of us whose data is now a source of public moc...

The Puritanical Glee Over the Ashley Madison Hack

High school students have long read The Scarlet Letter,the 1850 novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne set in a Puritanical Massachusetts town in the mid-17th Century. It chronicles the life of a woman who is found to have committed adultery (on her long-presumed-lost-at-sea husband); as punishment,sheis forced to stand before her village with the letter “A” attached to her dress. The intent is to forever publicly shame her forher moral transgression. AsThe Atlanticnoted in 1886, “the punishment of the...