Opinion

Mohammad Ibrahim Ali al-Deirawi was born on January 30, 1978 in Nuseirat refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. His family is originally from Bir Al-Saba’, an ethnically cleansed Palestinian town located in the southern Naqab desert. Mohammad was arrested by the Israeli army at a military checkpoint in central Gaza on March 1, 2001. He was sentenced to 30 years in prison for his role in the armed Palestinian resistance, and was freed on October 18, 2011 in a prisoner exchange between the Palestinian resistance and Israel.

Mohammad's interrogation commenced as soon as he arrived at the Central Asqalan (Ashkelon) Prison in southern Israel, where he experienced physical and psychological torture for nearly two and a half months. He was handed his sentence by an Israeli military court on March 20, 2003.

As soon as he was released from the Nafha Prison, 100 kilometers north of Bir Al-Saba’, he married Ghadeer, the beautiful and only daughter of his prison-mate, Majdi Hammad. Ghadeer and Mohammad have two children.

“Premature declarations of elections outcome” is the hot-potato phrase being passed around by lawyers, political operatives and journalists. It sounds way too Trumpian, but if it were to happen from either Trump or Biden it could spell disaster this week and the weeks after.

For older activists, especially those who remember Woody Hayes calling for peace between anti-war protesters and the National Guard as they faced-offed on the Oval, it boggles the mind Tuesday’s outcome could potentially ignite a deranged civil war on our downtown streets where not even the ghost of Woody can save us.

Peaceful rallies at the Statehouse called for by local and national progressives are scheduled for Wednesday night and Saturday, and no matter Tuesday’s outcome, hopefully the gun-toting red hats won’t be itchin’ for a fight, but we know how they lust to be shootin’ them dangerous Antifas. 

I’ll never forget the first time I was warned that COVID-19 might disrupt our lives. It was early March, and I was meeting with other board members of a local social-dance group. On the agenda was the question of whether we would soon need to cancel our events to keep our dancers safe. 

Naively, I doubted it would come to that, reasoning that U.S. health authorities would be able to control the outbreak since they could learn from China’s experiences. That, of course, turned out to be disastrously wrong. Instead, President Donald J. Trump and the rest of the government totally botched the country’s pandemic response.

If you still have any doubts about that, you might want to set aside an hour to watch The Curve. Written and directed by Adam Benzine and bankrolled through crowdfunding, the documentary is a step-by-step explanation of just what went wrong.   

NEON is making Totally Under Control available for free today through election, and hosting various watch parties including one with Judd Apatow and the filmmakers tomorrow. 

You can also download a brand new poster here: https://we.tl/t-eJHFRsanJH

NEON’s Documentary About the White House’s Failed Response to the Pandemic Was Just Nominated for 4 Critic’s Choice Documentary Awards

"There is a kind of an official view about democracy—it says that you, the public, are spectators not participants,” activist and scholar Noam Chomsky points out in a new video. “You have a function. The function is to show up every couple of years, push a lever, go home, don't bother the important people who run the world, you’ve done your job. We can’t accept that.”

At the same time, Chomsky is vehement about the urgent necessity of defeating Donald Trump. "Sometimes it's worthwhile to take a little time away from real politics, an interlude, and make sure you get somebody out. This time it is critically important," Chomsky says in the video (produced by my colleagues with the Vote Trump Out campaign). "There's a real malignant cancer that has to be excised."

Yale Magrass and Charles Derber’s latest book is called Glorious Causes: The Irrationality of Capitalism, War, and Politics. I hope people are reading it. I worry, because after Mom, apple pie, and shopping, what are more popular than capitalism, war, and politics? Probably not . . . oh, I don’t know . . . analyses of the similarities between the histories of Nazi Germany and the United States. Those are in this book too, and are probably the most interesting parts of it.

In the book’s defense, it is part of a series called “Universalizing Resistance,” and it focuses a lot on the same cultural divide between educated, rational cosmopolitans and traditional, irrational racists that the Democrats spent a fair amount of time blaming after the last time they nominated the least popular presidential candidate they could find.

Through October 31
Sean Christopher Gallery Ohio, 815 N. High St. Suite H & N, Columbus, Ohio
Columbus-based photographer and videographer Adam Berta welcomes you to his extended exhibition, “Adam Berta’s Protest Photography ends October 31 ” at Sean Christopher Gallery, Columbus Ohio during Regular Gallery Hours, by Appointment or choose a Virtual Option. Partial proceeds from all sales of artworks from the exhibit will benefit the Equal Justice Initiative @eji_org

Gallery Visits
Thursday Oct 29, Open Gallery Hours 3:30-530pm or by appointment
Friday Oct 30, Open Gallery Hours 3:30-530pm or by appointment
Saturday Oct 31, Open Gallery Hours 1:30-4:00pm

For all off-hours by appointment visits schedule in advance by calling (614) 327-1344

Here’s a piece of paradoxical news that puts even the looming U.S. presidential election in perspective: Nuclear weapons are now (or soon will be) . . . good Lord, illegal.

Armageddon is against the law!

Well, sort of. And the Trump administration doesn’t agree. Indeed, no nuke-armed nation has, as far as I can tell, anything but contempt for this infringement on its right to blow up the world (only if necessary, of course). War and peace, it seems, exist in parallel universes.

The Covid pandemic has given Pharma a temporary halo. Who cares about its prohibitively expensive drugs, the way it hides drug risks, the way that it "sells" diseases through TV ads and "symptom checkers" and the opioid epidemic it created? We need a vaccine and we need it now! Already Pharma has received $1 billion of our hard earned tax dollars to develop Covid vaccines.

But even if the majority of people agree to receive a vaccine and even if the virus doesn't mutate making a vaccine useless (neither scenario likely) there are burning vaccine questions that remain and the media continue to ignore.

* Why do drug makers receive government money for what they should be doing anyway? Isn't drug development their job? (They also got money to develop new antibiotics)

* If we, the taxpayers, funded the vaccines, why don't we own them? Why aren't they free?

Whenever you hear something repeated, it feels more true when you hear it repeated. In other words, repetition makes any statement seem more true. So anything you hear will feel more true each time you hear it again.

Each of the three sentences above conveyed the same message. Yet each time you read the next sentence, it felt more and more true. Cognitive neuroscientists like myself call this the “illusory truth effect.”

Illusory truth is one consequence of a phenomenon called “cognitive fluency,” meaning how easily we process information. Much of our vulnerability to deception in all areas of life revolves around cognitive fluency.