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Israel’s attack on the Gaza Movement’s aid ships: ROANE CAREY of The Nation asks, “What madness could have driven the Israeli government to order its navy to attack, in international waters, a flotilla of ships full of human rights activists, MPs from governments around the world, a Nobel Prize winner and two former US diplomats?” And will the Israeli attack bring international pressure to end the blocade of Gaza?
Plus: A strike in China at an enormous Honda transmission factory has unexpectedly turned into a symbol of the exploitation of Chinese workers. JEFFREY WASSERSTROM comments; he teaches history at UCI, writes for the Huffington Post and the China Beat blog, and his new book is China in the 21st Century: What Everyone Needs to Know .
Also: The US role in giving birth to Al Qaeda as an anti-Soviet force in Afghanistan is well-known — but it was not the beginning of enlisting Islamists to fight the Soviets. Pulitzer-prize winning Wall Street Journal reporter IAN JOHNSON traces the practice back to Hitler in WWII, and then to the CIA in Germany during the Cold War. He tells the story in A Mosque in Munich: Nazis, the CIA, and the Rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the West.
