Though we're currently down on Alexander Cockburn, his brother Andrew does not disappoint with his latest piece for Counterpunch, critique of the politics surrounding 'official' estimates/reporting on the downright horrifying number of Iraqi civilian casualties since the 2003 invasion. In contrast to the most recent Johns Hopkins findings, placing the number of Iraqi murders at 665,000, the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) (which, we should point out, excludes many of the country's most dangerous destinations--Baghdad, Anbar province, and two other areas deemed too unsafe to visit) recently published a far lower number: 151,000. Despite the fact that the two estimates quantify totally different death tolls (the NEJM report is interesting strictly in civilian casualties, while the Hopkins report compares death rates since the invasion with years before), the NEJM estimate has been touted by everyone from George Bush to The New York Times as the more accurate of the two; however, Cockburn draws attention to sloppy reporting and misleading statistical rhetoric in NEJM report, rightly taking the journal to task for lending a hand in attempts to downplay the devastating effects of the American invasion.
In other news, Gabriel Piterberg has written a fascinating article for the New Left Review, in which he analyzes and, in a sense, unearths, Hannah Arendt's political opposition to the Zionist project in Palestine. Recognizing the real danger of anti-Semitism, Arendt rejects the notion of a racially-exclusive Jewish state and attempts to find other solutions to the infamous 'Jewish question'. And finally, if you can get past the awful new layout at one of our go-to websites, ZNet Communications, you'll find a recent interview, conducted by Stephen Shalom, with our friend Bashir Abu-Manneh, in which the latter touches on the significance of 2007 and 2008 being, respectively, the 40th and 60th anniversaries of the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, and the establishment of the State of Israel. Bashir also speaks about congruity between present-day Hamas and pre-1982 Fatah, as well as the history and current state of the Left in Palestine.
**Samuel Beckett, Molloy, 1955
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