The ‘old‘ Sarah Palin has not been compromised by stylists and beltway coaches. She is simply staying true to form.

Cut, Kill, Dig, Drill
Jonathan Raban, London Review of Books, 9 October 2008

Having come to power saying that her agenda was to pare down Wasilla to ‘the basic necessities, the bare bones’, she surprised its citizens when she redecorated the mayor’s office at a reported cost of $50,000 salvaged from the highways budget; its new red flock wallpaper matched her bold, rouge-et-noir taste in personal outfits. Another $24,000 of city money went on a white Chevy Suburban, known around Wasilla, without affection, as the mayormobile.

[…]

Palin’s view of aesthetics was nicely highlighted in 1996, a few months before she ran for mayor, when a reporter for the Anchorage Daily News happened to light on her in an excited crowd of five hundred women queuing up in the Anchorage J.C. Penney’s, waiting to snag the autograph of Ivana Trump, who was in town to hawk her eponymous line of scent.

‘We want to see Ivana,’ Palin said, who admittedly smells like a salmon for a large part of the summer, ‘because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.’

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Related:
Sarah Palin On SNL: Costume Designer Says She Wanted Nicer Clothes

Just like her running mate, she’s a cold, calculating creature of ambition, as phony as the day is long.

Adam Shatz, London Review of Books, 9 October 2008

If you live in an American swing state you may have received a copy of ‘Obsession’ in your Sunday paper. ‘Obsession’ isn’t a perfume: it’s a documentary about ‘radical Islam’s war against the West’. In the last two weeks of September, 28 million copies of the film were enclosed as an advertising supplement in 74 newspapers, including the New York Times and the Chronicle of Higher Education. ‘The threat of Radical Islam is the most important issue facing us today,’ the sleeve announces. ‘It’s our responsibility to ensure we can make an informed vote in November.’ The Clarion Fund, the supplement’s sponsor, doesn’t explicitly endorse McCain, so as not to jeopardise its tax-exempt status, but the message is clear enough, and its circulation just happened to coincide with Obama’s leap in the polls.

The Clarion Fund is a front for neoconservative and Israeli pressure groups. It has an office, or at least an address, in Manhattan at Grace Corporate Park Executive Suites, which rents out ‘virtual office identity packages’ for $75 a month. Its website, clarionfund.org, provides neither a list of staff nor a board of directors, and the group still hasn’t disclosed where it gets its money, as required by the IRS. Who paid to make ‘Obsession’ isn’t clear – it cost $400,000. According to Rabbi Raphael Shore, the film’s Canadian-Israeli producer, 80 per cent of the money came from the executive producer ‘Peter Mier’, but that’s just an alias, as is the name of the film’s production manager, ‘Brett Halperin’. Shore claims ‘Mier’ and ‘Halperin’, whoever they are, are simply taking precautions, though it isn’t clear against what. The danger (whatever it is) hasn’t stopped Shore – or the director, Wayne Kopping, a South African neocon – from going on television to promote their work.

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By Nu’man Abd al-Wahid

“…If you can look into the seeds of time
And say which grain will grow and which will not…”

The ‘War on Terror’ has now taken in the war and invasion of Afghanistan (began 2002) and Iraq (began 2003). There was also the failed Israeli (with the overt acquiescence of Saudia Arabia, Jordan and Egypt) attempt to destroy the Lebanese resistance and re-establish itself in southern Lebanon (within a self-declared 72 hour time-frame). One of the reasons for these wars is that civilisation is at loggerheads with a militant and violent brand of political Islam which gained its ultimate murderous expression in the terrorist acts of September 11th 2001 in New York and Washington. One of the terms that seems to be obtaining wide and popular currency in describing this violent brand of political Islamism is ‘Islamofascism’. But how historically and politically accurate is this term?

There are two main movements that form the bedrock of contemporary political Islamism and their violent offshoots. The two movements are the Wahhabis from Najd (eastern region of what is today Saudi Arabia) and the Muslim Brotherhood originally from Egypt.

Both of these movements came to modern political formation and prominence, as the reader shall see, during an era when British imperialism was establishing itself in the Middle East. My aim in this essay is to contextually outline the support provided to these two movements by representatives of British Imperialism.

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For Immediate Release
October 21, 2008

Contact:
Greta Berlin, Cyprus, 357 99 08 17 67
Angela Godfrey Goldstein, Jerusalem 972 547 366 393
Osama Qashoo, 447833381660

On October 28, 2008, the Free Gaza Movement will set sail again for Gaza. On board will be a Nobel Peace Prize winner, five physicians, a member of the Israeli Knesset, and a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council. The boat will again carry 26 passengers and crew to the port of Gaza.

“We’ve spent the past month making sure that our boat is better and stronger, because the weather is getting more severe. Since we promised the people of Gaza we would return, we wanted to make sure we would return safely”, said Derek Graham, first mate on board the boat.

Mairead Maguire, the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her work for peace in Northern Ireland and one of the passengers on board stated, “We sail to Gaza to show the people we love and care for them. What less can we do whilst our governments remain silent and inactive in face of such preventable suffering of the women and children of Gaza and Palestine.”

Also on board is Mustafa Barghouti, a member of the Palestinian Legislative Council and Jamal Zahalka, a member of the Israeli Knesset (parliament). Both Palestinians are determined to forge alliances with their countrymen in Gaza, something they have not been able to do, because Israel has closed all land borders to this besieged people.

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