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Lawyer’s Committee on Nuclear Policy
After the 2001 attacks on the United States, attention has been drawn to marginalize nuclear weapons and increase global cooperation on the control and non-proliferation of nuclear weapons and nuclear material. As of 2006, there are estimated to be at least 25,000 nuclear weapons held by at least eight countries, 96 percent of them in the possession of the United States and Russia
Rather than intensifying such efforts, the U.S. has adopted a policy of elevating the role of nuclear weapons in its overall military strategy. John Burroughs, Executive Director of the Lawyers’ Committee on Nuclear Policy, claims that this will reduce U.S. and global security, not increase it.
Guest – Dr. John Burroughs, adjunct professor of law at Rutgers Law School and serves as Executive Director for the Lawyer’s Committee on Nuclear Policy. The LCNP was instrumental in bringing the landmark case before the International Court of Justice in 1995 that resulted in the advisory opinion of 1996, which stated that the threat or use of nuclear weapons is illegal.
He is co-editor of Rule of Power or Rule of Law? An Assessment of U.S. Policies and Actions Regarding Security-Related Treaties, Apex Press, 2003. He has published articles in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists and the World Policy Journal, most recently co-authoring “Arms Control Abandoned: The Case of Biological Weapons.”
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University of Michigan Press Halts Distribution of Joel Kovel’s book: Overcoming Zionism, Then Later Resumes Distribution.
Co-hosts Michael Smith and Michael Ratner talk with Joel Kovel about the efforts of the University of Michigan Press to halt and then resume distribution of his book. Read article here: Michigan Resumes Distribution of Anti-Israel Book.
Excerpt from: A Book On Hold
Late last month, the blog, Dissident Veteran for Peace — printed what it says is an e-mail from Pochoda, the press director, to Kovel, explaining why distribution was halted. Pochoda declined to comment on the e-mail, but Kovel said it was accurate. The e-mail reads: “Because it is a distributed title for Pluto Press, no one at UMP had read Overcoming Zionism prior to the Stand/With/Us diatribe. I and others read it after that assault, and had fully expected to gear up for, at least, a free speech defense. Though I had no trouble with the one-state solution your book proposes nor with a Zionist critique, per se … I (and faculty members I asked to read the book, as well) were apalled [sic] by your reckless, viscious [sic], and unmodulated attack on Zionism and all Zionists.”
Related reading – Campus Watch
Excerpt from Michael Smith’s review of Overcoming Zionism.
How did Kovel, a Jew from Brooklyn, the oldest son of Ukrainian immigrants who did well – moving with Joel to “the purgatory of Baldwin, Long Island†– come to this radical critique and equally radical solution? Joel graduated from Yale and became a successful psychiatrist. He taught at medical school before switching careers and taking a social science professorship at Bard, where for a time he held the Alger Hiss chair. He is still there, the only Marxist on the faculty. This book is not going to further his career.
“What kind of Jew am I?†he asks, and answers “a very bad one.†More accurately, he defines himself as what Isaac Deutscher called “a non-Jewish Jew.†Not that he is not spiritual; he writes of reaching for the infinite. But he is not religious. Being part of a sect is too narrowing and confining. He identifies with the Jewish heretics who transcended Jewry, but who are nonetheless part of the Jewish tradition – he lists Spinoza, Marx, Freud, Proust, Einstein, Kafka, Wittgenstein, and Luxemburg – and for whom “the true glory†of being Jewish is to live “on the margin and across boundaries.â€