The Night “Bibi” Won or My Balkan Nightmares

During the 1996 Israeli election, I was in the Channel 4 Television studios in London. I still remember the surrealistic atmosphere sitting in the editing room, putting the final touches on a film that was supposed to be broadcast in an hour, while on a small TV, the Channel’s news was broadcasting images of the [...]

Int’l War Crime Tribunal For the Middle East

By Ilan Ziv and Daoud Kuttab
For over twenty years we have worked together documenting the struggle between our peoples with the goal of saving our humanity, with the belief in the sanctity of life and the power of the rule of law. If we have learned anything in our years of work on the ground [...]

HATE TALK
Periodically, my blogs gets comments. I always have published them (I have the option to publish or delete comments sent to my blog.) From the start, I vowed to myself to publish any comments irrespective of their content. Yet last week I broke that vow and did not authorize the following comment to be [...]

REFLECTIONS ON VIOLENCE IN THE SEASON OF PEACE

It is a weird time I must admit. Around me are the trappings of the holiday season all talk about the season of “peace” and the wishes for a “happy new year,”  while we are publishing Mark’s latest blog from “hell hole.” Mark ’s blog, as usual, is dark and bleak, telling the story of [...]

The Terror Within

Anand Patwardhan is one of India’s leading documentary filmmakers and also a friend. He sent me an article he wrote after the recent terror attack in Mumbai. I have known Anand for the past 30 years. He is a dedicated, independent filmmaker, committed to expose the evils in his society. (To learn more about Anand [...]

DEATH ROW COVERUP OR JUST MY DREAM ABOUT TEXAS’ JOURNALISTS?

Let’s imagine that the Texas press was vibrant and dynamic, probing and investigative. Let’s imagine a young, ambitious, smart, local journalist is sent out to investigate the current crisis in a Texas prison, a crisis that led to 156,000  prisoners being “locked down”, some for as much as  month. First she must investigate [...]

From Bacolod in the Philippines, to Polunksy Death Row unit in Texas

The blogs and letters keep coming in fast and furious. Mark is writing about continuous searches of his cell that keep him living with “all my property on the floor waiting for another raid… or move to the hole.” In earlier blogs he detailed the raid, the destruction of his legal files, no clean towel [...]

Reflection on a Peanutbutter sandwich

“We here on Death Row have been on lockdown since October 13th…” Mark writes from Death Row in this week’s blog. ” We have been fed very little… just enough to keep the body moving… Johny sack meals, which consist of peanut butter sandwich and some other evil looking things… for example, the other day [...]

“Lockdown”

I was overseas this week screening my film Jesus Politics, when I received an unexpected letter from Mark.  The entire Texas prison system is under “lockdown,” after a death row inmate made a threatening telephone call to a state senator using a contraband telephone, allegedly smuggled into prison by a guard who was bribed.
What was [...]

A Christian Nation

More than a year ago, and before the primaries kicked off, Beliefnet.com, a Web site dedicated to “inspiration, spirituality, and faith,” interviewed John McCain.  The presidential hopeful claimed that the Constitution of the United States established a “Christian Nation,” a statement that caught my attention. As an avowed secularist, I rarely think about my “Jewishness.”  [...]