NEWSBYJAKE HOROWITZ

If anyone understands the plight of Shirley Sherrod - the Georgia Department of Agriculture official who was forced to resign from her post last week, after being falsely accused by the White House and the media of making anti-white racist remarks - it is America's Arabs and Muslims, who for years have endured similar treatment.

By now, Sherrod's story should be familiar. On July 19th, right-wing blogger Andrew Breitbart posted a short video excerpt from a speech Ms. Sherrod delivered to a Georgia NAACP dinner, selectively edited to give the impression that Sherrod had made discriminatory comments against white farmers, when in fact she had been recalling a parable designed to show that poor people should be treated equally, regardless of race.

At once, the video posted on the right-wing website BigGovernment.com became a cause celebre for conservatives, and within hours, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack moved in haste to protect the reputation of the Obama administration by forcing Sherrod to resign from her position. Only later did Vilsack, the White House, and the national media decide to watch Sherrod's entire speech, after which the grave injustice of her firing became clear. By the end of the week, President Obama had personally called Sherrod to apologize, and Vilsack offered her an elevated position within the Department.

Sherrod clearly fell victim to multiple levels of unjust attack, from a hysterical "gotcha" media culture to an administration far too concerned with partisan politics and unwilling to initiate a much-needed national dialogue on race. But while Sherrod's story is certainly unfortunate, her case is not unique. For years, an industry of fierce and relentless anti-Arab groups and individuals have been creating websites, posting videos, launching vicious smear campaigns, and tracking and monitoring the every move of American Muslims, Arab-Americans, and Middle East academics and scholars.

With one fell tweet, the former Alaskan governor has again captivated the nation.

In a Twitter message last week, Sarah Palin displayed her unparalleled command of the English language when she coined a new word, calling on American Muslims to "refudiate" a planned mosque near the World Trade Center site.

"Ground Zero mosque supporters, doesn't it stab you in the heart as it does ours throughout the heartland? Peaceful Muslims, pls. refudiate."

Then came the media attention that surrounds all-things Palin. After drawing instantaneous criticism from the liberal blogosphere, Palin corrected herself with a no-less offensive message, calling on "peaceful New Yorkers" to "refute the Ground Zero mosque plan if you believe catastrophic pain caused @ Twin Towers site is too raw, too real."

And she wasn't done yet. She fired back at her critics later in the day with more of that patented Palin audacity, by boldly comparing herself to Shakespeare: "English is a living language. Shakespeare liked to coin new words too. Got to celebrate it!"

Palanisms are seemingly a dime a dozen, but what is striking — and particularly infuriating — about Palin's latest rhetorical blunder is how little attention the mainstream media has given to the real content of her message. Comedic value aside, the fact that the celebrity Fox News commentator confused the words "repudiate" and "refudiate" and compared herself to the greatest playwright of all-time is insignificant, representing merely the latest in a long list [remember the Katie Couric interview?] of misspeaks for a notoriously gaffe-prone public figure. What the media has failed to probe is how a failed politician with no proven understanding of the Middle East, Islam, or Arab Americans is permitted to get away with such hateful remarks.

Palin's call for "peaceful" Muslims to publicly condemn plans for the buildi

Earlier this week, I met some of the most inspiring and powerful nonviolent leaders that I've ever encountered.

Gathered on the steps outside New York City's City Hall in lower Manhattan, these exemplars of social justice carried banners, chanted slogans, conducted interviews with the media, and distributed petitions in their united fight for equality and justice under the law.

This was the kind of civic engagement that most practitioners spend the course of their lifetime studying and trying to perfect. But these community activists were not seasoned veterans of nonviolent activism, and had clearly not spent years honing their tactics. They were elementary and middle school Muslim students fighting against religious discrimination in New York City's public schools, many of whom had just completed the 4th and 5th grade.

On Wednesday, close to 150 Muslim students, parents, and community leaders — along with Christian and Jewish religious figures — protested outside of City Hall to persuade Mayor Bloomberg to include the two largest holidays observed by Muslims on the public school calendar: Eid al Fitr, which celebrates the end of Ramadan, and Eid al Adha, which marks the end of the Hajj, the yearly pilgrimage to Mecca. The late morning rally was led by the Coalition for Muslim School Holidays, a network of more than 80 faith-based, civil rights, community, and labor organizations formed in 2006 to fight for Muslims' equal recognition in New York City's public schools.

The NYC school calendar includes major Christian and Jewish holidays like Easter, Christmas, and Yom Kippur, but no Muslim holy days. That means that close to 12 percent — or 120,000 — of New York City's 1.1 million students must choose between their education and their faith, forced to miss assignments and make-up classwork in order to celebrate their religious holidays.

The protest marked the one-year anniversary of the adoption of Resolution 12

In the market for a private army? You can probably purchase Blackwater — yes, the infamous team of private military contractors employed by the U.S. government in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Iraq — for very cheap.

That's because the company's owner, Erik Prince, announced earlier this month that the firm is up for sale. Sources close to the company claim that Prince intends to sell the company quickly, in a "fast move within a couple of months," after which he plans to leave the country and relocate to the United Arab Emirates (UAE).

In its statement to the public announcing the planned sale earlier this month, Blackwater stated, "Xe's new management team has made significant changes and improvements to the company over the last 15 months, which have enabled the company to better serve the U.S. government and other customers, and will deliver additional value to a purchaser."

But, it is altogether unclear how much value a company that is at the center of a host of pending civil lawsuits in U.S. courts for crimes in Iraq could hold for potential buyers.

Hard as it may be to believe, the BP oil disaster may actually have an upside, by bringing new life to the antiwar movement in Afghanistan.

Despite the constant daily stream of news stories covering the BP oil spill, the mainstream media has until now failed to draw the important connections between the environmental crisis in the Gulf and America's wars abroad.

But, there's a growing movement, led by Public Citizen, a government watchdog group, that calls on the U.S. government to hold BP fully accountable for its actions in the Gulf of Mexico by canceling the company's multi-billion dollar business contracts with the Department of Defense to fuel U.S. fighter jets and military vehicles in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a letter recently sent to the White House and Defense Secretary Robert Gates, the group gathered 150,000 backers in a drive to remove BP from the federal payroll, by calling on the White House to suspend and revoke the DoD's six federal fuel contracts — worth a total of $2.1 billion dollars — to the company and its subsidiaries.  According to the group's director Tyson Slocum, "You have to send a clear message to shareholders that committing felonies is not tolerated in the United States. And the way you do that is through some form of permanent sanctions."

After four long years of anticipation, the 2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa has finally arrived.

For weeks, ESPN sports commentators and millions of fans have been placing bets and picking favorites, with the hope that this year's final match will bring two of the sport's most spirited foes — Germany-England, Brazil-Argentina, or France-Italy — to the global stage. But while these storied rivalries have captured the world's attention, an important, yet hushed alliance that developed in the lead-up to this year's competition has instead flown under the radar: a partnership between Israeli and South African security forces to provide safety at the games.

While the precise details are unknown, a report released several months back inThe Jerusalem Post suggested that over 30 Israeli private security companies have been assisting the South African government to secure the World Cup by training law enforcement officials and equipping them with hi-tech defense products, such as rocket-proof shields, robotic cameras, and motion-detection imaging software.

From "Rocket Man" to "Candle in the Wind," we all know Elton John for his timeless and uncanny ability to produce chart-topping hit songs. But with his latest performance at the Mawazine World Rhythms Festival in Morocco, the world-famous English singer-songwriter may have just cemented his legacy in an altogether different way: by entering his way into the drive for democracy and equality in the Middle East.

Long known as an openly-gay advocate of LGBT rights, Sir John captured international attention this week when he defied the protests of Morocco's leading Islamist party — the Party of Justice and Development (PJD) — and headlined on the opening night of the week-long festival showcasing music from around the globe.

For weeks leading up to the festival, the PJD had campaigned to remove Mr. John from the program on the grounds that his appearance would reflect poorly on the country, by violating Islamic principles and promoting homosexuality. But despite the objections of leading PJD spokesman Mustapha Ramid, who contended that Morocco's "stages should not be used to allow a person with such a degree of debauchery to perform," the performance went forward as scheduled.

With a rapturous welcome, John captivated an audience of close to 40,000 Moroccans with renditions of "Candle in the Wind" and "I'm Still Standing."

Although the PJD's position is hardly novel — the party has long-opposed Morocco's penchant for government-sponsored outdoor concerts and opulent summer music festivals as padding the coffers of the regime and promoting values antithetical to traditional interpretations of Islam — John's performance has served as a flash point across the country, touching off a fierce debate, in a country where homosexuality is officially banned, over the complicated issue of Islam and gay rights in the Arab world.

The environmental catastrophe that continues to unfold in the Gulf of Mexico has deep reverberations in another prominent gulf halfway across the globe: the Persian Gulf.

In the nearly one-month span since the BP oil spill made the national news in late April, we've seen stories abound detailing the many troubling layers to the environmental disaster. But while journalists have covered in detail BP CEO Tony Hayward's slow and inadequate response to the spill, and scoured the company's record for other examples of involvement in environmental disasters across the globe, there's one aspect of the story that continues to fly under the radar: BP's decades-long involvement in the politics of the Middle East.

If the epic oil spill caused by British Petroleum — a multinational firm with ties to Halliburton and a long history of intervention in Iraq and Iran — has taught us anything, it is the need for greater linkages between the environmental and peace movements. That's because a BP-led consortium recently won the biggest Iraqi oil contract in June 2009, after having been rumored to have helped the British government to prepare for the U.S. and British-led invasion of Iraq back in 2002.

It may surprise you to learn that in the lead-up to the 2003 invasion, BP reportedly received close to five million dollars from the British Ministry of Oil "to help conduct technical studies providing the ministry, advice, analysis, and training for Rumaila field." The company tutored British troops in how to maintain and run the oil fields which were later seized in southern Iraq. Halliburton, the U.S.-based multinational corporation run from 1995-2000 by former Vice President Dick Cheney, was given the task of accompanying coalition troops into the oil fields to repair and rebuild the oil infrastructure.

I've never been a fan of the contrived one-liners that routinely characterize the annual gathering of the White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington, but one of President Obama's jokes at this year's event held on May 1 was particularly upsetting. In the presence of close to 3,000 guests, President Obama quipped, "Jonas Brothers are here, they're out there somewhere." Pretending to send a stern, fatherly message to the pop stars, Obama then added, "Sasha and Malia are huge fans, but boys, don't get any ideas. Two words for you: predator drones. You'll never see it coming."

I'm not usually one for strict politically correctness, and I can certainly appreciate good political satire. But, in treating the hundreds of civilian deaths directly resulting from U.S. predator drone strikes in the AfPak region as a laughing matter, Obama's crude joke struck me as deeply troubling. I'd imagine the comment probably lost something in translation for the people of Pakistan and the families of the civilian victims of U.S. drone strikes in the Pakistani tribal regions. For a president who spent last week assuring Afghan President Hamid Karzai of his commitment to minimizing civilian casualties in the war against al Qaeda and the Taliban, firing off a joke about utilizing predator drones to prevent his daughters from teenage dating does not exactly highlight the seriousness of America's effort to protect civilians in the region.

Ever wonder what's inside the mind of the world's most powerful private military contractor? Erik Prince, the owner of Blackwater, seldom makes public appearances. The few times he's made speeches in public, he has attempted to ban journalists from attending and prevented audience members from recording or videotaping his remarks.

Fortunately, The Nation's investigative sleuth Jeremy Scahill has managed to obtain a rare audio recording of a recent private speech delivered by Prince at the University of Michigan this past January.

The result is an absolutely stunning window into the worldview of the man who somehow continues to secure billions of dollars of the American taxpayers' money by winning government contracts to fight the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq, and now Pakistan.

In front of an audience of ROTC commanders and cadets, military veterans, and entrepreneurs, Prince delivered a speech entitled, "Overcoming Adversity: Leadership at the Tip of the Spear," in which the Blackwater CEO touched on a range of issues associated with the fight against terrorism and America's military involvement in the Middle East. Fortunately, Scahill was able to place a contact inside the meeting, who managed to capture Prince's remarks by clandestinely recording the speech underneath his seat.

I'd strongly encourage you to listen to the recording, as there are simply too many troubling statements to take up here. But here are some of the highlights lowlights: