Justin Podur – författare

In 1804 Haiti became the world's first independent black Republic following a slave revolution. 200 years later, ravaged by colonialism and violence, it was placed under UN military occupation.Haiti's New Dictatorship charts the country's recent history, from the 2004 coup against President Aristide to the devastating 2010 earthquake, revealing a shocking story of abuse and indifference by international forces. Justin Podur unmasks the grim reality of a supposedly benign international occupation, arguing that the denial of sovereignty is the fundamental cause of Haiti's problems.

In March 2015, President Obama initiated sanctions against Venezuela, declaring a “national emergency with respect to the unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States posed by the situation in Venezuela.” Each year, the U.S. administration has repeated this claim. But, as Joe Emersberger and Justin Podur ague in their timely book, Extraordinary Threat, the opposite is true: it is the U.S. policy of regime change in Venezuela that constitutes an “extraordinary threat” to Venezuelans. Tens of thousands of Venezuelans continue to die because of these ever-tightening U.S. sanctions, denying people daily food, medicine, and fuel. On top of this, Venezuela has, since 2002, been subjected to repeated coup attempts by U.S. backed forces. In Extraordinary Threat, Emersberger and Podur tell the story of six coup attempts against Venezuela.This book deflates the myths propagated about the Venezuelan government’s purported lack of electoral legitimacy, scant human rights, and disastrous economic development record. Contrary to accounts lobbed? by the corporate media, the real target of sustained U.S. assault on Venezuela is not the country’s claimed authoritarianism or its supposed corruption. It is Chavismo, the prospect that twenty first century socialism could be brought about through electoral and constitutional means. This is what the U.S. empire must not allow to succeed.

Under the crushing weight of the siege of Gaza, Laila and Nasser are members of the Palestinian resistance fighting desperately to free their people. Together, they learn of a plan to unite the disparate Palestinian factions and break Israel’s siege.Unknown to them, Ari, a brilliant Israeli spy, has decided that his conscience can no longer allow him to participate in the starvation of Gaza. A double agent whose every move is under mounting suspicion, Ari reaches out to the American contractors who trained him with a secret plan. As they all struggle to break the siege, they face the wrath of the Israeli military machine.

This book examines US interventions in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Rwanda -- two countries whose post-independence histories are inseparable. and America’s pre-emption of the Africa-wide movement for multiparty democracy in Rwanda and Zaire in the 1990s by supporting Paul Kagame’s Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF).