The Taliban launched a major attack in the capital of Kabul on Friday, injuring 7 people with a car bomb at the International office of Immigration, a UN-affiliated organization. In the firefight between the attackers and the Afghanistan Continue →
Middle East
Bill Moyers interviews Tim DeChristopher, leader of Peaceful Uprising, who just got out of jail after serving a two-year sentence for peacefully disrupting an oil and gas auction on public land that the Obama administration declared invalid.
David Schanzer writes at Islamicommentary:
David Schanzer
In his speech at the National Defense University, President Obama made his most impassioned and compelling argument to date about the need to close the prison for wartime detainees at the Guantanamo Bay Naval Continue →
Here is a photo gallery from my visit on May 9, 2013, to the Iraqi National Museum, courtesy the Ministry of Culture. Ancient Iraq or Mesopotamia was, of course, the cradle of civilization, and the treasures on display Continue →
At the fourth annual conference of the Project on Middle East Political Science here at GW, I was discussant for an outstanding paper which in part explored how and why protestors "broke the barrier of fear" in hyper-repressive states such Continue →
On Friday, May 24th, the Project on Middle East Democracy (POMED) held an event titled “Iran’s Presidential Election and U.S. Policy.” It featured Nazila Fathi, former New York Times journalist in Tehran and Research Fellow at Harvard University, Mariam Memarsadeghi, Continue →
Nabil goes in: A British Muslim responds to the Woolwich murder in which Lee Rigby, 25, of 2nd Battalion The Royal Regiment of Fusiliers, was butchered by clearly unbalanced persons. Our hearts go out to the Rigbys.
h/t reddit.com, Continue →
The next time you hear politicians campaigning on “lower taxes,” you should realize two things.
First, they don’t intend to lower your taxes, which are probably mostly social security. In fact, they might like effectively to raise those Continue →
John Kerry is advancing the show of extricating the US from the Middle East, this time by “exhausting all possibilities for peace.” This opens up some opportunities for the Palestinians that I explore in Souciant this week.
Filed under: Palestine Tagged: Continue →This map can be viewed as a collection of small to smallish nation-states or as, in its EU form, the 7th largest land mass and 3rd largest population in the world. Every EU country has a Jewish population.
The State of Continue →
Nitsana Darshan-Leitner, Director of Shurat HaDin law centre and winner of the Moskowitz Prize for Zionism for ‘taking Israel’s fight to the courtrooms’. (The prize was set up by the very right-wing billionaire Irving Moskowitz.] She led the attacks on Professor Hawking Continue →
Here are the good, the bad and the ugly things in President Obama’s important speech on counter-terrorism Thursday, and in the off-stage steps he has announced that mysteriously did not appear in the speech:
The Good:
President Obama seems determined Continue →
Chris Woods writes at the Bureau of Investigative Journalism
Barack Obama has made it clear that the US will continue with its controversial targeted killing programme.
In a major speech the US president also announced that he has signed into Continue →
Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com:
We have a word for the conscious slaughter of a racial or ethnic group: genocide. And one for the conscious destruction of aspects of the environment: ecocide. But we don’t have a word for Continue →
From last fall: Sen. Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma argues against relief aid for Hurricane Sandy, in part because working on it in the Senate would delay the beginning of his Christmas vacation. He admits that in Oklahoma Continue →
Photo Credit: AFP
Thousands of Yemenis demonstrated in Aden on Tuesday, calling for the south to regain independence. The protesters were responding to exiled southern leader Ali Salem al-Baid‘s calls to commemorate his 1994 declaration to break away from the north. Continue →
Photo Credit: AFP PHOTO/JOHN THYS
In a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry obtained by The Cable, General Salim Idris, commander of the Syrian opposition fighting force, reiterated his request that the United States provide the opposition with weapons Continue →
Policing Soweto, 1986. If the apartheid regime in South Africa had been a bit more sophisticated would it have won a few more friends?
Beyond South Africa: Understanding Israeli Apartheid
Much analysis of Israeli apartheid focuses on comparisons with South Africa. Al-Shabaka Continue →
Rashid Khalidi, Columbia University. Photo by Alex Levac
Full transcript of interview with Palestinian professor Rashid Khalidi
Following is a transcript of the interview with Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab Studies at Columbia University’s Department of History.
By Chemi Shalev, Ha’aretz December Continue →
The State Department requested $47 billion for State and Foreign Operations in FY2014 and in the recently released Congressional Budget Justification (CBJ) Volume 1, Secretary of State John Kerry states, “This budget strikes the balance between fiscal discipline and sustaining and advancing Continue →
The article by Joseph Massad’s that Al Jazeera has eliminated, which we described as ‘a patchy survey of beliefs about race and Jews’, can be read on our website: Antisemitists and zionists share the goal of getting Jews out of Continue →
Iran’s Guardian Council startled that country when it announced that Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, the former president (1989-1997) who was among the founders of the Islamic Republic, would not be allowed to run for president in the June election. Continue →
The Rise of the Sufis
by Matthew Barber—This story first appeared on Syria Comment
Newly-elected to the Syrian National Coalition, Sheikh Mohammad al-Yaqoubi is moderate, influential, and ready to go to work
From the beginning of the uprising, mainstream Syrian Sunni ‘ulema—the Continue →