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By Orhan Pamuk
$15.03
By John Crawford
$22
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In his latest flub, the Texas governor demonstrates why he is still the reigning champion of the political gaffe.
Posted on Jun 17, 2013
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AP/Hussein Malla
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“The best hope for an end to the killing in Syria is for the United States and Russia to push both sides in the conflict to agree to a ceasefire in which each holds the territory it currently controls,” Patrick Cockburn writes in The Independent.
Posted on Jun 5, 2013
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Paresh Nath, Cagle Cartoons, The Khaleej Times, UAE —
Posted on Nov 19, 2012
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By Eugene Robinson — Romney’s rushed statement Tuesday night calling the Obama administration’s response to the violence in the Middle East “disgraceful” was a new low in a campaign already scraping bottom.
Posted on Sep 13, 2012
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Wikimedia Commons
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The CIA has lost a foothold, and some measure of its critical anonymity, in Lebanon after some of the spy agency’s operatives were exposed in recent months. Last June, Hezbollah leader Sheik Hassan Nasrallah triumphantly announced that at least two agents had been nabbed within his organization’s ranks ... (more)
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AP / Hussein Malla
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By Robert Fisk — It all depends, I think, on whether criminals are our friends (Stalin at the time) or our enemies (Hitler and his fellow Nazis), whether they have their future uses (the Japanese emperor) or whether we’ll get their wealth more easily if they are out of the way (Saddam and Gadhafi).
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AP / Mohammed Zaatari
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As many as 13 are dead and scores more injured after Israeli forces shot at protesters Sunday. Crowds gathered near the borders of Gaza, Lebanon and Syria to condemn the founding of Israel. Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas said of the dead, “Their blood will not go to waste.” (more)
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Wikimedia Commons / Bernd Untiedt, Germany Some rights reserved
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On the same day that Libyan strongman Moammar Gadhadi told the people of rebel Benghazi he would show “no mercy,” the U.N. Security Council approved a resolution brought by the U.K., France and Lebanon to allow “all necessary measures” except invasion to protect Libya’s civilian population.
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AP / Thibault Camus
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By Juan Cole — Every state and movement in the Middle East is reading into the events in Tunisia its own anxieties and aspirations.
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AP / Ben Curtis
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More juicy stuff from the WikiLeaks mine: Lebanon’s defense minister aided Israel in 2008 by offering advice to Israeli officials on how best to combat the Shiite paramilitary group inside Lebanon.
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AP / Hussein Malla
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Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made quite a provocative gesture by staging a pro-Hezbollah rally at a Lebanese border town near Israel on Thursday—a scene that was not lost on the Israeli military.
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AP / Hussein Malla
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By Juan Cole — Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the Middle East’s populist answer to the American tea party, has stirred controversy with his trip to Lebanon, which will begin Wednesday.
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Flickr / Steve Slep (CC-BY)
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Lebanese officials are expected to approve Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s trip to the country’s border with Israel. Once there, Ahmadinejad may, as reported, throw some stones over the fence. Or he may skip the whole thing, if security concerns prevail.
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bbc.co.uk
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On Tuesday, violence erupted at the border between Lebanon and Israel, leaving five people dead and marking the first significant clash between the neighboring nations since 2006. Both sides claimed that the other had provoked the incident ... (continued)
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AP Photo/Isaac Brekken
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Donald Trump’s Miss USA pageant represents yet another bizarre cultural spectacle involving the conflation of capitalism, sexism and nationalism topped with a sparkly tiara, but this time, the winner’s story is slightly less predictable.
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In this clip from Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to members of AIPAC on Tuesday, the Israeli prime minister leads the audience through a thought exercise comparing Israel to New Jersey in an effort to sketch out how he views Israel’s security issues.
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Wikimedia Commons / Justin McIntosh
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By Robert Fisk — The greatest problem of writing historically about the Middle East is that the story has not ended. The war goes on. And both “sides”—actually, there are rather a lot of sides—produce conflicting narratives.
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Wikimedia Commons / Justin McIntosh
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By Robert Fisk — The Israeli-Arab conflict is about land. It is about colonies and walls and about binational states and two states and—in the end—about who has power. The Israelis with their eternal American supporters? Or the Palestinians, hopelessly divided and soaked—in Gaza, at least—in corruption and nepotism.
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bbc.co.uk
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Despite being told to change course by air traffic controllers in Beirut, the pilot of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 409 that crashed Monday flew into the storm he was advised to avoid, Lebanese officials said Tuesday.
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ethiopianairlines.com
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An Ethiopian Airlines plane carrying 90 passengers and crew crashed off the coast of Lebanon on Monday. The aircraft, which took off in a severe storm, was seen on fire before it went down. The cause of the crash is officially unknown, but Lebanese officials discounted the possibility of sabotage.
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AP / Mohammed Zaatari
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By Robert Fisk — It looks like a hop, skip and a jump. There’s the first electrified fence, then the dirt strip to identify footprints, then the tarmac road, then one more electrified fence, and then acres and acres of trees. Orchards rather than tanks. Galilee spreads beyond, soft and moist and dark green in the winter afternoon—a peaceful Israel, you might think.
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Wikimedia Commons/Vladanr
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Young hip-hop artists in Lebanon are using their music to deal with their lives in the wake of years of violence, reaching across religious and sectarian divisions and promoting nonviolence, and they’ve joined forces with pro-peace organizations while they’re at it.
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AP / Joerg Sarbach
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By Robert Fisk — Music and Islam have a dodgy relationship. I guess it’s really all to do with that most jealously guarded commodity, the human soul, over which music exerts such passion.
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AP / Evert Elzinga
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By Robert Fisk — “This young woman who upsets people ...” was the headline in Lebanon’s L’Orient Littáraire yesterday. The teenager was Anne Frank, who died of typhoid at Bergen-Belsen in 1945 after being betrayed to the Nazi authorities, along with her family, in her Amsterdam “safe house.”
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AP / Ben Curtis
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Hezbollah is reportedly prepping for another possible conflict with Israel, stocking up on arms and reinforcing fixed positions, as fears grow that the Netanyahu government will launch a new assault against Lebanon as a precursor to any attack against Iran and its nuclear facilities.
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AP / Darko Bandic
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By Robert Fisk — For decades, Lebanese journalism has been applauded as the freest, most outspoken and most literate in the heavily censored Arab world. Alas, no more. The Lebanese media are being hit – like the rest of the world – by the Internet and falling advertising revenues. But this is Lebanon, where politics is always involved. Is something rotten in the state of the Lebanese press?
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Flickr/Amir Farshad Ebrahimi
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By Robert Fisk — Israeli investigations of the Gaza war, its government officials announced, were “a thousand times” fairer than the Goldstone investigation—a preposterous claim, given Israel’s constant inability to conduct fair inquiries of its own—and that his mission “gave legitimacy to the Hamas terrorist organization.”
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By Robert Fisk — Everyone trusted Salah Ezzedine. A billionaire Shiite Muslim businessman and financier from southern Lebanon, he organized pilgrimages to Mecca, ran a major Beirut publishing house and a children’s television station, held major investments in east European oil and iron conglomerates and—much more to the point—was a close personal friend of very senior leaders of Hezbollah.
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Flickr / Lietmotiv
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By Robert Fisk — Almost 19 years to the day after Saddam Hussein’s legions invaded Kuwait—and less than 18 years since the U.S. coalition liberated it—the Croesus-rich emirate is still demanding reparations from Baghdad as if the dictator of Iraq was still alive.
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AP photo / Ben Curtis
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By William Pfaff — Recent developments in the Middle East and Central Asia, from Iran’s raucous election to Pakistan’s tribal revolt against the Taliban, cast doubt once again on Washington’s basic assumptions and anxieties.
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AP photo / Yves Logghe
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The world saw two major elections on Sunday—one on a continental scale, the other much smaller but no less talked about. The European Parliament will tilt further to the right after an election with near record-low turnout. In Lebanon, meanwhile, it appears that the U.S.-backed governing coalition will survive a strong effort by Hezbollah to win a majority.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Chris Hedges — Bibi Netanyahu’s assumption of power in Israel sets the stage for a huge campaign by the Israeli government, and its well-oiled lobby groups in Washington, to push us into a war with Iran, but a stable relationship with Iran would do more to protect Israel and our interests in the Middle East.
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Wikimedia Commons
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By Robert Fisk — I wonder—in an age when the BBC can refuse help to the suffering because of its “impartiality”—whether we still report war with the same power and passion as the men and women of an earlier generation.
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AP photo / Fadi Adwan
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By Robert Fisk — I wonder if we are “normalizing” war. It’s not just that Israel has yet again gotten away with the killing of hundreds of children in Gaza.
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AP photo / Sebastian Scheiner
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By Chris Hedges — The assault on Gaza exposed not only Israel’s callous disregard for international law but the gutlessness of the American press. Nearly all reporters were, as during the buildup to the Iraq war, pliant stenographers and echo chambers.
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By William Pfaff — The people of Gaza and Israel suffer at the hands of leaders whose bewildering and savage decisions have no rationally achievable purpose.
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AP photo / Abdel Kareem Hana
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By Chris Hedges — Israel will, from now on, speak to the Palestinians in the language of death. And the language of death is all the Palestinians will be able to speak back. The slaughter—let’s stop pretending this is a war—is empowering an array of radical Islamists inside and outside of Gaza.
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Theatrum Belli
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By Robert Fisk — So once again, Israel has opened the gates of hell to the Palestinians. Forty civilian refugees dead in a United Nations school, three more in another. Not bad for a night’s work in Gaza by the army that believes in “purity of arms”. But why should we be surprised?
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AP photo / Mohammed Zaatari
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By Robert Fisk — Can it be that yet another Israeli failure in Gaza will change the dynamics of “peacekeeping” in the Middle East, that at last the ghost of Arafat will watch the “internationalisation” of the Israeli-Palestinian war?
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AP photo / Hatem Moussa
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By Robert Fisk — We’ve got so used to the carnage of the Middle East that we don’t care anymore—providing we don’t offend the Israelis.
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By William Pfaff — The evidence suggests that American policy under Barack Obama will be a continuation of the neoconservative foreign policy of the Bush administration, given a human face.
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AP file photo
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By Chris Hedges — The world is far more complex than our childish vision of good and evil. We as a nation and a culture have no monopoly on virtue. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, when viewed from the receiving end, are state-sponsored acts of terrorism.
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AP photo / Rafiq Maqbool
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By Robert Fisk — Back in Afghanistan, the mind turns to the small matter of savagery. Not the routine cruelty of war, but the deliberate inhumanity with which we behave.
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AP photo / Hasan Sarbakhshian
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By Scott Ritter — Now that the presidential election has liberated Barack Obama from the need to play to the fickle whim of domestic politics, he should put away the saber and take a more enlightened approach to Iran.
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blogs.tnr.com
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The U.S. presidential election was watched with interest, of course, by Israelis, some of whom favored John McCain because they believed he would have been a better “friend of Israel” than Barack Obama will be. Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy wonders if there aren’t some problems with this idea.
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AP photo / Jim Bourg, pool
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By Scott Ritter — Ralph Nader is right: The two-party system is failing America. There isn’t time between now and Election Day to create a viable third-party candidate, and so the sad reality is one of two deeply flawed men, the byproduct of a deeply flawed political system, will serve as president for the next four or eight years.
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msnbc.msn.com
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Just before the seventh anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, al-Qaida has released a lengthy videotape featuring the group’s second-in-command, Ayman al-Zawahri, providing updates about how the holy war is faring around the globe and laying into Iran for “cooperating with the Americans” and with the American-approved governments in Iraq and Afghanistan.
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Link TV’s Mosaic Intelligence Report is back with an in-depth look at the recent prisoner swap between Lebanon and Israel, comparing and contrasting how the leaders and people of both nations viewed the exchange and investigating what it might mean for Hezbollah and Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert in particular.
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AP photo / Darko Bandic
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By Robert Fisk — Yesterday [July 16] was the last day of the 2006 Lebanon war, the final chapter of Israel’s folly and Hizbollah’s hubris, a grisly day of corpse-swapping and refrigerated body parts and coffin after bleak wooden coffin on trucks crossing the Israeli border, which left old Ali Ahmed al-Sfeir and his wife, Wahde, stooped and broken with grief.
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commons.wikimedia.org
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Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s Cabinet has agreed to a German-brokered prisoner exchange with Hezbollah. It is believed that under the terms of the deal, Israel would receive the bodies of two captured soldiers in return for the release of five Lebanese prisoners and the bodies of 10 more.
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New Iranian President Wants to Heal ‘Old Wound’ With U.S.
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