|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
$16.50
By Wellford Wilms
$25.00
$22
|
|
|
|
Wikimedia Commons / Justin McIntosh
|
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.
|
ethiopianairlines.com
|
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.
|
|
How are Middle Eastern media outlets reporting the crisis in Haiti? Mosaic Intelligence Report analyzes how some TV networks are seeing parallels between Port-au-Prince and Gaza, or pointing to the hypocrisy of the U.S. sending aid to one country while bombing others.
|
White House / Pete Souza
|
By Scott Ritter — The “war on terror” is a self-perpetuating problem with no solution. Worse, it ultimately will destroy America, not from any actions by whatever “enemy” America conjures up, but rather from the actions undertaken by America itself.
|
AP / Muhammed Muheisen
|
By Robert Fisk — The story of the Protestant "settlements" in Ireland provides a ghostly narrative of those modern-day "settlements" in the West Bank, where the Israelis insist on fighting the world’s last colonial war with the assistance of that great anti-colonial nation known as the United States.
|
|
It’s difficult to confirm the origin of all of these news and Internet videos of protests in Iran, but it’s clear that something major is again happening there.
|
Flickr / [sic!]ut.at
|
Maybe it’s because his grandson is running for public office, maybe because the former president just doesn’t like tension, but Jimmy Carter has written an open letter to the Jewish community essentially apologizing for any past statements that might have stigmatized the nation of Israel. (continued)
|
AP / Joerg Sarbach
|
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.
|
AP / Charles Dharapak
|
President Barack Obama just got a report card from Palestinian National Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, and it’s not good. According to Abbas, Obama “is doing nothing for the peace process” between Israelis and Palestinians ... (continued)
|
White House (Archive) / Vince Musi
|
Uri Avnery remembers Yitzhak Rabin, Yasser Arafat and the historic Oslo agreement that has since turned to mush. “The public memory,” Avnery warns, “is trying nowadays to obliterate” Rabin’s “inner revolution” toward peace with the Palestinians.
|
AP / Hatem Moussa
|
By Chris Hedges — The collapse of the Palestinian Authority, the result of Israel’s 42-year refusal to implement a two-state solution, leaves the Palestinians no option but to unilaterally declare an independent state.
|
AP / Ben Curtis
|
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.
|
AP Photo/Abdeljalil Bounhar
|
Hillary Clinton continued her diplomatic spree in the Middle East on Monday, meeting with Arab heads of state in Morocco, and she once again found herself revisiting, and perhaps revising, her words when she read a statement qualifying a comment she’d made last weekend about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
|
|
Petar Pismestrovic, Kleine Zeitung, Austria —
|
enjoyfrance.com
|
The internationality of Islam is emphasized by a new Pew Research study that found one in four people in the world to be Muslim. With 1.57 billion adherents, Islam ranks second only to 2.25 billion-strong Christianity. The study’s findings counter the disparaging, stereotyping notions that many in the West have of “the Muslim World.”
|
UNICEF Yemen
|
An escalating conflict between Shiite rebels and Sunni government forces has displaced at least 150,000 people in the northern part of Yemen. Aid agencies are struggling to absorb the stream of civilians as a lack of supplies and internal politics exacerbate the problem.
|
AP / Charles Dharapak
|
So, things didn’t go so well Tuesday for Barack Obama and his honored guests, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the latter of whom refused to budge on the contentious issue of Israeli settlements in the West Bank. Well, now President Obama is doing some not-budging of his own on the issue, as he told the United Nations General Assembly on Wednesday.
|
AP / Charles Dharapak
|
So much for President Obama’s hopes to make progress in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict this week. After meeting with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas, Obama had little to show for his time with the two leaders beyond the symbolic level of a tentative handshake to open their discussion at New York’s Waldorf Astoria Hotel.
|
|
Although the Obama administration, in particular Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, is maintaining a cautiously positive stance about the current state of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, there doesn’t seem to be much progress on that front—which, as Al Jazeera English points out in this report, might have to do with all involved parties driving a hard-line approach.
|
16.jpg)
World Economic Forum
|
Although the U.S. has requested that Israel stop building new settlements in the West Bank, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has apparently refused to put a halt to those projects. About the best he was willing to do Monday was say that construction might be scaled down “for a temporary period.”
|
Flickr / hoyasmeg
|
A leaked memo from Israel’s consul general in Boston, Nadav Tamir, has Israel’s extremist foreign minister calling for the diplomat’s resignation. Tamir wrote in an internal document that his government’s settlement policy has led to “the feeling in Washington that Obama has to deal with obstinacy from the governments of Iran, North Korea and Israel.”
|
|
Will Yemen become a haven for militants? Is President Obama ignoring the warning signs of unrest in this Middle Eastern hot spot? Link TV’s Jamal Dajani looks into the complex problems brewing in Yemen in this week’s “Mosaic Intelligence Report.”
|
|
Fateh, the largest faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization, will soon convene in an atmosphere charged with corruption, fraught with rifts and tales of betrayal and espionage fit for a John le Carré novel, as this installment of Link TV’s “Mosaic Intelligence Report” illustrates.
|
Flickr / Lietmotiv
|
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.
|
AP / Ariel Schalit
|
A black-clad gunman opened fire Saturday in what was described in earlier accounts as a gay and lesbian nightclub in Tel Aviv but which the BBC reported is “the headquarters of the local lesbian and gay rights association,” killing three people and wounding eight others before fleeing.
|
Flickr / ISM Palestine
|
A number of anonymous Israeli soldiers speaking through a human rights organization have made serious allegations about Israel’s winter assault on Gaza. The soldiers say unclear rules and reckless conduct led to unnecessary civilian casualties and wanton destruction.
|
Flickr / @@:@@
|
Iran’s Guardian Council has found “no major fraud or breach in the election” and will not annul the vote, a spokesman announced Tuesday. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, meanwhile, jumped into the fray, calling on the Iranian government to “respect fundamental civil and political rights.”
|
AP photo / Ali Zare
|
By Chris Hedges — Iranians do not need or want us to teach them about liberty and representative government. We gave to the Iranian people the corrupt regime of the shah and his savage secret police and the primitive clerics that rose out of the swamp of the dictator’s Iran.
|
Flickr / .faramarz
|
Iranian election officials announced over the weekend that in 50 districts, there were more votes cast than voters. It’s a glimmer of hope for protesters, who stayed home Sunday as the government flooded the streets of Tehran with security personnel. State media reported the arrest of 457 people following Saturday’s violence.
|
|
By William Pfaff — The West was wrong about this being a war of civilizations, and so were the Muslims. Islamic civilization is experiencing a double crisis, of modernity and of religion. Nothing could be clearer today in Tehran.
|
White House / Lawrence Jackson
|
President Obama says he is concerned about violence directed at protesters, but does not want “to be seen as meddling in Iranian elections.” He also warns that the “difference between Ahmadinejad and Mousavi in terms of their actual policies may not be as great as has been advertised.”
|
AP photo / Iranian Students News Agency / Arash Khamushi
|
Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has been re-elected president of Iran by a surprisingly wide majority, according to the country’s electoral commission. But his main rival also claimed victory and said, “I will not surrender to this dangerous charade.” The BBC reports that official figures show Ahmadinejad winning even in his opponent’s territory and among reformist voters.
|
wordpress.com
|
“Decapitation strategies don’t work.” Those words, uttered by the newly named U.S. commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, mark a shift in the military strategy in Afghanistan. Yes, indeed—it seems to have taken the Pentagon eight years to realize that “you’re going to have to convince people, not kill them.”
|
|
By Eugene Robinson — I used to fear that the president was overestimating the power of his personal history as an instrument of foreign policy. Now I wonder if he might have been underestimating.
|
Mr. Fish
|
By Chris Hedges — We may thrill to Obama’s rhetoric, but very few of the 1.3 billion Muslims in the world are as deluded. They grasp that nothing so far has changed for Muslims in the Middle East under the Obama administration.
|
|
You know you’re in for a spirited episode of “Left, Right & Center” when Truthdig’s own Robert Scheer drops a line like “Tony, you’re getting overly excited for NPR.”
|
|
By William Pfaff — Obama’s speech was distinguished by the quality of his previous major speeches, that of speaking as an adult to adults. He promised to say what he thought, and did so on all of the topics he addressed. Correction
|
|
The president called his landmark address to the Muslim world “A New Beginning,” and for good reason.
|
aljazeera.net
|
Tensions have been mounting between the U.S. and its usual BFF, Israel. President Obama’s demand for an end to the construction of settlements in the West Bank was rejected by Israel earlier this week. Obama has responded by suggesting that Israel’s intransigence endangers U.S. security.
|
|
By William Pfaff — Next week President Barack Obama travels to Cairo to deliver what is expected to be a major statement on relations between the United States and the Islamic world, but informed skeptics predict his new approach to the region will resemble the late months of the Bush administration.
|
guardian.co.uk
|
Investigators with the U.N. Human Rights Council may be forced to enter the Palestinian territories from Egypt because Israel is likely to refuse cooperation in the U.N.’s mission to investigate potential war crimes by the Israeli military and Hamas.
|
enjoyfrance.com
|
By William Pfaff — There is an important current in conservative U.S. opinion that believes Western Europe to be under something like a siege, or a potential siege, by its large Muslim immigrant population. I should actually say that it’s not just American conservatives, although they write alarmed books about the impending Muslim domination of Europe, and the collapse of European Christianity and identity. They fear the Decline of the West.
|
|
While the cameras rolled, President Barack Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu huddled at the White House on Monday and waxed diplomatic about the usual lineup of regional concerns: Israeli-Palestinian relations, Iran and the possibility of peace in the Middle East.
|
|
Despite the fact that only two cases of swine flu have been confirmed in the region, the top stories around the Middle East have been about the H1N1 threat—even to the point of edging out reports of violence in Iraq in the news lineup.
|
arcent.army.mil
|
Six years after the disastrous invasion of Iraq, Britain’s armed forces have formally ended their combat mission in the war-torn country. Believing that their role is finished, U.K. government officials handed over control of their base to the U.S.—not Iraqi—military.
|
Left: Flickr / realjameso16; right: World Economic Forum
|
President Obama and newly elected Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have their first meeting in a few weeks, a test of the special relationship between two countries that are now led by men with very different ideas about how to pursue peace in the Middle East.
|
dodimagery.afis.osd.mil
|
Women at war all too often do battle on two different fronts, as author Helen Benedict says in her new book, “The Lonely Soldier: The Private War of Women Serving in Iraq.” There’s the fight they signed up for and the one that can make them targets of their fellow soldiers in the most isolating and devastating ways.
|
timesonline.typepad.com
|
By Robert Fisk — The BBC Trust’s report on Jeremy Bowen’s dispatches from the Middle East is pusillanimous, cowardly, outrageous, factually wrong and ethically dishonest. But I am mincing my words.
|
View the most popular tags overall?
|
|
Global Capital and the Nation State
Newsletter 
Like Us
Follow Us
Get Our Feed
