Mid. East Dilemma

01/30/2024

Only an exceptional president could resist the endless war-profiteering of this mammoth war machine; alas, Biden doesn’t even try.

11/02/2023

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/longform/2023/11/1/know-their-names-palestinians-killed-in-israeli-attacks-on-gaza

A Palestinian child in Gaza is killed in an Israeli attack every 10 minutes.

08/18/2018

The bomb used in a devastating attack on a school bus in Yemen was sold as part of a US State Department-sanctioned arms deal with Saudi Arabia, munitions experts told CNN.

08/16/2018

Ten tons of letters and packages, which Israel had prevented from entering the Palestinian territory of the West Bank, have finally been released.

08/12/2018

The kingdom is harming its own citizens to send a warning to other allies

08/12/2018

For years, experts believed liberal democracy would gradually spread around the world but the system has eaten itself and the result is a new global populism.

08/01/2018

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07/31/2018

Israel has no legal right to use any kind of force in Gaza — under any circumstances.

07/30/2018

The United Nations agency for Palestinian refugees is also curtailing mental health services and mobile health clinics.

04/20/2018

Representatives cited her distress over “recent events” in Israel, without elaborating. Many took it to mean the deadly protests in Gaza.

04/14/2018

So we should not interpret or judge singular acts together, we should excise them from their historical texture: the present actions of the Israeli Defence Forces on the West Bank should not be judged against the background of the holocaust. The fact that many Arabs celebrate Hi**er or that synagogues are desecrated in France and elsewhere in Europe should not be judged as an inappropriate, but understandable, reaction to what Israelis are doing in the West Bank.

When any public protest against the Israel Defence Forces activities in the West Bank is flatly denounced as an expression of antisemitism, and – implicitly, at least – put in the same line with the defenders of the Holocaust, that is to say, when the shadow of the Holocaust is permanently evoked in order to neutralise any criticism of Israeli military and political operations, it is not enough to insist on the difference between antisemitism and the critique of particular measures of the State of Israel – one should go a step further and claim that it is the state of Israel which, in this case, is desecrating the memory of the Holocaust victims, ruthlessly manipulating them, instrumentalising them into a means to legitimise present political measures.

The ongoing attacks on the Labour Party for the alleged antisemitism of some of its prominent members is not only extremely biased and in the long term, it also obfuscates the true danger of antisemitism today.

03/08/2018

Only in Turkey is the identity of a citizen a matter of national security. That’s why the population registry in Ankara was until now a closed book, its details a state secret. Mustafa Kemal Ataturk’s definition of “Turkishness” was “anyone who is attached to the Turkish state as a citizen...

02/22/2018

A surge of legal cases against entertainers, journalists and activists has raised concerns about one of the Arab world’s freest environments.

11/28/2017

A young Frenchwoman has made an internet plea to clear her name and counter threats, opening a debate about sexual assault in the Arab world.

11/10/2017

"Put bluntly, he [Crown Prince Mohamed bin Salman] is clawing down all his rivals and – so the Lebanese fear – trying to destroy the government in Beirut, force the Shia Hezbollah out of the cabinet and restart a civil war in Lebanon. It won’t work, for the Lebanese – while not as rich – are a lot smarter than the Saudis. Every political group in the country, including Hezbollah, are demanding one thing only: Hariri must come back. As for Saudi Arabia, those who said that the Arab revolution will one day reach Riyadh – not with a minority Shia rising, but with a war inside the Sunni Wahhabi royal family – are watching the events of the past week with both shock and awe."

When Saad Hariri’s jet touched down at Riyadh on the evening of 3 November, the first thing he saw was a group of Saudi policemen surrounding the plane. When they came aboard, they confiscated his mobile phone and those of his bodyguards. Thus was Lebanon’s prime minister silenced.

11/04/2017

Professors Arang Keshavarzian and Mohamad Bazzi believe they were denied security clearance because of their Shia roots.

10/30/2017

There is a growing mood of self-confidence in Baghdad which I have not seen here since I first visited Iraq in 1977. The country seemed then to be heading for a peaceful and prosperous future thanks to rising oil revenues. It only became clear several years later that Saddam Hussein was a monster of...

10/22/2017

Follow four young Iraqi soldiers tasked with leading the fight against ISIS in Mosul.