(By Juan Cole) Bill O’Reilly maintains that one downside of having a woman president is that Muslims won’t respect her. For Mr. O’Reilly’s information, here are the women leaders of Muslim-majority countries, most of them freely elected by Muslim publics and all of them respected by the latter: Tansu Çiller, elected prime minister of Turkey, […]
Archives for March 2014
CIA: Only Spied On Senate Because They Took Documents Proving We Lied
Earlier this week, we wrote about the accusations that the CIA was spying on Senate staffers on the Senate Intelligence Committee as they were working on a massive $40 million 6,300 pages report condemning the CIA’s torture program. The DOJ is apparently…
Sunni Representation Imperiled in Iraq if al-Anbar can’t/ won’t Vote
(By Mustafa Habib) Events in Anbar mean that it will be very difficult for the people of the province to vote in the upcoming general election. Logistics are one problem, the fact that a third of the population has fled ongoing violence there and that many others have lost faith in the political process are […]
India’s Elections: Religious Nationalism and the Future of Democracy
(via The Economist) Elections in India: Carnival of democracy (via The Economist) LET the contest begin. On March 5th India’s electoral commission, at last, set the dates for the largest democratic exercise on Earth. By mid-May, India should have a new government. From April 7th until May 12th, across nine different phases of voting… […]
Censorship: Turkish PM, President tangle over Bruited ban on Facebook, Youtube
(By Juan Cole) President Abdullah Gul has rejected a suggestion by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Turkey might ban Facebook and Twitter. Nearly half of Turkey’s 77 million people use Facebook at least once a month and the country ranks 15th in the world for Facebook use. Turkey had banned Youtube 2008-2010. The good news […]
The Tea Party Congress Slashed Childrens’ Food Stamps but secretly Protected Pentagon Budget
(By Mattea Kramer) Washington is pushing the panic button, claiming austerity is hollowing out our armed forces and our national security is at risk. That was the message Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel delivered last week when he announced that the Army would shrink to levels not seen since before World War II. Headlines about […]
Israel West Bank Squatter population grows over 4%
Israel’s settler population in the occupied West Bank increased by 4.2 percent in 2013, interior ministry figures show, as US-backed peace talks with the Palestinians falter over the settlement issue. The number of settlers living in the West Bank rose…
US Drone Kills 5 Allied Afghan Troops, mistaking them for Taliban
A NATO air strike in eastern Afghanistan accidentally killed five Afghan soldiers on Thursday, officials said, the latest incident likely to worsen already fraught relations between Kabul and the US-led coalition. NATO offered its condolences over the…
US Hypocrisy on Crimean secession move: Washington Supported Break-up of Sudan, Yugoslavia, Iraq
(By Juan Cole) Russia has arranged for its supporters in the Crimean state parliament to vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, and has announced that there will be a popular referendum on the issue in the semi-autonomous province, which has been part of Ukraine since the 1950s and went with Ukraine when that […]
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