By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – For all his bluster about renegotiating the Joint Plan for Collective Action regarding Iran’s nuclear enrichment program, which the members of the UN Security Council plus Germany signed off on in summer of 2015, Donald Trump didn’t menace Iran itself during his campaign. He lamented Iranian […]
Archives for November 2016
Will Trump really be Isolationist? Or will he March us to War?
By Nick Turse | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – “So is he going to win?” The question washed over me as I slumped in my hard plastic chair. I had passed the day walking through a town where most homes lay in ruins and human remains were strewn across a field, a day spent looking over my shoulder for soldiers […]
FBI Confirms Rampant Islamophobia: Hate Crimes Surged by 67%
TeleSur | – – While anti-Muslims crimes shot up, Jews still remain the most frequent target of religious-based hate crimes in the U.S. From last year’s Chapel Hill shooting to the execution-style killing in August of a Queens Iman to September’s arson attack on the Florida mosque that Pulse nightclub shooter Omar Mateen attended, and […]
A Jerusalem Litmus Test
By Michael G. Roskin | (Informed Comment) | – – A quick and early litmus test of Trump’s “pragmatism”: Will he move the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem? He promised to do it immediately, but that could unleash anti-American Muslim violence worldwide. Congress voted overwhelmingly for it in 1995 but presidents, fearing repercussions, […]
Neofascist Trump Appointee Bannon: “Anger is a Good thing” “if you’re Fighting to Take this Country Back”
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Donald Trump named Neofascist Stephen Bannon as his White House strategist, a co-equal with incoming White House chief of staff and former RNC head Reince Priebus. Bannon has espoused large numbers of crackpot conspiracy theories and has talked about how good anger is in the effort […]
Shadow Wars: The Secret Struggle for the Middle East
By Christopher M. Davidson | (Informed Comment) | – – Swept along on a tidal wave of euphoria, by spring 2011 many had cautiously begun to believe that the wave of Arab uprisings that had already managed to topple the regimes of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak would herald the dawn of […]
A Gwen Ifill Interview with Juan Cole on Iraq & US Withdrawal: In Memoriam
Gwen Ifill/ Juan Cole | (PBS NewsHour) | – – Gwen Ifill, long-time co-anchor of the PBS Newshour, is dead at 61, after a battle with cancer. She was an expert interviewer, and she discussed Iraq with me many times on the NewsHour. I was so lucky to have been on with her. Ifill was […]
Real-Life Trolling: How Provocation Works and How to Respond
By Joshua Cole | ( The Michigan Daily) Yesterday was the anniversary of the attacks in Paris at the Bataclan concert venue and other locations throughout the city. These terrorist attacks in 2015 were provocations intended, as my colleague Juan Cole, a history professor put it, to “sharpen the contradictions” within French society. The goal […]
Election Postmortem: Did the Labor Unions get Taken for a Ride?
By Andrew Kolin | (Informed Comment) | – – According to a recent article in the Wall Street Journal, “Labor Unions Step Up Presidential Election Spending,” labor unions contributed to Hillary Clinton at a scale that is without precedent. The article pointed to $108.2 million contributed in this presidential election cycle. These contributions raise questions […]
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