By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Occasionally entertainment and politics intersect, often hitting a false note. You never want your screenplay to be, as they say in Hollywood, “on the nose.” You have to step sideways away from ordinary news and address some dimension of the human condition to make art. But […]
Archives for January 2017
How the Arrogance of Cold War Triumph brought us this Low
By Andrew J. Bacevich | ( Tomdispatch.com ) | – – The fall of the Berlin Wall in October 1989 abruptly ended one historical era and inaugurated another. So, too, did the outcome of last year’s U.S. presidential election. What are we to make of the interval between those two watershed moments? Answering that question […]
Comey should be fired if it’s the last thing Obama Does
By William W. Keller | (Informed Comment) | – – James Comey is keeping a low profile these days. Not even a peep. Not even after the FBI, CIA, and NSA finally agreed on something: Russia hacked the election and Puttin, who was directly involved, hoped to install Trump as president. Comey’s silence is odd, […]
Israel’s Netanyahu bribed Major Newspaper to get Positive Coverage
TeleSur | – – The Israeli right-wing leader tried to negotiate with the owner of a critical and highly circulated newspaper to get positive coverage. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, under police investigation for suspected corruption, was caught on tape negotiating mutual benefits with an arch enemy, the owner of one of Israel’s largest-selling newspapers, […]
10 Social Media Lessons from the Middle East for 2017
by Damian Radcliffe | ( Mediashift.org ) The past year has been another fascinating 12 months for social media watchers in the Middle East. I’ve been charting these developments in an annual round-up for the past five years, with my 2016 report showing an intensifying of a several previously highlighted trends. In particular, we’ve seen […]
US Media outraged by Russia, won’t Notice Israeli plot on UK Parliament
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment)- – Washington is obsessed by the story put out by US intelligence agencies that Russia tried to interfere in the US presidential election. But for reasons of self-preservation, the blockbuster story just hitting the headlines that an Israeli operative was plotting to get up scandals to unseat British members […]
Liberal Berlin Fights Fake Nazi anti-Muslim News by Bannon’s Breitbart
TeleSur | – – The “news” story portrayed a deliberate attack on a Dortmund church by a “mob” of Muslims. Far-right white nationalist website Breitbart has been criticized by German authorities and media for falsifying a story of a new year’s eve where a church was supposedly set on fire by a group of Muslims […]
Reflections by a Middle Easterner on the Electoral College as a Remnant of Elite Tribalism
By Hsain Ilahiane | (Informed Comment) | – – The Founding Fathers wrote the electoral college in the United States Constitution. In late summer 2004, I became a naturalized United States citizen in Des Moines, Iowa. The following November election day, with my voting card in hand, sure-footed and full of excitement, I walked over […]
Those Times the NSA Hacked America’s Allies
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The hysteria about Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee servers and the phishing scam run on Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager, John Podesta, is short on evidence and high in self-righteousness. Much of the report issued Friday was old boilerplate about […]
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