Juan Cole

28 Dead, over 50 Wounded in Bombings, Assassinations Shiites Keep Interior? At least 28 persons were killed in the Iraqi civil war on Thursday. Another big car bomb killed 10 and wounded 50, 15 critically, at a court building in the Shiite slum of Sadr City. In another Very Bad Sign, ‘ In other attacks, […]

Rumsfeld: It Depends on what the Meaning of “Where” Is Back in the Sixties it would be some activist college student who confronted the Secretary of Defense on an illegal, ill-conceived and unwinnable war. It is an index of the changed times that now it is retired CIA analyst Ray McGovern! William Dunham writes, ‘ […]

Hitchens “No Journalist”: Insider A person of long and wide experience with journalism and politics writes an interesting analysis of the Hitchens affair: ‘Hitchens has been in a spiral for a long time, more than a decade, and he threw in with the neocons sometime in the mid-1990s, and with David Irving about that time, […]

Dalila Case in Syria This is a letter I signed recently on behalf of the Committee for Academic Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa of the Middle East Studies Association. Thanks to the Committee members for their hard work, commitment and high ideals. I urge others to write or FAX about Dalila’s case. […]

Gold from Tomdispatch One of the essential websites for reality based journalism is Tomdispatch.com. It is always rich in commentary and reportage. But this week if you just go there, it is impossible to get away again without reading just everything. Tom Engelhardt meditates on the meaning of American power fantasies about bombing Iran. Money […]

Americana Update The initial fundraising drive for the Global Americana Institute has been extremely rewarding. Thanks so much to everyone who has supported us. We have noted that the great works of American political philosophy– Ben Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jeffers, James Madison, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B. Anthony, Martin Luther King, etc., etc. just are […]

Racial McCarthyism on the Right Redux A repeat and a reminder to let your academic friends know: “The petition I set up to defend John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt from scurrilous charges of anti-Semitism (which is to say, racism) for daring write an academic paper on the Israel lobby, is percolating along, accumulating signatures from […]

Bill Scher: The Importance of Cole v. Hitchens And, a Suggestion Bill Scher nails it. He also points out the MEMRI’s translation is close to my own. So, I have a suggestion for my readers. Every time you see a newspaper article that alleges that Ahmadinejad said that Israel should be wiped off the face […]

At Least 61 Dead in Iraq Civil War, Dozens Injured Censure Motion Against Iran Fails Another wave of violence washed over Iraq on Wednesday. A suicide bomber killed 18 potential police recruits in Fallujah and left 20 others injured, mostly critically. The black psy-ops folks not so long ago were touting Fallujah, 2/3s of the […]