By Juan Cole For the first time in nearly 2000 years, there are virtually no Christians in the city of Mosul in northern Iraq. The community is reported to have fled en masse after the so-called “Islamic State” (IS) of radical fundamentalists warned them that they faced the choice of converting to Islam, paying a […]
Gaza meets the New Politics of the Middle East: “Islamic State,” Egypt, Turkey
By Juan Cole The Israeli security establishment was almost certainly encouraged to launch its military assault on little Gaza by the current divisions over political Islam in the Middle East. Hamas is an offshoot of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, though they are quite separate in policies and leadership. The overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government […]
Falluja and Gaza: Why Counter-Terrorism fails when the Problem is Political
By Juan Cole There are such things as small terrorist groups that do a lot of harm and lack any significant social or political support. It may well be that such groups can be defeated by counter-terrorism operations. Other so-called terrorist groups are more organic, growing out of the profound suffering and grievances of a […]
Gaza: 4 Dead Boys on the Beach & Israel’s Precision War
By Juan Cole NBC.com caught the Israeli shelling of children on the beach on film. Apparently some of the children had been playing soccer with the journalists before the barrages began! There was no warning (contrary to what Euronews suggested) and there were no military targets on the beach. There were just little boys who […]
Israel, Gaza and the Fatal Spirit of Versailles
By Juan Cole The Egyptians appear to have floated their cease-fire agreement Tuesday morning in the press, and Hamas insisted any such proposal had to be communicated directly with them. As a result, an Israeli spokesman alleged, Hamas continued to fire rockets into Israel, with an Israeli man being killed by one (the only Israeli […]
Rand Paul to Rick Perry: Why Send US Troops to an Iraq that Won’t Defend Self?
By Juan Cole Texas Gov. Rick Perry, apparently considering another run for president (assuming he can remember to do it), attacked Rand Paul as an “isolationist,” calling him “blind” to the danger of international “terrorism” and pointing especially to the rise of the so-called Islamic State in northern Iraq. Perry said, “”That’s why it’s disheartening […]
The Court Trial of Bibi Netanyahu
By Juan Cole Dark Satire: Irony alert Prosecutor: “Justices of the International Criminal Court, I shall demonstrate to you that this man (points at detained Israeli PM Binyamin Netanyahu in orange jump suit and manacles at accused table) is guilty of serious breaches of international law and not just of war crimes but of a […]
Palestine 1896
First film footage taken of Ottoman Palestine (Lumiere Bros.), in 1896. Palestine 1896 h/t William Dalrymple Kemal Karpat wrote that according to the Ottoman Census of 1893, the population of most of what is now Palestine (excluding northern areas then attached to Beirut) was as follows: 371,959 Muslims 42,689 Christians 9,000 Jews This does not […]
The Map: A Palestinian Nation Thwarted & Speaking Truth to Power
By Juan Cole Reprint edn. … As part of my original posting, I mirrored a map of modern Palestinian history that has the virtue of showing graphically what has happened to the Palestinians politically and territorially in the past century. Andrew Sullivan then mirrored the map from my site, which set off a lot of […]
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