Juan Cole

Another deadly bombing was conducted this morning in Baquba, Iraq, killing 20 and wounding 60. Radicals detonated it outside a political rally for a small local Sunni Arab party. Diyala province is among Iraq’s most violent, with 560 killed last year. There are violent disputes among its Shiites, Sunni Arabs and Kurds, but also within […]

The United Nations is warning that the vast scale of the Syrian refugee crisis is straining the resources of the UN, Jordan and Lebanon. Jordan has over 400,000 Syrian refugees, who are straining its water and other resources. But their number is set to triple by the end of 2013, to over 1 million! UNICEF […]

Bill Moyer investigates the phenomenon of homelessness and poverty in the high tech Mecca, San Jose, California. It turns out to be a good metaphor for the United States as a whole.

Democracy Now! interviews the maker of “Shadows of Liberty,” a new film about how the concentration of ownership of news media in fewer and fewer corporate hands has corrupted our news. Excerpt of interview: “JUAN GONZÁLEZ: That was the trailer for Shadows of Liberty. The film’s director, Jean-Philippe Tremblay, joins us now in Denver. He’s […]

Vets, some of them having served in Iraq, come to eat at an Iraqi-American restaurant in Lowell to give them some business and make up for the loss caused by American lowlifes.

All the talk in Washington is about war on Iran, which poses no threat to the United States. But one never hears belligerence toward North Korea, which routinely menaces the US (most recently threatening to nuke the US territory of Guam). In contrast, Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has said his country cannot have nuclear […]

By Jeffrey Rudolph While Israel’s ultra-Orthodox Jewish community was a marginal presence in 1948, it has since grown into a meaningful social and political force. And this community, true to its fundamentalist beliefs, is extremely illiberal and thus aggravates undemocratic tendencies in Israel. The longer Israeli leaders permit the state to finance the ultra-Orthodox, the […]

The US embassy in Cairo’s twitter feed is known for its informality and irreverence, and tweeted out a link to Jon Stewart’s interventions on the charging of satirist Bassem Youssef for making fun of Morsi. Egypt’s government reacted with fury and managed to get the tweet deleted. Shame on the US embassy. Gee, you wouldn’t […]

The shooting of Kaufman, Texas district attorney Mike McLelland and his wife Cynthia remains a mystery. But investigators are increasingly looking into a cell of extremist white terrorists as the suspects. Two months ago, a county assistant district attorney, Mark Hasse, was murdered not far from his office at the court. (I used the term […]