Juan Cole

Pope Francis on Maundy Thursday declined to address enormous crowds. Instead he went to a prison to emulate Jesus’s act of humility before his crucifixion in washing the feet of his 12 disciples. The pope washed and kissed the feet of 12 inmates, two of them women and two of them Muslim (one of the […]

Yet again, researchers have found that there is no link between vaccines and autism. It is a myth, a hysteria, and a dangerous one, since large numbers of unvaccinated children are an epidemic waiting to happen. Why so many Americans go running off on such wild goose chases but can’t see the nose on their […]

Cenk Uygur interviews former president Jimmy Carter concerning his imminent complete eradication of the deadly guinea worm: This extremely impressive achievement of Carter and his Carter Center is one that I have discussed at some length in the past. Let’s just recall that some former presidents go around speaking for large sums, whereas Carter in […]

h/t Allvoices

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com It’s true that, last week, few in Congress cared to discuss, no less memorialize, the 10th anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.  Nonetheless, two anniversaries of American disasters and crimes abroad — the “mission accomplished” debacle of 2003 and the 45th anniversary of the My Lai massacre — were at least noted in passing in […]

This is a [pdf] letter to President Obama pleading for a substantial rethink of Yemen policy in his second term, which I among other Middle East experts signed. It was worked up by the Yemen Policy Initiative of the Atlantic Council and the Project on Middle East Democracy. Yemen gets little news coverage in the […]

Among all of the obsessions of the Red States, the fixation on the danger of Muslim law (sharia) taking over the United States is the most bizarre. How would that happen, exactly? But the Oklahoma State Legislature actually passed a law forbidding resort to Muslim law. How many Muslims can there even be in Oklahoma. […]

Palestinians staged a protest march on Wednesday to protest Israeli denial to their villages of their water rights. Israelis now take 80% of the water from the Palestinian West Bank and each Israeli gets far more water per day than each Palestinian. The Israelis coerce the Palestine authorities into arrangements whereby Israeli squatters get the […]

It turns out that 25% of Republicans don’t like their own party. The Republican Party has a structural problem, in that it has only two main constituencies: the very wealthy and the white Religious Right. Both are tiny but powerful minorities. Neither is at all representative of the US population. Both want to impose policies […]