Juan Cole

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 […]

Israeli war planes struck the Palestinian Gaza Strip on Tuesday. Israel has roughly 7.5 million people, Gaza roughly 1.7 million. Israel bombed and destroyed Gaza’s only airport and refuses to let Gaza port operate. It still places severe restrictions on Gaza imports, and lets Palestinians there export almost nothing of what they make. Nearly half […]

Dilip Hiro writes at Tomdispatch.com Washington has vociferously denounced Afghan corruption as a major obstacle to the U.S. mission in Afghanistan. This has been widely reported. Only one crucial element is missing from this routine censure: a credible explanation of why American nation-building failed there. No wonder. To do so, the U.S. would have to […]

Syrian dissidents say that some 6,000 people died in Syria in March, the largest one-month toll since the movement to overthrow the Baathist regime of Bashar al-Assad began two years ago. The UN estimates that over 70,000 have been killed in the fighting. Of the 6000 who died in March, one third, or 2000, were […]

Bassem Youssef tells Christiane Amanpour about the 5-hour Kafkaesque interrogation he underwent after being summoned by the prosecutor-general. The humorless prosecutors essentially made a montage of his punch lines and asked him about each of them as though they were evidence of a crime! Youssef vows to continue with his satire and with the same […]

Comedian Jim Carrey has hit back at Fox Cable News for its campaign of defamation in the wake of his release of a video parodying gun nuts. Carrey described the notorious far right wing propaganda organ as: “a media colostomy bag that has begun to burst at the seams and should be emptied before it […]

Why this and not that? I don’t understand my own country much of the time. For instance, in his first major public speech after resigning from his position as head of the CIA, David Petraeus felt he had to apologize again for having had an affair. But some elements of the CIA engaged in extensive […]