Juan Cole

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 […]

Ira Chernus writes at Tomdispatch.com Barack Obama came to Israel and Palestine, saw what he wanted to see, and conquered the mainstream media with his eloquent words. U.S. and Israeli journalists called it a dream trip, the stuff that heroic myths are made of: a charismatic world leader taking charge of the Mideast peace process. […]

I have long held that the worst thing about religious fundamentalism is that it is humorless. And, the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood is proving me right. The Egyptian Prosecutor General has issued a summons to Bassem Youssef for the comic’s satire on fundamentalist president Muhammad Morsi and for mocking ‘religions. Aljazeera English reports: Morsi just justified […]

Recycled WMD charges: From Jamiol’s World

Tom Giesen writes in a guest column at Informed Comment The option to avoid 3.6 degrees F (2 degrees C) of global warming – our goal for more than 10 years – is out of reach: we have emitted too many greenhouse gases and are on a much warmer trajectory. In 2000, we had many […]

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 […]