1. The end of any potential ‘two state solution’ to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Israel’s far right wing Likud government, headed by Binyamin Netanyahu, built or committed to build thousands of new family domiciles for Israeli squatters in Palestinian territory. In the absence of a Palestinian state, Palestinians are doomed to statelessness and a lack of […]
Schwarzkopf (RIP) and How the United States got Bogged Down in the Middle East
Gen. Norman H. Schwarzkopf is dead at 78. He died of pneumonia. Schwarzkopf was among the military leaders who repositioned the United States as a Middle Eastern hegemon. The US had interests in the Middle East from World War II forward, but the region was frankly on the back burner. The central American military and […]
FBI Violated Constitution by Branding Peaceful Occupy Wall Street as Terrorist threat
Second Amendment fundamentalists push for open carrying of firearms in public, and armed gun nuts even attended one of President Obama’s rallies in Arizona. That was apparently just all right with the FBI. But the peaceful protest movement, Occupy Wall Street, was treated by the FBI as a terrorist threat. Democracy Now! reports: The PATRIOT […]
The Afghan Sk8ter Girrls of Kabul (Video) – (Female Literacy has Tripled in Afghanistan)
Skateistan is a skateboard NGO in Kabul, which maintains a facility for skateboarding and gets as many as 300 youth to attend as spectators at competitions. The organization maintains that 40% of skateboarders in Kabul are girls and young women, and that it is one of few relatively gender-integrated sports. Although in the 1990s under […]
Syria’s Head of Military Police Defects, as Death Toll in Revolution Climbs to 45,000
Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Jasim al-Shalal, head of Syria’s military police, defected late Tuesday to Turkey, joining the revolutionaries against the regime. He announced his defection in a YouTube video, saying that the Syrian army is no longer fulfilling its primary mission, of defending the country from attack, but rather has become a gang attacking […]
Egypt: Women Cut their Hair in Tahrir Square to Protest Fundamentalist Constitution
Dozens of progressive Egyptian women cut their hair in Tahrir Square on Tuesday to protest the passage of Egypt’s new, fundamentalist constitution. The protesters chanted, “A woman’s crown is her liberation!” Mona Abd al-Radi, the secretary-general of the Union of the Women’s Organization of Cairo, and one of eight who cut her hair, said that […]
New Fundamentalist Constitution Approved, Heralds turn to Egyptian Theocracy
The Egyptian electoral commission on Tuesday signed off on the constitutional referendum, declaring that the country’s guiding legal framework had received a little over 63 percent of the vote. (It only got 56% in the first of two rounds, when the leftist, liberal and centrist opposition thought they had some chance of blocking it, but […]
Christmas 2012: The Flowering of Middle Eastern Christianity and the Challenges it Faces
There are more Middle Eastern Christians than ever before, and they are poised between emergence as a new political force in a democratizing region and the dangers to them of fundamentalism and political repression. The arguments you see for Christian decline in the region are mostly wrong. If we count the Christians in the Arab […]
Cairo Symphony Orchestra: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
Cairo Celebration Choir & Cairo Symphony Orchestra: “Santa Claus is Coming to Town”
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