Juan Cole

Sharif Abdel Kouddous on Gaza’s “Severe Damage” and Why Truce Won’t Stop the Violence of Occupation at Amy Goodman’s “Democracy Now!” The blurb from the show: Israel’s assault on the Gaza Strip ended in a ceasefire last week with the final toll standing at around 170 Palestinians killed, and more than 700 wounded. Meanwhile in […]

Pulitzer Prize-winning war journalist Tom Ricks was brought on Fox Cable News to discussion Susan Rice and the so-called Benghazi affair. His retort that Fox has been functioning as ‘a wing of the Republican Party,’ which obviously caused the interview to be hastily ended should not obscure what else he said. Ricks’s main points were […]

Lior Sternfeld writes in a guest column for Informed Comment: On November 29, 1947 the UN general assembly granted the Zionist movement one of its most prominent diplomatic achievements, when it approved the Palestine Partition Plan. The non-binding resolution, never voted on by the UN Security Council, proposed dividing the land of the British mandate […]

Excellent documentary on the fast-breaking solar technology revolution. From www.vpro.nl/ backlight.

Egypt is on the knife edge between plunging into Algeria-style faction-fighting between secularists and Muslim fundamentalists, and finding a graceful way for its elected president to climb down from his more extreme assertions of power and privilege vis-a-vis the other branches of government. The toll from fighting in Egypt between pro- and anti-Morsi activists all […]

Youth try to play cards in the midst of demonstrations and clashes between leftists and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, and seem really devoted to their game.

Steep sand-surfing:

The authors of Our Harsh Logic, Israeli veterans who protest the treatment of Palestinians via an organization, “Breaking the Silence,” write at Tomdispatch.com: “It’s Mostly Punishment…” Testimonies by Veterans of the Israeli Defense Forces From Gaza and the Occupied Territories By Breaking the Silence “There is no country on Earth that would tolerate missiles raining […]

The executive order issued by President Muhammad Morsi of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party last Thursday has thrown the country into substantial turmoil, with demonstrations, clashes and civil strikes throughout much of the country. The struggle against Morsi’s 7-point executive order is being fought on four levels: 1. Morsi’s rivals for political power, […]