Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu and his far rightwing government have slapped President Obama in the face with mail gloves by refusing to extend the freeze on new colonies in the Palestinian West Bank. Palestine Authority president Mahmoud Abbas reaffirmed his refusal to go forward with direct negotiations if Israelis were going to be seizing […]
On Reading the Qur’an: Hazleton
Leslie Hazleton on reading the Qur’an: Hazleton is author of After the Prophet: The Epic Story of the Shia-Sunni Split in Islam
Can ‘Desperate Housewives’ Defeat al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia? Wikileaks
US consulate confirms what everybody already knows. Jeddah in Saudi Arabia has bipolar disorder. The Red Sea Port wears a sober puritan mien during the day, but at night turns into Party Central. While the US consulate seems to have taken a certain amount of satisfaction in the knowledge that the Saudi middle and upper […]
Israelis Jettison Peace Talks in Favor of Massive Land Theft; Brazil, Argentina Recognize Palestinian State
The victory of the Republican right wing in the November elections for the House of Representatives has allowed the Israeli government to simply refuse to cooperate with a weakened President Barack Obama on a renewed peace process with the Palestinian leadership. The message of Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu to Obama? Translated from the Hebrew, […]
Why our Afghanistan War Dead don’t Seem to be News
Tom Engelhardt makes an argument for why the US casualties in Afghanistan are nowadays virtually ignored by television news and get buried in the back pages in the print media. He suggests that the war dead are mostly young, rural or small-town, and working or lower-middle class. It is certainly the case that if the […]
Cole in Truthdig: Iran is Winning, Israel Losing
My new column is out in Truthdig: Leaks Suggest Iran Is Now Winning in the Middle East” Excerpt: Iran is winning and Israel is losing. That is the startling conclusion we reach if we consider how things have changed in the Middle East in the two years since most of the WikiLeaks State Department cables […]
Egyptian Official: Israelis Might be Behind attacks by Sharks, which seem to be Beasts of Prey
Even shark attacks in the Middle East get caught up in the Arab-Israeli conflict. The fifth victim of a shark attack this week at Sharm El Sheikh in Egypt’s Sinai, an elderly German woman, was killed this weekend. The governor of southern Sinai, Muhammad Abd al-Fadil Shosha, said that it is not unlikely that the […]
Horrific Taliban Bombing of Would-Be Pashtun Militiamen
The administrative offices of Pakistan’s Mohmand tribal agency were hit by two suicide bombers on motorcycles on Monday, killing as many as 51 persons and wounding 120. The Taliban Movement of Pakistan [Tehrik-i Taliban Pakistan or TTP] took responsibility for the attack, which appears to have been intended to disrupt the planned formation of a […]
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