The thing that most disturbed me about the altercation between NY gubernatorial candidate Carl Paladino and NY Post reporter Fred Dicker was Paladino’s threat to “take out” Dicker. (For more see this story.) The only person I remember using that diction was George W. Bush, who pledged he would “take out” Saddam. Then he gave […]
Blogfather in Iran sentenced to 19.5 years for Dissent
Iran jails blogfather Hussein Derakhshan for nearly 20 years for blogging. Derakhshan made a lot of enemies when he started justifying the Ahmadinejad regime in 2008. But I remember the excitement in Iranian circles when he figured out how to use blogger.com (founded in 1999) to blog in Persian and then taught others. Blogging became […]
27 US Fuel Trucks Torched as Pakistan Blocks US Supplies at Khyber Pass for 2nd Day
Tensions between the United States (‘NATO”) and the Pakistani government boiled over on Thursday and Friday after American helicopter gunships killed 3 Pakistani Frontier Corpsmen and wounded 4 others. The two countries are nominally allies in the battle against Taliban and other extremists, but Pakistan stands accused of being selective in which extremists it wants […]
Americans are always Shouting About Religion But Don’t Know Much About It
Did you ever wonder how all that hysteria got going in August and September about mosque-building in the United States, in which Americans demonstrated themselves mostly ignoramuses about Islam and behaved often in an un-Christian manner toward their fellow Americans? The Pew Charitable Trust has done a poll, the results of which demonstrate that most […]
Redd: What About Jerusalem?
Adrienne Redd writes in a guest column for Informed Comment After remaining silent for the first month of the semester, a student in my seminar entitled “Understanding Global News” spoke up after I presented historical context pertaining to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. He first acknowledged to the rest of the class that he is of Palestinian […]
Update on German Terrorist Plot
Update: The plot is alleged to have been hatched by young Muslim-German men who had been attending the same mosque in Hamburg where the 9/11 hijackers attended. Some of them went to northwest Pakistan for training, and one of them was captured in Afghanistan in July. A Mumbai-style attack is inexpensive and logistically unchallenging. If […]
Major al-Qaeda Attacks on European Cities Said Foiled
The FT reports that the intensification of US drone bombardment of suspected al-Qaeda positions in Pakistan’s tribal northwest in recent days appears to have been related to intelligence that the cells were planning to hit a number of Western European capitals with “Mumbai-style” random machine gun and bombing attacks. One of the drone strikes is […]
Deputy Gov. Ghazni Killed;
Karzai Weeps, announces Peace Outreach Council
Anti-government guerrillas attacked the convoy of the deputy governor of Ghazni province on Tuesday. According to Pajhwok, “Deputy governor of Ghazni province Mohammad Kazem Allahyar, his son, two of his nephews and a guard were killed in the attack in the provincial capital Ghazni, said Zamarai Bashary, spokesman for the interior ministry.” In an address […]
Netanyahu Blows off US; Mahmoud Abbas pleads for Settlement Freeze
President Barack Obama has just gotten the Netanyahu treatment. Obama came into office saying that a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through the establishment of a Palestinian state alongside the Israeli one is key to American security. He had his special envoy cajole Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu of the far right Likud Party for […]
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