Juan Cole

If we were smart we’d move to Mali or the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville). The world’s earthquake zones according to the US Geological Survey Another way in which white slavery was unfair to the Haitians . . . End/ (Not Continued)

h/t Daily Kos: Evangelist Pat Robertson manages to blame Haitians for the earthquake, instead of a shift in tectonic plates: And you know Christy, something happened a long time ago in Haiti and people might not want to talk about it. They were under the heel of the French, uh you know Napoleon the third […]

Oh, no. Here we go again. Some 2000 villagers from near Lashkar Gah in Helmand province mounted a demonstration against the alleged desecration of the holy Qur’an by NATO troops. The rally turned violent, and Afghan and foreign troops opened fire, allegedly killing at least 6 persons. (NATO denied the deaths, saying only a sniper […]

ITN has early video of the earthquake devastation of Port au Prince, Haiti. For a quick overview of the Haitian economy, see this site. It was a sad story even before the earthquake. (courtesy Daniel Morel at twitter; for more, see here. Obviously, the country will need a lot of aid to come back from […]

Six NATO troops were killed in hostile action in Afghanistan on Monday, three of them Americans. The US troops appear to have been killed in close combat, whereas most of the other deaths were from roadside bombs. The notorious Bagram prison in Afghanistan will shortly be turned over to the Afghanistan army by the US. […]

Satire Republicans were outraged Monday by two-year-old remarks of Democratic Senate Majority leader Harry Reid about the electability of Barack Obama, in which Reid (an early Obama supporter) spoke of Obama’s light skin color and his lack of “Negro dialect.” The GOP, they said, would never apply such superficial criteria to the choice of high […]

The ongoing political turmoil in a major Pakistani city to which few Americans pay much attention could nevertheless prove pivotal to the Obama administration’s AfPak project. Ten more functionaries from various parties were assassinated in the southern Pakistani port city of Karachi on Sunday, on top of the three dozen killed from Thursday through Saturday. […]

Ahrar Ahmad reviews M. Shahid Alam. Israeli Exceptionalism: The Destabilizing Logic of Zionism (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 274 pp., for IC Ahrar Ahmad writes: Shahid Alam is primarily an economist and an educator. But, he is also a public intellectual, and often a lively polemicist, who writes with insight and conviction on issues dealing […]

Drudge Retort says, “Political cartoonist Mark Fiore wrote on his blog that he’s receiving death threats over a 90-second animated film he created that teaches viewers “how to speak Tea Bag.” Comparing his predicament to that of Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard, Fiore writes, “Muslim extremist, meet Tea Party extremist.” See Mark Fiore’s blog. This is […]