Middle East

(By Juan Cole) Bill O’Reilly maintains that one downside of having a woman president is that Muslims won’t respect her. For Mr. O’Reilly’s information, here are the women leaders of Muslim-majority countries, most of them freely elected by Muslim publics and all of them respected by the latter: Tansu Çiller, elected prime minister of Turkey, […]

Human Rights

Sunni Representation Imperiled in Iraq if al-Anbar can’t/ won’t Vote

contributors

(By Mustafa Habib) Events in Anbar mean that it will be very difficult for the people of the province to vote in the upcoming general election. Logistics are one problem, the fact that a third of the population has fled ongoing violence there and that many others have lost faith in the political process are […]

Dissent

Censorship: Turkish PM, President tangle over Bruited ban on Facebook, Youtube

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) President Abdullah Gul has rejected a suggestion by Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan that Turkey might ban Facebook and Twitter. Nearly half of Turkey’s 77 million people use Facebook at least once a month and the country ranks 15th in the world for Facebook use. Turkey had banned Youtube 2008-2010. The good news […]

Israel

Israel West Bank Squatter population grows over 4%

Juan Cole

Israel’s settler population in the occupied West Bank increased by 4.2 percent in 2013, interior ministry figures show, as US-backed peace talks with the Palestinians falter over the settlement issue. The number of settlers living in the West Bank rose…

Eastern Europe

US Hypocrisy on Crimean secession move: Washington Supported Break-up of Sudan, Yugoslavia, Iraq

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Russia has arranged for its supporters in the Crimean state parliament to vote to secede from Ukraine and join Russia, and has announced that there will be a popular referendum on the issue in the semi-autonomous province, which has been part of Ukraine since the 1950s and went with Ukraine when that […]

Iran

The New Cold War and the Middle East

contributors

(By Victor Argo) Cold War times are back in Europe. Russian troops are standing in Crimea. The peninsula in southern Ukraine is known for its sparkling wine and the conference of Yalta in 1945, where Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin agreed on the division of Germany and the post-war reorganization of Europe. Russian President Putin, with […]

Iraq

Kerry on Invading other Countries on a Trumped Up Pretext (Editorial Cartoon)

contributors

(By Paul Jamiol) courtesy Jamiol’s World

Barack Obama

McCain’s Mind-Boggling Hypocrisy on Crimea at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee Conference

Juan Cole

John Hickman, author of Selling Guantanamo, writes in a guest column for Informed Comment That the Crimean Crisis would be exploited by Republican Congressional leaders to criticize President Obama was inevitable. Politics hasn’t stopped at the water’s edge in the United States for a very long time. What wasn’t inevitable was the shamelessness of Senator […]

Featured

Obama to Netanyahu: Israel faces Int’l Sanctions over “Permanent Occupation of West Bank”

Juan Cole

(By Juan Cole) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to Washington, D.C., this week was even more of a disaster for him than might have been expected. It did not help that the Crimea crisis had broken out, which rather cast a bad light on one country militarily occupying parts of another. Most observers in Europe […]