Geography Archives: Iraq

Unemployed computer engineer Morad Lashin would like to work in Israel’s Electricity Company, a large state utility, but admits his chances of being recruited are slim. The reasons were set out in graphic form this month when a parliamentary committee revealed that only 1.3 per cent of the company’s 12,000 workers are Arab, despite the […]

The New York Times ran a story on May 4 that advanced a rather unusual argument: BP’s Gulf of Mexico oil spill was probably bad, but not that bad.  Helping the paper flesh out that line was a group called the Gulf of Mexico Foundation, which the Times dubbed “a conservation group in Corpus Christi, […]

There’s a funny if intimidating gun-nut bumper sticker you may have seen on the road: “gun control means using both hands.”  It’s clever, invoking and mocking gun control at the same time. This last week the United States government, by its actions, formally adopted this bumper sticker as its de-facto nuclear weapons and arms control […]

Author and analyst Hooman Majd traveled to Iran last month and has published an initial report from his travels, “Postcard from Tehran,” in ForeignPolicy.com.  Hooman makes a number of important points in his article, which largely reinforce our analysis of Iranian politics since the Islamic Republic’s June 12, 2009 presidential election and of U.S/Western policy […]

Job interviews for the position of imam at mosques in Israel are conducted not by senior clerics but by the Shin Bet, Israel’s secret police, a labor tribunal has revealed. Sheikh Ahmed Abu Ajwa, 36, is fighting the Shin Bet’s refusal to approve his appointment as an imam in a case that has lifted the […]

As we follow the NPT Review Conference in New York and the enormous salience of the Iranian nuclear issue there, it is useful to consider some recent observations about the Iranian case by the International Atomic Energy Agency’s former Director General, Mohamed ElBaradei.  Baradei was in the Boston area last week, where, among other things, […]

On April 25, the Washington Post had another piece on Iran, this time on the front page, that could easily have been run about Iraq back in 2002.  We have recently criticized the Post for relying on Green Movement partisans for ostensibly objective “analysis” about Iranian politics.  This front page article relies almost entirely on […]

Yet again, the Washington Post has published another highly inflammatory article on Iranian nuclear developments, “Iran’s Advances in Nuclear Technology Spark New Concerns about Weapons,” by Joby Warrick.  As we wrote, Warrick co-authored another recent story for the Washington Post on Iran’s nuclear program that “could easily have been run about Iraq back in 2002.” […]

  The antiwar movement everywhere should be extremely alarmed about the Obama Administration’s declaration in April that Washington can target Iran with nuclear weapons.  Although vague “all options are on the table” warnings were also issued under George W. Bush, now the threat of a pre-emptive nuclear strike on Iran is enshrined in the revised […]

  Hisham B. Sharabi Memorial Lecture, Palestine Center, Washington, D.C., 29 April 2010 It is a great honor to be here at the Palestine Center to give the Sharabi Memorial Lecture.  I would like to thank Yousef Munnayer, the executive director of the Jerusalem Fund, for inviting me, and all of you for coming out […]

  Barack Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 while at the same time sending more troops to the Afghanistan War.  What has become of the promise of “change”? I am one of the few who are not disillusioned, because I had no expectations.  I had written about Obama’s positions and prospects even before […]

The much-ballyhooed Tea Party “movement” that has arisen to absurdly accuse the corporate and imperial Barack Obama administration with “socialism,” “favoring the poor,” and other “radical leftist” crimes claims to be a decentralized, independent, “grassroots,” and popular/populist uprising against concentrated power.  Contrary to that claim, Part 1 of our report presented recent polling data showing […]

Today, POLITICO published our newest Op-Ed, “Obama’s Slippery Slope to Strikes on Iran” (excerpts below but also worth reading in full on POLITICO.com). Our piece was prompted by the partial leak of Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ January 2010 memo on Iran to the New York Times last week and subsequent statements by Gates and […]

A talk delivered to the Fifth Bil’in International Conference for Palestinian Popular Resistance, held in the West Bank village of Bil’in on April 21 Israel’s apologists are very exercised about the idea that Israel has been singled out for special scrutiny and criticism.  I wish to argue, however, that in most discussions of Israel it […]

The Washington Post‘s Glenn Kessler had an important story: “Even as Momentum for Iran Sanctions Grows, Containment Seems Only Viable Option.”  Glenn states his thesis up front: After months of first attempting to engage Iran and then wooing Russia and China to support new sanctions against the Islamic Republic, the Obama Administration appears within reach […]

Watching the news in August 2009, you may have heard about three U.S. citizens being detained in Iran.  Arrested for allegedly crossing the Iran-Iraq border on July 31, 2009, they remain in detention nine months later in Iran’s Evin prison.  Dubbed “the hikers” due to the fact that they were on a hiking trip in […]

National Security Adviser James Jones was the headline speaker at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy‘s 25th-anniversary gala dinner in Washington last night.  Substantively, General Jones’ speech focused on “two defining challenges” confronting the United States and its allies in the region: “preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them, […]

Palestinians are in Israel today because they managed to survive the depopulation of 1948, the year the Jewish state was founded (Arabs constitute about 20% of Israel’s population).  Ironically, while Benny Morris’ scholarship suggests that the mere existence of these Palestinians in Israel — and millions more in the occupied territories — irks him, Israel’s […]

  Two former soldiers from the Army unit responsible for the Wikileaks “Collateral Murder” incident have written an open letter of “Reconciliation and Responsibility” to those injured in the July 2007 attack, in which US forces wounded two children and killed over a dozen people, including the father of those children and two Reuters employees.  […]

My first thought upon reading the Chicago Council’s report “Engaging Religious Communities Abroad: A New Imperative for U.S. Foreign Policy” is that the title is misleading.  This report is not about engaging religious communities abroad — one hears little if at all from such communities — nor does it say anything particularly new.  There is, […]