Geography Archives: Jordan

The reconvening of the UN in late September and the possible recognition of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders may be a crucial political moment in the struggle for Palestinian liberation — or not.  Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak has characterized it as a looming “diplomatic tsunami” for Israel; Ali Abunimah, a prominent Palestinian-American […]

A number of news reports by AFP, the Guardian, and other news agencies and outlets are suggesting that Syrian security forces were responsible for shooting nine Syrian soldiers, who were killed in Banyas on Sunday.  Some versions insist that they were shot for refusing orders to shoot at demonstrators. Considerable evidence suggests that this is […]

  There are some sectarian slogans being chanted by SOME (not all) protesters in Syria (they refer to the need for “Sunnis who fear God”).  It is an opportunity to make this point: if one supports protests and revolutions against all Arab regimes (and Iran), it does not follow that one should endorse all strands […]

Paul Jay: The title of your upcoming book, Syria’s Democratic Experiment, first of all, what is the experiment?  And then talk a little about how we got there. Joshua Landis: Well, the book really deals with a period at the time of independence — 1946, ’45, ’46 — in Syria, when the French left and […]

Could it be that Syrian refinery workers thought it wise to warn imperialists not to descend on Syria to liberate their oil and jobs from them in the name of liberating them from Bashar? — Ed. Tartous, Syria, 29 March 2011 Cf. “Syria is the only significant crude oil producing country in the Eastern Mediterranean […]

March 31, 2011 Caseptla Bailey and Catrina Wallace Civil rights activist Catrina Wallace, who received national acclaim for her central role in organizing protests around the Jena Six case, was convicted today of three counts of distribution of a controlled substance.  She was taken from the courtroom straight to jail after the verdict was read, […]

Millions of Syrians rallied all over Syria, pledging loyalty to the country, in support of Bashar al-Assad, on 29 March 2011.  The dialectic of the regime and the opposition in Syria, it is safe to say, is neither like Tunisia and Egypt, nor like Iraq and Libya.  Instead, it is more like what happened in […]

The Empire admits: without Al-Jazeera, they could not have bombed Libya. How did Al-Jazeera, once dubbed the ‘terror network’ by some and whose staff were martyred by US bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, end up becoming the media war propagandist for yet another Western war against a small state of the Global South, Libya?  We […]

It is now clear that the no-fly zone has been expanded in Libya to a military campaign for a regime change, something that the UN Security Council did not authorize.  Gaddafi’s residence in Tripoli has been bombed and more strikes are taking place in Tripoli and other towns.  The argument of course is that Gaddafi’s […]

The Tunisian revolution has wiped out the Ben Ali system, and the Egyptian revolution is about to eliminate the Mubarak system after the fall of the president.  No doubt, the epoch of unlimited domination in the Arab world is coming to its end.  After decades of despotic, patronage-based regimes, the Arab peoples seem determined to […]

Press Conference of the Opposition Political Societies on the Reasons for the Call to Overthrow the Government A coalition of seven opposition political societies invites you to join the Bahraini masses to attend the grand march on Friday, 4 March 2011, entitled “Down with the Government.”1  The opposition coalition believes the current government must resign, […]

The events of the last weeks are one of those historical moments where the lessons of many decades can be telescoped into a few brief moments and seemingly minor occurrences can take on immense significance.  The entry of millions of Egyptians onto the political stage has graphically illuminated the real processes that underlie the politics […]

Aijaz Ahmad: The dictatorship is gone but the regime is still there [in Tunisia], tottering, hopefully on its last legs.  This is the last card that the old regime is playing, which is trying to keep the government under the control of the RCD, the ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Rally.  Actually most of the […]

Egypt is throbbing with resistance.  Cairo is cloven between the forces of revolution and those of counterrevolution.  Hundreds of thousands of people — on Tuesday, February 1, well over a million — have been streaming each day into Tahrir Square, the largest plaza in the Arab world, located in the heart of downtown Cairo.  Army […]

Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia.  He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut.  He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals.  His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the […]

  Arab uprisings are taking place with the historical speed of light.  I began writing this piece following the downfall of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and closed with the imminent downfall of the Egyptian one Hosni Mubarak.  The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings are not, as some armchair pundits called the Tunisian one, Jasmine Revolutions.  They […]

  Karl Marx, in his famous treatise on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, pointing out its similarities to the coup undertaken by Napoleon Bonaparte a little over 50 years before, remarked that history has the tendency to repeat itself, ‘the first [time] as tragedy, then as farce’. As with so many other […]

A Plenary Address at the American Studies Association Presidential Panel, San Antonio, Texas, 18 November 2010 For Ruthie Gilmore. I am an imposter here: not a real American Studies scholar.  I went to graduate school in the late 1980s to study History and Anthropology.  My interest was in the contemporary history of India.  When I […]

  Asʻad Ghanem.  Palestinian Politics after Arafat: A Failed National Movement.  Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2010.  x + 208 pp.  $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-253-35427-3; $24.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-253-22160-5. November 2010 marked the sixth anniversary of the death of Palestinian National Authority (PNA) president Yasser Arafat.  For the last two years of his life, the once […]

TO: Warden David Bobby, Ohio State Penitentiary Director Gary Mohr, Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction Chief William A. Eleby, Bureau of Classification Ohio Department of Rehabilitation We the undersigned call for an end to isolated “supermax” imprisonment in Ohio State Penitentiary.  We are especially concerned about the cases of Siddique Abdullah Hasan (Carlos Sanders); […]