Geography Archives: Lebanon

  • (Photo: The Cradle)

    Reviving ISIS: A U.S. weapon against the Resistance Axis

    Is it a coincidence that the world’s foremost terror organization is being revived just as the U.S. struggles under a multi-front assault on its hegemony in West Asia? More curiously, both ISIS and Washington’s targets are exactly the same.

  • USS Portland in the Red Sea, October 2021. Photo: US Navy / Flickr / CC BY 2.0 DEED

    The Red Sea is now the second front in the Gaza war

    John Rees asks whether the Gaza war will engulf the entire Middle East.

  • On September 16, in 1982, several thousand Palestinians at the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in Lebanon were brutally massacred. (Photo: File)

    ‘Avenging Sabra and Shatila’: On Israeli massacres and Palestinian resistance

    September 16 marks the 40th anniversary of the Sabra and Shatila massacre, the killing of around 3,000 Palestinians at the hands of Lebanon’s Phalangist militias operating under the command of the Israeli army.

  • Saad Hariri. (Photo Credit: The Cradle)

    Saad Hariri and the collapse of Lebanon

    The Syrian regime-change war and Lebanon’s economic collapse happened under Saad Hariri’s watch, but the Future Movement leader is seldom mentioned for the pivotal role he played in Lebanon’s unravelling.

  • 2019 Lebanese protests - Beirut (Wikimedia Commons)

    Lebanese portents

    Its two major sources of foreign exchange, tourism and remittances from the Gulf and elsewhere, have virtually dried up owing to the pandemic, causing its currency to depreciate massively, its external debt to be impossible to service, and its ability to import essential commodities which are the lifeline of the population to be severely curtailed.

  • Beirut explosion Lebanon regime change U.S.

    How the U.S. helped push Lebanon to the brink of collapse, and now threatens more sanctions

    While the media blames the crisis in Lebanon solely on corruption, the U.S. government unleashed a “maximum pressure” campaign to push regime change and crush Lebanese resistance with sanctions and aggressive hybrid warfare.

  • Jamil Molaeb (Lebanon), Untitled, October 2019.

    It is late, but it is early morning if we insist a little

    Nothing happens in Beirut and Lebanon that is transparent; plots of all kinds unravel against the ordinary hopes of the population.

  • Lebanon explosion

    Lebanon explosion is an ecosocialist issue

    In saying that the terrible explosion in Beirut is an ecosocialist issue I am not counterposing this claim to the fact that this is also an issue of corruption, of government incompetence, of health and safety and many other things.

  • FILE PHOTO: Concrete barriers erected by authorities to block a street hosting banks and financial institutions near the government palace in Beirut, Lebanon, January 24, 2020. REUTERS/Aziz Taher/File Photo

    Lebanon state prosecutor blocks order to freeze assets of 20 banks

    Lebanon’s state prosecutor suspended an order on Thursday to freeze the assets of 20 local banks, warning it would plunge the country and its financial sector into chaos, according to a copy of the decision seen by Reuters.

  • Concrete wall put up by security forces in Riad al-Solh

    Lebanon is a severe case of subordinate financialization that must avoid the IMF

    To me, the Lebanese crisis looks like, in the first instance, as a foreign exchange and international transactions crisis, a classic developing country crisis in the era of financialisation. As such it is closely connected to the country’s policy on the exchange rate. The fixed peg policy chosen by the Lebanese ruling class and operated by the central bank and the government for a long time, has proven destructive. The country’s economy is under great pressure because the strong pound has damaged Lebanese competitiveness on an international scale and facilitated the growth of domestic credit.

  • "Who's afraid of the revolution?"

    The Lebanese Intifada, or the growth of an anti-capitalist mass movement

    Today the cow is dry. Businessmen stepped on her neck for years, extracting the last drop of milk. There is nothing left for them to fight for, except for the hopes of using us to beg either from the U.S., the E.U. or the Gulf States.

  • Lebanon

    Will Lebanon be the next energy war?

    In 2010 the oil and gas geopolitics of the Mediterranean changed profoundly. That was when a Texas oil company, Noble Energy, discovered a huge deposit of natural gas offshore Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean, the so-called Leviathan Field, one of the world’s largest gas field discoveries in over a decade.

  • We Stand with Palestine in the Spirit of “Sumud”

    At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016.  Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors.  We […]

  • Cuius Regio, Eius Religio

    Turkish Islamists used to dismiss the European Union as a “Christian club.”  Their claim has acquired greater plausibility now that EU leaders have appointed Recep Tayyip Erdoğan Europe’s refugee gatekeeper, bolstering his Islamist government in order to keep Muslims out of Europe.  Such was the import of the agreement the two sides reached last November, […]

  • Red Is the Primary Color of the Rainbow

    This paper was presented at “Color Revolution and Cultural Hegemony,” the 6th World Socialism Forum in Beijing, China, October 16-7, 2015. The term “color revolution” is code.  It is a code for regime change, and the term is often treated as synonymous with activities of the CIA and its assorted vehicles such as the National […]

  • Changing Captains on the Left

    Wealthy, powerful heads of state and other bosses high up in the Bavarian Alps, and the vigorous protests from opposing crowds kept out of earshot downhill, largely stole media thunder this past weekend.  Far lower in altitude and attention, with almost no thunder from the media or otherwise, another meeting was held in less scenic […]

  • Democracy, Hypocrisy, and President Gauck

    In the USA Republicans are jubilant.  Jubilation here in Germany is about an event twenty-five years ago: “We beat those red SOBs!”  But is there not, hidden behind the confetti, helium balloons, and crowing of the victors in both Germany and the USA, an occasional jarring note of anxiety? A man with good reason for […]

  • Who Can Stop the “Islamic State”?

    The most severe crisis in the Middle East to date, the coming to power of the “Islamic State” in Iraq and Syria, has entered an extremely absurd phase.  The European states are about to follow the lead of the U.S. by exporting arms to the Kurdistan Regional Government under the command of Mustafa Barzani.  This […]

  • National Lawyers Guild, Other Legal Organizations Urge International Criminal Court to Investigate War Crimes by Israeli, U.S. Leaders in Gaza

    The National Lawyers Guild (NLG), Center for Constitutional Rights, International Association of Democratic Lawyers, Arab Lawyers Union, and American Association of Jurists (Asociación Americana de Juristas)sent a letter on Friday, August 22 to Fatou Bensouda, Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), urging her to initiate an investigation of war crimes, genocide, and crimes against […]

  • Europe’s Future — Wanna Bet?

    There are many TV talk shows in Germany, sometimes hot, often vacuous.  But the one on January 16th hit the roof, with far more people watching it afterwards via Internet than at the time it was aired.  And their comments, by the thousand, were mostly pounded away in great anger! A main cause of such […]