Geography Archives: Middle East

On November 18, I received the sad news: my Moroccan friend and teacher, Abraham Serfaty, passed away in Marrakesh, Morocco.  Serfaty was a well-known Moroccan communist dissident and an anti-Zionist Jewish Arab.  He died at the age of 83, after a long illness. My relationship with Abraham started four decades ago with a small book […]

  I am in Tel Aviv.  70 km away from the fires, I cannot even see the smoke cloud above the Haifa area, which is moving into the sea and may reach Cyprus before it comes to me.  The pictures on my plasma TV are, however, very saddening.  You see tens of thousands evacuated from […]

The corporate media are reliable and consistent.  They consistently focus on the sensational, and they reliably take the position of the US government.  So, it should come as no surprise that the recent release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks is being covered with much sound and fury, signifying little. On the sensational and gossip-mongering […]

  In eyes that hate your hunger It’s like a jungle sometimes It makes you wonder. . . . The Narcicyst, Yassin Alsalman, is an Iraqi rapper (born in Basra, raised in Dubai, and now living in Montreal, Canada).  Shadia Mansour is a British-born Palestinian singer.  Directed and edited by Ridwan Adhami (Ridzdesign).  Written by […]

The media spin on the latest batch of WikiLeaks revelations gives the impression that, next to Israel, it’s the Arab states that are most energetically pressuring the U.S. to attack Iran.  In terms of the real threat to Iran, that’s definitely putting the cart before the horse. In the first place, the Arab governments mentioned […]

We were struck by a piece published by Reza Marashi — former State Department desk officer for Iran who now works as the National Iranian American Council’s research director.  For us, the most striking passage is the following: It should now be clear that U.S. policy has never been a true engagement policy.  By definition, […]

November 29, 2010 We will be writing about the WikiLeaks documents and Iran throughout this week.  As we sort through the cables that are available so far, the first major point is that, as even the New York Times‘ quasi-neoconservative David Sanger and his colleagues noted in their first story on the documents, the Obama […]

WikiLeaks document dumps are largely what media want to make of them.  There’s one conventional response, which goes something like this: “There’s nothing new here, but WikiLeaks is dangerous!”  But there’s another option: “There’s nothing here, except for the part that confirms a storyline we’ve been pushing.”  In those cases, WikiLeaks is deemed very, very […]

  Reference ID Date Classification Origin 05TELAVIV1593 2005-03-17 14:02 SECRET Embassy Tel Aviv This record is a partial extract of the original cable.  The full text of the original cable is not available. S E C R E T SECTION 01 OF 03 TEL AVIV 001593 SIPDIS E.O. 12958: DECL: 03/14/2015 TAGS: PARM PREL MNUC […]

  Reference ID Date Classification Origin 09RPODUBAI177 2009-04-22 11:11 SECRET//NOFORN Iran RPO Dubai Game of Attrition.  Ahmadinejad’s defeats on the budget and his plan to distribute cash payments to lower-income Iranians show that power centers, such as the Majles, are actively working to pressure the President prior to the June election, according to [Source removed].  […]

No voting for the Muslim Brotherhood under the Mubarak dynasty. . . . Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Al Jazeera on 25 November 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi.  Cf. “Egypt: Systematic Crackdown […]

A hallmark of the Obama administration’s Iran policy has been a dual track approach to its contentious nuclear program: diplomacy, and pressure on the regime.  An improvement, to be sure, over President Obama’s predecessor’s policy — essentially all pressure and no diplomacy — but pressure, the Iranians have stated time and time again, will not […]

Struggling as I have for the past decades to grasp the dynamics of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and find ways to get out of this interminable and absolutely superfluous conflict, I have been two-thirds successful.  After many years of activism and analysis, I think I have put my finger on the first third of the equation: […]

Since returning to government service to take up his current position, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has been a sober skeptic about the wisdom of military strikes against Iranian nuclear targets — under President Obama as well as under President George W. Bush, and regardless of whether such strikes would be carried out by the […]

Negotiations on Iran’s nuclear program are due to start again shortly, and once again the European Union is called upon as a “mediator.”  This is no minor challenge.  With Iran insisting on discussing Israel’s nuclear capacity and the United States preparing a tougher uranium swap agreement, a deal seems as far away as ever.  Nevertheless, […]

Acclaimed philosopher and activist Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor Emeritus of Linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.  He shared his perspectives on international affairs, economics, and other themes in an interview conducted at his office in Boston on September 14, 2010. Keane Bhatt: Your new book Hopes and Prospects begins with the story of […]

If Sudan gets carved up, it won’t be common people in southern Sudan who will benefit. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 13 November 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.   The text above is an interpretation of the cartoon by Yoshie Furuhashi. | Print

Paul Jay: Certainly President Obama had more support for the war in Afghanistan from the Republican Party than he ever did from within his own party.  But might this mean increased pressure for a more aggressive stance towards Iran? . . .  What’s your take?  How do you think this election might affect US foreign […]

Part 1 Part 2 Part 1 Tom Corbett, Governor-Elect for Pennsylvania: It’s now time to come together, to tell the rest of the world — to tell the rest of the world Pennsylvania is open for business. Jesse Freeston: And that business is natural gas.  Pennsylvania’s race was unique in that it was fought primarily […]

  This letter invites you to join what will be the largest veteran-led civil resistance to U.S. wars and occupations in recent history, Washington, D.C., December 16: <www.stopthesewars.org>. During the Vietnam War, Martin Luther King called our government “the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.”  That was true then — and is even […]