Geography Archives: Middle East

Iraq turns to Paul the Octopus of the 2010 World Cup fame: “Just pick the prime minister, form a government, and save us.” Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 16 July 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation of […]

Joseph A. Massad.  Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan.  New York: Columbia UP, 2001.  Paperback, 396 pages, ISBN: 0-231-12323-x. In Colonial Effects: The Making of National Identity in Jordan, a book that is painstakingly researched (there are almost 75 pages of end notes alone), Joseph A. Massad explores and analyzes the roles […]

Coverage of Shahram Amiri’s departure from the United States and his return to Iran has focused, rather superficially, on the question of whether he was kidnapped or defected and then changed his mind.  Frankly, we are more interested in what reports that the CIA tried to pay Amiri $5 million say about the current political […]

When the Soviet Union was in terminal crisis in 1990 and the prospect emerged of the United States establishing long-term domination of the international political system, the influential Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer sought to capture the character of the unfolding geopolitical era. The term he used became a buzzword in then-emerging neo-conservative circles, and […]

Ali Farzat is a Syrian cartoonist. | Print

July 14, 2010 After an unofficial nine-month “moratorium,” the Israeli government has returned with a vengeance to its policy of demolishing Palestinian homes.  Yesterday, July 13, six homes were demolished in East Jerusalem. In Jabal Mukaber, the homes of the Tawil family (15 people) and the Masrawi family (six people) were demolished.  In Beit Hanina, […]

“Until the philosophy which holds one race superior and another inferior is finally and permanently discredited and abandoned . . . everywhere is war.” — Bob Marley, “War,” 1976 (lyrics adapted from a speech by Haile Selassie I at the UN in 1963) Every few months the specter of a new American war in the […]

The spur of the Arab Peace Initiative can’t move the wooden horse of negotiations on the path of peace, tethered as the horse is to the Israeli position. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 30 June 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text […]

  The countries comprising the “Vienna Group” (i.e. USA, France, and Russia, plus the International Atomic Energy Agency, IAEA) have expressed their “Concerns about the Joint Declaration Conveyed by Iran to the IAEA.”  Iran has repeatedly declared that the Tehran Brazil-Iran-Turkey Joint Declaration was never intended as a final binding document, but as a basis […]

Norman Finkelstein is one of the world’s foremost public intellectuals writing about the Israel-Palestine conflict.  He is the author of many books on the topic, most recently Beyond Chutzpah, an exhaustive account of Israel’s human rights record, and This Time We Went Too Far (reviewed in New Left Project), an analysis of the Gaza massacre […]

The United States and its Arab and European allies are hard at work to eradicate Iran’s small nuclear program, ignoring Israel’s big fat nukes. Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was published in his blog on 30 June 2010; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  The text above is an interpretation […]

The West is worried about Turkey.  Its spokespeople fear that the West might have “lost” Turkey since its Prime Minister, Recep Erdoğan, associated himself with President Lula, proposed to act as intermediary between the West and Iran, and, later, reacted with determination against Israel’s violent raid on a boat sailing under the Turkish flag and […]

Apparently, my skirt was too short for “West Beirut” according to my relative, who lives in “East Beirut.”  She was certain I would get harassed.  She did not delve deeply into the issue, but simply reiterated that the “type of people” who lived in “West Beirut” were not open-minded enough for short skirts and did […]

Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu’s visit to the United States last week was capped off on Sunday with the broadcast of a previously-taped interview on Fox New Sunday.  The interview covered a range of important topics, including the state of the U.S.-Israel relationship and prospects for Israeli-Palestinian peace.  But it is the Prime Minister’s remarks […]

I affirmed on July 4 that neither the United States nor Iran would give in; “one, due to the pride of the powerful, and the other, out of resistance to the yoke and the capacity to fight, as has occurred so many times in the history of humanity…” In almost all wars, one of the […]

Thank you for having me, Yousef [Munayyer], and thank you all for coming out on a day when it’s over 100 degrees.  I know it wasn’t easy.  I’m going to talk a little about the research that went into this book [The Unspoken Alliance: Israel’s Secret Relationship with Apartheid South Africa] and where my interest […]

  Slavoj Žižek.  Living in the End Times.  Verso, 2010. Reading Žižek has always been as challenging as it is enjoyable, an experience of pleasure and pain that seems at times an intellectual correlate to the operation of objet petit a (little object a).  The concept of objet petit a has been a constant in […]

My condolences to the people of Lebanon. Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  See, also, Abigail Fielding-Smith, “Women Mourn Loss of Enigmatic Shiite Cleric: Ayatollah Fadlallah Both Supported Women’s Rights and Inspired Militant Groups” (GlobalPost, 7 July 2010). | Print

In his History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides relates how Pericles, in the fifth century BC, imposed economic sanctions against the city of Megara, which had allied itself with Sparta.  Athens prohibited trade with this city state and sent a message: if Megara did not break its alliance with Sparta, it would be punished.  Megara […]

Protest against torture and police brutality, galvanized by the murder of Khaled Said, Lazoghly Square, Cairo, Egypt, 13 June 2010. Hossam el-Hamalawy is an Egyptian socialist, journalist, and photographer.  Visit his blog: .  The photographs above were first published on his blog and Flickr under a Creative Commons license. | Print