Geography Archives: Middle East

When Henry Kissinger opines in an op-ed in the Washington Post, it behooves us all to pay attention.  There is a message there.  Kissinger has always presented himself as the supreme “realist” proponent on U.S. imperial policy.  But he has also always taken care not to distance himself too far from the conservative political Establishment. […]

The US Government is waging war on Venezuela — not your typical, traditional war, but a modern, asymmetric — 4th Generation War – against President Chávez and the Bolivarian Revolution.  Below is a presentation I created regarding the pattern and escalation of US Government aggression against Venezuela, with clear quotes and cites as evidence to […]

Is the Bush administration ramping up for an attack on Iran?  The signs seem to point in that direction.  On March 11, Navy Adm. William Fallon, commander of the U.S. forces in the Middle East, retired early because of differences with Washington on Iran policy.  And now, Dick Cheney’s current Middle East tour may be […]

  AMSTERDAM – TV Producer Harry de Winter, President of the board of the foundation Een Ander Joods Geluid [Another Jewish Voice], today placed a remarkable advertisement on the front page of the newspaper Volkskrant.  De Winter puts Geert Wilders‘s criticism of Muslims in the same category as anti-Semitism. See below the de Winter ad […]

  Maryam Firuz in the final decade of her life Maryam Firuz, the first woman who became a political committee member of a party in Iran, passed away in Tehran, in the afternoon of Wednesday, 12 March 2008.  She was an iconoclast, a friend of many artists and intellectuals, and a prisoner for seven years. […]

March 19, 2003: a date that will live in infamy.  Perhaps not in the minds of many of our fellow citizens, but surely to most people around the world.  On that date, U.S. military forces invaded Iraq. Almost a year later I was in a small farming village some miles north of Baghdad, accompanying members […]

  The recent beefing up of the US Navy in the Mediterranean has caused concern in Russia and some Mediterranean countries.  Experts believe the appearance of US warships off the coast of Syria and Lebanon presages a US military operation in the region. The recent deployment of the US Navy guided missile destroyer DDG 67 […]

Reeling from the blow that it received in the aftermath of the Colombian military’s illegal incursion on March 1 into Ecuador — which resulted in the brutal massacre of a number of civilians and members of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), including its chief negotiator Raul Reyes — US imperialism has once again […]

  In September 2000, I decided to do my part to bring peace to the Middle East.  As a Canadian attorney of Palestinian origin, I believed I could use my legal skills to help broker a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestinians.  Naive?  Perhaps. I left my comfortable life in California and moved to […]

  This Thursday the House of Commons passed a Confidence Motion put forward by the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper to extend the Canadian mission in Kandahar, Afghanistan to December 2011 past the current commitment to 2009.  With the support of the Liberal Party (breaking their previous position of a call for a […]

  Y’all remember five years ago?  Were any of you on the streets with Direct Action to Stop the War (DASW) in downtown San Francisco five years ago? I wasn’t.  I was not on the streets because I had a brand-new baby who needed to eat every two hours, so I couldn’t risk arrest.  I […]

  As feminists and people of conscience, we call for solidarity with Palestinian women in Gaza suffering due to the escalating military attacks that Israel turned into an open war on civilians.  This war has targeted women and children, and all those who live under Israeli occupation in the West Bank, and are also denied […]

If the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is one of the world’s most intractable, much the same can be said of the parallel debate about whether its resolution can best be achieved by a single state embracing the two peoples living there or by a division of the land into two separate states, one for Jews and the […]

  Israel’s Declaration of Independence states that the Jewish people arose in the Land of Israel and was exiled from its homeland.  Every Israeli schoolchild is taught that this happened during the period of Roman rule, in 70 CE.  The nation remained loyal to its land, to which it began to return after two millennia […]

In November 2007, the Center for Immigration Studies, a think tank that favors reducing immigration, released a report entitled “Immigrants in the United States, 2007: A Profile of America’s Foreign-Born Population.”   The report was covered widely in the media, and the author, Center staff researcher Steven Camarota, was given many opportunities to repeat his […]

  Rafah, the Gaza Strip, March 3 — Israeli officials said today that they finished their military operation in the Gaza Strip, but the Israeli attacks continue, and we fear that Israel is still planning a major invasion.  On February 29th, Israel’s Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai warned of “a bigger holocaust” for Palestinians. From […]

The world’s largest prison — Gaza prison with 1.5 million inmates, many of them starving, sick and penniless — is receiving more sympathy and protest by Israeli citizens, of widely impressive backgrounds, than is reported in the U.S. press. In contrast, the humanitarian crisis brought about by Israeli government blockades that prevent food, medicine, fuel […]

Israeli Deputy Defense Minister Matan Vilnai’s much publicized remark last week about Gaza facing a “shoah” — the Hebrew word for the Holocaust — was widely assumed to be unpleasant hyperbole about the army’s plans for an imminent full-scale invasion of the Strip. More significantly, however, his comment offers a disturbing indication of the Israeli […]

7 March 2008 The South African Municipal Workers’ Union has vowed to intensify its campaign to force municipalities in the country not to have any trade dealings with Israel. SAMWU firmly believes that Israel is an apartheid state that needs to be isolated and the perpetrators of human rights violations, prosecuted.  The union utterly condemns […]

6 March 2008 The Congress of South African Trade Unions is appalled at the destruction of the headquarters of the Palestinian General Federation of Trade Unions (PGFTU) in Gaza, by two one-ton Israeli F-16 missiles. One person is dead, 37 are injured, mostly women and children, some of them in critical condition in hospital, and […]