Geography Archives: Middle East

The mark of Cain won’t sprout
from a soldier who shoots
at the head of a child
on a knoll by the fence
around a refugee camp —
for beneath his helmet,
conceptually speaking,
his head is made of cardboard.

Let’s pretend for a moment that Israel and not Gaza is under siege by its Arab neighbors.  The Arabs are preventing all food supplies, medicine, and fuel from reaching starving Israelis.  The reason given: Israel’s refusal to accept the Arab peace initiative (land for peace). What would America and the rest of the world do? […]

INTRODUCTION: UNDERSTANDING FOR PEACE Much has been written about the Kenya elections — the rigging and the violence that has ensued, and the way to peace.  But next to nothing has been written regarding the nature of Raila’s Orange Democratic Movement. To struggle for peace, which in turn calls for engaging with the political leadership, […]

At what point does an individual stop supporting the lesser of two evils?  The question became particularly important this primary race, as one man ascended to political stardom ostensibly breaking free from the evils of mainstream politics and creating a platform based on hope and change.  This transcendent figure is presidential hopeful Barack Obama. Searching […]

Written hurriedly in Caracas February 2008 Background These are some brief impressions and reflections in the midst of a short visit to Venezuela.  For 10 days I traveled with a wonderful group of 23, mainly from the New York City area (with delegates from Washington, DC, Washington State, and myself from Vermont).  It was led […]

After more than a decade of military aggression and genocidal sanctions, on March 19, 2003, the United States launched its most recent attack against the people of Iraq.  The following day, the people of the world took to the streets in protest.  More than 20,000 turned out in San Francisco to take part in coordinated, […]

The ideology of neoliberal globalization has been on a roll since the early 1980s.  It was not in fact a new idea in the history of the modern world-system, although it claimed to be one.  It was rather the very old idea that the governments of the world should get out of the way of […]

The National Conference of Black Lawyers (NCBL) concludes that the mission of Africa Command (Africom) infringes on the sovereignty of African states due to the particularity of Africa’s history and Africa’s current economic and political relationship to the United States.

The German elections on Sunday, like so many Hollywood films, were full of suspense until the last minute.  Was there also a happy ending?  To use the handy German word combination for Ja and Nein — Jein. The elections were for the legislatures in two of Germany’s sixteen provinces, Hesse and Lower Saxony.  In the […]

It was a bright, hot July day in Yazd, an ancient, oasis city in central Iran.  The five members of our 2007 People’s Peace Delegation were following our tour guide to see one of the city’s famous Wind Towers, which boast a hundreds-years-old form of natural air-conditioning. I had fallen a bit behind the rest […]

Sign the DEFUND/REFUND Petition Defund the war in Iraq Refund human needs at home and in Iraq The estimated cost of the first four years of the Iraq War is $1 trillion. For what we have spent for just ONE DAY of the Iraq War, we could have funded: * 95,364 Head Start Places for […]

Saturday 26.1.08: A countrywide relief convoy and Israeli demonstration in solidarity on the Gaza border with a parallel Palestinian demonstration in the Strip. It is impossible to keep one and a half million people in a huge prison, and if you try an explosion is bound to happen, as happened today at the Gaza Strip’s […]

About 3:00 am on Wednesday morning Jan. 23, well-coordinated explosions demolished the iron wall built by Israel to seal the southern border between the Gaza Strip and Egypt (the Philadelphi axis).  Tens of thousands of Palestinians streamed across the border and entered the Egyptian side of the town of Rafah, which had been bisected by […]

  Music by Checkpoint 303 <http://checkpoint303.free.fr/> Haitham Sabbah, an uprooted Palestinian, was born in Kuwait on 2 April 1969.  He lives in Bahrain now, married with three children.  This is a video that Sabbah created to help end the siege of Gaza.  Read Sabbah’s blog at <http://sabbah.biz/>. | | Print

The people of Palestine have done it again, taking their own fate in their hands after being let down by their own “moderate” political leadership and, indeed, the entire international community in their struggle for freedom.  Early this morning they simply blew up the wall separating Gaza from Egypt, breaking a siege imposed on them […]

Once again, speculation about a dollar crash abounds.  The hegemonic roles of the US currency and economy have repeatedly been called into question since the 1970s.  Skeptics saw each major economic downturn and depreciation of the dollar as the beginning of the end of US hegemony.  In defiance of the often predicted decline, the US […]

George Crile (Charlie Wilson’s War, 2003) credits the Houston Congressman with convincing House Members to overcome their valid doubts and keep funding Zia ul Haq.  Members knew in 1979 that the Pakistani dictator had overthrown and murdered President Zulfikar Ali Bhutto (Benazir‘s father), that his human rights record was abominable, and that he fostered a […]

On 6 February 2007, President Bush announced that the United States would create a new military command for Africa, to be known as Africa Command or Africom.  Throughout the Cold War and for more than a decade afterwards, the U.S. did not have a military command for Africa; instead, U.S. military activities on the African […]

Do facts matter in international relations?  One day after the latest US National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) established with high confidence that Iran is not developing nuclear weapons, President Bush stepped in front of the cameras to declare that the NIE makes it clear that Iran needs to be taken seriously as a threat to peace. […]

On October 21, 2007, after an ambush on a military outpost in an Eastern province of Turkey, eight soldiers of the Turkish army were captured by PKK (Kurdish Workers’ Party) militants and were taken across the border to Northern Iraq where they were held captive for two weeks before being released.  Release, however, didn’t bring […]