Geography Archives: Middle East

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  PART ONE From the look of things, it would appear that we are still a long way from resolving the serious post-election crisis that is gripping and almost crippling Kenya. Even after Raila Odinga and the Orange Democratic Movement considerably softened their pre-conditions for internationally mediated talks with their opposite numbers by dropping their […]

Iran’s release of the video taken on the morning of Sunday, January 6th in the Strait of Hormuz, clearly debunks Pentagon’s hype of depicting a routine patrolling operation by the Iranian Navy as an act of unfathomable aggression against the United States. The timing of this so-called “provocation” incident in the Persian Gulf just before […]

Several hundred Hadash (Equality and Peace Front) and Communist Party of Israel activists participated in an anti-Bush demonstration in front of the American Consulate in West Jerusalem.  They reached the site on foot due to the checkpoints and massive streets closures in the city, designed to facilitate the movement of Bush’s convoy.  Hadash Chairman and […]

All peace activists want peace, but do activists want peace at any cost?  In Aldous Huxley’s classic book, Brave New World, peace came at a high price, but there was ‘peace’ nonetheless.  Arguably, ‘peace’ also exists within most Western citizens’ minds, mainly because their daily lives are neatly partitioned off from the multitude of ultra-violent […]

Today, two movements for the promotion of human rights in Sudan and Palestine seek to emulate the successful role played by boycotts, divestment, and sanctions in achieving democracy and equality in South Africa.  The two movements, however, have received radically different receptions on Capitol Hill.  This double standard testifies to official Washington’s selectivity when it […]

It apparently never occurred to anyone in our leading human rights organizations or the Western media that the same moral and legal standards ought be applied to the behavior of Israel and Hizbullah during the war on Lebanon 18 months ago.  Belatedly, an important effort has been made to set that right. A new report, […]

Des Moines — Hours before voting begins in the nation’s first presidential poll, peace activists placed the Iraq war front and center again this afternoon as they occupied the Iowa headquarters of Senator Hillary Clinton for the second time since campaigning began last fall. Three Hillary Clinton campaign staff guard the entrance to her Des […]