Geography Archives: Middle East

Veterans, community groups, and campus activists organized an action of solidarity to make the University of Oregon the second school in the nation to visually represent the Iraq death toll.  Two hundred volunteers placed 112,000 white flags around school property, with each flag representing 6 Iraqi lives destroyed during the US occupation.  3,000 red flags […]

Jane Fonda told the crowd at the January 27, 2007 demonstration in Washington DC that it had been 34 years since she had appeared at an anti-war demonstration, due to the lies told about her by the right wing. It has been almost 38 years since my first DC demonstration, the great outpouring of November […]

Absent a national antiwar political formation on the horizon, local politics can point to the wave of the future.  Take Sacramento.  A peace-in is underway at the office of Doris Matsui in the Robert T. Matsui Federal Courthouse, named after her late husband who represented California’s 5th congressional district for over two decades.  She was […]

  The American Historical Association (AHA) is the most prominent professional organization for American historians.  Its annual meeting, held recently in Atlanta, featured abstruse panels and presentations with titles such as “Disciplined Bodies and the Production of Space, Place, and Race: Atlanta’s Latino Day Laborers at the Cusp of the Twenty-First Century” and “The Desire […]

When I was a teenager apprenticing at being a trade unionist and a left winger both, two of my favorite books were Labor’s Untold Story and History of the Great American Fortunes.  I recommend them to any readers desiring a review of our own history as working people here in the United States.  Both are […]

  Hard to tell which is more upsetting: Hrant Dink’s “unsurprisingly shocking” murder, or the hypocrisies uttered by government officials in his wake. Once words of condolences and condemnation are quickly dispensed with — in a monotone reminiscent of a computerized voice telling a caller that “the number you have dialed is not in service” […]

This year is the 130th anniversary of Britain’s Anti-Slavery Convention of 1877.  In the second of two articles,1 James Heartfield discovers that “Anti-Slavery” turned out to be an excuse for colonisation in the struggle between Gordon of Khartoum and the Mahdi. Successful as the Anti-Slavery ethos of British policy was in rendering British domination as […]

  President Bush’s troop escalation, the anti-war sentiment of the new Democratic Congress, and the rising cost of the war are motivating thousands of union members to board buses bound for an anti-war protest Jan. 27 in Washington, D.C. A CALL TO ARMS AGAINST WAR: Edward Hysyk, a top District Council 37 official, said unions […]

To endorse the statement below, please go to: www.petitiononline.com/NYCLAW2/petition.html. January 24, 2007 Despite overwhelming rejection of its policies in the November elections, the Bush administration has steadily escalated its war in the Middle East. This has meant not only ordering thousands more troops to Iraq and Afghanistan, but arming and financing Israel’s attacks on Lebanon […]

Au moins 15 personnes ont été blessées par balles mardi au Liban, où des affrontements ont éclaté entre les partisans du gouvernement et ceux de l’opposition, qui bloquaient les axes routiers avec des pneus brûlés. Dans ce climat de vive tension, l’opposition a appelé à poursuivre le mouvement de grève générale entamé le jour même […]

“Un esercito segreto contro di noi ma gli sciiti sapranno resistere” BAGDAD – Si sente braccato e si nasconde.  Non dorme mai più di una notte nello stesso letto.  Qualcuno dei suoi fedelissimi gli ha già voltato le spalle.  Ha perfino trasferito la famiglia in un luogo segreto.  Moqtada al Sadr sente che la fine […]

L’opposition libanaise qui cherche à intensifier sa campagne destinée à faire chuter le gouvernement de Fouad Siniora, a appelé samedi à la grève générale à compter de mardi 23 janvier 2007. “L’opposition en appelle à sa base populaire pour permettre une intensification de son mouvement de protestation pacifique et démocratique et appelle les Libanais à […]

When Colonel Harry Summers told a North Vietnamese counterpart in 1975 that “[y]ou know you never defeated us on the battlefield,” the reply was: “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.1 News stories surrounding the US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq proclaimed the arrival of a long-promised “Revolution in Military Affairs” (RMA), a […]

“We cannot admit rivals in the East or even the central parts of Africa . . . to a considerable extent, if not entirely, we must be prepared to apply a sort of Munro [sic] doctrine to much of Africa.” — Lord Carnarvon1 The original Monroe Doctrine initiated in 1824 prevented European interference in the […]

  There’s a woman — some call her “Black Hawk Down” lady — who lives in a packed, squalid neighborhood in the middle of Mogadishu and runs a rather simple but grisly museum.  For under a dollar, visitors can view her prized possession, the mangled, mud-splattered nose of a US Black Hawk helicopter that was […]

Romanticized, demonized, celebrated, denounced — among activists in the United States and Canada, academia is all of these things. It is a gate-keeping institution that shapes and is shaped by relations of power and privilege. It is a site of intense struggle: those who are structurally excluded battle for access, while those who study there fight for affordable and relevant education, and those who work there demand dignity, respect, and living wages. It is a place both where people develop radical politics and transformative visions and where people seclude themselves in insular, disconnected ivory towers. These contradictions are stark. Yet radicals have tried to make use of the academy. Since the 1960s, in particular, graduate school has become an attractive pathway for many activists, but also often an isolating and depoliticizing one. This is still true today, as radicals active in a variety of movements are choosing to go to grad school.

Several weeks ago, with much media fanfare, the James Baker-Lee Hamilton Committee submitted to President George W. Bush its long-awaited, bipartisan report on the U.S. war in Iraq.  On balance, the report provided Bush with a face-saving strategy for pulling out all U.S. combat forces by the beginning of 2008.  The Baker-Hamilton report favors an […]

Passing the grim marker of 3,000 U.S. troops killed in Iraq briefly focused Americans’ attention on the war.  But we live in a big country with lots of malls. To be sure, the death of 3,000 soldiers is tragic and sickening, yet we are a nation of over 300 million and most families have not […]

The war that Western powers — primarily US, Israel and Britain — began against the Islamic world after September 11, 2001 is about to enter a new more dangerous phase as their early plans for “changing the map of the Middle East” have begun to unravel with unintended consequences. Codenamed “the war against terror,” the […]

Le Bureau politique du Parti Communiste libanais a tenu une réunion extraordinaire afin de débattre de la situation économique qui prévaut dans le pays et des mesures prises dernièrement par ce qui reste du gouvernement de Fouad Sanioura en préparation à la troisième conférence qui se tiendra, le 25 janvier, à Paris. Il a publié […]