Geography Archives: Middle East

On the 101st anniversary of the founding of the Communist Party of Turkey, Peoples Dispatch spoke to Ekin Sönmez, a member of the party’s Central Committee, about how the party is confronting the urgent challenges facing Turkey’s working class and is deepening the struggle for socialism.

There is not even-handed regulation of doctors worldwide regarding complicity with torture. The case of the Israeli Medical Association serves as a prime example.

On Wednesday, September 1, Chinese Foreign Affairs Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin said that the massacres of civilians committed by the US military in Afghanistan during 20 years of occupation and war should be fully investigated.

At the weekly briefing in Moscow on Thursday by the Foreign Ministry spokesperson Maria Zakharova stated that Russia will consider recognising Afghanistan’s new authorities once an inclusive government is formed in the country.

Military occupations excite violent resistance throughout history. The U.S. has given up the fantasy of transforming Afghanistan. This removes Israel’s cover for its occupation and is generating panic among Israel’s friends.

“Except for Palestine” is a remarkable little book. Within it, the authors Hill and Plitnick present the larger picture that the self-proclaimed progressive “universal” values of the United States are argued for in many troubled spots of the world, except for Palestine.

The United Church of Christ resolution calling Israel’s continued “oppression” of Palestinians a “sin” has alarmed the American Jewish Committee and for good reason: Other Protestant churches are sure to follow, with measures that pose a real threat to apartheid.

In 2010, I was in Washington and arranged to interview the mastermind of Afghanistan’s modern era of suffering, Zbigniew Brzezinski. I quoted to him his autobiography in which he admitted that his grand scheme for drawing the Soviets into Afghanistan had created “a few stirred up Muslims”. “Do you have any regrets?” I asked. “Regrets! Regrets! What regrets?” – John Pilger

Corporate media coverage of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and the collapse of the country’s U.S.-backed government has offered audiences more mystification than illumination.

On the night of 14 August 1791, enslaved Africans gathered in the Bois Caïman forest and planned the revolt that would begin the Haitian Revolution. Last week, on the 230th anniversary of this meeting, Haiti was hit by an earthquake that has upturned the lives of more than a million people.

Despite the announcements from the Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that “everything is under control”, Turkey is experiencing one of the deepest crises in recent years. A conversation with Hasan Durkal.

On Sunday, 15 August, Afghanistan’s President Ashraf Ghani fled his country for Uzbekistan. He left behind a capital city, Kabul, which had already fallen into the hands of the advancing Taliban forces.

Question: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs that the American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahiddin in Afghanistan six months before the Soviet intervention. In this period, you were the national security advisor to President Carter. You therefore played a key role in this affair. Is this correct?

There are too many careers and too much money tied to American power projection. So expect it to shift, not recede from the stage.

The U.S. has been defeated today in Afghanistan not by a super power with an advanced military, but by a rag-tag army of fanatical locals who perfected and consolidated their fanaticism under U.S., Saudi and Pakistani tutelage in the 1980s to fight the Soviets.

Mapping the fight for women’s liberation in Gaza and the West Bank.

Palestinian citizens of Israel are 20 percent of the population. But not a single one was on Israel’s 90-member Olympic team.

On Wednesday afternoon, Israeli forces shot and killed 11-year-old Mohammed al-Alami in his father’s car, as the family were on their way home from grocery shopping. The next day at Mohammed’s funeral, Israeli soldiers attacked the procession, killing 20-year-old Shawkat Awad.

A new open-source study concludes that Syrian insurgents carried out the Ghouta sarin chemical attack in August 2013. The explosive findings add to a growing body of public evidence that undermines U.S.-led efforts to blame the Syrian government, which almost led to U.S. military intervention.

Ben & Jerry’s decision to halt its operations in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and in Jerusalem has pro-Israel editors working overtime.