Geography Archives: Middle East

Contrary to popular media portrayals, the Middle East wasn’t always plagued by regressive fundamentalism. Salafi jihadist groups like Al Qaeda were not popular in the region. They still aren’t. They have been violently imposed on people thanks in large part to the actions of the US, which has a longstanding pattern of backing religious fundamentalists to further its geopolitical ambitions.

Russia’s strategic alliance with Iran is at the heart of global tensions, and the speed and ferocity of statements by the new U.S. administration do little to allay concerns.… The crusading language of the new US administration is alarming and is engineered to promote “Iranophobia.” Once again the narrative that the Islamic Republic is on the verge of producing nuclear weapons with which it will target Israel and set off an unprecedented Middle Eastern arms race, strives to dominate the public sphere.

2016 was a very difficult year for the Egyptians. Most—both the average man and the political caste—even say it was / is the worst year in the country’s history.

Attacking the “revolution” or uprising of 2011, its aims, symbols and representatives, has no longer become an excess of some “Mubarakists”, but obviously, the policy of the regime. This policy is encouraged by the fact that more and more Egyptians are longing to Mubarak’s time. They blame the 2011 revolution for their misery and not the policies of the regime.

Do federal courts have the legitimate power to block Presidential orders concerning immigration and border control? Yes. Article 3 of the constitution gives them that power. In the current controversy, we should remind ourselves of this fragile and endangered separation of powers, on which we now rely as a bulwark against racism, bigotry and xenophobia.

Since 2011, the torrent of ill-informed, inaccurate and often entirely dishonest analysis of events in Syria has been unremitting. I have written previously about the dangers of using simplistic explanations to make sense of the conflict, a problem that has surfaced repeatedly over the past five years. However, there is a greater problem at large.

This dream.  Something is in the house, something’s breaking, the things I love are going away.  I reach for Laura, she becomes translucent, evaporates.  I wake up, telling myself this dream means I’m worried about how tired and worn Laura has grown from years of activist work trying to get people out of prison.  I’ve […]

1. The recent election of Donald Trump after Brexit, the rise of fascist votes in Europe, but also and much better, the electoral victory of SYRIZA and the rise of Podemos are all manifestations of the depth of the crisis of the system of globalized neoliberalism. This system, which I have always considered unsustainable, is imploding before our eyes at its very heart. All attempts to save the system — to avoid the worst — by minor adjustments are doomed to failure.

The escalating attack on worker rights in the United States has taken several forms in recent years.  In some American states, right-wing politicians have passed laws denying public employees such as teachers, janitors, police, and firefighters the right to organize into unions and bargain collectively.  Some of these laws strip recognition and power from existing […]

In one hurrying day, eighty years ago, in Albacete, a center of Spain’s La Mancha region, a few officers somehow created quarters for five hundred men arriving the following day, then five hundred more, and more.  Soon three or four thousand, somehow organized in units despite a mad variety of languages, were issued a motley […]

Time to vote for our next president!  Time to choose just the right person to lead our world’s most militarily advanced superpower.  That’s why presidential elections should be nonviolent and fulfilling on a deep personal level!  O whom, shall I choose?  Let’s see. . . Hillary Rodham Clinton: Democrat and fellow feminist.  Speechifies against poverty, […]

To add your signature to this open letter in solidarity, please sign at <bit.ly/2dtPmzP>. Open Letter to San Francisco State University President Leslie Wong: Uphold the MOU with An-Najah University and Support Professor Abdulhadi! Members of the Delegation with faculty and students from An-Najah University. In March 2016, nineteen of us were part of a […]

In January 2016, I attended Tate Britain’s Artist and Empire: Facing Britain’s Imperial Past, a disappointing exhibition that in spite of its title did not face Britain’s past in any meaningful way.  On the contrary, as I argued in my review, it shied away from this bloody history in favour of quasi-glorification, non-committal wording and […]

Darien, CT — Only days before he was to enter Yale Law School, Trey Von Der Brown, 22, was mowed down behind the wheel of his powder-blue 2016 Mini Cooper convertible in a hail of police bullets.  In the passenger seat, Wentworth MacFarquhar, 19, a second-year student at Yale Business School, was critically wounded. Rich-white-people […]

On the night of 15-16 July, Turkey went through a cataclysm that stunned the world: a huge section of the armed forces of the country (TSK in its Turkish acronym) attempted to take power from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP, came very close to its objective, but was ultimately defeated.  Official […]

  With the failure of the attempted coup of 15 July, the true danger begins now: an attempt to transform the de facto presidential system into overt fascism with the support of a racist and reactionary militant mass movement buoyed by the rhetoric that the “coup was thwarted by popular resistance” “#NATO partner #Erdoğan uses […]

Dear Hillary Rodham Clinton, I am voting for you to be our first woman president because Sisterhood is Powerful, and who doesn’t love power?  For a woman to be accepted as “one of the boys,” she has to be twice as good at the things boys like.  War, for instance.  That’s you, Sister! As Senator, […]

Back in 1963 Bob Dylan (soon to be 75) wrote a bitter song; Pete Seeger also sang it often.  It asks, after the death of a young boxer: “Who killed Davey Moore?  How come he died, and what’s the reason for?”  Then came the alibis of all those responsible, from the manager and media to […]

At a moment of growing resistance to state violence and injustice the world over, a delegation of nineteen anti-prison, labor and scholar-activists from the United States traveled to Palestine in March 2016.  Our delegation included former U.S.-held political prisoners and social prisoners, former Black Panther Party members, prison abolitionists, trade unionists and university professors.  We […]

On April 24, 2013, some 1,134 people died in the collapse of the Rana Plaza complex outside Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh.  The building housed factories where low-wage workers, largely women, stitched garments for the U.S. and European markets. For several years before the disaster a number of U.S. opinion makers — notably New York […]

As the 2016 electoral game here ratchets up to nasty polemics, the US media is mainly focused on the carnival atmosphere of the Republican Party candidates.  (The Democratic Party infighting is only now beginning to boil over.)  Meanwhile, the Obama administration, free from scrutiny, continues its airstrikes in Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Iraq, and […]