Geography Archives: Middle East

I met Matan Kaminer in Tel Aviv in January 2012, and we agreed to do an extended interview about the state of the left in Israeli society after the controversial J14 social justice protests. Can you tell us a little about yourself and your background?  How did you get involved in political activity? I was […]

  Samir Amin: You see, the US establishment — and behind the US establishment its allies, the Europeans and others, Turkey as a member of NATO — derived their lesson from their having been surprised in Tunisia and Egypt: prevent similar movements elsewhere in the Arab countries, preempt them by taking the initiative of, initiating, […]

On the eve of Independence Day, police imposed lockdown on the office of Zochrot (Hebrew for “remembering”), an Israeli activist organization dedicated to raising public awareness of the Nakba, the catastrophe of displacement and dispossession inflicted on Palestinians. Just as Zochrot activists tried to leave their office last night, around 10:30 PM, for a symbolic […]

  Sajjad Jafari is an Iranian cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published by Fars News, reproduced here for non-profit entertainment purposes. Cf. “The number of [scientific] publications from Iran has grown from just 736 in 1996 to 13,238 in 2008 — making it the fastest growing country in terms of numbers of scientific publications in the […]

To the Editor of the New York Times, Your editorial “Speculators and the Gas Pump” urging tighter regulation of the oil market is a fool’s errand in these days of legislative gridlock.  But contrary to your assertion, there is an “easy fix” available to President Obama, although not the Republican prescription of “more drilling or […]

  Press Conference, Moscow, 10 April 2012 Sergey Lavrov is Russia’s Foreign Minister and Walid al-Moallem is Syria’s Foreign Minister.  Pavel Andreev is Executive Director of RIA Novosti and of the Valdai Club Foundation.  James Longman is a BBC producer.  Nathalie Novikova and Peter Oliver are RT correspondents.  Reema is a Syrian tweep.  Wael Yousef […]

The president of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, Comandante Hugo Chávez, communicated this Good Friday, 6 April 2012, with the president of the Syrian Arab Republic, Bashar al-Assad, with whom he had a telephone conversation in the afternoon. The two presidents, who are united by long-standing personal brotherhood, said they continued to closely follow the […]

Recent developments in the West African Republic of Mali are raising serious concerns about the possibility of yet another U.S. intervention.  On March 22, one month before a scheduled presidential election, a military coup toppled the government of President Amadou Toumani Touré.  Quickly taking sides, the regional 15-member Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) […]

The 66-day hunger strike of Palestinian prisoner Khader Adnan brought overdue attention to Israel’s practice of detaining Palestinians for lengthy periods without criminal charges.  It also brought attention to the same practice in other countries, including the United States, where, as Salon.com columnist Glenn Greenwald pointed out, indefinite detention is “now firmly in place” for […]

In recent weeks, there has been a notable shuffle in the positions of key external players in the Syrian crisis.  Momentum has quite suddenly shifted from an all-out onslaught against the Assad government to a quiet investigation of exit strategies. The clashes between government forces and opposition militias in Baba Amr were a clear tipping […]

  Zahera Shalabi is the sister of Hana Shalabi, a 29-year-old woman from the village of Burqin in the Jenin district in Palestine.  On February 16, the Shalabis’ home was raided and Hana was arrested.  She has since been in Israeli prison under what is called Administrative Detention, held without charge or trial, like over […]

Email-ID 1671459 Date 2011-12-07 00:49:18 From [email protected] To [email protected] A few points I wanted to highlight from meetings today — I spent most of the afternoon at the Pentagon with the USAF strategic studies group — guys who spend their time trying to understand and explain to the USAF chief the big picture in areas […]

“No genuine democratic nationalist movement in the world has ever asked for any imperialist intervention.” — Aijaz Ahmad Aijaz Ahmad is a Marxist critic in India.  Prabir Purkayastha is a member of the Delhi Science Forum.  Video by NewsClick (15 February 2012).  See, also, Prabir Purkayastha, “Why Syria Matters: Interview with Aijaz Ahmad” (27 November […]

Attempting to latch onto the just, vital, and growing movement in support of the Palestinian national liberation struggle, Gilad Atzmon is one of a very small and unrepresentative group of writers who have argued (in agreement with many Zionists) that there is no meaningful distinction to be made between Jews in general and Israeli atrocities. […]

“Perception is 100 percent of politics,” the old adage goes.  Say something three, five, seven times, and you start to believe it in the same way you “know” aspirin is good for the heart. Sometimes, though, perception is a dangerous thing.  In the dirty game of politics, it is the perception — not the facts […]

Recent pro-Syria protests in Tunis, Tunisia, against foreign interventions in Syria . . . 19 February 2012 21 February 2012 24 February 2012 See, also, the Communist Workers’ Party, et al.’s joint statement against foreign interventions in Syria: . | Print

  Famous Hollywood actress Angelina Jolie recently directed a movie called In the Land of Blood and Honey in which Serbs are depicted as raping Muslim women prisoners during the Bosnian War.  As the movie doesn’t show the conduct of Bosnian soldiers, among the Serbian public it has been characterized as one-sided and anti-Serbian.  We […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist. | Print

Translation of the TeleSur & RT tweets by Yoshie Furuhashi. | Print

  We all know it from the movies of Costa-Gavras: once “the leaders of the free world” start visiting your country frequently, carnage won’t be far behind. Nowadays, the capital city of Turkey, Ankara, looks very much like the set of a Costa-Gavras movie (except, of course, what we really want to see happens off-camera). […]