From 21 January to 2 February 2010, Eric Toussaint and Olivier Bonfond — both involved in alterglobalization activism and members of the International Council of the World Social Forum, of the world coordination of social movements, and of the Committee for the Abolition of the Third World Debt 1 — participated in various events and […]
Geography Archives: Middle East
Thanks to the University of Tehran
We just returned from a trip to the Middle East, which included stops in Lebanon, Syria, and the Islamic Republic of Iran. We will be writing about our meetings, discussions, and observations on this trip in future posts. First, though, we want to express our gratitude to the Faculty of World Studies at the University […]
Egypt: Workers Protest against Tanta Flax & Oils Company
Ian Lee and Sarah Carr
In 2005 the Tanta Flax & Oils Company was privatized and subsequently bought by Saudi investor Abdellah El-Ka’aky. In May 2009, workers launched a five-month strike backed by the state-controlled Egyptian Federation of Trade Unions (EFTU). An agreement was reached but workers went back on strike in December to protest the deteriorating conditions in […]
Rachel Corrie Gets Her Day in Court
On March 10, in the Israeli city of Haifa, American peace activist Rachel Corrie will get her day in court. Rachel’s parents, Cindy and Craig Corrie, are bringing suit against the Israeli defence ministry for Rachel’s killing by an Israeli military bulldozer in Gaza in March 2003. Four key American and British witnesses who were […]
The Second Battle of Gaza: Israel’s Undermining of International Law
The Israeli attack on Gaza in December 2008/January 2009 was not merely a military assault on a primarily civilian population, impoverished and the victim of occupation and besiegement these past 42 years. It was also part of an ongoing assault on international humanitarian law by a highly coordinated team of Israeli lawyers, military officers, PR […]
A Dream
In a deserted place in Iran there is a stone tower, not very high, without any door or windows. In its only room (whose floor is dirt and whose shape is a circle) are a wooden table and a bench. In this circular cell, a man who looks like me is writing, in letters […]
Turkey: Tekel Workers Have Final Say for End of Resistance
Four labour union confederations announced their joint decision to end the resistance if the Tekel workers decide not to continue. The confederations consider the resistance as a success. In a joint decision, the Turkish Confederation of Labour Unions (Türk-İş), the Confederation of Progressive Trade Unions (DİSK), the Public Workers Unions Confederation of Turkey (KAMU-SEN) and […]
Why Iran?
Iran continues to be the privileged member of the “Axis of Evil,” a notion formally but not really abandoned by the United States. It is accompanied by Venezuela, Bolivia, and Ecuador, in addition to North Korea, among others. Why Iran? The criteria mentioned by Hillary Clinton make no sense. Risk of possessing conditions to manufacture […]
No Tutu Is Big Enough to Cover Up War Crimes
Burlington, VT, February 19, 2010 — Human rights activists from Vermont, New York and Israel interrupted a performance of the Israel Ballet at the Flynn Theater in Burlington, VT calling attention to the dance company’s complicity in Israeli war crimes. Using two banners that read “No Tutu Is Big Enough to Cover Up War […]
A Socialist View of Sexuality and Liberation?
Sherry Wolf. Sexuality and Socialism: History, Politics, and Theory of LGBT Liberation. Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2009. 333 pp. $12. The cover photo on Sherry Wolf’s book shows a protest rally with a woman holding a highlighted rainbow flag. Radical gay and lesbian activists, one assumes. Look closely, though, and you’ll see that the woman is […]
Flying with a Foreign Language
College student Nick George was handcuffed, interrogated, and jailed for hours at the airport when he tried to bring English-Arabic flash cards on the plane to study on his flight back to school. Now he is an ACLU plaintiff. “First she asked me about how I felt about 911. . . . I thought […]
Letter from Ofer Military Prison: “Missing the Five-year Anniversary of Our Struggle in Bil’in Will Be Like Missing the Birthday of One of My Children”
It has been two months now since I was handcuffed, blindfolded and taken from my home. Today news has reached Ofer Military Prison that the apartheid wall on Bil’in’s land will finally be moved and construction has begun on the new route. This will return half of the land that was stolen from our village. […]
Divided over the Afghan Issue, the Dutch Government Resigns
After fourteen hours of negotiations, the Jan Peter Balkenende government failed, on Saturday, 20 February, to agree on whether to maintain the Dutch contingent in Afghanistan. The Prime Minister announced, in the middle of the night, the resignation of his coalition, which included his party the Christian Democratic Appeal (CDA), the (social democrat) Labor […]
The Greek External Debt and Imperialist Rivalries: “One Thief Stealing from Another”
The current Greek economic crisis has an aspect of ancient tragedy (for the Greek people) mixed with a bad theatrical farce (staged on behalf of the European and the Greek bourgeoisie). The farce comes first. Till very recently the two establishment parties (the center-left PASOK and the center-right ND) preached that their economic policies […]
Chutzpah, Inc.: “The Brave People of Iran” (versus the Disappeared People of Palestine, Honduras, Afghanistan, Etc.)
It is almost a commonplace, at least for the real — as opposed to the cruise-missile — left, that the flow of information, opinion, and moral indignation in the United States adapts well to the demands of state policy. If the state is hostile to Iran, even openly trying to engage in “regime change,” and […]
How Wars Are Made
In a visit to Qatar and Saudi Arabia this week, Hillary Clinton said that Iran “is moving toward a military dictatorship” and continued the Administration’s campaign for tougher sanctions against that country. What could America’s top diplomat hope to accomplish with this kind of inflammatory rhetoric? It seems unlikely that the goal was to support […]
Israel’s Region-wide Underground War
Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if Iranian intelligence was almost universally believed to have assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state. Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the operation using forged or […]
Rethinking Islam and Masculinity in Germany
Katherine Pratt Ewing. Stolen Honor: Stigmatizing Muslim Men in Berlin. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008. xii + 282 pp. $60.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8047-5899-4; $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-8047-5900-7. Katherine Pratt Ewing’s Stolen Honor provides an interesting and original approach to analyses of discourses of Islam in Europe by focusing on constructions of Muslim masculinity in […]
A Dangerous Liaison: The Iranian Greens and the West
In the 1979 Revolution in Iran the liberal forces made a fatal mistake: they adopted the old dictum of the enemy of my enemy is my friend and allied themselves with just about every force that opposed the tyrannical rule of the shah. The result was helping to replace one form of despotism for another: […]
PFLP Hosts National Unity Meeting of All Factions in Gaza
The Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine hosted a meeting of all national and Islamic forces, including representatives of Fateh and Hamas, in its office in Gaza City, on February 14, 2010. This meeting was the first of its kind to take place in Gaza since the internal division. The objective of the meeting […]
