This study compared The New York Times‘ and The Moscow Times‘ coverage of the political movements in three former Soviet republics. Data analysis revealed a clear pro-movement pattern in The New York Times’ reporting. The U.S. newspaper used more pro-movement sources than pro-incumbent sources. Overall, The New York Times depicted the protesters favorably and […]
Geography Archives: Middle East
Turkey: Will Hunger Strike of Tekel Workers Lead to General Strike?
Six union confederations in Turkey have announced that they will go on a general strike if the government does not respond to the Tekel workers’ demands by 26 January 2010. The hunger strike mentioned below is now on hold pending the government response by the deadline. — Ed. Worker Yaşar from the Tek Gıda-İş union: […]
On the Liberal Hope for the New Middle Class’s Capitalist Revolution in the Muslim World
Vali Nasr. Forces of Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean for Our World. New York: Free Press, 2009. 320 pp. This empirically informative yet analytically defective book labors to dissect the complexities of political and economic development in the Muslim world, strongly focusing on Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, […]
The Oliver Kamm School of Falsification: Imperial Truth-Enforcement, British Branch
An important and perhaps growing feature of official and strong-interest-group propaganda is the resort to personal attacks and flak to keep dissidents at bay and inconvenient thoughts out of sight and mind. This has been notable over many years in the case of pro-Israel propaganda, where we can observe a positive correlation between upward spikes […]
Time for Progressives to Jump Democrats’ Sinking Ship
Republican Scott Brown’s defeat of Democrat Martha Coakley in Massachusetts’ Senate race proves it’s time for real progressives, activists, and independents to dump and jump the Democratic Party’s sinking ship of state. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing, over and over again, expecting a different result. Every electoral cycle people who consider […]
Iran: Where Is the Obama Administration Going?
Not surprisingly, Saturday’s meeting of representatives from the P-5+1 countries reached no agreement about further sanctions against the Islamic Republic over its nuclear activities; as we pointed out in a post on January 14, China’s Vice-Minister for Foreign Affairs, He Yafei, who has been representing his country in the P-5+1 political directors’ meetings, declined to […]
Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Islam
Elyse Semerdjian. Off the Straight Path: Illicit Sex, Law, and Community in Ottoman Aleppo. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2008. xxxviii + 247 pp. $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8156-3173-6. The content of Off the Straight Path is less juicy than its title suggests. The reader with an appetite for stories of sexual scandals and dangerous liaisons […]
US: From Sanctions to War against Iran?
Kenneth Katzman: Certainly, as long as the floor is open for talks, there is always a hope for a deal. But I think, from the US standpoint, the United States is certainly not counting on a deal. Obviously, the thrust of US policy, I think, is starting to shift, from a focus on getting […]
Debating the Strategic Significance of Iran’s Natural Gas
Following on from our recent post, “Iran, the Competition over Eurasian Natural Gas, and the Revival of Classical Diplomacy in the 21st Century,” we want to draw readers’ attention, first of all, to a very thoughtful comment on that post from Ed Chow, our friend and colleague at CSIS. Ed generously notes his agreement with […]
Iran: A Good Time for Goodbye to Subsidies
See the Oil Wars blog for a similar perspective on the contradictions of populist political economy (especially the difficulty of making a sensible trade-off between consumption and investment) in Venezuela. How do you respond to the kind of perspective represented by Djavad Salehi-Isfahani (regarding Iran) and Oil Wars (regarding Venezuela)? Thoughts on this question will […]
China to Send “Lower-level” Envoy to P5+1 Talks on Iran Sanctions
In yet another demonstration of the (in)effectiveness of the Obama Administration’s quixotic quest to get China on board for what Secretary of State Hillary Clinton used to call “crippling sanctions,” the Chinese foreign ministry announced that Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei, who has been representing Beijing at meetings of the P5+1 political directors regarding […]
Sex Workers Targeted in New Orleans
More than half of the people on Louisiana’s Sex Offender Registry — which was designed for rapists and child molesters — are indigent women convicted of sex work. Tabitha has been working as a prostitute in New Orleans since she was 13. Now 30 years old, she can often be found working on a corner […]
The Obama Administration Moves toward Regime Change in Its Iran Policy
In one of our posts surrounding our January 6, 2010 Op Ed in The New York Times, we noted that “analytic views of Iranian politics since the June 12 presidential election have important implications for the debate about U.S. and Western policy toward Tehran.” In particular, buying into the proposition that the Islamic Republic is […]
Stop-Loss
Listen to “Stop-Loss” “Army Specialist and Iraq war veteran Marc Hall was incarcerated by the US Army on December 11, 2009, in Liberty County Jail, Georgia, for recording a song [“Stop-Loss”] that expresses his anger over the Army’s stop-loss policy. Stop-loss is a policy that allows the Army to keep soldiers active beyond the […]
Media Battles in Latin America Not about “Free Speech”
For at least a month now in Ecuador there has been a battle over regulation of the media. It has been in the front pages of the newspapers most of the time, and a leading daily, El Comercio, referred to the fight as one for “defense of human rights and the free practice of journalism.” […]
Iran: The Green Movement and US Foreign Policy
Soraya Sepahpour-Ulrich: . . . I think there’s nothing new that the West is painting a distorted image of what’s going on in Iran. I also want to mention that it’s very normal to have political dissent in any country. Iran is not unique in that sense. But what’s happening is by distorting the […]
A Year after the Gaza War
Speech at the Protest Rally, Tel Aviv, 2 January 2010 Good evening to all who came to mark the first anniversary of the Gaza carnage, and to protest on the comfortable complacence which inhabitants of this city and this country exhibit in face of the slow annihilation which goes on and on in Gaza […]
Bend It Like Iran (with Hooman Majd)
“The Iranians have always figured out how to beat the system. . . . Even Iranians who are opposed to this government, even Iranians who are opposed to the Islamic Republic, don’t really wanna return to being a client state of the United States.” — Hooman Majd
Long Live Palestine
Lowkey (born Kareem Dennis, 23 May 1986) is a British musician, poet, playwright, and political activist of English and Iraqi descent. Check out Lowkey’s MySpace page: . For bookings, email . | | Print
Cuba. Again. Still. Forever.
More than 50 years now it is. The propaganda and hypocrisy of the American mainstream media seems endless and unwavering. They can not accept the fact that Cuban leaders are humane or rational. Here’s the Washington Post of December 13 writing about an American arrested in Cuba: “The Cuban government has arrested an American citizen […]
