Geography Archives: Middle East

  Because we can’t go.  We’ve lost a lot of people and we lost them for a cause.  The cause is that we want Mubarak to be out.  We owe it to them to stick it to the end.  We have many injured people; it will be very hard to move them. . . .  […]

“No trusting the army for their security anymore, protesters started putting up barricades around Tahrir Square and started forming security committees to protect their occupation from attacks by Mubarak’s thugs.” — Hossam el-Hamalawy “Tahrir is regaining its strength.  It’s getting lively again after yesterday’s brutal assault.” — Sharif Kouddous Graffiti sprayed on an army tank: […]

  What explains the diametrically opposed stances of the imperialist powers and corporate media: promoting regime change in Iran while endeavoring to preserve the fundamentals of the regimes, with or without modification, in Egypt and Tunisia?  In part, the increasingly anachronistic legacy of the policy and ideology about Israel developed in the wake of the […]

2 February 2011 Every revolution, sooner or later, has to stand on the barricades and fight a counter-revolution.  The scenes today at the Tahrir Square are nothing short of a scene that we imagine from the French revolution: the people holding ground against hordes of militiamen of a dying regime.  Young and old, women and […]

In 2002 Iran was added to the neoconservative-designed ‘Axis of Evil’ and thus declared ripe for US military intervention. The threat of war in the ‘greatest crisis of modern times’ (John Pilger in the New Statesman, July 12, 2007) was at its height in 2006-2007.  With President Obama assuming office in 2009, a great hope […]

Egypt is a cornerstone in the US plan of control of the planet.  Washington will not tolerate any attempt of Egypt to move out of its total submission, also required by Israel in order to pursue its colonisation of what remains from Palestine.  This is the exclusive target of Washington in its ‘involvement’ in the […]

  Protests sweeping Egypt have done more than raise hopes of democratic change.  Egypt’s women are hoping this might mark the start of a new era for them as well.  Women have been on the frontlines of the demonstrations, braving tear gas and gunfire, to call for the unseating of President Hosni Mubarak.  They helped […]

  “They gave them bribes to beat us, to beat us here. . . .  My friends here, my friends, my daughter and son, who are here among the people, who are here together, they want me to go home.  I said no.  I have to stay here, because . . . we have to […]

So not only did Vodafone have a disgraceful role during the April 2008 Mahalla uprising, now also the company is sending out text messages announcing pro-Mubarak’s protests. Massive demonstration to start at noon this Wednesday from Mustafa Mahmoud Square, in support of President Mubarak Can activists in the UK sue the mother company? Hossam el-Hamalawy […]

  “As soon as I saw the defiant tone and substance of Mubarak’s speech, I realized that he is not speaking for himself but for the US/Israeli sponsors. . . .  I just read the speech by Obama: it confirmed my suspicion, that basically Mubarak was permitted by the US to do with the Egyptian […]

GEB Statement on Recent Attacks on Civil Liberties On September 24, 2010, the FBI carried out coordinated raids on the homes and offices of fourteen anti-war activists in Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan.  During the raids, the FBI confiscated everything from computers and mailing lists to children’s drawings and photos of Martin Luther King. Ten of […]

Mubarak’s fate is sealed, not even the support of the United States will be able to save his government. The people of Egypt are an intelligent people with a glorious history who left their mark on civilization. “From the top of these pyramids, 40 centuries of history are looking down upon us,” Bonaparte once said in a moment of exaltation when the revolution brought him […]

Vijay Prashad is a prominent Marxist scholar from South Asia.  He is George and Martha Kellner Chair in South Asian History and Professor of International Studies at Trinity College, Connecticut.  He has written extensively on international affairs for both academic and popular journals.  His most recent book The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the […]

  Arab uprisings are taking place with the historical speed of light.  I began writing this piece following the downfall of Tunisian dictator Ben Ali and closed with the imminent downfall of the Egyptian one Hosni Mubarak.  The Tunisian and Egyptian uprisings are not, as some armchair pundits called the Tunisian one, Jasmine Revolutions.  They […]

“Guttenberg trotz Ansehensverlust beliebtester Politiker” [Guttenberg, Germany’s Most Popular Politician, Despite Scandals] (AFP, 28 January 2011). The German man of the hour is Baron Karl-Theodor von und zu Guttenberg.  Actually he has eight other given names, which modestly prohibits him from using, but the title shows that his family traces back to 1158.  He is […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.   Cf. Nancy A. Youssef, “Why Has Egypt’s Army Not Confronted the Protests?” (McClatchy Newspapers, 30 January 2011). | Print

Tomorrow the Egyptian people will go to the streets en masse to give the final blow to the regime.  The people are talking of a rally of millions, and people have been pouring into Midan Atahrir, Tahrir Square, today and heading towards Cairo from the provinces.  The regime closed all the roads and stopped the […]

  Amy Goodman: Your feelings today in the midst of this popular rebellion against the Mubarak regime, calling on Mubarak to leave?  Do you agree? Nawal El Saadawi: We are in the streets every day, people, children, old people, including myself.  I am now 80 years of age, suffering of this regime for half a […]

  Karl Marx, in his famous treatise on Louis Bonaparte’s coup d’état of 2 December 1851, pointing out its similarities to the coup undertaken by Napoleon Bonaparte a little over 50 years before, remarked that history has the tendency to repeat itself, ‘the first [time] as tragedy, then as farce’. As with so many other […]

US tax dollars at work. . . . Cf. “Security Assistance: State and DOD Need to Assess How the Foreign Military Financing Program for Egypt Achieves U.S. Foreign Policy and Security Goals,” GAO-06-437 (11 April 2006).  See, also, “Egypt’s Minister of Defense Joins Protesters in Tahrir Square” (Al-Masry Al-Youm, 30 January 2011). | Print