Geography Archives: Syria

Last week, stories surfaced in the Lebanese and Arabic press, saying that Syria was about to do away with Article 8 of the constitution that designates the Ba’ath Party as “leader of state and society.”  This of course was before President Bashar al-Assad gave a speech on Monday, hinting to the possibility of either doing […]

The fact that the corrupt Ma’mun Al-Humsi is a member of the council reveals a lot about its corruption and about its control by the House of Saud and Hariri Inc.   Ma’mun Humsi once said that the Hariri family does not buy people.  Enough said. As’ad AbuKhalil is a professor of political science at California […]

  Much of the commentary in the Arabic media in recent days has focused on the realignments taking place across the Middle East as a result of the various Arab uprisings. Ammar Nehmeh, an occasional columnist at the Beirut-based leftist daily As-Safir, wrote that forces that traditionally resist U.S. policy in the region, and that […]

Seldom it is that the Russian Foreign Ministry chooses a Sunday to issue a formal statement.  Evidently, something of extreme gravity arose for Moscow to speak out urgently.  The provocation was the appearance of a United States guided missile cruiser in the Black Sea for naval exercises with Ukraine.  The USS Monterrey cruiser equipped with […]

  Jean Bricmont: There’s no limit to how crazy they can be.  They haven’t finished the war with Libya, which was supposed to last days, not weeks, not months.  Now it’s been months, they say another three months.  So they haven’t even finished Libya yet, and they are maybe going to go to another war […]

  Today, with the declaration of “Day of the Clans,” it becomes obligatory for one to distance oneself from the dominant reactionary forces within the Syrian opposition.  It is clear that the same reactionary forces that have been at the heart of the Iraqi opposition under occupation are there in the Syrian opposition.  What about […]

  RIA Novosti Russia is against any UN resolution on Syria as the situation in the country is not threatening to global security, Foreign Ministry spokesman Alexander Lukashevich said on Thursday. Britain and France submitted a new draft resolution on Syria on Wednesday.  The UN Security Council will vote on the document in the next […]

An old story from Istanbul in the Ottoman era mentions a Turkish imam who killed a Christian and confessed the crime, whereupon he was advised by the judge to talk things over with the mufti who told him privately that a good Muslim never admitted felony against infidels and he should simply recant his confession.  […]

Russia went to the Group of Eight (G-8) summit meeting at Deauville as an inveterate critic of the “unilateralist” Western intervention in Libya, but came away from the seaside French resort as a mediator between the West and Libyan dictator Muammar Gaddafi.  The United States scored a big diplomatic victory in getting Moscow to work […]

  So Syrian opposition groups met in Antalya.  I closely followed that conference and read about their deliberations and received reports about it. There are Syrian leftists who argue with me constantly that I should not reduce the Syrian opposition to lousy Khaddam or lousy Ma’mun Humsi (a tool of Hariri Inc.) or lousy war […]

  Syrian opposition groups will be meeting for three days in Antalya, Turkey in a conference organised by the Egypt-based National Organisation of Human Rights (NOHR).  The conference, set to begin on Tuesday, 31 May, is to ‘support the revolt in Syria and claims of the Syrian people,’ said Ammar Qurabi, NOHR president.  The conference […]

Which is the tyrant? say you.  Well, ’tis he That has the vine-leaf strewn among his hair And will deliver countries to the care Of courtesans — but I am vague, you see. Abu al-‘Ala’ al-Ma’arri (973-1057), born in Ma’arra in what is today Syria, was a poet and philosopher.  This poem is from The […]

Painful events have been continuing in Syria for nearly two months, since the emergence of a protest movement raising legitimate local and general demands among people in the governorate of Daraa. This movement threw light on the presence of major problems in the political life in Syria: the continuation of the state of emergency, the absence of laws governing political activity, and so on.

Last year, we took the Washington Post‘s Joby Warrick to task for stories he published that relied “almost entirely on unnamed U.S. officials and a known terrorist organization” to advance “Iraq-redux” claims that the Islamic Republic is seeking to build nuclear weapons.  Now, Warrick published a front-page story in the Washington Post — a story […]

The last thing Russian President Dmitry Medvedev did before departing for France to attend this week’s Group of Eight summit meeting in Deauville was place a call to Damascus. Prima facie, one may think the call made sense, since, as Reuters reported, “Syria’s crackdown on pro-democracy protests” is going to be high on the agenda […]

  May 24, 2011, 19:30 In continuation of the telephone conversation between the presidents of Russia and Syria held on April 6, 2011, and on the eve of his trip to France for a G8 summit, Dmitry Medvedev stated the principled position of the Russian Federation regarding the events in Syria and around it.  The […]

The President of the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela communicated by telephone with his brother, the President of the Syrian Arab Republic, Bashar al-Assad, in order to convey to him a personal greeting full of affection and hope at a moment when the imperialist forces are unleashing violence against the Syrian people. President Hugo Chávez received […]

Elias Muhanna: Since when have Middle Eastern governments, or any governments for that matter, managed to stifle religious parties in the Middle East by preventing them from coming to the fore?  If they pass a political parties law in Syria but they don’t allow religious parties, don’t you think that’s just gonna blow up in […]

Fahd Bahady is a Syrian cartoonist.  This cartoon was first published in his blog on 23 May 2011; it is reproduced here for non-profit educational purposes.  Cf. Gil Ronen, “South Sudan Wants Ties with Israel” (Arutz Sheva, 17 February 2011); “Israel Hopes to Attain a New African Ally in S. Sudan” (Jerusalem Post, 29 February […]

The parties involved in the revolt in Syria so far have not made their programs public.  Undoubtedly, the drift of the Ba’athist regime, won over to neoliberalism and singularly passive in the face of the Israeli occupation of Golan, is the reason for the uprising of people.  However, the CIA’s intervention must not be ruled […]