Geography Archives: Turkey

Joshua Landis: Well, this [speech delivered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on 30 March 2011] was a classic hard-line speech.  It was a nationalist speech.  It was an us-against-them speech.  And he rallied the nation.  And that’s what he sought to do.  He was fairly relaxed.  He made some jokes.  But he said this is […]

Yes, “collaborators,” that’s the word, not “revolutionaries.”  Calling a spade a spade can at least get rectification started, though, pace the street-fighting intellectual, too late in the game. — Ed. The US-Nato intervention in Libya, with United Nations security council cover, is part of an orchestrated response to show support for the movement against one […]

The imperialist killers headed by the USA, France, Britain and NATO as a whole and with the approval of the UN started a new imperialist war.  This time in Libya. Their allegedly humanitarian pretexts are completely misleading!  They throw dust into peoples’ eyes!  Their real goals are the hydrocarbons in Libya. We, the Communist and […]

Dakar, Senegal (PANA) — Ongoing attacks on Libya by Western forces occurred in defiance of the ongoing efforts by the African Union (AU) to explore the diplomatic option to resolve the crisis in the North African nation. The Western coalition, including the US, UK and France, unleashed a barrage of missiles on Libya starting Saturday, […]

The Tunisian revolution has wiped out the Ben Ali system, and the Egyptian revolution is about to eliminate the Mubarak system after the fall of the president.  No doubt, the epoch of unlimited domination in the Arab world is coming to its end.  After decades of despotic, patronage-based regimes, the Arab peoples seem determined to […]

As everyone knows, Muammar Gaddafi is an authoritarian dictator.  Authoritarian dictators are a dime a dozen in world history, though, so that is not what would distinguish him from the rest of his kind in history books.  What might make him stand out is this: in the twilight of his autocratic career, Gaddafi had become […]

Which way to look?  So much was happening inside and outside Germany!  Most dramatic were the revolutionary events on the southern shores of the Mediterranean.  Aside from amazement that those decade-long dictators could be forced out by the will of the people, there were some worries among sun-seeking German vacationers who annually flee the icy […]

Millions of people in Egypt and all over the Middle East erupted in joy as Omar Suleiman announced on Friday that Hosni Mubarak had resigned. The Egyptian military decided to oust a widely-resented dictator as it witnessed the growing threat of a potential revolution being born in Egyptian streets.  Had it been allowed to continue […]

Since yesterday, and actually earlier, middle-class activists have been urging Egyptians to suspend the protests and return to work, in the name of patriotism, singing some of the most ridiculous lullabies about “let’s build new Egypt,” “let’s work harder than even before,” etc.  In case you didn’t know, actually Egyptians are among the hardest working […]

“Freedom lies behind a door closed shut,” the great Egyptian poet Ahmed Shawqi wrote in the last century.  “It can only be knocked down with a bleeding fist.”  More than that is bleeding in the Arab world at the moment. The uprisings we are witnessing in Egypt have been a rude awakening for all those […]

America’s international standing is under mounting strain on multiple fronts.  Nowhere is this more glaring than in the Middle East, where the balance of influence (and hence power) is shifting away from the United States and toward Iran, Turkey, and their allies.  This trend may, in fact, accelerate as a consequence of ongoing unrest in […]

  People’s Houses (Turkey) is preparing to organize the second People’s Rights Forum on 21-23 January 2011 in Ankara, in a time when people’s rights struggles against neo-liberal capitalist aggression on labour, humanity and nature are growing. The first People’s Rights Forum was held in July 2007 with the common initiative and contributions of People’s […]

Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  Cf. “The year 2011 promises to be auspicious for the security industry.  On the 31st of December, the Greek government announced its intention to build, on the land border with Turkey, a barbed-wire wall to prevent entrance of migrants.  A few weeks before that, Israel began building a barrier […]

Shown the word “Kurd” on an eye chart . . . : General: “Turk!” Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan: “Voter!” Carlos Latuff is a Brazilian cartoonist.  Cf. Delphine Strauss, “Turkish Army Wades into Kurdish Debate” (Financial Times, 17 December 2010). | Print

Yesterday was the 10th day of the Muslim holy month of Muharram — commemorated by Shi’a Muslims for centuries as the holy day of Ashura.  (We send our best wishes to all of our readers who are observing this special time.)  One of our readers highlighted something truly striking that happened yesterday, in connection with […]

  “The silent vigils started with the disappearance of Hasan Ocak, who was detained by police in Istanbul on March 21, 1995.  55 days later, his tortured body was uncovered in a graveyard for unidentified people.  Ocak’s family and friends led the first sit-down protest. . . .” Bijoyeta Das is an independent multimedia journalist […]

In the run-up to a new round of nuclear talks between the P5+1 and Iran on Monday, Western commentators are re-hashing old arguments that the Islamic Republic is either too politically divided or too dependent on hostility toward the United States for its legitimacy to be seriously interested in a nuclear deal.  From this perspective, […]

  I am in Tel Aviv.  70 km away from the fires, I cannot even see the smoke cloud above the Haifa area, which is moving into the sea and may reach Cyprus before it comes to me.  The pictures on my plasma TV are, however, very saddening.  You see tens of thousands evacuated from […]

The corporate media are reliable and consistent.  They consistently focus on the sensational, and they reliably take the position of the US government.  So, it should come as no surprise that the recent release of US diplomatic cables by WikiLeaks is being covered with much sound and fury, signifying little. On the sensational and gossip-mongering […]

The media spin on the latest batch of WikiLeaks revelations gives the impression that, next to Israel, it’s the Arab states that are most energetically pressuring the U.S. to attack Iran.  In terms of the real threat to Iran, that’s definitely putting the cart before the horse. In the first place, the Arab governments mentioned […]