Archives for 2006

Condi told by Olmert to Back off? Steve Clemons reports that the Israelis have told US Secretary of State Condi Rice to back off her calls for Israel to exercise restraint in its responses to Hizbullah.

Iraqis Condemn Israeli Attacks Both Sunni and Shiite clerics and politicians condemned the Israeli attack on Lebanon on Friday. The Friday sermons were thunderous. Money and resources will likely flow to Hizbullah and the Palestinians. More later.

Is the Arab Spring turning to Dust under Israeli Bombardment? Petroleum hit $76.70 a barrel on Thursday, a record high price, in reaction to the new Middle East crisis. (Though in real terms, the 1980 post-Iranian revolution crisis price was probably $80 a barrel in today’s dollars). To those of you in the Gen-X and […]

Mashhadani: Jews the Source of all Iraq’s Problems And, remember how the Bush administration trumpeted the December 2005 elections in Iraq and the joining in of the country’s Sunni Arabs as a great advance? In fact, of course, what really happened was that hard line Sunni fundamentalists not much different from Hamas got 44 seats […]

Muqdadiyah Massacre of Shiites Baghdad Sunni Neighborhoods Organize Militias At Muqdadiyah, a mixed Sunni-Shiite town north of Baghdad, guerrillas came to a bus station, separated out 24 or more Shiites from the other passengers, and took them to a nearby village where they killed most of them (al-Zaman says they murdered 22). The massacre is […]

The Beginning of a New War? Will it Spill over on Iraq? All hell broke loose on Wednesday in the Mideast, with a Hizbullah attack on the Israeli army and Israeli reprisals, and the Israeli dropping of a 500 pound bomb on Gaza. I roundly condemn Hizbullah’s criminal and stupid attack on Israel and escalation […]

Of Mushrooms and Peak Experiences The magic mushrooms really do work. Depending on what you mean by “work.” I suspect that these mushrooms were used to make the soma of the ancient Hindu scriptures, and the haoma of ancient Iran. The mushroom-produced drug induces feelings of oneness with the universe and afterwards, a sense of […]

190 Dead in Mumbai Train Bombings The likelihood is that the sophisticated coordinated attack on the trains in India’s western commercial hub of Mumbai (Bombay) was carried out by al-Qaeda-linked groups seeking the independence of Muslim-majority Kashmir from India. It is also possible that they are seeking, as Peter Bergen suggested on CNN, to encourage […]

Over 60 Dead as Faith-Based Killings Continue Kurds to the Rescue? By my count, nearly 200 Iraqis have been killed in civil war violence during the past 3 days, dozens of them murdered for having the wrong religious identity (Shiite or Sunni). The Associated Press reports that bombings and shootings took the lives of 60 […]