BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — At least 151 Palestinian children are currently being held as “security prisoners” in Israeli jails, Palestinian legal monitor Military Court Watch said in a statement on Tuesday. The group said that 47 percent of those are being held inside Israel in violation of the Geneva Conventions, which prevents the transfer of detainees […]
Archives for February 2015
The Lone-Wolf Terror Trap: Why the Cure Will Be Worse Than the Disease
By Matthew Harwood | (Tomdispatch.com) The shadow of a new threat seems to be darkening the national security landscape: the lone-wolf terrorist. “The lone wolf is the new nightmare,” wrote Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer recently, and the conservative pundit wasn’t alone in thinking so. “I really see [lone wolves] as being a bigger threat […]
‘Muslims are Jews’ natural allies in Europe’: Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt
RT | – “Europe’s economic difficulties in recent years have led to a rise in radicalism and anti-immigrant sentiment, and the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attacks brought these tensions to boiling point. How are these changes affecting Europe’s sizeable Jewish and Muslim minorities, and how are they testing the limits of Western ideas of tolerance and […]
Is ISIL’s ‘Shock and Awe’ more Awe-ful because One Victim?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – The Daesh (ISIL or ISIS) burning of a captured Jordanian pilot alive produced justified revulsion globally, resulting in the terrorist organization being termed “barbarous” and similar epithets. Why did it behave this way? Because it wants to terrify its opponents into submission and underline that it is too […]
Paying the Piper: How America’s Iraq War haunts its Failed Syria Policy
By Michael MacDonald, author of Overreach: Delusions of Regime Change in Iraq | (Special to Informed Comment | – If recent reports in the New York Times are to be believed, the Obama administration just got serious about the political realities gripping Syria and Iraq. Up to this point, the US has sought, for reasons […]
Huge Win for the Open Internet! FCC Officially Embraces Title II
By Corynne McSherry | Electronic Frontier Foundation | — Well done, Team Internet. After a year of intense activism, we may have finally convinced the Federal Communications Commission to change course and craft clear, bright-line rules to protect the open internet, based on legal authority that will actually survive the inevitable legal challenge. According to […]
Palestinian Family must visit graves via tunnel under Apartheid Wall near Bethlehem
BETHLEHEM (Ma’an) — Palestinians have suffered in many ways as a result of the Israeli separation wall, and in the case of one family in al-Walajah west of Bethlehem, the wall separates them from the graves of their relatives. Ahmad Barghouth, 66, told Ma’an he buried his parents and grandparents years ago in his field […]
Why is Fox News Propagandist-in-Chief for ISIL/Daesh Atrocities?
John Iadarola, Jimmy Dore, and Desi Doyen | The Young Turks | – “Fox News has chosen to embed on its website the video of Islamic State burning a hostage to death, a move which makes them the only US media organisation to broadcast the video in full. The extremely graphic 22-minute video shows Muadh […]
Angry Jordanian Crowds Rally over ISIL Murder of Pilot, but some blame US, King
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) – Jordanian protesters came out in the thousands on Tuesday to protest the gruesome murder by Daesh (ISIL, ISIL) of a captured Jordanian pilot, Muath al-Kasasbeh. He was from the central Jordanian town of Karak (pop. 70,000), 87 miles south of the capital of Amman, and crowds came out […]