By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Oman Daily’s Jabbar al-Rubaie reports that Iraqi security sources announced yesterday that Daesh (ISIL, ISIS) had executed a number of the residents of the city of Hawija near Kirkuk in northern Iraq because they attempted to escape the city, over which Daesh holds sway. Hawija […]
Archives for August 2016
Nagasaki, 1945: “The world did not need your experiment”
By H. Patricia Hynes | (Informed Comment) | – – Kyoko Hayashi nearly died on August 9, 1945 in the atomic bombing of Nagasaki. She was fourteen years old and working at a factory less than a mile from the epicenter of the atomic explosion. She traveled barefoot for nine hours through the ruins of […]
Obama not only did not pay Iran Ransom, he denied Iran Billions it had Coming to It
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Zack Beauchamp at Vox has a very clear explanation of why the $400 million the US paid to Iran in January was not a ransom for hostages. The fact is that the Obama administration dodged a likely ruling by an arbitration court against the United States […]
The Decay of American Politics: Pseudo-Election 2016
By Andrew J. Bacevich | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – My earliest recollection of national politics dates back exactly 60 years to the moment, in the summer of 1956, when I watched the political conventions in the company of that wondrous new addition to our family, television. My parents were supporting President Dwight D. Eisenhower for […]
Donald “Dr. Strangelove” Trump and some of the Times We almost had a Nuclear War
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – I have long wondered why no one in Hollywood has remade Stanley Kubricks’s 1964 “Dr. Strangelove: Or How I learned to Stop worrying and Love the Bomb.” They’ve remade almost everything else from the 1960s, but that classic Peter Sellers film languishes in black and white […]
Dear Trumpists: Khizr Khan is not ‘Muslim Brotherhood’ and it wouldn’t matter if he Were
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – A Trump adviser is trying to smear Khizr Khan, the Pakistani-American legal consultant who spoke at the DNC, as a “Muslim Brotherhood agent.” This ignorant discourse is only possible because people just have no idea what they are talking about. It wouldn’t fly if done about […]
#CanYouHearUsNow: Muslim Women Lambast Trump’s Orientalism
TeleSur | – – Muslim women activists took to social media to take a stand against the Republican candidate’s bigoted drudgery. Muslim-Americans Khizr and Ghazala Khan, parents of the late Army Capt. Humayun Khan who died while serving in Iraq, became the latest targets of U.S. Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s incessant bigotry. While speaking […]
Black Lives Matter Protests in Palestine
TeleSur | – – BLM argued that police violence and killings against Black people in the U.S. are connected to the decades-long Israeli oppression of Palestinians. Activists from the Black Lives Matter movement in the U.S. joined a protest in the Palestinian village of Bilin near Ramallah city in the West Bank in an effort […]
6 Signs the Big Global Switch to Solar has already Begun
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – China has installed 20 gigawatts of new solar power just in the first half of this year. This achievement beats analysts’ expectations by a wide margin. China wants to add 20 GW of new solar every year for the next four, but apparently could do twice […]