By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Exciting news, folks: Informed Comment is in the midst of a major redesign and aims at becoming a magazine. The redesign is not cheap, and neither will be our plans to attract more writers for the site. And, we undertake this endeavor at a time when […]
Archives for November 2017
What Causes Mideast Extremism? It’s the Dictatorships, Stupid!
Middle East Monitor | – – The Foreign Minister of Qatar said on Thursday that extremism in the Middle East is the result of authoritarianism, the Qatari News Agency has reported. Mohamed Bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani expressed his sadness that the region has become a region of instability instead of peace and coexistence. “People are suffering […]
‘Trump Talks Too Much’: Iran Shrugs Off Oil Boycott Threat
TeleSur | – – An Iranian official said Trump sees himself as the chief of a global village: “This comes as he is just the president of the U.S., and a hated one.” Iran has denounced a potential boycott of the country’ss crude oil recently floated by U.S. President Donald Trump, slamming the statements as […]
Trump still wants Expensive Coal but the Market wants Cheap wind & Solar
By Jonathan Marshall | (Consortiumnews.com) | – – Market trends now favor renewable energy as a cost-effective alternative to fossil fuels, but President Trump’s resistance to this good news is doing real damage in the fight against global warming, reports Jonathan Marshall. With petrochemical billionaires Charles and David Koch paying many of the GOP’s bills […]
Will Trump manage to stab both Syrian Kurds and Turkey in the Back at same time?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Trump is alleged to have promised Turkish President Tayyip Erdogan that he will cease arming the YPG Kurds in Syria. This news comes just around the time there is a flurry of articles about how the Trump administration wants to stay long term in eastern Syria, […]
Extremists Kill 235 at Mosque in Egypt’s Sinai
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – A massive explosion went off outside a mosque in the small town (pop. 2500) of Rawdah 12 miles west of El Arish on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt’s Sinai peninsula yesterday, and then the mosque congregation was targeted by gunmen, killing at least 235 and wounding […]
The Falsehood of Trump’s ‘Precision Strikes’ and ‘Clean Wars’
By Paul Rogers | ( OpenDemocracy.net) | – – Trump’s worldview promises low-cost military success. The blasting apart of civilian lives in Iraq says otherwise. Many previous columns in this series focus on the transition in the western way of war since 9/11 from tens of thousands of “boots on the ground” to “remote warfare”. […]
Saudi Arabia makes it ‘Terrorism’ to Criticize the King
Human Rights Watch | – – (New York) – Saudi Arabia’s new counterterrorism law includes vague and overly broad definitions of acts of terrorism, in some cases punishable by death, Human Rights Watch said today. The law replaces a widely criticized counterterrorism law promulgated in 2014, adding definitions of specific acts of terrorism and their […]
Israel’s Bedouin as Sisyphus: Homes destroyed over & over
By Aniqa Raihan | ( Foreign Policy in Focus) | – – Thousands of Arab Bedouins in Israel’s Negev desert are denied power, water, sewage, and roads by the state. And their villages are under constant threat of demolition. Photo: Aniqa Raihan Before the creation of modern Israel, the Negev desert, which constitutes the southern […]