By Ramazan Kılınç | – Omaha, NE (Informed Comment) – Turkey is a country where the status of democracy and human rights has never been isolated from international developments. Turkey became a multi-party democracy only after it was threatened by Soviet Russia and put under the NATO defense shield. As I examined elsewhere, when Turkey […]
Archives for October 2019
Will Tunisia’s Populist “Robocop” new President bring “Freedom and Dignity” or . . .?
By Mohamed Kerrou | – Kaïs Saïed has won Tunisia’s presidential election. This triumph came at the expense of the two forces that have dominated Tunisia’s political landscape since the 2011 revolution: Islamism and nationalist secular parties. Over the past eight years, these two movements failed to meet the urgent demands of the people, expressed […]
Will Massive Lebanese Demos end the Country’s Era of Corruption?
By Amira Abo el-Fetouh | – We may be too optimistic to hope that the massive demonstrations that have spread in all the cities of Lebanon will lead to the collapse of Hariri’s regime that has ruled the country for about 30 years. This regime was established when businessman Rafik Hariri, close to Saudi Arabia, […]
No, Trump isn’t Bringing Troops home: Not those in Syria, or any of the 60,000 in the Mideast
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Although Trump keeps talking about bringing the troops home from the Middle East, that isn’t what he is doing. There are some 60,000 US troops in and around the Middle East. There is no prospect of any significant number of them “coming home” any time soon. In fact, Trump just […]
An Arab Autumn:The Hidden Political Poison That Iraq And Lebanon Are Really Protesting About
By Mustafa Habib | Baghdad | (Niqash.org) | – This month Iraq and Lebanon have anti-government protests in common. Partially that’s due to the ineffective and deeply corrupt quota system their governments also share. There’s no easy way out of this trap. Politics More in common than you might know. Thousands of locals in Lebanon […]
The Rats of Oran: The Far Right’s War on Culture
By John Feffer | – ( Tomdispatch.com) – The far right is on a roll. Just a few years ago, liberals and conservatives would have considered its recent political victories a nightmare scenario. Right-wing extremists have won elections in the United States, Brazil, Hungary, India, and Poland. They pushed through the Brexit referendum in the […]
Archeology and Early Islam: A Yemeni Inscription to “Wadd,” the love god Denounced in the Qur’an
In the Qur’an, the chapter of Noah (71) contains a denunciation of the worship of a set of gods, most of which are not attested in northern and western Arabian inscriptions and the worship of which probably lapsed long before the era of the Qur’an (610-632 A.D.). One of them is Wadd, the god of […]
Trump hands Oil & Gas to Syria & Russia as he claims “We’ve taken control of the oil in the Middle East”
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Trump claimed that “we’ve taken control of the oil in the Middle East” as a result of his greenlight to Turkey to invade Syria. As usual, no one could understand what he was talking about. Syria and Turkey are not oil states, though Syria was doing 400,000 barrels a day […]
Fueling Global Heating: Our Tax System Rewards the Biggest Carbon Criminals
By Charlie Simmons | – ( Otherwords.org) – Last year, the biggest fossil fuel companies paid zero dollars in taxes — and actually received billions in rebates. By Charlie Simmons | October 16, 2019 Greta Thunberg, the 16-year-old Swedish climate activist who sparked student protests across the globe, had this to tell the UN General […]
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