2021

By Layla Darwish | – ( Middle East Monitor ) – I was taking part in a recent protest in California, proudly waving my Palestinian flag, when a couple drove past in a white pick-up truck and shouted, “Go back to your country!” A light breeze grazed my arms, so I decided to retrieve my […]

Haredim

The Real Danger of Israel’s New Government

Phyllis Bennis

By Phyllis Bennis | – ( Foreign Policy in Focus) – The new Israeli government takes office already largely paralyzed. With eight diverse parties, they agree only on two things. One, they want to get rid of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Check — that’s done. Two, given the unlikeliness of reaching agreement on any major […]

Featured

If Hard Liner Raisi wins Iran’s Presidential Election, he has Trump to Thank

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – June 18 is election day in Iran. There are two main candidates for president, the arch-conservative Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s chief justice, and the centrist Abdolnaser Hemmati, an academic who served as chief of the national bank for the past three years. So it is sort of as though Chief Justice […]

Iran

Conservative hard-liner poised to be Iran’s next president – what that means for the West and the nuclear deal

The Conversation

By Nader Habibi | – ( The Conversation ) | – Iran’s conservative rulers’ effort to orchestrate the outcome of the June 18 presidential election triggered a voter boycott – but the result may still bode well for ongoing negotiations over the lapsed 2015 nuclear deal. The leading candidate is Ebrahim Raisi, chief of Iran’s […]

Antisemitism

5 ways to push antisemites and the Alt-Right out of the Palestinian solidarity movement

Waging Nonviolence

By Shane Burley | – With support for Palestinian freedom hitting a new level, intentional strategies are needed to stop white nationalists looking to hijack the movement. ( Waging Nonviolence ) – As Israel resumes its bombing of Gaza, and settlers attack Palestinians on both sides of the Green Line — the boundary between what […]

Militarization

The other Big Lie undermining Democracy: Why our Recent Wars Began, and how Badly they were Bungled

William J. Astore

( Tomdispatch.com) – Americans may already be lying themselves out of what little remains of their democracy. The big lie uniting and motivating today’s Republicans is, of course, that Donald Trump, not Joe Biden, won the 2020 presidential election. Other big lies in our recent past include the notion that climate change is nothing but […]

Featured

Not only Should Congress repeal 2002 Authorization for use of Force in Iraq, it should Apologize for that Pack of Lies

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Jacob Pramuk at CNBC reports that Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and the Biden White House are backing an attempt to repeal the 2002 Authorization for the Use of Military Force that allowed the Bush administration to launch the Iraq War. The repeal is driven in part by the Trump […]

China

Is Putin’s Positive View of the Biden Summit a sign he is Souring on his China Alliance?

Nikola Mikovic

Belgrade (Special to Informed Comment) – The results of the historic summit between the US President Joe Biden and his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin, held in Switzerland on June 16, will be felt for some time. Officially, the two leaders discussed Syria, Libya, Iran, Afghanistan, Ukraine, hacking and “strategic stability”, but what they agreed during […]