By Charles Recknagel, RFE/RL The United States is putting together the first international coalition to try to roll back the Islamic State (IS) militants in Iraq and Syria. But when the nearly 40-state-strong alliance starts operations, it will find that there is already another coalition on the ground whose presence could complicate the U.S.-led effort […]
A Way out of the Gaza Trap
By Jean-Pierre Filiu, author of Gaza: A History One person has been enjoying every minute of this summer’s fifty-day war on Gaza. He was known formerly as Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, until he changed his name to Caliph Ibrahim. His self-proclaimed “Islamic State” has been winning recruits by the dozen every time a child was killed […]
Is Israel’s Far-Right Government Inciting against the Israeli Left?
Middle East Eye Leftist Israeli activists staged weekly protests during the war in Gaza and they were confronted by rightwing protesters that shouted racial slurs and physical attacks. Middle East Eye: Israel’s Zionist Left: A Chronicle of Ambivalence
The Next Conflict in Iraq? Will the Kurds try to Annex Kirkuk Permanently?
By Nawzat Shamdeen | Berlin | via Niqash.org What will happen to Iraq’s “disputed territories” once Sunni Muslim extremists have been driven out? Will the Iraqi Kurdish military, who now control some of it, insist on staying? Or will conflicts between the Iraqi Kurdish and the Iraqi army make for the country’s next crisis? NIQASH […]
CBS Unjustly Punishes Rihanna For Ray Rice Controversy
Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks “CBS Sports pulled Rihanna’s intro to Thursday night’s NFL game between the Ravens and the Steelers following the release of video showing Ravens running back Ray Rice beating then-fiancée Janay Palmer in an Atlantic City casino elevator. CBS said it pulled the intro last Thursday to maintain an “appropriate […]
Gulliver and the Lilliputians: It’s America’s Small Wars that are Unwinnable
By Tom Engelhardt It’s possible I’ve lived most of my life on the wrong planet — and if that sounds like the first sentence of a sci-fi novel maybe, in its own way, it is. I thought I knew where I was, of course, but looking back from our helter-skelter world of 2014, I wonder. […]
Congressman Lloyd Doggett: Don’t be Stampeded into War
U.S. Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-Texas) House Floor Speech September 16, 2014 The Middle Eastern tragedy, in which this resolution will further entangle America, is directly related to the wholly unnecessary Bush-Cheney invasion of Iraq. Having learned so little from the sacrifices of that conflict, the Congress now approves greater involvement in a Syrian civil war […]
I refuse to serve – the lonely conscience of Israel’s refuseniks
By Ahron Bregman, King’s College London via The Conversation In 1988, I was in Kathmandu in Nepal when I found out that war was raging in the occupied territories; it would soon become known as “the intifada”. And when, in a small corner shop I spotted in one of the papers a picture of an […]
Employers’ theft from Worker Wages 3 times more than all other Theft in US
The Young Turks “As the economy slowly recovers, it’s become increasingly clear that it’s not just unemployed Americans who need help from the government. It’s those that are employed as well. “That’s the main finding of a new report from the Economic Policy Institute on wage theft. What is wage theft? It’s when employers refuse […]