By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – King Salman of Saudi Arabia created a high-powered “anti-corruption” commission on Saturday, appointing his son, the crown prince Mohammad Bin Salman, to head it. The committee is a sort of star chamber, with wide powers to freeze bank accounts, ground private jets, and order suspects jailed. […]
Rick Perry has it Backwards: Oil causes Mass Rape
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Somehow Secretary of Energy Rick Perry managed to find Africa, and while he was there, he learned that a lot of people don’t have electricity. In a news conference this week, he expressed the opinion that fossil fuels would prevent sexual assault. Perry said, assaulting and […]
Iran’s Khamenei to Putin: Isolate US by dumping the Dollar
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The president of the Russian Federation Vladimir Putin visited Tehran on Wednesday for consultations with President Hassan Rouhani and the country’s clerical leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Khamenei is quoted by Tahrir [Liberation] as saying that Russia and Iran could cooperate to isolate the United States and […]
Dear Sean Hannity: Allahu Akbar is in the Catholic Catechism
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Sean Hannity manages to combine being sneaky with being a bully. You think of a bully as maybe too straightforward, someone who hulks over others glaring and tries to impose his will on them. It is the 89 pound weakling we think of as sneaky, going […]
Dear John Kelly: Yes, Slavery was wrong in 1860s & Muslims helped Convince Americans to end It
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – John Kelly’s ignorant remarks about the Civil War and compromise on Laura Ingraham’s show have rightly angered a lot of people. One of the arguments he made was for historical relativism: ““I think we make a mistake, though, and as a society and certainly as, as […]
Is Bin Laden Shaping America more than our Founding Fathers?
The ‘War on Terror’ is destroying Democracy
That Time when Muslim Tunisia advised the Antebellum US to Abolish Slavery
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Revised classroom version Some observers imply that in 1861, most people in the world believed in slavery and so you can’t blame the American South for retaining it. This premise is not true. For one thing, a majority of American states had abolished slavery. Ohio did […]
No Compromise: Let’s not forget Kelly’s ‘Empty Barrel’ Smear
Kelly seems not to think enslaving people of African Heritage was Always Wrong
Upshot of Mueller Probe: Putin did to US what we did to Iran and Iraq
US Middle East policy often seemed similar to Putin’s Plot on America via Trump
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