By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Hassan Nasrullah, the secretary general of Lebanon’s Hizbullah, called for a new Palestinian uprising or intifada in the wake of Trump’s recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. He said Trump had thereby issued “A second Balfour Declaration.” (The first was in 1917 when the British cabinet […]
How Trump’s Jerusalem Move Just Helped Iran Win the Mideast
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Some sections of the crazy quilt that makes up the Trump administration want to push Iran back out of the Arab world and weaken it, in support of Israel and Saudi Arabia. Those actors have just been handed a big setback by Trump’s slurred and crazed […]
Another way Trump will get us Killed: to move US embassy in Israel to Jerusalem
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The White House says that the US is preparing to move its embassy to Jerusalem and recognize that city as Israel’s capital instead of Tel Aviv. It is calling this move a “recognition of reality.” It is not, it is the creation of a deadly and […]
German Poll: Trump a bigger Challenge than N. Korea, Russia or Syria
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – A public opinion poll on German foreign policy carried out by the Koerber Foundation for its annual Berlin Forum has a bombshell finding: Germans are more disturbed about Trump and see relations with him as a bigger challenge than relations with North Korea, Russia, or than […]
If you’re not Driving an Electric Car you’re Losing Money
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The Guardian reports on a new study showing that right now, in 2017, owning and operating a purely electric car such as the Chevy Bolt or a Tesla 3 or a Nissan Leaf is cheaper than operating a gasoline/ petrol automobile. For the moment, the researchers […]
How Hezbollah deals with Hariri Crisis will affect Mideast Stability
By Elias Ghazal | (The Conversation) | – – When the prime minister of Lebanon, Saad Hariri, suddenly resigned from office while visiting Saudi Arabia on November 4, the Lebanese people and their leaders struggled to make sense of it. First they were shocked when they watched Hariri’s deeply unsettling eight-minute resignation video, which was […]
The Art of Keeping Guantanamo Open: The Uncharged, Untried and their Paintings
By Erin L. Thompson | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – We spent the day at a beach in Brooklyn. Skyscrapers floated in the distance and my toddler kept handing me cigarette filters she had dug out of the sand. When we got home, I checked my email. I had been sent a picture of a […]
Top 3 Bad Pieces of News for Trump in Flynn Plea Deal
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Trump got three pieces of bad news on Friday, along with the one good piece of news that he managed to lower taxes on himself and his billionaire cronies as the expense of health care for working people. The first piece of bad news is that […]
Trump ‘Working Visit’ to Britain has to be Cancelled after he outrages all 65 million Britons
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – You can’t take him anywhere. And, he is leaving a trail of US diplomatic catastrophes even with close allies. In the aftermath of massive and almost unanimous British outrage at Trump’s retweets of anti-Muslim hate videos (one phony and two irrelevant to Muslims in general) posted […]