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?
By Tom Engelhardt | ( Tomdispatch.com) | – – Honestly, if there’s an afterlife, then the soul of Osama bin Laden, whose body was consigned to the waves by the U.S. Navy back in 2011, must be swimming happily with the dolphins and sharks. At the cost of the sort of spare change that Donald […]
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
By Gail Ukockis | (Informed Comment) | – – “Oh, no. No. Never. Well, I’ll apologize if I need to. But for something like that, absolutely not. I stand by my comments.” This was the response by General John Kelly when asked on Monday night whether he was going to apologize to Representative Wilson for […]
Upshot of Mueller Probe: Putin did to US what we did to Iran and Iraq
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – The indictment of George Papadopoulos, the foreign policy adviser for the Trump campaign in 2016, for lying to the FBI is the most important news that came out Monday. What he lied about was the timeline of his contacts with the Russian Federation on behalf of […]
Climate Emergency: Heat Trapping Gases make largest Jump in recorded history
TeleSur | (Informed Comment) | – – Carbon dioxide or CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere have reached unprecedented high levels, a United Nations watchdog group reports, warning that urgent measures are needed to achieve the targets set by the Paris climate agreement and avoid cataclysmic changes in the earth’s climate conditions. “Concentrations of carbon dioxide […]
How Fox & Murdoch paved way for Putin Election Ploy
Reprint edn. Update: Reuters reports that “Facebook says 126 million Americans may have seen Russia-linked political posts” By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – In Edgar Allan Poe’s “Purloined Letter,” detective C. Auguste Dupin discovers a stolen letter in the thief’s own apartments after police searches had failed to turn it up. It […]
A mid-6th Century (Christian?) proto-Arabic Inscription from N. Arabia Mentioning Al-Ilah
(Politically oriented readers of IC please excuse this reprint of a path-breaking but extremely technical discussion in Arabian religious and linguistic history. It is highly important for the study of the beginnings of Islam, since it discusses an inscription from al-Jawf, Saudi Arabia dated to 548 CE, i.e. some sixty years before the beginning of […]
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