Juan Cole

Could Thomas Jefferson's DNA Trail Reveal Middle-Eastern Origins? Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the Jefferson clan in the British Isles may have descended from a Phoenician merchant family that set up a trading post up there. Maybe the Lebanese (many of whom trace their ancestry to the Phoenicians) will get more interested in Jefferson’s […]

AFP Arabic reports that a female suicide bomber detonated her payload in a tent in northeast Baghdad (Bub al-Sham) among pilgrims walking to the Shiite holy city of Karbala, killing 56 and wounding 144 according to late reports. The pilgrimage commemorates the 40th day after the anniversary of the martyrdom of Imam Husayn, the grandson […]

US drones killed 123 civilians, three al-Qaeda men in January The Pakistani newspaper, The News alleges that: “Afghanistan-based US predators carried out a record number of 12 deadly missile strikes in the tribal areas of Pakistan in January 2010, of which 10 went wrong and failed to hit their targets, killing 123 innocent Pakistanis. The […]

Reuters reports that President Hamid Karzai is calling upon the Taliban and other insurgent groups to drop their demand that foreign forces leave the country before agreeing to attend a Loya Jirga or national tribal council in six weeks to seek reconciliation with the Karzai government. Karzai says he will go to Riyadh to seek […]

Reprinted from last spring. Bookstores and bibliophiles: time to get working on this–advertising, word of mouth, etc. for this year.. There is a delightful custom in Barcelona. On April 23, St. George’s Day, men give their girlfriends or wives a rose. And the women give their male beloved a book. The gift of the book […]

In an audiotape attributed to Usamah Bin Laden, the mass murderer called for a boycott of the US dollar and blamed the US for global warming. There is nothing worse than a terrorist who kills thousands of innocent people, but being a hypocrite is also a pretty bad character flaw, and Bin Laden manages both. […]

Coal River Mountain Protestors Meet with Governor – Huntington News Network The closest thing you might get in today’s world to Gandhists and followers of Martin Luther King, on a practical plane, are the campaigners in West Virginia against shearing off mountaintops for coal mining. Coal mining should be illegal, much less destroying the environment […]

Muslim inventions that shaped the modern world – CNN.com Coffee houses, surgical techniques, algrebra, some key institutional developments in universities and hospitals, all from Muslim science. Not to mention optics, astronomical advances (some think they influenced Copernicus), etc. And those alcoholic stills so popular in Kentucky during Prohibition? Yup, Jabir ibn Hayyan was behind them. […]

NATO troops appear to have made a horrible error in Afghanistan on Friday, as they clashed with what turned out to be Afghan National Army troops and called in an air strike on them, killing 4 and wounding 6. The governor of Wardak province where the fight took place said he was at a loss […]