Featured

Orono, Maine (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Empathy will never be exhausted as gaza schools and hospitals are torn asunder by pilots in fighter jets, their grievances transposed from another time and place into strafing refugee villages with clinical precision; All good gained from sufferings of times long past, all dissipated by the voracious bombing of innocents […]

Featured

Syria’s New Fundamentalist Government: Women “biologically” Unsuited to Politics, Universities to be Segregated

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Obeida Arnaout, the spokesman for the Sunni fundamentalist Levant Liberation Council (Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham or HTS) gave an interview on Wednesday with the Lebanese Al-Jadid channel that provoked a firestorm of protest among Syrian women and, well, non-fundamentalists. He pledged, “There will be no imposition of the hijab on the […]

Climate Crisis

Scientists: Cyclone Chido, which Devastated Indian Ocean Island of Mayotte, was 40% more likely to be a Cat 4 because of Climate Change

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Cyclone Chido devastated the Indian Ocean island of Mayotte, destroying an estimated 20,000 homes and wiping out entire shantytown neighborhoods. The island has about 65,000 households, so a third may be flattened. Godzilla-sized waves measured as high as 22 feet. About half the population still lacks electricity, and ironically water […]

Featured

Closing Israeli Embassy does not Deter Ireland from Recognizing Palestine, Joining Genocide Case against Netanyahu Gov’t

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The current Israeli Foreign Minister, Gideon Saar, is likely a war criminal by virtue of serving in the cabinet of a government pursuing a genocide. He nevertheless had the gall to accuse the Prime Minister of Ireland of being a bigot, closing the Israeli embassy in Dublin on the grounds […]

Donald Trump

Trump: Turkey’s Erdogan staged “Hostile Takeover” of Syria using HTS Proxies, and is the “Victor”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Donald J. Trump held an impromptu press conference at Mar-a-Lago on Monday. In the course of his remarks, he said a couple of things about the Middle East, Informed Comment’s beat. Since he’ll be back in the White House in about a month, these observations give some clue as to […]

Featured

Iraq’s Barzani hails Syrian Leader’s Assurances on future of Syrian Kurds

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The fall of the al-Assad regime in Syria has broached again the issue of the largely Kurdish Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES) and its relationship to the new government. Many Kurds are fearful for their future, as Euronews reports. The officers of the new government have said […]

Featured

How did we Get Here? Excerpt from my new book “Gaza Yet Stands”

Juan Cole

This is an excerpt from a draft of the introduction to my new book, Gaza Yet Stands, which briefly sketches how Israeli colonial policies turned it into an open-air concentration camp. By the way, the book makes a great Christmas gift for your progressive friends and family members who agree that Christmas should mean that […]

Featured

Türkiye reaches 18.7 GW Photovoltaic Capacity, shows how Solar can meet Growing Air Conditioning demand

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – One of the paradoxes of human-made climate change is that as we heat up the planet by burning gasoline, coal and fossil gas, it makes the summers hotter. These torrid months impel people to run the air conditioner nonstop, which requires burning more coal or fossil gas, which causes it […]

Featured

With HTS rule of Syria and Taliban in Afghanistan, did the U.S. lose the “War on Terror”?

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – US policy in the Middle East is a dinosaur-like holdover from two eras, the Cold War and the “Global War on Terror” (GWOT). Here I would like to raise the question of whether the U.S. lost both. The United State government does a lot o hand waving about human rights, […]