Featured

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The United Nations High Commission on Human Rights formally reported on Friday on the unjust water situation in the Palestinian West Bank, which is under Israeli military occupation and subject to an illegal colonization effort by Israel to displace the indigenous population with Israeli squatters. A draft of the report […]

Democratic Party

It isn’t Red COVID, it is Republican Necrophilia – Creepy Love of Death

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The United States has crossed the threshold of 700,000 Americans dead from COVID-19 according to data from Johns Hopkins University. Some 43 million Americans have contracted the deadly disease, which can have long-term health consequences. In contrast, the 1918 influenza epidemic killed 675,000 Americans. While this is the absolute number […]

Featured

Dozens of masked Israeli Black Shirts attack homes in small Palestinian Town, Injure Residents, including a Toddler

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Palestinian newspaper Quds gives the details of an attack this week by Israeli squatter-settlers on native Palestinians of the small town of Mafriqa in the vicinity of al-Khalil (which the Israelis call Hebron). Palestinian rights organizations said that on Tuesday, 60 armed squatters with clubs and handguns and stones […]

Asian-Americans

Top 5 Things Wrong with the Mainstreamed Racist Republican “Replacement Theory”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Dan Primack and Russell Contreras at Axios survey the ways in which the anti-Semitic, white supremacist “replacement theory” is being mainstreamed in the Republican Party. I pointed out in April that Tucker Carlson’s “White Power Hour” on Fox (Joy Reid’s term) is full of contradictions on replacement theory, and that […]

Afghanistan

Generals on Afghanistan: Yes, Trump is Largely Responsible for Chaos

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Senate Hearing on the collapse of Afghanistan, at which the top US generals testified, underlined that actions taken by the Trump administration had a significant impact on undermining the Ashraf Ghani government and the Afghanistan National Army. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin admitted that, “The fact that the Afghan […]

Featured

In Height of Hypocrisy, Nuclear-Armed Israeli PM Bennett slams Iran, which has no weapons or program, for “crossing all red Lines”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The Israeli newspaper Arab 48 reports that far-right Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett, in his address to the U.N. General Assembly on Monday, ignored the Israeli-Palestinian struggle and focused instead on the issue of Iran. He alleged that the Iranian nuclear program had “surpassed all red lines,” asserting that Iran […]

Climate Crisis

Israeli Youth Protest Israel-UAE Oil Pipeline that Endangers Climate, Key Coral Reefs: The Dark Side of “Abraham Accords”

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The so-called Abraham Accords, which take the patriarch’s name in vain, were about many things, but genuine peace was not one of them. The were a series of bilateral horse trades with no implication for Israeli-Palestinian peace. Now it turns out that they were in part a plot against the […]

Featured

Palestinian Parties, Organizations Greet Abbas’s Pledge to take Israel to Int’l Court as “Historic” and Roadmap

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – al-Quds [Jerusalem] reports that Palestinians in the West Bank greeted President Mahmoud Abbas’s UN speech, in which he pledged to take Israel to the International Court of Justice at the Hague* if its squatter-settlements weren’t withdrawn within a year, with widespread acclaim.* The ICJ “is the principal judicial organ of […]

Featured

Palestine President Mahmoud Abbas gives Israel a Year to Withdraw from Palestinian Territories or he will go to the Int’l Court

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – According to Al Jazeera, Mahmoud Abbas, the president of Palestine, gave an uncharacteristically vehement speech at the UN General Assembly on Friday. He said, “The crimes against the Palestinians in their own country committed by the Israeli Occupation authority will not halt their struggle to achieve liberty on their land.” […]