Featured

Did Israeli PM Netanyahu start Bombing Gaza Again to Stay out of Jail and Appease Fascists in his Cabinet?

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The propaganda put out by the Biden administration would have us believe that the Israeli government, shocked by the horrid October 7 terrorist attack by Hamas, is turning Gaza into rubble in a quest to destroy Hamas and prevent the recurrence of such an assault. On December 1, the United […]

Cambodia

How War Criminal Kissinger paved the Way for a Genocidal Total War on Gaza’s Civilians

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Henry Kissinger’s death at 100 is an opportunity to consider the ways in which his lawlessness helped undermine International Humanitarian Law, the laws of war that responsible leaders attempted to erect to prevent the horrors of WW II from recurring. In his single-minded calculation of supposed “national” interest, which he […]

Featured

How Israel Sabotaged U.S. Nuclear Diplomacy with Iran

Marc Martorell Junyent

Critical Review of Ilan Evyatar, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonathan Davis, Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023. Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – The book starts with a heist […]

Arab Americans

Three Young Men Shot down in the Name of an Anti-Palestinianism that cannot Be Named

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – As Peter Beinart correctly argues, anti-Palestinianism is not a word in American English. I can tell since the internet helpfully underlines it in red to mark it for correction whenever I write it. Of course, it ought to be a word. It can become a word. It needs to become […]

Featured

The Gaza Crisis has Exposed the Bankruptcy of the UN and International Humanitarian Law, Threatening a Rules-Based Order

Hilal Cibik

Gaza has been enduring one of the most devastating massacres in this century. The Strip has been under blockade for two decades, and the world has recently witnessed some of the bloodiest days in the region’s history. On October 7th, following a horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel that took some 1200 lives and […]

Featured

President Biden needs to Dump his War Hawks and Turn to Peace Work if he wants to Salvage his Presidency

Omer Abid

Grand Blanc, Mi. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – It has been clear since the horrid terror attack of October 7 by Hamas that President Joe Biden has been getting dreadful advice from his top officials, whether at the State Department, the CIA or the National Security Council. The president’s refusal to draw any red […]

Christianity

Juan Cole: Infidel or Pagan? Understanding Kufr (كفر) in the Qur’an | Muhammad the Prophet of Peace

Juan Cole

Gabriel Said Reynolds of Notre Dame writes: “In this video I interview Professor Juan Cole, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan. We discuss the historicity of Muhammad’s raids as well as the picture of the messenger that is obtained when one focuses on the Qur’an alone. The bulk […]

Featured

How Long will Palestinians go on being Scapegoats for the West’s Atrocities in WWII?

Sara Jamshidi

Seattle, Wa. (Special to Informed Comment; Featured) – If an Arab writer would create a Palestinian version of Schindler’s List, and if an Arab, or a filmmaker sympathetic to Arabs, would create the movie, I wonder what the story would look like. I wonder what the writer would write. I wonder what the filmmaker would […]

Colonialism

That Time when Napoleon Bonaparte’s Army in Palestine Burned Crops, Pounded Houses with Artillery, and Cut off Water to Cities

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – On 24 June 1799 General Louis-Alexandre Berthier wrote a dispatch from Ottoman Palestine back to the French Ministry of War (people were more honest back then) about the French retreat from their failed attempt to take Ottoman Palestine. Since the army ravaged the Palestinian countryside with retaliatory attacks, given their […]