Human Rights

By Anne-Ruth Wertheim, Amsterdam Crystal Night took place on the night between 9 and 10 November 1938. Across the whole of Nazi Germany and parts of Austria, a pogrom was held against Jews. Jewish synagogues, shops, homes and businesses were ransacked which led to the atrocity becoming known as Chrystal Night after the shards of […]

Africa

Photo of the Day: Mandela Training in Algeria

Juan Cole

h/t Sami Ben Gharbia ‏@ifikra Nelson Mandela training with the Algerian Liberation Front in 1962. The Algerians fought an 8-year war, 1954-1962, to become independent from French imperialism, in the course of which between half a million and a million Algerians died (the population of the country was then 11 million). In 1962, South Africa […]

censorship

Blacked Out: Could Governments just Erase Dissidents from the Internet with a Click?

Juan Cole

By Peter Van Buren What if Edward Snowden was made to disappear? No, I’m not suggesting some future CIA rendition effort or a who-killed-Snowden conspiracy theory of a disappearance, but a more ominous kind. What if everything a whistleblower had ever exposed could simply be made to go away? What if every National Security Agency […]

Featured

Israeli Blockade of 40,000 Gaza Fishermen Briefly Broken by Youth Protesters

Juan Cole

About 200 Palestinian youth ctivists briefly broke the Israeli blockade on fishing off Gaza past an arbitrary 6-mile limit on Monday. World Bulletin writes: “”We want to show the world that there are people under occupation who are being starved in Gaza while the world is watching,” Ishraq Mahmoud, spokeswoman of the Palestinian Uprising Youth […]

Domestic Surveillance

American Writers are Self-Censoring to Avoid NSA Scrutiny (McCauley)

Juan Cole

Lauren McCauley writes at Commondreams.org: Recent disclosures of the NSA's widespread dragnet program coupled with its frequent targeting of journalists are having a 'chilling effect' on American writers, stifling their freedom of expression at great detriment to society, says a new report Chilling Effects: NSA Surveillance Drives U.S. Writers to Self Censor. Published Tuesday by […]

Human Rights

Against Demonizing Syria’s Refugees (Seeley)

Juan Cole

Nicholas Seeley writes in a guest column for Informed Comment On a sunny fall afternoon, Abdullah joined me for lunch in the sitting room of my apartment in Amman, Jordan, and told me his story. He hails from a small town in southern Syria, a cousin to some of the families I’ve become friends with […]

CIA

How the US Government Betrayed the Constitution and invented an Imaginary Fascist One

Juan Cole

The idea of having a strong Federal government was controversial in the early United States, and one of the ways Federalists reassured Americans that it wouldn’t become tyrannical was to append a Bill of Rights to the Constitution. That attempt to prevent despotism has failed, because the Federal government and its various agencies have set […]

censorship

Johns Hopkins University Orders Cryptography Professor’s Blog Posting Removed for Classified NSA Links (Larson & Elliott)

Juan Cole

Jeff Larson and Justin Elliott write at ProPublica Citing concerns about linking to classified material, Johns Hopkins University asked a professor this morning to remove a blog post discussing last week’s revelations about the NSA’s efforts to break encryption. The post had linked to government documents published by ProPublica, the Guardian, and the New York Times. […]

censorship

Greenwald Partner falsely detained as Terrorist: How to Create a Dictatorship

Juan Cole

How to turn a democracy into a STASI authoritarian state in 10 easy steps: 1. Misuse the concept of a Top Secret government document (say, the date of D-Day) and extend classification to trillions of mundane documents a year. 2. Classify all government crimes and violations of the Constitution as secret 3. Create a class […]