Arab World

Tom Engelhardt writes at Tomdispatch.com Given these last weeks, who doesn’t know what an AR-15 is? Who hasn’t seen the mind-boggling stats on the way assault rifles have flooded this country, or tabulations of accumulating Newtown-style mass killings, or noted that there are barely more gas stations nationwide than federally licensed firearms dealers, or heard the renewed debates over the […]

Drones

Everything You Always Wanted to Know about US Drone Strikes *but Were Afraid to Ask (Currier)

Juan Cole

Cora Currier writes at ProPublica: You might have heard about the “kill list.” You’ve certainly heard about drones. But the details of the U.S. campaign against militants in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia — a centerpiece of the Obama administration’s national security approach – remain shrouded in secrecy. Here’s our guide to what we know— and […]

Israel/ Palestine

Cole : “The Syrian Regime Will Likely Fall, but it Could Take Time” (WorldView Show)

Juan Cole

I was interviewed by Denis G. Campbell of the UK Progressive for his internet news and affairs program, the WorldView Show, and the exchange has just been posted. We mainly talked about the ongoing violence in Syria and its regional implications, and about the plight of the Palestinians.

Syria

The Syrian Opposition Attacks Bashar al-Assad’s Defiant Speech (Aljazeera & Alarabiya via OSC)

Juan Cole

The USG Open Source Center translates broadcasts from Arabic satellite television concerning the speech on Sunday of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, in which he again dismissed his opposition as terrorists and blamed outside hands at the same time as he called for a vague political process. The revolutionaries were scathing in their responses. Pan-Arab TVs […]

Syria

Syria’s Head of Military Police Defects, as Death Toll in Revolution Climbs to 45,000

Juan Cole

Maj. Gen. Abdul Aziz Jasim al-Shalal, head of Syria’s military police, defected late Tuesday to Turkey, joining the revolutionaries against the regime. He announced his defection in a YouTube video, saying that the Syrian army is no longer fulfilling its primary mission, of defending the country from attack, but rather has become a gang attacking […]

Egypt

Egypt: Women Cut their Hair in Tahrir Square to Protest Fundamentalist Constitution

Juan Cole

Dozens of progressive Egyptian women cut their hair in Tahrir Square on Tuesday to protest the passage of Egypt’s new, fundamentalist constitution. The protesters chanted, “A woman’s crown is her liberation!” Mona Abd al-Radi, the secretary-general of the Union of the Women’s Organization of Cairo, and one of eight who cut her hair, said that […]

Egypt

New Fundamentalist Constitution Approved, Heralds turn to Egyptian Theocracy

Juan Cole

The Egyptian electoral commission on Tuesday signed off on the constitutional referendum, declaring that the country’s guiding legal framework had received a little over 63 percent of the vote. (It only got 56% in the first of two rounds, when the leftist, liberal and centrist opposition thought they had some chance of blocking it, but […]

Egypt

Christmas 2012: The Flowering of Middle Eastern Christianity and the Challenges it Faces

Juan Cole

There are more Middle Eastern Christians than ever before, and they are poised between emergence as a new political force in a democratizing region and the dangers to them of fundamentalism and political repression. The arguments you see for Christian decline in the region are mostly wrong. If we count the Christians in the Arab […]

Syria

200 Dead, Many Children, in Syrian aerial bombing of Halfaya

Juan Cole

Opposition forces said that Syrian fighter jets bombed the town of Halfaya near Hama on Sunday. The bombs struck a crowd standing in line to buy bread, and some 200 victims are said to have been killed, and dozens more injured. The attack on Halfaya likely was the regime’s response to its fighters confronting the […]