Middle East

San Francisco (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – This week will go down in history as a time when the governing body of the Democratic Party had a chance to oppose the U.S. government’s arming of Israel. But with the first Democratic National Committee meeting in seven months getting underway on Monday, the DNC’s leadership […]

Climate Crisis

Iran’s Water Crisis Opens A New Front With Israel

Radio Free Europe Radio Liberty

( RFE/ RL ) – Amid soaring temperatures, power blackouts, and widespread water rationing, Pezeshkian painted a grim picture of the nation’s water woes. He warned that “there won’t be any water in the dams by September or October.” Pezeshkian described the situation as “a serious and unimaginable crisis,” pointing to depleted reservoirs and underground […]

Climate Crisis

When even Saudi Arabia Jumps into Solar and Wind Power, You know Change is Here

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Saudi Arabia’s massive oil deposits and its 9.53 million barrels per day (bpd) of petroleum production make it an enormous carbon polluter and the foremost enemy of climate science and of electric vehicles. Some 38% of Saudi power plants use petroleum and 62% of electricity generation is done by domestically […]

European Union

How Europe is managing Guilt over Gaza: The Politics of moral Cleansing

Global Voices

Europe’s distancing from Netanyahu masks deeper complicity in Gaza’s devastation and the silencing of Palestinians Written byGuest Contributor By Dalia Ismail ( Globalvoices.org ) In the last few months, a noticeable shift has emerged across Europe as several governments signal a willingness to pressure Israel by moving toward the recognition of a Palestinian state. France […]

Archaeology

Ancient Nomadic Scythians Found to be Ethnically Diverse

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The more genetic history that is done, the more it is clear that ancient ethnonyms, the names given supposed ethnicities, put a variety of peoples under a single rubric. I talked recently about how the Phoenicians, long thought to be what we would now call Lebanese, were actually a multi-ethnic […]

Displaced and Refugees

Making it official: Famine strikes Gaza City

Middle East Monitor

by Dr Binoy Kampmark ( Middle East Monitor ) – History shows that famines are, for the most part, engineered. Be it through carelessness, selfishness or plain malice on the part of officialdom, creating the circumstances under which a population expires to hunger is a matter of construction. As the economist and Nobel Laureate […]

Iran

Ancient Iran’s Paradise Pleasure Gardens: Unimaginable Beauty and Opulence

The Conversation

By Peter Edwell, Macquarie University (The Conversation) – Some of the most enduring ancient myths in the Persian world were centred around gardens of almost unimaginable beauty and opulence. The biblical Garden of Eden and the Epic of Gilgamesh’s Garden of the Gods are prominent examples. In these myths, paradise was an opulent garden of […]

Featured

Netanyahu far outscores Putin and George W. Bush in Killing innocent Civilians, at 83% of the Dead

Juan Cole

Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Political Scientist and liberal Zionist Michael Walzer gave an interview early in the Israeli campaign against Gaza in which he said, “It’s not easy for me to say such a thing, but if there were almost 10,000 Hamas fighters among the 30,000 Palestinians killed, it’s not a bad ratio for […]

Israel/ Palestine

Israel’s Plan for massive new West Bank Settlement would make a Palestinian State Impossible

The Conversation

By Leonie Fleischmann, City St George’s, University of London (The Conversation) – The Israeli government has approved a plan for construction of a massive new settlement bloc in the controversial E1 area in the occupied West Bank. In reviving a project first proposed in 1994, which will comprise about 3,500 new dwellings in a line […]