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Egypt

Egypt’s Cover-Up: Rabia Massacre One Year Later

By Sarah Leah Whitson Published in: Open Democracy “Forget about Morsy, forget about Rab`a,” my Egyptian neighbourhood grocer told me the other day, expressing the loyalty to the president, Abel Fattah al-Sisi, shared by many of his countrymen back home. “We are saved from these people.” Yet, one year later, there is no forgetting the […]

Iraq

Sexual violence as a war strategy in Iraq

By Nazand Begikhani via Your Middle East “These are strategic theories of rape in wartime which have been deliberately practiced by IS jihadists in Syria and now in Iraq,” writes Dr Nazand Begikhani. In the last few days, while the world has been overwhelmed by the flow of information about atrocities committed by Islamic State […]

Colonialism

Gaza and the Palestine Crisis in History: World War II

By William R. Polk At the outbreak of World War II, both Palestinians and Zionists enlisted in large numbers — 21,000 Jews and 8,000 Palestinians — to help the British in their hour of need. But both kept their long term objectives firmly in mind: both continued to regard British imperialism as the long-term enemy […]

Featured

The Long Knives Come out in Baghdad

By Juan Cole The coup-like atmosphere created by Nouri al-Maliki’s stationing of his troops at the Green Zone, checkpoints and bridges in Baghdad on late Sunday backfired on him with Iraq’s parliamentarians. Nearly half of the members of his Islamic Da`wa Party (Islamic Call or Mission Party) in parliament defected from him. Most of the […]

Iraq

Nightmare in Iraq

Joe Stork via Human Rights Watch Fearing for their lives, more than 150,000 Yezidis fled Sinjar and surrounding villages to mountains north of the city on August 3, 2014 when the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) attacked the area. Some young and elderly are dying from the harsh conditions. I visited a Yezidi […]

Colonialism

Gaza and the struggle for Palestine: the 1930s

By William R. Polk Annoyed but not deterred, the British Colonial Office decided in the 1930s, as it was then also doing in India, to crack down hard on the “troublemakers.” It put Palestine under martial law and brought in 20,000 regular soldiers to be quartered on rebel villages, blew up houses of suspected insurgents […]

Israel

Israel can’t Afford to Lose Jews Like Me

by DAVID H. SCHANZER for ISLAMiCommentary David Schanzer Writing in the New York Times . . . , columnist Shmuel Rosner labeled non-Israeli liberal Jews that are becoming more estranged from modern day Israel, as “fair weather fans” that Israel both can and should ignore. He is dead wrong on both counts. I am far […]

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