religion

By Juan Cole An Israeli crowd gathered outside the wedding of a Muslim man and a Jewish woman in Rishon Lezion, shouting “death to Arabs” on Sunday. They were from the far right Lehava group, and make a specialty of harassing couples in mixed marriages. They called Maral Malka, 23, a traitor for converting to […]

Featured

Can al-Abadi win over Iraq’s Moderate Sunnis?

Juan Cole

By Juan Cole Arguably, the so-called Islamic State (actually a vicious gang of serial killers) could never have taken over northern and Western Iraq if the largely Sunni Arab populations there had not been deeply alienated from the government in Baghdad by the openly sectarian politics of former Shiite prime minister Nouri al-Maliki. Al-Maliki systematically […]

Egypt

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

contributors

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

contributors

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 […]

Health

Hundreds, if not Thousands will Die: Film Crew finds Iraqi Yezidis still Trapped on Mountain

contributors

Channel 4 News “Dramatic footage as our Foreign Affairs Correspondent Jonathan Rugman helps drag dehydrated children to the back of a military helicopter who have fled Islamic State forces in northern Iraq. As the helicopter left Mt Sinjar it came under fire from IS militants and the helicopter crew are filmed returning fire. Camerawoman: Philippa […]

Colonialism

Gaza and the Palestine Crisis in History: World War II

contributors

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

Juan Cole

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

contributors

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

contributors

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 […]