There is still doubt in the minds of serious people about Israel’s attack on the Free Gaza flotilla and the events that lead to the death of 9 of the activists aboard. There can be little surprise of…
AGGREGATOR (archive)
Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah ‘worse than Hiroshima’
Published: 28/07/2010Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945,…
Now Afghanistan too shows the limits of American power
Published: 28/07/2010The catastrophic illusions and acts of official betrayal at the heart of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are being progressively exposed, one after another. In London, the former head of MI5 Eliza Manningham-Buller confirmed to the Iraq inquiry this…
President Obama: Why Are We in Afghanistan?
Published: 28/07/2010Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele recently said the unthinkable: Afghanistan is “a war of Obama’s choosing.” Steele’s remarks triggered a verbal slugfest between neocon proponents of endless war, such as William Kristol, and Iraq hawks turned Afghanistan doves, such…
How to fix Afghanistan
Published: 28/07/2010America’s war effort in Afghanistan remains adrift, a fact accentuated recently following the firing of General Stanley McCrystal.
Yet the problems that America faces are in many ways intrinsic to the nation it is trying to change, and part and…
Strategic Depth: a Pakistani or US doctrine?
Published: 28/07/2010Wow, what a week that was. US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton with a bag-full of demand-notes and directional charts, followed by an international Afghan Conference in Kabul where Russians, Chinese and Indians all but differed with the US strategy…
Iraq: a local dilemma or US design?
Published: 23/07/2010The former US ambassador to Iraq, Ryan Crocker, recently described the Iraqi elections and their aftermath as “high drama and low comedy”. It is the perfect description, yet he should have added that this was a natural outcome of the…
Tricky Bibi
Published: 22/07/2010This video should have been banned for broadcast to minors. This video should have been shown in every home in Israel, then sent to Washington and Ramallah. Banned for viewing by children so as not to corrupt them, and distributed…
Why Israel keeps moving to the right
Published: 21/07/2010Israel has been sliding into ever greater isolation in the few last years and this process has accelerated since Binyamin Netanyahu came to power in 2009. The international community is put off by his tactics: whenever the question of Israel’s…
Gaza – How to kill an economy
Published: 21/07/2010First close down the borders and refuse to allow any exports out.
Then ban the importing of any raw material for factories and businesses.
Force the commercial class to rely on expensive underground smuggling tunnels to procure what the community…
West Bank poverty ‘worse than Gaza’
Published: 21/07/2010Children living in the poorest parts of the West Bank face significantly worse conditions than their counterparts in Gaza, a study conducted by an international youth charity has found.
The report by Save the Children UK, due to be released…
Debunk of comparison between Israel, apartheid South Africa
Published: 21/07/2010Over 200 concerned Israelis, many of them of South African origin, attended a panel on “Combating Israel’s Delegitimization: Debunking the Apartheid Myth,” held Sunday evening at the Menachem Begin Heritage Center in Jerusalem.
The event was organized by two South…
The Netanyahu-Fayyad “economic peace” one year on
Published: 21/07/2010Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was elected on a platform of “economic peace” with Palestinians in the West Bank. He contended that developing the Palestinian economy, by providing Palestinians with jobs and a better living stands, would render the “problems”…
An Attack on Iran: Back on the Table
Published: 18/07/2010In late 2006, George W. Bush met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon and asked if military action against Iran’s nuclear program was feasible. The unanimous answer was no. Air strikes could take out some of Iran’s…
The GCC stocks the larder against future food crisis
Published: 14/07/2010Until recently, most international media have deemed the financial crisis as the main plague currently affecting the states of the Gulf Co-operation Council – Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE – as well as the rest of the…
Fadlallah – His door was always open
Published: 14/07/2010The passing of Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah is, naturally, an occasion to remember the person, and one can easily recall how his humble home in Beirut’s southern suburbs was more of a forum than a simple address.
It hosted innumerable…
Fadlallah’s Inspiring Life
Published: 14/07/2010BEIRUT — Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, Lebanon’s most influential Shiite Muslim leader who died in Beirut a few days ago, was a marja or a source of emulation for other Shiites, during his lifetime — just about the highest…
Lebanese cleric passes into lore
Published: 14/07/2010“Throughout my life, I have always supported the human being in his humanism and I have supported the oppressed. I think it is the person’s right to live his freedom and it is her and his right to face the…
Ayatollah Fadlallah tributes divide opinion
Published: 14/07/2010A Shia cleric dies in Lebanon and a CNN journalist gets fired for her tweet praising him while a British ambassador is made to apologise for eulogising him on her blog.
It could be yet another story about the pitfalls…
Washington’s state of denial claims yet more casualties
Published: 14/07/2010You’d be surprised how much can be revealed in a 140-character “tweet” on the Twitter social network. Octavia Nasr, a 20-year veteran editor at CNN, has managed through one such mini-message to demonstrate the extent to which the Middle East…
UNIFIL needs a charm offensive
Published: 08/07/2010Since the end of the July-August war of 2006, south Lebanon has not been the same. That is not because the war obliterated vast swaths of villages and residential communities, but because the presence of international forces has contributed greatly…
U.S. indirectly paying Afghan warlords as part of security contract
Published: 07/07/2010The U.S. military is funding a massive protection racket in Afghanistan, indirectly paying tens of millions of dollars to warlords, corrupt public officials and the Taliban to ensure safe passage of its supply convoys throughout the country, according to congressional…
The US in Afghanistan – Rifts or policy drift?
Published: 07/07/2010The storm in Washington over General Stanley McChrystal’s egregious conduct culminated in his swift dismissal and replacement. But the reverberations from this expose of the Obama administration’s dysfunctional national security team will haunt its Afghan mission for months to come.…
How lessons in the dark arts of special ops led McChrystal to the edge
Published: 07/07/2010They called it the “Death Star” because according to one source who worked inside it, “you could just reach out with a finger and eliminate” somebody. On the walls were banks of television screens, known by the special forces boys…
Israel has eyes on Lebanon’s resources
Published: 06/07/2010Newswire services have revealed that Lebanese President Michel Sulaiman has raised the super-sensitive offshore oil issue in the Eastern Mediterranean with his Syrian counterpart, President Bashar Al Assad. Sulaiman was quoted commenting: “There is an oil wealth in the sea…
Jordan’s New Electoral Law Disappoints Reformers
Published: 02/07/2010After months of civil society advocacy, King Abdullah recently promulgated a new electoral law in preparation for fall elections to replace the parliament dissolved in November 2009. To the dismay of local reformers, the revised law maintains the controversial one-man…
The two faces of Lebanon
Published: 01/07/2010Thousands of Lebanese and Palestinian activists are marching in Beirut today in support of social and economic rights for the more than 400,000 Palestinians living in the country’s 12 refugee camps.
A debate in the Lebanese parliament over granting civil…
EU’s Union for the Mediterranean drifts into irrelevance
Published: 30/06/2010Two weeks ago European leaders decided to postpone an upcoming summit of something called the Union for the Mediterranean. It is safe to say that very few people in the Mediterranean noticed or cared.
The story of the UfM is…
Egypt in awkward position on Gaza following Israeli attack on aid flotilla
Published: 30/06/2010GAZA CITY — With pressure building on Israel to lift its blockade of the Gaza Strip, Egypt finds itself in the uncomfortable position of continuing to help enforce the siege while watching Turkey outflank the region’s traditional Sunni Arab heavyweights…
Ankara’s Washington misreading
Published: 28/06/2010The flotilla attack, which turned out to be one of the saddest events of the Republic of Turkey’s recent history, still produces consequences in the Middle East and beyond.
Following the attack, Turkey waged a diplomatic war against Israel with…
Iran and Turkey: Friends Today, Rivals Tomorrow?
Published: 25/06/2010It is the friendship Western policymakers wish they could have prevented: Turkey — secular, Western-leaning, and a key member of NATO — drawing close to a resurgent theocratic Iran whose nuclear program and geopolitical ambitions present a full-frontal challenge to…
Israel and Turkey: “Friendemies”
Published: 23/06/2010Over the last couple of months I have been frequently asked why the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, government is so “enthusiastic” about the deterioration of relations between Turkey and Israel. I find such questions and the line of…
A new strategic divide in the region
Published: 23/06/2010In the past, I have argued in these virtual pages that problems between Turkey and Israel should not be considered as one-off events. There are structural reasons for tensions to flare up. Therefore I concluded that there would be ever…
Egyptian analyst Howeidy: Turkey embarrassed Arab regimes
Published: 23/06/2010Egyptian political analyst Fahmy Howeidy has said most of the Arab governments are not happy with the Turkish role in the Middle East because of Turkey’s firm stance against Israel as opposed to the standing of the Arabic regimes.
“First…
Turkey and the Freedom Flotilla
Published: 16/06/2010The disastrous Israeli interception of the Freedom Flotilla carrying humanitarian relief for the people in Gaza marked a turning point in the history of the Middle East and in the history of Turkish-Israeli relations in particular. The incident sent unprecedentedly…
Turkey: an honest broker in the Middle East
Published: 16/06/2010I can’t say I was surprised when I read Joshua Teitelbaum’s piece “Turkey is calling for a jihad against Israel”. For some time now, rather similar pieces regarding Turkey have been published in the American and European press. It’s clear…
Turkey’s Strategic U-Turn, Israel’s Tactical Mistakes
Published: 16/06/2010The Turkish-Israeli crisis touched off by the Gaza flotilla episode encapsulates the evolution of the two countries’ bilateral relations in recent years. Though it is the Turkish government that has slowly been changing its strategy vis-à-vis Israel by tilting more…
‘Gaza economy collapsing under siege’
Published: 15/06/2010Most of Gaza’s factories have closed and its water is polluted as a result of Israel’s policy of closing land crossings to all but humanitarian aid, according to a new report being released Monday by the human rights group B’tselem.…
New face of power in the Middle East
Published: 10/06/2010Ever since Israeli commandos stormed a ship carrying aid to Gaza killing nine activists, the face of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – the man who led denunciations of the raid – has been prominent on front pages and…
The Gulf and South Korea face threats of a similar kind
Published: 09/06/2010This past weekend in Singapore, I listened to the senior-most Asian officials, including the South Korean president Lee Myung-Bak, describe their predicament in dealing with North Korea at the International Institute for Strategic Studies’ Shangri-La Dialogue. It was difficult not…
Israel’s Turkish predicament
Published: 09/06/2010Losing an ally and friend should worry the people of Israel, if not their government. Turkey’s friendship was valuable for emerging from political isolation and the siege of popular hatred in an environment of hostility.
But it has been generously…
A Puppet on a String
Published: 09/06/2010No explanation can justify or whitewash the crime that was committed here, and no excuse can explain away the stupid actions of the government and the army. Israel did not send it soldiers to kill civilians in cold blood; indeed,…
In the aftermath of the Israeli assault
Published: 09/06/2010The assault and massacre committed by Israeli Defense Forces is sufficiently grave, but Turkey has continued talking about it perhaps even more than the Palestinians since Monday.
The issue has been transformed into a new nationalist uproar rather that an…
Catalyst for national catastrophe in the Middle East
Published: 09/06/2010So once again Israel wins the battle and loses the war. The decision to launch a naval commando assault on the Mavi Marmara cruise ship and the Gaza flotilla has irrevocably lost Israel the friendship of Turkey and triggered anti-Zionist…
Kalt und fest
Published: 09/06/2010Many years ago, when Ze’ev Jabotinsky and his followers were assaulted by waves of hatred and anger and called fascists and murderers, he issued a call to his adherents: “Kalt und fest!” – Cool and firm! This too shall pass.…
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