Hundreds of thousands of people from around the world have converged on countries bordering Occupied Palestine in an attempt to march to al-Quds (Jerusalem) in solidarity with the Palestinian people. Called the Global March to Jerusalem (GMJ).
The uneasy peace that had descended on Gaza after the bloody Israeli onslaught of December 2008–January 2009, code-named Operation Cast Lead, ended on March 9 when Israel launched an air strike against Zuhair al-Qaissi, Head of the Popular Resistance Committees group.
After the 2011 Libya War, a beleaguered Syria is the new Middle Eastern prize for which the world’s military-industrial gladiators are now battling. This smoldering long war was inaugurated by the Arab Spring, where the popular movements provided a perfect cover for the Anglo-American axis to slip in their Manchurian candidates a la the Syrian “opposition.”
Civilian suffering, especially that of children, always arouses deep concern among Muslims, indeed all people. Human suffering of any kind should concern people everywhere and they should help end this tragic situation as quickly as possible. It is, however, at the larger level that there is much confusion and misunderstanding about what is really afoot in Syria.
Two competing narratives continue to dominate discussion about events in Syria. The first and most-often repeated narrative, eagerly projected by the Western corporate media as well as al-Jazeera, is that the people of Syria have risen up for their rights and will settle for nothing less than the ouster of President Bashar al-Asad.
Khader Adnan, a 33-year-old Palestinian baker detained without charge by Israel since December 2011, ended his 66-day hunger strike on February 21, which had taken him to the verge of death. Adnan ended his strike only after Israel agreed to release him after serving another two months of “administrative detention”, under which a suspect can be held without charge for six-month periods, renewable indefinitely.
The Qatari-based tribal-owned network, al-Jazeera’s news broadcast on February 16 about Libya was revealing. It started with a report on the mayhem that has gripped Libya since the capture and brutal murder of Colonel Muammar Qaddafi on October 20, 2011. Without showing any footage of the brutality perpetrated by various militias against civilians, the network switched to an episode of 16 years ago to tell viewers how terrible Qaddafi’s rule was.
The self-proclaimed superpower is clutching at straws about “peace talks” following the Taliban’s convincing defeat of US-NATO armies in Afghanistan. While talk about talks has gone on for years with American officials — civilian and military — making bold pronouncements about commencement of “secret talks”, only to discover that some goat herder or a petty bicycle shop owner had taken the “smart” Americans for a long ride, the latter have not given up.
Merely a year ago Turkey enjoyed much respect among neighbors and established warm and cordial relations with them, helping to catapult Ankara’s political, economic and cultural objectives. Frequent visits to neighboring countries by Turkish delegations, usually accompanied by senior government officials including Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, signing memorandums of understanding and agreements, increasing trade and political as well as military cooperation, heralded a new era for the conflict-torn region.
After the Age of Reaganomics and the decline of participatory democracy in the United States, presidential elections have become a TV sport rather than a mass political practice. In hotly contested elections such as George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, the turnout is a mere 50% of eligible voters. As the US officially transitions to a corporatocracy, though, it appears that even an apathetic voter population is far too dangerous to entrust with the country’s political decision-making.
The enterprise of US perpetual war is confronted with a persistent problem. Spiraling rates of psychological and social problems in returning war veterans is placing enormous stress on the narratives that the US government has constructed around the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.
The crisis in Syria has entered a stalemate with neither side able to deliver a decisive knockout blow. This may serve the regime better than its opponents although it is not for lack of trying by the opposition, especially aided by their foreign sponsors and backers. The major hurdle facing the regime’s opponents — and there are divergent groups — is that they are disunited.
As human rights campaigners around the world commemorated the 10th anniversary of the opening of the US detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, marking a decade of human rights abuses known as the “war on terror”, one would have expected that Western governments would be contemplating scaling back their aggressive rhetoric and draconian laws which have become a feature of the 21st century.
Occupy Wall Street, the national protests that were sparked in New York City’s Zuccotti Park on September 17, 2001, headlined the anger of the 99% whose futures have been derailed by the financial elites of the country and their political executors. While uneasily tolerating the mushrooming protests for a month, all the while investing in elaborate security systems to protect their wealth and holdings from mass anger, Wall Street called in the national authority to pull the plug.
A charismatic politician charming crowds throughout Pakistan. A rising crescendo of political speeches and rallies setting the nation afire, an impalpable sense of excitement building in the populace, casting the halo of destiny itself on the celebrity politician. A sense of promise, a social contract written anew; Zulfikar Ali Bhutto in 1973? No, rather it is Imran Khan in 2012, launching a flamboyant path to become the next prime minister of Pakistan.
With his December 12 outburst against niqab, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney confirmed that the rightwing government he serves is rabidly Islamophobic. This is not the first time Kenney and other members of the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper have attacked Muslims.
In the post-9/11 theatrics of George W. Bush, one of the more memorable is his explanation for why the dastardly terrorists chose to attack the glorious symbols of US power: “They hate us for our freedoms,” or in another version, “They hate us for our civilization.”
Russia’s grip on the North Caucasus is becoming more complicated and therefore, loosening up as a consequence of recent developments.
Who says the Americans hate all the Haqqanis? Take the case of Husain Haqqani, the recently disgraced Pakistani ambassador to Washington, who was such a darling of the Washington neocons that he was publicly feted as a close ally.
Pakistan’s relations with the US have never been easy but recent developments have brought them to such a point that even the polite and usually soft-spoken Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was forced to concede: “we do not trust the Americans.”
