Since January 2011, Syrian streets have been hit by a protest demanding removal of the Ba‘th regime and Bashar al-Asad from power. A growing armed insurgency and other developments, which took place in November, showed that the situation is getting out of control, dragging the country into a bloody civil war.
Iraq War veteran, Ross Caputi, writes about his thoughts on the role of veterans in the Occupy movement. The author is a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah and a member of March Forward! He is the founder of the Justice for Fallujah Project, which hosted various events during the second annual Remember Fallujah Week, November 16-19, 2011.
Iraq War veteran, Ross Caputi, writes about his thoughts on the role of veterans in the Occupy movement. The author is a Marine Corps veteran of the second siege of Fallujah and a member of March Forward! He is the founder of the Justice for Fallujah Project, which hosted various events during the second annual Remember Fallujah Week, November 16-19, 2011.
The drama of the Irvine 11 came to a close in an exercise of farce on 9-23-2011. Eleven Muslim students were tried in a Santa Ana, California court for heckling Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren during a February 2010 event at the University of California, Irvine.
One thing has become clear as a result of the movements for dignity and freedom sweeping the Muslim East (aka the Middle East): the old order has been permanently and irrevocably altered.
The Fall season is here, and Ankara is somnolent with the dreams of Rome. Turkish Prime Minister Erdogan recently completed his Arab Spring tour over North Africa, including the recently despoiled Libya, delivering his trademark no-holds barred rhetoric that has won the hearts of the Arab street.
A large percentage of Muslims worldwide have become quite enamored with the phenomenon of Recep Tayyip Erdogan and the political party — the Development and Justice Party (AKP) — he leads in Turkey.
After distorting the teachings of their own religion, Christianity, and then abandoning it all together, the Western world is now busy trying to give the same treatment to Islam in order to subvert it.
In the grand old days of colonialism, European nations used all sorts of elaborate excuses for occupying the fabulously wealthy territories of Africa and Asia. Rudyard Kipling called it the “white man’s burden” to transmit (European) culture and civilization to the unwashed natives.
Soon after the so-called Arab Spring began to blossom, Turkey’s popularity has been on the rise in the Arab world. Since the Justice and Development Party (AKP) was first elected in 2002, Turkey with its flourishing democracy, and rapidly growing economic and military might has become an emerging regional power.
The story of the second relief Flotilla to Gaza is a tale of how to marshal all the king’s horses and all the king’s men in order to muffle a humanitarian enterprise. After Israeli commandos killed nine Turkish members of the first Freedom Flotilla on May 31, 2010, Turkish-Israeli relations chilled to sub-zero, while Israel’s already-brittle reputation developed minute fracture lines.
Almost everything about Saudi Arabia is different from neighboring countries, starting with its opaque politics and secretive decision-making and the manner in which it treats people, especially women and foreigners.
For his May 18 speech on the Muslim East, US President Barack Obama gave his latest performance in the production titled (Steadily Weakening) Empire Strikes Back. His flowery words have long since lost their perfume and his grammatically complex sentences, such a heady delight after the linguistically-challenged Bush, now seem to fall as flat as an out-of-tune piano.
Pakistan’s relations with the US can be compared to a boy befriending a baby python. They played with each other and enjoyed scaring other villagers. Over the years, while still playing with the boy curling all around him, the snake grew bigger and stronger, as pythons do, with his curls and squeezes becoming tighter.
Cynthia McKinney is a former member of the US Congress from Georgia and was the Green Party presidential candidate in 2008. At the invitation of Crescent International she spoke at the Conference, Peace and Justice in the Age of Imperialism, held in Toronto last February. Cynthia McKinney is currently on a fact-finding mission to Libya from where she dispatched this report.
As revolution fans across the Middle East, there are reams of commentary on the reasons behind the spectacular conflagration. Some are sage, such as Shahid Alam’s insightful analysis of the “dignity deficit” that the Muslim world suffers from.Others verge on doomsday comic, pinning the blame on unruly natural causes than self-evident political ones, such as Paul Krugman’s warnings of natural disasters and their impact on world food supply. Even Hillary Clinton, who is usually so serenely autocratic, struck a somber note in a recent Munich visit, declaring that “the status quo is not sustainable.”
In the Republican Party’s latest homage to fascism, conservative politicians and media networks are spreading hysteria about the “invasion of Shari‘ah” in the United States. As Glenn Beck, the Tea Party’s weepy evangelist described it on his Fox News show, Shari‘ah is a form of “stealth jihad” that is “working to destroy America from within.”
1On April fool’s day, Judge Richard Goldstone penned an op-ed in The Washington Post, sheepishly retracting the UN-sponsored Goldstone Report investigating Israel’s war crimes during the 2008–2009 Gaza Massacre.
Dr. Haytham Mannaa a prominent Syrian opposition activist confirmed that the foreign hand was involved in the events in Syria from the very early start of demonstrations.
