December 2011

Israel’s emerging ‘Jewish Hezbollah’?

by News Sources 12.19.2011

Mark Perry writes: Seven months ago, during the early morning hours of May 30, Jewish settlers visiting Joseph’s Tomb in Nablus in the Palestinian West Bank engaged in a shoving match with IDF soldiers deployed to protect them. Within minutes, the confrontation escalated; several soldiers were punched by Jewish worshippers and rocks rained down on [...]

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Renewed threat of sectarian conflict as Iraq’s Sunni vice president faces arrest

by News Sources 12.19.2011

As Al Jazeera reported yesterday and the New York Times reports today, Iraqis have given scant attention to the departure of the last American troops as the country heads into a deepening political crisis. Iraq’s Shiite-dominated government was thrown into crisis on Monday night as authorities issued an arrest warrant for the Sunni vice president, [...]

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The Arab Spring and the West: seven lessons from history

by News Sources 12.19.2011

Seumas Milne writes: There’s a real sense in which, more than any other part of the former colonial world, the Middle East has never been fully decolonised. Sitting on top of the bulk of the globe’s oil reserves, the Arab world has been the target of continual interference and intervention ever since it became formally [...]

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Don’t break the internet

by News Sources 12.19.2011

At Stanford Law Review, Mark Lemley, David S. Levine, and David G. Post, write: Two bills now pending in Congress—the PROTECT IP Act of 2011 (Protect IP) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House—represent the latest legislative attempts to address a serious global problem: large-scale online copyright and trademark [...]

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Egyptian army targets women protesters

by News Sources 12.19.2011

Al-Masry Al-Youm reports: Local human rights watchdogs on Sunday accused the Egyptian military of systematically targeting female political activists, and demanded that Egypt’s military rulers admit to violations committed against demonstrators. In a joint statement, five human rights organizations accused military rulers of exercising “unprecedented violence against protesters, with the targeting of female activists being [...]

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The battle for Upper Egypt

by News Sources 12.19.2011

Lauren E. Bohn writes: Assiut feels far away from the famed epicenter of Tahrir Square. The oft-neglected peripheral region of Upper Egypt (the cultivated valley of the Nile from Cairo in the north to Aswan, 535 miles south) has been plagued by institutional apathy for years, long dismissed as a dead-end, from where one travels [...]

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Bleak future for returning U.S. veterans

by News Sources 12.19.2011

The Economist reports: Brett Quinzon did two tours in Iraq before leaving active duty in May. Originally from Minnesota, Mr Quinzon now lives in Thomaston, a small town around 65 miles south of Atlanta. A grey December morning found him filling out forms in Atlanta’s large veterans’ hospital, seeking treatment for depression. Since returning from [...]

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Death of Kim Jong-il

by News Sources 12.19.2011

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Climate change and the failure of market mechanisms

by News Sources 12.19.2011

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How to halt the expansion of inequality in the U.S.

by News Sources 12.19.2011

Former Supreme Court justice Louis D. Brandeis once said, “We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we cannot have both.” Professors Ian Ayres and Aaron S. Edlin say we have reached the Brandeis tipping point. Yet even while acknowledging this level of inequality undermines democracy, [...]

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Secret U.S., Taliban talks reach turning point

by News Sources 12.18.2011

Reuters reports: After 10 months of secret dialogue with Afghanistan’s Taliban insurgents, senior U.S. officials say the talks have reached a critical juncture and they will soon know whether a breakthrough is possible, leading to peace talks whose ultimate goal is to end the Afghan war. As part of the accelerating, high-stakes diplomacy, Reuters has [...]

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Hamas moves away from violence in deal with Palestinian Authority

by News Sources 12.18.2011

The Guardian reports: Hamas has confirmed that it will shift tactics away from violent attacks on Israel as part of a rapprochement with the Palestinian Authority. A spokesman for the Hamas prime minister, Ismail Haniya, told the Guardian that the Islamic party, which has controlled Gaza for the past five years, was shifting its emphasis [...]

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The U.S. is blind to the price of war that is still being borne by the Iraqi people

by News Sources 12.18.2011

Gary Younge writes: According to Christopher Gelpi, a political science professor at Duke University who specialises in public attitudes to foreign policy, the most important single factor shaping Americans’ opinions about any war is whether they think America will win. This solipsistic worldview is hardly conducive to the kind of introspection that might translate remorse [...]

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Tom Engelhardt: Restless planet

by TomDispatch 12.18.2011

The four occupations of planet earth How the occupied became the occupiersBy Tom Engelhardt On the streets of Moscow in the tens of thousands, the protesters chanted: “We exist!” Taking into account the comments of statesmen, scientists, politicians, military officials, bankers, artists, all the important and attended to figures on this planet, nothing caught the [...]

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How the U.S. is helping crush Bahrain’s pro-democracy movement

by News Sources 12.18.2011

Nicholas Kristof writes: When President Obama decides soon whether to approve a $53 million arms sale to our close but despotic ally Bahrain, he must weigh the fact that America has a major naval base here and that Bahrain is a moderate, modernizing bulwark against Iran. Yet he should also understand the systematic, violent repression [...]

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Political crisis in Iraq as U.S. withdraws

by News Sources 12.18.2011

Al Jazeera reports: The last US troops withdrew from Iraq this morning, but the story has barely merited a mention on Iraqi television; local media are instead focused on a deepening political crisis, which includes – among other issues – an arrest warrant for the vice-president. The latest development came on Saturday night, when Nouri [...]

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Egyptian soldiers shoot, chase, and beat unarmed protesters in Cairo

by News Sources 12.18.2011

The New York Times reports: Egypt’s military rulers escalated a bloody crackdown on street protesters on Saturday, chasing down and beating unarmed civilians, even while the prime minister was denying in a televised news conference that security forces were using any force. In one of the most incendiary developments, video cameras captured soldiers stripping the [...]

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Israel has never been so ugly

by News Sources 12.18.2011

Ari Shavit writes: We have never been so ugly. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanayhu seeks to silence the call to prayer over the loudspeakers of the country’s mosques, and to shut down Channel 10 television. Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman expresses support for the Russian “democtator” who has just rigged elections. Defense Minister Ehud Barak stands by [...]

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Scores of unintended civilian casualties in NATO bombing of Libya

by News Sources 12.18.2011

The New York Times reports: NATO’s seven-month air campaign in Libya, hailed by the alliance and many Libyans for blunting a lethal crackdown by Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi and helping to push him from power, came with an unrecognized toll: scores of civilian casualties the alliance has long refused to acknowledge or investigate. By NATO’s telling [...]

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Iraqi women’s activist rebuffs U.S. claims of a freer Iraq: ‘This is not a democratic country’

by News Sources 12.18.2011

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Inside Syria – Syria’s direction

by News Sources 12.18.2011

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Inside Story — U.S. foreign policy, Republican style

by News Sources 12.18.2011

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The Arab Awakening is here to stay

by News Sources 12.17.2011

Christopher Dickey writes: Westerners have long felt the need to lecture Arabs about Arab history. “We know the civilization of Egypt better than we know the civilization of any other country,” Lord Balfour told the British Parliament in 1910. “We know it further back; we know it more intimately; we know more about it.” Indeed, [...]

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