Who really controls Iraq

My following review is about the book by The Independent’s Patrick Cockburn, Muqtada Al-Sadr and the Fall of Iraq: Kristofer Shawn Goldsmith was a former army sergeant in the US army. He enlisted in late 2003 at age eighteen and believed then, “under the influence of the media and its terrorism paranoia”, that Saddam Hussein…

How not to be yourself

Be Like Others is an amazing documentary on a hidden world in Iran: In a country where homosexuality is punishable by death, the state has discovered a ”˜cure’. Welcome to Iran, where male is male and female is female – with nothing in between; where a 1979 fatwa authorised sex-change operations for ”˜diagnosed transsexuals’ and…

Friends and foes are now welcome

Foreign “interference” in Iraq? Good luck finding it: A new airport, funded in important part by Iran has opened at the Shiite holy city of Najaf. It will likely bring millions of pilgrims from Iran, Pakistan, India and elsewhere to the shrine of Imam Ali, the son-in-law and cousin of the Prophet Muhammad. American authorities…

Redefining the enemy

An alternative view on the recent arrest of Radovan Karadzic: The spirit of the media frenzy surrounding the arrest of the former Bosnian Serb leader Radovan Karadzic on July 21 is based entirely on the doctrine of non-equivalence inaugurated in 1992: Serbs willed the war, Muslims wanted peace; Serb crimes are bad and justly exaggerated,…

Crushing humanity

Gideon Levy, Haaretz, July 24: Israel might be able to go on claiming that it will not be the first to introduce nuclear weapons into the Middle East, but it cannot do the same regarding another weapon of mass destruction: the bulldozer. The claim that terror has adopted an original new weapon, a “new fashion”…

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