Juan Cole on the spluttering end to the (kind of/sort of) formal US involvement (though private contractors are only increasing): The US keeps fretting over Iranian influence in Iraq, but that is silly. If you didn’t want Iranian Shiite influence in Iraq you shouldn’t have overthrown the Sunni Saddam Hussein and seated the Shiite fundamentalists…
“A Third Way” to accept West Bank settlements?
Preview of a documentary that details the friendships between Jewish colonists in the West Bank and Palestinians living under occupation. An attempt to normalise occupation? You decide:
Supporting Palestine inching closer to the mainstream
(via Mondoweiss) Tilda Swinton in the… November 2011 Vogue magazine
The troubles with Hamas in Gaza
The Islamist political party is struggling to maintain power and influence in the blockaded Strip, according to Time magazine. In so many ways, the Arab Spring needs to arrive in Palestine: When the islamist movement known as Hamas first took control of Gaza in 2006, the family of Ahmed Ayyash, a third-year engineering student at…
Likudnik at heart of the British Tory government
The Independent on Sunday: Adam Werritty, the man at the centre of the Liam Fox cash-for-access scandal, has been involved in an audacious plot to topple Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it was claimed last night. The self-styled adviser to Mr Fox, whose close personal friendship with the former defence secretary led to Mr Fox’s downfall,…
This is why #Occupytheworld is taking off
Nicholas Kristof in the New York Times: The frustration in America isn’t so much with inequality in the political and legal worlds, as it was in Arab countries, although those are concerns too. Here the critical issue is economic inequity. According to the C.I.A.’s own ranking of countries by income inequality, the United States is…
Rewarding failure in the privatised asylum seeker world
The death last year of Jimmy Mubenga by private contractor G4S, as he was being forcibly removed from Britain, revealed the largely hidden and unaccountable world of outsourced horror in a supposed democracy. One year on, justice remains elusive. This letter appeared in the Guardian a few days ago: Jimmy Mubenga died one year ago…
What kind of hero is needed today?
The following photo was taken today by Neesha Bremner at #OccupyMelbourne: