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…
Showing all posts tagged Iran
Telling it like it isn’t (on Israel/Palestine)
My latest New Matilda column is about the Western media’s delusions over the Middle East: Distortions, delusions, misrepresentations. No wonder Western leaders and media don’t understand the popularity of groups like Hezbollah and Hamas in the Arab world It shouldn’t come as any surprise that Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah is consistently voted the most popular…
Looks like the Zionists are a little late
Tony Karon, The National, July 12: Despite all the posturing, Israel, for reasons both political and technical, can’t attack Iran without US permission; the US, meanwhile, remains unlikely to give that permission, or do the job itself. Among the reasons: ”¢Iran’s facilities are too dispersed and hardened to be sure that air strikes – which…
The image can lie
Errol Morris, New York Times, July 13: We don’t need advanced digital tools to mislead, to misdirect or to confuse. All we need is a willingness to uncritically believe. Don’t believe everything you see.
Raging against rising internet repression
My following article appears in the US magazine The Nation on the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit and the issue of web repression: During the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008–sponsored by Harvard University and Google in Budapest, Hungary, in late June, and attended by over 200 bloggers, human rights activists, writers, journalists, hackers and…
Israel’s faulty plan
Gideon Levy, Haaretz, July 7: So what is the “great plan”? As things look now, this is the way Israel is planning its future: Every time some Middle Eastern country tries to obtain nuclear weapons, Israel will bomb it. Bomb – and bombard. Beyond the problematic assumption that we are allowed to do what others…
The dangers of blogging for democracy
My following article appeared in yesterday’s edition of Crikey: 64 people have been arrested for blogging their views since 2003, according to… a recent… University of Washington report. Three times as many people were arrested for blogging about political issues in 2007 than the year before. More than half of all the arrests since 2003 were made…
Battle of the Brainwashed
My latest New Matilda column is about the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit in Budapest last week: Are Chinese netizens any more thin-skinned than Westerners when attacked online for their opinions? Antony Loewenstein reports from the Global Voices Citizen Media Summit During the Harvard University sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit 2008 in Budapest last…
Personality disorder in Iran
The positive: Iranian Minister of Telecommunications and Information Technology Mohammad Soleimani said on Tuesday that there are as many as 63 million fixed and mobile phone users in Iran. Addressing the Fourth International Seminar on Information and Telecommunications Security in Damascus, Soleimani said 27 percent of Iranian population are linked to internet. Soleimani said 53…
Not talking sides
Yet more evidence that global public opinion is completely at odds with the Western political elite’s blind support of the Zionist state: A new WorldPublicOpinion.org poll of 18 countries finds that in 14 of them people mostly say their government should not take sides in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Just three countries favor taking the Palestinian…