By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Trump did an interview with “Fox and Friends” for this morning in which he alleged that former president Barack Obama is behind the leaks that have bedeviled Trump’s White House. The Fox agent provocateur asked Trump a leading question as to whether Obama is also behind […]
Archives for February 2017
ISIL: In Iraq’s desert, mass grave horror beneath the dirt
AFP | (Video News Report) | – – “The sinkhole that could be the largest mass grave in Iraq’s latest conflict is barely visible from the road, nothing more than a small depression behind a desert ridge near Mosul. The Islamic State group transformed the Khasfah into a “place of death”, using it as an […]
Image of the Day: European Buddhists (?) & Zoroastrians, c. 1650
British Museum | (Safavid Era Painting) | – – School/style: Persian School/Style term details Culture/period: Safavid dynasty term details Date: 1650-1700 (circa) Production place: Made in: Iran “Four men worshipping at a fire altar and idol shrine; detached folio from an illustrated manuscript. At left, two Zoroastrian men hold their hands out in prayer toward […]
Is Trump a bigger danger to the US or Europe?
By Joschka Fischer | (Project Syndicate) | – – BERLIN – Little more than a month after US President Donald Trump’s inauguration, it has become clear that nothing good will come of his presidency. Unfortunately, the pessimists turned out to be realists: things really are as bad as they said they would be. Worst-case scenarios […]
After Mosul: Can Iraq survive without a unified National Army?
By Balsam Mustafa | (The Conversation) | – – The operation to retake Iraq’s second city of Mosul from the so-called Islamic State [group] (IS) has entered its crucial phase. The Iraqi army, federal police, elite counter-terrorism units, and rapid response troops are operating on the ground, bolstered by discreetly embedded US special forces. The […]
Trump Official detained, nearly Deported French Holocaust Scholar
TeleSur | – – “My situation was nothing compared to some of the people I saw who couldn’t be defended as I was,” Rousso said on Twitter. Henry Rousso, a French historian and a prominent scholar on the Holocaust, said he was detained for more than 10 hours by federal border agents at a Houston […]
Would Trump let Oscar Winner Mahershala Ali back into the Country?
By Juan Cole | (Informed Comment) | – – Mahershala Ali, 43, last night won an Oscar for best supporting actor, in Moonlight . The film treats themes of sexual repression, gayness, and the plague of drug dealing and addiction. Moonlight, of course, also won Best Picture, after a historic error in which the winner […]
Turkey’s Coup aftermath and Human Rights: A Feminist Perspective
By Banu Gökarıksel | ( Duke University Blog ) | – – Feminist critiques of political power reveal the central function of gender, sexuality, and difference in maintaining that power. Yet, in current events, a feminist geopolitics is rarely considered and has been absent from analysis of the 2016 coup attempt and its aftermath in […]
Trumpocalypse: How the U.S. Invaded, Occupied, and Remade Itself
By Tom Engelhardt | (Tomdispatch.com) | – – It’s been epic! A cast of thousands! (Hundreds? Tens?) A spectacular production that, five weeks after opening on every screen of any sort in America (and possibly the world), shows no sign of ending. What a hit it’s been! It’s driving people back to newspapers (online, if not […]