June 5 2018 marks the 51st anniversary of the Israeli occupation of East Jerusalem, the West Bank and Gaza. But, unlike the massive popular mobilisation that preceded the anniversary of the Nakba – the catastrophic destruction of Palestine in 1948 – on 15 May the anniversary of the occupation is hardly generating equal mobilisation. The unsurprising death of the ‘peace process’ and the inevitable…
The controversy over Iranian “advisors” in Syria and their actual battlefield function is nothing more than a word game designed to delay the “phased withdrawal” of Tehran’s forces. The US, “Israel”, and even Russia have called for the withdrawal of Iranian troops from Syria, albeit for different reasons and expressed in different ways, though Damascus…
Vladimir Putin will have paid very close attention to the location of the Syrian artillery battery where four Russian soldiers lost their lives at the weekend. The desert around Deir ez-Zour remains a dangerous place – politically as well as physically – in which the Americans and Russians play an extremely risky game of war….
The annual meeting of the St Petersburg International Economic Forum – dubbed as “Russia’s Davos” – on May 25, which traditionally promotes foreign investment in the Russian economy, ended this time around as a major political event signaling a renewed bid by President Vladimir Putin for détente with the West. In wide-ranging remarks at the forum, Putin…
A recent documentary by Al Jazeera Investigations lifted the lid on the power and influence of what is often termed the Islamophobia industry. A well-funded network of organisations and groups which work in loose association are funding some of the worst hate and incitement against Muslims in the West. Such groups operate around the world,…
Tuesday, 15 May, marked the 70th anniversary of what the Palestinian people term Youm al-Nakba, or the Day of Catastrophe. The Nakba is the defining event that formed and solidified the Palestinian liberation struggle. Between 1947 and 1948, more than 750,000 Palestinians – about half of the Arab population in Palestine at that time –…
