Below the Western media’s radar, tensions have been escalating in Israeli-occupied Jerusalem. In the last week, a new confrontation has emerged over al-Aqsa Mosque compound, in the context of intensifying efforts by Israeli authorities and settlers to change the status quo and take over Palestinian properties in and around the Old City. The Jordanian government…
In his novel 1984 George Orwell invented the expression “newspeak” to describe the ambiguous or deliberately misleading use of language to make political propaganda and narrow the “thought options” of those who are on the receiving end. In the context of today’s political discourse, or what passes for the same, it would be interesting to…
You might imagine that a report by a multinational observer force documenting a 20-year reign of terror by Israeli soldiers and Jewish settlers against Palestinians, in a city under occupation, would provoke condemnation from European and U.S. politicians. But you would be wrong. The leaking in December of the report on conditions in the city…
In which country did a senior, state-salaried cleric urge his followers last week to become “warriors”, emulating a group of young men who had murdered a woman of another faith? The cleric did so with impunity. In fact, he was only echoing other highly placed colleagues who have endorsed a book – again without penalty…
Every single foreign intervention has made the Middle East reconfigure itself against the interventionists. It has harshly counter-attacked, creating the opposite of the insurgents’ desired effect. When we look at recent history (the last four decades since the PLO was expelled from Lebanon), the list is cataclysmic. We find the formation of Hezbollah, Hamas, al-Qaeda,…
I predicted three weeks ago that the Senate bill on the Middle East, which was rejected three times while the government was shutdown, would quickly receive cloture by a comfortable margin to end debate and proceed to a full vote in the Senate after the federal bureaucracy reopened. That has proven to be the case….
