By Jamal Kanj The election landscape in Iran is becoming increasingly clear. According to state-run Press TV, a whopping 686 candidates registered to run in the presidential poll. However, only eight men remain on the ballot for the first round on June 14 after candidates were vetted by the Guardian Council, which consists of 12 [...]
By Ali Younes – Amman A large majority of Jordanian Members of Parliament (MPs) voted last week to pass a resolution to force the government to expel the Israeli ambassador from Amman over Israeli settlers attacks and attempts to occupy the Islamic holy site Al Aqasa Mosque in Jerusalem. The resolution was sponsored by MP [...]
By Greta Berlin Three years ago, the Free Gaza movement was wrapping up final preparations for a flotilla of eight ships to head out to Gaza, determined to break Israel’s illegal siege on 1.5 million Palestinians shut into an open-air prison. Most of us were already in Cyprus or Turkey or Greece, as we were [...]
By Stuart Littlewood The Church of Scotland’s revised report ‘The Inheritance of Abraham?’ has now been released ahead of their Assembly. The Church felt obliged to change some of it after Jewish leaders sought to interfere, one complaining that it was “an outrage to everything that interfaith dialogue stands for… and closes the door on [...]
By Jeremy Salt – Ankara While all options are said to be still on the table, Barack Obama is clearly backing away from any deeper involvement in Syria now it is clear that nothing but direct intervention is going to bring down the government in Damascus. In the past few months alone the armed groups [...]
By Rima Najjar Merriman “Calamity either destroys a people or makes it stronger. In the past half century Palestinians have transformed catastrophe into strength. They have done so through education and through their exposure to the world. They have done so by rebuilding their shattered lives in exile, by recovering their history, folklore, customs and [...]
By Jamal Kanj Palestinians are this week commemorating the 65th anniversary of Al Nakba (the disaster or catastrophe). On May 15, 1948, Israel was declared a nation on the ruins of more than 500 townships and 800,000 expelled Palestinians. In December 1948 the international community adopted UN resolution 194, calling on Israel to allow the [...]
By Dr. Ahmed Yousef – Gaza The “Arab Spring”, as we now have come to know it, has seemingly changed the nature of politics and the balance of power in the Middle East forever. The West was caught off guard and after initially grappling with the new situation, are now dealing with Islamist parties whom [...]
By Ramzy Baroud Many Palestinians remember and reference al-Nakba, also known as the Catastrophe, on May 15 every year. The event marks the expulsion of nearly a million Palestinians, while their villages were destroyed. The destruction of Palestine in 1947-48 ushered in the birth of Israel. Older generations relay the harsh and oppressive memory of [...]
By Deepak Tripathi Recent remarks by Carla Del Ponte, a Swiss investigator of the UN Independent Commission of Inquiry, have changed the nature of debate on the use of chemical weapons in Syria’s civil war. Momentum had been building up for months against Bashar al-Assad’s government, first on the basis of accusations that such weapons [...]
By Susan Abulhawa Al Jazeera Stream contacted me a few days ago asking if I would participate on a show commemorating the Nakbe. I would be the only Palestinian, the producer said, “to balance things out” amidst various Israeli voices. Here’s the exact excerpt of the email: “We are looking for a unique angle with [...]
By Stuart Littlewood “The political and humanitarian situation in the Holy Land continues to be a source of pain and concern for us all,” says the introduction to the Church of Scotland’s report The inheritance of Abraham? A report on the ‘promised land’. It is the Church’s latest reflection on the “questions that need to [...]
By Eric Walberg Pakistan’s elections come at a key junction in the region’s geopolitics, with the public firmly opposed to the US ‘war on terror’ being conducted on Pakistani soil with no regard for its sovereignty. Pakistan’s new prime minister has a mandate to take his country in a new direction, but will he use [...]
By Jamil Toubbeh Following exposure of the break-in in June of 1972 at the HQ of the Democratic National Committee office at the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C., an event that captured US public attention for months, a child of school age was asked to comment on this mesmerizing phenomenon that became known as the [...]
By Hasan Afif El-Hasan The Palestinian issue is a political and humanitarian man-made tragedy where the indigenous Palestinians have been dehumanized and their rights have been delegitimized; and the policy makers of the World’s Superpower created conditions where the afflictions of the Palestinians today is almost beyond a peaceful solution. The Palestinians used to own [...]
By Mohamed El Mokhtar Sidi Haiba Following the recent investigative report by Max Blumenthal, a journalist affiliated with the pro-Palestinian online site Electronic Intifada, a seemingly disturbing account of a list of sponsors and sources of funding of two organizations (The American Islamic Congress and Free Arabs) came to light in rather great, and quite [...]
By Jonathan Cook – Nazareth Washington’s reputation as an “honest broker” in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is in tatters after four years of indulging Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s intransigence. The Obama administration desperately needs to resurrect a credible peace process. Faced with a diplomatic impasse between Israel and the Palestinian Authority of Mahmoud Abbas, John [...]
By Jamk Kanj US Secretary of State John Kerry has succeeded in tailoring yet another peace initiative to appease Israel. But it took Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu no time to effectively reject the offer, telling Kerry and company it was not occupation – it was all “about a Jewish state”. American diplomacy in the [...]
By Jayantha Dhanapala The two-year-old conflict in Syria rages on with the embattled dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad and his Ba’ath Party withstanding the attacks of a motley group of rebels supported by the West and by the money bag monarchies of Saudi Arabia and Qatar with Israel not far behind. Dictatorships – whether unelected, elected [...]
By Yves Engler While the Harper Conservative government has loudly proclaimed its close ties to Israel, most Canadians would be surprised to learn the Tories have decided to make the two countries blood brothers. In the international affairs equivalent of a Mafia initiation ceremony Canada has sworn undying loyalty and to be a faithful soldier [...]
By Julie Webb-Pullman While the United States peddled the threat of chemical weapon use to justify its arming of the ‘opposition’ in Syria, Israel destroyed a chemical research facility near Damascus which was allegedly developing such weapons – thus unleashing every single potentially-poisonous particle on the Syrian public. Thus guaranteeing that regardless of whether there [...]
By Stuart Littlewood William Cook in his masterly way tells us not to give up even if “overwhelmed by darkness of the times”. And he reminds us that “sixty-five years ago this May 14, the world body admitted to its membership the state of Israel even as that self-declared state was in the process of [...]
By Sam Bahour You are born in a country, say the United States. As such, you become a citizen of that country. You are issued a passport from your country of citizenship which allows you to travel to other countries, as a tourist, a foreigner. Of course, you can apply for residency or citizenship in [...]
By Uri Avnery An ambassador is an honest man sent abroad to lie for the good of his country, a British statesman famously wrote some 400 years ago. That is true, of course, for all diplomats. The question is whether the diplomat lies only to others, or also to himself. I am asking this these [...]
By Rima Najjar Merriman After all the hasbara and whitewashing Israel has been vigorously conducting, the conversation about the Palestinian-Israeli conflict is finally changing – at least among activists and academics. Here is a distillation of Israel’s problem and a proposed solution. Bottom Line about Israel Israel is already Greater Israel from the Mediterranean to [...]
By Vacy Vlazna The villages, Lidice in former Czechoslovakia and Deir Yassin in Palestine are harrowing examples of ethnic cleansing and collective punishment perpetrated on the innocent by Nazis and Israelis respectively. Significantly, on moral grounds, they serve to demonstrate that profound human lessons of WWII went tragically unheeded. The memory of the slaughter of [...]
By Jamal Kanj Israeli leaders are masters at muddling the international community with trivial issues while turning the peace negotiations into a temporizing process “to end all peace.” Assured by US subservient backing, and for more than 15 years prior to current Sisyphean process, Israel rejected Palestinian’s peace overtures insisting on impossible chameleon terms to [...]
By Eric Walberg The world is taking note of the ruling Conservatives’ shameful betrayal of Canada’s once admirable reputation as a fair country, sincerely working on the world stage to improve the lot of the disadvantaged and suffering. In the UN Human Rights Council’s Universal Periodic Review, Canada was criticized to such an extent that [...]
By Jay Janson While staring at the New York Times front page photo of the bat-winged nuclear-capable B-2 Stealth Bombers up in the blue sky on their first non-stop long-range mission from the US on their way to a practice sortie to end in a mock bombing drop of inert munitions on a range off [...]
By Uri Avnery When the huge immigration wave from the Soviet Union arrived in 1990, we were glad. First of all, because we believe that all immigration is a good thing for the country. This, I believe, is generally the case. Second, because we were convinced that this specific group of immigrants would push our [...]
