Until mid-2007, there was a serious political obstacle to a massive conventional war by Israel against Hamas in Gaza: the fact that Hamas had won free and fair elections for the Palestinian parliament and was still the leading faction in a fully legitimate government....
Despite two wars involving more than 200,000 U.S. troops and a global economic crisis, foreign-related news coverage by the three major U.S. television networks fell to a record low during 2008, according to the latest annual review of network news coverage by the...
My early reaction to the Israeli ground invasion of the Gaza Strip is perhaps more U.S.-centered than some others'. But the most significant aspect of the U.S. response, implicitly acknowledged in most news reports and commentary, is precisely that nobody really...
There's got to be some irony in the U.S. transference of control to Iraqi security forces while the Israelis pound Gaza. Why? Because, despite the hoopla in the U.S. press and its Iraqi clones, the nature of the control being "given back" to the Iraqis seems quite...
If America were blessed with a noninterventionist foreign policy, we could all thank Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert for giving President-elect Barack Obama a thoroughgoing lesson in the absolute irrelevancy of Israel and Palestine to the national interests of the...
We all know the rationalization for Israel's brutal invasion of the Gaza Strip. After all, it's been reiterated endlessly over the airwaves by official and unofficial spokesmen for the Israeli government, on all channels, and with no rebuttal or skeptical perspective...
Updated at 7:05 p.m. EST, Jan. 5, 2009A half dozen bombs struck Baghdad today, but none seemed to target foreign pilgrims streaming towards Karbala. Across Iraq, at least 7 Iraqis were killed and 45 were wounded in reported attacks. The Constitutional Freedoms and...
Updated at 10:46 p.m. EST, Jan. 4, 2009Thousands of Shi'ite pilgrims, many foreign, are making their way to Karbala to observe the Ashuraa holiday which culminates in three days. As in the past, troublemakers have taken advantage of the 10-day holiday despite...
The "Israeli model" has long been held up by hawks in the United States as the gold standard for dealing with adversarial nation-states, guerrillas, and terrorists. The storyline goes that Israel is a small country surrounded by aggressive enemies that use...
In times of crisis, most Arabs tune in to al-Jazeera television. Sometimes it's comforting for the truth to be stated the way it is, with all of its gory and unsettling details, without blemishes and without censorship. When Israel carried out massive air strikes...
