Like another empire founded on ideological hubris, and stained with the blood of countless victims, this one engages in periodic political purges: when one faction is vanquished, mass firings occur in the upper echelons of the bureaucracy. We don't send them to the...
Leaving the hotel is always an adventure. Last night, Abu Talat whisked me, with a full beard and a keffiyeh draped around my shoulders,out into the chaotic streets of occupied Baghdad. As we traveled around the capital, we took side roads, winding, varying routes...
TEHRAN – It is said that the only time Ayatollah Khomeini, the founder of Iran's Islamic revolution, smiled was when he sat next to Yasser Arafat in the Iranian capital in 1979. Arafat was the first foreign dignitary to pay tribute to the revolution and was...
President Bush's reelection mandate has apparently resulted in a radical change in our policy toward the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK). Quoting some unnamed U.S. official, the Japanese newspaper Yomiuri Shimbun said that the U.S. has just established a...
UNITED NATIONS - No country can justify torture, the humiliation of prisoners, or violation of international conventions in the guise of fighting terrorism, says a UN report released here. The 19-page study, which is likely to go before the current session of the UN...
The death of Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat will test whether U.S. President George W. Bush intends to maintain his staunch support for Israel's right-wing government at the risk of further alienating the U.S.' European allies and Muslim public opinion. It will also...
RAMALLAH - For almost four decades, Yasser Arafat was Mr. Palestine to many in this fractured homeland. Yasser Arafat represented the Palestinian people, wherever they are, as the head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO), which was accepted by the Arab...
Two, three, or four young Palestinians are killed by Israeli forces every day now (we call it "restraint"), but none of them could win even a fraction of the attention given to Yasser Arafat, the dying old leader. The endless stream of words occasioned by Arafat's...
Today Abu Talat meets me, and he is in a somber mood. He's down because last night after the curfew began at 9:30 p.m., US military helicopters were circling his neighborhood until 3 a.m. "How can we live like this," he asks while holding up his hands,...
Often it is said that we should understand genocide to prevent it. This is wrong. Understanding is not the key. An explanation is: specifically, explaining genocide as due to unlimited power. Let's first consider the Holocaust, which is the paradigm case of genocide....
