Obama will win election but he has failed as President
Barack Obama is a cool dude. Mitt Romney is a dork. That could be the decisive factor. Almost everyone I know tells me that, if they were in the US, they'd vote for Obama. And almost without...
View ArticleIsrael warns Hamas of 'heavy price'
Israel has warned that the Palestinian movement Hamas will pay a "heavy price" for the latest barrage of rocket attacks and that the conflict could escalate. The flare-up, which began on Saturday, as...
View ArticleA modest proposal: Establishing a 'future' capital of the world
The idea of a global city has a long lineage. It is most often associated with being a centre of world trade and finance, but it usually also possesses strong cultural and touristic resources that...
View Article'Orientals' and Yankee presidents
Yankee presidents may come and go, but what does change are the spectacles through which they perceive the Middle East, especially its Arab component. However, although Yankee presidents may change in...
View ArticleInhale Reality, Exhale the Truth
Scattered are the lunatics, like rats, scurrying across the floor in panic when the lights are turned on. For forty years they have assumed that the cultural world of the United States is to their...
View ArticleInterpreting Obama's victory
Around the world, even more than in the United States, there is an audible sigh of relief the day after Obama won a clear mandate for a second term as president. It mainly meant that many were...
View ArticleThe purity of drones
In April of this year, Israel's Defence Minister Ehud Barak staged a visit to Bogota, where his activities included marketing Israeli drones to the Colombian state. According to a subsequent report in...
View ArticleAssassination: A Permanent Foreign Policy? (FCNL - Friends Committee on...
2C: the FCNL Staff Blog The below is a guest post by former FCNL legislative secretary Bridget Moix. The title of the article alone should have sent us all straight to FCNL's legislative action center...
View ArticleSinister Automatons
‘Before they were blind, deaf and dumb,’ exults Mark Maybury, chief scientist for the U.S. Air Force. ‘Now we’re beginning to make them to see, hear and sense.’ We know that rhetoric. ‘I became myself...
View ArticleSri Lanka rebels aim for glory
Some Tamil Tiger rebels became good marksmen during Sri Lanka's long civil war, and now that the conflict is over, they are getting even better, with some help from their former enemies. More than 300...
View ArticleArturo Escobar: a post-development thinker to be reckoned with
Drawing on influences from Foucault to Said, the Colombian's arguments have a sophistication that often goes unrecognised Arturo Escobar's ideas are best summed up in his 1995 book Encountering...
View ArticleInternational law, the Gaza war, and Palestine's state of exception
The large-scale military assault launched by Israel on Gaza, and the manner in which both Israeli and Palestinian forces are fighting this war, raise numerous red flags regarding large scale...
View Article'Chavez is still a model for Obama': Interview with Santiago Zabala
What does Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez, the Occupy movement and the Arab Spring all have in common?According to Santiago Zabala, professor of philosophy at the University of Barcelona, they're all...
View ArticleAmerica’s wallpaper war
As the US concludes yet another election cycle, it is worth interrogating the current state of the world’s unipolar hyperpower – and of the foreign policy, red in tooth and claw, that affects us all....
View Article10 Myths About Obama and the Democrats
As we head into The Chosen One’s second term, it might be useful to explode a few of the chronic myths that cling to the man more tightly than his shadow. Myths that have helped liberal intelligentsia...
View ArticleObama’s Fatwa
I just read Salman Rushdie’s memoir, , describing his nine years in hiding from Ayatollah Khomenei’s death sentence (fatwa), imposed for his “heretical” novel Satanic Verses. The entire world deplored...
View ArticleTime for a Reset on Human Rights
In 2008, Barack Obama's election thrilled many human rights activists. For eight years under George W. Bush, the U.S. government had used torture, held hundreds in long-term detention without trial,...
View ArticleThe Bombs-Away Election
Many Americans are rightly disgusted by the non-choice they are offered in the presidential race every four years. This year is no different despite the serious problems that the United States faces...
View ArticleChris Hedges: Elites Will Make Gazans of Us All
 Illustration by Mr. Fish Gaza is a window on our coming dystopia. The growing divide between the worldâs elite and its miserable masses of humanity is maintained through spiraling violence. Many...
View ArticleFuzzy new words for drone killings
‘Political language,” George Orwell wrote in 1946, “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable.” When government action can be defended only by arguments “too brutal for most people...
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