Multinationals and their products have been involved in suppressing the Arab Spring and have made hefty profits from providing surveillance capacity, security contracting and arms sales to repressive regimes.
Contrary to what international relations types may think, leaders seldom do a rigorous cost-benefit analysis of the results before waging war.
The right has been conducting a campaign with deep pockets to instill fear and hatred of Islam in Americans.
With homes and buildings vandalized, and communities literally reduced to ashes, it has become easy to dismiss the violence on the street as “pure criminality.” But such conclusions are naive and insufficient. Viral civil unrest should not be reduced to simple terms; the riots have many different elements. Although some rioters have been plainly motivated by opportunism, social, political, and racial factors are also at play.
An attempt by the Nazis to make a propaganda film about how Jews were responsible for conditions in the Warsaw ghetto never got off the ground.
If conditions do not change quickly by the time of the U.S.-promised veto of Palestinian statehood at the UN General Assembly on September 20, the Palestinian-Israeli conflict could explode into a new uprising with hundreds of deaths. The recent attack of Palestinian extremists on a bus in the southern Israeli resort town of Eilat and the eager over-reaction of Israeli President Benjamin Netanyahu is a harbinger of what is to come.
On June 25, 1991, Slovenia achieved its independence. As the new state took form, citizens of the former Socialist Republic of Slovenia gained immediate citizenship, retaining their economic and social rights in a fresh homeland. But all citizens of other republics of the former Yugoslavia, with permanent addresses in Slovenia, were granted only six months to file for citizenship. If they failed to act within this timeframe, their permanent resident status was revoked immediately. This arbitrary act of abjuration resulted in the “erasure” of 25,671 people from the registry of permanent residents in Slovenia.
As the sun rose on August 2, Spanish authorities destroyed the tent-village that had come to symbolize what some participants have called the Spanish Revolution. The ruling Socialist Party, via the Ministry of the Interior and in conjunction with the right-wing Popular Party that controls the local government, ordered Madrid’s Puerta del Sol cleared of all remnants of the 15-M (May 15) movement as its participants, the indignados (the outraged) watched helplessly.
Allegations have surfaced that the Guinean woman who accused the former executive director of the IMF, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of sexual assault had lied during her asylum proceedings. This story has fed into a larger narrative that desperate immigrants, assisted by unscrupulous enablers, cheat their way through the system to gain asylum. Some media outlets played their part to further advance this impression.
At a certain point, the issue of Israeli government support of settlers to the exclusion of the average Israeli will rear its ugly head in Israel’s protests.