Neither former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh nor al Qaeda in Yemen have learned that murdering your countrymen turns their survivors against you.
The visual landscape of the Arab World has changed greatly as various forms of creative expression have flourished in the days since the Arab Spring. Graffiti and street art not only played a distinct role in the political dissent of this revolutionary period. Art has also been an ongoing experience for the revolutionary youth that is strengthening civil society and the democratic process.
Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they — and the vast national-security structure that continues to be built-up and institutionalized around the presidential self — are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.
The White House neither confirms nor denies the air war in Yemen.
Thanks to fuzzy accounting, civilians killed in drone strikes are liable to be categorized as militants posthumously.
In Paris, poets staged a flash mob outside the Louvre Museum. In North Carolina, they sent poems to their state legislators, calling on them to restore arts education funding to the decimated state budget. In Vancouver, BC, poets cleaned up a beach before their reading. There was a reading in solidarity with the people of Tibet in Pasadena, California, events throughout Mexico City demanding an end to violence, and “an exorcism of fear and helplessness” in Norman, Oklahoma. Poets gathered in Fez, Morocco, and Jalalabad, Afghanistan and Sharjah, United Arab Emirates.
Despite limited evidence, the United States painted Anwar al-Awlaki as a terrorist mastermind and executed him without the trial to which he was entitled as a U.S. native.
The Islamist specter in Yemen is driving cooperation between the U.S. and the Saudi government with its questionable human rights record.
Perhaps it’s time we sympathized with what drives suicide bombers.
“Every time civilians are killed, you almost always do more harm than good,” agreed Carnegie’s Boucek. “You turn off the Yemeni people from wanting to co-operate; you turn off the government, because it looks like they’re facilitating it. It breeds further radicalization and makes it appear that Americans only care about terrorism, which is a pretty small issue compared to the challenges that Yemen faces and that lead to state failure or collapse,” he added.