The man arrested for ploughing his car into anti-racist counter-protesters at the Charlottesville "Unite the Right" rally is identified as a follower of the Vanguard America hate group. We will now be treated to endless debate about whether he is a "terrorist" or just an angry lone nut—with both sides overlooking the critical role of car culture in the attack.
The Rohingya Muslim people of Burma, facing genocide in their homeland, have fled by the thousands to Bangladesh—where they are not being welcomed. Long confined to refugee camps near the border, they now face forcible relocation to an uninhabited offshore island. Shunted from one region to another, they are targeted by the predictable propaganda—stigmatized as Muslim terrorists in Burma, they are now stigmatized by Bangladesh authorities as drug-traffickers.
A thousands-strong defiant youth-led protest was held outside the Philippines' House of Representatives as ultra-hardline President Rodrigo Duterte gave his second State of the Nation Address—in which he pledged to keep pursuing his bloody drug war that has left some 8,000 dead in his first year in office. Duterte offered drug dealers and users a choice of "jail or hell."
Donald Trump, the buddy of Putin, Erdogan, Sisi and Duterte, now calls Venezuela a “dictatorship” and slaps sanctions on President NicolĂĄs Maduro. All this proves is that Maduro is more useful to Trump as an external demon. Can we oppose Maduro’s power-grab without legitimizing Trump’s hypocrisy?
There is an unseemly tone of gloating to conservative commentary on the crisis in Venezuela, with pundits pointing to the current chaos as evidence that "socialism" doesn't work. But a case can be made that, contrary to conservative and mainstream assumptions, the problem is precisely that the Bolivarian Revolution has been insufficiently revolutionary and socialist.
Washington has now made it official that its enemy in Syria is just ISIS and al-Qaedaâand explicitly not the Bashar Assad dictatorship. A US Army representative told CNN that the Coalition has issued a directive to rebel forces operating out if its base in southern Syria that they must be exclusively focused on fighting ISIS and not the Damascus regime. One rebel faction, Shohada al-Quartyan, has refused to accept this ultimatum, and left the base.
The democratic transition in Tunisia since the 2011 uprising has been the one real success story of the Arab Revolutionâand the Tunisian revolution was also the first that served to spark the subsequent wave. So Tunisia’s pro-democracy forces have international responsibilities, seen as keepers of the flame. It is distressing to learn that the General Union of Tunisian Workers (UGTT), a pillar of the country’s pro-democracy movement, sent a delegation to Damascus to meet with dictator Bashar Assad and express solidarity with his “war against terrorism.”
Among international volunteer brigades drawn by the anarchist-influenced politics of the Rojava Kurds is now the first explicitly LGBT military unit in the Syrian warâthe Queer Insurrection and Liberation Army (TQILA). But these international brigades are attached to the Kurdish militia force being backed by the Pentagon to take Raqqa from ISIS. Mounting civilian casualties of US air-strikes on Raqqa, as well as charges of abuses by the advancing Kurdish forces, raise grim questions about northern Syria’s future after the eventual defeat of ISIS.
Civilian casualties from the US-led war against ISIS are set to double under President Trump, according to the AirWars website that has been monitoring the toll of the conflict. At least 2,300 civilians were killed in Coalition strikes overseen by the Obama White House in Iraq and Syria. As of July, more than 2,200 additional civilians appear to have been killed in Coalition raids since Trump was inaugurated.
One year after Rodrigo Duterte took office on a pledge to expunge the "virulent social disease" of drug abuse, the civilian death toll in his crackdown may be as high as 8,000. Among the upwards of 80,000 arrested under Duterte's rule are some, including opposition politicians, who have been clearly framed for speaking out against him. And in the restive southern island of Mindanao, he has made good on his threats to instate martial law.
The full liberation of Mosul from ISIS has been declared, but at a terrible cost in human lives—and multiple contradictions among the alliance assembled to take the city could open a new war in Iraq's north.
Russia announced that it is sending forces to police the “de-escalation zones” in Syriaâwhich could provide a spark for massive escalation.
