From Newsday, Sept. 19 (emphasis added): BLOCK 7, AYACUCHO PETROLEUM FIELD, Venezuela — The Islamic world may be roiling over remarks by the pope, but in this remote patch of eastern Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez suggested yesterday that a little… Read moreChavez to Ahmadinejad: Islam is “revolutionary”
From Indian Country Today, Sept. 19: NEW YORK – Tribal leaders and the Aymaran president of Bolivia, Evo Morales, held a historic meeting September 18 before Morales’ speech at the United Nations, where they discussed the dangers facing the natural… Read moreEvo Morales meets with Native American leaders
Sarah Ferguson writes for the Village Voice, Sept. 19: Anti-War Crowd Dogs Bush at the U.N. Protesters swamped Dag Hammarskjold Plaza opposite the United Nations Tuesday as President Bush was inside pledging to deliver “democracy” to the Middle East. Most… Read moreNew Yorkers protest Bush
We’ll have a clearer idea of what is going on here when the dust settles, but two things are worth noting about the Sept. 19 coup d’etat in Thailand. First, the coup leader Gen. Sonthi Boonyaratglin is the first Muslim… Read moreThailand: new GWOT flashpoint?
More evidence that Pakistan, the USA’s closest ally in the region, is ironically serving as a staging ground for the destabilization of US-occupied Afghanistan. First this, from The Guardian, Sept. 19: A chain of suicide bombings killed 19 people, including… Read moreAfghanistan: “Mullah Dadullah” pledges more terror
We warned even before the US invasion that the northern city of Kirkuk—contested by Kurds, Arabs and Turkmen—was Iraq’s most likely flashpoint for civil war. Up until now, it has (comparatively speaking) been spared embroilment in the sectarian warfare tearing… Read moreIraq: ethnic struggle behind Kirkuk terror
As suicide bombings and other random carnage become a daily affair in Iraq, a Baghdad book-sellers’ enclave which had been something of an intellectual autonomous zone even under the Saddam dictatorship is effectively shut down. Freedom’s on the march. From… Read moreBaghdad intellectual enclave shut down by war
Anybody have any idea who the “Lions of Monotheism” are? From Newsday, Sept. 19: Palestine’s Christians face retalliation from Muslims over Pope’s words NABLUS — The charred churches of this West Bank town were shuttered yesterday and circled by armed… Read moreAnti-papal backlash spreads to West Bank
This hero of the left has again revealed himself as fundamentally reactionary. Those with any familiarity with the struggle in Western Sahara know that talk about opposing the “partition of Morocco” is akin to opposing Israeli withdrawal from “Judea and… Read moreGeorge Galloway betrays Western Sahara
A little over a year ago, Mauritania’s long-ruling dictator Maoya Sidi Ahmed Ould Taya was overthrown in a coup d’etat led by Col. Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, who promised to usher in democracy. This June, a popular referendum approved a… Read moreMauritania moves towards democracy …except for slaves
Did Israel “let it happen on purpose”? From a Sept. 18 Haaretz account of Israeli intelligence “failures” in the recent Lebanon war: MI knew about Hezbollah kidnap plans Military Intelligence had clear information about an impending kidnap attempt by Hezbollah… Read moreLIHOP theory for Lebanon invasion?
You knew that it would. But an interesting glimmer of hope is that in Egypt, where Muslim-Coptic tensions have exploded into violence all too recently, both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Coptic hierarchy are urging people to chill out. In… Read moreAnti-papal backlash gets worse
