Who Are We? We Are Many!

A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD
A scene from Deir Ezzor City, Syria, now under ISIS control. AFP PHOTO / AHMAD ABOUD

Some people have enough moral sense to criticize Israel, but not to criticize anything that Assad and his supporters have done and are still doing. They see ISIS stoning women and chasing away Christians, but they ignore all evidence and testimony of torture, mass rape and mass murder in Assad’s concentration camps. They ignore evidence of collaboration between ISIS and Assad. They ignore Iran’s role in the current mayhem in Syria, Iraq and Gaza, and advocate engagement with her. They defend Russia and ignore her duplicity in war crimes in Syria and Ukraine. Clearly these people cannot truly be concerned with human rights. Their stand by the Palestinians at this stage seems motivated more by ideology than any sense of moral solidarity – an ideology that put Israel and America, and sometimes the West as a whole, at the center of all evil designs in the world; an ideology that, in essence, covets the power that these countries have and longs to appropriate it, rather than be truly dedicated to holding all equally accountable for their misdeeds.

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Fodder is our name

A family rests on the rubble of their home in Jebaliya (Time Magazine)
A family rests on the rubble of their home in Jebaliya (Time Magazine)

It took decades for Palestinian to finally win overt support in some mainstream international media outlets. But, and as is often the case with modern-day Arabs, the victory is Pyrrhic in nature and will not translate into any substantive support for the Palestinians’ goal of establishing their own independent state.

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Ah, the sheer lunacy of it all!

Mideast-Israel-Palest_Horo-31-965x543
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu during a press conference at the Defense Ministry in Tel Aviv, Friday, July 11, 2014. (photo credit: AP/Gali Tibbon, Pool)

Netanyahu finally speaks his mind | The Times of Israel.

If Netanyahu rejects a binational state and a fully sovereign Palestinian state, then, what does he endorse: apartheid “lite”? The expulsion of Palestinians into Egypt and Jordan? What other conclusions can one draw here? I mean a demilitarized entity encircled by walls and fences and crisscrossed by security checkpoints won’t even amount to a Lesotho-type state. Be that as it may, it’s clear that the Two-State Solution has by now taken its last breaths.

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The Iranian Connection

ISIS fighter in Mosul
ISIS fighter in Mosul

ISIS: The New Taliban by Ahmed Rashid | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.

The condemnation of Saudi Arabia on account of her funding of extremist movements around the world is more than warranted. But the persistent failure to condemn Iran on account of her similar efforts since the Islamic Revolution, in support of certain Shia groups like Hezbollah, and the occasional extremist Sunni group as well, including some units currently affiliated with ISIS in Syria, and the extremist factions in Hamas, is really baffling. This phenomenon is as well documented as its Saudi equivalent, is fueled by similar mixture of cynical and strategic calculations, and it poses no less a danger to global security and regional stability than Saudi involvement. So, why do researchers keep neglecting to highlight Iran’s role, even as some pushes for the kind of an engagement with Iran that, in practical terms, amounts to an appeasement? Is there an agenda involved here? What is it? Or how else could we explain this phenomenon?