It’s hard being anything but a particular kind of Sunni Muslim in Pakistan these days. Christians, Hindus, Shia Muslims and members of the Ahmadiyya sect — considered heretical by many other Muslims — are wise to remain circumspect. Even adherents of Sufi orders, most of them Sunnis, are considered idolaters by Salafist fundamentalists. All these […]
There has arguably never been a president like Rodrigo Duterte, even in a country used to sometimes outrageous political personalities. To call him undiplomatic is putting it mildly. He is uncouth, goes into tirades, and breaks all the rules of statecraft, even using profanity to criticize other world leaders, as he did in 2016, when […]
Though it’s been called America’s longest war, that’s not exactly accurate. Actually, it’s the longest of its colonial wars. That’s different. The United States and some of its allies have been battling the Taliban in Afghanistan since 2001, following the al-Qaeda attacks on New York and Washington that September 11. It was intended to punish the […]
In the lead-up to the May 19 presidential election in Iran, most observers maintained that the electorate would be focused on one main issue. Did the lifting of economic sanctions on the part of the United States following the nuclear agreement signed by Tehran with the five members of the UN Security Council, plus Germany, […]
As William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.” How true this has been the case in the current presidential election in France. Thanks to the candidacy of Marine Le Pen and the National Front, arguments about the wartime collaborationist fascist regime, led by Marshal Henri Philippe Pétain and headquartered in […]
The recent release of the once-inaccessible archive of the United Nations War Crimes Commission, dating back to 1943, by the London-based Wiener Library, the world’s oldest Holocaust archive and Britain’s largest collection on the Nazi era, has reignited an old debate. How much did the Allies know during World War II that Adolf Hitler’s genocidal regime […]
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has been auditioning for the role of Ottoman sultan — a position left vacant by Mehmed VI with his abdication in 1922 — for at least the past 14 years. In 2004, Erdogan became Turkey’s prime minister, following the parliamentary election victory of his newly-founded Justice and Development Party (AKP) […]
The 100th anniversary of the death of Ludwik Zamenhof, the creator of the Esperanto language, was observed on April 14 of this year. Zamenhof, a Jewish physician, was born in the northeastern Polish city of Bialystok in 1859 and died in Warsaw in 1917. Bialystok belonged to the Russian Empire at the time and, as […]
Are the neoconservative jingoists in Washington pushing for armed conflict with Russia? Their charge that an April 4 chemical gas attack by air against civilians in the Syrian town of Khan Sheikhoun was ordered by Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, supported by Moscow, is, very conveniently, giving them further ammunition to create war hysteria. Two days […]
As turbulent a country as ever, Egypt, in the last six years, has seen an uprising topple a dictator, the election of a Muslim Brotherhood leader to power, and finally a coup that brought a former general/ defence minister into office. When Barack Obama came to Washington in 2009, he promised a “reboot” in relations […]