The age of the Arab dictator is over. The current wave of unrest sweeping the Middle East has deposed two dictators, spilt much blood and fundamentally shaken the status quo. Already, the movement that began with a few street demonstrations in Tunis has led to a regime change in Egypt and threatens to overthrow the monarchy in Bahrain, a military regime in Libya, a dictatorship in Yemen and many other governments throughout the region. What coul...
...ation of another set of shocking photos. In May 2004, the BBC reported that photos showing two Iraqi women, both wearing traditional black robes and being raped at gunpoint by men wearing US army uniforms, were circulating on Arabic-language websites. The BBC said, “These pictures do not seem genuine: the uniforms do not seem right … But the damage has been done.” The photos may have come from the hardcore porn site IraqBabes, which offered...
Illustration by Amalia Rinehart Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine By Candace Lukasik: Among the Arab revolutions of the last year, there is one struggle for justice that has endured since 1948: The occupation of Palestine. The Arab Spring offers new hope for a shift in the Palestinian condition of dispossession, discrimination, and death. The Arab revolutions grew out of a sustained hope for freedom. Grassroots mass mobilization was th...
"We are not Tunisia," "We are not Tunisia and Egypt," "We are not Tunisia and Egypt and Libya," "We are not Tunisia and Egypt and Libya and Yemen" On Saturday, the Arab League announced that it has (finally) taken some substantive action on the issue of Syria: if the Assad regime does not desist from its violent tactics against civilians and hold up its end of the Arab League-brokered conflict resolution...
Illustration by Liz Lee Offset against grey skies and the black uniform of an average Istanbulite bundled against the cold, the bright yellow and turquoise banners of the Peace and Democracy Party (BDP) bring a hint of the Arab Spring to Taksim Square. Occupying the symbolic heart of a vibrant, modern Turkey, Kurdish demonstrators have gathered to protest a move to ban 12 of their candidates from the Turkish general election – a ripple in an oc...
...ian National Council will be funding and arming the FSA, all seem to point to a civil war into which the country is precariously perched to descend, if it has not already. The most recent development was the withdrawal of the Arab League monitors due to the non-cooperation of the regime and the referral of the conflict to the United Nations Security Council. Now of course, the Syrian regime’s most important supporter in the region is Iran. The co...
...e brutality and the composition of Qaddafi’s forces came from former Libyan Ambassador to India, Ali Al-Essawi, in a sit-down interview with Al Jazeera. He characterized these mercenaries as black Africans who could not speak Arabic – “foreigners” who were “doing terrible things” to women and children. Both Western and Arab news outlets fed the public with a barrage of violent images that resulted in the construction of a narrative of African mer...
...able to launch Operation Cast Lead, enter Gaza, send a message, and leave with relatively minimal political consequences. Entrenched allegiances held firm and the political climate disarmed any popular uprising. But then the Arab Spring happened, and is still happening. With the likes of Mubarak gone, the empowerment of popular Arab and Islamist forces in countries across the region, and a United States exhausted from years of war and uncertain...
...amas government. Yet that “18.8%” was taken from a poll in June 2009—nearly three and a half years ago. And the “67%” was taken from a March 2011 poll—nearly two years ago, and at a time when the forces from the start of the Arab Spring had not yet fully emerged, ones that have since favored Hamas’s position. He cites a Washington Post article written on November 30 that says the spike in support for Hamas was beginning to fade at that time. Wel...
...pholding the values of the revolution. As long as Egypt’s political situation remains fragile and dirty, Americans will be tempted to deem the revolution a failure. But this entirely misses the point of the revolution, of the Arab Spring as a whole. In The Invisible Arab, an agonizingly opinionated but important and honest book on the Arab Spring, Al-Jazeera journalist Marwan Bishara makes a powerful statement that we often take for granted. “The...
Follow us at
Like us on
Recent Comments