Throughline-Qatar's World Cup - 0 views
Will MBS Bankrupt Saudi Arabia? - Middle East News - Haaretz.com - 0 views
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five years in and with little progress in sight, cracks are appearing in Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman’s flagship project to diversify the oil-driven Saudi economy. Neom’s former employees raised concerns that bringing the giga-project out of the realm of science fiction might never happen. Architecture experts have called it “insane.” Sources inside the royal circle no longer shy away from lashing out at MBS’ ever-changing ideas, “mood swings,” “terrible tempers” and fear-based leadership.
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“The general concern is this will turn out like for the Shah of Iran, developing schemes that become incredibly detached from reality and no one will tell him to refocus,” a source familiar with the dynamics of Saudi Arabia’s royal family told me, on condition of anonymity
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the risk of the Crown Prince ending up in an echo chamber cemented by yes-men. Power consolidation under MBS is unprecedented in Saudi Arabia’s recent history, moving the kingdom’s system from “one of consensus within the family to one-man rule.”
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Palestinian schools in Jerusalem strike over Israel-imposed books | Israel-Palestine co... - 0 views
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Palestinian schools in occupied East Jerusalem are observing a general strike in protest at attempts by Israel’s Jerusalem municipality to censor and edit Palestinian textbooks, as well as introduce an Israeli curriculum in classrooms.
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“What is worrying the parents is that they are being cornered between distorted Palestinian curriculums and Israeli curriculums,”
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“There is an Israelisation of Palestinian education going on,”
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Josep Borrell's European 'garden' is built on the plunder of the 'jungle' | Middle East... - 0 views
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Continuing the racist metaphor which Israel's former prime minister, the Lithuanian-born Ehud Barak, née Brog, posited in 2002 when he described Israel as a "villa in the jungle", European Union foreign policy chief Josep Borrell declared last week that "Europe is a garden. We have built a garden…The rest of the world – and you know this very well, Federica [Mogherini] – is not exactly a garden. Most of the rest of the world is a jungle, and the jungle could invade the garden."
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In the 19th and much of the 20th century, the favourite metaphor that European colonial racists used against the rest of the world was that Europe represented "civilisation", while the rest of the world represented "savagery" and "barbarism". The indigenous peoples of the Americas were described early on as savages. Any resistance to Europe’s colonial genocides then or later was considered nothing short of barbarism, as the French described the resistance of the enslaved Africans of Saint Domingue, the Algerian people, the Kanak of New Caledonia, among many others.
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Borrell’s imperialist and racist metaphor was spewed as part of his opening remarks at the European Diplomatic Academy in Bruges last week and were addressed to the Italian Islam expert and former communist Federica Mogherini, rector of the College of Europe.
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Man Arrested in Mecca for Going on Pilgrimage 'For the Queen's Soul' - 0 views
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umrah
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The man, who was wearing a generic white pilgrimage costume, held a banner handwritten in both Arabic and English saying, “Umrah for the soul of Queen Elizabeth II, may Allah grant her a place in heaven and accept her among the righteous people.”
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People generally take photos while on pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia, and sometimes that includes shoutouts and banners with different messages, but security has been tightened after an Israeli journalist snuck into the Hajj, the major Muslim pilgrimage, in July.
Iran Protests Against Hijab, Human Rights Abuses Boil Over | WPR - 0 views
1950s U.S. Foreign Policy Looms Large in Lebanon - New Lines Magazine - 0 views
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the legacy of containment looms large over Lebanon. For decades, the U.S. has been the single largest financial supporter of the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF), in a bid to balance Iran’s influence in the economically and politically stricken country. Despite growing U.S. isolationism, the Biden administration shows no sign of reversing this time-honored interest in Lebanese security, confirming $67 million in aid to the armed forces earlier this year.
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Washington’s reductive containment mentality only deepened complex internal fissures within Lebanon’s society and achieved little for its people
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By hitting the panic button, Chamoun unwittingly began a new era of U.S. involvement in the Middle East. Operation Blue Bat may have been a stroll along the beach for the Marines who landed at Khalde, but the invasion was both immensely risky in the short run and immeasurably costly in the long run.
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King Charles III's Admiration for Islam Could Mend Divides | Time - 0 views
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Almost 30 years ago, then-Prince Charles declared that he wanted to be a “defender of faith,” rather than simply “Defender of the Faith,” to reflect Britain’s growing religious diversity. It created a bit of a storm in a teacup, as he had clearly not meant that he would be changing the traditional role so much as adding to it. The new King is a particular type of Anglican: one that on the one hand, is incredibly tied to the notion of tradition; but on the other, has shown a great deal of affinity for both Eastern Orthodox Christianity and Islam, two religions clearly outside the Anglican fold that he must now titularly lead.
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the King has been quite public about his admiration for Islam as a religion, and Muslim communities, both in Britain and abroad.
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Privately, he’s shown a lot of sympathy for where Muslims are in difficult political situations, both in Europe and further afield. Robert Jobson’s recent Charles at Seventy claims that the King has significant sympathies for the Palestinians living under Israeli occupation, for example. It’s also claimed that he disagreed with dress restrictions imposed on Muslim women in various European countries.
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Dented plaque, creaking hospital and Queen's complex legacy in Aden - Al-Monitor: Indep... - 0 views
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A battered plaque in a rundown hospital and a crackly, black-and-white newsreel are all that remain of Queen Elizabeth II's 1954 visit to Aden, the war-torn Yemeni city whose troubles are a reminder of Britain's complicated legacy in the Middle East.
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mildew, emaciated children and the stench of urine, as the under-equipped facility grapples with an impossible workload in the face of a long-running conflict.
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British colonialism is inextricably linked with the Middle East partly because of the 1916 Sykes-Picot agreement, when Britain and France carved up much of the region between them amid the collapse of Ottoman rule during World War I. Many Arab leaders remain close to British royalty, however. After the queen's death this month at 96, sombre tributes were offered by monarchies that thrived under British protection.
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More than Genocide - Boston Review - 0 views
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Mass state violence against civilians is not a glitch in the international system; it is baked into statehood itself. The natural right of self-defense plays a foundational role in the self-conception of Western states in particular, the formation of which is inseparable from imperial expansion. Since the Spanish conquest of the Americas starting in the sixteenth century, settlers justified their reprisals against indigenous resistance as defensive “self-preservation.” If they felt their survival was imperiled, colonizers engaged in massive retaliation against “native” peoples, including noncombatants. The “doctrine of double effect” assured them that killing innocents was permissible as a side effect of carrying out a moral end, like self-defense.
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By the nineteenth century, the Christianizing mission had been augmented by a civilizing one of the “savage” natives. More recently, this colonial ideology has manifested itself in the project of “bringing democracy to the Arab world,” with Israel designated as the “the only democracy in the Middle East,” the proverbial “villa in the jungle.”
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Without imperial possessions and the lucrative trade in sugar and other commodities predicated on the Atlantic slave trade, European states would not have generated the surpluses necessary to pay for their military establishments and the bureaucratic apparatuses required to sustain them. And while European powers and settlers in their colonies did not set out to exterminate the peoples they conquered, they killed any who resisted, claiming that their hands were forced.
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The Post-WWI Migrations That Built Yugoslavia and Turkey Have Left a Painful Legacy - N... - 0 views
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the religious, ethnic and linguistic diversity that characterized their territories in the Middle East and Eastern Europe no longer chimed with the new world order being organized around nation-states
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Designing measures such as the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, the League of Nations legitimized demographic engineering policies and made migration an intrinsic part of nation-building. With international encouragement, the states with Muslim minorities in the Balkans devised multipronged policies to push out the citizens they saw as undesirable. Turkey became the only destination for Balkan Muslims, even when they were not Turkish.
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in 1938 Belgrade and Ankara concluded a little-known agreement to transfer 200,000 Yugoslav citizens to Turkey. The transfer did not materialize because of the start of World War II, but the migrations did eventually take place and continued into the 1950s. For both Yugoslavia and Turkey, new states created in the aftermath of World War I, migration was an important part of nation-building.
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AIPAC Is Endorsing Candidates, But Progressives Should Turn Them Down | Teen Vogue - 0 views
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When I served as president of Bears for Israel, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee’s affiliate group at UC Berkeley from 2017-to 2019, I thought I was playing my part to promote peace. But in the past several years, I’ve come to see that AIPAC — alongside an alliance of hawkish U.S. politicians, Christian Zionists, and defense contractors — contributes to the cycle of violence by demanding or benefiting from unconditional support for the Israeli government no matter the cost.
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I decided to study Arabic in college and worked in humanitarian aid in Greece, where I befriended Syrian-Palestinian refugees. I developed deep relationships with Palestinians through academic programming and made friendships with Palestinian-Americans at school and as a staffer working on Democratic campaigns. My relationships across differences stood in direct contrast to the echo chamber I grew up in, where I was taught that the only option for sustained Jewish safety in a post-Holocaust world was separating ourselves from non-Jews in a militaristic state of our own.
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there can’t be safety for some at the expense of another and that our Jewish community must reject the idea that our freedom is synonymous with retaining power over others. We must understand that Palestinian and Jewish safety are not mutually exclusive, but are in fact intertwined.
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The Ukraine War: A Global Crisis? | Crisis Group - 0 views
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The Ukraine conflict may be a matter of global concern, but states’ responses to it continue to be conditioned by internal political debates and foreign policy priorities.
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China has hewed to a non-position on Russian aggression – neither condemning nor supporting the act, and declining to label it as an invasion – while lamenting the current situation as “something we do not want to see”. With an eye to the West, Beijing abstained on rather than vetoing a Security Council resolution calling on Russia to withdraw from Ukraine, and reports indicate that two major Chinese state banks are restricting financing for Russian commodities. Beijing now emphasises the principles of territorial integrity and sovereignty in its statements, a point that had either been absent from earlier statements or more ambiguously discussed as “principles of the UN Charter”.
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the worldview that major powers can and do occasionally break the rules
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Turkey's "anti-colonial" pivot to Mali: French-Turkish competition and the ro... - 0 views
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Turkey uses anti-colonial discourse to exploit postcolonial sentiments with a view to challenging the political and economic power of Western actors, to portraying Turkey as a legitimate and “anti-colonial” ally and partner and, in the long run, to establishing a robust Turkish presence in Mali, the Sahel and beyond
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Despite initially employing anti-colonial and anti-imperialist arguments to fan winds of solidarity (Zarakol, 2011, 125–135, 148), Mustafa Kemal subsequently championed the Westernization of Turkey with a view to transforming it into a modern, European, Western -rather than a “postcolonial”- country, a policy in which he diverged from other regional actors
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The focus on postcolonial discourse intensified following the 2016 coup attempt, which was presented as an attempt by “Western colonialist forces” to topple Turkey’s legitimate government
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Our Oligarch - 0 views
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Abramovich is perhaps the most visible of the “oligarchs” surrounding Putin, who are widely perceived as extensions of the Russian president and keepers of a vast fortune that is effectively under the Kremlin’s control. Much of this wealth was extracted from Russia’s enormous energy and mineral resources, and is now stashed in secret bank accounts in the Mediterranean and the Caribbean, in empty mansions and condos from London to Manhattan to Miami, and in yachts and private jets on the French Riviera.
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as much as 60% of Russia’s GDP is offshore
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The reserved, gray-bearded Abramovich is notoriously litigious toward critics who seek to detail his close ties to Putin. Last year, he successfully sued the British journalist Catherine Belton, who claimed in her 2020 book Putin’s People that the Russian president dictated Abramovich’s major purchases, including his decision to buy Chelsea. He also extracted an apology from a British newspaper for calling him a “bag carrier” for the Russian president.
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The weaponisation of water and Iraq's climate catastrophe - 0 views
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From a population of half a million in the 1950s, half a century later saw approximately 20,000 remain. In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein drained the marshes to punish its inhabitants, whom he accused of betrayal during the Iraq-Iran war between 1980-1988. One of his tactics was to build dams, destroying the livelihoods of residents by withholding water. Hundreds of thousands of residents were displaced, and by the year 2000, it was estimated that 90% of the marshes had disappeared.
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the United Nations ranked Iraq as the fifth most vulnerable country to climate change on earth
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Residents of the marshes have stated that being granted UNESCO world heritage status has done nothing to improve their quality of life. They cite broken promises and negligence from the central government towards their plight, in regard to the constant worsening of their living conditions. These issues have provided predicaments for those whose descendants have inhabited this region for thousands of years.
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