"People holding a sign 'To: America. From: the Egyptian People. Stop supporting Mubarak. It's over!" so tweeted my brave colleague, Democracy Now! senior producer Sharif Abdel Kouddous, from the streets of Cairo.
U.S. foreign policy
Falling Arab dictatorships and Israeli government panic
The walls are crumbling. The walls behind which dictators indulge in decadent opulence while "their" people are mired in wretched circumstance. The walls behind which "leaders" secretly sell -- for personal gain -- the rights of the people they claim to represent.
Across North Africa and the Middle East, across the Arab world, for decades dictatorship and deepening corruption, firmly supported by imperial powers, seemed beyond challenge. Today, once "stable" regimes are now facing a popular reckoning.
From the vantage point of Palestine, there are three new dynamics.
Wikileaks exposes the lies of U.S. diplomacy
Wikileaks is again publishing a trove of documents, in this case classified U.S. State Department diplomatic cables. The whistle-blower website will gradually be releasing more than 250,000 of these documents in the coming months so that they can be analyzed and gain the attention they deserve. The cables are internal, written communications among U.S. embassies around the world and also to the U.S. State Department. Wikileaks described the leak as "the largest set of confidential documents ever to be released into the public domain [giving] an unprecedented insight into U.S. government foreign activities."
Obama brings support for repressive regime on visit to Indonesia
If a volcano kills civilians in Indonesia, it's news. When the government does the killing, sadly, it's just business as usual, especially if an American president tacitly endorses the killing, as President Barack Obama just did with his visit to Indonesia.
The problems with U.S. foreign policy in Latin America
President Barack Obama's re-election campaign launched its first Spanish-language ads this week, just after returning from the Summit of the Americas. He spent three days in Colombia, longer than any president in U.S. history. The trip was marred, however, by a prostitution scandal involving the U.S. military and Secret Service. Gen. Martin Dempsey, chair of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, said, "We let the boss down, because nobody's talking about what went on in Colombia other than this incident." Dempsey is right. It also served as a metaphor for the U.S government's ongoing treatment of Latin America.
Netanyahu's campaign to change U.S. politics using Iran
Driven by fear that a second-term Obama administration won't be as lenient towards Israeli expansionism and dispossession of Palestinians as a Republican (or even a first term Obama) administration, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is using Iran to change the course of the U.S. election. While Netanyahu's call for a strike against Iran's nuclear facilities has kept Washington silent on discussing Palestinians, he is looking to make that permanent by shepherding a coalition of right-wing Western support to push America into another Middle East war.
The terrorizing occupation of Afghanistan
We may never know what drove a U.S. Army staff sergeant to head out into the Afghan night and allegedly murder at least 16 civilians in their homes, among them nine children and three women. The massacre near Belambai, in Kandahar, Afghanistan, has shocked the world and intensified the calls for an end to the longest war in U.S. history. The attack has been called tragic, which it surely is. But when Afghans attack U.S. forces, they are called "terrorists." That is, perhaps, the inconsistency at the core of U.S. policy, that democracy can be delivered through the barrel of a gun, that terrorism can be fought by terrorizing a nation.
Protests launch campaign to stop war on Iran
A series of anti-war demonstrations took place across Canada last week that marked the beginning of a co-ordinated campaign to oppose sanctions and war on Iran. A total of seven actions were organized in Toronto, Ottawa, London and Vancouver, including rallies, marches, information pickets and a "die-in," with support from the Canadian Peace Alliance (CPA). The protests coincided with a three-day visit to Canada by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who arrived in Ottawa on March 2 to drum up support for an Israeli attack on Iran. Netanyahu's stopover in Canada was followed by his meeting in Washington with Barack Obama to press the case for war.
Who wants to intervene in Syria?
Bachar al-Assad has risen to the heights of being one of the least popular men in the world. He is denounced as a tyrant, indeed a very bloody tyrant, by almost everyone. Even those governments that refuse to denounce him seem to be counselling him to curb his repressive ways and to make some sort of political concessions to his internal opponents.
