Let’s examine how this has played out among university officials. Academic authorities include Presidents, Regents /Trustees, and state or local officeholders. One can discern three patterns of behaviour: the fawn, the wolf, the headless chicken. Fawns are vulnerable, defensive, low in self-confidence and instinctively run and hide rather than fight. When ta...
Denial of civil liberties, accompanied by punishment for anybody who exposes those violations, has become commonplace in contemporary America. Yet, nothing that the nation has experienced – and that the more discerning protest – prepared us for the grotesque spectacle on display in the brutal suppression of free speech on university campuses. What we witness...
The police crackdown on pro-Palestinian genocide protesters on campuses [1] in a dozen major U.S. academic institutions, including the prestigious Ivy League, is disturbing. In 1968, the emblematic private (sic) Columbia University (New York) was the epicenter of demonstrations against the Vietnam War, which resulted in the police arrest of over 700 students...
For overwhelming Western political analysts, journalists, scientists, etc., the disappearance of the USSR in 1990/91 was symbolized overdramatically by the physical destruction of the Berlin Wall followed by the removal /destruction of status /monuments devoted to the communist leaders and communist ideology. This geopolitical change called for a new world...
Iran’s first direct successful attack on Israel for its many brutal attacks on Syria, Lebanon, Iran and the annihilation of Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has dramatically changed the rules for all state and non-state actors in the Middle East. On 13 April, for the first time in nearly 190 days, Palestinians in Gaza were able to sleep without fear of...
Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu has fractured a long-standing pillar of Israeli foreign policy that dictated it always needed to ensure the backing of the United States. Fixing the pillar may prove easier said than done. US President Joe Biden’s insistence that US support for Israel is “ironclad,” despite the conditioning of arms sales, is rooted as much i...
Emmanuel Macron has never had any regard for French culture. During his first election campaign, he never ceased to mock it. His ambition was to become President of the French Republic, but in his eyes, this only made sense within the European Union. During his two terms in office, he solved few French problems, but patiently built the EU into an empire of s...
NATO attacks Russia not only with physical weapons, sanctions and propaganda; it also attacks Russia using religion. On April 15, Tass reported that Ukrainian artillery units in Adveevka were given Orthodox Churches as targets for their high explosive shells. That the Nazi Kiev forces attack churches should not perhaps surprise us. The Donbas People’s Republ...
Not many cinema aficionados would know that Ila Arun, famous for her peppy Hindi song Choli Ke Peechey..., is also the lyricist, composer, and singer of one of most popular Hindi songs ever produced on women’s political participation. Close to the end of the 10th Lok Sabha in 1995, Ila Arun’s Vote for Ghaghra turned out to be the most popular Indi-Pop song o...
The same squalid resort to autocratic methods marks the European scene equally. In Berlin, riot police break into a meeting hall to disband forcibly a peaceful group assembled to discuss how to bring an end to the Gaza tragedy. Foreign participants are banned from ever again setting foot on German soil, a coterie that includes former Greek Treasury Minister ...
Is the West launching an all-out war against the global ‘South,’ against the BRICS – plus, against the ‘other’? Are we in the first stages of a civilizational struggle initiated by the US-led assemblage we call the “collective West”? That would have seemed an absurd idea until very recently. How can one reconcile such a dire proposition in the age of Globali...
The Zionist Israeli-Arab Palestinian conflict today is one of, if not the most significant, global security problems to be dealt with.[1] However, this conflict is historically not much old as it is a pretty modern issue, dating, in fact, since the First Zionist Congress in 1897. The focal question is: What is conflict about? In other words: What are those t...
Sukumar Sen, the first Chief Election Commissioner of India, wrote, “The main argument levelled in the past against adult suffrage was the magnitude of the task involved. It was felt that the number of voters under adult suffrage would exceed all reasonable bounds and that its adoption would involve too stupendous an administrative task for the governments. ...
An Israeli ground offensive in the southern Gazan enclave of Rafah is a question of when, not if. Not because Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu is oblivious to US and international pressure but because it could prove to be make or break for Israel’s embattled leader. Mr. Netanyahu has promised “total victory” in the Gaza war and to “finish the job” in Rafah....
If the mullahs’ rhetoric is clearly anti-Israeli, relations between the two countries are much more complex than we believe. There are in fact two opposing groups in Iran, one intends to do business by all means with the rest of the world, while the other aims to free people from colonization. The first has not stopped doing business with Israel, while the s...
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States believed that a unipolar world would last forever: year after year, day after day, it became increasingly blatant in its disregard for the interests of others and the opinions of the rest of the world. Then the concept of an international “rules-based order” was born: a group of American scholars, for...
They have consequences, whether uttered by government officials, members of parliament, military commanders, religious figures, activists, or pundits. Words become part of a battle of competing narratives in which the narrative is a tool to achieve a political outcome. In the Israeli-Palestinian battle of narratives, they, more often than not, either are des...