The fears created by the IS have actually reduced in major ways the civil rights of citizens and residents in the United States and western Europe. There is massive hypocrisy concerning which tyrants are being opposed. In effect, everyone protects the tyrants that are their geopolitical ally and denounces the tyrants that are not.
The U.S. drone war across much of the Greater Middle East and parts of Africa is in crisis and not because civilians are dying or the target list for that war, or the right to wage it just about anywhere on the planet, are in question in Washington. Something far more basic is at stake: drone pilots are quitting in record numbers.
Whenever a new poem by Mahmoud Darwish was published in al-Quds newspaper, I rushed over to Abu Aymen’s newsstand that was located in the refugee camp’s main square. It was a crowded and dusty place where grimy taxis waited for passengers, surrounded by fish and vegetable venders.
As the U.S. drone war flares up again in Yemen, a distressingly familiar pattern is playing out.
“Selling weapons isn’t just something you do for economic reasons,” says Andrew Smith, a spokesman for the UK group Campaign against Arms Trade (CAAT). “When you sell weapons, what you are doing is giving political support to the government you are dealing with."
The Sinai Peninsula has moved from the margins of Egyptian body politic to the uncontested center, as Egypt’s strong man - President Abdul Fatah al-Sisi - finds himself greatly undercut by the rise of an insurgency that seems to be growing stronger with time.
Copyright Toward Freedom 2019