Erdogan’s Sweet Tooth

Following the successful UN vote last week on enhanced membership status for Palestine, a photograph has been circulating that shows Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan intently feeding Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal a piece of cake decorated with Palestinian flag icing. Indeed, were it up Erdoğan, he would go down in history as [...]

Bin Laden in Syria

To ex-members of the anti-imperialist left propelled into the arms of NATO by the Libyan war last year, the conflict now devastating Syria pits the regime of Bashar al-Assad against “the Syrian people.” Thanks to this brilliantly clear dichotomy, anyone less than gung ho about providing weapons and other forms of support to the Free [...]

Framing the Beirut Bombing

As expected, there’s been a mad rush among the anti-Syrian opposition in Lebanon to blame the Syrian regime and its Lebanese allies for the killing of Lebanese security chief Wissam al-Hassan in yesterday’s car bombing. Lebanon’s Daily Star quoted MP Nuhad Mashnouq as assailing “the butcher Bashar Assad and the black regime that rules Syria [...]

War, Sport, and Inflatable Sex Dolls

For the past few days, Turkish media coverage of the conflict in Syria has been eclipsed by the departure of Brazilian soccer star Alex de Souza from Turkey’s Fenerbahçe football club. After yesterday’s incoming fire from Syria killed five members of the same family in the border town of Akçakale, however — prompting continuing rounds [...]

Terror Verde

Of far more legitimate concern than the impending subversion of world order by greenwashed commie terrorists is, of course, that the fabrication of such threats contributes to a blanket delegitimization of environmental activism.

Tom Friedman as Midwife

In the aftermath of Pulitzer champ Thomas Friedman’s latest New York Times offering, “Syria Is Iraq,” commentators have begun to question whether Friedman himself has not discovered the joys of Friedman-parodying. As Matt Taibbi remarked at Rolling Stone: “This column today is so crazy I have to think Friedman is kidding.” To put it in [...]

An Army of One

Last weekend, MSNBC host Chris Hayes offered the following sensible explanation for his reluctance to engage in a blanket application of the word “hero” to fallen U.S. military members:  I feel uncomfortable with the word hero because it seems to me that it is so rhetorically proximate to justifications for more war. As might be [...]

Cocaine, Death Squads, and the War on Terror

In March of 2009, my friend Amelia Opalinska and I hitchhiked around Colombia. Despite our parents’ conviction that such behavior was conducive to immediate kidnapping by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), the greatest challenge we ultimately faced was the reluctance of motorists to pick us up. After being informed by a compassionate passerby [...]