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Middle East


“60 Minutes” Airs Dreadful Segment on Prince Salman

by Stanley Heller   March 24, 2018

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Hopefully this piece will be a bit of help to those demonstrating against Prince Salman’s #TrillionaireTour of the U.S.  (Aramco, the kingdom/Saudi family-owned oil company is valued at $2 trillion.)  Another piece I wrote about Saudi Arabia and the colleges that take Saudi elite money is at The Nation.

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Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists – Founding Statement of Principles

by the Alliance of Middle Eastern Socialists   December 23, 2017
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We are an alliance of Middle Eastern socialists opposed to all the international and Middle Eastern regional imperialist powers and their wars, whether the U.S., Russia and China or Israel, Saudi Arabia, Iran and Turkey. We also oppose other authoritarian regimes such as Assad’s in Syria and El Sisi’s in Egypt as well as religious fundamentalism whether of ISIS, Al Qaeda, Hezbollah or the Muslim Brotherhood. Although the Muslim Brotherhood and Hezbollah consider themselves gradualists and oppose the Jihadism of Al Qaeda and ISIS, all of these organizations share the goal of establishing a state based on Shari’a Law and preserving the current capitalist order.

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The House Resolution on Yemen is a Stinker

by Stanley Heller   November 21, 2017

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Congress was given a chance to stand up for basic humanity and the Constitution, but instead chose to lay an egg, a rotten one at that. It rejected a chance to use the War Powers Act to halt U.S. collaboration with Saudi Arabia’s ruthless war and siege tactics in Yemen. Instead it passed a resolution that could have been written by the Saudi kingdom’s lawyers and publicists.

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Looking Back at the June 1967 Middle East War

by Stephen R. Shalom Summer 2017

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JUNE 2017 IS THE FIFTIETH ANNIVERSARY of the 1967 Middle East War—the June War or, as Israelis like to call it, the Six Day War.

Why should we care today about this historical event? For one, the war—with its resulting conquests, refugees, and shifting alliances—helped define the modern Middle East and make it one of the world’s great flash points for further conflict. But there are other reasons as well why this war bears re-examination.

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The Arab Winter as "Morbid Symptom"

by Farooq Sulehria   July 15, 2016

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Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising. Stanford: Stanford Univeristy Press, 2016. 240 pp. $21.95.

The title of Gilbert Achcar’s latest book is derived from Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks: “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born, in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear”.

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The Foreign Policies of Sanders, Trump, and Clinton: America and the World In 2016 and Beyond

by Joanne Landy   May 20, 2016

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[This article will appear in the Summer 2016 issue of New Politics. Corrections since it was initially posted have been included.]

The world today is faced with crises on virtually every front, and any assessment of the foreign policy positions of the two major parties’ 2016 presidential candidates must be measured against how well they respond to these crises.

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Towards Progressive Politics in the Middle East

Problematica in conversation with Gilbert Achcar

Abbas Shahrabi Farahani and Gilbert Achcar   March 24, 2016

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Recent mass movements in Middle Eastern and North African countries, despite their defeats and failures, showed prospects and possibilities of a progressive change or a progressive mass organization in the region.  Fulfillment of these possibilities requires concentrating on attaining a comprehensive, critical knowledge of the region’s social, political, economic and cultural mechanisms and relations. To achieve these initial goals, Problematica has started a series of interviews with progressive or leftist Middle Eastern and North African intellectuals, activist and MENA scholars. In this interview over Skype, we have put some questions to Gilbert Achcar, Marxist intellectual and scholar of Middle East Studies and Professor of Development Studies at SOAS, University of London. He has published in 2013 The People Want: A Radical Exploration of the Arab Uprising. A sequel will be coming out soon under the title of Morbid Symptoms: Relapse in the Arab Uprising.

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Washington and Moscow: Halt the Bombing and Stop Supporting Dictators in the Middle East!

by Campaign for Peace and Democracy Winter 2016

ImageOutside powers have had a long and shameful history of cynically supporting dictatorships in the Middle East because maintaining friendly autocratic states in the region suits their geopolitical objectives. And today those criminal policies are flagrantly on display. 

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Neoliberalism and the Failure of the Arab Spring

by Yousef Khalil Summer 2015

ImageThe foundations for the Arab uprisings that took place in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis were laid in the years before by the neoliberal restructuring of Middle Eastern and North African economies.

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Sanders and the Middle East

by Riad Azar   July 3, 2015

ImageRegardless of one's views on whether or not the socialist left should support Bernie Sanders in his race for the White House, the momentum behind the self-described “democratic socialist” has been impressive. Beginning at 2% in April, his popularity grew to 14% in May and at last check was 32% in New Hampshire.

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"We're Facing an Important Crossroad"

Lebanese author Gilbert Achcar says the third revolutionary phase must be free of religious radicalism.

Dina Kabil interviews Gilbert Achcar   January 26, 2015

ImageLebanese Marxist intellectual Gilbert Achcar, author of The People Want (2013), Eastern Cauldron (2004) and The Clash of Barbarisms (2002/2006), says Egypt is at an historical and highly important crossroads in the development of the long-term revolutionary process— stressing the urgency in building leadership and formulating strategies appropriate for change.

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Syria, Iraq, ISIS, and the West

Winter 2015
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The Arab Revolutions

The Game’s Not Over Yet

by Kit Wainer Winter 2014

Long-time revolutionary activist, historian, and analyst Gilbert Achcar has produced a provocative assessment of the Arab Spring. In The People Want, Achcar develops a Marxist analysis of the roots of the Arab revolutions, traces their trajectories since December 2010, and draws a tentative balance sheet of what progress has been made and what possibilities remain.

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BAHRAIN UPDATE

by Campaign for Peace and Democracy Winter 2012

CPD’s statement "End U.S. Support for Bahrain’s Repressive Government" was signed by more than 1900 people, including several hundred Bahrainis, and was widely circulated in this country and Bahrain.

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Andalusian Uprising: The Empire that Unites the Arab Spring and European Anti-Austerity Protesters

Greg Smithsimon   November 26, 2011

     In the seventh century, Musa bin Nusair, born in Syria, traveled and fought his way through the Middle East and across North Africa, expanding the Muslim empire headquartered in Damascus, Syria. With his general Tariq bin Ziyad in the lead, he crossed the Mediterranean from Morocco with an army of several thousand, taking control of most of Spain. From 711 until 1031, the Umayyad Empire stretched from Córdoba to Damascus.

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