Good to see that one of the key Arab nations, like Egypt, is happy to lie down with a rapacious Jewish state: Saudi Arabia has conducted tests to stand down its air defences to enable Israeli jets to make a bombing raid on Iran’s nuclear facilities, The Times can reveal. In the week that the…
Showing all posts tagged Iran
Listening to whispers in Tehran and beyond
Dissent exists in the Islamic Republic, away from the Western media.
The reasons most Israelis have no real interest in giving up the West Bank
While America’s neo-conservatives begin a full-fledged campaign of hatred directed at Turkey, this is how one of the United States’ major (war-supporting) Jewish writers, The Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg, frames the debate; Israeli fear, paranoia and belligerence: Last night Mrs. Goldblog and I went to a dinner at which The Situation was the main topic of…
We don’t care about the people of Iran
A new Human Rights Watch report on the desperation in Iran one year after the disputed elections: Reports received by Human Rights Watch from human rights campaigners and others inside Iran suggest that the current atmosphere inside the country is markedly different than the images of mass protest beamed across airwaves and cyberspace a year…
Israel must be “enlightened”
What world do these people live in? Here’s Ari Shavit in Haaretz: If Israel intends to attack Iran, it must carry out the following diplomatic operations during the year preceding such an offensive: position itself anew in the international arena as an enlightened, peace-seeking democracy; tighten its alliances with the United States and the West;…
Syria, Iran and Turkey are now calling the shots
The major role of Turkey in the Middle East is shifting fast, damn fast. Old alliances, always formed around convenience over principle (that’s foreign affairs, I hear you say) are moving. Paul McGeough outlines what’s going on but a stronger analysis is by Pepe Escobar in Asia Times. Poor, little Washington just can’t control the…
Rules of the cyberjihad
In my book The Blogging Revolution I examine Tehran’s various methods of censoring the web and torturing online dissidents. That campaign is only getting worse and Western firms are complicit: Iran’s mullahcracy inevitably recalls the latter days of the Soviet Union. But — at least until the very end — the Soviet censors could clamp…
Repeat after me; no Twitter explosion in the Islamic Republic
I’ve written before about the hyped media campaign last year that falsely claimed the civil unrest in Iran was a Twitter Revolution. In fact, many of the Iranian Twitter accounts were being run from inside the US. So how many hacks will read this? But it is time to get Twitter’s role in the events…
No, anti-Semitism isn’t (mostly) behind the current campaign
Radio Farda is the Iranian branch of Radio Free Europe and receives millions of hits monthly by discussing issues the Islamic Republic would rather keep hidden. I was interviewed last week about the Gaza flotilla (though I should note, for the record, that I think real anti-Semitism is a tiny reason behind the current campaign…