Blogs
Unconventional – and sometimes provocative – insight from critical voices.
on :
Wednesday, 29 Aug, 2012
Sözde [SURZ-deh] adj. so-called (pej.)
A key piece of Turkish official jargon, much used by bureaucrats, policemen, court officials and others whose job it is to decide what the public should and should not think, this word has the effect of rendering the noun that follows it invisible to the user (and sometimes to the hearer too).
As a straightforward pejorative, sözde has a longish history (cf. Sözde Kızlar - 'so-called girls' - the title of a 1930 novel which describes the sticky e...
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on :
Tuesday, 28 Aug, 2012
Lebanon’s second largest city, Tripoli, has witnessed a dramatic rise in sectarian violence in recent days. Last week for instance, Sunni leaders from the Bab Al-Tabbana district fought Alawites from the Jabal Muhsin district, according to a recent report by the BBC. The clashes lasted two days, even after the military had intervened and a fragile truce had been settled. The fighting left 12 individuals dead and 100 wounded.
Lebanon, a country no stranger to sectarian violence due to its 1...
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on :
Friday, 24 Aug, 2012
When it comes to glad-handing dictators, Ahmed Mourad has had more experience than most.
“I shook hands with Gaddafi in 2004 and 2008,” he recalls with a smile. “We met in...
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Thursday, 23 Aug, 2012
An interview with Hussein, a 22 year-old former Hezbollah member and fighter. Originally from Nabatiyeh (Southern Lebanon). Hussein now lives in Beirut. In 2006, during the Israeli...
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on :
Thursday, 23 Aug, 2012
I first met Rahim Demirbas in 2010. A friend had told me about this old man who had been planting trees around his village for over a decade, thirty-five thousand of them in total,...
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on :
Wednesday, 22 Aug, 2012
It’s hard to feel sorry for China’s leadership, populated as it is by autocrats and oligarchs with little regard for the liberal yearnings of its people. And while China’s ec...
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on :
Tuesday, 21 Aug, 2012
Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad has elicited some of the strongest language from the White House this week following his claim last month that the military would use chemical weap...
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on :
Tuesday, 21 Aug, 2012
American journalist, Robert D. Kaplan, recently wrote an opinion piece for the US security intelligence firm STRATFOR entitled “Good Mideast Dictators.”
In it, Kaplan defen...
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on :
Monday, 20 Aug, 2012
Putumayo World Music, established in 1993 is known for its collection of diverse world music, thematically and geographically organized. Its selections are often surp...
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on :
Friday, 17 Aug, 2012
We had just finished interviewing a Bedouin sheikh in the sandy wilderness of North Sinai, when things began to get out of hand.
About 25 miles west of the Egyptian-Israeli bord...
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