In this quiet hour, I summon words, a humble man amidst shadows long, To speak of wounds not my own, to voice a plea so loud and strong. For streets that haunt with harried silence, for whispers in the dark, For the women who carry nightmares in the hollows of their hearts, I say, not Continue reading »
World Affairs
Lies and impunity paved the way for the worst time in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Hanan Ashrawi says Gaza is “worse than even the Nakba, because it is a wilful, deliberate, total genocide”. Continue reading »
The non-violence training to join the Freedom Flotilla Coalition’s ships to Gaza has been intense. As hundreds of us from 32 countries gathered in Istanbul, we were briefed about what we might encounter on this voyage. “We have to be ready for every possibility,” our trainers insisted. The best scenario, they said, is that our Continue reading »
Former US ambassador Chas Freeman argues that Iran’s strike “changes all the rules of the game in the Middle-East”. For Ambassador Freeman, the most important factor is that: “the Saudis, the Emiratis and others informed the United States that they would not permit American operations against Iran from their territory and Iran warned those states Continue reading »
Rwanda is now a peaceful country which remembers each year, the awful genocide of 1994. People can blindly become killers if their leaders are successful in instilling enough fear into them. Learning from history is an antidote. There are anniversaries and anniversaries. There are those that celebrate a marriage or a person surviving another year. Continue reading »
What the present moment reveals, once again, is that Western aggression during the “Cold War” was never about destroying socialism, as such. It was about destroying movements and governments in the periphery that sought economic sovereignty. Why? Because economic sovereignty in the periphery threatens capital accumulation in the core. This remains the primary objective of Continue reading »
On February 28, 2022, four days after Russia had attacked into Ukraine, Moscow and Kiev began peace talks. The Russian attack had aimed to force Kiev to promise neutrality – i.e. not to join NATO. It also aimed to put an end to eight years of neo-NAZI and other militant bombing of the two Russian-speaking Continue reading »
The Syrian Civil War was the longest and most complex geopolitical conflict to emerge out of the Arab Spring, thus creating a complicated legacy for leftist analysts to interrogate. In this interview, exclusive for Counterpunch, former United Nations special rapporteur, and international relations scholar Richard Falk, breaks down Palestine and Syria and the history and Continue reading »
I have flashes of climate grief, recognition in photographic bursts: Pakistani cotton farmers walking through knee-deep water trying to salvage a few white puffs of income off blackened plants; precious graves of ancestors being inundated by the sea in Fiji, the Torres Strait Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, Samoa, the Marshall Islands; the view of fire-ravaged forests, Continue reading »
Vladimir Putin has in the past justified brutal Russian military actions – such as in Ukraine and Syria — by saying they are the same as the Israeli actions we now see in Gaza. Putin has said that “attempts to spare terrorists under the pretext of protecting civilians are unacceptable”. At a meeting of the Continue reading »