Donald J. Trump ran for president on a platform that included a pledge to bring back the torture technique of waterboarding and “a hell of a lot more.” On the campaign trail, Trump told his supporters: “We have to fight so viciously and violently because we’re dealing with violent people…We have to fight fire with fire…or we are not going to have much of a country left.” Clearly, he was operating on the premise that these techniques work, that the kinds of people subjected to waterboarding and other forms of custodial violence in the “war on terror”—namely, Muslims—deserve it, and that the cancellation of the George W. Bush administration’s torture program by Barack Obama in 2009 was a mistake.
Torch-bearing white supremacists and neo-Nazis marching in Charlottesville, VA in August 2017 shocked many with their chants of “blood and soil” and “Jews will not replace us.” Days later, white nationalist Richard Spencer was interviewed on Israeli TV about the role of the so-called “alt-right” in Charlottesville rally that turned deadly. When pressed about their anti-Semitic slogans, he asserted that Jews are overrepresented both on the left and in the “establishment” as “Ivy League-educated people who really determine policy,” while ”white people are being dispossessed from this country.” [1] He excluded Jews from this circle of persecuted “white people.” Indeed, he implied that Jews were the persecutors, dispossessing white people of their country by imposing a multicultural regime that allowed black and brown people to displace whites and deprive them of their national heritage.
Less than a year into Trump’s presidency, the world’s policeman is back, now armed with a Twitter account. Flying largely under the media radar, the US military is flexing its muscles around the world—and in some areas it is going on the offensive. Since Trump took office, the United States has quietly increased the number of troops in the Middle East by 33 percent and there are plans for an “enduring presence” in both Iraq and Syria. More troops and yet another supposedly new strategy are being deployed for the endless war in Afghanistan. US soldiers are fanning out across an archipelago of bases in Africa to conduct what they call “train, advise and assist” missions with nearly 1,000 soldiers in Niger. In Somalia the numbers are also climbing: Troop levels are the highest since the “Black Hawk Down” incident in 1993. An aggressive surge of lethal drone strikes and clandestine missions led by the military’s elite Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and a reinvigorated CIA in far-flung corners of the world outside of America’s declared battlefields marks the widest departure from Trump’s ostensible isolationism. This surge signals, paradoxically perhaps, an embrace of both Obama’s drone warfare presidency and a more naked militarization of US foreign policy.
The arrival of the Donald J. Trump presidency shook the foundations of US domestic politics but also rattled the Middle East. This chaotic administration regularly sends mixed messages and sows confusion as the president’s erratic tweets and off-the-cuff comments...
Bargu, Banu. Starve and Immolate: The Politics of Human Weapons (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014). Bashkin, Orit. Impossible Exodus: Iraqi Jews in Israel (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). Bayat, Asef. Revolution Without Revolutionaries: Making...
Jerusalem has been the focus of an increasing number of academic publications in the past several years. Most of these publications focus mainly on the city’s history, identity and changing architectural features since Israel occupied its eastern section after the June 1967 War. Few serious attempts have been made to discuss the human aspect of the city’s united, yet divided, population and even less attention has been paid to US policies toward the city.
In the spring of 2016, a small group of academics at the University of Cambridge put a motion before Regent House, the governing body of the university, to hold a discussion on the Prevent program—the British government’s counter-radicalization scheme. The scene during the discussion was palpably grim, with scholar after scholar imploring the university to refuse implementation of a program that had already spread across most public institutions and universities in the country.
The US-led global war on terrorism in the Middle East is entering a post-ideological phase, in which everyone is allegedly united in the fight against an Islamic pandemic of violence, regardless of religious creed, political persuasion or ideological conviction. Throughout the Islamic world during Ramadan, the site of the struggle against this fundamentalist violence in general, and ISIS terrorism in particular, shifts from the battlefield to popular culture.
For the past 25 years, every evening around sunset, an elderly man could be seen gingerly crossing the Boulevard Pasteur, Tangier’s busy main thoroughfare. Shuffling toward the Grand Poste, he would walk slowly down the pavement to Café Maravillosa. Regulars would stand up to shake his hand. “Marhba, Si Juan.” Waiters would greet him, “Ja’izat Nobel dyalna, our own Nobel laureate,” and set him up at a table with a pot of green tea. For the next two hours, a steady rotation of old acquaintances, students and tourists would stop by to chat or take a photo. Before his death on June 4, 2017, Juan Goytisolo, the acclaimed Spanish novelist, was the last of his breed, the lone survivor of the American and European writers who settled in Tangier in the post-war years, constructing the myth of the northern Moroccan port as a literary and epicurean capital.
On May 31, 2017, Fatah commander Col. Bassam al-Saad was juggling three telephones—two mobile phones and one landline—at his office in Lebanon’s largest Palestinian refugee camp, Ain al-Hilweh. As the commander of the Joint Palestinian Security Force (JPSF), the defacto military police of the self-governed camp, the colonel was in the process of overseeing the deployment of his roughly 100-strong force. Entering a particularly sensitive area in the war-torn Tiri neighborhood following devastating clashes in April between the JPSF and a local Islamist group, he was also juggling the ratio of police from each political faction to ensure a smooth operation.
You are not in Gaza, this is al-Hoceima!” This title describes a video clip of tear gas in the streets of al-Hoceima, the epicenter of the ongoing protests by the Hirak movement in the mountainous Rif region of northern Morocco. [1] Hirak protesters risk their lives demonstrating against corruption and for civil rights and state investment in the peripheral Berber-speaking region. Protests have been ongoing since the October 28, 2016, death of local fish seller Mohcine Fikri, who was crushed in a garbage compactor while trying to retrieve 500 kilograms of illegally-caught swordfish police had confiscated. Solidarity demonstrations spread across Morocco and the Moroccan diaspora in Europe. As tensions between the movement and the Moroccan state (al-makhzen) have intensified, protestors have drawn on the Palestinian question to suggest a reading of state violence, tracing parallels with the Israeli war machine’s actions in the occupied Gaza Strip.
On August 12, 2017, more than 1,200 people gathered in Chicago to bid farewell to Rasmea Odeh, a Palestinian-American community organizer facing deportation due to US government efforts to repress struggles for social justice and support for Palestinian freedom. At the gathering, Angela Davis honored Rasmea’s lifelong commitment to revolutionary struggles against racism, Zionism and imperialism. A week later, Kristian Davis Bailey, a Detroit-based activist with the Black4Palestine network, stood outside Rasmea’s sentencing hearing with banners that declared: “From Assata to Rasmea, We Fight for Freedom/Hurriya.”
For Palestine, 2017 is a year of anniversaries. One hundred years since the Balfour Declaration gave imperial imprimatur to the Zionist project. Fifty years since the beginning of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. And thirty years since the start of...
In 2015, Tunisia’s President Beji Caid Essebsi proposed a draft economic reconciliation law to forgive graft and other corrupt acts committed by civil servants and businessmen under the regime of ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali in exchange for closed-door confessions and return of ill-gotten gains. Such economic crimes were a major trigger of the 2010-2011 protests that led to the Tunisian revolution—and Essebsi’s bill provoked a powerful response, a campaign called Maneesh M’sameh (I Will Not Forgive). The campaign’s initial goal was to protect the integrity of investigations of economic crimes by the Truth and Dignity Commission (L’Instance Vérité et Dignité), created in the summer of 2014.
Abou-Hodeib, Toufoul. A Taste for Home: The Modern Middle Class in Ottoman Beirut (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2017). Contosta, David R. America’s Needless Wars: Cautionary Tales of US Involvement in the Philippines, Vietnam and Iraq (Amherst, NY:...
The University of Toronto is not known as a particularly progressive institution. Like many universities, it has adopted neoliberal thinking and practice, becoming part of Academia, Inc. But two seemingly unrelated events during the 2014-2015 academic year showcased the increasing political activity of the school’s graduate student body.
The scant international coverage of Oman’s 2015 Consultative Council elections is not surprising. An absolute monarchy widely perceived as a bastion of political stability, Oman rarely features in world news. The sultanate’s strong ties with both Iran and the Arab Gulf monarchies allow it to play an important role in regional diplomacy, but the representatives of Sultan Qaboos bin Sa‘id al-Sa‘id fulfill this role discreetly. When the wave of Arab uprisings in 2011 reached the sultanate’s shores, Omanis were as surprised as the international community. Protests in the cities of Muscat, Salala and Suhar lasted from January 17 to May 14 of that year, with demonstrators voicing demands for political, economic and social reform.
Dilsa Deniz, an anthropologist of the Alevi-Kurdish religion, was fired from her position as an assistant professor at Nişantaşı University in Istanbul after she signed the Academics for Peace petition issued in Turkey on January 10, 2016. More than 1,000 scholars signed the petition to protest the Turkish government’s disengagement from the peace process with the Kurdish opposition and the killing of civilians in several Kurdish towns. Jeannie Sowers, a political science professor at New Hampshire, spoke with Deniz in December 2016 about her activism, the situation of scholars in Turkey and the Turkish state’s renewed attacks on Kurdish culture, language and political participation.
Alevis are the second largest faith community in Turkey. As a religious collective incorporating aspects of Shi‘i Islam into their teachings, Alevis have faced systematic state exclusion since the 1923 establishment of the Turkish nation-state, which privileges Sunni Islam despite its avowed secularism. Although the community constitutes 15-20 percent of Turkey’s population, their places of worship, cemevis, have no legal status and do not enjoy the state economic support accorded to mosques. A glass ceiling blocks Alevis from obtaining high-ranking government jobs, and various other forms of daily discrimination push members of the community to hide their identity in public.
Yemeni-American activist Rabyaah al-Thaibani was born in Ta‘izz, Yemen’s largest city, in 1977. She moved to the United States as a child to join her father, who was working nights cleaning office buildings in Manhattan. She grew up in Brooklyn, attended Columbia University and since has worked in community development in New York City. In 2011, she helped establish the Yemeni-American Coalition for Change, and in February 2017 worked to bridge Yemeni and American concerns by co-organizing the Yemeni bodega strike, mounted in protest of President Donald Trump’s first attempt at a “Muslim ban.” A named plaintiff in New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman’s effort to challenge the second “Muslim ban” in court, al-Thaibani agreed to talk with MERIP about how her childhood in Yemen and her experience as part of a wide Yemeni diaspora have influenced her activism in the US. She also spoke about what she would like outsiders to appreciate about Yemen and its current conflict. In a wide-ranging conversation of more than two hours with Stacey Philbrick Yadav, associate professor of political science at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, al-Thaibani described the connections she sees between her home and her homeland, the optimism she feels about Americans’ “accidental awakening” since Trump’s election, and the ways in which Yemenis are represented in American policy debates. The following is an edited excerpt of the conversation.
