A democratic secular state makes no distinctions among its citizens based on their beliefs. Secularism dominates all basic principles of the constitution, including democracy, and forms the bedrock of Turkey’s legal order. (More…)
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BEIRUT – Over the past two decades, peace agreements have increasingly prescribed the integration of former rebels into the national armed forces they once fought as a strategy to promote reconciliation. (More…)
On July 23-24, 1968, African American radicals engaged in a wild shootout with police in the Glenville section of Cleveland. When it was over, six people were dead and the raw racial tension that had simmered below the surface in the city since the Hough Riots two years earlier again flashed into the open. (More…)
Gaza—the outpost of Africa, and the door of Asia—is situated in the south-west of Palestine, and is only about twelve miles to the north of Rafah (formerly Raphia), which marks the Turko-Egyptian boundary, running down to Akaba. (More…)
Support for Italy’s Matteo Salvini may be rising, but his dehumanizing vision of migrants represents only a minority of Italians. While international observers are right to be anxious when Italy’s deputy prime minister quotes wartime fascist leader Benito Mussolini, the attitudes of Italians towards migrants and migration are far more nuanced than those of its populist government. (More…)
It’s hard to get the world interested in the realities of the war in eastern Ukraine. Frankly, it’s boring. (More…)
Like last summer’s widely lauded Get Out, Sorry To Bother You, the first film by hip-hop activist Boots Riley, is a rollicking bad time, every bit as fun as it is disturbing. And that’s surely the main reason that, like Jordan Peele’s directorial debut, it is doing well with audiences that don’t generally seek out left-wing multicultural art. Although less narratively “tight” than Get Out, (More…)
The Labour Party is once again engulfed in the anti-Semitism scandal that has managed to reproduce itself continuously since Jeremy Corbyn became party leader. (More…)
Pier Paolo Pasolini’s reputation in North America is founded almost entirely on his work as a filmmaker, particularly his medievalist trilogy of box-office hits: The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales and The Arabian Nights. In Italy, he was a central and very public figure in twenty-five years of post-war intellectual life. Besides his work in film — which came toward the end of his interrupted career — he wrote poetry and novels, worked in theatre, social criticism, political theory, social linguistics, and was a journalist. (More…)
The Assad government’s rapid advance through southwest Syria since June 19 displaced 330,000 Syrians in one of the largest and fastest displacements since the beginning of the seven-and-a-half-year war. Among them was Logain Almelehan, a 32-year-old Syrian activist and journalist for Horriya Press, a pro-revolution news platform founded in 2015. (More…)
Baudrillard says somewhere that the (or one) reason that schizophrenics are persistently agitated is that they lack a capacity for differentiation, such that all the dangers of the universe seem proximate and threatening. Perhaps this does not comport with modern psychology’s understanding of schizophrenia, but as a back-of-the-envelope diagnosis of our current circumstance, one could really do a lot worse. The entire American political spectrum is saturated with suspicions, some more valid and some less, that the centre cannot hold and the blood-dimmed tide is fast approaching. (More…)
If the world’s cameras were to move a little deeper into Gaza, into the streets and behind the doors of people’s homes, they would see the desperation in almost every home. After 10 years of siege, the 2 million people of Gaza, living packed on a tiny strip, find themselves without work, their economy killed off, without the bare essentials for decent life. The siege is fracturing minds, pushing the most vulnerable to suicide in numbers never seen before. (More…)