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Category: History

Sufis still gather in Afghanistan

Sufis still gather in Afghanistan

Annika Schmeding writes: My introduction into the world of Afghanistan’s Sufism began in 2015, over lunch with my friend Rohullah, the director of a research institute in Kabul. I had been working in Afghanistan in various sectors from government to nongovernmental jobs, and had returned to explore topics for a PhD that I had embarked on, a year prior. I asked what had happened to Afghanistan’s Sufis. Were they all gone? Afghanistan had, after all, once been the cradle of…

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War on Gaza: Netanyahu, Hamas and the origins of the 2023 Nakba war

War on Gaza: Netanyahu, Hamas and the origins of the 2023 Nakba war

Avi Shlaim writes: Politically speaking, Netanyahu looks like a dead man walking. What is clear is that Netanyahu’s new policy of eradicating Hamas has no chance of succeeding. Hamas has a military wing, the Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, which commits terrorist acts when it targets Israeli civilians. Even if all its commanders are killed, they would be quickly replaced by new recruits and more militant ones. But Hamas is also a political party with institutions and a social movement with…

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What happened when the U.S. failed to prosecute an insurrectionist ex-president

What happened when the U.S. failed to prosecute an insurrectionist ex-president

Jill Lepore wrote earlier this month: Jefferson Davis, the half-blind ex-President of the Confederate States of America, leaned on a cane as he hobbled into a federal courthouse in Richmond, Virginia. Only days before, a Chicago Tribune reporter, who’d met Davis on the boat ride to Richmond, had written that “his step is light and elastic.” But in court, facing trial for treason, Davis, fifty-eight, gave every appearance of being bent and broken. A reporter from Kentucky described him as…

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What does it mean to erase a people – a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out

What does it mean to erase a people – a nation, culture, identity? In Gaza, we are beginning to find out

Nesrine Malik writes: I will start this column with a question for you, dear reader. What connects you with your country, and makes you feel it is yours? What gives you a sense of identity and belonging? It’s the physical things, of course – where you live, where you were born, where your family and friends reside. But underlying those practical aspects, I suspect, are all the other things that you don’t think about, that you take for granted. The…

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Mehdi Hasan interviews Jewish journalist Masha Gessen on comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era ghetto

Mehdi Hasan interviews Jewish journalist Masha Gessen on comparing Gaza to a Nazi-era ghetto

  Russian-American writer Masha Gessen received backlash in Germany and a scaled-back ceremony for a prominent award after they compared conditions in Gaza to those of Nazi-era Jewish ghettos in Eastern Europe in a recent piece. MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan speaks with Gessen, a staff writer at The New Yorker, about the controversy.

Welcome to the Nixon Renaissance, where ‘Tricky Dick’ is cool and Watergate was a set-up

Welcome to the Nixon Renaissance, where ‘Tricky Dick’ is cool and Watergate was a set-up

Ian Ward writes: In late August, Republican presidential hopeful Vivek Ramaswamy took a break from his typical campaign events to make a pit stop at an unusual venue for mainstream Republicans: The Richard Nixon Presidential Library. Speaking before a packed house, Ramaswamy was slated to deliver a speech on foreign policy. But his opening remarks served the more provocative purpose of challenging Nixon’s much-maligned status in the annals of conservative history. “He is by and away the most underappreciated president…

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How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today

How the politics of memory in Europe obscures what we see in Israel and Gaza today

Masha Gessen writes: There are now dozens of antisemitism commissioners throughout Germany. They have no single job description or legal framework for their work, but much of it appears to consist of publicly shaming those they see as antisemitic, often for “de-singularizing the Holocaust” or for criticizing Israel. Hardly any of these commissioners are Jewish. Indeed, the proportion of Jews among their targets is certainly higher. These have included the German-Israeli sociologist Moshe Zuckermann, who was targeted for supporting the…

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Israel is getting away with murder — with American support

Israel is getting away with murder — with American support

Avi Shlaim writes: On 7th January 2009, while Operation Cast Lead was in full swing, I wrote an article in the Guardian. “How Israel brought Gaza to the brink of humanitarian catastrophe”. This was Israel’s first major assault on the Gaza Strip after its unilateral withdrawal in 2005. Further major military offensives followed in 2012, 2014, 2021 and 2022, not counting minor flare-ups and nearly 200 dead during the border protests in 2018 known as the March of Return. By…

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Henry Kissinger, America’s most notorious war criminal, dies at 100

Henry Kissinger, America’s most notorious war criminal, dies at 100

Travis Waldron and George Zornick report: Henry Kissinger — who as a top American foreign policy official oversaw, overlooked and at times actively perpetrated some of the most grotesque war crimes the United States and its allies have committed — died Wednesday at his home in Connecticut. He was 100 years old. Kissinger’s death was announced by his consulting firm on Wednesday evening. No cause of death was immediately given. Kissinger served as secretary of state and national security adviser…

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Before Hillary Clinton, there was Rosalynn Carter

Before Hillary Clinton, there was Rosalynn Carter

Azadeh Moaveni writes: When Americans look back and take stock of their most impressive first ladies, they rarely think of Rosalynn Carter. In a 2020 poll that asked historians and other experts to rank first ladies on a score of exemplary characteristics, Mrs. Carter came in ninth, trailing Dolley Madison, Betty Ford and Jackie Kennedy. When Apple TV+ produced “First Ladies,” a series of six documentary portraits, in 2020, it ignored Mrs. Carter entirely. So too did Showtime’s 2022 drama…

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Nakba generation relive trauma of displacement in Gaza

Nakba generation relive trauma of displacement in Gaza

The Guardian reports: Umm Ghadeer’s earliest memories are of the Nakba, or catastrophe, of 1948 in which about 700,000 Palestinians were expelled from their homeland after the creation of Israel. She was three years old. Last month she was forced to abandon her home all over again, fleeing Shejaiya, a neighbourhood of Gaza City, after the outbreak of war between Israel and Hamas. “I cried very hard because I relived the experience of displacement when we fled our homes in…

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How the hillbillies remade America

How the hillbillies remade America

Max Fraser writes: On April 29, 1954, a cross section of Cincinnati’s municipal bureaucracy—joined by dozens of representatives drawn from local employers, private charities, the religious community, and other corners of the city establishment—gathered at the behest of the mayor’s office to discuss a new problem confronting the city. Or, rather, about 50,000 new problems, give or take. That was roughly the number of Cincinnati residents who had recently migrated to the city from the poorest parts of southern Appalachia….

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Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable

Poland shows that autocracy is not inevitable

Anne Applebaum writes: Thirty-four years ago, in June 1989, Poland woke up to a surprise. Despite a voting process rigged to favor the Communist Party, despite decades of propaganda supporting Communists and smearing anti-Communists, despite the regime’s control of the army, the police, and the secret police, the democratic opposition won, taking all of the seats that it was allowed to contest. A team of former dissidents took control of the government two months later—the first non-Communist government in Soviet-occupied…

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The history of Palestinian liberation movements

The history of Palestinian liberation movements

  The history of Palestinian liberation movements is paved with setbacks, betrayals and bitter rivalries. What began as an attempt to unify the resistance against Israeli occupation has over time been undermined by regional and global political interests, ideological differences and disagreements over the justification, and use, of guerilla tactics. Today the question of who represents Palestinian interests is hotly contested, with Hamas and Fatah vying for control, and a wave of dissatisfied young factions on the rise in Gaza…

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Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric echoes Hitler’s in Mein Kampf

Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric echoes Hitler’s in Mein Kampf

The New York Times reports: Former President Donald J. Trump said undocumented immigrants were “poisoning the blood of our country” in a recent interview, language with echoes of white supremacy and the racial hatreds of Adolf Hitler. Mr. Trump made the remark in a 37-minute video interview with The National Pulse, a right-leaning website, that was posted last week. It drew broader scrutiny on Wednesday after the liberal MSNBC host Mehdi Hasan surfaced the quote in a post on X….

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This isn’t democracy. It’s the heartbeat of authoritarianism

This isn’t democracy. It’s the heartbeat of authoritarianism

Joanne Freeman writes: Without a doubt, the Republican ousting of Republican Speaker Kevin McCarthy is a banner of dysfunction. Sifting through the chaos for its meaning is more complex. It certainly signals that something is broken, but what? It’s not the Republican Party’s fracture in and of itself. Fractured political parties are hardly new; the 19th century was the great age of splintering parties. We’ve had contentious speakerships before (though a party ousting its own speaker is something special). Extremism…

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