Posts Tagged ‘revolution’

The Battle of Chile and the wonder of movie theaters

The Battle of Chile is a great film that was made more powerful by the sound of anguish in the audience

Warrior-gymnasts in Tonkin, Vietnam, 1909

French overlords in colonial-era Vietnam make the locals do ridiculous things

Homs, Syria after five years of war

Drone video footage shows there’s no life left in Syria’s third largest city


Syrian-American composer who plays for peace

A symphony for Syria reminds me of Sarajevo and the hope that cosmopolitan tolerance will survive

Bashar al-Assad stonewalls Charlie Rose

Charlie Rose gets in a theater of the absurd debate with Assad and loses

Activists in Raqqa exposing the Islamic State

We owe a great debt to the people documenting the devastation around them


The cultural destruction of war in the Middle East

My beloved Museum of Islamic Art in Cairo may not be a total loss but much is elsewhere

Looking for Ukrainians to lead the separatist movement

Santa Claus and a dog whisperer among those leading the Ukrainian separatist movement

The ancient theater in Sabratha, Libya

Anarchy in post-Gaddafi Libya sends me into storage to find photos I took on my trip there in 2004


Sisi builds his regime

Joshua Stacher explains the violence and repression in Egypt

98.1% of Egyptians vote for the Sisi constitution

By comparison, Mubarak only claimed 88.6% of Egyptians voted for him in his last election in 2005

Prayer of Fear by Mosireen

The media collective Mosireen perfectly captures the current moment in Egypt


Robin Wright carves up the Middle East

Wright is wrong and her analysis risks looking prescriptive rather than descriptive

Was the coup in Egypt even necessary?

Morsi might have been forced from power anyway, but the military short circuited that

Draft articles of impeachment for Morsi now

Even elected leaders can lose their legitimacy; Egypt needs a legal statement to that effect


Video drones over Taksim Square in Istanbul

When the police control the streets, video drones can see what they are up to

The Yugoslav war reappears in Syria

War never ends: it breeds skills that just get applied to perpetrating bad deeds later on

The Aldo Moro assassination, Reggio-Emilia, Italy, 1978

A prized book of Italian newspapers and a dead terrorist; is there a connection?


My twenty years in Egypt

My first trip to Cairo was in 1992. Here are some thoughts on how it has changed

If you missed the Egyptian royal family…

A film made by the Egyptian royal family about a coup d’état that was lost for nearly sixty years

New York Times op-ed on Syria is wrong about the Obama doctrine

How not to make the case for US intervention in Syria


The embassy mobs and Obama’s ‘failure’ in the Middle East

Is Obama’s policy in the Middle East in ‘epic collapse’? Hardly. But serious people have doubts now

Latest in the battle over the Mohamed Mahmoud mural

The New York Times blog The Lede picks up the battle over street art in Cairo

The amazing mural on Mohamed Mahmoud that was just painted over

What a loss for Cairo, artistically as much as politically