- After Nice, Don't Give ISIS What It's Asking For
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
Not much is yet known about Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel, the 31-year-old man French police say is responsible for a horrific act of mass murder last night in the southern city of Nice. In the wake of the killings, French President Francois Hollande has denounced the attack as "Islamist terrorism" linked to the militant group the Islamic State. Supporters of ISIS online have echoed these statements, claiming responsibility for the attack as another blow against its enemies in Western Europe. While the motive for the attack is still under investigation, it is worth examining why the Islamic State is so eager to claim such incidents as its own.
- After Paris
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
Some have seen the terrorism as the consequence of French foreign policy in Syria. Yet we should be wary of seeing these attacks as a response, however perverted, to French, or Western, foreign policy. The terrorists did not target symbols of the French state, or of French militarism. They did not even target tourist spots. They targeted, rather, the areas and the places where mainly young, anti-racist, multiethnic Parisians hang out. What the terrorists despised, what they tried to eliminate, were ordinary people, drinking, eating, laughing, mixing. That is what they hated - not so much the French state as the values of diversity and pluralism.
- Apostasy, Blasphemy and Free Expression in the Age of ISIS
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
The right to religion comes with a corresponding right to be free from religion.
- Benign State Violence vs. Barbaric Terrorism
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
The US and UK target for assassination civilians that allegedly have a connection with ISIS. Such operations are performed without a trial. Peppe discusses how the governments of these countries justify one form of extrajudicial killing while demonizing the murders that ISIS commits.
- Black Flags: The Rise of ISIS
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2015
Pulitzer prize-winning book about the origin of ISIS.
- Connexions Library: Middle East Focus
Resource Type: Website
Published: 2009
Selected articles, books, websites and other resources on the Middle East.
- The Deciders
The disastrous Iraq policies that led to ISIS were not President Bush's
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
In May 2003, in the wake of the Iraq War and the ousting of Saddam Hussein, events took place that set the stage for the current chaos in the Middle East. Yet even most well-informed Americans are unaware of how policies implemented by mid-level bureaucrats during the Bush administration unwittingly unleashed forces that would ultimately lead to the juggernaut of the Islamic State.
- Fake news about the Rojava revolution
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Sharply different opinions have developed among the radical left in recent years towards the Syrian radical democratic movement led by the Democratic Union Party (PYD) -- an initially Kurdish-based force which through a series of political and military struggles and alliances has recently formed the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria, as a model for a multi-ethnic, non-sectarian, federal and socially just alternative for the nation and the region.
- From Israel to ISIS
Harper's 'Orwellian' Foreign Policy
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
It’s getting difficult to remember a time when the Canadian Parliament actually tried to make principled decisions regarding foreign policy and our place in the community of nations.
- From Sykes-Picot to "Islamic State": Imperialism's Bloody Wreckage
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
When the Jihadist group Islamic State (formerly known as ISIS) changed its name and declared the establishment of the Caliphate, it did so with the release of a promotional video entitled "The End of Sykes-Picot." This was a reference to the 1916 Sykes-Picot Agreement that marked the end of the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of two zones of influence, British and French.
- How the Media Gets It Wrong
On Asking the Wrong Questions and Mapping Media Dead Zones
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
- IS and climate change - an inconvenient truth for Republicans
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
US Democratic presidential contender Martin O’Malley sparked controversy last month by saying that the conditions for the rise of the so-called Islamic State (IS, also known as Isil, Isis or Da'esh) were set by the impact on Syria of climate change, which drove farmers from their land into slums around cities and created extreme poverty.
- ISIS Church Bombings Kill 47 in Egypt
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Ditz details two recent ISIS attacks in Egypt targeting Christian churches and followers.
- ISIS Destroys Memorial & Church of Armenian Genocide in Der Zor, Syria
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
ISIS has destroyed the on-site monument to the Armenian people who perished in the deserts of Der Zor in the Genocide of 1915. The church and memorial contained irreplaceable bones of the martyred dead.
- ISIS and the IDF: Canada's Double Standard
Who are the Real Terrorists?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
Why can westerners join the Israeli Defense Forces while westerners joining Islamic State are despised and killed? In what sense is the IDF scenario any less reprehensible than the IS one?
- ISIS Slave Market Puts Women and Girls on Same List as Cattle
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
I am thinking of the price list leaked out from the ISIS Sex Slave Market that included women and girls on the same list as cattle. ISIS needed to impose price controls as they were worried about a downturn in their market.
- ISIS Thrives on the Disunity of Its Enemies
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
The aftermath of terrorist attacks such as the massacre in Paris are a bad time to produce new policies, but they provide ideal political conditions for a government to take radical, if ill-thought-out, initiatives. Leaders are carried away by a heady sense of empowerment as a worried or frightened public demands that something be done in response to calamity and to prevent it happening again. The moment of greatest risk is not when the bombs explode or the guns fire, but when governments react to these atrocities.
- ISIS-Turkey Links
Research Paper
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
Is Turkey collaborating with the Islamic State (ISIS)? Allegations range from military cooperation and weapons transfers to logistical support, financial assistance, and the provision of medical services. Columbia University's Program on Peace-building and Rights assigned a team of researchers in the United States, Europe, and Turkey to examine Turkish and international media, assessing the credibility of allegations.
- The Jihadis Return
ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising
Resource Type: Book
Published: 2014
Though capable of staging spectacular attacks like 9/11, jihadist organizations were not a significant force on the ground when they first became notorious in the shape of al-Qa'ida at the turn of century. The West's initial successes in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan weakened their support still further. Today, as Middle East commentator Patrick Cockburn sets out in this new book, that's all changed. Exploiting the missteps of the West's wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya, as well as its misjudgments in relation to Syria and the uprisings of the Arab Spring, jihadist organizations, of which ISIS is the most important, are swiftly expanding.
- 'Let's Bring In Our Pentagon Spokesman' - Bombing Syria
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
If you want to get close to the 'defence' establishment, you better be close to the 'defence' establishment: ideologically, sympathetically, 'patriotically'.
- Living in Pitiless Times: Baghdad, Beirut and Paris
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
A week of horrible carnage -- bomb blasts in Beirut and Baghdad and then the cold-blooded shootings in Paris. Each of these acts of terror left dead bodies and wounded lives. There is nothing good that comes of them – only the pain of the victim and then more pain as powerful people take refuge in clichéd policies that once again turn the wheel of violence. How does one react to these incidents? Horror and outrage come first. They are instinctual.
- NBC News Releases the Long-Awaited Trailer for its Summer Horror Film About ISIS
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
ISIS now officially poses a bigger threat to the "U.S. homeland" than the one posed by former title-holder Al Qaeda.
- Nothing Succeeds Like Failure
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
The U.S. has been warring with the Islamic State (IS) for more than a year now. The centerpiece of that war has been an ongoing campaign of bombings and air strikes in Syria and Iraq, thousands upon thousands of them.
- 'Only I and my paper were prosecuted'
Journalist who exposed Turkey's hospitality for jihadists
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
Jihad fighters are treated in Turkey with state complicity; Journalist Dogu Eroglu of the opposition daily BirGun (One Day) was prosecuted.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - September 19 2014
Spying, terrorism, and protest
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2014
Coverage of spying, terrorism, and protest. Articles on how the ISIS (Islamic State group) comes to be using American weapons; the U.S. government's secret plans to spy for American corporations; the insidious power of propaganda; how to spot and defeat disruption on the Internet, and steps to sustainable livestock production. Topic of the week is War Crimes; book for the week is Berkeley: The New Student Revolt, and website of the week is LabourStart.
- Other Voices: The Connexions Newsletter - July 23, 2016
Workers and Climate Change
Resource Type: Serial Publication (Periodical)
Published: 2016
Working people -- and most of us are workers -- are affected by climate change in every aspect of our lives. As climate change worsens, our lives will worsen. If we are successful in bringing about the needed rapid change away from a fossil fuel based economy, working people are the ones who stand to bear most of the costs, including the cost, for millions of workers and their families, of losing their jobs.
Many elements of the environmental movement have been guilty of ignoring working people, while others actually blame ordinary working people for climate change and the injustices associated with it. Yet it is working people who are dying, in many places, even now, from excessive heat in factories, fields, construction sites, and homes. And million of working people stand to lose their jobs, homes, and communities in the transition to a low-carbon or no-carbon economy.
- Political correctness demands diversity in everything but thought
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
For 50 years I've been painstakingly cataloguing the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of US foreign policy, building up in the process a very loyal audience. To my great surprise, when I recently wrote about the brutal militarism and human-rights violations of the Islamic State, I received more criticism from my readers than I've gotten for anything I've ever written. Dozens of them asked to be removed from my mailing list, as many as I'd normally get in a full year. Others were convinced that it couldn’t actually be me who was the author of such words, that I must have been hacked. Some wondered whether my recent illness had affected my mind. Literally! And almost all of the Internet magazines which regularly print me did not do so with this article.
- Report: Hundreds of Civilians Killed by U.S.-Led Bombing of ISIS in Iraq and Syria
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
A new report from a group of journalists and researchers says that hundreds of civilians have died during airstrikes by the U.S. and other nations fighting the Islamic State, a marked contrast to the Pentagon’s official admission of just two civilian deaths.
- Secret Pentagon Report Reveals US "Created" ISIS As A "Tool" To Overthrow Syria's President Assad
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
- 70,000 Kalashnikovs: Cameron's "Moderate" Rebels
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
Not since Hitler ordered General Walther Wenck to send his non-existent 12th Army to rescue him from the Red Army in Berlin has a European leader believed in military fantasies as PR Dave Cameron did last week. Telling the House of Commons about the 70,000 "moderate" fighters deployed in Syria was not just lying in the sense that Tony Blair lied - because Blair persuaded himself to believe in his own dishonesty - but something approaching burlesque. It was whimsy - ridiculous, comic, grotesque, ludicrous. It came close to a unique form of tragic pantomime.
- Trump's Muslim Ban Will Only Spark More Terrorist Attacks
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Donald Trump's travel ban on refugees and visitors from seven Muslim countries entering the US makes a terrorist attack on Americans at home or abroad more rather than less likely. It does so because one of the main purposes of al-Qaeda and Isis in carrying out atrocities is to provoke an over-reaction directed against Muslim communities and states.
- 24 reasons ISIS are wrong: Muslim scholars blast Islamic State
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2014
A large group of Islamic theologians addressed the head of the Islamic State in an open letter, articulately accusing the movement of practices that have nothing to do with Islam, even rejecting the extremists’ right to call themselves jihadists.
- US Democrats Cultivated the Barbarism of Isis
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2019
There is something profoundly deceitful in the Democratic Party and corporate media's framing of Donald Trump's decision to pull troops out of Syria. One does not need to like Trump or ignore the dangers posed to the Kurds, at least in the short term, by the sudden departure of US forces from northern Syria to understand that the coverage is being crafted in such a way as to entirely overlook the bigger picture.
- Wag The Dog -- How Al Qaeda Played Donald Trump And The American Media
Responsibility for the chemical event in Khan Sheikhoun is still very much in question.
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2017
Once upon a time, Donald J. Trump, the New York City businessman-turned-president, berated then-President Barack Obama, back in September 2013, about the fallacy of an American military strike against Syria. At that time, the United States was considering the use of force against Syria in response to allegations (since largely disproven) that the regime of President Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons against civilians in the Damascus suburb of Ghouta. Trump, via tweet, declared "to our very foolish leader, do not attack Syria - if you do many very bad things will happen & from that fight the U.S. gets nothing!"
- The West Failed to Learn the Most Important Lessons From the Rise and Fall of ISIS
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2019
The attempted coup in Venezuela today is an example of imperial overreach western governments displayed in the Middle East.
- Where does ISIS come from?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2016
A review of Abdel Bari Atwan, Islamic State: The Digital Caliphate.
Rosa Luxemburg said that capitalism would end in either socialism or barbarism. Looking at the Middle East, as hopes of democracy and social justice have been dashed by counter-revolution and violence, and at the West’s depictions of Islamic State or ISIS, barbarism might seem to have triumphed. Abdel Bari Atwan, editor for 25 years of the Arabic daily AlQuds AlArabi and now running the news website Rai al-Youm, is well placed to give an informed account of the origins, ideology and spread of ISIS.
- Why Do Jihadis Seem So Evil?
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
The day before the Paris carnage, two suicide bombers killed at least 40 people in a Shia district of Beirut. The week after, two suicide bombings of street markets in Nigeria killed 49 people. Faced with such atrocities, we can often do little but reach for adjectives such as 'barbarous', 'depraved', or even 'evil'. But what is it that makes people act in such depraved, evil ways?
- Why States of Emergency and Extreme Security Measures Won't Stop ISIS
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
There is little sign that the G20 leaders gathered in Turkey have understood the nature of the conflict in which they are engaged. ISIS's military strategy is a unique combination of urban terrorism, guerrilla tactics and conventional warfare. In the past, many states have used terrorism against opponents, but, in the case of ISIS, suicide squads focusing on soft civilian targets at home and abroad are an integral part of its war-making strategy.
- A year after James Foley and Steven Sotloff murders, more awareness of risks
Resource Type: Article
Published: 2015
Journalists who regularly cover violence are considered a hard-boiled bunch. But a year ago this month, even the toughest were crying. There was no emotional body armour to deflect the horror of the beheading videos of freelancers James Foley, Steven Sotloff, and other Westerners held hostage in Syria by the self-styled Islamic State, also known as ISIS, ISIL, or IS.
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