Abou Jahjah comments تعليقات أبو جهجه

by Yassine Channouf

Twice I met him, and as many times he delighted me. I can credit Robert Fisk with getting me interested in Lebanon. I have always read his books and articles passionately, and those who know me grew weary of my continuous references to him. But no more. The Fisk I admired is no longer the Fisk that the world knows today. His last article in which he equates Hezbollah, the Lebanese Resistance, with a bunch of anti-Semites is the figurative drop. The reason for this outrageous accusation? Hezbollah’s opposition to the teaching of the Anne Frank diary in the schools in the south of Lebanon. Robert Fisk has lived in Lebanon for more than 30 years, and most importantly throughout the savage period of the civil war. It is, nor should it be a secret that Robert Fisk is one of the best western journalists dealing with the Middle East, but that should not impede us from criticizing him on certain critical issues.

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By Cynthia McKinney

This is Cynthia McKinney and I’m speaking from an Israeli prison cellblock in Ramle. [I am one of] the Free Gaza 21, human rights activists currently imprisoned for trying to take medical supplies to Gaza, building supplies - and even crayons for children, I had a suitcase full of crayons for children. While we were on our way to Gaza the Israelis threatened to fire on our boat, but we did not turn around. The Israelis high-jacked and arrested us because we wanted to give crayons to the children in Gaza. We have been detained, and we want the people of the world to see how we have been treated just because we wanted to deliver humanitarian assistance to the people of Gaza.

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Another spot on analysis of George Friedman the American private spy and analyst, I don’t agree with everything but with most of it. It is very well informed.

June 22, 2009

By George Friedman

Related Link

• The Geopolitics of Iran: Holding the Center of a Mountain Fortress

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• Ongoing Coverage and Updates

Successful revolutions have three phases. First, a strategically located single or limited segment of society begins vocally to express resentment, asserting itself in the streets of a major city, usually the capital. This segment is joined by other segments in the city and by segments elsewhere as the demonstration spreads to other cities and becomes more assertive, disruptive and potentially violent. As resistance to the regime spreads, the regime deploys its military and security forces. These forces, drawn from resisting social segments and isolated from the rest of society, turn on the regime, and stop following the regime’s orders. This is what happened to the Shah of Iran in 1979; it is also what happened in Russia in 1917 or in Romania in 1989.

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The turmoil in Tehran reflects a refusal to accept Ahmadinejad is popular and confusion about how to respond to the US

• 
• • Seumas Milne
  • The Guardian, Thursday 18 June 2009

‘They have elected a ­Labour government," a Savoy diner famously declared on the night of Britain’s election landslide in 1945. "The country will never stand for it." From the evidence so far coming out of Iran, something similar seems to be ­happening on the streets of Tehran – and in the western capitals just as desperate to see the back of Iranian president ­Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

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June 15, 2009 | 1745 GMT

By George Friedman

www.stratfor.com

The Iranian Presidential Elections

In 1979, when we were still young and starry-eyed, a revolution took place in Iran. When I asked experts what would happen, they divided into two camps.

The first group of Iran experts argued that the Shah of Iran would certainly survive, that the unrest was simply a cyclical event readily manageable by his security, and that the Iranian people were united behind the Iranian monarch’s modernization program. These experts developed this view by talking to the same Iranian officials and businessmen they had been talking to for years — Iranians who had grown wealthy and powerful under the shah and who spoke English, since Iran experts frequently didn’t speak Farsi all that well.

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