By Chris Hedges The Christian Fascists Are Growing Stronger Truthdig collage based on a White House photo by Pete Souza By Chris Hedges (The following is from truthdig) Tens of millions of Americans, lumped into a diffuse and fractious movement known as the Christian right, have begun to dismantle the intellectual and scientific rigor of the Enlightenment. They are creating a theocratic state based on “biblical law,” and shutting out all those they define as the enemy. This movement, veering closer and closer to traditional fascism, seeks to force a recalcitrant world to submit before an imperial America. It champions the eradication … Continue reading American Fascists The Radical Christian Right

Leave Veena Malik alone! Veena Malik’s behavior is being judged by the media and public When Pakistani film and television personality Veena Malik went to India to participate in popular reality show “Big Boss 4″ she was doing a job – as an actress not an ambassador. According to Malik one of her tasks on the show was adding melodrama to the program – which she did. She was also, apparently requested to display a certain degree intimacy with Indian model and actor Ashmit Patel.  This was where it all went wrong. The Pakistani public’s moral barometer hit the roof at … Continue reading Veena Malik – FrontLine with Kamran Shahid!

By Spengler Some years ago, a well-known Middle East analyst briefed a conservative audience at a private seminar in New York City. “A Palestinian state,” he said, “might achieve the modest prosperity and political stability of a Tunisia.” Tunisia, long a byword for stable secular governance in the Muslim world, isn’t Tunisia anymore. We well may see the future of many Muslim countries in a Tunisian mirror: neither secular or authoritarian, nor democratic, nor Islamist, but merely chaotic. The one thing we may say with certainty about the Tunisians is that there won’t be very many of them a generation … Continue reading Tunisia’s lost generation

By Kaveh L Afrasiabi In the aftermath of Israel’s admission that Iran may be several years away from acquiring nuclear weapons capability, the chances have declined that Israel will strike Iran’s nuclear facilities in the foreseeable future. That doesn’t stop Tel Aviv from frantically trying – to no avail – to rekindle the military option as it sees the undesirable ramifications of the latest intelligence estimate that sanctions on Iran mean it won’t be able to build an atomic weapon for at least a few years yet. With the genie of a reduced Iran proliferation risk already out of the bottle, it will … Continue reading Israel drums up heat on Iran

Why Tunisia can but Iran can’t By Ali Reza Eshraghi The surprising rapidity with which Tunisians unseated President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali has been watched keenly in Iran, not least by the political opposition known as the Green Movement. As Iranian blogs and Facebook messages abound with the punning phrase, “Tounes tounes, Iran na-tounes” – meaning “Tunisia could, Iran couldn’t” – there has also been sober reflection on why this was the case; why the massive protests that followed the disputed presidential election of June 2009 came to nothing in the end. At the same time, as economic hardship sparked riots in … Continue reading Tunisia can but Iran can’t

By Francesco Sisci BEIJING – In a ritual equal only to that of the church, last week China placed a statue of Confucius in its political heart, Tiananmen Square, before Mao Zedong’s portrait and near the modern obelisk to the People’s Heroes, two symbols that materially defined China’s national identity for 60 years. This is a political statement, not a celebration of art, and it reshapes the country’s ideological mission. The removal of images of saints from churches was the pronouncement of the Protestant Reformation and unleashed a wave of radical development in European and world history with the rapid … Continue reading Confucius takes a stand

By Syed Saleem Shahzad Events of the past two years suggest that the plans of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to scale down its troop numbers in Afghanistan this year is not the beginning of the end of combat operations. Rather, it’s a switch to a new plan that aims to facilitate the broader participation of regoinal allies such as Russia, India and the Central Asian Republics for the defeat of the Islamic militancy. Already, there has been collaboration in Afghanistan between NATO and Russia’s anti-drug operatives, while Uzbek President Islam Karimov’s 2008 proposal that Western capitals set up … Continue reading A shadowy new battlefield