The coming year is promising to be a crucial one in the history of West Asia. Just weeks have passed since the ouster of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad and his replacement with pro-Western leader Abu Mohammed al-Jolani. Syria was a key member of the so-called “Axis of Resistance” – a coalition of actors opposing Israel and…

You might have heard that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been propping up Hamas in Gaza… but is there more to the story? Some argue that Netanyahu has an ‘alliance’ or at least an interdependency with Hamas to serve his own goals, but is that really true? In the first two parts of this…

The New York Times deleted a video of violence in Amsterdam it published once it realized that the perpetrators were Israelis and not an anti-Semitic mob. The Times had falsely claimed that the video showed Israeli football fans being attacked while in the Netherlands to support their team. What the video actually showed was a…

The incoming former President Donald Trump has styled himself as an anti-war, pro-deal candidate, maintaining that the wars in Ukraine and Palestine would never have happened if he had been president during the past four years. He campaigned on this platform, even though it is demonstrably true that he is no dove. The unprecedented amount…

There are some weeks when decades happen. In just a few days, the Syrian government has fallen, President Bashar al-Assad has fled to Moscow, and Al-Nusra founder Abu Mohammad al-Julani has taken power. How could all of this have happened so quickly? Only last year, it appeared that Assad was entrenching his position internationally, being…

The New York Times is pushing for regime change in Venezuela and supported a failed coup attempt this summer against President Maduro, who it calls a dictator who won a “tainted election.” Of course, the Times celebrated the short-lived 2002 U.S.-backed coup against Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez and has continued to call for another ever since.…

The MintPress podcast The Watchdog, hosted by British-Iraqi hip-hop artist Lowkey, closely examines organizations about which it is in the public interest to know—including intelligence, lobby, and special interest groups influencing policies that infringe on free speech and target dissent. The Watchdog goes against the grain by casting a light on stories largely ignored by…

Many are confused by the sudden ceasefire between the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) and Hezbollah in southern Lebanon. One of Hezbollah’s initial operational goals was to maintain military pressure on Israel until a ceasefire was achieved in Gaza. That outcome now seems increasingly unlikely, though some remain hopeful that the ceasefire in Lebanon could spark…

There are three geopolitical flashpoints that could ignite a great-power confrontation between the collective West and nations aligned with the emerging multipolar world: Israel/Iran, Russia/Ukraine, and China/Taiwan. The incoming Trump administration has branded itself as a peace-making entity. But is this claim accurate? Moreover, given the realities of great-power politics, is peace even attainable? On…

President Joe Biden’s executive legacy will likely be marked by genocide, reckless great-power politics, massive and escalating deportation policies, and nuclear brinkmanship. With two months remaining in office, the president has authorized the Armed Forces of Ukraine to employ ATACMS, a U.S. supersonic ballistic missile system, against Russian and North Korean military forces inside Russian…

Sayed Hassan Nasrallah, the general secretary of the Lebanese resistance group Hezbollah, was assassinated by Israel in late September, an event that reverberated across the region and beyond. According to the Israeli Defense Forces (IDF), they decided to target Nasrallah after concluding that he would not accept a ceasefire agreement in Lebanon unless a ceasefire…

If last week’s U.S. election results took you by surprise, then you may not have been closely following the converging social, economic, and political issues coalescing in America—an empire in decline. On Tuesday, the majority of voting Americans cast their ballots for President-elect Donald Trump, choosing to accelerate that decline. The Democratic Party’s collapse is…