Middle East

Revolution, Uprising, Protest Movement, Crisis, Armed Insurgency, Civil War, and many other variations of titles have been used over the past 15 months to describe events in Syria. There have been many disagreements on Syria over this span of time, but there is no disagreement over the fact that Syria has been the central event on the global political scene.

Cairo, 20 June, 2012 – Hundreds of thousands of activists returned to Cairo’s Tahrir Square on Monday night to protest supplementary constitutional amendments issued by the ruling military council in recent days.

In recent days a series of controversial public service announcements aired on state-owned TV channels in Egypt, angering Egyptians and foreigners alike. The advertisements, which warn Egyptians against talking to foreigners “because they might be spies”, have been slammed for being “shallow” and inflammatory.

Pressenza, in communication with writers detailing points of view unaligned with the ‘taken’ media, republishes here two opinion pieces on the issue of the Houla Massacre. The standard media reports are otherwise following the line that it is the Syrian regime that was responsible and is not bothering to correct that view.

In a June 9, 2012 article John Rosenthal drew attention to the words of U.N. special envoy Kofi Annan, about a “tipping point” in the Syria conflict: the savage massacre of over 90 people, predominantly women and children, for which the Syrian regime of Bashar al-Assad was immediately blamed by virtually the entirety of the Western media.

I wrote an article that I helped reconstruct demolished Palestinian homes out of civil disobedience. After the article by Melanie Lidman in The Jerusalem Post on April 30, stating that the Interior Ministry was accusing me of illegally constructing Palestinian homes demolished by the municipality, I wrote an op-ed that appeared on May 8.

In April of this year, I wrote that the upheaval in Syria (the Sunni majority revolt against the Alawite-dominated regime) has turned into a battleground between the Sunni axis led by Turkey and Saudi Arabia and the Shiite axis led by Iran. As events continue to unfold in the region, particularly the Sunni Islamists’ monopolization of the political processes in … (read more)

“To which faction would you have given your support? Whether on the side of the pure or the wicked, you would only have increased your folly”.

Silo, “Humanize the Earth” (Collected Works), Latitude Press, US.

We publish this opinion article about the conflict in Syria and more broadly in relation to the regional conflict in the Middle East.

While the entire watching world condemned the heinous Syria massacre of 26 May 2012 in Houla, little substantial could be understood from the killings as to which group was primarily responsible. For the West it was the Assad regime but there was no evidence of any such sole perpetrator, thus China, Russia as major powers took a more cautious view.

15 months after Mubarak ’s ouster, this week Egyptians headed to the ballot box to choose a new President in the country’s first multi-candidate Presidential election. Unlike previous polls when election results had invariably been foregone conclusions, the outcome of this historic vote is uncertain with analysts and voters unable to speculate who the likely winner may be.