Many people assume the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is particularly difficult to understand, perhaps even convoluted beyond a solution. When I started educating myself about U.S. foreign policy in the late 1980s — topics like Central America, Iraq and Iran, and corporate-led globalization — I avoided what I assumed was the dizzyingly complicated topic of Israel/Palestine. But […]

Many well meaning Americans trying to follow foreign policy are treated to a disjointed, confusing narrative that jumps from one flashpoint to another. Every few weeks a new crisis dominates the news, the reporting adds little to our understanding of the way the world works, and the resulting debate is shallow and familiar. Current news […]

Inter Press Service reporter and Truthout contributor Gareth Porter has been awarded the 2012 Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism, a top UK award for reporting that tells “an unpalatable truth, validated by powerful facts.” In a series of extraordinary articles, Gareth Porter has torn away the facades of the Obama administration and disclosed a military […]

NPR rarely engages radical critics, but this week the syndicated interview show “On Point” featured Noam Chomsky for an hour. Here’s how the show introduced the interview: These seem like big troubled times and Noam Chomsky joins us to give us his take on everything from the Occupy Movement to the Arab Spring. Noam Chomsky […]

This past week the writing of David Sanger of the New York Times offered additional documentation of what was already clear: The United States is at war with Iran. Sanger’s stories — “Obama Order Sped Up Wave of Cyberattacks Against Iran” and “Mutually Assured Cyberdestruction?” — draw on his new book, Confront and Conceal: Obama’s […]

The Institute for Public Accuracy provides an excellent update on the “Escalating Drone Strikes in Pakistan,” noting that the United States launched new drone strikes on Pakistan over the weekend, causing at least a dozen deaths in the tribal area of South Waziristan. Junaid Ahmad, a law professor at Lahore University of Management Sciences in […]