Juan Cole

If you can't see the hypocrisy of the media then please ignore my post and move on. Is it a bigger crime to kill civilians or to kill soldiers? Is James the dozen-civilian-killer a terrorist or not? Media calls him a "suspect", why was the Fort Hood shooter not called a suspect while he was being investigated? Can't you see the pattern that if the murderers is a European / white American he is a "suspect" and if it's a brown American (like the Fort Hood killer) he is a "terrorist". Did you see the sympathetic posts about the person who went on a killing spree in Afghanistan? The poor guy had issues so we wanna consider that rather than call him a terrorist, how about the brown guys killing civilians, maybe they had issues? Maybe they had trauma from their folks being murdered or tortured? I am not justifying any crimes, I am only highlight how the media is justifying some crimes and calling other perpetrators terrorist from the get go.

>Obama trying to kill a terrorist and then accidentally killing civilians is not terrorism.

>It all comes down to intent, no?

Oh yeah, when we bomb wedding parties out intent is good, when they killed civilians their intent was bad, that was simple, now I get it.

https://www.google.com/search?q=afghanistan+wedding+bombed

Clinton knowingly bombed Sudan pharmaceuticals factory (I have posted the link somewhere on this page) and killed half million infants by sanctions alone (1996 UN estimate of the period 1991-1996), Bush knowingly went to…

If you want a secret tip to exploring a new world, download Papers (http://www.mekentosj.com/papers/), put all the interesting publications you find in one Dropbox folder, and import them. The annotation and note features - as well as the back-up option - makes this a really enjoyable way to publications.

It really is something to read papers that define the way we think, and it's a nice alternative to short blog posts and (pop) articles versus (pop) books.

Here are some papers to get you started:

\* 'I've Got Nothing to Hide' and Other Misunderstandings of Privacy: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=0998565

\* Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization: http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Papers.cfm?abstract_id=1450006

\* A technique for isolating differences between files: http://ejohn.org/projects/javascript-diff-algorithm/

\* A Future-Adaptable Password Scheme: http://static.usenix.org/events/usenix99/provos.html

Maybe this is cheating, maybe it isn't, but I definitely recommend it.

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If you want to get political, some left-of-centre-leaning writers you can't go wrong with:

1. Matt Taibbi on Wall Street, Rolling Stone (http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/blogs/taibblog)

2. Frank Rich in American politics, now at New York Magazine (https://twitter.com/frankrichny)

3. Glenn Greenwald on civil liberties and foreign policy, in moderation (http://www.salon.com/writer/glenn_greenwald/)

4. Juan Cole on the Middle…

I've read two responses to these events that nicely cover this question from what amount to opposite sides, although the distance between them is small:

1) Ross Douthat in the NYT, saying "In this sense, many of the Western voices criticizing the editors of Hebdo have had things exactly backward: Whether it’s the Obama White House or Time Magazine in the past or the Financial Times and (God help us) the Catholic League today, they’ve criticized the paper for provoking violence by being needlessly offensive and 'inflammatory' (Jay Carney’s phrase), when the reality is that it’s precisely the violence that justifies the inflammatory content." http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/07/the-blasphemy-we-need/

2) This piece by Juan Cole: "Al-Qaeda wants to mentally colonize French Muslims, but faces a wall of disinterest. But if it can get non-Muslim French to be beastly to ethnic Muslims on the grounds that they are Muslims, it can start creating a common political identity around grievance against discrimination." http://www.juancole.com/2015/01/sharpening-contradictions-satirists.html?wpmm=1&wpisrc=nl_wonk

While I appreciate what Cole is saying, I come down on Douthat's side. When people are being murdered for having an opinion the question of whether or not that opinion is in good taste or presented in a well-mannered way is... secondary.

So I personally think that "escalating" by making more fun of murderous nutjobs is a pretty good move to make, even if it will be…

The planned military intervention does not want to "solve" the problem. It wants to send a message beyond Syria.

It's about holding people accountable for genocide.

I have raised my concerns about this position here. [1]

I also have to ask: Why exactly is it that the FSA is "completely overwhelmed"? At the start that was clearly not the case. Hm, now is there some authority in Syria that wanted to frame the conflict from the start as a democratically elected leader against foreign jihadists? Could it be that said authority targeted primarily the non-jihadists over the last two years?

I think that the most plausible explanation is that the jihadi movement had more external support. War is expensive: all sides of the conflict are in need of arms, food, medical and other supplies, training and expertize. And the FSA has got least.

I think that Assad is generally not a good guy. And that FSA has had legitimacy at the start of the war. Probably, Assad would've liked to frame the conflict as "Assad" vs "Jihadists/Foreign-sponsored freedom fighters" from the very beginning. But the conflict has indeed became a proxy war with many sides, and the FSA has got caught in the middle of them. [2] [3]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6327563

[2] http://www.policymic.com/articles/28414/syria-civil-war-u-s--backed-iraq-government-attacks-u-s--backed-syrian-rebels

[3] http://www.juancole.com/2013/09/government-rejects-strike.html

Putting aside the completely unsourced FUD in your comment

Which of my claims are you questioning?

My question was why would you consider a network that is openly financed by Qatar objective, and an organization that is not financed by Israel "Israeli PR"?

I think Al Jazeera is relatively objective (compared to other news networks) because they often include people with opposing views on their shows. Beyond that, I don't think objectivity is the be-all and end-all of news networks. I can't watch CNN because its programming is directed towards children: lots of flashy opinion, idiotic conventional wisdom, a shockingly limited window of acceptable discourse, very little actual news content regarding issues that matter (as opposed to celebrity 'news'), etc. I'd hesitate to trust Al Jazeera's reporting on Qatar, but Qatar isn't a very important country and Al Jazeera has managed to piss off a lot of middle eastern dictatorships and monarchies.

In contrast, MEMRI has been strongly criticized by scholars like Juan Cole: http://www.juancole.com/2004/11/intimidation-by-israeli-linked.html Beyond that, how do you know that MEMRI isn't financed by Israel?

After having a long conversation with a close friend in Iran, and also reading this post guess post on Juan Cole's blog [ http://www.juancole.com/2012/01/jahanpour-as-us-and-iran-confront-each-other-where-is-the-diplomacy.html ] I'm starting to realize more and more that the way we have treated Iran since Carter (read: 1979 revolution) is completely wrong. Instead of finding ways to pressure the Iranian government we are hurting the Iranian people. The sanctions we place on Iran hurts the Iranian people and their small businesses much more than the Iranian government and it's abundant(for now) oil resource.

Obama really tried at first to bring in a different approach. First off he understood the structure of power in Iran and so wrote a letter to Khamenei directly. Then he tried to talk to the Iranian people in parallel by sending the message for Norooz (Iranian New Year). Next he offered to sit and talk with the Iranians without any preconditions, but what messed everything up for him was the Iranian elections. That was (read: is) a big pile of mess that no one really knew (read: knows) how to deal with.