Month: July 2020

Land seizures, annexations, and conquest. These are words axiomatic to the state of Israel. In the main, the state has maintained an uncomfortable position based on patience and attrition. We have waited this long; you will wait longer. Be it dispossessed Palestinians and their aspirations for state recognition or what are loosely described as the objections of the “international community”, Israel has imperial staying power. Be patient, and the rage over the abuse of Palestinians will die down.

In the past, there have been many attempts at holding accused Israeli war criminals accountable. Particularly memorable is the case of the late Israeli Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, (known, among other nicknames, as the ‘Butcher of Sabra and Shatila’) whose victims attempted to try him in a Belgian Court in 2002.

The German government’s new report flies in the face of major EU reports… German statistics on anti-Semitism have been the object of criticism for quite some time.

One of the most noted contrasts between assessing the Islamic State today and the group at the height of its success in Iraq and Syria in 2014-2015 is that the Islamic State has become much more of a global phenomenon, and wherever the Islamic State’s name and banner turn up in some part of the world, suddenly much more global interest arises in the developments in that area.

The jihadist insurgency against the Egyptian army and its local allies in the Sinai region has been dominated since late 2014 by the Islamic State’s ‘Sinai province’, the origins of which primarily lay in the group Ansar Bayt al-Maqdis that pledged allegiance to the Islamic State. There has however been at least one other noteworthy jihadist group present in the Sinai region: Jama’at Jund al-Islam (Group of the Soldiers of the Islam), but its own media output has been infrequent and it is clearly much weaker than the Islamic State’s Sinai province/affiliate. Jama’at Jund al-Islam has appeared to be more aligned with the Islamic State’s rival al-Qa’ida.