Muslim Issues

Washington’s pathetic capitulation to Israel while pleading for a meaningless three-month freeze on settlement expansion—excluding Arab East Jerusalem—should go down as one of the most humiliating moments in U.S. diplomatic history. In September the last settlement freeze ended, leading the Palestinians to cease direct talks with Israel. Now the Obama administration, desperate to lure Israel into a new freeze and thus …

WIKILEAKS deserves protection, not threats and attacks. IN 1958 a young Rupert Murdoch, then owner and editor of Adelaide's The News, wrote: "In the race between secrecy and truth, it seems inevitable that truth will always win." His observation perhaps reflected his father Keith Murdoch's expose that Australian troops were being needlessly sacrificed by incompetent British commanders on the shores of …

Iran is winning and Israel is losing. That is the startling conclusion we reach if we consider how things have changed in the Middle East in the two years since most of the WikiLeaks State Department cables about Iran’s regional difficulties were written. Lebanon’s Sunni prime minister, once a virulent critic, quietly made his pilgrimage to the Iranian capital last …

WikiLeaks cables claim al-Jazeera changed coverage to suit Qatari foreign policy The Qatari prime minister, Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim al-Thani, offered a deal which was not agreed with Egypt over al-Jazeera, US embassy cables claim. Photograph: Getty Qatar is using the Arabic news channel al-Jazeera as a bargaining chip in foreign policy negotiations by adapting its coverage to suit other …

WikiLeaks' founder Julian Assange turned increasingly to Switzerland on Sunday, dodging a barrage of threats online and in the real world to keep access to a trove of U.S. State Department cables under a Swiss Web address. The elusive founder of the website WikiLeaks said he faced "hundreds of death threats." The site hinged on the Swiss Pirate Party's wikileaks.ch …

  Speak Softly and Carry a Very Big Carrot By Maidhc Ó Cathail Even those familiar with the long and shameful history of America’s appeasement of Israel were taken aback by the Obama administration’s extraordinary offer to Netanyahu. In exchange for a paltry one-off 90 day freeze on illegal settlement expansion in the occupied West Bank (excluding East Jerusalem), Israel …