Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Dr Ramzy Baroud
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For the Love of Gaza
When I first arrived at John F. Kennedy International Airport on July 24, 1994, I was both scared and torn by guilt. My fears were not merely those of any new immigrant trying to start a new life in some other place. As a Palestinian, the United States, as a…
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The latest Democracy Perception Index reveals shifts in global perceptions
The Democracy Perception Index (DPI) issued its 2024 report on 8 May, revealing important and interesting shifts in global perceptions about democracy, geopolitics and international relations. The conclusions in the report were based on the views of over 62,000 respondents from 53 countries, representing roughly 75 per cent of the…
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Nakba resurrected – How the Gaza Resistance ended segmentation of Palestine
Inadvertently, Israel has pressed the reset button on its war with the Palestinian people, taking back the so-called conflict to square one. Save a few self-serving Palestinian officials affiliated with the Palestinian Authority (PA), most Palestinians do not seem consumed with the return to the peace process, or even engaged…
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Beyond awards and accolades: Why Gaza journalists are the best in the world
By granting its 2024 World Press Freedom Prize to Palestinian journalists covering the Israeli war on Gaza, UNESCO has acknowledged a historic truth. Even if the decision to name Gaza’s journalists as laureates of its prestigious award was partly motivated by the courage of these journalists, the truth is that…
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Israel wants to destroy Gaza and annex the West Bank, but what do the Palestinians want?
What is taking place in occupied Palestine is not a conflict between more or less equals, but a straightforward case of illegal military occupation, apartheid, ethnic cleansing and outright genocide by one, heavily-armed side — Israel — against the largely unarmed other, the Palestinians. Those who insist on using “neutral”…
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Civilisational unity, not clash: How Gaza challenged Samuel Huntington’s fantasies
Identity is fluid, because concepts such as culture, history and collective self-perceptions are never fixed. They are in a constant state of flux and revision. For hundreds of years, the map of the Roman Empire seemed more Mediterranean and, ultimately, Middle Eastern than European – per the geographic, or even…
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What should we expect from the US intifada for Gaza?
The mass protests at dozens of US universities cannot be reduced to a stifling and misleading conversation about anti-Semitism. Thousands of American students across the country are not protesting, risking their own futures and safety because of some pathological hatred of the Jewish people. They are doing so because they…
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The ideological coup: How disciples of Kahane became the new face of Israel
Throughout history, fringe religious Zionist parties have had limited success in achieving the kind of electoral victories that would allow them an actual share in the country’s political decision-making. The impressive number of 17 seats won by Israel’s extremist religious party, Shas, in the 1999 election was a watershed moment…
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Feeding war, killing peace: Why the US vetoed ‘Palestine’?
The outcome of the Palestine vote and the American veto at the United Nations Security Council on 18 April was predictable. Though European countries are becoming increasingly supportive of a Palestinian state, the United States is not yet ready for this commitment. These are some of the reasons that the…
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NATO’s never-ending war: The 75-year-old bully is faltering
The western discourse on the circumstances behind the creation of the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), 75 years ago, is hardly convincing. Yet, that over-simplified discourse must be examined in order for the current decline of the organisation to be appreciated beyond the self-serving politics of NATO’s members. The history…
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Cruelty of language: Leaked NY Times memo reveals moral depravity of US media
The New York Times (NYT) coverage of the Israeli carnage in Gaza, like that of other mainstream US media, is a disgrace to journalism. This assertion should not surprise anyone. US media is driven neither by facts nor morality, but by agendas, calculating and power-hungry. The humanity of 120 thousand…
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When Namibia stands up to Germany, it shows that Gaza has revolutionised the Global South
The distance between Gaza and Namibia is measured in terms of thousands of kilometres, but the historical distance is much closer. This is precisely why Namibia was one of the first countries to take a strong stance against the Israeli genocide in Gaza. Namibia was colonised by the Germans in…
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Killing humanitarian workers as a strategy: Israel’s endgame in Gaza
Israel described its clearly deliberate killing of seven humanitarian aid workers in Gaza on 1 April as a “grave mistake”, a “tragic event” of a kind that “happens in war”. Obviously, Israel was lying. In fact, this entire so-called war in Gaza — which is in reality a genocide —…
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Irremediable defeat: Israel’s other unwinnable war
Historically, wars tend to unite Israelis, but not any more. It’s not that Israelis do not agree with Benjamin Netanyahu’s war aims; they simply do not believe that the prime minister is the man who can win this supposedly existential fight. Netanyahu’s war remains unwinnable simply because wars of liberation,…
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Beyond Political Saviors: The Biden-Trump Quandary
In his 2023 State of the Union address, US President Joe Biden, now 81, made lofty promises about tackling inflation, fighting climate change, reforming immigration policies and working for “more freedom, more dignity and more peace”. The implicit, but always obvious, message that Biden wanted to convey is that only…
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Complicit in genocide: Where Israel gets its weapons from
Over 9,000 Palestinian women have been killed since the start of Israel’s war against the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip. Mothers have been the largest civilian population group killed by the occupation state, at an average of 37 per day since 7 October. These statistics, from the Palestinian Health Ministry…
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US foreign policy is prolonging Israel’s genocide in Gaza
When a country’s foreign policy as large and significant as that of the United States is governed by a case of cognitive dissonance, terrible things happen. These terrible things are, in fact, already happening in the Gaza Strip, where well over 100,000 Palestinians have been killed, wounded or are missing,…
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Words vs. action: A supplication for Gaza, and humanity
‘All we can do for Gaza is just offer our Du’a.” This is an oft-repeated statement by enraged Arabs and Muslims who feel helpless before the Israeli genocide in Gaza. But is it true that only invocations and supplications are possible, as tens of thousands of Palestinians in the Gaza…
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On solidarity and Kushner’s shame: How Gaza defeated US stratagem, again
Jared Kushner, a former US official whose relationship to power is that he married the wealthy daughter of a man who was later to become the US president, once attempted to teach Palestinians how to handle their own struggle for freedom. In 2020, he advised Palestinians to stop ‘doing terrorism’,…
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To save Israel: The US is destroying the international system it once constructed
In a conversation in 2020 with Princeton Professor Emeritus, Richard Falk, he told me that historically, colonised nations that have won the legitimacy war have always won their freedom. Palestine is unlikely to be the exception. The Gaza war, however, is confronting the world with an unprecedented challenge, specifically to…
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Hypocrisy and genocide: how Gaza has exposed the West like never before
The Israeli genocide in Gaza will be remembered as the moral collapse of the West. From the day that the Israeli war against the Palestinians in Gaza began, following Operation Al-Aqsa Flood on 7 October, every moral or legal frame of reference that Washington and its Western allies supposedly hold…
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United against Israel: Time to end the world’s longest occupation
Left to its own devices, Israel would never grant Palestinians their freedom. In the past, though, some people, whether in ignorance or otherwise, claimed that peace in Palestine can only be achieved through “unconditional negotiations”. This mantra was also championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu when he cared enough…
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Netanyahu’s last battle promises no victory, just slaughter in Rafah
The Palestinian city of Rafah is not only older than Israel, it is also as old as civilisation itself. Rafah has existed for thousands of years. The Canaanites referred to it as Rafia, and Rafia has been almost always there, guarding the southern frontiers of Palestine, ancient and modern. As…
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The ‘two-state solution’ is a distraction; the problem is Zionism
The problem in Palestine-Israel is not the absence of a Palestinian state, but Zionism. What is the use of a Palestinian state, if the racist, exclusivist ideology of Zionism continues to define Israel, and impose that definition on the Palestinians? This ideology calls for the racial purity and dominance of…