The American or European populist Right fanatically opposes Muslim fundamentalism in which it sees the main threat to Western Christian civilization. They claim Europe is on the verge of becoming “Europistan”. For the European as well as for American populists, the US withdrawal from Afghanistan is the ultimate humiliation of …
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The Taliban has suddenly changed its stance toward women in public and working places. Their spokesperson, Zabihullah Mujahid, said at a news conference on Tuesday that working women should stay at home for their own safety, undermining the Taliban’s efforts to convince international observers that the group would be more …
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A couple of days ago, Hamad International Airport in Qatar was proclaimed the best in the world, winning over Changi Airport in Singapore. But reports on the luxury amenities available at Hamad were totally overshadowed by what is going on at the Kabul airport: Thousands desperately trying to leave the …
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The Western media tell us there can be several explanations for that. The first one is blatantly racist: the Afghan people there are simply not mature enough for democracy, they long for religious fundamentalism – a ridiculous claim if there ever was one. Half a century ago, Afghanistan was a …
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Thirty-two years after the fall of socialist regimes in Eastern Europe, nationalist conservative populism is returning there with a vengeance: the recent turn of Hungary, Poland, Slovenia and some other post-socialist countries – I call them a new axis of evil – into a conservative-illiberal direction worries us all. How …
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Every authentic Leftist should put on the wall above his bed or table the opening paragraph of Oscar Wilde’s The Soul of Man under Socialism, where he points out that, “It is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.” People find …
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On June 29, Donald Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense for Presidents Gerald Ford and George W. Bush, and one of the main architects of the US invasion of Iraq, died at the age of 88. He will be remembered mostly for the catastrophic consequences of that invasion. The goal of …
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Today, WikiLeaks co-founder Assange is celebrating his 50th birthday, being held at the Belmarsh maximum-security prison in London as Washington seeks his extradition to the US, where he could be jailed for up to 175 years if found guilty. When Belarus forced a Ryanair plane en route from Athens to …
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Sometimes the Slovene government does something that makes me deeply ashamed of being a citizen of Slovenia. One such moment came earlier this month when, in an act of solidarity with Israel, it decided (together with Austria and the Czech Republic) to fly Israeli flags along the national and EU …
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Is there a more sobering lesson than being humiliated and reduced to near-impotence by a virus, a primitive self-reproductive mechanism which some biologists don’t even count as a form of life? No wonder that calls for a new ethic of modesty and global solidarity abound. But is this the true …
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