Monthly Archives: July 2009

Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman

Juan Cole is the Richard P. Mitchell Professor of History at the University of Michigan. He is the author of Engaging the Muslim World. He has a regular column at Salon.com. and writes the Informed Comment blog. He has now written what I think is the first piece that connects modern day American imperialist paranoia in […]

July 28, 2009 – 9:29 am | By arafiqui | Posted in American And Her Wars | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fear The Pushtun Bogeyman

Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War

They took the New York Times on a war tour. The Battle For Pakistan it was called when the magazine finally published the photographs their boys had so carefully constructed and bought back. They had all the elements that would suggest valor, fear, desperate battles, the struggle of ‘a state’ against an unseen but clearly […]

July 20, 2009 – 12:17 pm | By arafiqui | Posted in Photography | Tagged , , , , | Comments Off on Wrapping Photographers Into The Packaging of War

The Shock Of Gaza Or Salvaging Something From What Was Nearly Nothing

A few days after arriving in Gaza last January, I posted the following piece on the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting’s Untold Stories blog site dedicated to the Gaza project that writer Elliott Woods and I were working on. I think it fairly captures what was going on in my head during that time. On […]

July 11, 2009 – 6:24 pm | By arafiqui | Posted in The Question Of Palestine | Comments Off on The Shock Of Gaza Or Salvaging Something From What Was Nearly Nothing

Fighting Ghosts And Selling The Good War Or Why Are The Toy Soldiers On The Front Lines!

The silence is deafening. As American troops are dropped in on Afghanistan to fight their fantasy war, there is no sound from our defenders of truth and checkers of power i.e. the media, about the operation, its objectives, our continued presence in the country, our blood thirsty allies, our ‘pretend’ Afghani democracy, our support of […]

July 9, 2009 – 11:04 am | By arafiqui | Posted in American And Her Wars, Journalism, Photography | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Comments Off on Fighting Ghosts And Selling The Good War Or Why Are The Toy Soldiers On The Front Lines!