Tag: Middle East

After October 7, Marwan Barghouti called on Palestinian factions to rise up to fight the oppressive Israeli occupation. According to Al Jazeera, “this call to action spread like wildfire” and resulted in Marwan being sent to solitary confinement. As Palestinian life hangs in the balance, calls for his release have...
There was a time when American clergy were the nation’s conscience. In the late 18th and early 19th centuries, many abolitionist Protestant ministers were leaders in the movement to end slavery. Congregationalist Jonathan Edwards, Jr. (1746-1801) was among the many outstanding voices in the Abolition Movement.  Since World War I, few members...
As the genocide of Palestinians continues with daily massacres of scores, sometimes hundreds, of starving people being targeted and killed by the Israeli military as they come to attempt to get food, another ship of the Gaza Freedom Flotilla coalition, the Handala, is sailing to bring attention to the criminal actions of the...
The ongoing genocide in Gaza has brought greater global attention to the plight of Palestinians, a huge number of whom have been refugees since the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 when they were expelled from their land in what is known as the Nakba. The brutal Israeli...
In early July, Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, issued a damning report detailing how large corporations profit from the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza and genocide in Gaza that has taken place since...
From 2011 to 2016, demonstrations in Syria against the Ba’athist government headed by Bashar al-Assad escalated into an armed insurgency and large-scale pitched battles, sieges and counter-sieges in and around major Syrian cities such as Aleppo and Damascus. During that time, agents of U.S. diplomacy, soft power, defense and...
In late June, Syrians experienced the worst attack on a Christian church since 1860 On June 29, 2025, I attended a church service at St. Moses the Black Orthodox Church in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. St. Moses is an Antiochian church, also known as the Church of St. Peter, and harkens...
Mahmoud Khalil is free! After spending 104 days unjustly held in an ICE detention center in Jena, Louisiana, he was reunited with his wife Noor, newborn son Deen and community over the weekend...
As Israel began its unprovoked attacks on Iran on June 13, the last three of the twelve volunteers of the Gaza Flotilla ship Madleen were still in Israeli prisons. Marc van Rennes, a Dutch citizen, was in the detention cell at Ben Gurion Airport when Israeli authorities closed the airport expecting Iranian...
In the past couple of days, Donald Trump has been speaking about the possibility of the United States formally entering the Israeli war against Iran. And as of this evening, the U.S. has begun bombing Iran. But the reality is the United States has been at war with Iran...