The Rise of Hizbullah  The impact of the Iranian revolution, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982, Israel's subsequent occupation of the south )1982-85), and the massacre of Palestinians and Lebanese in the Shatila and Sabra refugee camps by Christian Phalangists with Israeli complicity, contributed to the formation of extremist revolutionnary Islamic organizations, in particular Hizbullah (Party of God) and al-Jihad, whose goals were to emulate Iran. Following Iran's example, they were against the utited States and Israel and sought to violently overthrow the Lebanese government and impose an Islamic state. Hizbullah's pro-Iranian orientation was clearly set forth in its…

Former Central Intelligence Agency Director John Brennan urged for those in America's intelligence community to not give up and continue to carry out their jobs amid President Trump's plans to shake up the apparatus.   "I’m hoping that the intelligence professionals are going to continue to do their best to provide the intelligence and the analysis that the executive branch, as well as legislative branch, needs," Brennan told MSNBC on Friday. "They need to try to do it despite the headwinds they’re feeling coming from the White House. A lot of these individuals, I’m sure, are being intimidated and now…

The president has interpreted the Republican-controlled Senate’s vote to acquit as a writ of absolute power. here are two kinds of Republican senators who voted to acquit Donald Trump in his impeachment trial two weeks ago: those who acknowledged he was guilty and voted to acquit anyway, and those who pretended the president had done nothing wrong. “It was wrong for President Trump to mention former Vice President Biden on that phone call, and it was wrong for him to ask a foreign country to investigate a political rival,” Senator Susan Collins of Maine declared, but added that removing him “could have unpredictable…

The hashtag #PresidentWarren was trending on Twitter in the United States on Tuesday morning as supporters of Elizabeth Warren flooded social media with the phrase amid the primary candidate's polling decline. As the Massachusetts senator was on the campaign stump in Nevada ahead of the state's Democratic caucus on Saturday, the candidate's backers buoyed her by getting #PresidentWarren to sixth place in the U.S. Twitter trending charts. At the time of writing, the social media platform records that 137,000 tweets have used the hashtag declaring support for the former Democratic primary frontrunner. Using the hashtag, New Mexico Rep. Debra Haaland…

The world is waiting anxiously to see whether the U.S. and Afghan governments and the Taliban will agree to a one-week truce that could set the stage for a “permanent and comprehensive” ceasefire and a withdrawal of US and other foreign occupation forces from Afghanistan. Could the talks be for real this time, or will they turn out to be just another smokescreen for President Trump’s addiction to mass murder and celebrity whack-a-mole? If the ceasefire really happens, nobody will be happier than the Afghans fighting and dying on the front lines of a war that one described to a BBC reporter as “not really our fight.”…