The group that calls itself the Islamic State (IS) has carried out ethnic cleansing on a historic scale in northern Iraq. IS has systematically targeted non-Arab and non-Sunni Muslim communities, killing or abducting hundreds, possibly thousands, and forcing more than 830,000 others to flee the areas it has captured since 10 June 2014. Ethnic and religious minorities - Assyrian Christians, Turkmen Shi'a, Shabak Shi'a, Yezidis, Kakai and Sabean Mandaeans - have lived together in the Nineveh province, much of it now under IS control, for centuries. Today, only those who were unable to flee when...

Hassan Nasrallah, current leader of the Lebanese Hizbollah was born August 31, 1960 in the Bourj Hammoud, one of the most impoverished and underprivileged neighborhoods in the eastern suburbs of Beirut. There was no running water and no electricity. Houses were often crude shacks made from tin sheets and wood. "I remember the sound of rain striking the metal," says Ayoub Humayed, a parliamentarian who also lived there as a boy. Hassan Nasrallah was the oldest of three brothers and five sisters. His father, Abdul Karim, was a vegetable vendor from Al Bazuriyah, a small village near Tyre in...

Hillary Clinton is running for president, but due to her advanced age, inability to think on her feet, and unquenchable lust for money, she would like to avoid having to actually campaign for as long as possible. For the most part, the national press has seemed content to let her get away with this. However, a few enterprising reporters are attempting to legitimately vet the presumed Democratic nominee, and have begun to investigate the inner workings of the Clinton Foundation. In doing so, they've uncovered some troubling facts. The string of revelations began when the Wall Street Journal...

Syriza leader Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek Prime Minister, began his political career as an activist of the youth section of the Communist Party. Later, he became the leader of Synaspismos and its successor party Syriza. Both were a coalition of Marxist parties including the Communists and Maoists. The 40-year old Tsipras is an admirer of revolutionary leaders such as Fidel Castro, Ernesto Che Guevara and Hugo Chavez. He named his son Ernesto after the Argentinean-Cuban revolutionary. Two years ago, he flew to Caracas, Venezuela, to attend the funeral of Chavez. Many of the new Greek...

Beginning in the 1950s and peaking in the 1980s, a number of developments greatly advanced Turkey's modernization. These same events also transformed Turkish politics. The result was a confrontation between provincial/traditional and urban/modern cultures, new social classes, and the fragmentation of the conservative electorate from the 1970s onward. This same situation provided the environment for the growth of Islamist parties in Turkey taking votes away from their center-right competitors. Islamist political movements vary greatly among different states in their doctrines and strategies....

Since 2003, Anglo-American power has secretly and openly coordinated direct and indirect support for Islamist terrorist groups linked to al-Qaeda across the Middle East and North Africa. This ill-conceived patchwork geo-strategy is a legacy of the persistent influence of neoconservative ideology, motivated by longstanding but often contradictory ambitions to dominate regional oil resources, defend an expansionist Israel, and in pursuit of these, re-draw the map of the Middle East. Now despite Pentagon denials that there will be boots on the ground - and Obama's insistence that this would not...

The Islamic State announced several months ago that it was "annexing" territory in Algeria (Wilayat al-Jazair), Libya (Wilayat al-Barqah, Wilayat al-Tarabulus and Wilayat al-Fizan), Sinai (Wilayat Sinai), Saudi Arabia (Wilayat al-Haramayn) and Yemen (Wilayat al-Yaman). It is likely that the Islamic State plans to pursue a similar approach in Afghanistan and Pakistan following its announcement of accepting pledges of allegiance from former members of the Afghan and Pakistan Taliban to also try and "annex" territory there under the framework of a new wilayah called "Wilayat Khorasan." On its...

In a campaign-style appearance in Boca Raton, Donald Trump told the Tea Party crowd that he's a real conservative -- he's anti-tax, pro-life, pro-gun, and will "fight to get rid of Obamacare." Three elderly people fainted at the rally. We hope they swooned for the April sun, not at Trump's convictions. It shouldn't be a surprise that Trump has latched onto the far-right's birtherism. As he enters his fourth decade as a professional attention seeker, Trump has a long record of saying just about anything that will win him headlines. Especially when it strikes a cultural or political nerve. It's...