Weekend long read

1) Israeli journalist and author RonenBergman writes about the ongoing investigation into the 1994 AMIA centre bombing.Weekend Read

“Investigating Judge Rodolfo Canicoba was appointed to handle the case in Nisman’s place, and he embarked on a world-wide journey in the wake of Ali Velayati, the former Iranian foreign minister, who was one of the suspects on the Interpol arrest warrant that had been issued at Nisman’s request. Each time over the past year when Canicoba heard that Velayati was about to visit another country outside Iran, he asked its government to extradite the Iranian. The most recent of these was Iraq, to which he submitted a demand on October 21, 2016.

Extradition has not yet been executed, and it is doubtful that any country, especially Iraq, will ever risk getting into trouble with Iran by arresting and extraditing so senior a figure as Velayati. But the fact that Argentina has made it clear that it will not drop the matter — together with the warrants dangling over the heads of senior Iranian officials — has a symbolic significance. The case remains one of the most intriguing and dramatic clashes between terrorism and international law in history.”

2) At the Middle East Quarterly, Professor Richard Landes discusses Edward Said’s impact on Western understanding of the Middle East.

“Whether one views the impact of Edward Said (1935-2003) on academia as a brilliant triumph or a catastrophic tragedy, few can question the astonishing scope and penetration of his magnum opus, Orientalism. In one generation, a radical transformation overcame Middle Eastern studies: A new breed of “post-colonial” academics, boasting a liberating, anti-imperialist perspective, replaced a generation of scholars disparaged by Said as “Orientalists.” Nor was this transformation limited to Middle Eastern studies: Said and his post-colonial paradigm assembled a wide range of acolytes in many fields in the social sciences and humanities.”

3) At the NYT, Kenan Malik takes an interesting look at the topic of ‘fake news’.

“In the past, governments, mainstream institutions and newspapers manipulated news and information. Today, anyone with a Facebook account can do it. Instead of the carefully organized fake news of old, there is now an anarchic outflow of lies. What has changed is not that news is faked, but that the old gatekeepers of news have lost their power. Just as elite institutions have lost their grip over the electorate, so their ability to define what is and is not news has also eroded.”

 

 

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