Egyptians fought bravely, ousted Mubarak and gave power to the military. But it turns out that USA effectively controls the Egyptian Army. It financed it, trained it and should it go into conflict with it, it can easily defeat it. So Egyptian people, whether they are aware of this or not, gave considerable power to USA. In Latin America and other parts of the world, giving power to US backed military would have been seen as a huge step back in time. So this situation must change quickly and in favor of the Egyptian people. It could also change in favor of US and EU foreign policy in the region.

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You probably remember the uproar that was caused by the publication of Danish cartoons that some Muslims found offensive.  Demonstrations around the world were massive.  According to Wikipedia there were over 100 deaths. Now let’s leave aside the controversy over how offensive those cartoons were.  To me the point is that when Muslims want to organize and protest over something that is dear to them, they do.
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I read this article from El País (in spanish) in which El Houssine Majdoub, a Moroccan journalist, blames the West and its “repugnant role” for the suffering of Muslim citizens in their own countries.

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Because, the USA is a very federal country and there´s little a President can do to change the way America is going other than by convincing Congress, Governors and Mayors to go along with him.

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I am in the process of downloading a file that contains all the unedited cables that Wikileaks has obtained. You can do the same by downloading this link using a program like Vuze. This is a 1.4GB file so it may take a while. As far as I know it is not illegal to download it as it is not copyright material. In any case it is probably not illegal because you cannot read whatever it is that you are downloaded as it is encrypted. What this file is is a Poison Pill. Assange goes, this file is open for humanity to see.

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The Spanish papers dedicate several pages everyday to the Basque Country debate. The Spanish people are obsessed by the situation in the Basque Country, in part because of terrorism. However, I found out that every year in Spain more people die in car accidents than have died in the entire history of ETA, yet, I don’t see as much ink spilled to cover that story.

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China calling itself Communist is like Latin countries calling themselves Catholic. The Communist Chinese seem to like money as much as the Catholic Latinos like sex and yet both have “ideologies”, whose main principles are based around repression of what those cultures like the most. Maybe it is unsuccessfully trying to fight these “excessive” desires that makes these cultures come up with ideologies that are so far from their own reality of life. You are as unlikely to find a Chinese who believes in sharing his wealth as you are to find a Brazilian who practices abstinence. But there you go.

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This morning I read that most Muslims believe that 9/11 was a conspiracy created by the US government to justify the invasion of Iraq. This worried me. How could the majority of Muslims be so wrong?

But then I thought that the US government and that of some EU countries did lie to invade Iraq. It lied about the weapons of mass destruction conspiracy and the connections between Saddam Hussein was and 9/11.

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As Israel continues to fight in Gaza, I, a Jew, continue to question the morals and effectiveness of their military campaign. And, just as when I objected to the invasion of Lebanon in 2006, I still hear the same old appeasement song. I hear it again, and again, and again from my Jewish friends: Hitler, Hitler, Hitler. Hezbollah is Hitler. Hamas is Hitler. Iran is Hitler. The Palestinians are Hitler. The Arabs are Hitler. They are all Hitler. They are all for the systematic extermination of the Jewish people. Even when commentators in Europe, the US and other regions disapprove of the methods used by the Israeli government to deal with Hezbollah and Hamas, my Jewish colleagues are quick to dismiss those opinions as those of anti-Semites. In their minds, people who disagree with the foreign policy of Israel are simply waiting for the enemies of the Jewish people to complete the work left undone by the Nazis. For them, the Palestinians are not a people with valid claims about a country, but instead a neo-Nazi group that was created to make sure that Hitler’s final solution gets implemented.

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Let me put a string of assumptions about the Middle East, the USA and China together and see if we draw similar conclusions.

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