Rasa - The solidarity shown by the Islamic states' leaders during the Wednesday summit in Istanbul to defend the Palestinian identity of the holy Quds frustrated the US and forced it to raise baseless allegations against Iran, Abdel Bari Atwan, the editor-in-chief of Rai al-Youm newspaper, said.

Rasa - In theory, the global financial system is supposed to help every country gain. Mainstream teaching of international finance, trade and “foreign aid” (defined simply as any government credit) depicts an almost utopian system uplifting all countries, not stripping their assets and imposing austerity. The reality since World War I is that the United States has taken the lead in shaping the international financial system to promote gains for its own bankers, farm exporters, its oil and gas sector, and buyers of foreign resources – and most of all, to collect on debts owed to it.

Rasa - President Trump announced last week that he was returning North Korea to the US list of “state sponsors of terrorism” after having been off the list for the past nine years.

Rasa - USAID Chief Mark Green has announced some $130 million in US provided food aid is being set aside for Yemen, citing the mounting “humanitarian catastrophe.”

Rasa - In an extraordinary US Senate hearing last week, lawmakers and military officials rounded on President Trump as being a danger to world peace due to his Commander-in-Chief powers for launching nuclear weapons.

Rasa - The same country which insists Iraq’s Popular Mobilization Units, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, Yemen’s Ansarullah, and Palestine’s Hamas must disarm, its weapons companies now claim more than half of global arms sales, raking in nearly 58 percent or $217 billion of a total $375 billion in profits.

Rasa - White people don’t riot. At least that’s the presumption of many white Americans, especially Trump supporters whose easily provoked fears have been fomented by decades of televised civil unrest and the urban wreckage at Ferguson, Baltimore, Los Angeles, and further back, Detroit and Watts.

Rasa - True, geo-political and social upheavals are following at a dizzying pace, but that has nothing to do with the people of the Middle East, and certainly not Iran as Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and US President Donald Trump would like to suggest.

Rasa - If the bloody debacle in Iraq should have taught Americans anything, it is that endorsements by lots of important people who think something is true don’t amount to evidence that it actually is true. If endorsements were the same as evidence, US troops would have found tons of WMD in Iraq, rather than come up empty.

Rasa - Unlike what “fakestream” media outlets in the West would like to suggest, no ethnic group or community is going to be forgotten by the government in post-ISIL Syria – even those who colluded with the foreign-backed terrorist group.