The movement seeks to amend Iraq’s constitution to ban discrimination against black people, and have the state improve their representation in parliament.  Most Iraqi-Africans continue to hold menial jobs, serving as cleaners or musicians and dancers. They are denied a chance to serve and advance in the army and police, as well as local bureaucracies.They continue to seek social awareness about their plight, asking for access to the national media to address their grievances.

The Saudi government is continually looking for some acceptable justification to suppress this Shi’a minority, which Riyadh believes threatens the stability of the kingdom. The designation of Shi’a as heretics aids in cementing this justification. However, the Saudi rulers have gone one step further. They have tied the interests of their Shi’a citizens to Iran, creating a false narrative of Iranian hegemony. 

We who experience these events through the media are infinitely better off than people for whom they are life-or-death reality.  But even at our remove, it’s hard not to feel beaten up and helpless.  This feeling is amplified by the media’s economic self-interest in keeping us anxious and riveted, and by our addiction to our ubiquitous screens.  Steven Pinker’s argument – that this is actually the least violent time in human history – may be factually accurate, and there are plenty of genocides within living memory to put today’s torrent of rotten news in perspective.

Obama might talk tough and promise to be “relentless, but the cold hard truth is the US does not care that much about freelance journalists anywhere in the world. It didn’t ask for them to be there, unlike the US ambassador killed in Benghazi, Libya. Forget the government, freelancers don’t even have news organizations that truly have their back. Even a major news organization cannot save you from fanatics hell-bent on making an example out of you as Daniel Pearl discovered in Pakistan. 

Freelancers who find themselves in trouble depend on the kindness of the organizations that buy their work. In Foley’s case, GlobalPost claimed it spent millions in an attempt to rescue him, including hiring a security firm and investigating his whereabouts.But in general, a freelancer is more vulnerable, often traveling without bodyguards and contingency plans. There’s a viral photo of Foley carrying his camera and sound recorder and other equipment that reminds viewers of how freelancers need to take advantage of the full multimedia spectrum – reporting, photojournalism, sound recording – in order to make a living. 

The beheading of Foley, a dreadful and tragic event, sparked a surge of gloom, doom, and hype among senior US officials and within the media at large. Of late, estimates of total ISIS fighters and foreign recruits have soared, but are based on what could only be iffy information. This is precisely what ISIS’s leaders intended. ISIS perceives, as do other ruthless entities, that the US (and its allies) are traumatized far more by the death of one citizen than vastly broader atrocities in the Middle East. 

Two-and-a-half years after the U.S. pulled out of Iraq the country has crumbled into a bona-fide failed state, with Baghdad under siege by ISIS (jihadist militants from the Islamic State), who are having a run of Iraq, and some analysts now worry that ISIS will commit mass genocide against Iraq's Shi'a population if Baghdad falls. The war in Iraq started with Operation Shock and Awe but ended in a fizzle and, some would argue, in an epic exercise in human futility. 

The success of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in capturing large territories in Syria and Northern Iraq, and now threatening Baghdad, has raised once again the specter of a Sunni-Shi’a war in the Middle East. Such a scenario is possible, but unlikely. That’s because Sunni and Shi’a believers throughout the world are divided into many factions living under different social conditions and with different religious, social and political agendas. 

ISIS is a mature Sunni Muslim movement started in 2000. The government of Iraq and its troops are largely Shi’a Muslim. The territories now conquered by ISIS are also Sunni. There is only one conclusion that fits the facts of the success of the ISIS conquest: The Sunni residents of Northern Iraq are aiding ISIS in the takeover. Thus the ISIS “conquest” is not that at all—it is rather a full-scale revolt of the Sunni population against the Shi’a government.

There is great division of opinion regarding potential U.S. military action in Syria. However, one group is ecstatic over President Obama’s endorsement of a military attack on Damascus. These are the neconservatives who dominated the George W. Bush administration, and who still hold tremendous influence in Washington. An attack on Syria would be one step in fulfilling “stage two” of a longstanding neoconservative plan to bring about regime change throughout the Middle East in three stages: Iraq, Syria and finally Iran.