by JURIST Staff

We may not have the infrastructure, but we have the will.

—Banner held at protests across Syria, April 2025

In an unprecedented wave of demonstrations across government-held territory, the Syrian people have taken to the streets not to challenge their own leadership, but to protest Israel’s ongoing human rights atrocities in Gaza and its repeated military strikes on Syrian soil.

This explainer breaks down what’s happening, what’s fueling the anger, and what it signals about a country emerging from decades of internal rule, and why Syrians are rallying around a cause that reaches far beyond their own country's borders.

by Bill Weinberg, Skunk

This brief memoir of CounterVortex editor Bill Weinberg's days as a young neo-Yippie in the 1980s first appeared in Canada's Skunk magazine in winter 2012-13. 

On Nov. 14, I went back to 9 Bleecker Street for the 63rd birthday bash of Aron Kay, the famous Yippie Pie-Man.

Aron is something of a legend in activist and radical circles in New York City. Of impressive girth and walking with a cane, he still sports beard and tie-dyed t-shirt, and is viewed as a kind of an elder statesman by some of the Occupy Wall Street crowd. Although his physical condition no longer allows him to engage in the daring tactic that won him notoriety, he has more than earned his sobriquet. Across his career, he has wafted pies into the faces of (in chronological order) right-wing pundit William F. Buckley, New York’s Senator Patrick Moynihan, Watergate burglar E. Howard Hunt, anti-feminist mouthpiece Phyllis Schlafly, New York City Mayor Abe Beame, Watergate burglar G. Gordon Liddy, CIA chief William Colby, Studio 54 empresario Steve Rubell, California governor Jerry Brown, Vietnam-era National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy, H-bomb mastermind Edward Teller (who got a special mushroom pie—get it?) and anti-abortion crusader Randall Terry.

by Uri Gordon, Freedom

Last week the Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN) released a declaration, setting out a new decentralized structure for the autonomous indigenous communities in Mexico's southern state of Chiapas. To get more insight into this change and its significance, Freedom spoke to Bill Weinberg, a longtime journalist and anarchist in New York City. His book about the Zapatistas, Homage to Chiapas: The New Indigenous Struggles in Mexico, was published by Verso in 2000. He spent much time in Chiapas and elsewhere in Mexico during the 1990s, covering the indigenous movements there, prominently including the Zapatistas. In recent decades he has been spending more time in South America and is now completing a book about indigenous struggles in the Andes, particularly Peru. He continues to follow the Zapatistas and Chiapas very closely, and covers world autonomy movements on his website CounterVortex.org.