Global Research in International Affairs Center
Since we can’t get good coverage of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood in the Western media, it’s necessary to turn to the Islamists’ intended victims — Arab liberals — to get a better picture. NowLebanon explains it all to you in an article on what it calls the “media blitz” of the Muslim Brotherhood and its politicians in the Freedom and Justice Party (FJP): Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood has been displaying great skill in handling the media over the past year. Since the revolution … [Read more...]
Here’s a fascinating exchange telling us not only about the contemporary state of Islam, Islamism, and the political issues involving them but also the debates and conflicts shaping Western civilization today. It also taught me about the common theme between revolutionary Islamism and the revolutionary leftism that today masquerades as liberalism. The interviewee is Hazem Salah Abu Ismail, a leading Islamist presidential candidate in Egypt and the Salafists’ favorite. I’ll annotate his … [Read more...]
President Barack Obama will probably be defeated in November by people voting for the Republican candidate who will then tell their friends that they voted for Obama. For them, that will be a compromise between responding to the reality they see as opposed to being in fashion and not being called nasty names by one’s peers. It is like the story told by the latest Western woman to be sexually assaulted by a mob in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Listen carefully to what she says: “Heather … [Read more...]
Dear readers, I’d like to share with you a secret. Every day I read and hear things by people who claim to be experts on the Middle East. I have read them on the land; I have read them on the sea; I have read them in the air. And they will never surrender to reality. Here are the two main causes of error: --They think the Middle East is just like the West so they can extrapolate from their own experience. When someone would say, “If I were Yasir Arafat, I’d….” My response … [Read more...]
It’s ironic how the West has adopted the narrative of the very people who caused so much disaster in the Middle East. There are two reasons: The ignorance of the Western “experts” and the domination of the radical interpretations that made the mess in the first place. Here’s a example. In a paper just published by Harvard, somebody named Neil Lewis (where do they find these people to write about Middle East issues who know nothing about them?) argues that the idea the New York Times … [Read more...]
The trouble with the Palestinian Authority (PA) is that while in the Western mass media it is virtually always portrayed as moderate the PA simply doesn’t act that way. Its contrary behavior involves not keeping its commitments, daily incitement to kill Israelis and destroy Israel in its institutions, and refusal to negotiate seriously. Above all, it means refusing to make peace in the context of a two-state solution. Among other things, it rejects the idea off a peace treaty ending the … [Read more...]
Jackson Diehl is by far the best journalist writing in the mass media about the Middle East. In a recent column, he tries to find some middle ground between the dominant ideas — that Islamist regimes are no problem at all and that the Muslim Brotherhood is really moderate — and what he defines as a too extreme conservative and Republican analysis. While I don’t quite agree with him, there is much of merit in his dichotomy. We should all learn from it even though I’m going to suggest … [Read more...]
One of the benefits of spending much of my time talking to people from around the world is getting an original, fresh perspective on the United States, its policies, politics, and political culture. Recently, I had a discussion with a brilliant academic who had grown up in a Communist country, has spent a lot of time in the United States, and studies this kind of thing. To explain how the U.S. conception of the world is shaped, he used the phrase “engineering mentality.” The … [Read more...]
I ran into an older, retired Israeli colleague who is a fine scholar in his field. We hadn’t met for 25 years and agreed to have coffee in a nearby Tel Aviv cafe. In the ensuing conversation I learned some key things about why current intellectual and political discussion is such a wreck. The retired professor has read nothing I’ve written. He is on the left-wing politically, in the historic non-Communist sense, but his work has always been first-rate and untouched by any political … [Read more...]
The region-wide upheaval known as “the Arab Spring” would make it seem that terrorism, especially Islamist terrorism, is pretty much as dead as are its thousands of victims. After all, if the protest demonstration and balloting have proven able to resolve grievances then who needs to blow people up? And the same applies to intimidation and instability since presumably people vote, a government is elected, and democracy immediately enues. But the Middle East is far from through with … [Read more...]
This article discusses the 2006/2007 U.S. troop surge in Iraq. It examines to what extent the shift in strategy was responsible for the dramatic drop in violence as well as the implications for U.S. strategy in future conflicts. This article can be found in PDF version here. INTRODUCTION Adopted at the end of [...]
Pakistan is facing a serious crisis today and despite the proclivity of the nation’s elites to blame external forces, the wounds are largely self-inflicted. India is not the biggest danger Pakistan faces today. It is the extremist groups that the security establishment has nurtured over the years that have turned against the Pakistani state. The [...]
This article considers the reasons for and the overall impact of holding a national referendum in Turkey on September 12, 2010, for a series of constitutional amendments passed by the governing AKP (Adalet ve Kalkinma Partisi or Justice and Development Party). Although the measures were publically accepted with nearly 58 percent approval, the prospects for [...]
Israel: An Introduction, a project by the Global Research in International Affairs Center (GLORIA), of the Interdisciplinary Center of Herzliya, and published by Yale University Press will be in stores on February 21st, … [Read More...]