The Arab Transformation of 2011

In just one year, the Arab and Muslim world has undergone a total transformation. It started in Tunisia, North Africa a year ago, when a 26-year-old street vendor decided he couldn’t take it anymore. Faced with constant petty police harassment and no recourse when he complained to the authorities, Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire, […]

Anti-Semitism definition and modern day application

The U.S. ambassador to Belgium, Howard Gutman, is facing an intense campaign by hard-line pro-Israel voices in the U.S. who want him fired over remarks he made about anti-Semitism late last month. Gutman, an Obama fundraiser-turned-ambassador, as well as a Jew and child of a Holocaust survivor, was addressing a Brussels conference devoted to combating […]

Arab Spring certainly not the first democratic movement in Muslim world

The Arab-Islamic world has a long history of democracy –democracy which is regularly crushed by western force. In 1953 Iran had a parliamentary system, the US and Britain overthrew it. There was a revolution in Iraq in 1958, we don’t know where it would have gone, but it could have been democratic. The US basically […]

Selective US concerns over Arab repression

If President Barack Obama wanted to place Washington “on the right side of history” during the ongoing “Arab Spring”, his reaction to recent events in Bahrain will likely make that far more difficult. While Obama and his Administration has called for regime change in Libya, it has remained remarkably restrained about the escalating crackdown by […]

The Nature of the Arab Economies

Most of the Arab economies where the revolts are taking place are based on ‘rents’ from oil, gas, minerals and tourism, which provide most of the export earnings and state revenues (Financial Times, Feb. 22, 2011, p. 14). These economic sectors are, in effect, export enclaves employing a tiny fraction of the labor force and […]

Another side of Muammar Gaddafi of Libya

Pravda offers a novel opinion about Libyan leader Colonel Muammar Gaddafi, different than Western spin: The daily media attack on the leader Muammar Gaddafi is one more terrorist strategy of the government of the United States of America to recover influence in the Arab world. How can you call someone a dictator who overthrew a […]

Saudi Arabia greed and corruption “beyond the bounds of reason”

When Saudi King Abdullah arrived home in Saudi Arabia last week, he came bearing gifts: handouts worth $37 billion, apparently intended to placate Saudis of modest means and insulate the world’s biggest oil exporter from the wave of protest sweeping the Arab world. But some of the biggest handouts over the past two decades have […]

Orchestrating a flawed transition for Egypt

As the Mubarak regime turns to violence in a vain attempt to repress the peaceful protests that have swept Egypt’s streets, the risks associated with current U.S. strategy for Egypt and the wider region continue to grow. Washington’s response has departed little from its original script. This script involves repeatedly invoking the language of “moderation” […]

A curtailing of American influence in the Middle East?

What is happening in Egypt, like what happened in Tunisia, tightens the noose that unless Israel and Washington radically change their policies toward the Palestinians and the Muslim world, it threatens to strangle the Jewish state, as well as dramatically curtail American influence in the Middle East. The failure of the United States to halt […]

Why America’s love affair with Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Jordan

Much of the media coverage of the protests in Egypt has noted that President Obama is in a tough position because the regime of Hosni Mubarak is an important ally of the United States. So it’s natural to ask: How and why did the United States become allies with Egypt in the first place? And […]