Middle East

The Middle East’s kings of cowardice

by News Sources 04.19.2013

Marc Lynch writes: Egyptian comedian Bassem Youssef rocketed to global celebrity last month after being charged for insulting President Mohamed Morsy. The escalation against Youssef was rooted in the intense polarization of local Egyptian politics and the prickly, insecure nature of the Muslim Brotherhood-led government. The move badly backfired on the Egyptian government: It inspired [...]

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Video: Diplomacy, Obama and the Middle East

by News Sources 04.01.2013
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The next wave of religious violence

by News Sources 02.23.2013

Patrick Martin writes: A new wave of sectarian violence has engulfed the Near East, the crest of which has reached Pakistan, where 200 Shia Muslims have been killed in two recent bombing attacks carried out by Sunni extremists. The first attack came Jan. 10, when twin bombs were used. First, a suicide bomber detonated his [...]

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Video: Covering the Middle East — a deadly assignment

by News Sources 02.20.2013
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A Saudi, an Indian and an Iranian walk into a Qatari bar …

by Attention to the Unseen 12.13.2012
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A new urban consciousness in the Arab world?

by News Sources 07.02.2012

Deen Sharp writes: New York’s built environment is continuously being made and remade. The 1950s and 1960s was a particularly dramatic period for construction in the big apple, and a single man, Robert Moses was responsible for much of the reconstruction. For twenty years, Moses constructed huge highway infrastructure projects and urban renewal projects that [...]

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Video: Is the U.S. choosing stability over democracy in the Middle East?

by News Sources 03.28.2012
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The Sunni-Shia wars

by News Sources 01.01.2012

Patrick Cockburn writes: In three of the Arab countries east of Egypt – Syria, Bahrain and Yemen – protesters have challenged their governments over the past year but failed to overthrow them. The reasons for those failures are very different though they have important points in common. In each of these states protesters were frustrated [...]

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Don’t stop at Iraq: Why the U.S. should withdraw from the entire Persian Gulf

by News Sources 12.22.2011

Toby C. Jones writes: The U.S. is finally drawing down its military presence from Iraq, but why stop there? Why not reduce or outright remove our military presence from the entire Persian Gulf? The U.S. has been waging war in the Gulf for more than two and a half decades, since it took up arms [...]

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Inside Story – Is political Islam replacing Arab dictators?

by News Sources 12.01.2011
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Do the Middle East’s revolutions have a unifying ideology?

by News Sources 12.01.2011

Marc Lynch writes: “Why does every nation on Earth move to change their conditions except for us? Why do we always submit to the batons of the rulers and their repression? How long will Arabs wait for foreign saviors?” That is how the inflammatory Al Jazeera talk-show host Faisal al-Qassem opened his program in December [...]

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Chas Freeman considers the global outlook for 2012

by News Sources 11.19.2011

From a speech by Chas Freeman given in Macau, China, yesterday: Europe used to be boringly predictable, which was good for business. Now bits of it have reverted to being excitingly unreliable, which is bad. Repeated crises have addicted European leaders to summits, where they agree on partial solutions to problems and create new ones, [...]

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Nuclear Israel revisited

by News Sources 11.11.2011

Joseph Massad writes: How many times must this story be retold? It is common knowledge in the United States, in Europe, in the Arab World, indeed in the entire world. The international press has been reporting on it since the late 1960s. The historical details of the story are also well known. In 1955, President [...]

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Can the West stop worrying and learn to love the Islamists?

by News Sources 10.25.2011

Tony Karon writes: Tunisia’s election and Libya’s celebration of the overthrow of Col. Muammar Gaddafi won’t have made for a happy weekend among those fevered heads in Washington who believe the West is locked in an existential struggle with political Islam: If anything, the Islamist tones of the Libyan celebrations, coupled with the Islamist victory [...]

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Arab world indifferent about death of unknown American cleric

by Paul Woodward 10.02.2011

But the headline says: “As the West Celebrates a Cleric’s Death, the Mideast Shrugs.” The New York Times, forever the trumpet of institutional power, apparently sees no need to draw a distinction between the White House and the West — even though most people in the West, like those in the Middle East, wouldn’t, until [...]

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Palestine vote showcases the decline of American power

by News Sources 09.27.2011

Juan Cole writes: The United States, castigated by its critics as recently as a decade ago as a “hyper-power,” is now so weak and isolated on the world stage that it may cast an embarrassing and self-defeating veto of Palestinian membership in the United Nations. Beset by debt, mired in economic doldrums provoked by the [...]

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In riddle of Mideast upheaval, Turkey offers itself as an answer

by News Sources 09.27.2011

Anthony Shadid reports: Not so long ago, the foreign policy of Turkey revolved around a single issue: the divided island of Cyprus. These days, its prime minister may be the most popular figure in the Middle East, its foreign minister envisions a new order there and its officials have managed to do what the Obama [...]

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Gaddafi’s fall unlikely to alarm Arab leaders

by News Sources 08.22.2011

Brian Whitaker writes: Just a few days before completing his 42nd year in power, Muammar Gaddafi appears to have become the third Arab dictator to fall in the past eight months. Tunisian president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali was the first to go, hounded out of the country in January after 23 years in power. [...]

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U.S. impotent in face of Middle East events

by News Sources 08.17.2011

Zvi Bar’el writes: How long will the Syrian protesters wait until the United States and its allies deign to intervene in their slow massacre? What is the critical mass of people who must be killed for the “international community” to act? When there’s an earthquake, countries jostle each other to be visibly first in line [...]

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On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 4)

by News Sources 07.15.2011

(Watch Part 1 here, Part 2 here, and Part 3 here.)

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Does Islam stand against science?

by News Sources 07.14.2011

Steve Paulson writes: We may think the charged relationship between science and religion is mainly a problem for Christian fundamentalists, but modern science is also under fire in the Muslim world. Islamic creationist movements are gaining momentum, and growing numbers of Muslims now look to the Quran itself for revelations about science. Science in Muslim [...]

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On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 2)

by News Sources 07.13.2011

(Watch Part 1 here.)

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On Orientalism — Edward Said (Part 1)

by News Sources 07.13.2011
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How the GOP and America’s Arab allies support slavery

by News Sources 06.28.2011

Time magazine reports: Three days before the congressional elections last fall, Hillary Rodham Clinton stood halfway around the world, pledging to young victims of human trafficking at Cambodia’s s Siem Reap Center that they would continue to enjoy the support of the U.S. State Department, which then provided some $336,000 to the shelter. The acclaimed [...]

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