Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
New research may hold key to Indonesia’s church-building controversy
By Testriono JAKARTA: In Bogor, a city in Indonesia’s West Java province, the Presbyterian congregation GKI Yasmin has been prohibited by the local administration from holding services in their church for years. Indonesia’s Supreme Court has ruled that revoking the church’s permit is illegal. However, GKI Yasmin and many churches like it have not been protected …
The Chancellor who played with fire
By Joschka Fischer BERLIN: German Chancellor Angela Merkel should be happy nowadays: her party’s approval ratings aren’t bad, and her own are very good. She no longer has serious rivals within the center-right Christian Democratic Union (CDU), while the left opposition is fragmented into four parties. Her response to the European crisis has prevailed — or …
Mubarak out, SCAF to follow
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: Did we have cause to celebrate a year ago, on Feb. 11, 2011? Yes and no. Since hindsight is always 20/20, looking back the answer is in reality more no than yes. When then-vice president Omar Suleiman made the historic 30-second announcement that Mubarak has “relinquished” his position as president and …
No escape from empire’s graveyard
By Brahma Chellaney NEW DELHI: With the stage set for secret talks in Qatar between the United States and the Taliban, US President Barack Obama’s strategy for a phased exit from war-ravaged Afghanistan is now being couched in nice-sounding terms that hide more than they reveal. In seeking a Faustian bargain with the Taliban, Obama risks …
Virtual Arab-Israeli peace conference offers hope
By Ruth Eglash JERUSALEM: Just days after long-time Israeli-Palestinian peace negotiators Yitzhak Molcho and Saeb Erekat clashed yet again at a meeting in Jordan, thousands of young people from across the Middle East gathered together online for an event which set a new standard for mutual understanding and partnership. Conferences bringing together Jews and Arabs might …
Obama’s Middle East malady
By Zaki Laïdi PARIS: No sooner did US President Barack Obama welcome home American troops from Iraq and laud that country’s stability and democracy than an unprecedented wave of violence — across Baghdad and elsewhere — revealed the severity of Iraq’s political crisis. Is that crisis an unfortunate exception, or, rather, a symptom of the failure …
When women lead
By Joseph Nye MUNICH: Would the world be more peaceful if women were in charge? A challenging new book by the Harvard University psychologist Steven Pinker says that the answer is “yes.” In The Better Angels of Our Nature, Pinker presents data showing that human violence, while still very much with us today, has been gradually …
Austerity under Attack
By Daniel Gros BRUSSELS: Europe seems to be obsessed with austerity. Country after country is being forced by either the financial markets or the European Union to start cutting its public-sector deficit. And, as if this were not enough, 25 of the 27 EU member states have just agreed on a new treaty (called a “fiscal …
Tunisians share aim of advancing economy
By Amine Ghali BLONDON: A year after the fall of the previous regime Tunisia is undergoing an unprecedented political transformation. A transition government has led the country to the successful election of a constituent assembly. A new government has already been appointed, marking the second phase of the transition process focused on drafting the constitution and …
Don’t shoot the messenger
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Gracious madam, I that do bring the news made not the match, Cleopatra was told by a hapless messenger conveying the news that her beloved Antony had jilted her, according to Shakespeare. As with journalists in Egypt today, he was trying to save his eyesight. The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) counts …
Real battle in Egypt is not on the streets
By Maria Golia CAIRO: On Feb. 3 I walked around my downtown Cairo neighborhood to see how the latest street battles were proceeding. They began again (for the third time in as many months) following a Feb. 1 riot in a Port Said sports stadium in which 74 people died. It seems fans flooded the pitch …
American funk
By Ian Buruma NEW YORK: The eccentric Bengali intellectual Nirad C. Chaudhuri once explained the end of the British Raj in India as a case of “funk,” or loss of nerve. The British had stopped believing in their own empire. They simply lost the will, in Rudyard Kipling’s famous words, to fight “the savage wars of …
Austerity vs. Europe
By Javier Solana MADRID: It is now increasingly clear that what started in late 2008 is no ordinary economic slump. Almost four years after the beginning of the crisis, developed economies have not managed a sustainable recovery, and even the better-off countries reveal signs of weakness. Faced with the certainty of a double-dip recession, Europe’s difficulties …
Decoding Egypt: The Dominance of Mubarakism
By Nael M. Shama One year after the dramatic ouster of former Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, many Egyptians now look retrospectively at the jubilation that followed his resignation with pain and bitterness. “We made a big mistake by leaving Tahrir Square,” they say, admitting that the removal of Mubarak did not connote the triumph of the …
A strategy for Russia’s Snow Revolution
By Mischa Gabowitsch MOSCOW: Nonviolent revolutions do not always remain nonviolent, as the examples of uprisings in Egypt, Libya, and Syria in the Arab Spring have shown. But peaceful movements for regime change often do succeed. They have toppled illegitimate rulers, as with the post-Soviet “color revolutions” in Georgia and Ukraine, and ended apartheid in South …
Overcoming Islamophobia in US elections
By Muqtedar Khan NEWARK, Delaware: Islam has become an important part of American discourse leading up to the 2012 federal elections and candidates everywhere appear eager to take a position on Islam for political gain. Across the country, rising Islamophobia has made it difficult for some Muslims to build mosques and practice their faith, although their …
Neville Chamberlain was right
By J. Bradford DeLong BERKELEY: Neville Chamberlain is remembered today as the British prime minister who, as an avatar of appeasement of Nazi Germany in the late 1930’s, helped to usher Europe into World War II. But, earlier in that fateful decade, relatively soon after the start of the Great Depression, the British economy was rapidly …
OP-ED: What now? Don’t bite the hands that feed
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: The irony of it. What President Obama failed to do in three years, Field Marshall Tantawi achieved in half an hour: Uniting the disparate Democrats and Republicans in Congress. More than 40 signed a letter saying future aid to Egypt hangs in the balance. Currently there’s no way to certify the conditions …
EDITORIAL: Why SCAF must go
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: One of my childhood friends buried her son yesterday. He was 22. His name was Omar. He had his whole life ahead of him. No one could have imagined that Omar, like over 70 other Ahly club fans, was going to return from a football game in a coffin. The massacre …
The unfinished revolution: We must support Egypt’s protesters (Part II)
By Bianca Jagger Under Egypt’s Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the mistreatment of women has triggered unspeakable outrage. Salwa Hosseini told Amnesty International that she was detained, stripped and searched in a room with two open doors and a window, through which male soldiers looked and took pictures of the naked women. According to Amnesty, …
Foul play at Port Said
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: All but mourning must be set aside. Moliere said if grief is suppressed too much it might well redouble. The greatest grief is that we cause ourselves, Sophocles wrote in the Oedipus. It was proper for Field Marshal Tantawi to announce three days of public mourning. It was right to vow to …
The unfinished revolution: We must support Egypt’s protesters (Part I)
By Bianca Jagger January 25, 2012 marked an historic date for Egypt. On this day last year millions of people stood in the now iconic Tahrir Square, peacefully demanding ‘Bread, Freedom and Dignity’. The number of protesters gathered in Tahrir, asking for their basic human rights, was unprecedented in Egypt’s history. It was not only the …
Blaming capitalism for corporatism
By Saifedean Ammous and Edmund Phelps NEW YORK: The future of capitalism is again a question. Will it survive the ongoing crisis in its current form? If not, will it transform itself or will government take the lead? The term “capitalism” used to mean an economic system in which capital was privately owned and traded; owners …
An American stuck in Cairo
By Dan Boylan With cropped hair, lightweight combat boots and body armor, thugs understood how clearly they made their point by simply fingering the triggers of their AK-47s. The American who stood nearby probably found a long afternoon shadow to watch them from as they ransacked his Cairo office. The American is a lean, 36-year-old with …
Old habits die hard
By Khalil Al-Anani Despite its stunning victory in the recent parliamentary elections, the image of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) among revolutionary Egyptians has been badly shaken. The recent clashes between the movement’s youth, who went to Tahrir Square to celebrate the anniversary of the Egyptian revolution, and the revolutionary activists, who were there to protest against …
An Iraqi film hero in America
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: One of Iraq’s only working filmmakers, Oday Rasheed — whose brilliant film 2005 Underexposure followed a group of characters in Baghdad after the United States-led invasion in 2003, and whose new film Qarantina is now premiering — is in Manhattan. The glamorous settings in which he is now showing Qarantina — …
Sustainable humanity
By Jeffrey Sachs ADDIS ABABA: Sustainable development means achieving economic growth that is widely shared and that protects the earth’s vital resources. Our current global economy, however, is not sustainable, with more than one billion people left behind by economic progress and the earth’s environment suffering terrible damage from human activity. Sustainable development requires mobilizing new …
Responsibility While Protecting
By Gareth Evans NEW YORK: Ten months ago, the United Nations Security Council, with no dissent, authorized the use of “all necessary measures” to protect civilians at imminent risk of massacre in Colonel Muammar el-Qaddafi’s Libya. Those lives were saved — and, if the Security Council had acted equally decisively and robustly in the 1990’s, so …
What do Egypt’s generals want?
By Omar Ashour CAIRO: “Whatever the majority in the People’s Assembly, they are very welcome, because they won’t have the ability to impose anything that the people don’t want.” Thus declared General Mukhtar Al-Mulla, a member of Egypt’s ruling Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF). Al-Mulla’s message was that the Islamists’ victory in Egypt’s recent …
Mood indigo
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Trouble comes in threes. Tourism’s tanked. Foreign investors are queasy. This week the neighbors acted up, moving on with Red-Med — the superfast rail link the Chinese want to build across Israel to bypass the Suez Canal. The Suez Blues: India, China, Malaysia, Japan and Indonesia groan about delays and the time …