Latest in Opinion Highlight
Latest in Opinion
The people versus the police
By Naomi Wolf NEW YORK: America’s politicians, it seems, have had their fill of democracy. Across the country, police, acting under orders from local officials, are breaking up protest encampments set up by supporters of the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement — sometimes with shocking and utterly gratuitous violence. In the worst incident so far, hundreds …
Ready for new Erdogans in the Middle East?
By Yuksel Taskin Right after the landslide victory of the AKP in the 2007 elections, the government led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan felt secure enough to follow a very active and more independent foreign policy under the supervision of Ahmet Davutoglu, appointed minister of foreign affairs in 2009. Even before the outburst of the “Arab spring”, …
The end of population growth
By Sanjeev Sanyal NEW DELHI: According to the United Nations’ Population Division, the world’s human population hit seven billion on October 31. As always happens whenever we approach such a milestone, this one has produced a spike in conferences, seminars, and learned articles, including the usual dire Malthusian predictions. After all, the UN forecasts that world …
The G-20’s helpful silence on capital controls
By José Antonio Ocampo and Stephany Griffith-Jones NEW YORK: When French President Nicolas Sarkozy took the reins as host of this year’s G-20 summit, to be held in Cannes on November 3-4, he called on the International Monetary Fund to develop an enforceable “code of conduct” for the use of capital controls (or capital-account regulations, as we …
Clearinghouse over-confidence
By Mark Roe CAMBRIDGE: To reduce the chance that a financial meltdown like that of 2007-2008 will recur, regulators are now seeking to buttress institutions for the longer-run — at least when they can turn their attention from immediate crises like those of Greece’s debt, America’s ceiling on governmental borrowing, and the potential eurozone contagion from …
The Palestinian struggle at a crossroads
By Dawoud Abu Lebdeh EAST JERUSALEM: The Israel-Hamas prisoner exchange last week was a very emotional moment for thousands of Palestinians who were reunited with family members they had not seen for years. But it came at a price. Some of the public perceive the prisoner release deal as an achievement for Hamas’ militant approach, a …
A nation of vidiots
By Jeffrey Sachs NEW YORK: The past half-century has been the age of electronic mass media. Television has reshaped society in every corner of the world. Now an explosion of new media devices is joining the TV set: DVDs, computers, game boxes, smart phones, and more. A growing body of evidence suggests that this media proliferation …
Prisoner swap: Short-lived ramifications
By Shlomo Brom The exchange of 1,027 Palestinian prisoners for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, after years of campaigning and negotiating is a dramatic event that deeply affects Israeli public opinion and probably also Palestinian public opinion. Naturally, there is a tendency to look for broad and long-term implications of this recent development. Some commentators look …
The thin blue line
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Between anarchy and order stand the police. Their power is derived from trust and respect. Not brutality. Remember Steve Biko, the South African anti-apartheid activist? He was beaten to within an inch of death in Police Room 61 in Port Elizabeth and expired soon after. Remember the rhino whip found in a …
Dying to grow?
By Henry Miller STANFORD: We are constantly bombarded with information about the purported risks or protective effects of one or another food, dietary supplement, chemical, drug, or activity. In July, for example, an article in The Annals of Internal Medicine reported that people who work at least 11 hours a day have a 67 percent higher …
Saudi Arabia’s old regime grows older
By Mai Yamani LONDON: The contrast between the deaths, within two days of each other, of Libya’s Col. Muammar Qaddafi and Saudi Crown Prince Sultan bin Abdel Aziz is one of terminal buffoonery versus decadent gerontocracy. And their demise is likely to lead to very different outcomes: liberation for the Libyans and stagnation for the Saudis. …
Women of the Arab Spring: Their issues are everyone’s issues
By Natana Delong-Bas BOSTON, Massachusetts: The capture and killing of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi, on-going demonstrations for an end to the oppressive reigns of Yemen’s Ali Abdullah Saleh and Syria’s Bashar Al-Assad, and new elections in Tunisia show that one thing has not changed in the Arab Spring — change itself. Even in Saudi Arabia, where requests …
In memory of Khaled Saeid
By Rania Al Malky CAIRO: The recent verdict in the case of the brutal killing of 28-year-old Alexandrian Khaled Saeid, which was central to galvanizing the anti-regime sentiment that eventually toppled Mubarak, is both a blow to everything Egypt’s uprising stood for and a wake-up call, especially in light of the recent torture to death of …
The Arab Spring and Europe’s chance
By Massimo D’Alema ROME: The term “spring” may suggest a gentle awakening, but what is happening in North Africa and the Middle East is a true revolution, fomented by a new, digitally-savvy generation. The Arab upheavals are a by-product of the inexorable process of globalization in the twenty-first century, with almost instantaneous communications and increasing …
Reform without regime change in Morocco?
By Moha Ennaji FEZ, Morocco: Influenced by the events in Egypt and Tunisia, Moroccans have been demanding political and constitutional rights that would give citizens greater influence in government affairs. But unlike their neighbors, Moroccans have not made large-scale calls for regime change. This difference should not be seen as complacence. Instead, it stems from a …
A French election American-style
By Raphaël Hadas-Lebel PARIS: Primary elections in France? The idea that a large number of voters should designate the presidential candidates of the major political parties was born in the United States, and we French have long believed that such things were American to the core. But has the political primary now been successfully transplanted …
Strengthening the stabilizers
By Olin Wethington PARIS: The G-20 summit in Cannes in early November is a major opportunity to address the mandate, governance, and institutional capacity of the Financial Stability Board, the international body that monitors, and makes recommendations about enhancing, the international financial system. The meeting is particularly timely, because the FSB will soon be under new …
Prisoner swap: Not relevant to the real issue
The best hint the Middle East could provide as to the ramifications of last week’s prisoner exchange for the overall conflict came two days after the exchange itself. It was the dramatic death of Libya’s Muammar Qaddafi. The pace of events in the region, particular in light of the Arab revolutions surrounding Israel and …
America’s economic stalemate
By Martin Feldstein CAMBRIDGE: The United States appears trapped in a dangerous economic stalemate. The refusal by both Republicans and Democrats to give ground on the budget is preventing the government from dealing with its massive fiscal deficit and rapidly rising national debt. Indeed, the Congressional Budget Office projects that the national debt could increase to …
Muslims and Christians: if you don’t communicate, you don’t exist
By Safia Aoude ALEXANDRIA, Egypt: “We can write anything now!” said an editor of the Egyptian newspaper Al-Ahram to some visiting Danish participants in Cairo as a part of a recent Alexandria-based conference called “Media´s Role for Changing Society and Democracy”. The Egyptian revolution has certainly become a catalyst for free speech and for more political …
The responsibility to protect comes of age
By Gareth Evans NEW YORK: Good news not only sells less well than bad news, but also often seems harder to believe. Reaction to Harvard psychologist Stephen Pinker’s majestic new book, “The Better Angels of Our Nature”, is a case in point. In 800 meticulously argued and documented pages, Pinker shows that, over the course of …
Uncomfortable truths
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: Censorship’s logical end is when nobody is allowed to read any books except the books that nobody reads, wrote George Bernard Shaw. The degree of restriction on political debate before parliamentary elections in a few weeks’ time is a measure of Egypt’s freedom. The media is caught in a conundrum. On the …
A PALESTINIAN VIEW: Prisoner exchange: No impact on a dead process
By Ghassan Khatib Perhaps surprisingly to some, the exchange of prisoners negotiated between Israel and Hamas, with Egypt’s mediation, might not have any impact at all on the peace process. This deal was most remarkable in its overwhelmingly positive reception by the Israeli and Palestinian publics. Israelis were a little bit cautious but mostly supportive. Palestinians, …
Three ways to wave the Eurozone
By Jean Pisani-Ferry BRUSSELS: Since the summer, the continuing installments of the Greek crisis have concealed a worrying process of fragmentation in the eurozone. Indeed, there are several grim indicators of this development. First, the spread between banks’ borrowing rate and the zero-risk rate has been climbing since July. Financial institutions with liquidity increasingly prefer to …
Muslim Americans find ways to engage
By Mehrunisa Qayyum WASHINGTON, DC: In August 2011 the Abu Dhabi Gallup Center released a report in which the key finding was that Muslim Americans are among the most integrated and successful citizens in the United States. To accompany these statistics, personal stories highlight how, unlike first-generation immigrants who tended focused their activism on fundraising for …
The language of global protest
By Jan-Werner Mueller PRINCETON: The protest movements that have flared up across the West, from Chile to Germany, have remained curiously undefined and under-analyzed. Some speak of them as the greatest global mobilization since 1968 — when enragés in very different countries coalesced around similar concerns. But others insist that there is nothing new here. The …
Occupy the mortgage lenders
By Simon Johnson WASHINGTON, DC: Participants in the Occupy Wall Street movement are right to argue that the big banks have never properly been investigated for the mortgage origination, aggregation, and securitization behavior that was central to the financial crisis — and to the loss of more than eight million jobs. But, thanks to the efforts …
The bogey of fiscal stimulus
By Jomo Kwame Sundaram NEW YORK: After the economic disaster of 2008-2009, people are understandably wary of the devastation that yet another financial crisis can wreak. But the likelihood of another crisis is quite small, and its adverse impact would be far less devastating this time around, as there are no more massive credit or asset …
Making Israel-Palestine a good place to live
By Michael Felsen BOSTON, Massachusetts: There’s something very disconcerting about a recently conducted Israeli public opinion poll. The survey, undertaken for the Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth at the beginning of this month, revealed that 66 percent of Israeli Jews don’t believe that there will ever be peace with the Palestinians. In the same poll, 88 per …
Plutocrats playing with fire
By Philip Whitfield CAIRO: The poor will always be with us. It’s more than an ageless sermon. It’s the reality of political change fuelling the world’s abomination of fat cats. But what do we do with the wealthy? They’ll be around for eternity. Sequestration doesn’t work. Nationalizing Egypt’s assets half a century ago didn’t reduce the …