CAIRO: In his historic speech to the Israeli Knesset on November 20, 1977, President Anwar Sadat said: “Peace cannot be worth its name unless it is based on justice and not on the occupation of the land of others. It would not be right for you to demand for yourselves what you deny to others. …

The International Monetary Fund should be an essential port of call for emerging-market and developing countries facing financing needs. With its ability to mobilize large financial resources and buttress policy credibility, the IMF can help mitigate the large economic and social costs often associated with crises. Against this background, the world has come together in …

CAMBRIDGE: China is likely to be the first of the major economies to recover from the current global downturn. Its pace of expansion may not reach the double-digit rates of recent years, but China in 2010 will probably grow more rapidly than any country in Europe or in the western hemisphere. But, even as China …

PRINCETON: The world is confronted by a dramatic financial crisis that many policymakers believe is more severe than the interwar Great Depression. Before 2008, experts said that a new Great Depression was impossible because of the strength and the depth of the cooperative mechanisms set up at the end of World War II. The G-20 …

Ehud Olmert would probably never have made it to the office of prime minister were it not for two events related to former Prime Minister Ariel Sharon: the creation of Kadima and Sharon s stroke and subsequent coma. Sharon created Kadima, a centrist political party, at the expense of other parties, most importantly Labor and …

Perhaps the most inexplicable aspect of Ehud Olmert s largely failed three years as prime minister of Israel was his extensive yet totally unproductive series of meetings with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas (Abu Mazen). Not a great deal appears to have happened there. So unpromising was this summit institution that the Israeli political right, then …

NEW YORK: The United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen this year will be the moment in history when humanity can rise to the challenge and decisively deal with the issue. It is beyond the shadow of a doubt that greenhouse gas emissions must be radically reduced to prevent climate change from sliding into climate …

CAIRO: The unprecedented court verdict that handed 10 rapists the death penalty for kidnapping and gang raping a woman in the governorate of Kafr El-Sheikh revived once again the debate over sexual harassment in Egypt, the reasons behind it and the best means to combat it. A plethora of explanations are provided to account for …

WASHINGTON, DC: Iran’s presidential race just got more interesting, with former Prime Minister Mir Hussein Mousavi throwing his hat in the ring and former President Mohammad Khatami withdrawing his. This development poses the most significant challenge yet to current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad – and a potential opportunity to alter the relationship between Iran and the …

LONDON: This semester I am teaching a course about Aristotle, democracy and law on a University of London campus which has large numbers of Muslim students. Over the past few weeks, two of them approached me – independently, and at different times. They both asked, a bit nervously, whether Aristotle s philosophy is compatible with …

AMSTERDAM/NEW YORK: Stenciled silhouettes of a boy s face, freshly spray-painted in red and black, peered down on us from almost every other corner as we walked through the streets of Dheisheh refugee camp in the West Bank. We saw the image on children s necklaces, sewn into flags and on the walls of dilapidated …

CAIRO: Aiming to open dialogue with rivals of the US like Iran, Syria, and Russia and the Afghani Taliban movement, American president Barack Obama treads the steps of dialogue diplomacy. But can Obama follow the same diplomacy with the banned Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt? Unfortunately, the answer is no. There are four reasons that will …

The late historian Barbara Tuchman was an accomplished writer, but her reputation rests more properly on her insights. Her seminal work, August 1914 , was so filled with them that few historians can write of the war to end all wars without mentioning it. Its silver binding stands glimmering, even now, on the shelves of …

PARIS: As the economic crisis deepens and widens, the world has been searching for historical analogies to help us understand what has been happening. At the start of the crisis, many people likened it to 1982 or 1973, which was reassuring, because both dates refer to classical cyclical downturns. Today, the mood is much grimmer, …

LONDON: I was in Jordan, that beautiful oasis of calm and moderation in a difficult and dangerous neighborhood, when I first heard the news about the murder of two British soldiers and a Catholic policeman by dissident republican terrorists in Northern Ireland. We had looked out across what Christians call the Holy Land from the …

American engagement with Syria has started and there are positive signs. Rogue state and axis of evil have been replaced by encouraging developments, including the meeting between the Syrian ambassador in Washington and Jeffrey Feltman of the State Department, followed by visits to Damascus by Senator John Kerry, Representative Howard Berman, Feltman and Daniel Shapiro …

In his first interview with an Arab television network soon after his inauguration, US President Barack Obama confirmed his intention to engage right away with all the major parties involved in the Middle East. Such engagement, he went on, would start with listening, because all too often the United States starts by dictating. Obama has …

In his January 20 inauguration speech and in subsequent statements, US President Barack Obama has called for establishing new relations with the Muslim world based on common interests and mutual respect. He has also advocated the settlement of the Arab-Israel conflict, notably the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, as well as the combating of terrorism. Although he has …

I have industriously been searching for the type of terrorism that the West associates with Islam; the type of terrorism that is considered the greatest danger threatening the future of Western civilization. As a result of this erroneous concept, Islam has become known as the religion of blood and violence. Jihad which represents the most …

NEW YORK: The global economic crisis will be with us for a generation, not just a year or two, because it is really a transition to sustainability. The scarcity of primary commodities and damage from climate change in recent years contributed to the destabilization of the world economy that gave rise to the current crisis. …

Egypt has come under a barrage of criticism due to its reluctance to keep open its border with Gaza despite humanitarian appeals. Critics also wonder how the largest and one of the most influential Arab nations can cooperate with the incoming right wing Israeli government led by Binyamin Netanyahu, who is open in his non …

There is no weapon of mass destruction worse than poverty. Tragically, for some Egyptians, selling a kidney is the only way out, destroying not only their bodies, but also their souls. Prey to an elaborate underground network of body-part brokers, Egyptians with few options have become a statistic, prompting the World Health Organization to identify …

WASHINGTON, DC: A colloquial Hebrew expression says “not every day is Purim , which can loosely be translated to “you can’t fool all the people all the time . Israelis – and many in our pro-Israel community in the United States – in the past wanted to believe that Palestinian economic development is the path …

BETHLEHEM: The international community employs a double standard in its reaction to Palestinian and Israeli extremism. While the democratically elected Hamas government in Palestine is shunned for its refusal to live up to one set of standards, extremists in the Israeli government are largely tolerated and judged according to another set of standards. The Palestinian …

LONDON: Earlier this month, the International Criminal Court (ICC) upheld the request of the court’s chief prosecutor to issue an arrest warrant for Omar Al-Beshir, the President of Sudan, charging him with war crimes and crimes against humanity. Al-Beshir responded by expelling foreign aid agencies looking after the refugee camps in Darfur. This is the …

MEXICO CITY: In El Salvador, for the first time ever in Latin America, a former political-military organization that tried to gain power through the barrel of a gun has achieved its aims through the ballot box. Although the Sandinista Front in Nicaragua did win a semi-legitimate election in 1984, it had reached power five years …

Salam Fayyad resigned as prime minister of the West Bank-based Palestinian Authority on March 7. His resignation was part of a picture far larger than mere politics in Ramallah. A few days earlier, a donor conference at Sharm El-Sheikh had pledged over $4 billion in aid for the Palestinians. Three days later, Palestinian unity government …

The resignation of Palestinian Prime Minister Salam Fayyad did not come as a surprise to anyone in Palestine. The resignation was timed with the start of the national reconciliation dialogue in Cairo that, among other things, seeks to agree on a national unity government to replace the current one. By resigning in advance of this …

WASHINGTON, DC: The decision of former Iranian president Mohammad Khatami not to seek the presidency again has revealed how muddled Iranian presidential politics now is. In trying to sort out this muddle, the most important thing to keep in mind is not so much who will be elected, but what that choice will reveal about …

WASHINGTON, DC: Water privatization is often portrayed as morally wrong but if we look beyond ideology and sentimentality this doesn’t add up. Poor countries, where lack of water and sanitation kills nearly 2 million people a year, need to get water supplies right. One billion people lack clean drinking water but only three percent of …