DAKKA: As fears about the Islamization of politics in the Muslim world grow, Bangladesh, with the world’s fourth-largest Muslim population (126 million), has moved dramatically in the opposite direction. Bangladesh is usually heard about only when cyclones and tsunamis ravage its low coastline, but the country’s relatively anonymous international stature belies its strategic importance. Its …
In his 1846 short story “The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Allen Poe recounts the story of Montresor, who, seething from years of slights, kills his friend Fortunato by burying him alive in his wine cellar, brick-by-painstaking-brick. Little did Poe know that Montresor’s tactics would eventually be put to such effective use by nation-states. Israel’s latest …
CAIRO: As the Ahly-Ismaili football game ended last week in a shameful confrontation between the fans of both clubs, the situation among the Arabs, was no less shameful, at a time when Israel is forging ahead with its barbaric scheme of Gaza’s “glorious destruction, according to an Israeli military spokesman, “gloriously destroying the hope of …
NEW YORK: Every effort to protect innocent people in Gaza from being killed or injured must be made, and the rocket attacks on Israeli civilians must stop. An immediate ceasefire should be entered into with an international, multinational monitoring presence dispatched to ensure compliance. Even more humanitarian aid must flow to those Palestinians who are …
PARIS: During a visit to the Middle East, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates warned that enemies of the United States should not use the power vacuum there to try to alter the status quo or to undermine the new American president’s objectives. But the major challenge in this respect is now coming, ironically enough, from …
CAIRO: Below is a release by the ICRC, titled “ICRC gravely concerned about the humanitarian situation in Gaza : “The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) is alarmed about the deteriorating situation in the Gaza Strip. “The continuing escalation of violence, with military operations taking place in highly populated areas, has serious consequences for …
NEW YORK: A consensus now exists that America’s recession – already a year old – is likely to be long and deep, and that almost all countries will be affected. I always thought that the notion that what happened in America would be decoupled from the rest of the world was a myth. Events are …
In the Lebanon war, we were informed about the objectives of the operation and knew they were impractical. Now we are not told, so we have to guess. Is this about destroying Hamas? Apparently not. Beyond the nausea that this expression conveys, there is also apparently no such animal. After all, we are talking about …
CHICAGO: The Council of Islamic Relations calls the Israeli attack on Gaza a “disproportionate and counterproductive … massacre . Its homepage features a photo of a bombed out building in Gaza with a panicked official ushering civilians to safety. The American Jewish Committee’s homepage has a picture of Palestinian militants in ski masks holding guns …
WASHINGTON DC: As she prepares for her role as Secretary of State, Senator Hillary Clinton and the rest of the Obama foreign policy team should consider how a new American-Iranian relationship might advance American interests in Iraq and Afghanistan, and conceivably even the Arab-Israeli peace process. This will not be easy. Since the Iranian Revolution, …
The ground offensive that Israel started in the beginning of the second week of its war against the Palestinian people in Gaza was expected and, once the air operation had begun, to some extent wanted by both Israel and Hamas. Hamas, which was at an obvious disadvantage in the aerial phase of the war, kept …
Israel’s war with Gazan-based Hamas is a faithful expression of its broader dilemma with militant Islam. That dilemma is being played out against the backdrop of Israel’s complex relations with a troubled Arab world. As with Hezbollah in Lebanon in the summer of 2006, Israel is now fighting a non-state actor, backed by Iran and …
Unified Arab stance: a red herring of the highest order Comment on editorial titled “The Price of Egypt’s Silence on Gaza (published Jan. 3, 2009). It is becoming a bit ridiculous for people to keep lamenting the lack of a unified Arab stance in response to things like Israel’s recent attacks on Gaza. The simple …
The truce between Hamas and Israel ended in the early hours of December 19, but the accusations over why it ended have followed the missiles and rockets across the border. Hamas accuses Israel of not complying with the terms of the six-month Egyptian-mediated truce under which Israel was expected to end its siege and blockade …
An innocent Egyptian soldier killed by PalestiniansComment on editorial titled “The Price of Egypt’s Silence on Gaza (published Jan. 3, 2009). An innocent Egyptian soldier was killed on the borders by Palestinians, leaving behind three little children. How come no one is talking about that? Who in the Arab world has been paying the price …
Israel has opted to launch a major attack on Hamas in Gaza. The idea appears to be to use heavy military force, primarily from the air, but with a limited objective: to weaken Hamas to a point where it returns to a ceasefire on conditions congenial to Israel. The opening conditions are favorable from Israel …
The devastating Israeli bombardment of Gaza in the past few days did not come as a surprise to anybody. Its scale and magnitude, however, were unexpected by almost everybody except its perpetrators. The attack, which Israel called Operation Cast Lead , began around 11:30 am last Saturday when 64 aircraft delivered over 100 tons of …
CAIRO: I received a phone call from a French TV correspondent asking me to comment on Gaza. A few minutes earlier, I had watched the Israeli Embassy spokeswoman in Paris speaking on another TV program. The presenter told her that the World Public Opinion calls for a ceasefire on both sides. “You cannot put Israel …
CAIRO: At 11:30 am on Dec. 27 the Israeli air force bombed Palestinian government headquarters and civilian buildings all across the Gaza Strip. Six consecutive days of attacks resulted in over 400 dead and thousands injured. In the densely populated Gaza Strip the attacks caused the death of scores of civilians. The UN reported seven …
CAIRO: A 19-year-old Egyptian intern at this newspaper said something, which to me, sums up what’s at stake for the future of this country if Egypt continues doing nothing about the barbaric assault on Gaza. “I’ll hate my country forever if it’s true that our government knew about this attack and supported it, she said. …
AMMAN: Wasted time is always to be regretted. But in the Middle East, wasting time is also dangerous. Another year has now passed with little progress in bridging the divide between Palestinians and Israelis. The current air strikes on Gaza, and continuing rocket attacks on Askelon, Sderot and other towns in southern Israel, only prove …
As the United States prepares to celebrate the inauguration of its first African-American president, it showcases again one of the best aspects of its national identity. Though it took more than 200 years to reach this point, foreign observers, especially in Europe, marvel at Barack Obama’s ascendancy. They recognize from their own relative marginalization of …
STOCKHOLM: Europe has made an ambitious commitment to scale up its aid to Africa, and Africa’s challenges call for that greater engagement. But boosting aid to countries that are already aid-dependent requires clearer delivery mechanisms and a degree of budgetary predictability. Something new is called for, and cash transfers directly to poor people could be …
CAIRO: Three years ago an expert on Egyptian politics argued that Egyptian foreign policy “sometimes seems like an aging movie star. Last month, Egyptian Foreign Minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, confirmed this argument by emulating aging celebrities who blame others for their loss of glamor and attention. The Iranians, he said, are trying “to impose and …
LONDON: Economics, it seems, has very little to tell us about the current economic crisis. Indeed, no less a figure than former United States Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan recently confessed that his entire “intellectual edifice had been “demolished by recent events. Scratch around the rubble, however, and one can come up with useful fragments. …
NEW YORK – “Why aren’t you as an Arab lady writing about Gaza? “Where are your columns about Gaza? “Say the Israelis are wrong! The messages started to arrive soon after Israel’s bombardment of Gaza killed close to 300 Palestinians. Implicit was the pressure to tow the party line, Hamas is good, Israel is bad. …
CAIRO: I’m not optimistic about the advent of the New Year. All issues, domestic and regional alike, don’t portend well. As 2008 ends with many negative events on both levels, we can hardly expect the situation to improve in 2009. Indeed it may even get worse. As regards the situation in Egypt, I expect the …
PARIS: Will the year 2009 and the beginning of Barack Obama’s presidency mark the beginning of a new era in transatlantic relations, or will the old divisions linger, nurtured by the depth and gravity of the economic crisis? Will the crisis lead to nationalistic and selfish attitudes on both sides of the Atlantic, stymieing the …
LONDON: So what does 2009 hold in store for us? As ever, the unpredictable – a terrorist atrocity or a rash decision by a national leader – will take its toll. But much of what happens tomorrow will be a result of history. In the last century, the world’s population increased four-fold, and the number …
BERKELEY: A decade ago, the 2008 Nobel laureate in economics, Paul Krugman, wrote a little book entitled The Return of Depression Economics. It sank like a stone. The East Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998 was sharp but short and quickly cured once the IMF realized that feckless governments were not the problem and then United …
