On Aug. 8, 2008, the world watched with awe the amazing spectacle of the Olympics opening ceremony in Beijing. We saw the electronic unrolling of Chinese scrolls replete with great historic symbols and were mesmerized by dancers creating “harmony, using their bodies as ink brushes. 2008 martial arts students performed millennia-old moves with mechanical precision, …
OASIS OF PEACE: In Israel, there is a village where Arabs and Jews live as neighbors. Both groups endeavor to create a just society that can be a model for peace in the region. What s it called? Oasis of Peace. Though the town s name gives the impression that it s some sort of …
LONDON: Privacy has become a big issue in contemporary jurisprudence. The “right to privacy is enshrined in the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights, and guaranteed by Article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights. But Article 8 is balanced by Article 10, which guarantees “free expression of opinion. So what right has priority …
BONN, Germany: The entrance of the international newsagent at Cologne s main station is a tangle of people and voices. The store sells an almost infinite range of newspapers and magazines from Germany and elsewhere. You have to know just what you re looking for to find it here. But one magazine stands out from …
AUSTIN, Texas: Back in 1989, when the publication of Salman Rushdie s novel “The Satanic Verses sparked a new phenomenon of protests from Muslims – particularly by those in the West – I was a student body senator at the University of California at Berkeley, where the Free Speech Movement was born in the 1960s. …
Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf’s resignation brings to an end one of the more interesting curiosities of subcontinental politics: for more than four years, Pakistan had a president who was born in India, while India had a Prime Minister (Manmohan Singh) who was born in Pakistan. Since the two countries’ separation is now more than six …
CHICAGO: Time is not on the side of peacemakers in the Middle East. Even relentless optimists are giving up. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become increasingly overshadowed and orchestrated on both sides by extreme and uncompromising religious groups that view their political mandate as holy and sacred. This is hindering any peaceful resolution in the short …
NEW YORK: August 8, 2008, may someday be remembered as the first day of the post-American era. Or it could be remembered as another “Sputnik moment, when, as with the Soviet foray into outer space in 1957, the American people realized that the country had lost its footing and decided it was time for the …
An Israeli-Syrian peace deal could be signed by the end of this year, but that requires Bush administration involvement that has not been forthcoming, the head of a high-profile Syrian delegation visiting Washington said last Thursday. If the political will is there, we could achieve an agreement within three or four months, said delegation lead …
Four years have elapsed since US President George W. Bush called for supporting democracy and freedom in the Middle East. The outcome is nothing. This tragic fact is not only because of the ability of authoritarian regimes, especially in the Arab region, to modernize their tools of tyranny and repression of political opposition, but rather …
WASHINGTON: When a bomb exploded in the Shaja’iyyah district of Gaza last month, killing four Hamas operatives and a 5-year-old girl, Hamas blamed Fatah, and moved violently against its remaining Gazan enclaves. Fatah forces then pursued retribution against Hamas in the West Bank. Another round of intra-Palestinian conflict and bloodletting ensued, with the leading pro-Fatah …
CAMBRIDGE: While George W. Bush has begun to acknowledge the risks of global climate change, his administration failed to lead on the issue for eight years. That may change after the 2008 American election. Both presidential candidates, Barack Obama and John McCain, promise to take climate change more seriously. Emissions of carbon dioxide, a greenhouse …
LUND, Sweden: Crises in the Middle East are seen and interpreted differently depending on whom you ask. For example, Israel s perception of and reaction to Hamas and Hezbollah is colored by the historical trauma that the Jewish people suffered over the centuries. Unfolding events there are perceived as part of the struggle against anti-Semitism, …
Whenever Ramadan approaches government agencies suddenly become concerned with markets, goods and services. This is a feature of the patriarchal state which the Egyptian regime is unwilling to admit has actually ended a few years ago. The purpose of establishing this state in the mid-fifties was to tighten the grip of the late President Gamal …
Like most Syrians, Samer Zayat has no love for Israel. He was a little uneasy when Syria announced in late May that it was holding indirect talks on a peace settlement with its old nemesis. Yet Mr Zayat, a 35-year-old television cinematographer, says he views a peace deal with Israel as necessary and inevitable – …
LONDON: Intellectually, we Israelis all know that economic cooperation with our Arab brethren is a positive thing, a goal to strive for. But our business practices reflect little progress in attaining such a goal. We all know of grand schemes such as Israeli billionaire Yitzhak Tshuva s involvement in the Red Sea-Dead Sea Canal, a …
PRINCETON: When people say that “Money is the root of all evil, they usually don’t mean that money itself is the root of evil. Like Saint Paul, from whom the quote comes, they have in mind the love of money. Could money itself, whether we are greedy for it or not, be a problem? Karl …
I couldn’t grasp the reason why people were so distressed about the military coup which overthrew the democratically-elected president of Mauritania. In the third world, the role of the military is, in fact, none other than to lead coups, and not necessarily to achieve victories over the enemy at times of war. Indeed military defeats …
A couple of months ago, as Israelis celebrated 60 years of statehood and Palestinians marked six decades of dispossession, I wondered whether there would ever be peace between the two peoples. Rather than dwell on the depressing present or venture into the minefield of the past, I decided to look forward in time, to a …
On Saturday August 9th in the afternoon, I was getting ready to give a talk about Palestinian olive trees to a gathering of authors and thinkers at Keystone College in Pennsylvania. For the title of the presentation, I cracked the word olive in two, and turned it into O’ Live! But death mocked me. Shortly …
What happened to Egypt’s stock market last week was nothing short of a tsunami. The acute and erratic fall and rise was triggered by rumors involving a murder mystery that maliciously pointed to an Egyptian construction guru (with absolutely no proof) accusing him of fleeing the country. On Sunday, Talaat Moustafa Group’s stock traded 14 …
The Abu Fana monastery crisis, albeit recently solved, has noticeably produced a number of negative repercussions on Muslim-Christian relationships in Egypt. Among them, the controversial lecture given by Coptic Orthodox bishop Thomas at Houston Center in the United States and the picture is looking more complicated. A conflict over a piece of land has turned …
It may sound like the escapist indulgence of a well-fed man fleeing the misery around him. But when Jawdat Khoudary opened the first ever museum of archaeology in Gaza last month in an act of Palestinian patriotism, showing how this increasingly poor and isolated coastal strip now ruled by Hamas, was once a thriving multicultural …
It is quite understandable that Israel would be deeply disappointed by Turkey s decision to invite Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad for an official visit this week. In Israel s view, such a visit will only further legitimize a leader who is reviled for his denial of the Holocaust and for his repeated existential threats to …
Last month, the Doha negotiations, promising freer trade, broke down, ostensibly over a small technicality in safeguard rules. In reality, the talks collapsed because nobody – not Europe, not the United States, China, India, or the other main developing countries – was willing to take the political short-term hit by offending inefficient farmers and coddled …
Barring any unexpected developments, the Palestinians may have a state before the end of 2008. It will not be the best of states in the best of worlds. It will not match the historic realities of the region, nor will it reflect the true interests of all those involved. But it will give everyone something …
I met Zakia in the restaurant of the United Nations compound in Kabul, partly because it was convenient and partly because there are still not that many public places for a western man to sit and talk to an Afghan woman alone. Zakia (not her real name) is a former director of an Afghan non-governmental …
During his recent visit to South Africa, President Hosni Mubarak was asked about Egypt’s stance toward the International Criminal Court’s indictment against Sudanese President Omar Al-Beshir for war crimes. Mubarak affirmed his country’s support of Sudan and solemnly added that “it is not appropriate to take a President to court. What can one, in the …
A year and half ago Mauritania witnessed the first free democratic elections in the Arab world. This was not only because there was real competition between more than one candidate, but also because it came after a military coup led by Ould Mohamed Fal that ended the rule of former Mauritanian President Maaouiya Ould Taya, …
Pervez Musharraf of Pakistan stands virtually alone today while facing the most serious challenge to his presidency: possible impeachment by the new democratically-elected government. The potential charges are serious: conspiring to destabilize the government that was elected last February, unlawfully removing the country’s top judges in November 2007, and failing to provide adequate security to …
