Blair’s breakfast in bed! When I met Tony Blair on his first visit to Cairo a few months after he became Prime Minister, he paused when I asked him: “As Prime Minister of Great Britain, what do you miss the most? He thought about it for a while, his famous smile slowly fading away, and …

In the course of the 1948-1949 Arab-Israeli war, about 700,000 Arabs were either expelled by the Israelis from territory it held or left their homes at the request of the Arab states. As Khaled al-Azm, then prime minister of Syria, recalled in his 1973 memoirs, “Since 1948 we have been demanding that the refugees return …

In May 1997 Tony Blair was swept into power on an enormous wave of optimism. Britain’s youngest prime minister since 1812, his approval ratings were the highest of any postwar British leader. He won three elections, two of which, prior to the Iraq war, were landslides. Yet tomorrow, 10 years on, Blair will leave office, …

A new Pew Research Center Global Attitudes Survey published this week reveals that public attitudes towards the United States around the world continue to deteriorate, as they have for half a decade now, with particularly strong negative views about the US role in Iraq and American-style democracy. The massive survey of 45,000 people in 47 …

Two weeks after the Group of Eight leaders met in Germany an impression remains that they wrought a political miracle in Heiligendamm. Three things were supposedly saved at the G-8 summit: world climate, Africa, and relations between Russia and the United States. It seemed that a world government had met on the shores of the …

Many Lebanese, particularly in the majority camp, have been preoccupied with the court being set up to try suspects in the assassination of the late Rafik Hariri. The resignation of Serge Brammertz from the International Criminal Court to devote himself full-time to the upcoming Hariri trial suggests there is something there for them to look …

I was in Europe earlier this week speaking with current and former officials, experts and diplomats about the situation in the Middle East, when the news broke of the appointment of former British Prime Minister Tony Blair as special envoy of the Quartet for Arab-Israeli peace-making. It is hard to know if this is a …

CAIRO: As part of the campaign against substance abuse, the United Nations Information Center marked international anti-drug day with a conference at their Cairo office on Tuesday. Maher Nasser, manager of the United Nations Information Center, Mohammed Abd El Aziz, manager of the regional drug office and Dean Medhat Zaky, general manager of the public …

JERUSALEM: The academic year of 1995-1996 was most eventful for Israelis. November saw the assassination of our Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and several months later, a spate of bus bombings led to the election of Netanyahu. In November, shortly after the murder, and then again in May, the Ecumenical Institute at Tantur, overlooking Jerusalem on …

Somalia’s decision to delay yet again the National Reconciliation Congress comes as no surprise. The Transitional Federal Government’s (TFG) latest attempt at reconciliation was foiled long before the first session of congress began. While many fingers point to Mogadishu’s boycotting majority, the Hawiye clan, whose demands were not met prior to the start of congress, …

A fundamental question faces those seeking to calm the latest round of conflict in the Palestinian territories. How is it possible for Hamas to emerge as a powerful political force at a time when regional states and the international community are opposing the movement? Primary attention focuses on the gruesome daily quality of life plaguing …

The Bush administration may live in a bubble of “unreality, regarding its foreign policy in Iraq, but neoconservatives inhabit a parallel universe on Iran. Unbelievably, despite the fact that the American quagmire in Iraq has greatly weakened the United States’ position vis-à-vis Iran, the neocons are pushing for military action against that theocratic regime. According …

Sailors have a colorful phrase to describe a boat that is so close to the wind that it has stopped dead in the water – unable to fill its sails and make any headway. They say the boat is “in irons. The Bush presidency is perilously close to being in irons, at least as seen …

By a strange twist of fate, the blast that killed Lebanese parliamentarian Walid Eido, his son, and several others last week almost coincided with the visit to Damascus by Oliviero Diliberto, an Italian parliamentarian and leader of the Italian communists, who are in the ruling coalition. The coincidence of a European dignitary’s visit to Damascus …

When foreign-policy gurus Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Brent Scowcroft all start saying the same thing, it’s time to pay attention. That happened this month in a joint appearance broadcast on “The Charlie Rose Show, and their comments ought to be required reading for presidential candidates in both parties – not to mention the current …

Bernard Kouchner, France’s new foreign minister, has a long and distinguished record as an advocate of intervention in countries where human rights are abused. As a co-founder of Doctors Without Borders, he stated that “we were establishing the moral right to interfere inside someone else’s country. Saddam Hussein’s mass murder of Iraqi citizens is why …

I was elated with the news that the US is planning to cut its aid to Egypt by $200 million for its bad human rights record. Such a fortunate step should finally assure us – after years of anxiety – that the Bush administration is now seriously committed to the protection of human rights in …

WASHINGTON,DC: Today s world seems to have gone insane in the name of God. Violence and extremism take centre-stage in international news and much of it speaks in religious terms. Nevertheless, there are examples of leaders who, in the midst of ongoing conflict, have renounced their former violence in order to engage their enemies using …

There is, at last, a “breakthrough in the crisis in Darfur. The Sudanese government has given “unconditional acceptance to a 20,000-strong force of United Nations and African Union peacekeepers. Under proposals put forward by UN and AU planners, the force will have a strong mandate and a protection capability. This is the force that Darfurians …

Hamas’ capture of the Gaza Strip last week has created, along with Iran, a second radical Islamist state in the Middle East. The region, probably the Arab-Israeli conflict, and certainly the Palestinian movement, will never be the same. Fatah’s defeat in Gaza is not due to American foreign policy, Israel, or anyone but Fatah itself. …

CAIRO: I met two members of the Muslim Brotherhood during a visit to the Pyramids. After establishing that they don’t want to kill me because and I don’t want to kill them, they took me to a mosque to try and convert me. Hey, it’s more respectable than trying to take my money. Although I’m …

We have a choice of which memory we decide to take away from this year’s AUC celebration of World Refugee Day. The first is of a killing. The second is of children playing. I know which memory I will take with me, and it starts with the moment I heard a busload of singing children …

Even though Shiism is roughly as old as Islam itself, its role in Muslim history has been, for most of the past 1,400 years, confined to its periphery. The fact that Shias comprise a small minority living amidst a vast sea of Sunnis, coupled with a historically-old proclivity to conceal their faith to protect themselves …

Thanks to Fatah s ineptitude and corruption, Israel s shortsightedness, and the Bush administration s misguided policies, Hamas is now in control of the Gaza strip, setting the stage for potentially ominous developments. Specifically, it was Israel, seeking a counterbalance to the PLO, that gave Hamas s early organizers a helping hand in the mid-1980s; …

As the crumbling state of affairs in Gaza and the West Bank continues to shock Arab media and analysts, a more covert and perhaps duplicitous scenario begins to emerge. Since January 2006, Arab media pundits have joined their western counterparts in expressing surprise that the Islamist militant group Hamas could so sweep the elections and …

A little more than a week ago, leaders of the world’s industrialized nations met for their annual summit in Heiligendamm, Germany. Our modest goal: to win a breakthrough on climate change. And we got it-an agreement to cut greenhouse gases by 50 percent before 2050. Especially gratifying, for me, is that the ways and means …

ISTANBUL: When Turkey s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) – a party with Islamic roots – nominated one of its own as president, millions of protesters took to the streets. The rallies were the latest act in a drama which began when Turkey s founding fathers adopted, in addition to a commitment to eventual …

It’s hard to know who appears more ludicrous and despicable, the Palestinian Fatah and Hamas leaderships allowing their gunmen to fight it out on the streets of the Gaza Strip and the West Bank, or an American administration saying it supports the “moderates in Palestine who want to negotiate peace with Israel. US Secretary of …

The Saudi Shia news service Al-Rasid released its second annual human rights report in late April. The document is a survey of discriminatory practices against the kingdom’s Shia minority. Noting a palpable stall in government reform efforts, the report cited the influence of Salafist hardliners in the clerical bureaucracy who dissuaded the ruling family from …

Absolute Freedom for All I do not agree at all with those who claim – and they are many – that there is no freedom in Egypt. The truth is that we have never, throughout our seven-thousand-year history known the kind of freedom we now enjoy. The press, for example, has come to enjoy absolute …