Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan has embarked on an awesome task: to undo some nine decades of history and reverse the secularization of his country begun by Kemal Ataturk, the revered first leader of the modern Turkish republic. Erdogan’s project involves bringing Islam back into Turkish politics, and emphasizing, rather than negating, the glories of the Ottoman […]
It’s been more than three and a half years since the brutal Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi met his end in a drainage pipe outside his native city of Sirte. But things in that nation have become so bad since then that there must be many Libyans who miss him. Rival coalitions backed by militias are […]
Back in 2010, Iranian Ayatollah Mohammed Bagher Kharrazi called for a “Greater Iran” that would assume hegemonic control over much of the Middle East and Central Asia, stretching from Afghanistan to the Mediterranean. “If I am elected as president, I will return the lands of Tajikistan, Armenia and Azerbaijan, which were separated from Iran” by […]
While the crisis between Russia and Ukraine has been the focus of much of the world’s attention lately, there are simmering brushfires in other areas of the former Soviet Union. In the North Caucasus, still part of the Russian Federation, five Muslim-majority ethnic republics, with a combined area of 97,200 square kilometers and a population […]
As Marcellus, one of the sentries at Denmark’s royal castle in Shakespeare’s Hamlet might have said, “Something is rotten in the state of Argentina.” The puzzling death of a prosecutor on Jan. 18 in Buenos Aires has fed speculation that he might have been murdered while gathering evidence in a high-profile terrorist attack more than […]
The three days of terror in Paris are over. The gunmen who murdered 12 people at the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, the brothers Cherif and Said Kouachi, French citizens of Algerian Muslim descent, have been killed by the French police. The victims, mostly journalists, included the Jewish caricaturist Georges Wolinski and two police officers. A second suspect, Amedy […]
The Western-led war against the Taliban in Afghanistan has, we are told, come to an end. It began on Oct 7, 2001, a month after the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington, and was initially aimed at degrading Osama bin Laden’s al-Qaeda organization, which had found a home in the country, then ruled largely […]
In an article I published in the Calgary Herald in November 1999, I wrote that “it is conceivable that some international tribunal may someday indict an Israeli leader for war crimes.” Might this soon come to pass? On Dec. 30, Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas signed the Rome Statute, paving the way for membership in the International Criminal Court […]
Now that President Barack Obama has indicated that he will be removing Cuba from the list of state sponsors of terrorism, only three countries — Iran, Sudan and Syria — remain. The list began in December 1979, with Libya, Iraq, South Yemen and Syria. Cuba, Iran and North Korea were later added. During his 2002 […]
By re-establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba after an almost 54-year break, U.S. President Barack Obama will be putting an end to a policy that long ago became pointless. Cuba may be no democracy, but Washington enjoys diplomatic relations with at least 20 countries whose regimes are more repressive than that of the Castro brothers. Yet […]