The 2011 British census provides a snapshot of the country’s Muslim population, which now stands at almost 2.8 million — 4.4 percent of the country’s overall total. Most live in cities like Birmingham, Bradford, and, of course, London, whose Muslim population, at a bit over one million, is 12.4 percent of the city’s people. Philip […]
Among the many ethnic groups that inhabit the Caucasus are the Azeris, a Turkic people who speak a language related to Turkish, but who are culturally closer to the Persians. The Republic of Azerbaijan’s 9.4 million people inhabit a land 86,600 square kilometers in size. The country borders the Russian Federation’s republic of Dagestan to […]
Who is a Russian? In everyday conversation, people speak of “Russia,” but the country is actually the “Russian Federation.” Even today, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, only 81 percent of its almost 144 million people are ethnic Russians. So who is a “Russian?” And who is not? In English, we sometimes differentiate between people’s […]
In an article published last July in the Los Angeles Times, veteran journalist Doyle McManus noted, “The drone has become America’s counter-terrorism weapon of choice.” Controlled by operators from the ground thousands of miles away, or at American bases in places like Djibouti or in the United States itself, drones carry lethal missiles, can hover for […]
The Gaza War between Hamas and Israel last summer may not have extended to the West Bank, but it has unleashed a wave of urban violence in eastern and western Jerusalem, affecting its transportation system and dividing its Arab and Jewish segments even further apart. Given the use of attack vehicles in this unrest, which […]
This is a country with no religious toleration for non-Muslims — an absolutist entity with no democratic institutions. And it beheads people on a regular basis. It espouses an austere, puritanical and absolutist Islam, with incitements to jihad and conquest, and tries to export it to other countries. Apostates from Islam, homosexuals, and blasphemers can […]
Although they were tried and executed more than half a century ago, Ethel and Julius Rosenberg’s names remain familiar to most Americans. Executed on June 19, 1953, after their conviction for conspiracy to pass atomic bomb secrets to the Soviet Union during and after World War II, the Rosenbergs were at the center of one […]
It is arguably the most influential book of the 20th century. It is certainly the most notorious. Should it be able to circulate freely, or is it simply too toxic? And in the era of the internet, can a ban on its publication even work? The book is Mein Kampf; the author, Adolf Hitler. The book has […]
The Turkish parliament on Oct. 2 passed a motion by a margin of 298-88 authorizing its forces to be deployed in Iraq and Syria in the case of a threat to national security. The bill, submitted by Prime Minister Ahmet Davutoglu, also allows for foreign troops to transit through Turkey and calls for the establishment […]
They are usually small in area and population, ethnically and religiously homogenous, well-off and situated in a peaceful part of the world, alongside neighbours who have no designs on them. What are they? Countries which go virtually unnoticed internationally. Yet they can be quite interesting. The quintessential example? Uruguay. A settler state like its big […]