Syria is the new Afghanistan. Following the invasion of Afghanistan by the Soviet Union in 1979, thousands of foreign volunteers, many of them Muslims from the Arab world, streamed into that country to join American and Saudi-backed fighters battling the Red army. Three decades on, a similar phenomenon is unfolding in Syria as foreigners, mainly […]
Category: Middle East
Gaza: Back To Square One
Tranquility has belatedly returned to southern Israel and the Gaza Strip now that the Israeli government and Hamas have begun observing an open-ended Egyptian cease fire plan that went into effect on Aug. 26. In other words, we’re back to square one — to the situation that prevailed before the eruption of fullscale war on […]
Barack Obama’s Dilemma
U.S. President Barack Obama finds himself on the sharp horns of a dilemma following the barbaric beheading of James Foley, an American freelance journalist, on Aug. 19. Foley was the second American reporter since Daniel Pearl to be killed by crazed Islamic radicals. Foley was murdered by Islamic State, an extremist, bloodthirsty outfit bent on […]
Israel Faces War Of Attrition
Israel and Hamas have resumed fighting, having rejected each other’s irreconcilable demands at fruitless talks in Cairo under the auspices of Egypt. On Aug. 19, eight hours before the latest truce was to have expired, gunmen in the Gaza Strip fired rockets into Israel. In response, the Israeli and Palestinian delegations left Cairo, while Israel […]
War Curriculum
Since 1949, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency, a body supported by the international community, has spent billions of dollars tending to the humanitarian needs of more than one million Palestinian refugees in the Middle East. The refugees, having been displaced from their homes in 1948 and 1967, certainly require assistance. But should the […]
The Hezbollah Threat
In what was an epic failure of intelligence during its most recent war with Hamas in the Gaza Strip, Israel stumbled upon a cross-border tunnel network of frightening proportions of which it had scant knowledge. The discovery prompted Israeli pundits to speculate whether Hezbollah, Israel’s Shiite enemy to the north, possesses the same array of […]
America’s Frankenstein
Nuri Kamal al-Maliki is America’s Frankenstein. The United States empowered him, and now it is trying to get rid of him. Plucked from obscurity by Washington in 2006 to succeed Ibrahim al-Jaafari as Iraq’s next prime minister, Maliki, a Shiite, has been a thorn in its side ever since. Volatile and mercurial, Maliki is currently […]
Open Letter To Green Party
I‘ve voted for the Green Party of Canada in the last two federal elections, even as I realized that its chances of forming a government were realistically nil. I cast my ballot for the Greens because, as a tree hugger, I liked its sincere and earnest approach to politics and its fresh and progressive ideas […]
Gaza War: An Assessment
The guns have finally fallen silent in the Gaza Strip. After a 29-day war, the fourth pitting Israel against Hamas in eight years, Israel has unilaterally withdrawn from Gaza and repositioned its army along the border in case of a flareup. Both sides are observing a 72-hour truce and have sent delegations to Cairo in […]
Erdogan’s Latest Rant
If nothing else, Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is consistent. On Aug. 3, in his latest anti-Israel rant since the war in the Gaza Strip erupted, he compared Israel to Hitler and accused Israel of deliberately killing Palestinian mothers. Speaking to supporters at a rally in Istanbul about a week before the Aug. 10 […]