“American Presidents have long been criticized for being too in thrall to the Jewish lobby. The American Jews influence US foreign policy and that explains Washington’s unwavering support for Israel.”Who made this statement this past week?(a) A disgruntled fringe neo-Nazi (b) Some poor soul ranting on their Facebook page (c) The BBCSadly, as you can […]

The eurozone crisis has captivated audiences around the world, but it is recent economic data from China that should be capturing the attention of policymakers. Despite confident predictions from Wen Jiabao that the economy was heading for more growth, April figures across a range of sectors make for grim reading: industrial production is down, fixed-asset […]

Yesterday’s massive bombings in Damascus portend a new stage of the Syrian crisis. The apparent involvement of al-Qaeda in Iraq in these bombings, and other evidence of the increased jihadi radicalization of the opposition movement, puts an end most likely to any prospect of an organized external military intervention in Syria.That intervention was unlikely anyway, […]

This blog is entitled “The Middle East and Beyond” for a fairly obvious practical reason: It enables me to discuss subjects far and wide, since the word “beyond” can mean practically anything I want it to. I intend to limit myself geographically, however, to the Middle East, North Africa and the geopolitical peripheries of both. […]

“The glass is 10 percent full,” says Nigel Fisher, the U.N.’s humanitarian coordinator for reconstruction efforts in Haiti. “It’s now time to tackle the remaining 90 percent.”Yet more than two years after the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti, and after billions of recovery dollars pledged by the United Nations, foreign governments, and private aid organizations, […]

Incidences of writers taking ownership of words are few and far between. Moses or whoever wrote Genesis certainly owns begat; the authors of the Declaration own inalienable; and Maurice Sendak owns rumpus. I cannot hear the word without thinking of reading Where the Wild Things Are to my children. When we reached the moment when […]

Republicans in Indiana have spoken.  They have decided that Senator Richard Lugar does not deserve another term in Washington.  That’s too bad—not just for Senator Lugar, who after all has had a long and successful 36-year career in the Senate—but for the institution of the Senate and the country as a whole.  Let me explain […]

Today’s local prestige newspaper, the Washington Post, brings two items on Libya, one a short news clip and the other a column by a well-known commentator—in this case, David Ignatius. Taken together, the two items furnish further evidence that all is not well either in Libya or in parts of the western Sahel as a […]

On April 13, 2012 Religion News Service carried a story about Andrew Bowen, a 29-year old resident of Lumberton, North Carolina. Throughout the year 2011 he practiced a different religion each month—Hindu in January, Baha’i in February, Zoroastrian in March, and so on. Bowen had what he called a teenage experience of “Christian fundamentalism”. Married […]

The Greek election on Sunday was a predictable disaster: the two mainstream parties, the socialist PASOK and the center-right New Democracy (ND), were displaced by new extremist parties that appeared on their right and left, including the left-wing Syriza and KKE (Communist) parties which won a quarter of the vote between them, and the right-wing […]