Articles
What We Can Learn from the Attacks on U.S. Embassies
1. Fear of a Black Flag (or It’s the Salafists, Stupid) Ordinary Egyptians, Libyans and Yemenis didn’t come across the latest insults to their religion because...
Hizballah Fears al-Qaeda-Type Attacks from Lebanese Sunnis
A day after the radical Salafist Sunni preacher Sheik Omar Bakri was arrested last month, having been sentenced in absentia by a Lebanese court to life...
The Rise Of The Salafis
In the 13 months that Mohammed Abdel-Rahman has been protesting outside the U.S. embassy in Cairo, he has become so familiar to American officials that they...
After Protests, Tunisia’s Salafists Plot a More Radical Revolution
In a park hidden from the road and strewn with trash, two young Salafist men dressed in the traditional garb of gray tunics and sandals laid out their plan for...
Religious Flowering -- and Splintering -- Comes to Cairo: Inside the Salafist Revival
Friday noon prayer at the al-Tawhid mosque in Cairo used to be led by a state-appointed imam. And his sermons were downright boring, says Ibrahim Abdel Alim, a...
What the Salafists Want: An Interview with the Blind Sheik’s Son
He wants his father freed and he wants shari’a imposed unquestioningly on Egypt. Other than that, Mohammed Abdel Rahman doesn’t want to cause trouble
Why the U.S. May Be Secretly Cheering a Muslim Brotherhood Run For Egypt’s Presidency
Liberals and secularists are furious at the decision this week by Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood to name Khairat al-Shater as its candidate next month’s presidential...
Benghazi Baloney
Scott Shane has a fine piece of analysis today about the real issues involved in the Benghazi imbrogliowhich is to say the issues not being raised by the...
Democracy, Egyptian Style
To listen to Kamal Habib extol the democratic ideal is to slip into a parallel universe where down is up and black is white. This is, after all, the co-founder...
Why America should go slow on declaring victory in Libya - or making promises
[co-written with Michael S. Smith II of Kronos Advisory LLC] The demise of Col Qaddafi, a despicable despot who should have met this or a worse fate sooner, will...
11: Roots Of Terror: Islam's Other Hot Spots
Where exactly does terrorism start? In the past two years, the U.S. has leaned hard on its allies across the globe to crack down on the sources of Islamist...
The Rise Of The Jihadists
The five insurgents are gathered in a muddy field outside Baghdad, their faces shrouded behind scarves and illuminated only by the light of a full moon. They...
The YouTube War
In a conflict that has already yielded too many scenes of graphic horror, it takes a mere 27 seconds of video footage to plumb new depths of depravity. Posted on...
Syria: Intervention Will Only Make it Worse
The various schemes that have been proposed for a kind of tiddlywinks intervention from around the edges of the conflict—no-fly zones, bombing Damascus and so...
Shoe Thrown at Iran President in Cairo
Ahmadinejad is the first Iranian President to visit Egypt since Tehran's 1979 Islamic revolution.
Interview with a Newly Designated Terrorist: Syria’s Jabhat al-Nusra
The group has been one of the most effective against the Assad regime. So why has the U.S. categorized it as a terror organization? A Jabhat leader sees a...
French Anti-Terror Raids Leave Extremist Suspect Dead
French special forces shot and killed suspect Islamist extremist Oct. 6 in an exchange of gunfire during a dawn raid in the eastern city of Strasbourg. The...
The President and the Islamist: Two Politicos Spar Over Tunisia’s Future
There are few better ways to gauge the Arab Spring’s bitter ideological divisions than to visit this country’s two most powerful men. On the one end of Tunis,...
World
Can the People Beat the Militias? 1 | LIBYA The Sept. 11 assault on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, which led to the death of Ambassador Chris Stevens, exposed...
