Sitting in their palaces, the Saudi princes have watched with a growing sense of dread the seismic shifts taking place in the Middle East. Unlike so many pundits in the West, the Saudis have had no illusions about the likely results. As President Obama called for Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak to step down, the...
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By: Sarah Stern and Kyle Shideler “The depiction of Khomeini as a fanatical reactionary and the bearer of crude prejudices seems certainly and happily false. What is encouraging is that his entourage of close advisers is uniformly composed of moderate, progressive individuals.” — Richard Falk, The New York Times, February 16, 1979 The Middle...
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Now this is not the end. This is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning. — Sir Winston Churchill This has been a dramatic month. It is difficult to catch one’s breath over the sweeping changes that have rocked the Middle East. Over the past...
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By Sarah N. Stern and Kyle Shideler We are in the midst of an earthquake, and all of us wish for clarity and simple solutions.  After years of observing the highly repressive and autocratic regimes in the Middle East, we can’t help but identify with the dissidents in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The government’s shutting...
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As I write these words, the Egyptian uprising is in its sixth day, going full blast and with no end in sight. The pressure cooker, under the iron fist of 30 years of President Hosni Mubarak’s repressive rule, had been simmering for some time. Last week, the pot boiled over. What started this wave...
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In the light of recent events in Tunisia, I find myself concerned with a sad but demonstrable fact. In struggles for power during periods of revolutionary upheaval, the most totalitarian ideology tends to win out. This is the case even when the democratic will of the people initially launched the process of revolution against...
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Those of us who routinely watch the Middle East, are familiar with the perennial “Zionist plot stories,” which pop up in the Muslim media as countries such as Saudi Arabia or Iran arrests the occasional “Mossad agent,” who turns out to be a vulture or a squirrel, or a pigeon. There are also the...
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Last Thursday, London’s Financial Times reported that U.S. officials are worried that Iran could deploy a new generation of centrifuges. Such devices are three times faster than the centrifuges Iran relies on now, thus shortening the time needed to enrich uranium and reach nuclear weapon status. “If they were to deploy large numbers of...
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This week, I was honored to participate in a conference organized by Ashraf Ramelah of the Voice of the Copts movement, celebrating International Human Rights Day, entitled, “Human Rights in the Middle East.  What the West Needs to Know.” The snow that almost  paralyzed most of Washington this Thursday did not prevent these courageous...
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The failed cargo bomb plot in Yemen, which occurred just days before the American mid-term elections on November 2, are once again an excellent microcosm of the problems facing America and the West. The bombs were found only after two cargo planes had been intercepted, one in Dubai and one in England, and after...
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