Egypt’s final round of elections earlier this month confirmed our greatest fear: victory by the Muslim Brotherhood. The Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party (FJP) received 41% of the parliament. Together with other parties, Islamists dominate two-thirds of the new Egyptian legislature, and elected a strong Brotherhood leader Mohamed al-Katatni, as Speaker of the...
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By: Sarah Stern and Kyle Shideler This past Friday, at a policy conference in Washington, Puneet Talwar, Senior Director for Iran, Iraq and the Gulf States at the White House National Security Council addressed the group. In his “on the record” remarks, Mr. Talwar calmly stated, “We have a three legged stool in our...
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Once again, we at EMET wish that we had been proven wrong. As soon as the demonstrators took to the streets in Tahrir Square in Cairo, Egypt last winter, we had been alone on Capitol Hill arguing that  the United States should immediately halt, or at least temporarily suspend, all U.S. military aid and...
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As part of her national tour, on October 5, 2011, author, speaker, human rights activist, and blogger Nonie Darwish spoke at the George Mason University (GMU) Law School concerning human rights in the Muslim world and the problems stemming from the Muslim world’s use of Islamic law, often called “Sharia.”  Ms. Darwish is descended...
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Last Sunday, as Coptic Christians assembled peacefully in Maspero, Egypt to protest the burning of a Coptic church. The army responded by opening fire on protesters and deliberately driving armored vehicles into the crowd. Video (Warning: graphic), shows military vehicles plowing into the crowds, actively attempting to run down protestors at high speeds. According...
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Several months into the brutal crackdown perpetrated by Bashar Assad’s regime, suppressing the Syrian people, during which human rights groups estimate as many as 1,600 people have been killed, the “Assad the Reformer” chorus  may have finally been silenced. U.S. Ambassador Robert Ford, and French Ambassador Eric Chevallier earned the wrath of the Syrian...
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This past winter, the Arab and Muslim worlds have been rocked by a confluence of events, by what some people have dubbed “The Arab Spring”, but which I prefer to refer to as “The Arab Hurricane”. What began as a routine harassment by a government bureaucrat to a Tunisian vegetable vendor (and ended in...
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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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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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