Free Republic

From Algeria to Iraq, the Muslim Brotherhood is well-positioned. Natan Sharansky, former Soviet dissident and current chairman of the Jewish Agency, wrote in his seminal book titled The Case for Democracy about fear societies and free societies. The Arab Middle East has been a collection of largely fear societies. The recent events in Tunisia and Egypt, however, have transformed the psychology of many Arabs, and the political ramifications are soon to follow. The fear barrier that gripped the people living in the dictatorships throughout the Middle East has been breached. The corrupt dictators in Egypt (Mubarak) and Tunisia (Bin Ali)...

This September 2011, when the United Nations General Assembly meetings open in New York, the Palestinians, led by Mahmoud Abbas, will receive overwhelming international support for recognition of a Palestinian state. The Palestinians have galvanized worldwide support by strategically organizing a targeted public relations campaign. Recognition of a 23rd Arab state will mark the greatest public relations failure the Israeli government has ever experienced. Israel has categorically failed to convey a simple message: a contiguous Palestinian state will, in no uncertain terms, become a terrorist state, destabilizing both Israel (with over 1 million Israeli Arabs) and the Hashemite Kingdom...

He endorsed the "will of the people" in Egypt without knowing what it is, and he actively rejected the will of the Israeli people who voted for a center-right government. In his appeasement speech to the Muslim world titled “A New Beginning,” delivered on June 4, 2009, at the University of Cairo, President Barack Obama declared: I know there has been controversy about the promotion of democracy in recent years, and much of this controversy is connected to the war in Iraq. So let me be clear: No system of government can or should be imposed by one nation by...

According to Israeli daily Haaretz, National Security Advisor General Jim Jones was quoted in a classified foreign ministry cable as having told his European interlocutor, “The new administration will convince Israel to compromise on the Palestinian question. We will not push Israel under the wheels of a bus, but we will be more forceful toward Israel than we have been under Bush.” The compromise Gen. Jones is speaking forcing Israel into an expedited agreement on a Palestinian state. Jones has spoken in the recent pass of stationing NATO forces to oversee the implementation of the peace accords, a re-run of...

Rev. Bill Harter is a charismatic and well-respected Presbyterian Church (USA) pastor who has taken forty church missions to Israel and the Palestinian Authority territories. On various occasions at meetings with State Department officials, Rev. Harter revealed to them that Christian Palestinians say one thing in public and the opposite in private. He requested that the State Department appoint a human rights officer and station him at the U.S. Consulate in Jerusalem in order to monitor, record, and redress the abuses that Christian Palestinians are undergoing at the hands of the Palestinian Authority and Hamas-sponsored gangs. Rev. Harter was told...

Beyond the platitudes showered upon Israel and AIPAC by the presidential candidates John McCain and Barack Obama at AIPAC’s Annual Policy Conference held in Washington D.C. June 2-4 looms the question of whether the candidates’ words will be translated into policies? The only real measure of their intentions might be revealed in their choice of advisors.

It may be a historical curiosity that both Condoleezza Rice — President Bush’s secretary of state — and President Barack Obama chose Cairo University as the venue to send their messages to the Arab world. Egypt, the most populous Arab country and the largest Arab recipient of U.S. foreign aid, is also the country from which President/dictator Hosni Mubarak pledges his support for the U.S. and the West, causing his countrymen to hate America for its support of their dictator. Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 al-Qaeda suicide bombers, was an upper-middle-class Egyptian. What is significant about the two...

The results of the mid-term elections were widely considered to be a rebuke of President Barack Obama’s policies, specifically against his domestic agenda. His foreign policy failures, however, have not been scrutinized as closely. Yet, the ramifications of his failed policies, particularly in the Middle East, reverberate daily. The Obama administration’s withdrawal of 100,000 U.S. troops from Iraq, in the absence of a government able to provide security for the people of Iraq, has contributed to renewed sectarian violence, especially against the shrinking Christian community. Fr. Ladimer Alkhaseh, pastor of the Assyrian Evangelical Church in San Jose, CA, reacted to...

A senior Saudi royal ruled out direct elections to Saudi Arabia’s unelected parliament in comments published on Monday, days after King Abdullah appeared to hold open the possibility. Saudi Arabia, an absolute monarchy closely allied to the United States, held elections for half the members of its municipal councils in 2005, and reformers now hope for elections to the Shura assembly in line with moves in other Gulf nations. ‘When I go to the Shura assembly I meet members who are of the finest calibre in the country and that’s what’s important — the people and quality. It’s not important...

We all have heard the moralistic aphorism: “Man cannot live by bread alone.” However, in the Middle East the proper aphorism is: “Nations in the region cannot live on oil alone.” Water is, in fact, a much more valued commodity there. Conflicts and wars have arisen and may yet arise between nations in the region over the control of water resources. In late 1964, Syria and Israel were close to war when the Syrian government attempted to divert the rivers Hazbani and Banias, which flow into the Jordan River. Syria was determined to prevent Israel from using the waters of...

In his 1984 bestseller, “The Haj” (Doubleday, NY), Leon Uris captured the essence of the Arab-Israeli conflict through his two protagonists: Haj Ibrahim, muktar of the village of Tabah in the Ayalon Valley of Mandatory Palestine, and Gideon Asch, a pre-Israel Palestinian Jew, whose familiarity with Arab life, language and culture made him an honorary Bedouin. Uris’ dialogue astutely reveals the vast differences between the Arab and Jewish mindsets – deeply rooted in their cultural differences. Uris focuses on the Jewish liberal, cosmopolitan culture of openness, practicality, compromise, and humanism in contrast to the unforgiving desert culture of the Arabs,...

In following the Western press one gets the impression that the Arab (Palestinian)-Israeli conflict is the most important story that needs to be covered in the Middle East. In reality, however, it ranks third in order of importance when viewed within the stricture of three concentric circles that complete the picture of the current Middle East. What makes these circles all the more significant is that they all touch upon religion. The first and most important of the circles addresses the Sunni-Shiite divide and pits the aggressive and revolutionary Shiite Iran against Sunni (Wahhabi) Saudi Arabia over hegemony in the...

President Barack Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the new leaders of their respective democratic nations, are like two horses bound to a carriage, each pulling in a different direction as it relates to Middle East policy. For Mr. Netanyahu however, the Middle East is home turf, and any wrong move might have critical if not existential consequences. For Mr. Obama on the other hand, half the world away, a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians based on a two-state solution, would bring him and his administration prestige, and perhaps Arab triumphalism, but little more. It is apparent...

In his late 80’s, Adly Abadir is a Coptic-Christian refugee from Egypt and the international president of Copts United based in Zurich, Switzerland. Mr. Abadir is an engineer of note who was compelled to escape his homeland because of persecution by the Egyptian regime-much of it is religious intolerance on the part of the Muslim majority towards the Christian Copts-one of the oldest Christian communities in Christendom. And, because Hosni Mubarak’s regime appeases the Wahhabi-influenced radicals of the Muslim Brotherhood. Abadir has sought to bring together all the minorities in the Middle East who have endured religious, racial and ethnic...

The Muslims in Europe have succeeded in intimidating European governments into stifling free speech. Not however free speech for Muslim radicals who seek to Islamize Europe and eventually the U.S., but rather the free speech of those who oppose the creeping takeover of Western institutions by Muslims. Geert Wilders, the Dutch parliamentarian (Freedom Party) has exposed the Islamist’s agenda, and now faces prosecution by the Amsterdam Court of Appeals for statements they deem “insulting and harmful to the religious esteem of Muslims.” Mr. Wilders is being persecuted for his courage to speak the truth in contrast to the cowardly and...

At 91, Bernard Lewis, the doyen of Middle Eastern Studies who for more than half a century has been considered one of the West's foremost scholars of Islamic history and culture, is the author of more than two dozen books, most notably The Arabs in History, The Emergence of Modern Turkey, The Political Language of Islam, and The Muslim Discovery of Europe and is the subject of envy because of his remarkably lucid mind and memory. Both qualities were on display on Wednesday evening, May 2, 2007 when he addressed an overflow audience in the ballroom of the Loew’s Philadelphia...

Few Israeli public figures have undergone the kind of transformation that former Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Chief of Staff (2002-2005) Moshe Yaalon has. The only other figure to do so is Israel ’s Foreign Minister and current Kadima Party leader, Tzipi Livni. Her transformation however, was in the reverse. The daughter of the former Chief of Operations for pre-State underground Irgun, Livni has become the great hope of the Israeli political left. Yaalon, in contrast, is a son of devoted Mapai party (the party led by Ben Gurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister that has subsequently become the Labor party) members,...

Pope Benedict XVI’s recently concluded visit to Jordan, Israel and the Palestinian territories, highlighted the demographic and political decline of Christian communities in the region. Nearly a century ago Christians accounted for 20 percent of the region’s population — today they number less than 5 percent. Israel is the only place in the Middle East where Christian social and political growth is taking place. Elsewhere in the region, a dwindling Christian population is getting close to extinction as a result of Muslim intimidation and violence and, lack of economic opportunities leading to ever increasing emigration. Significantly, in preparation for the...

U.S. President Barack Obama and Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the new leaders of their respective democratic nations, are like two horses bound to a carriage, each pulling in a different direction as it relates to Middle East policy. For Netanyahu however, the Middle East is home turf, and any wrong move might have critical if not existential consequences. For Obama on the other hand, half the world away, a peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians based on a Two-State solution, would bring him and his administration prestige, and perhaps Arab triumphalism, but little more. It is apparent that...

Did the Harvard School of Government really need to know what an Islamofascist terror-sponsor had to say? Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government welcomed former Iranian President Muhammad Khatami last week. The current Iranian government led by its anti-Semitic, Holocaust-denying president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has sent Khatami on a “charm offensive” to neutralize America’s resolve to seek sanctions against Iran. Teheran was offered generous incentives to end its quest for nuclear weapons and rejected those made by the UN Security Council as well as Great Britain, France, and Germany. Iran has arrogantly dismissed the idea of ending its nuclear weapon’s ambitions while...