Free Republic

Golden State Warriors coach Steve Kerr owes Israel a debt of gratitude for taking out the terrorists responsible for his father’s assassination in Lebanon four decades ago, but don’t expect the progressive former NBA star to say thank you, an Israeli columnist said. Kerr’s father, Malcolm Kerr, was gunned down in 1984 while serving as the president of American University in Beirut by two members of an Islamic jihadist group that is believed to have had ties to Hezbollah. “But don’t expect a thank you. It’s not in his progressive lexicon.” He has not commented publicly on the Israeli military’s...

Is the Middle East becoming less Arab? Hisham Melhem Saturday, 8 November 2014 President Obama’s letter to Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, in which he laid out the foundation of a new relationship emanating from a nuclear compromise, and stressed shared U.S.-Iranian interests in combatting the extremist Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), is emblematic of a gradual and subtle shift in Washington’s attitudes towards the region in general and its Arab actors in particular. In this rapidly changing Middle East, the U.S. sees a diminishing Arab influence brought about by the erosion of the state system, lack...

Where is Malcolm Kerr when we really need him? We have asked this question in my family many times during the past 25 years of intifadas, suicide bombings, checkpoints, insistent terror and increasing complication in the Middle East. The question is always followed by a sigh because Malcolm Kerr, a brilliant scholar of Middle East politics, was a famous casualty of those complications, gunned down in January 1984 as he stepped out of a lift on the way to his office at the American University of Beirut. Kerr, a neighbour and family friend for 20 years, had been president of...