السياسة العربية والإسلامية

This article also appeared in Hurriyet Daily News on January 15, 2010. The diplomatic spat between Israel's Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon and the Turkish ambassador Oguz Celikkol on Monday was the worst thing that could have happened to the already strained Ankara-Jerusalem ties. Relations between Turkey and Israel have

Last summer, Hamas security forces raided a mosque affiliated with the Salafi-Jihadi group Jand Ansar Allah, killing 24 and wounding 130 in the ensuing firefight. This relatively recent episode highlights the presence in Gaza of Salafi-Jihadi groups inspired by but not yet formally affiliated with al-Qaeda. Unlike Hamas, which despite

Over the last two years, thousands of Iraqi detainees have been released from prisons in compliance with Iraq's 2008 general amnesty law and the U.S.-Iraq Security Agreement that was enforced in January 2009. Following the withdrawal of U.S. combat troops from Iraqi cities in June, and the upsurge in violence

A new opportunity is now emerging for the "Green Movement" in Iran to demonstrate opposition to the Islamic Republic and the manipulated presidential election results earlier this year. Friday, December 18, marks the beginning of the months of Muharram and Safar in the Islamic lunar calendar. For the regime in

In a speech in Washington, DC in August 2008, Ted Gistaro, then the United States national intelligence officer for transnational threats, painted a picture of a resurgent Al-Qaeda core, with an increasingly secure safe-haven in Pakistan's tribal areas. Al-Qaeda had, in Gistaro's view, "maintained or strengthened key elements of its

FEATURING Dan Meridor, Ataollah Mohajerani, Aharon Farkash, Jackson Diehl, Michael Mandelbaum, Hossein Bastani, Khalil Shikaki, Mortimer Zuckerman, Ronald Neumann, Charles Wald, and many other distinguished speakers The Proceedings In June 2009, President Barack Obama traveled to Cairo to deliver a speech outlining what he hoped would mark a "new beginning"

During the 1960s, Egypt and Saudi Arabia fought an eight-year proxy war in Yemen so fierce that Egypt repeatedly deployed chemical weapons against its Saudi-backed adversaries, the Yemeni royalists. Fifty years on, the revolutionary ideology of Egypt's former president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, is a distant memory, and while Cairo and

On December 7, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan will meet with US President Barack Obama in Washington. The meeting follows Obama's April visit to Turkey when he reached out to the Turks to realign Ankara with the US after the tumultuous years of the Bush administration. Despite Obama's efforts

Islamophobia is rising in the West because so many of us confuse Islam with Islamism. This confusion also inadvertently helps organizations like al-Qaeda. Not a day goes by that yet another publication or pundit uses the terms Islamic and Islamist interchangeably, not realizing that Islam is a religion and Islamism