By Barry Rubin

While the outcome still isn’t clear, it seems that a new example of failure and humiliation is unfolding for the Obama Administration’s Middle East policy.

It appears increasingly unlikely that the president’s high-profile effort to restart Israel-Palestinian talks will succeed during the remainder of 2010 or even well beyond that time.

This Administration has had a very clear idea of what it wanted to achieve:

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A briefing by Amatzia Baram*

Amatzia Baram is a professor in the Department of the History of the Middle East and director of the Center for Iraq Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel. Prior to the invasion of Iraq, he served as a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. In 2003-2005 he was Senior Fellow at the USIP and the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., and in 2006 taught an honors course on Iraq at Melbourne University. He also advised various branches of the Clinton and George W. Bush administrations on Iraq and the Gulf region. Presently he is a Goldman Guest Professor for Middle East at Georgetown University. On October 28, Mr. Baram addressed the Middle East Forum in New York on the current political situation in Iraq. The following is a brief summary, including updates to the end of November 2010.

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In an article entitled, “Israel’s English-Language Media, AFP, Selectively Report on Israeli Poll,” CAMERA shows how the media emphasizes Jewish dislikes but minimizes or ignores Arab (Palestinian) dislikes:

… Perhaps most interesting to observers of the Arab-Israeli conflict, Jews were asked if it would bother them to have Arabs as neighbors, and Arabs were asked if it would bother them to have Jews as neighbors. Indeed, the English-language Web sites of Ha’aretz, Yediot Aharonot and the Jerusalem Post each mentioned this aspect of the poll in their coverage of the overall findings. So did Agence France Presse. But in a striking double standard, each of these news sources presented readers with only half of the picture, relaying that many Jews expressed discomfort about the idea of living next to an Arab but altogether ignoring the fact that even more Arabs expressed discomfort about the idea of living next to a Jew. …

Israeli Arab respondents expressed less tolerance for foreign neighbors; 70 percent of whom said they would rather not live beside a homosexual couple, while 67 percent said they would rather not live next to Haredi families. …

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Interview by the Middle East Quarterly*

Ali Allawi, Iraq’s first post-Saddam civilian minister of defense, was born in Baghdad in 1947. He was educated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the London School of Economics, and Harvard University. On top of a long and successful career as a merchant banker, he has held visiting posts in a number of academic institutions, including the International Institute for Islamic Thought and Civilization in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, founded by the Islamic philosopher Syed Naquib al-Attas, and the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies at Oxford University.

During the 1980s and the 1990s, Allawi was a prominent member of the London-based Iraqi opposition to Saddam Hussein’s regime, and in 2002, was one of the drafters of a declaration of Iraqi Shiites,[1] a statement that helped lay the groundwork for Saddam’s ouster.

Allawi returned to Iraq in September 2003 after forty-five years of exile and was made minister of trade in the Interim Iraq Governing Council, followed by a year’s stint as minister of defense. In January 2005, he was elected to Iraq’s Transitional National Assembly, and three months later, was appointed minister of finance in the Transitional Government headed by Ibrahim al-Jaafari. He held this post until May 2006 when he returned to private life.

Author of two prize winning books — The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace[2] and The Crisis of Islamic Civilization[3] — Allawi is currently a senior visiting fellow at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Efraim Karsh interviewed him in London by telephone on July 26, 2010.

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by Phyllis Chesler

Recently, a good feminist — yes they do exist–someone who has fought in the trenches for years on behalf of battered and raped women — implored me to stop publishing at this site. She said that I was the only “real,” pioneer feminist left standing who had continued to engage in the most important battles which humanity now faces. However, she was getting flack when she sent my pieces around precisely because my work is being published on conservative websites and by someone like David Horowitz.

Right there, that should have made her wonder why allegedly “feminist” or liberal websites were neither publishing nor even linking to my work and why allegedly “conservative” (and therefore presumably anti-feminist) venues have embraced that work.

She wrote (and I am paraphrasing):

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By Steven A. Camarota, CIS.org

This Memorandum examines the costs and likely impact of the DREAM Act currently being considered by Congress. The act offers permanent legal status to illegal immigrants up to age 35 who arrived in the United States before age 16 provided they complete two years of college. Under the act, beneficiaries would receive in-state tuition. Given the low income of illegal immigrants, most can be expected to attend state schools, with a cost to taxpayers in the billions of dollars. As both funds and slots are limited at state universities and community colleges, the act may reduce the educational opportunities available to U.S. citizens.

Among the findings:

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