by David Barnett and Efraim Karsh*

Of the countless threats of violence, made by Arab and Palestinian leaders in the run up to and in the wake of the November 29, 1947 partition resolution, none has resonated more widely than the warning by Abdul Rahman Azzam, the Arab League’s first secretary-general, that the establishment of a Jewish state would lead to “a war of extermination and momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and the Crusades.”

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By Barry Rubin

Every day in the Middle East, terrible things take place. The worst are the material acts of violence and oppression. The second-worst are the lies and distortions of truth that help ensure things don’t get better. Every day in the West, the lies are echoed, amplified, and invented. This also helps ensure things don’t get better in the Middle East and that they do get worse in the West.

Now I’ve found, from the most unexpected place, a single sentence, an ancient proverb, that explains it all. It comes from the Navahos and it goes like this:

You cannot awaken someone who pretends to be sleeping.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

Tunisia, where the 2011 Arab uprisings began, remains an ominous model for where these uprisings will end.

The nation’s first round of elections are in, and, as expected, the Islamist party, al-Nahda, won by a landslide, gaining over 40% of the seats in the national constituent assembly. As usual, the mainstream media, interpreting events exclusively through a Western paradigm, portrayed this largely as a positive development.

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by Steven Shamrak

Most people of this planet do not care or even know about Israel and Jews. Many of them receive glimpses of information about the Arab-Israel conflict from reports they accidentally hear on radio, see on TV, or read on newspaper headlines. Unfortunately, under bombardment from the modern media, some of them have adopted the main stream “understanding” of the issue, but still they do not care about the factual truth behind reports. Even many members of the Jewish tribe, who are still suffering from the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) inflicted on Jewish people during two millennia of living in exile and persecution by Christians and Muslims, have become believers of these opinions continuously propagated by the world press and Western governments who are oblivious to the danger of Islamic expansion. Strangely, the fake opinions about the Arab-Israel conflict have not been refuted by the string of Israel’s governments or the Jewish leadership of the Diaspora.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

Since Nouri al-Maliki first became prime minister of Iraq in April 2006, a recurring talking point about his time in office has been that his days are numbered. Indeed, in a paper I wrote for the Middle East Review of International Affairs quarterly journal in the summer of this year, I cast severe doubt on whether the Iraqi premier would remain in power until the expiry of his second term in 2014.

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by Phyllis Chesler

I recently attended a Hebrew poetry class taught by a friend, Atara Fobar, who translates Hebrew poetry into English. Atara is a serious teacher and is the distinguished translator of Moshe Itzhaki. Every month, Atara teaches poetry to religious Jews of a certain age–to the kind of people whose delight in learning is almost child-like and which renders them ageless.

We are a bit like those Jews who continued to write and produce plays, newspapers, and musical evenings in Holocaust era ghettos, who so optimistically kept taking books out of libraries (and returning them) until they could no longer do so.

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by Robert R. Reilly
Intercollegiate Studies Institute, 2011. 244 pp.

Reviewed by Raymond Ibrahim*

Last week, “Saudi Arabia’s religious police arrested an Indonesian housemaid for casting a magic spell on a local family and ‘turning its life upside down.’” The maid “confessed” to using sorcery, and “commission experts took the magic items to their office and managed to dismantle and stop the spell.”

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By Jonathan Spyer

Early this week, the US-based Noble Energy Company began exploratory drilling for offshore gas deposits off the coast of Cyprus. They did so with the agreement of the Nicosia authorities, in an area indisputably located within Cypriot territorial waters. Despite this, there was real concern that the drilling could face interference from Turkish navy ships on maneuvers in the area.

The explorations proceeded undisturbed. The Turkish ships observed procedures from a discreet distance. But Cyprus’s defiance of recent Turkish warnings against beginning the search for natural gas in this area is unlikely to be the last word on the matter.

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By Jerry Kammer, CIS.org

Some late-night time with Tivo this week provided three compelling Latino perspectives on the state of the American dream. The first came from a former illegal immigrant from Mexico who is now a brain surgeon; the second from an unidentified Central American migrant riding atop a train rumbling toward the U.S. border; the third from a former Cuban refugee who is now president of Miami-Dade College.

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by Daniel Pipes*

Mu’ammar al-Qaddafi, Libya’s leader since 1969, is defunct, gunned down in his home town of Sirte.

How fitting that he called the rebels against him “rats,” yet his final moments were spent in a reeking drainage pipe under a highway, just like a rat, like his fellow Arab despot Saddam Hussein. Indeed, he is the sixth tyrant on the lam in the past decade to be captured or executed; that leaves only Mullah Omar, the former Taliban leader, on the loose, hiding like a common criminal.

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

Critics have often argued that Western nations — the United States in particular — have been hypocritical in their policies towards Bahrain. Is this claim accurate? Too often, no full overview has been given on what is going on in the country. Who precisely are the predominantly Shi’a protestors? What is at stake? Most importantly, which outside nations can influence the situation?

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By Gary Gerofsky

Peace Studies at McMaster University — non-violence, Gandhi peace events, love and peace — who could possibly take exception with such positive messages of global tolerance and efforts to make the world a peaceful place to live? Who would dare challenge this facade of eternal goodness and inclusion? Well, allow me to interject to explain why, in our Orwellian world, peace does not mean what it should and how a department has been hijacked by a monomaniacal agenda that concentrates on criticism of one democratic country and treats tyrants and terrorists as if they were angels. This is an agenda copied from what they do in the UN where peace has also been turned on its head to mean the enabling of: war, terrorism, historical revisionism, moral relativism, and support for groups that are anti-Western. This Peace Studies department must be viewed and scrutinized in the context of Israeli activist and sometimes-government-minister Natan Sharansky’s “3D test of Anti-Semitism: Demonization, Double-Standards and Delegitimization.” Confronting free and law-abiding countries and ignoring real tyrants as if they do not exist is now acceptable behaviour to certain academics and administrators who hide behind the false banner of “peace” to convey their love of concepts of non-peace, war, hate and envy. The custodians of higher education at universities, if they have anything to say at all, which is rare, hide behind free speech and academic freedom to slough off criticism of the campaigns being waged under their willfully blind leadership.

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by Daniel Pipes*

That Gilad Schalit has been released after five years of captivity by Hamas brings joy to anyone who watches the Israeli soldier’s reunion with his parents and the ecstatic welcome he received by his countrymen. It also reminds one of the Israel Defense Forces’ noble purpose in doing all it can to stand by its men.

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By Barry Rubin

The easiest way to understand the current situation in the United States is this:

We are in a new version of the 1960s with four significant differences.

1. The radicals aren’t just demonstrating in the universities, they control them.

2. The radicals aren’t being ignored by the mass media, they control them.

3. The president of the United States is the leader of the New Left, sort of like the head of the campus branch of SDS and the Black Student Alliance put together. In comparison, Bill Clinton was the head of the campus Young Democrats.

4. The music’s not nearly as good.

Yet is support for the radical Left really higher than in the 1960s? I don’t think so. The movement has just camouflaged itself much better, including convincing millions of people that this is a mainstream liberal one.

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By Fern Sidman

Tensions flared between dozens of pro-Israel demonstrators and members of “Students for Justice in Palestine” on Sunday afternoon, October 16th outside of Columbia University on the third and final day of the 2011 National Students for Justice in Palestine “teach-in” organized by members to prepare for their upcoming Israel Apartheid Week events across college campuses throughout North America.

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