by Caroline Sevier*

Almost as soon as it started, the democratization agenda that the Bush administration hoped would be the lodestar of its post 9-11 foreign policy has been all but shelved. The insurgency and sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, the regional threat posed by an expansionist Iran, and the Palestinian civil war have combined to help resurrect the U.S. embrace of regional stability as a foreign policy priority and have convinced President George W. Bush to reduce his emphasis on transformative diplomacy. Leaders such as Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Saudi King Abdullah bin Abd al-’Aziz, whom many administration officials viewed as embarrassing allies during Bush’s first term, now enjoy a renaissance of U.S. support. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, for example, said little as Mubarak crushed liberal dissidents, and shortly before Bush met the Saudi king, he parried questions after a Saudi court sentenced a 19-year-old rape victim to 200 lashes and six months in jail.[1]

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By Barry Rubin

Golda Meir once said that a bad press was better than a good epitaph. In other words, pragmatic considerations must take precedence over public relations.

Sometimes it seems as if contemporary Israeli governments have forgotten that concept. Yet in general, especially where it counts, this principle continues to prevail in Israel.

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By Phyllis Chesler

For years now I have maintained that the hottest and most important war is the war of ideas or rather the propaganda war unleashed by ideologues in both the East and the West. The Arab and Islamist world is canny, strategic, and clever; they are also unbelievably bold liars. (Remember the Al Dura Affaire and the alleged massacre in Jenin). The politically correct West falls for the lies and treats them as sacred political truth.

Here are some recent examples of how the West is actively and foolishly collaborating in Big Lies to its own disadvantage.

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By Curtis R. Ryan

While democracy has proven to be a fragile and elusive form of politics in the modern Arab world, Islamist movements have flourished–ranging from grass-roots pro-democracy activism to militant jihadism and terrorism. Whether Arab politics witnesses more political liberalization in the near future will depend in large part on the nature of Islamist movements, as well as ruling regimes’ reactions to them. This article examines the broad range of Islamist alternatives within one of the more liberalizing Arab states–the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan–with a view to understanding the depth and breadth of Islamist forms of political mobilization.

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by Daniel Pipes*

With the Democratic Party primaries over, American voters can focus on issues of political substance. For instance: How do the two leading candidates for U.S. president differ in their approach to Israel and related topics? Parallel interviews with journalist Jeffrey Goldberg of The Atlantic, who spoke in early May with Democrat Barack Obama and in late May with Republican John McCain, offer some important insights.

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By Wolfgang G. Schwanitz

Amin al-Husaini, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, remains a controversial figure. The Palestinian leader, who was born in 1895 and died in 1974, first sparked controversy during his lifetime. As an officer in the Ottoman army during the First World War, he implemented the German idea of organizing jihad and terror behind enemy lines. (See my discussion here.) Later, he led the resistance against the British mandate authority in Palestine during uprisings in 1929 and in 1936. He fiercely opposed Jewish settlement.

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by Cinnamon Stillwell*

It isn’t often that characters based on the field of Middle East studies show up in current fiction, but the novels of author Daniel Silva are an exception. The last three novels of his series featuring Israeli secret agent/art restorer Gabriel Allon explore the intersection of Middle East studies and international intrigue.

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by David J. Rusin*

A Saudi court’s sentence of 200 lashes and six-months’ imprisonment for a 19-year-old victim of gang rape, known only as the “Qatif girl,” recently made headlines across the United States. Her story would never have come to outside attention without the efforts of her lawyer, Abdul Rahman al-Lahim. A specialist in commercial law, the 36-year-old Saudi also takes human rights cases on a pro-bono basis.[1]

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by Daniel Pipes*

Two religiously-identified new states emerged from the shards of the British empire in the aftermath of World War II. Israel, of course, was one; the other was Pakistan.

They make an interesting, if infrequently-compared pair. Pakistan’s experience with widespread poverty, near-constant internal turmoil, and external tensions, culminating in its current status as near-rogue state, suggests the perils that Israel avoided, with its stable, liberal political culture, dynamic economy, cutting-edge high-tech sector, lively culture, and impressive social cohesion.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

In Saudi Arabia, you can get killed just for suggesting that religions besides Islam be respected. From the McClatchy-Tribune News Service:

… A few weeks ago, one of the nation’s most senior religious authorities directed that two reporters for a mainstream Saudi newspaper be executed for publishing stories suggesting that religions other than Islam are worthy of respect. …

Abdul-Rahman al-Barrak, a 75-year-old sheik, issued the fatwa calling for the journalists’ death. …

“It’s disgraceful that articles containing this kind of apostasy should be published in some papers in Saudi Arabia,” he wrote last month. If the reporters do not repent, they “should be killed.”

Barrak is not just some cranky old miscreant. He is a member of the Saudi legislature, appointed by the king. Barrak spent a long career in senior positions at a respected government-funded university.

Soon after, 20 other senior Saudi clerics stood up to endorse enthusiastically Barrak’s fatwa. Later, about 100 human-rights advocates from across the region condemned the edict, calling it “intellectual terrorism.” That had little visible impact in Riyadh.

But a striking feature of this episode is that the Saudi government has not said or done anything about it — probably because King Abdullah realizes that many and perhaps most members of Saudi Arabia’s religious establishment agree with Barrak. After all, two weeks after he issued that fatwa, the legislature soundly defeated a proposal, favored by the Arab League, to adopt a law promoting respect for other religions. The vote was 77 to 33. …

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by Daniel Pipes*

When I lived in Cairo in the 1970s, I conducted a little experiment: What, using only Arabic-language sources, could I learn about Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the like? The paucity of resources stunned me; basically, the best way to learn about these subjects was to read between the lines of antisemitic tracts.

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by Daniel Pipes*

There’s an impression that Muslims suffer disproportionately from the rule of dictators, tyrants, unelected presidents, kings, emirs, and various other strongmen — and it’s accurate. A careful analysis by Frederic L. Pryor of Swarthmore College in the Middle East Quarterly (”Are Muslim Countries Less Democratic?“) concludes that “In all but the poorest countries, Islam is associated with fewer political rights.”

The fact that majority-Muslim countries are less democratic makes it tempting to conclude that the religion of Islam, their common factor, is itself incompatible with democracy.

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By Barry Rubin

The Middle East today is driven by five big conflicts: Among states for power; the Iran-Syria alliance’s war on everyone else; the struggle between Arab nationalists and Islamists to control each country, and the Sunni-Shia and Arab-Israeli conflicts.

No wonder there’s so much turmoil.

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By Andrew L. Jaffee

Jimmy Carter once again has demonstrated his strident anti-Israel bias, stating this weekend that, “I think someone should be meeting with Hamas to see what we can do to encourage them to be cooperative and to find out what their attitude is.” This is Hamas’ attitude, as collected from its own TV broadcasts by PMW:

My message to the loathed Jews is that there is no god but Allah, we will chase you everywhere! We are a [Palestinian] nation that drinks blood, and we know that there is no blood better than the blood of Jews. We will not leave you alone until we have quenched our thirst with your blood, and our children’s thirst with your blood. We will not leave until you leave the Muslim countries.

Is Carter naive enough to think that a terrorist group like Hamas will change its stripes to spots and become a genuine peace partner for Israel? Or is his bias against Israel so strong that he is willing to overlook the fact that Hamas’ “founding charter commits the group to the destruction of Israel, the replacement of the PA [Palestinian Authority] with an Islamist state on the West Bank and Gaza, and to raising ‘the banner of Allah over every inch of Palestine’ [including Israel]?”

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Daniel Nassif is the news director of Alhurra, a U.S.-funded Arabic satellite television news network created in 2004, and has also been news director of its sister network, Radio Sawa, launched in 2002. Nassif was born in Lebanon in 1958. He immigrated to the United States in 1977 and finished his undergraduate and graduate studies in political science and public policy for international affairs at the University of Michigan in 1986. He currently resides in northern Virginia with his wife and two sons. Adam Pechter, deputy publisher of the Middle East Quarterly*, interviewed Nassif on October 19, 2007, in Alhurra’s offices in Springfield, Virginia.

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