by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

In the run-up to the Tunisian Constituent Assembly elections and the aftermath that saw a plurality of seats won by the al-Nahda (Renaissance) party, you may have noticed frequent references in the media to this political organization as a “moderate Islamist” party. This is of course not the first time such terms have been used to denote Islamist political factions: recall for example how the ruling AKP party in Turkey is often called “mildly Islamist” (to borrow the Economist’s phrasing).

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by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi*

As the U.S. troop presence in Iraq continues to diminish, it is worth examining what sort of political system has been left behind. Is Iraq really a democracy as many officials in the Bush administration hoped it would be? Sadly, the answer to this question cannot be in the affirmative.

It is of course true that in March 2010, Iraq conducted elections recognized as free and fair by the UN. However, as Osama al-Nujayfi, the Sunni speaker for the Iraqi parliament, astutely observed, democracy is more than just about holding elections. In many of the other essential aspects of a truly democratic society, Iraq’s status is far from satisfactory.

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By Barry Rubin

What does theocracy look like? This is what theocracy looks like! *

Many people find it hard to comprehend what the Obama Administration thinks it’s doing in the Middle East. But it’s really very simple if you know the history of the arguments, read carefully administration speeches and documents, watch their actions, and talk to some of those involved.

Leaving aside a number of points I’ve made in a previous article (which would be good to read in conjunction with this one), I want to focus here on one concept: the idea that the U.S. government has outsmarted the Islamists.

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by Damla Aras*

The referendum held on January 9, 2011, was a milestone for Sudan. With an overwhelming majority of 98.3 percent, southerners decided to secede from the north and to create Africa’s youngest state — the Republic of South Sudan. While this momentous development was expected to end Khartoum’s decades-long struggle with the southern Sudanese rebels, it has set off a number of ticking time bombs and exacerbated existing conflicts. On top of Sudan’s financial problems and the wider impact of the Arab upheavals, President Omar Bashir’s government is now facing a number of pressing issues in the post-referendum era. With the rise of new disputes and the escalation of protracted conflicts, is Bashir’s Sudan on the verge of further instability?

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By David North, CIS.org

Other English-speaking nations have “value-added,” “evidence-based” immigration policies, but the U.S., to its detriment, does not.

That is the chilling, central message of Value Added Immigration: Lessons for the United States from Canada, Australia and the United Kingdom, a new book by former U.S. Secretary of Labor Ray Marshall, which was unveiled at a seminar in Washington yesterday, hosted by the Economic Policy Institute, a think tank and the publisher of the book.

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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 David North, CIS.org

One of the largely hidden problems with current U.S. immigration policy is that if we let in an immigrant, refugee, or asylee we set in motion, over time, the admission of that person’s (often numerous) relatives.

His or her siblings, parents, nieces and nephews, and ultimately, their siblings, parents, spouses, nieces and nephews, and so on, generation after generation. Chain migration is the cause of much of the expansion of the U.S. population.

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by Raymond Ibrahim*

In a globalized world where debate and diplomacy predominate, there is one sure way to discern the sincerity of any particular government: see how it behaves at home, where it is in power; see especially how it treats its minorities.

Consider the government of Iran. Gearing up for the Durban III Conference, supposedly against racism, scheduled to take place in New York City this week, Tehran and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad no doubt plan on complaining to the international community about Israel as in former conferences — portraying the Jewish state as “the most cruel and repressive racist regime,” a “barbaric” government that engages in “inhuman policies” against the Palestinians.

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by Amitai Etzioni*

The 2001 attacks on the United States have intensified the debate that has existed since the dawn of Islam: How is the West to respond to the followers of Muhammad? Some — most famously Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington — held that the contest is between two rather monolithic civilizations that are bound to clash. In a 2007 award acceptance speech at the American Enterprise Institute, Lewis described a history of clashes between Islam and the West. He stated that at first Muslims sought to spread their nascent faith through conquest throughout the then-Christian world; then the Christians invaded the Muslim world (the Crusaders); then the Muslims pushed back into Europe (the Golden Age of Islam); then the West retaliated by colonizing the Muslim world; and now the Muslims are again rising against Christendom by terrorism and flooding Europe with immigrants.[1] Huntington argued that “Islam’s borders are bloody, and so are its innards. The fundamental problem for the West is not Islamic fundamentalism. It is Islam, a different civilization whose people are convinced of the superiority of their culture and are obsessed with the inferiority of their power.”[2] By contrast, President George W. Bush stated in the wake of the 9/11 attacks that “Islam is peace,”[3] while British prime minister Tony Blair argued that the problem was not Islam but “extremists trying to hijack it for political purposes.”[4]

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by Jonathan Schanzer*

In its final report of July 22, 2004, the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (commonly known as the 9/11 Commission) charged that Congress had failed America. In the commissioners’ judgment, Congress had “adjusted slowly to the rise of transnational terrorism as a threat to national security. In particular, the growing threat and capabilities of [Osama] bin Laden were not understood in Congress … To the extent that terrorism did break through and engage the attention of the Congress as a whole, it would briefly command attention after a specific incident, and then return to a lower rung on the public policy agenda.” Indeed, the commission was unequivocal about “Congress’s slowness and inadequacy in treating the issue of terrorism in the years before 9/11.”[1]

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by Daniel Pipes*

With trumpets and drum rolls, the White House in early August released a policy paper on methods to prevent terrorism, said to have been two years in the making. Signed personally by Barack Obama and with rhetoric vaunting “the strength of communities” and the need to “enhance our understanding of the threat posed by violent extremism,” the document looks anodyne.

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by Daniel Pipes*

The White House engaged in two furtive gambits last week that painfully exposed the Obama administration’s amateurish, deceitful Middle East-Islamic policies.

The first case concerned the thorny issue of Jerusalem’s legal status in American law. In 1947, the United Nations ruled the holy city to be a corpus separatum (Latin for separated body) and not part of any state. All these years later and despite many changes, U.S. policy holds that Jerusalem is an entity unto itself. It ignores that in 1950 the Government of Israel declared western Jerusalem to be its capital and in 1980 declared the whole of Jerusalem to be the capital. The Executive Branch even ignores U.S. laws from 1995 (requiring a move of the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem) and 2002 (requiring that U.S. documents recognize Americans born in Jerusalem as being born in Israel). Instead, it insists that the city’s disposition be decided through diplomacy.

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By Gary Gerofsky

The far left of center Canadian New Democratic Party (NDP) has been an option that a minority of voters in Canada considered seriously. Federally, they have never been in power and, of the three main parties (Conservative, Liberal and NDP), the NDP always came in third. Provincially they have held power in Ontario, Saskatchewan, British Columbia, Nova Scotia and partially in the Yukon.

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by Steven J. Rosen*

In a few weeks, an overwhelming majority in the United Nations General Assembly will likely vote for collective recognition of a Palestinian state. But which Palestinian state? Of the three Palestinian states the assembly could recognize, two are real and arguably could meet the requirements for statehood. But it is the third, purely imaginary one that the assembly will endorse, one that neither has a functioning government nor meets the requirements of international law.

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By David North, CIS.org

Recent news reports reminded me that all higher education immigration fraud, through the massive F-1 visa program, is divided into three parts:

1. There are the individual students who drop out of legitimate universities to become illegal aliens on their own;
2. There are visa mills which are distinctly illegitimate establishments; they recruit would-be illegal aliens, and, in effect, charge them substantial fees for their F-1 visas; or they operate marginal operations more keyed to profits than to education; and
3. There are more rarely, or more rarely caught, employees of legitimate universities who misuse their positions to facilitate the conversion of legitimate foreign students into illegal aliens.

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