Terrified of the secular/modern/liberal demonstrators who made their presence known in Tahrir Square, as well as of the soccer hooligans, Mohamed Tantawi and Egypt's Supreme Council of the Armed Forces have forged a mutually beneficial relationship with

It's not every day that someone like the U.S. secretary of defense forecasts an ally's move but this just happened when Leon Panetta said that he believes, in the paraphrase of a Washington Post reporter, that "there is a strong likelihood that Israel

Given the many excellent organizations dealing with Middle Eastern and Islamic issues, what niches does the Middle East Forum's fill? We provide strategic counsel, as opposed to advocacy or apologetics. To understand what this means, look at the

My disagreements with the Bush policies parallel those of Rudy Giuliani. His new Foreign Affairs article, "Toward a Realistic Peace," breaks dramatically with current policies on a number of issues, and especially vis-à-vis the Arab-Israeli conflict: Too

What does the Syrian government want in Lebanon? Some highly-placed observers in the American government are sanguine about its ambitions there. Richard Murphy, the Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern and South Asian Affairs, told Congress in

In the initial years after political independence, Arab opinion leaders shied away from public criticism of their governments, fearing that anyone unsympathetic would seize upon their words and use them to discredit Arabic-speaking peoples. To a certain

Muslim-majority countries may be the main source of terrorism, but the leaders of these states generally take a harder line against their Islamists in opposition than do their Western counterparts. This makes sense, for (1) all this is quite new to

The scourge of the twentieth century was overly-powerful governments; could the looming problem of this century be too-weak governments? The political scientist R. J. Rummel estimates, in his evocatively titled study, Death by Government (New Brunswick,

When Egypt's Lower House convened on Jan. 23, Islamists held 360 out of its 498 seats, or 72 percent. This astounding figure, however, reflects less the country's public opinion than it does a ploy by the ruling military leadership to remain in power. In

That's the thesis implicit to David Goldman's analysis at "Recall notice for the Turkish model." After dubbing the Turkish economy a bubble that "is bursting, starting with the stock market and national currency," he makes this observation about the

Egypt Independent reports on vandalizing, looting, and fighting at the nuclear power plant being built at El-Dabaa, a town in the desert to the west of Alexandria. The account draws on an unnamed source at the Ministry of Electricity and Energy who

I raised the issue of Turkey's continued membership in NATO in April 2009 at "Does Turkey Still Belong in NATO?"; here I will collect others who agree that the issue at least needs to be raised.David Schenker, Washington Institute for Near East Policy,

Between 1967 and 1993, just a few hundred Palestinians from the West Bank or Gaza won the right to live in Israel by marrying Israeli Arabs (who constitute nearly one-fifth of Israel's population) and acquiring Israeli citizenship. Then the Oslo Accords

It's not every day that the leader of a brand-new country makes his maiden foreign voyage to Jerusalem, capital of the most besieged country in the world, but Salva Kiir, president of South Sudan, accompanied by his foreign and defense ministers, did

It is a matter of record that Israel is the subject of far more political and media scrutiny than its Arab neighbors. Indeed, of all countries, Israel is second only to the Soviet Union in the amount of air time and newsprint it receives in the United