Like many a “hawkish” liberal before him, former UK prime minister Tony Blair crossed over to the dark side of neoconservatism.

While Palestinians celebrated the reconciliation agreement signed between Fateh and Hamas, the reactions in Washington and Israel were reminiscent of the biblical “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. American political commentators were dumbfounded by the news of the pac

In this November’s mid-term elections, the Democratic Party will be focused on winning back the governorships and legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Democrats lost decisively in these important states in 2010, giving Republicans the opportuni

Because Arab Americans and American Muslims have been waiting to see when theaObama administration would finally act to end Bush-era ethnic and religious profiling guidelines and practices, we were troubled to read press accounts this week indicating that Attorney General Er

I did my doctoral work at Temple University, whose founder was a 19th-century Baptist preacher, Russell Conwell. Conwell was, to be sure, an accomplished writer, a captivating preacher and a visionary entrepreneur, but the theology he helped popularise was, in a word, distu

Western biases are not only transparently self-serving and flat-out wrong, they can also be so annoying.  As an example, a few weeks back, the Washington Post featured a long lament by a British intellectual pointedly suggesting that because Europe was in decline, the world

US President Barack Obama’s upcoming meeting with Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah comes at a time when transformative developments are convulsing the regional and world order, and relations between the US and the Kingdom have become strained. It is a situation that the

While reviewing polling data on Israeli and Palestinian attitudes towards the current US-led peace effort, what comes through quite clearly is not just the obvious disconnect between the views of the two groups, but the extent to which this disconnect is driven by the Israeli-cen

This past week, Washington hosted two of my least favourite annual events.