Middle East Quarterly articles from January 2004

Middle East Quarterly archives from January 2004

Hamas from cradle to grave.
January 1, 2004... Over the past three years, the United States has uncovered just how systematically terrorist groups conceal their activities behind charitable, social, and political fronts. Investigators, faced with the threat posed by al-Qa'ida and its many...

Al-Manar: Hizbullah TV, 24/7.
January 1, 2004... Al-Manar (the beacon) is the official television station of the Lebanon-based Hizbullah, the Iranian-supported Shi'ite movement that appears on every U.S. terrorism list. Many political movements and organizations in the Arab world publish in...

Israel's security: the hard-learned lessons.
January 1, 2004... Between September 1993 and September 2000, the Middle East was the setting for a great historical experiment: the effort to negotiate a final resolution of the decades-old conflict between Israelis and Palestinians. The experiment failed, and...

Ansar al-Islam: back in Iraq.
January 1, 2004... Months before the Iraq war of 2003, The New Yorker, Christian Science Monitor, and The New York Times published reports about Ansar al-Islam ("Partisans &Islam"), a brutal band of al-Qa'ida guerrillas based in a Kurdish area of northern Iraq...

The lie that won't die: collusion, 1967.(textbook bias regarding the Six-Day War)
January 1, 2004... The United States' role: Israel was not [fighting] on its own in the [1967] war. Hundreds of volunteers, pilots, and military officers with American scientific spying equipment of the most advanced type photographed the Egyptian posts for it...

20/20 vision? The Middle East to 2020.(Document)
January 1, 2004... The National Intelligence Council (NIC) is the U.S. intelligence community's center for midterm and long-term strategic thinking. Among its other functions, it takes the lead in the production of National Intelligence Estimates--the coordinated...

Saddam's "engaging smile".(Document)(1969 report on Saddam Hussein by British ambassador Glencairn Balfour-Paul)(Transcript)
January 1, 2004... In the course of a long political career, Saddam Hussein met many Western diplomats and emissaries. One of the first was Glencairn Balfour-Paul, (1) who as British ambassador to Iraq initiated a meeting with Saddam in December 1969. The Baath...

Iraq: the Jews are coming!
January 1, 2004... BAGHDAD--When Imam Mahdi al-Jumayli of the small Hudhayfa mosque in Baghdad's Shurti neighborhood met three American officers to resolve a dispute over soldiers entering the grounds of his mosque, his first question to them was, "Are any of you...

After Jihad: America and the Struggle for Islamic Democracy.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Noah Feldman. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003. 272 pp. $24. Feldman was briefly retained by the Office for Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance in Baghdad to assist in the drafting of a new Iraqi constitution. The...

Against War with Iraq: an Anti-War Prime.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Michael Ratner, Jennie Green, and Barbara Olshansky. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. 78 pp. $6.95, paper. As part of The Open Media Pamphlet series, this pocket-sized primer was published to mobilize Americans against the war with...

Al-Qaeda: the Terror Network that Threatens the World.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Jane Corbin. New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 2002.315 pp. $24.95. Corbin, a British journalist, has compiled a solid account of al-Qa'ida's exploits since the group's inception in the late 1980s. While not groundbreaking, her work is...

Arab Economic Integration: Between Hope and Reality.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by Ahmed Galal and Bernard Hoekman. Washington, D.C.: Brookings Institution Press, 2003.170 pp. $20.95, paper. By the time the European Common Market was created by the treaty of Rome in 1957, the Arab League states had signed among...

Arabie Saoudite: La Menace.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Stephane Marchand. Paris: Librarie Artheme Fayard, 2003. 406 pp. 22 [euro], paper. Saudi officials have denounced their American critics, claiming there is an organized campaign to denigrate the kingdom--with some darkly hinting that it...

The Battlefield Algeria, 1988-2002: Studies in a Broken Polity.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Hugh Roberts. London and New York: Verso, 2003.402 pp. $25. Roberts, director of the Algeria Project and an analyst with the International Crisis Group, has published a collection of his articles written in the period 1987-2002 that plot...

Ben-Gurion against the Knesset.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Giora Goldberg. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 338 pp. $64.50. Goldberg begins with a theoretical discussion on the status of legislatures and on the role of quasi-parliamentary institutions in the early Zionist movement. But he quickly turns...

The Case for Israel.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Alan Dershowitz. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, Inc., 2003. 264 pp. $19.95 ($19.95, e-book, Adobe Reader). In his conclusion to The Case for Israel, renowned Harvard Law School professor Dershowitz asks his readers to imagine the...

Decision on Palestine Deferred: America, Britain and Wartime Diplomacy, 1939-1945.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Monty Noam Penkower. London: Frank Cass Publishers, 2002.384 pp. $62.50. "When the historian of the future assembles the black record of our days," Chaim Weizmann once remarked, "he will find two things unbelievable: first, the crime...

The Invention and Decline of Israeliness: State, Society, and the Military.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Baruch Kimmerling. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001. 268 pp. $45. What has become of Israeli identity since the establishment of the state of Israel, Kimmerling asks. He replies that the hegemony of the secular Zionist...

Iraqi Kurdistan: Political Development and Emergent Democracy.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Gareth R.V. Stansfield. London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2003. 261 pp. $80. Iraqi Kurds hold five of the Iraqi Governing Council's twenty-five seats. Masud Barzani's Kurdistan Democratic Party (KDP) and Jalal Talabani's Patriotic...

The Jews of the Middle East and North Africa in Modern Times.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by Reeva Spector Simon, Michael Menachem Laskier, and Sara Reguer. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003.549 pp. $57.50 ($24.50, paper). It is rare to find a multi-authored volume of essays (twenty-four writers in all) that...

Jews, Turks, and Ottomans: a Shared History, Fifteenth through the Twentieth Century.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by Avigdor Levy. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2002. 395 pp. $34.95. This volume, long-awaited by those interested in the topic, represents a major and stimulating contribution to the scholarship on what may be the most...

The Jordanian-Israeli War 1948-1951: a History of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Maan Abu Nowar. Reading: Ithaca Press, 2002. 515 pp. $49.50. Abu Nowar's voluminous tome illustrates the dual denial in which the Arabs are living: denial of Jewish history and their own. This particular case is the more disturbing given...

The Malady of Islam.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Abdelwahab Meddeb. Trans. from French by Pierre Joris and Ann Reid. New York: Basic Books, 2003. 241 pp. $24. On the subject of Islam, Meddeb presents a brave and insightful Muslim voice; on the subject of politics, he is just another...

The Middle East Military Balance, 2001-2002.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by Shlomo Brom and Yiftah Shapir. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. 400 pp. $37.95. The Jaffee Center's annual compilation considers the ramifications of military power in the Middle East. While Arab states are examined, they are seen...

The Oxford Dictionary of Islam.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by John L. Esposito. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 359 pp. $45. In 1995, I wrote in these pages about an earlier co-production by Esposito and the Oxford University Press, the four-volume The Oxford Encyclopedia of the...

Persian Pilgrimages: Journeys across Iran.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Afshin Molavi. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2002. 315 pp. $25.95. No book compares with Molavi's Persian Pilgrimages to give a feel for contemporary Iran. A young Iranian-American who has reported on Iran for The Washington Post...

Saddam: King of Terror.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Con Coughlin. New York: HarperCollins, 2002. 350 pp. $26.95. There is no getting around it: leaders of vicious totalitarian states (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or Saddam Hussein) are fascinating. How they rose from humble backgrounds to such...

Shaping the Current Islamic Reformation.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by B.A. Roberson. London: Frank Cass, 2003. 262 pp. $27.50, paper. What "Islamic Reformation," the reader might correctly ask? Despite the eccentric title, this multi-author work has an unusually interesting assortment of essays....

Syria's Terrorist War on Lebanon and the Peace Process.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Marius Deeb. New York: Palgrave, 2003. 285 pp. $49.95. The title says it all: Deeb, an instructor of Middle East politics at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University, has broken ranks with the pieties of...

Tolerance and Coercion in Islam: Interfaith Relations in the Muslim Tradition.(Brief Article)(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Yohanan Friedman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 233 pp. $60. What does Islam say about non-Muslims? The vast literature on this subject tends to wobble unsteadily on a narrow base of evidence--namely the Qur'an itself. Or...

The Tragedy of the Middle East.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Barry Rubin. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 296 pp. $29. The prolific Rubin, lately of the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, has given us a brilliant but maddening book about one of the most contentious,...

The Ulama in Contemporary Islam: Custodians of Change.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Muhammad Qasim Zaman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002. 312 pp. $29.95. Zaman's book might seem to have little to offer those interested in current Middle East issues. His focus is almost entirely on Pakistan and to a lesser...

Unlocking the Middle East: the Writings of Richard Falk.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... Edited by Jean Allain. New York: Olive Branch Press, 2003. 306 pp. $18.95, paper. Falk is a still-surviving totem of the 1960s leftist revolution in American academia and this collection might better be thought of as a tourist guide than a...

The 'West', Islam and Islamism: Is Ideological Islam Compatible with Liberal Democracy?(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Caroline Cox and John Marks. London: Civitas, 2003. 115 pp. 6 [pounds sterling], paper. Cox and Marks bring to bear their considerable experience in studying Marxism in this study of contemporary Islamism and its clash with the West....

Workers and Peasants in the Modern Middle East.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Joel Beinin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. 226 pp. $55 ($20, paper). Beinin has produced a strange and difficult book, in large part due to the topic itself: the lives of working people and a chronological survey of...

Zacarias, My Brother: the Making of a Terrorist.(Book Review)
January 1, 2004... By Abd Samad Moussaoui, with Florence Bouquillat. Trans. from French by Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods. New York: Seven Stories Press, 2003. 143 pp. $14.95, paper. In one of the more complete and insider accounts on the men of al-Qa'ida,...

Say it in Arabic.(Last Word)
January 1, 2004... Sir James Craig was principal instructor of the Middle East Centre for Arab Studies (MECAS) at Shemlan, Lebanon, from 1955 to 1959. The school, run by the British Foreign Office, was famed for its course in colloquial Arabic. In Craig's history...