Middle East Quarterly articles from June 2004

Middle East Quarterly archives from June 2004

Tunnel-vision in Gaza.
June 22, 2004... The Philadelphi corridor is a narrow stretch of sand, ten kilometers long and about a hundred meters wide, separating Egypt from the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces patrol its length in a zone established and defined by the 1979 Israeli-Egyptian...

Techno-smuggling.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2004... ALGIERS--Smugglers in Algeria have reportedly come up with a novel way to get their contraband into Morocco--donkeys, with tape recorders on their backs. A taped message is repeated, saying "Err," Arabic for "walk," so that the donkeys do...

NGOs make war on Israel.(Nongovernmental organizations)
June 22, 2004... The horrors of the Holocaust and the outrage over the failure of Allied powers to intervene provided the impetus for the creation of today's international human rights system, anchored in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (1) The...

Try, try, try again: Bush's peace plans.
June 22, 2004... Nearly four years have elapsed since the Oslo process (1993-2000) between Israelis and Palestinians foundered in bloodshed. Over that period, two U.S. administrations have tried to forge policies that would reduce the violence and point toward...

Our democracy.
June 22, 2004... Israeli (on right): "'In our democracy in Israel, the people are allowed to demonstrate against Sharon." Arab (on left): "We, too. In our democracy in the Arab world, our people are allowed to demonstrate against Sharon!!" Hamid in Al-Ittihad...

Freedom of speech--in any language.
June 22, 2004... Following the terrorist attacks of September 11,2001, many have rightly cited the Middle East's democracy deficit as one of the prime reasons that the region has produced so much terrorism and political violence. In a November 2003 speech to...

The Arab mind revisited.
June 22, 2004... Editors' preface: In the spring of 2004, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal drove headlines in the United States and the Middle East. Journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a report in The New Yorker, entitled "The Gray Zone," describing the abuse of...

Who will ban hand first?(Brief Article)
June 22, 2004... ALGIERS--"The Hand of Fatima" that many Muslims in France carry as a sign of faith is a superstitious throwback to paganism and has nothing to do with religion, according to Islamic scholars here. The image has been in the news recently with...

U.S. culture corps.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2004... The following are excerpts from a handout that accompanied a weeklong course on Iraq "s customs and history given to 25,000 U.S. Marines prior to their spring 2004 deployment to Anbar province in Iraq (the "Sunni triangle"). (1) The course was...

Grade inflation in new Iraq?
June 22, 2004... BAGHDAD -- Some Iraqi students are exploiting lawlessness to instill fear in their teachers and get the marks they covet. Last week, the threats became reality--a university lecturer was shot dead in what many believe was retaliation for a bad...

Nation and assassination in the Middle East.
June 22, 2004... Until modern times, there existed no form of legitimacy in the Middle East outside of Islam. Rulers ruled in the name of God; assassins struck them down in the name of God. The assassinations of the early caliphs and the struggle between the...

Fixing the Arab world.(Brief Article)
June 22, 2004... "No two countries that both had a McDonald's had fought a war against each other, since each got its McDonald's." --Thomas Friedman "The Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention" Chapter Ten The Lexus and the Olive Tree ...

Going third world, a la Francaise.(Excerpt)
June 22, 2004... Editors 'preface: A noted historian of the Middle East has said the following about the legacy of scholars who devoted their careers to the study of the region: The giants of the recent past tend to be largely forgotten as soon as...

Ahmad Chalabi: "the biggest error was occupation.".(Interview)(Interview)
June 22, 2004... Ahmad Chalabi is the leader of the Iraqi National Congress (INC). He was born in Baghdad in October 1944 to one of Iraq's most prominent families. (His father, 'Abd al-Hadi, was president of the Iraqi senate.) The Chalabis were forced into...

The Qaradawi fatwas.(Document)
June 22, 2004... Editors' preface: In July 2004, Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi visited the United Kingdom to address several conferences, including a conference against restrictions on the hijab, or Muslim women's head-covering. (Such restrictions have already been...

All the Shah's Men: an American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... All the Shale's Men: An American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror. By Stephen Kinzer. Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 258 pp. $24.95. Kinzer, a reporter for The New York Times, believes that one of the roots of Middle East...

Bush in Babylon: the Recolonisation of Iraq.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Bush in Babylon: The Recolonisation of Iraq. By Tariq Ali. New York: Verso, 2003.214 pp. $20, paper. Stalin reportedly said that paper holds whatever is written on it. Ali tests that proposition to the limit. But rather than his ridiculous...

Civilization and Its Enemies: the Next Stage of History.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Civilization and Its Enemies: The Next Stage of History. By Lee Harris. New York: Free Press, 2004. 232 pp. $26. Had Arthur Koestler read Harris's work before writing the Act Of Creation, (3) he might have used it to illustrate that sudden...

Employment Creation and Social Protection in the Middle East and North Africa.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Employment Creation and Social Protection in the Middle East and North Africa. Edited by Heba Handoussa and Zafiris Tzannatos. Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2002. 282 pp. $27.50, paper. Eight collected papers about labor...

The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Division?(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Future of Iraq: Dictatorship, Democracy, or Division? By Liam Anderson and Gareth Stansfield. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. 260 pp. $24.95. Is democracy possible in Iraq? Or should the United States divide Iraq along ethnic or...

Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Funding Evil: How Terrorism Is Financed and How to Stop It. By Rachel Ehrenfeld. Chicago and Los Angeles: Bonus Books, 2003. 267 pp. $24.95. In Funding Evil, a valuable contribution to the study of how money eventually appears in the...

An Introduction to Islam, 2nd Ed.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... An Introduction to Islam, Second Editon. By David Waines. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. 392 pp. $65 ($23, paper). This second edition of Waines's 1995 work has thirty-five more pages, most of them in the section on...

Iraq's Burdens: Oil, Sanctions, and Underdevelopment.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Iraq's Burdens: Oil, Sanctions, and Underdevelopment. By Abbas Alnasrawi. Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002. 179 pp. $64.95. Restoring public services in Iraq, such as electricity, has proven to be much more of a straggle than the U.S.-led...

Israel on the Couch: the Psychology of the Peace Process.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Israel on the Conch: the Psychology of the Peace Process. By Ofer Grosbard. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2003. 195 pp. $68.50 ($22.95, paper). So many different ideas and proposals have been raised for resolving the...

Israeli Identity: in Search of a Successor to the Pioneer, Tsabar and Settler.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Israeli Identity: In Search of a Successor to the Pioneer, Tsabar and Settler. By Lilly Weissbrod. London: Frank Cass, 2002. 256 pp. $54.50. As the provocative subtitle of this complex, interesting study suggests, the identity of the...

Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution. By Nikki R. Keddie. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003. 400 pp. $18.50. University of California historian Keddie published the first version of this book, titled Roots of Revolution, in...

The Palestinian People: a History.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Palestinian People: A History. By Baruch Kimmerling and Joel S. Migdal. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2003. 568 pp. $45 ($17.95, paper). Kimmerling, a sociologist at the Hebrew University, has long been identified as one of the...

Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Politicide: Ariel Sharon's War against the Palestinians. By Baruch Kimmerling. London: Verso Books, 2003.234 pp. $22. In Politicide, Kimmerling--on his own, this time--takes up ideas from The Palestinian People (see above) and carries them...

The Paradoxical Kingdom: Saudi Arabia and the Momentum of Reform (Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Paradoxical Kingdom: Saudi Arabia and the Momentum of Reform. By Daryl Champion. New York: Columbia University Press, 2003. 294 pp. $32.50. Champion, an independent scholar with a doctorate from the Australian National University and a...

The Road to Al-Qaeda: the Story of Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... The Road to Al-Qaeda: The Story of Bin Laden's Right-Hand Man. By Montasser al-Zayyat. London: Pluto Press, 2004. 137 pp. $19.95, paper. Zayyat, a famous Islamist lawyer from Egypt, writes an interesting account on the life and times of...

Saudi Arabia Enters the Twenty-First Century: the Political, Foreign Policy, Economic, and Energy Dimensions.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Saudi Arabia Enters the Twenty-First Century: The Political, Foreign Policy, Economic, and Energy Dimensions. By Anthony H. Cordesman. Westport: Praeger Publishers, 2003. 588 pp. $65. Cordesman has penned an indispensable work that provides...

Yasir Arafat: a Political Biography.(Book Review)
June 22, 2004... Yasir Arafat: A Political Biography. By Barry Rubin and Judith Colp Rubin. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. 354 pp. $27.50. Yasir Ararat has become infamous throughout the world, but few, including most world leaders, understand who...

Bush apology sparks goodwill.(Parody)
June 22, 2004... WASHINGTON -- The recent apology of U.S. President George W. Bush for abuses by American military prison guards continued to reverberate around the globe today, as the White House was again inundated with a flurry of "apology accepted" notes...