Middle East Quarterly articles from March 2005

Middle East Quarterly archives from March 2005

Energy first.(China and the Middle East)
March 22, 2005... China's Middle East policy is undergoing a major shift. Traditionally, Beijing considered the region too distant for significant investment and instead limited its efforts to convincing Arab capitals to sever their ties to Taiwan and establish...

Providing Arms.(China and the Middle East)
March 22, 2005... Chinese policy in the Middle East has grown more active over the past decade. With its overriding goal of securing oil and gas to fuel China's economic growth, the Chinese government has actively cultivated its relations with the oil-rich...

Post-Zionism and the Sephardi question.(The Post-Zionist Critique)
March 22, 2005... A growing group of Jewish Israeli professors is challenging the legitimacy of the Israeli state from within. Many are Mizrahim, as the Sephardi Jews from the Middle East and North Africa are increasingly called, and do so from a distinctly...

Terror led to Jews' exodus.
March 22, 2005... In June 1941, there was the Farhud--or pogrom--during which "the mob wreaked havoc," recalls [Moshe] Kahtan [who left Iraq in 1955]. "For two days, they killed Jews in the streets, kidnapped girls, raped them, killed them, and mutilated the...

Benny Morris's reign of error, revisited.(The Post-Zionist Critique)
March 22, 2005... The collapse and dispersion of Palestine's Arab society during the 1948 war is one of the most charged issues in the politics and historiography of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Initially, Palestinians blamed the Arab world for having promised...

Sharansky likens Mideast studies to propaganda.
March 22, 2005... President Bush's democracy muse Natan Sharansky, the Israeli minister, suggested to a daylong gathering at Columbia University yesterday that the way in which the Middle East is studied and taught at Columbia and other schools reminds him of...

"The hell of Israel is better than the paradise of Arafat".
March 22, 2005... In the Palestinian Authority's (PA) elections that took place in January 2005, a significant percentage of Arab Jemsalemites stayed away from the polls out of concern that voting in them might jeopardize their stares as residents of Israel. For...

Beheading in the name of Islam.
March 22, 2005... Images of masked terrorists standing behind Western hostages in Iraq and Saudi Arabia have become all too common on Arabic satellite stations such as Al-Jazeera and Al-Manar. Islamist websites such as Muntadiyat al-Mahdi (1) go further,...

Ex-rockets star Olajuwon: America has "no morals".
March 22, 2005... WASHINGTON--Hakeem Olajuwon told an audience at a 1995 conference in Houston sponsored by a group later linked to a terrorist organization that America was near morally bankrupt and Islam was the only solution. The 1995 gathering was hosted...

Assessing English translations of the Qur'an.
March 22, 2005... Multiple English translations of the Qur'an, Islam's scripture, line shelves at book stores. Amazon.com sells more than a dozen. Because of the growing Muslim communities in English-speaking countries, as well as greater academic interest in...

King Abdullah II: "Iraq is the battleground--the West against Iran.".(Interview)
March 22, 2005... King Abdullah II bin Al Hussein, descendant of the Prophet Muhammad, is the fourth ruler of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and the great-grandson of his namesake, the kingdom's founder. Born on January 30, 1962, to King Hussein's second wife,...

Democracy and elections, un-Islamic?
March 22, 2005... BAGHDAD, Iraq--A new online magazine purportedly posted by al-Qaida's affiliate in Iraq has launched an effort to recruit Muslims to rid Iraq of infidels and apostates--its names for Americans and their Iraqi partners. The colorful,...

Kanan Makiya: "all levels of the Iraqi government were complicit.".(Interview)
March 22, 2005... Kanan Makiya is among Iraq's most prominent democracy and human rights advocates. Born in Baghdad in 1949, he left Iraq in 1968 to study architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology but, starting in 1981, dedicated himself to...

Saddam's Baath Party back in business.(Brief Article)
March 22, 2005... BAGHDAD -- By day, Iraqis loyal to Saddam Hussein's much-feared Baath Party recite their oath in clandestine meetings, solicit donations from former members, and talk politics over sugary tea at a Baghdad cafe known as simply "The Party." ...

Who undercut Ambassador Horan?(Correspondence)(Letter to the Editor)
March 22, 2005... To the Editor: Your tribute to Ambassador Hume Horan was moving and richly deserved. He was a man of extraordinary decency, integrity, and ability. The only sentence in the piece with which I'd quibble is the one that reads, "Horan's...

The Challenge of Hizb ut Tahrir: Deciphering and Combating Radical Islamist Ideology.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... The Challenge of Hizb ut Tahrir: Deciphering and Combating Radical Islamist Ideology. Edited by Zeyno Baran. Washington, D.C.: The Nixon Center, 2004. 119 pp. $6.95, paper. The Nixon Center's February 2004 Istanbul workshop on Hizb...

The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign against Terror.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... The CIA at War: Inside the Secret Campaign against Terror. By Ronald Kessler. New York: St. Martin's Press, 2003. 496 pp. $27.95 ($15.95, paper). Kessler, a New York Times journalist and best-selling author, gained impressive access to the...

Dark Victory: America's Second War against Iraq.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Dark Victory: America's Second War against Iraq. By Jeffrey Record. Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2004. 375 pp. $24.95. In 1993, Record, a former Senate Armed Services Committee staff member, authored Hollow Victory: A Contrary View of...

Disarming Iraq.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Disarming Iraq. By Hans Blix. New York: Pantheon Books, 2004. 285 pp. $24. Blix has produced a straightforward, easy-to-read account of the U.N.'s Iraq inspections and the crisis at the U.N. in the lead-up to the 2003 Iraq war. With its...

Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis. By Bat Ye'or. Cranbury, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005. 384 pp. $49.50 ($23.95, paper). In 1985, Bat Ye'or offered Islamic studies a surprise with her book, The Dhimmi: Jews and Christians...

Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel.(Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue)(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Oasis of Dreams: Teaching and Learning Peace in a Jewish-Palestinian Village in Israel. By Grace Feuerverger. New York and London: Routledge Falmer, 2001.218 pp. $25.95, paper. Israeli and Palestinian Identities in Dialogue. Edited by Rabah...

Operation Iraqi Freedom and the New Iraq. Insights and Forecasts.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Operation Iraqi Freedom and the New Iraq. Insights and Forecasts. Edited by Michael Knights. Washington: The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, 2004.375 pp. $19.95, paper. The 2003 Iraq war has spawned much punditry. Journalists,...

What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building.(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... What We Owe Iraq: War and the Ethics of Nation Building. By Noah Feldman. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. 154 pp. $19.95. Feldman, a New York University professor of constitutional law who briefly worked for the Coalition...

Who's Left in Israel?(Book Review)
March 22, 2005... Who's Left in Israel? Edited by Dan Leon. Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. 189 pp. $49.50 ($24.95, paper). Leon, former editor of New Outlook, has collected articles by Israel's most vociferous and venomous far-leftists to show that,...

Dissident Watch: Aktham Naisse.(Commentary)
March 22, 2005... In 1989, Aktham Naisse, a 38-year-old Syrian human rights activist, founded the Committee for the Defense of Democratic Liberties and Human Rights and started publishing the Sawt ad-Dimuqratiya (Voice of Democracy) newsletter. Two years later,...