The upcoming Baghdad meeting over Iran’s nuclear program has raised legitimate hopes of a peaceful end to a high-stakes conflict, but it also raises risks that the P5+1 powers will misplay their hand – by either accepting a bad deal or letting Tehran buy time and make further progress on the nuclear front. Here, then, …
As U.S. and other global leaders prepare for their May 23rd meeting with Iranian officials on nuclear issues, the regime in Tehran continues to showcase its odious nature by abusing the rights of its people – particularly its gays. Gay rights in Iran may seem disconnected to Iran’s nuclear program but, in at least one …
“And so it goes.” The phrase, from Kurt Vonnegut’s 1969 anti-war classic, Slaughterhouse-Five, is a literary shrug; a way to dismiss death and destruction; a device for turning the page rather than confronting humanitarian horror. Collectively, that’s where we are in Syria. The region looks for U.S. leadership, but a war-weary, economically fragile America has …
Dear Diary, I’m still grieving my father’s death this week, and I haven’t received any condolences from Arab leaders. I wasn’t expecting any, of course. Frankly, it’s my friends and colleagues, at home and around the world, who are giving me more sleepless nights lately. I’ve been working my tuchis off the last several years …
“Iran perceives the renewal of its nuclear talks with the 5+1 as a significant victory over the West and over its Arab neighbors,” the Middle East Media Research Institute (MEMRI) reports this week, “both in terms of the substance of the talks and in terms of enhancing Iran’s geopolitical status – which has suffered considerably …
Continue reading “New nuclear talks mark Iranian victory, Western retreat”
I met Irshad Manji, the dynamic Muslim reformer, several years ago in Washington when she passed through in between her jaunts to Europe, Asia, and elsewhere to discuss, per the title of her first book, the “trouble” with Islam today and offer what she considers a more modern, more tolerant, more pluralistic interpretation of her …
A gaunt man of 62, bearded and bespectacled, stares at us through sad eyes that reveal his pain. On the day in late March that Rabbi Arthur Schneier visited him in his Cuban jail, he wore a light blue shirt, a white undershirt, and a tallit over his shoulders as he and Schneier posed for …
Continue reading “Hell hole in Cuba: Raul must free Alan Gross”