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Coming on the heels of a spate of revelations regarding corruption in the Israeli government – as well as worrisome signs of dysfunction in Israeli governance, exposed during last summer's unresolved campaign against Hamas – the Israeli public was shocked again recently by yet more revelations of pervasive corruption in high places. Now a dark cloud on the political horizon, corruption (as well as its neglect by the authorities) shows signs of developing into a major political storm. It could deeply affect the upcoming March elections, in which Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will have to defend his seat against a...

Henry Kissinger to Iraq in 1975: "We Can Reduce Israel's Size" Middle East QuarterlyFall 2006, pp. 71-78 Print Send RSS Preface by Kenneth W. SteinThe December 1975 memorandum of conversation between U.S. secretary of state Henry Kissinger and Iraqi foreign minister Sa'dun Hammadi reflects deep U.S.-Iraqi tensions at a time when Baghdad was widely considered the most radical Arab capital. It also reveals Kissinger's effort to soften Baghdad's hard-line views toward Washington.Bilateral tension was entrenched. Before 1958, Iraq had been part of the U.S.-sponsored Baghdad pact, an anti-Soviet alliance, but Iraq's 1958 Republican Revolution deeply changed the Iraqi policy. General...

Is a Muslim within his rights to insist a female physician examine his wife, or refuse male assistance in the birth of his child? And, are hospitals obliged to accommodate the Muslim's wish when this unfairly burdens staff, entails a delay that jeopardizes patient care, or if accommodations like these contravene the Hippocratic oath? Europe grapples with questions like these with increasing frequency; and Great Britain and the Netherlands appear well on their way to translating the discriminating tastes of their hospital guests into hospital policy. The Dutch Telegraaf reports that the Dutch physicians' organization (KNMG), in reply to...

Amidst the vacuum of Judy Miller saying nothing and the misshapen vessel of Bob Novak's obfuscations, informed speculation swirls, on this site among many. At bottom, we wonder if Miller -- perhaps the private citizen singly most responsible for the current quagmire -- is admirably upholding a principle underlying one of the few brakes on an unbridled administration. Or has she realized, potential book deal and all, the salutary power of a four-month stint in reputation rehab? Or just maybe, as has been recently and deliciously floated, is she protecting her own Tinkers to Evans to Chance role as a...

Posted on Fri, Apr. 04, 2003 Group pans selection of Phila. man for panel By David O'Reilly Inquirer Staff Writer The White House yesterday announced that President Bush had nominated Daniel Pipes of Philadelphia, a controversial scholar of militant Islam, to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. An American Muslim advocacy group that Pipes has called "Osama bin Laden's representatives in Washington" quickly denounced the appointment as "insensitive" and called on Bush to rescind it. The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) yesterday described Pipes as "the nation's leading Islamophobe" and an advocate for Israeli interests. Pipes is director...

The software is blocking the posting of material from the callous, cynical, hate-filled, hypocrite lefties at CounterPunch. I'm going to go ahead and provide a link under this vanity for the following reasons: 1) To further publicize the Middle East Forum's important new website, Campus Watch, which is devoted to monitoring and countering the extreme political radicalism and anti-Westernism dominant in academic Islamic & Middle Eastern Studies. 2) So y'all can have a good laugh at how the lefties HOWL when the merest shadow of their tactics of academic insurgency are applied to them. (Somebody call the WHAAAAAAAAAAAMBULANCE!) CounterPunch article...

An important new organization that promises to focus public concern on "blame America first" bias in the academy is in danger of being discredited. The Middle East Forum, under the direction of Daniel Pipes, has established a project and website called, "Campus Watch." Campus Watch is designed to monitor Middle East Studies in the United States, analyzing and criticizing errors and biases, and drawing public attention to controversies over funding, academic appointments, etc. Campus Watch maintains that Middle East Studies in the United States is dominated by professors who are actively hostile to America's interests in the world. The organization's...

Here is their "About Us" page: About Campus Watch The Problem American scholars of the Middle East, to varying degrees, reject the views of most Americans and the enduring policies of the U.S. government about the Middle East.Examples: There may be a war on terrorism underway, but the scholars downplay the dangers posed by militant Islam, seeing it as a benign and even democratizing force.With only one exception, every American president since 1948 has spoken forcefully about the benefits to the United States from strong and deep relations with Israel. In contrast, American scholars often propagate a view of Middle...

World dispatch -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues Monday August 19, 2002 A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue...

How CAIR Put My Life in Perilby Khalid Durán On April 4, 2001, a self-described advocacy group based in Washington, D.C. by the name of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), issued a press release1 attacking my forthcoming book, Children of Abraham: An Introduction to Islam for Jews.2 CAIR's attack snowballed into a campaign of personal vilification, which eventuated in a Jordanian political leader calling me an apostate (murtadd).3 Neither CAIR nor Sheikh ‘Abd al-Mun‘im Abu Zant of Jordan's Islamic Action Front had ever read or even seen my book, but the CAIR attack prompted the latter to issue an...