Published in Middle East Policy, Washington, D.C.; December 5, 2014 Mustafa Malik, an international affairs commentator in Washington, is investigating the impact of Hindu nationalism on liberal values and democratic institutions in his native India. Earlier, he conducted fieldwork on religious movements and nationalist experiments in the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent as a...
On the darker upper strip of my computer screen I saw my eyebrows rising, as I read, for the first time, President Obama’s mission in Iraq and Syria. Now, as his aides and spokespersons drone on and on about that mission, I get ticked off or, alternately, amused. Can the United States and its allies...
The anti-government protests now raging in Pakistan and the travails of Hamas in Palestine remind me of Nurul Amin, my mentor. He served, at different times, as prime minister of Pakistan and Bangladesh, which was then East Pakistan. In February 1972, in Rawalpindi, Amin was telling me about the political intrigues that had led to...
Here’s a searing expose of the ominous U.S.-Israeli narrative about Iran’s nuclear program. It shows how American neocons and the Israeli right wing made Iran’s peaceful nuclear program into an “existential threat” to Israel and sold it to the world. It reminds me of the “mushroom cloud” invented and propagated by the neocons during the...
America and Iraq would have been spared the horrors of the uncalled for Iraq war if children of those who had decided to invade that country had been sent into the battlefields.
THE UNITED STATES has taken a welcome step to tackle the Syrian crisis. It has joined Russia in arranging a peace conference in Geneva next month, which, unfortunately, would also expose America’s diminished global standing. The end of Syria’s murderous Bashar al-Assad regime will come, however, from its eventual attrition from the uprising. A main...
The Independent echoed the common Western views of Salam Fayyad’s resignation. The Palestinian prime minister’s exit had “thro[wn] into doubt the future of the Palestinian Authority and the peace process with Israel,” observed the liberal British newspaper. Has Fayyad’s parting really caused – or rather reflected – the crisis facing the Palestinian government and the...
AS CHUCK HAGEL is about to be nominated for the defense secretary post, neocons and the Israel lobby have got their knives out. These henchmen of the Israeli right-wing masterminded the disastrous Iraq war. Most of us knew the war’s twofold goals: To take out Saddam Hussein because he was Israel’s fiercest and strongest Arab...
Political columnist Pat Buchanan once described Capitol Hill as the third “Israeli-occupied territory” after the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. Those days the White House frequently resisted Israeli pressure to support its occupation of the West Bank and Gaza, while Congress routinely supported the Israeli stance. Thursday, the Obama administration voted against the U.N....
That was a shocker. On Monday, Mitt Romney launched a blistering, if empty, assault on President Obama’s allegedly “passive” policy toward Muslim extremists and terrorists. The Republican presidential nominee accused the president of not being able to tackle “violent extremists,” some of whom stormed the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. Obama “passive” about extremists and...