Olivier Guitta

London

Plus ça change. .  .  . Algeria, ever obedient to the wishes of the army and Security Services, reelected its ailing and elderly president in a landslide on April 17. Abdelaziz Bouteflika, known as Boutef for short, garnered 82 percent of the vote in a virtually uncontested race. Ali Benflis, who…

it is less than three years since the fruit vendor Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire in the small Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, sparking the events that toppled dictator Ben Ali and launched the “Arab Spring.” Now, the high hopes of those days have faded, and Tunisia is in disarray, its society…

Algerian president Abdelaziz Bouteflika returned to Algiers on July 16 after three months in a hospital in Paris. His health will prevent him from running for reelection in April, and it’s unclear whether he can run the country until then. As a result, the contest over his succession is already…

Normally placid, neutral Switzerland has been going through a rough couple of years. First there was financial scandal, when Swiss banking giant UBS was caught helping U.S. clients evade taxes. Then came intense international pressure to overturn the country’s banking secrecy laws. It didn’t help…

In his speech in Cairo, President Obama mentioned no less than three times the headscarf sometimes worn by Muslim women. Each time, his purpose was to stress "the right of women and girls to wear the hijab"--but never their right not to wear it. It was as if it had never occurred to the president…

A few weeks ago, an adviser to Iran's supreme leader called Bahrain Iran's 14th province. Not only did Bahrain react indignantly, but--more important--so did Saudi Arabia. For, even as a potential conflict between Iran and Israel grabs headlines, tensions have been building between Tehran and…

In terms of Islamic extremists in Canada [as] they regard the proximity of Canada to the U.S., it's making Canada a kind of Islamic extremist aircraft carrier for the launching of major assaults against the U.S. mainland.

While al Qaeda and the Muslim Brotherhood have become household names, another Sunni Islamist group of nearly equal importance--Hizb ut- Tahrir (HT), or the Islamic Liberation party--remains little known in the United States. That may be changing. HT's activities in places as far-flung as Britain,…

As jihadist plots continue to be uncovered from Glasgow to New Jersey, it is plain that no place can be considered entirely safe. That includes placid, would-be neutral Switzerland, where a series of incidents and controversies in recent months points to a small but untiring Saudi-sponsored…

WHILE THE April 11 suicide bombings in Algiers struck at hard targets--the government palace and a police station--soft targets are most likely the preferred point of attack for terrorists in the region.

A few days before the March 11 suicide bombing that rocked Casablanca, Moroccan police arrested a big fish: Saad Husseini, number two in the Moroccan Islamic Combatant Group (GICM), the outfit responsible for terror attacks in Casablanca in 2003 and Madrid in 2004 that killed a total of 236 people.…

THE CHIRAC ERA is fast coming to a close. After a twelve-year stint as French president, Chirac will soon leave the Elysée Palace, and his successor will most likely be none other than Chirac's interior minister Nicolas Sarkozy. But despite Sarkozy's ties to Chirac, he represents a glimmer of hope…

On March 11, three years to the day after the Madrid bombings, a cybercafe in Casablanca was hit. Two terrorists carrying explosive belts entered the cybercafe to surf the web. They were trying to connect to a terrorism-related site, and the manager wanted to prevent them from doing so. When he…

After nearly four years of fruitless negotiations between the EU-3 (France, Germany, and the United Kingdom) and Iran over the nuclear issue, the U.N. Security Council on December 23 passed Resolution 1737. It imposed limited, almost meaningless, sanctions on the mullahs' regime. But it also set a…

WHILE SOMALIA HAS been grabbing all the headlines, it isn't the only area of Africa that has seen a recent surge in terror activity among al Qaeda linked groups. Jihadists have been making advances in the Maghreb--that part of North Africa composed of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia--as well. While…

IN 1989, the first hijab incident in Europe took place in Creil, a suburb of Paris, when three high school girls tried to go to class wearing the Islamic headscarf. The students were expelled. Fifteen years later, with the hijab spreading fast among Muslims in France, the government formally banned…

ON SEPTEMBER 20, the State Department denied a visa to Muslim scholar Tariq Ramadan on the grounds that he had contributed around 600 euros to a French charity classified as a terrorist organization since 2003 because of its relationship with the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas. This latest…

A LITTLE MORE THAN three years ago, Morocco experienced Islamic terrorism firsthand. On May 16, 2003, Casablanca was hit with four simultaneous attacks that left 45 people dead and hundreds injured. The attacks were perpetrated by Moroccan citizens who were members of the al Qaeda-affiliated…

FRANCE HAS A LONG HISTORY in Lebanon, a country it administered under a League of Nations mandate from 1920 to 1943 and whose elite is bilingual in French and Arabic. France also has a history with Hezbollah, going back to the group's beginnings more than twenty years ago. In order to appreciate…

ON JULY 10, a group of terrorists entered a campground in Gouraya, a Mediterranean resort 75 miles from Algiers, and randomly massacred 5 people. The victims were among the 22 killed by terrorists in Algeria in the first half of July--putting that month on track to be a little less bloody than…

Paris

IT IS NOW ABUNDANTLY CLEAR that the recent murderous protests over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper last September were anything but spontaneous. The actions of Islamist agitators and financiers have deliberately drummed up rage among far-flung extremists otherwise…

THE FRENCH USE THE EUPHEMISM "quartiers sensibles"--sensitive neighborhoods--for the troubled, predominantly Arab and African working-class suburbs of Paris and other cities that increasingly resemble a ticking bomb at the heart of their society.

IN THE AFTERMATH of the London bombings perpetrated by homegrown jihadists, Europeans are rethinking their approach to multiculturalism in general and their tolerance for hate speech--especially the sermons of radical imams--in particular. In France, which has long had hate-speech laws, Interior…

AN OFFICIAL REPORT DEALING WITH religious expression in French schools has become a must read for anyone interested in the Islamization of France. Written under the auspices of the top national education official, Jean-Pierre Obin, the report was not initially released by the Ministry of Education.…

TWO RECENT REPORTS in the Lebanese press suggest that there may be less to Syria's withdrawal from Lebanon than meets the eye. First, the daily Al Seyassah (a Kuwaiti paper which carries a Lebanese edition) reported that, according to sources close to the Lebanese Ministry of Interior, tens of…

FR D RIC ENCEL, PROFESSOR OF international relations at the prestigious Ecole Nationale d'Administration in Paris and a man not known for crying wolf, recently stated that France is becoming a new Lebanon. The implication, far-fetched though it may seem, was that civil upheaval might be no more…

THE MOST IMPORTANT POLITICAL EVENT in Saudi Arabia in the last year may have been the appointment on February 9 of Abdullah bin Saleh al-Obaid, a hard-core Wahhabi, to the prestigious post of education minister. Al-Obaid replaces a secularist reformer at the head of a ministry controlling 27…

IN THE PAST FEW WEEKS, Kuwait has been waging its own war on terror at home. The police have engaged in five fierce and bloody gun battles with extremists since January 10, as reported by the Associated Press. Five policemen have been killed in these encounters, along with four security men and two…

DEPENDING ON THE OUTCOME OF the investigation, a recent grisly murder in Jersey City, New Jersey, may be a sign of things to come in our domestic war on terror.