Sohrab Ahmari is a journalist, author, and commentator known for his writing on Middle Eastern politics, Islamism, and foreign policy. He contributed to The Weekly Standard between 2010 and 2014, covering topics including Iran, jihadism, and human rights in the Middle East and Europe. He has since become a prominent voice in conservative intellectual circles, serving as an op-ed editor at the New York Post and authoring several books.
Amiri Baraka, New Jersey’s controversial one-time poet laureate, died yesterday, aged 79. The poet, essayist, and playwright’s body of work will be remembered, if at all, as among the least humane in the history of American letters. An early 9/11 denier—a notorious 2002 poem suggested Jews were…
Trita Parsi has some explaining to do. The Iranian-born and Swedish-raised president of the National Iranian American Council is perhaps the most outspoken advocate for engagement with the Islamist regime in Tehran. If that posture has won him praise in certain foreign policy circles, this may be…
Today, after deliberating for less than ten hours, a federal jury found Tarek Mehanna guilty of the most serious charges leveled by federal prosecutors against him, including providing material support to terrorists, conspiring to kill in a foreign country, and lying to counterterrorism officials.…
In late March, as Boston emerged from winter, so did the city’s protest community. On the 24th of the month I watched as antiwar students joined forces with partisans of the Palestinian cause and Nation of Islam members in their immaculately pressed suits and distinctive bow ties, to gather in…
The Oslo Freedom Forum is the brainchild of activist and social entrepreneur Thor Halvorssen. As the National Review’s Jay Nordlinger recently commented, Halvorssen’s Forum is “that rare thing under the sun: a genuine human rights conference.” Unlike so many other such gatherings, the goal here in…
Ahmed Benchemsi would probably have held on to his job as editor of Morocco’s top newsmagazine, TelQuel, had he known a wave of democratic uprisings was about to engulf the Middle East and North Africa. Last October, he had been forced to shutter TelQuel’s Arabic-language sister publication,…
Oslo—During the Second World War, Nazi Germany occupied Norway over five brutal years. By the time the Scandinavian nation was liberated by Allied forces and its indigenous resistance movement, more than 10,000 Norwegians had lost their lives and almost as many had spent time in German…
Though Egyptian state TV has announced Hosni Mubarak’s resignation, it is unclear what the mass revolt rocking Egypt has in store for that ancient nation’s future. But what is clear is that the momentous events in Cairo--and, indeed, the massive tsunami of people-power engulfing the entire…
The Ayatollahs’ Democracy