Stephen Schwartz

The author of this volume—a professor of Spanish and Portuguese studies at Northwestern—wrote it with provocative intent. But whether The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise will stimulate the academic and media debate he desires cannot be predicted. Darío Fernández-Morera's arguments are undermined by…

This evening, the Washington policy debate over radical Islam is promised a fresh interfaith effort. In the Dirksen Senate Office Building, beginning at 6 p.m., Sens. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) and Ben Cardin (D-Md) will cohost a reception honoring a new "Muslim Jewish Advisory Council" (MJAC). The…

In a decision separate from the U.S. inquiries into Russian political interference during the 2016 presidential contest, Washington announced on Monday, January 9, that five prominent individuals inside Russia would be sanctioned. The U.S. Treasury's Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) added…

On Sunday, January 8, an editorial in The Guardian pointed out correctly, “whatever else there is to say about Russia's alleged involvement in the 2016 US election, do not make the mistake of saying that such a thing is unprecedented—because it is not." Indeed, anyone who thinks there is no…

Founded in 2007, the Community Security Service (CSS) is a low-profile, nonprofit organization based in New York City and concerned with protection of American Jewish institutions and public activities. CSS has trained thousands of volunteers in professional security methods, provides physical…

Turkey's Islamist president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, appears as the sole person in his country's politics who knows what he wants. Erdogan seeks absolute power and acts against all obstacles to his ambitions. He is eager to identify new "enemies" whose purported conspiracies he believes justify his…

Andrzej Wajda, the Polish film and theatre producer and director who restored his country's consciousness of its torment at the hands of its Russian and Nazi German enemies, died on October 9 in Warsaw at the age of 90. His body of work made him an outstanding personality in the past 60 years of…

On Friday, September 23, U.S. federal judge Leonie Brinkema of the Eastern District of Virginia sentenced Kosovo-born Ardit Ferizi, a 21-year old citizen of that Balkan state, to 20 years in prison for hacking into an American-based retail company database and culling the names, email addresses,…

Warren Hinckle III, who died last month in San Francisco, aged 77, was a man of the past. He enjoyed a brief period of national prominence during the late 1960s, when he edited Ramparts, the aggressively leftist monthly. But during the Hinckle ascendancy, his capers and capering—often overdressed…

Warren Hinckle III, who died last month in San Francisco, aged 77, was a man of the past. He enjoyed a brief period of national prominence during the late 1960s, when he edited Ramparts, the aggressively leftist monthly. But during the Hinckle ascendancy, his capers and capering—often overdressed…

The death of Islam Karimov, the 78-year old party boss and dictatorial president of Soviet and post-Soviet Uzbekistan, a key strategic power in Central Asia, was announced September 2 in official Uzbek media. The cause of his demise was reported to be a stroke, and rumors of it had circulated for…

Adam Hochschild is a prominent San Francisco leftist, cofounder of Mother Jones, and the successful author of books on the British antislavery movement, the Belgian colonization of the Congo, World War I, and the legacy of Joseph Stalin. In assembling this volume, he faced a formidable challenge:…

Adam Hochschild is a prominent San Francisco leftist, cofounder of Mother Jones, and the successful author of books on the British antislavery movement, the Belgian colonization of the Congo, World War I, and the legacy of Joseph Stalin. In assembling this volume, he faced a formidable challenge:…

The Islamic Republic of Iran does not recognize the independence of the Republic of Kosovo. While the Balkan state of some 1.8 million people is 80 percent Muslim, few among them are Shia, save for some spiritual Sufis whose variety of Shiism is extremely heterodox when compared with Tehran's…

The rulers of Saudi Arabia have announced a new program for cultural renovation of architecture associated with the life of Muhammad. As described in the leading pan-Arab daily Asharq Al-Awsat, a Saudi Commission for Tourism and National Heritage (SCTH) has begun planning rehabilitation of sites in…

Pristina, Kosovo

On May 19, Montenegro, smallest of the Balkan states with only about 650,000 people, signed the accession protocol beginning its process of membership in NATO. If the agreement is ratified by all the countries of the Atlantic alliance, which seems probable, Montenegro will become its 29th…

On April 26, Pope Francis recognized the martyrdom of 38 Albanian Christian church leaders killed during the Communist terror of Enver Hoxha, who ruled the small and poor Balkan country from 1944 until his death in 1985. Ecclesiastical affirmation of their martyrdom is an important step toward…

Few ordinary Americans still consider the contras, the Nicaraguan anti-Communist rebels of the 1980s, much of a hot topic. But American leftists, especially among the Democrats of Washington, D.C., haven’t forgotten them. The reappearance in George W. Bush’s administration of John Negroponte, Otto…

Authorities in Bosnia-Herzegovina have initiated a new proceeding against Husein Bilal Bosnic, a prominent local Wahhabi preacher, reports the Sarajevo daily of record, Oslobodjenje [Liberation]. Bosnic is already behind bars, convicted of organizing groups to join the so-called "Islamic State"…

Radovan Karadzic has been convicted and sentenced to 40 years' imprisonment for genocide and other crimes, by the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague. He was the political leader of radical nationalist Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina during the 1992-95 war that…

Notwithstanding its 80 percent Albanian Muslim population, Kosovo has mostly kept infiltration by ISIS or other Islamist radicals at bay. Hashim Thaci, the former head of the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), elected president by the country's National Assembly on February 26, told the German newspaper…

Ardit Ferizi, 20, appeared in federal court in Alexandria at the end of January, in what may be the first legal case in the United States involving terrorism and computer hacking. The proceeding shows how a simple network of operatives and computers is used by the so-called "Islamic State" (ISIS)…

Noel Malcolm, senior research fellow at All Souls College Oxford, is a polyglot and polymath. Skillful with sources in Albanian, Romanian, Serbian, modern Turkish, Italian, and other languages, he is probably best known for books produced during the Balkan wars of the 1990s, Bosnia: A Short History…

It seems time is running out for the main protagonist in a quarter-century-long saga involving radical Islam and hyper-humanitarianism, extending from Iraqi Kurdistan to Norway. A U.S.-designated terrorist group, Ansar al-Islam (Volunteers of Islam) is prominent in the Syria and Iraq fighting,…

Nigeria, once known only as Africa's most populous country, now mainly makes headlines for the eruption in its northeast of the brutal jihadist force, Boko Haram ("Western education is prohibited"). Boko Haram has occupied parts of Nigeria and invaded neighbors, including Niger, Cameroon, and Chad.…

The Dayton accords, formally signed in December 1995, have reached their twentieth anniversary. Dayton is commonly portrayed as a “peace agreement” for war-torn Bosnia-Herzegovina and an outstanding achievement of Bill Clinton’s administration. The accords were an achievement; the war ended. Yet…

The Spanish Civil War is among the 20th-century military conflicts about which the most continues to be published, and in many languages. Often, new volumes on the three-year (1936-39) bloodbath recapitulate old themes: the ideological drama of fascist militarism versus a leftist republic;…

On Sunday, October 4, the Central Asian former-Soviet republic of Kyrgyzstan held national elections to its 120-member parliament. The main incumbent party, the reforming Social Democrats (SDPK) were returned to power, and the ruling president, Almazbek Atambayev, who is their leader, gained a…

The photo of 3-year old Aylan Kurdi, drowned on a Turkish beach, elicited declarations of concern from media around the world. Aylan’s brother Galip, 5, and their mother Rehanna died in the same incident. After four years of civil war in Syria, we were told, the horrific photograph would awaken the…

Daša Drndić, a Croatian, has gained respect in her country as a novelist, literary critic, and playwright. After teaching in Canada and completing a master’s degree in communications in the United States, thanks to a Fulbright grant, she now teaches philosophy at the University of Rijeka. 

Twenty years have now passed since the brutal subjugation of the besieged town of Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia-Herzegovina, after which 8,000 Bosnian Muslim men and boys were slaughtered by Serbs commanded by ex-Yugoslav army general Ratko Mladic. The terrible episode is itself worth commemorating,…

On Wednesday, June 24, as reported by the Balkan Investigative Reporting Network (BIRN), a foreign-funded news agency, the government of Kosovo sent police to raid the offices of five Iranian-controlled non-governmental organizations in the Balkan country.

Female genital mutilation or cutting (FGM/C) exists in the Islamic Republic of Iran even while the redoubt of clerical dictatorship is absent from a recent survey of FGM in 29 countries, published by UNICEF. The UN agency examined states in Africa and the Middle East. The UNICEF document did not…

Skopje

“Islamophobia,” which carries with it implications of viciousness, pain, and disease, is not considered a neutral term, either by Muslims who accuse others of it (including some moderate believers in Islam), or by those who supposedly spread it. “Islamophobia” suggests deliberate, if not deranged,…

On Wednesday, April 29, King Salman Bin Abd Al-Aziz of Saudi Arabia announced a set of changes to his cabinet. Salman, 79, assumed the throne after the death of his half-brother, King Abdullah Bin Abd Al-Aziz, in January. Abdullah, who was 90 or 91, earned a reputation as a reformer of the desert…

Last month the Kosovar Center for Security Studies (KCSS), a think-tank in the Balkan republic, published a “Report Inquiring Into the Causes and Consequences of Kosovo Citizens’ Involvement as Foreign Fighters in Syria and Iraq.” The survey was financed by the U.S. Embassy in Pristina, the Kosovo…

Kosovo Albanians, overwhelmingly Muslim, love America—which rescued them from Serbian aggression in 1999—and desire diplomatic relations with Israel. Kosovo does not recognize the Palestinian Authority and does not belong to the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC).

Following the death of Saudi King Abdullah at the end of January, and the succession of his half-brother, now King Salman, 79, many observers of the desert monarchy have speculated on its future.

Muslim political and religious leaders in Bosnia-Herzegovina, which is partitioned between a “Republic of Serbs” and a “Muslim-Croat Federation,” have taken firm measures to stop agitation and recruitment for ISIS.

The Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) is a federal program that, since its establishment by Congress in 2001, has granted millions of dollars—$47,750,971 through 2013—to about 800 projects of foreign governments seeking to preserve historic structures and institutions. Administered…

The hideous practice of female genital mutilation (FGM) is neither an exclusively Muslim nor a principally Middle Eastern phenomenon. It exists among non-Muslims through wide areas of Africa.

Barack Obama’s accommodation with Castroite Cuba is a low point in the history of American international relations. Benjamin Franklin affirmed, “Where liberty dwells, there is my country.” The Obama administration, in its attitudes on Iran, Syria, and Ukraine as well as on Cuba, appears to prefer…

German chancellor Angela Merkel has cautioned that the adventurism of Russian president Vladimir Putin would not remain limited to Ukraine, or even to other countries bordering on Russia. Since Russia seized Crimea in February-March 2014, Putin’s provocative campaign has included imposition of…

As Saudi Arabia undergoes its slow process of change, the matter of women and motor vehicles remains crucial. On October 24, Saudi women were summoned by a social media campaign to take to the roads in cars they own, typically, but do not drive.

Ayatollah Seyed Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi has been imprisoned in his native land since 2006. In a statement on November 7, he announced a hunger strike from his cell in Tehran’s Evin House of Detention, notorious for the political and spiritual dissidents held and abused there.

Recently, some media commentators have argued that, rather than the product of a simple confrontation between Sunni and Shia Muslims in Syria and Iraq, the rise of the so-called “Islamic State” should be perceived as an eruption into those countries of Wahhabism, the only interpretation of Islam…

Since Islam emerged more than 14 centuries ago, Mecca, near the western coast of the Arabian peninsula, has drawn the interest of the world. For Muslim believers, the city and its sacred mosque—which encompasses a high, cubical structure, the Kaaba—are the focus of spiritual devotion as the qibla,…

The Islamic Republic of Iran remains the worst global example of capricious interference by Muslim theocrats in the personal and spiritual lives of its citizens. On September 9, as reported by the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran (ICHRI), seven young Iranians went on trial. Their…

Perm-36, also known as ITK-6, is the only intact facility remaining in Russia from the Soviet-era gulag system of political prisons and labor camps. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Perm-36 was turned into a Gulag Museum, “to promote democratic values and civic consciousness in contemporary…

Abulghasem Salavati, who heads Branch 15 of the Revolutionary Court in Tehran, is known as one of Iran’s “hanging judges.” As the London Guardian reported recently, Salavati and his colleague, Mohammad Moghiseh, are most prominent judges in a drive to suppress independent journalists and political…

Ayatollah Seyed Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi has been incarcerated, mainly in Tehran’s ignominious Evin Prison, since 2006. He is accused of “combat against God” for his criticisms of the Iranian clerical dictatorship, and is serving an 11-year sentence. Now kept in the “special clerical ward,” he…

On Friday, July 11, as reported at the Kurdish English-language news portal Rudaw [Events], combat fighters representing the Kurdish Regional Government (KRG) in Iraq, known as Peshmerga, occupied oil fields in Hassan and Makhmour, near the ethnically-mixed city of Kirkuk that the KRG occupied in…

The virtues of Stanley Payne, the outstanding living historian of the Spanish Civil War, are on gratifying display in this comprehensive volume. He writes with appropriate sweep: “[C]ivil war in Spain was not a complete anomaly, but rather the only massive internal conflict to break out in Western…

April 17, 2014, has come to be known among Iranian dissidents as “Black Thursday.” On that day, at least 100 Iranian riot police, members of the Revolutionary Guard Corps, soldiers, and officers of the Ministry of Intelligence and National Security joined prison guards in raiding Ward 350 of…

Vladimir Putin learned lessons from the Balkan wars of the 1990s that the rest of the world ignored or has forgotten. He invokes an obviously false parallel between the NATO bombing of Serbia and liberation of Kosovo in 1999, and his own annexation of Crimea. In his speech of March 18, Putin sought…

Travelling from Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina, to Mostar, a city almost midway toward Dubrovnik on the Adriatic Coast, one drives through a stunningly-beautiful landscape of mountains, forests, and rivers. On a recent trip, however, I observed a surprising sight: four gas stations…

On Saturday, March 8, members of the Gonabadi-Nimatullahi Sufi order, the most powerful Muslim contemplative body in Iran, assembled with supporters of other political prisoners in Tehran, for a peaceful protest against repression by the country’s clerical regime. Participants in the demonstration,…

Sarajevo

As reported in the Washington Post on February 3, tough punishment of Saudi Arabians who travel abroad for jihad has been decreed by King Abdullah, absolute ruler of the desert monarchy.

The young state of Kosovo—with an Albanian majority of more than 90 percent, of whom 80 percent are Muslim—declared its independence in 2008, but now faces a “risk from extremist religious currents, which requires . . . counter-measures at a strategic level.” Further, Kosovar Albanians have an…

The ascension of Iran’s president Hassan Rouhani supposedly represented a “period of hope.” That may be true for Western negotiators hoping to spend more time in Geneva, but not for the Sufis and other religious minorities of Iran, whom the regime in Tehran continues to repress.

On November 26, the Financial Times published an extravagant encomium to Lady Catherine Ashton by its Brussels bureau chief Peter Spiegel, under the headline “EU foreign policy chief Lady Ashton comes of age in Iran talks.” Spiegel reported, “her team returned from negotiations in Geneva to a…

The Obama administration’s appeasement of Iran over its nuclear weapons program is intertwined with its appeasement of Syrian president Bashar al-Assad. For Obama, the red line in Syria was the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons, not his murdering, at this stage, upwards of 120,000 people.…

On October 28, 1913, a trial ended in Kiev, then in imperial Russia and today capital of Ukraine. Mendel Menahem Beilis, a 39-year-old secular Jew and father of five children, a Russian military veteran, and manager of a brick factory, had been accused of murder for alleged ritual purposes—the…

On Saturday, October 26, news broadcasts around the world presented images that, innocuous in any other country, were revolutionary for the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Responding to an online petition titled “oct26driving.com,” at least 60 female subjects of the desert monarchy drove cars on the…

On October 2, Arab media reported that a Kuwaiti radical Muslim television preacher, Tareq Suwaidan, was prohibited from visiting Saudi Arabia. Suwaidan had sought to go to Mecca to perform “umrah,” a shorter version of the annual hajj pilgrimage.

Against the expectation of many observers, social change continues in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. Recent reforms have particularly affected the status of women. At the end of August, the Saudis took a remarkable and surprising step by criminalizing domestic violence. As reported in the London…

Challenged by a respected and moderate Islamic scholar, Dr. Xhabir Hamiti, in an election for the top position in the Islamic Community of Kosovo, the Balkan republic’s radical chief cleric Naim Ternava has “amended” the Community constitution, which limited occupancy of the post to two five-year…

The title of Ferghe News, an Iran-based website, means “Cult News.” It is dedicated mainly to defaming Sufi Muslims. But Ferghe News, following the ideological posture of the Iranian clerical dictatorship, also condemns the Saudi-based Wahhabi sect (historically the most violent enemies of the…

In the ongoing debate over Islam and democracy, Bangladesh, the eighth largest country in the world, with 164 million people—90 percent of them Muslim—is, oddly enough, seldom discussed. Yet Bangladesh has been a democratic, parliamentary republic since 1991. The country will hold new general…

Through the modernist upheaval in American cultural life, with its earliest significant traces in the 1930s and an inerasable mark on the society as we now know it, three publishing houses were most prominent in redefining aesthetic taste. All of the trio remain in business today. 

The Balkan republic of Kosovo has not been spared infiltration by Islamist extremism. In June, Imam Irfan Salihu from the historic and multifaith southern Kosovo city of Prizren—the country’s second largest after the capital, Pristina—was relieved of his mosque duties after delivering a harangue in…

The election of new Iranian president Hassan Rohani, a subordinate-level cleric, has led to much conjecture in Western media about his possible moderation in domestic, foreign and especially nuclear policy. But news of heavy prison sentences against seven spiritual Sufi webmasters and lawyers, held…

Arab and non-Arab commentators alike perceived a definitive regionalization of the Syrian civil war last month, when Iranian regular troops and Tehran-backed Hezbollah forces helped the dictatorship of Bashar al-Assad retake the strategic town of Qusayr, near the Lebanese border, from rebel…

On Monday, June 10, former British prime minister Tony Blair released a thoughtful memorandum that was quickly reproduced on websites around the world. Titled “The Trouble Within Islam,” Blair’s reflections were stimulated by the resurgence of Islamist terror in Britain, where a serviceman, Lee…

Early in this book, author Brendan Simms, professor of history at Cambridge, quotes John Locke: “How fond soever I am of peace I think truth ought to accompany it, which cannot be preserved without Liberty. Nor that without the Balance of Europe kept up.” As Simms indicates, for Locke, “truth” was…

Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, killed during the Boston rampage last week, and his surviving brother Dzhokar Tsarnaev, 19, who is charged by federal authorities in the series of abominable crimes, are doubtless the first Chechens many Americans will ever have heard of. And the news coverage of the last…

Away from the eyes of the world, ideological Islamists pursue infiltration of the moderate Muslim communities in Kosovo and Albania. But in nearly all cases, they continue to be rejected.

Who are the Hazaras and why are they marked for annihilation in Pakistan? Two frightful terror bombings, taking 185 lives and wounding hundreds more, were reported from the city of Quetta, near the border with Afghanistan, and the capital of Pakistan’s Baluchistan province, in the first two months…

On Thursday, February 21, at 10 a.m. local time, Iranian members of the Gonabadi-Nimatullahi Muslim contemplative order celebrated “the day of the Sufi” by protesting outside the infamous Evin Prison in Tehran. The demonstration marked the fourth anniversary of a memorable challenge to the…

Kosovo, the Albanian-majority Balkan republic, is probably best known for its fervent pro-Americanism, understandable given the role of U.S.-led NATO forces in assisting its 1.8 million inhabitants against Serbian oppression in 1999. American troops in Kosovo are drawn from National Guard units and…

In nearly all the Arab revolutions in North Africa and the jihadist offensives that followed them, incursions against Sufi shrines have preceded the onset of wide-scale radical aggression. As they initiate their invasive strategies, terrorists linked to al Qaeda and inspired by Saudi-financed…

Sarajevo

If I were of a cynical nature, I might suspect that this volume possesses an agenda beyond explaining the world’s most important and least predictable Muslim country to Westerners. But an awkward combination of a pretentious title and a lightweight style employed by its author should not distract…

The small republic of Kosovo, with a population of less than two million—90 percent ethnic Albanians, of whom 80 percent are Muslim—is the Balkan zone offering the greatest resistance to radical Islam. Some vignettes from recent interviews may impart the flavor of the debate over Islamism in the…

On November 29, Albania was the sole Muslim-majority country in the United Nations to be counted among the 41 abstainers from the proposal to admit Palestine as a non-member observer. Certain Islamists were displeased, to say the least. In particular, Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan,…

Tirana, Albania

Early in November, the Saudi Arabian government announced the replacement of interior minister Prince Ahmed Bin Abdul Aziz, named to the post in June of this year, after the death of Prince Nayef, his elder brother. Nayef, who succumbed at age 78, had been feared widely as the embodiment of the…

With Barack Obama’s reelection, withdrawal of U.S. and other NATO combat troops from Afghanistan in 2014—except for trainers of an Afghan national army—remains high on his agenda. The leading rival Islamic powers, Saudi Arabia and Iran, are meanwhile competing for future influence over the…

A post in the Wall Street Journal blog covering India suggests relations are souring between Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, long the main instrument of Riyadh’s ideological influence over South Asian Muslims. The desert monarchy has extradited several terrorist suspects to India, under a treaty signed…

The 2012 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, the European Union (EU), was lauded by the Norwegian selection committee for having “contributed to the advancement of peace and reconciliation, democracy and human rights in Europe.” Among various attainments, some decades in the past and others arguable, the…

In the seven years since King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz assumed the throne of Saudi Arabia, the absolute monarch, whose reformist aspirations are widely believed to be sincere, has attempted to curb some of the outrageous human rights violations for which the desert kingdom is known. Many of these…

On August 24, 2012, the German daily Tagesspiegel reported a dismaying decision by the German Academic Exchange Service, or Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD). The agency decided in favor of continued cooperation between the University of Potsdam’s Institute for Religious Studies (IRS)…

The libraries of the University of San Francisco (USF), a Jesuit institution, this month completed digitizing a unique American periodical, the Albanian Catholic Bulletin, accessible here to any interested readers. The Bulletin came out mainly in English with a small section in Albanian, reversing…

On Friday, August 17, the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan ended, followed by Eid-Ul-Fitr, the “festival of fast-breaking” that usually involves three days of celebration. This year in Kosovo, Eid Ul-Fitr was accompanied by an impressive journalistic feat: a team of investigative reporters published…

The al Qaeda-allied Somali terrorists of Al-Shabaab (“The Youth”), and the pirates that comprise their “navy,” have repeatedly gained world attention—and then been forgotten. In July, Al-Shabaab was blamed for homicidal raids in Kenya, as revenge for Kenyan intervention against the Islamist…

The Muslim fasting month of Ramadan began on July 20 and will end on August 17 or August 19 (depending on lunar observations around the world). Muslims will donate for relief of the poor during Ramadan, but they will be especially generous after its end, during the first three days of the…

Last week, the U.S. Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released a report and held hearings on the giant British-based HSBC bank. HSBC Holdings was ranked as the sixth-largest public company in the world by Forbes in 2011, with assets of $2.5…

Turkish rulers, from Ottoman times to the present-day neo-fundamentalist regime of Recep Tayyip Erdogan, have never been comfortable with the Alevi Muslims. Counting a quarter of Turkey’s current domestic and diaspora population of 80 million, Alevis emerged in the 16th century as eastern Anatolian…

In a remarkable development, the people of Libya on Sunday voted against the seemingly-irresistible advance of the Muslim Brotherhood (MB) in the “Arab Spring” countries of North Africa. Until Libyan ballots began coming in, Western media seemed assured that the MB would repeat, in that country,…

The death last week of Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, Nayef Bin Abd Al-Aziz, aged 78 and heir to his half-brother, King Abdullah Bin Abd Al-Aziz, was not immediately foreseen by the Saudi public. The appointment of his successor was, by contrast, no surprise. Saudi’s new crown prince is Nayef’s…

Saudi Arabian crown prince Nayef Bin Abd Al-Aziz, designated heir to King Abdullah Bin Abd Al-Aziz, died Saturday in Geneva, where he was receiving medical treatment. Nayef, 78, headed the country’s ministry of interior and was deputy premier in the royal cabinet. He was named crown prince last…

On May 20, Tomislav Nikolic was elected president of Serbia in a second-round runoff against incumbent Boris Tadic. Tadic, who sought a third term, and his Democratic party, have been described as victims of Serbian populist opposition to European Union financial austerity. Nikolic, candidate of…

Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah Bin Abdul Aziz last December called for promoting the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), including the Saudi kingdom, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and Oman, into a unified body, which has been described as a “super-state.” The Saudis and the…

While most of the informed Western public is aghast at the economic and political chaos that appears to be overtaking the government in Athens, southeast Europe has seen aggravated Islamist turmoil in the Balkan Muslim-majority lands and minority communities on and near Greece’s borders.

Twenty years have passed since the Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia at the beginning of March 1992. Bosnian independence came after Slovenia, Croatia, and Macedonia had left Yugoslavia in 1991. Slobodan Milosevic, the Yugoslav dictator, proclaimed Serbian…

Turkish prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has a habit of shifting positions toward his country’s neighbors, while pursuing the “soft Islamist” political agenda of his Justice and Development party (AKP). Erdogan’s Turkey was a close ally of Assad’s Damascus clique until the Syrian massacres, and…

The great majority of Kosovar Albanians take pride in their reputation as the most pro-American Muslims in the world. Their Sunni Islam is conventional and moderate, and spiritual Sufism is a powerful force among the believers. Since 2009, however, a serious effort has been visible in the Balkan…

On March 2, the Jeddah newspaper Arab News reported that Crown Prince Nayef Bin Abd Al-Aziz, currently the designated successor to King Abdullah Bin Abd Al-Aziz as the absolute ruler of Saudi Arabia, had left for a “vacation” in the United States, via Morocco.

The case of Hamza Kashgari, the 23-year-old ex-columnist for the Saudi Arabian daily newspaper Al-Bilad (The Land), has exposed the convoluted internal situation in the desert kingdom. The controversy began on the birthday of Muhammad, when Kashgari wrote an imaginary dialogue with the Muslim…

On Wednesday, January 25, a team of 150 officers from the State Investigation and Protection Agency of Bosnia-Herzegovina (SIPA) arrested Nusret Imamovic, leader of the main Wahhabi Islamist cell in the country, and his brother Eldin Imamovic.

While Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, and other Balkan countries have been plagued by radical Islamist incursions, Albanian prime minister Sali Berisha, who is Muslim, told the Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronoth at the end of November that he considers Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and his Iranian government “the…

The Saudi Arabian monarchy is now led by two counterposed figures: the reforming King Abdullah and the fanatical Wahhabi crown prince Nayef. Recent incidents in the kingdom, although at first glance minor, may indicate the approach of a significant confrontation between modernizing and…

Two of the most respected Muslim academics in Bosnia-Herzegovina have given lengthy interviews in which they condemned Wahhabism, or “Salafism,” as the Arab-financed Islamist ideology is also known. Their sharp criticism was published in the aftermath of the October 28 shooting attack at the U.S.…

Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad will travel soon to the Kurdistan Regional Government (KRG) for a discussion of border disputes and trade relations, reports the Iraqi news agency Aswat al-Ira. Ahmadinejad will meet with KRG president Massoud Barzani, who visited Tehran at the end of October…

On November 11, Al Jazeera announced from its home offices in Doha, Qatar that it had broadcast its first “Al Jazeera Balkans” news bulletin at 5 p.m., Bosnian time. A press release described Al Jazeera’s southeast European enterprise as “the first regional news channel,” which, the report…

On Friday, October 28, a 23-year-old Slav Muslim from Serbia named Mevlid Jasarevic fired an automatic weapon for 30 minutes at the U.S. Embassy in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina. According to the Washington Post, Jasarevic also carried hand grenades and had been arrested for theft in…

On October 16, 100,000 Indian Muslims gathered for a “mahapanchayat”—a mass assembly of local council leaders—in Moradabad, a city in Uttar Pradesh, the country’s leading state in population, with about 200 million people, a majority of them Muslim. At a press conference announcing the convocation,…

Americans were stunned on October 11 when the Justice Department unsealed its complaint against Mansour Arbabsiar, a 56-year-old used-car dealer from Corpus Christi now in federal custody, and Ali Gholam Shakuri, a member of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps-Quds Force. Shakuri remains inside…

The soft-Islamist Turkish government of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his Justice and Development party (known by its Turkish initials as the AKP) has expansive foreign-policy ambitions. In addition to its embrace of the Hamas regime in Gaza and accompanying criticism of Israel, Ankara…

Kosovo’s top Islamic cleric, Naim Ternava, last month purged the two most outspoken anti-radical preachers from the local Sunni religious apparatus. The dismissal of Mullah Osman Musliu of the Drenas region and Imam Idriz Bilalli of the Podujeva municipality—both proven moderates—from the official…

On September 25, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia made world headlines by proclaiming the right of his female subjects to nominate and compete as candidates in municipal elections. The king also pledged to appoint women to the country’s 150-member, unelected “shura council,” or executive consultative…

In Muslim-majority Kosovo last week, as the fasting month of Ramadan came to an end and families prepared for the reopening of public schools, the parliamentary Assembly of the Republic rendered its judgment on a controversy that has agitated the country for more than a year: It voted not to permit…

We previously noted that a petition against the Bashar al-Assad regime's repressive action has been circulating Syria, signed by a leading group of sheikhs. We've obtained the full text and translated, and are here publishing the petition:

On Saturday, August 27, during special night-time prayers held during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan, Syrian soldiers and club-wielding gangs encircled the large Al-Rifa’i Mosque in Damascus and then attacked it, killing two people and wounding 12, according to the Local Coordinating…

Arid Uka, 21, a German-Albanian Muslim who killed two U.S. servicemen and wounded two more at Frankfurt Airport on March 2 of this year, will go on trial in a German court beginning August 31, on two counts of murder and three of attempted murder. The dead Americans were Senior Airman Nicholas J.…

Israeli media report that Aleksandar Cvetkovic, 43, a Bosnian Serb who emigrated to the Jewish state and acquired Israeli citizenship through marriage, has been ordered extradited to Bosnia-Herzegovina to face trial for his alleged involvement in the Srebrenica massacre of 1995. Cvetkovic, who…

On July 21, the most respected Kosovo daily, Koha Ditore (Daily Times), reported that two lawyers, a writer, and an ordinary citizen of Pristina, capital of the territory, had commenced civil legal measures against Shefqet Krasniqi, imam of the city’s Grand Mosque, for his hateful remarks about…

On Friday, July 1, Pristina, the capital of the Kosovo Republic, saw some 1,000 Albanian Muslims praying in the main, downtown open-air square, while demanding space for a new and large mosque. The demonstration was the second such event in two weeks.

Baqa al-Gharbiyya, Israel—A high-level academic conference on Sufism, the spiritual tradition in Islam, was held here on May 24-25, and it offered lessons apart from any involving religion. For anyone unacquainted with actual life in Israel – and for academics lured by demagogic calls for a boycott…

Saudi authorities have arrested Manal al-Sherif, a courageous female subject of the kingdom who blogged about the demand made by her and others for the right of Saudi women to drive motor vehicles.

Since its onset in mid-January, the Arab Spring has caused serious problems for the Islamic Republic of Iran. Even more than other Middle Eastern states threatened by mass dissent, Iran’s ruling regime has fostered bizarre conspiracy theories blaming its intellectual enemies, both foreign and…

Turkey is a member of NATO, and as such might have been expected to participate fully in the military campaign to curb Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi’s brutal repression of his rebellious subjects. But from the beginning of international talks on Libya, the “soft-Islamist” Ankara government of…

Western military support for the Libyan resistance has raised urgent questions about the character of those fighting against the Qaddafi dictatorship. Barack Obama’s speech on the Libya mission on Monday night did not specifically mention the rebels, as was quickly pointed out in an Associated…

Last week, the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), composed of Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Oman, and Bahrain, sent Saudi soldiers and UAE police across the causeway from Saudi territory into Bahrain, as supporters of a Sunni Muslim monarchy, against massive protests by the…

March 11, which social-networking Saudi dissidents had chosen for a “Day of Rage,” has come and gone without the emergence—so far—of a massive and turbulent reform movement like those seen in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya. Demonstrations by members of the Saudi Shia community in the Eastern Province,…

The crisis of the Libyan dictatorship has shamed a number of prominent personalities in academia and culture, who benefited from Qaddafi’s random, but typically excessive, spending on whatever he and his family desired. London School of Economics (LSE) director Sir Howard Davies resigned from his…

Arif Uka is a 21-year-old German-Albanian Muslim whose family came from the ethnically divided region of Mitrovica in northern Kosovo. He is being held by German police after the shooting deaths Wednesday of two U.S. Air Force members, and injury to two more—one seriously—in a group headed for…

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, or al-Ikhwan al-Muslimun, is more than a radical network, comparable to al Qaeda; more than an ideological phenomenon, like the followers of Khomeini in the 1979 Iranian Revolution; and more than a political insurgency, similar to Pakistani jihadism. It is an…

In times of economic and social dislocation, conspiracy theories abound. The sudden uncertainty of events drives ordinary people as well as pseudo-intellectuals, in countries all over the world, to seek explanations for newly revealed political and financial problems in “magical thinking,” blaming…

Like other tyrannies before it, the Iranian clerical dictatorship, headed by “supreme leader” Ayatollah Ali Khamenei and the venomous demagogue Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seeks to frighten and intimidate its subjects by identifying a wide range of alleged internal and external enemies. But the Iranian…

The isolated and often-derided country of Albania, with a Muslim majority amounting to 70 percent of its three million citizens, has lately illustrated that small nations may often have great ideas, or, at least, may act responsibly in the face of major challenges that cause bigger powers to…

This past weekend Sweden became the latest country in Western Europe to suffer from radical Islamist terrorism. As reported by Swedish papers, Iraqi-born Taimur Abdulwahab Al-Abdaly, aged 28, who blew up a car and then himself in downtown Stockholm, had been granted Swedish citizenship in 1992. But…

The name of Iranian ayatollah Seyyed Hossein Kazemeyni Boroujerdi is little known outside his own country, which is unfortunate. Ayatollah Boroujerdi has been held in Tehran’s notorious Evin prison since 2006.

Last April, when I was in Sarajevo, the Bosnian metropolis, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt happened to make a quick tour of the country, coming by private plane from Venice, where Jolie was filming The Tourist, a mystery pic with Johnny Depp. The arrival of the superstar couple was itself somewhat…

The most recent Islamist terror attack on a major Pakistani Sufi shrine struck the mausoleum of Baba Fariddudin Ganj Shakkar in the Punjab city of Pakpattan on October 25. Bombs hidden in milk cans, carried on a motorcycle, killed six people and left 15 injured.

The Washington Metro bomb plot was consigned to lesser media attention in the last week of the electoral campaign. But reporting on Farooque Ahmed, the 34-year-old Pakistani-American residing in Ashburn, Va., who was stung by the Federal Bureau of Investigation in the Metro affair, provided a…

The kingdom of Jordan is widely acknowledged for its internal contradictions. It accepts peace with Israel, and its intelligence service has been praised for its work against al Qaeda. But as disclosed by CIA director Leon Panetta and described in the Washington Post this week, a Jordanian…

As reported in the New York Times earlier this week, Saudi prince Alwaleed bin Talal, best-known for his rejected offer of a $10 million check to Mayor Rudy Giuliani in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has come out against the Ground Zero mosque. Alwaleed’s Kingdom…

The “virus” of Saudi-financed Wahhabi radicalism has “destroyed every chance” for the development of European Islam, according to a leading Muslim theologian from Bosnia-Herzegovina. Professor Resid Hafizovic of the Sarajevo Faculty of Islamic Studies, in an interview with the Bosnian secularist…

An announcement of the Nobel Prize for literature is almost necessarily accompanied by columns listing those distinguished writers who were passed over, as well as more than a few clunkers who were not. As for the roster of the omitted, since the Russians Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) and Leo Tolstoy…

On September 12, Turkey’s voters approved a package of 26 amendments to the country’s long-established secularist constitution. The amendments presented to the voters comprised of reforms to the Constitutional Court, strengthening of labor rights, and enhancement of women’s status, among other…

In mid-August, as the controversy over the Ground Zero mosque began to gain international attention, a leading Saudi journalist wrote two opinion articles opposing the project. Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, then manager of the Saudi-owned, Dubai-based Al-Arabiyya satellite television network, first…

On Monday, September 13, the Associated Press and other media outlets reported that the Obama administration will ask Congress for approval to sell Saudi Arabia up to $60 billion worth of high-tech fighter aircraft and helicopters, with an option of $30 billion in naval armaments to follow. Because…

While its former “partner” and ruler from the other side of India, Pakistan, contends with--and often appears to accommodate--the aggression of the Taliban, Bangladesh (population 160 million, almost entirely Muslim), has quietly adopted a more vigorous policy of legal action to curb Islamist…

Will the scheme to locate a multi-story megamosque near Ground Zero be doomed by disaffection between Sharif El-Gamal, the head of Soho Properties, Inc., purchaser of the land for the building, and Feisal Abdul Rauf, the “spiritual guide” of the Cordoba Initiative and American Society for Muslim…

Supporters of the "Ground Zero mosque" have been oddly obsessed with the idea that the proposed Islamic center shouldn't be called a "mosque." As Frank Rich wrote last Sunday in the New York Times: "It’s not a mosque but an Islamic cultural center containing a prayer room."

The people of Pakistan, and Muslims as well as non-Muslims around the world, were horrified when, at midnight on July 1, three bombers struck the Data Darbar Sufi shrine in Lahore. Sufis often perform their rituals, known as zikr or “remembrance of God,” on Thursday nights, in preparation for the…

The state of California, a major player in the American textbook market, introduces its students to Islam in the seventh grade. For this purpose, the California State Board of Education has recommended the use of, among others, a world history textbook entitled History Alive! The Medieval World and…

The leader of the “Ground Zero mosque” project in New York, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, is commonly portrayed as a moderate and a sincere believer in interfaith dialogue. Typical is a profile in Time that described Rauf and his wife as "the kind of Muslim leaders right-wing commentators fantasize…

Last Thursday, July 22, 20-year-old Zachary A. Chesser of Fairfax County, Va., was arrested for providing material support to, and attempting to join, the Somali Islamist militia affiliated with al Qaeda, al-Shabab. Chesser has been ordered to remain in jail until his trial.

Sharif El-Gamal, owner of Soho Properties. Inc., purchaser of the buildings near Ground Zero that have been slated for transformation into a 15-story mosque has come before the public, via CNN, to argue in favor of the project, known as “Cordoba House.”

The provocative anti-Israel posture of Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the AKP firebrand, appears to have lost some favor within Turkey itself. But how about among the two and a half million Turkish immigrants and their descendants in Germany? Could Turkish Muslims in Western Europe, under AKP…

On June 17, the anti-terrorism unit of the Kosovo police, acting by request from the U.S. Department of Justice, arrested 29-year old Bajram Asllani, a Kosovar Albanian and one of two suspects who fled North Carolina after law enforcement action 10 months ago against a jihadist conspiracy based in…

Rashad Hussain, America’s special envoy to the Organization for the Islamic Conference (OIC), the Saudi-based body formed in 1969 to “protect” Jerusalem from the Israelis, announced a new title this week for President Barack Obama.  According to Hussain, Obama is America’s “Educator-in-Chief on…

The Anti-Terrorism Unit of the Kosovo Police, acting on a request from the U.S. Department of Justice, last Thursday, June 17, arrested 29-year old Bajram Asllani, a Kosovar Albanian and one of two suspects who fled North Carolina after law enforcement action 10 months ago against a jihadist…

Why did ethnic riots between Kyrgyz and Uzbeks suddenly erupt in Osh and Jalalabad in southern Kyrgyzstan, driving almost half a million people from their homes, leaving nearly 200 dead, and injuring thousands?

Reuters news agency was caught cropping photographs of the Gaza blockade-running raid by Turkish radical Islamists, removing knives from the hands of the extremists and blood from the scene. Previously, in its coverage of the Lebanon war of 2006, Reuters was forced to retract altered images by a…

Kosovo media have reported that an Islamist ideologue from that country, Fuad Ramiqi, was among the participants in the ill-fated attempt to break Israel’s naval blockade at Gaza. Ramiqi was joined by three Albanian Muslims from Macedonia--Sami Emini, Jasmin Rexhepi, and Sead Asipi.

In the aftermath of the attempt by Hamas supporters to breach Israel's Gaza blockade, more questions should be asked about Turkey's relationship to Hamas--and about the U.S. attitude toward Turkey and its pro-Hamas associates. One point is already obvious: Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan of…

In the aftermath of the failed Times Square bombing, the world appears--not for the first time--to be catching on about Pakistan. That country’s reality is simple: Radical Islamist movements have a choke-hold over the military and intelligence services, and blackmail Islamabad into subsidizing…

As noted by the New York Times early this morning, a naturalized U.S. citizen of Pakistani origin named Faisal Shahzad, aged 30, was arrested by federal authorities in the attempted car-bombing in Times Square, thwarted on May 1. Shahzad was apprehended on a flight to Dubai that was about to take…

Yesterday in Washington, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), a think-tank dedicated to warm ties between the United States and so-called “moderate Islamists”--mainly in the Muslim Brotherhood--held its 11th annual conference.

Yesterday in Washington, the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy (CSID), a think-tank dedicated to warm ties between the United States and so-called “moderate Islamists”--mainly in the Muslim Brotherhood--held its 11th annual conference.

The collapse of the government in Belgium has put a hold on attempts by local authorities there to ban from public the face veil or niqab and the burqa, or full-body covering, until a new government can be assembled. The standard proposed in Belgian legislation was sensible: nobody could wear a…

Oslo

Kosovo

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is the leading Islamic extremist organization in North America. CAIR pretends to be a civil liberties group but has a long record of promoting radical ideology and of flimsy complaints of discrimination against Muslims. On March 17, CAIR unveiled a…

Last week, the Albanian Muslims of Kosovo, who have demonstrated their aversion to radical Islam in a series of recent clashes with extremist infiltrators, took another  significant step toward ridding their new republic of Muslim fanatics.  A self-proclaimed imam, Xhemajl Duka, who had come to…

The closing meeting of a “Christian-Muslim Summit” at the National Cathedral in Washington on Wednesday evening was notable for who wasn't there. The public ceremony ended three days of talks between delegations from the Roman Catholic and Episcopal churches and Sunni and Shia Muslim clerics. The…

Over the past decade, since the U.S.-led NATO intervention to defend the Kosovar Albanians against the terrorism of the late Slobodan Milosevic, Artemije Radosavljevic, bishop of the Serbian Orthodox church in Kosovo, has gained considerable local and global publicity. Artemije’s media career began…

Three years ago an unusual volume was issued by Crown Books. It was signed by Cathie Black, president of Hearst Magazines, and titled Basic Black: The Essential Guide for Getting Ahead at Work (and in Life). Presented as a chronicle of how one woman broke through the glass ceiling to attain…

Proposals to ban niqab, the face veil worn by some Muslim women, are gaining support in France and Britain.   France saw its first crime by “burqa bandits” on February 6, when two men wearing head-to-foot female “Islamic” garments robbed a post office in the Parisian suburb of Athis-Mons.  The men…

Islamist infiltration of the Albanian-speaking areas in the Balkans began even before the U.S.-led Kosovo intervention of 1999. (The offensive by radical Islam continues in Kosovo has previously been chronicled here, here, here, and here, with attacks focused on moderate Muslim clerics.) The…

On Saturday, January 23, the Iranian opposition community from the environs of the nation’s capital gathered in a George Washington University auditorium.   They were drawn to a ceremony that imported the idiom, if not the total experience, of the Green Movement against clerical tyranny in their…

On a dark winter’s day in Sweden some eight years ago, one of the most remarkable and beloved figures in modern Iranian culture died on a sidewalk.  His name was Seyed Khalil Alinejad. While is largely unknown among non-Iranians, since little is written about him in English, his story continues to…

Anybody curious about how and why Yemen became a place where al Qaeda and other jihadist groups operate with apparent impunity--while its government claims to be a reliable ally of the United States--should simply look at a map of the Middle East. Throughout its history Yemen has been different…

With the New Year, enhanced fears of, and challenges to, the Afghan and Pakistani Taliban, al-Qaeda, other local jihadists, and their allies among violent Muslim fundamentalists, have become visible across the Indian subcontinent. Intra-Muslim tension inside India, between moderate Barelvi-Sunni…

In the past year, exposure of significant jihadist recruitment inside the United States has left Americans worried that "homegrown terrorism" may become a serious threat. Eight years after the atrocities of September 11, 2001, media and government appear stunned by the upsurge of jihad incidents in…

The assassination of State University of New York-Binghamton Middle East anthropology professor emeritus Richard Antoun, on Friday, December 4, in which a Saudi Arabian graduate student named Abdulsalam Al-Zahrani has been charged, once again highlights the issue: how to distinguish between…

Eight years after the atrocities of 9/11, Americans need to know what public school textbooks are teaching about Islam, radical Islam, and terrorism. The big three textbook states--those that set standards for content because publishers aim to capture their large sales, California, Texas, and…

As most of the world has come to know, Saudi Arabia has many unique characteristics. These are not mere tourist attractions associated with date palms and camels. Rather, Saudi Arabia is the only country in the world named after its "owners," the Al-Saud family. It is the only country in the world…

Dalia Mogahed has enjoyed a varied career. Born in Egypt, she was brought to America as a child and climbed a fairly ordinary professional ladder. She earned a master's in business at the University of Pittsburgh and pursued success in corporate life. But she became an American Muslim celebrity…

There seems no end to contractor abuse scandals in countries fighting terrorism or undergoing "nation-building." The latest to be reported in the media involves ArmorGroup North America, a private security firm guarding the American embassies in Iraq and Afghanistan. It began in Baghdad on August…

Trotsky

Iftar is a ritual observed by Muslims at the end of the daily fast during the month of Ramadan. Muslims break the fast at sundown--a time prescribed by local clerics, based on astronomical calculations--by drinking water and eating dates. Families, other social groups, and mosques then hold…

The invasion of Kosovo by Islamist radicals, including assaults on moderate Muslims (see here, here, and here) now includes threats of a "religious war" against Albanian Christians, some of whom have left Islam for the Catholic faith of their ancestors.

Al Qaeda flags keep showing up around the globe. On Tuesday, August 18, U.S. authorities unsealed a warrant that had authorized searching the homes of two individuals from the vicinity of Raleigh, N.C. The pair were among eight men charged late last month with plotting Islamist terrorism. The…

Death has its clichés, including that which marks the passing of a notable individual as "the end of an era." Corazon "Cory" Aquino, leader of the non-violent "people's power" movement that overthrew the Philippine dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos, died in Manila on August 1, at 76. But the life of…

Democracy Denied, 1905-1915

Kosovo

Franco and Hitler

Sarajevo On a quick trip to the Balkans, I found myself inadvertently following in the footsteps of Vice President Joseph Biden, who swung through Bosnia-Hercegovina, Serbia, and Kosovo last week. Biden's comportment during his visit, which lasted three days from May 19 to 21, reaffirmed much about…

As the Taliban, its Afghan detachments swelling with local jihadists, penetrates deeper into an apparently-collapsing Pakistan, politicians and media around the world, amid visible paralysis, are "rediscovering" the brutality of which the South Asian radical Islamists are capable. As with other…

Geneva

Prishtina, Kosovo

Amsterdam

Many of the initiatives by President Obama in the Middle East and Muslim countries rest on unrealistic expectations--desert mirages, one might say--surrounding the motives of terrorists and other enemies of freedom. The most obvious example has been Obama's flattery toward the Iranian dictatorship,…

One Currency for Bosnia

Extremist rhetoric and violence by Wahhabi Islamists continues to rock the Kosovo Republic. As described a month ago here, the Balkan territory, with an overwhelming Muslim majority, has experienced a sudden campaign of propaganda and physical assaults against Islamic moderates. Wahhabi bombast in…

Vice President Joseph Biden has told the Europeans that the new administration wishes to "reset" relations with Vladmir Putin's Russia. But the January 19 slaying of two dissidents, 34-year-old human rights lawyer Stanislav Markelov and journalism student Anastasia Baburova, 25, on a Moscow street…

Saudi Arabia may have finally begun its long-predicted turn toward significant reform, as reported over the past weekend in Gulf media. King Abdullah ibn Abd Al-Aziz has effected a series of major decisions that could impose a dramatically new and modern direction on the kingdom.

Osman Musliu is a moderate Muslim mullah and Kosovar Albanian patriot. He demonstrated his commitment to both causes during the Kosovo war of 1998-99, when he was the sole Islamic cleric in the territory willing to officiate at the funeral of Adem Jashari, the main founder of the Kosovo Liberation…

Detroit

The coincidence can best be described as macabre: The terrorist assault on Mumbai occurred just as a House Select Intelligence Oversight Panel, headed by Democratic Rep. Rush Holt of New Jersey, initiated an inquiry into the conviction of a radical Muslim hatemonger, Ali Al-Timimi, for recruiting…

The Mighty Wurlitzer

Pristina, Kosovo

The Islamic Center in Washington, D.C., is among the most prominent and opulent Muslim prayer houses in America. It displays the national flags of Muslim countries out front and makes obvious to thousands of passing motorists that the faith of Muhammad has a place in America.

The ignobility of the Nobel Prizes awarded this year by the Swedish and Norwegian Academies, the first for literature and the second for peace, maintains the pattern of recent years. Bereft of inspiration or awareness, they are reduced to honoring nearly-forgotten writers, and do-gooders with…

Early this year, the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) announced the completion of an inventory of Islamic books and videos in Muslim chapel libraries in the 105 federal correctional institutions. The bureau had undertaken the inventory at the recommendation of the Justice Department's Office of the…

Girls of Riyadh

The latest Russian invasion of Georgia--following the examples provided by tsars Paul I and his successor Alexander I (in 1801) and Soviet dictator Vladimir Lenin (in 1921, three years after Georgia first gained modern independence)--has fully revealed the character of post-Soviet neo-imperialism…

Mitrovica, Kosovo

Amsterdam

London

Ezra Pound: Poet

More historical illiteracy from the Democrats: Barack Obama said yesterday he would bring Osama bin Laden to justice in a way that wouldn't allow the Sept. 11 mastermind to become a martyr. At a Washington news conference after huddling for the first time with a newly formed group of national…

Democratic senator James Webb of Virginia pursued an undeniably distinguished military career. But a fine record of service in arms doesn't preclude becoming a demagogue as a politician. Last Thursday, Webb assailed Republican Sen. John McCain for comments on the Today Show, namely, McCain's…

AFTER POWERFUL POLITICAL and media voices in America began expressing doubts about the war on terror, disaffection with U.S. intervention soon came to seem as if it were a permanent feature of our political landscape. Even as it is widely admitted that "the surge" has worked in Iraq, commentators…

U.S. FEDERAL AGENCIES charged with high responsibilities in defending the nation have achieved new levels of semantic obsession, thinking that the goal of defeating Muslim terrorists is undermined by improper terminology. We have already suffered debates about "Islamofascism" and the nomenclature…

Jihad and Jew-Hatred

LAST YEAR THE New York Police Department (NYPD) issued a clear-sighted and path-breaking document titled Radicalization in the West: The Home-Grown Threat. Prepared by Mitchell D. Silber and Arvin Bhatt of the NYPD Intelligence Division, the report was serious, well-researched, and articulate. It…

Dumnica, Kosovo

ON MONDAY, MARCH 3, the first U.S. special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC), which brings together 57 Muslim countries, took up his duties. Named by President George W. Bush, America's new diplomat to Muslims is Pakistan-born Sada Cumber of Austin, Texas. Cumber is the…

Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, head of the Anglican Communion, doubtless thought he was making a positive contribution to interfaith relations when he gave a speech on February 7 suggesting that some form of official recognition in Britain for elements of sharia--Islamic religious law--is…

ALBANIANS AND THEIR SUPPORTERS euphorically celebrated Sunday's declaration of independence by the republic of Kosovo. The sensation of liberty from Serbian domination was intoxicating. But Kosovo's future is less than crystal-clear.

Berkeley, Calif.

America's Three Regimes

Pristina, Kosovo

MUCH OF THE WORLD has expressed shock and outrage at the sentences recently handed down by a court in the Saudi Arabian city of Qatif. Judicial authorities there ordered that a 19-year-old woman be lashed 200 times and jailed for six months after she was kidnapped at knife-point and raped by seven…

AS REPORTED AT LENGTH in THE WEEKLY STANDARD--the latest commentary appeared here on September 16, 2007--federal, state, county, and city prison officials have wrestled since the horror of 9/11 with the presence of radical Muslim chaplains in our country's correctional systems. To the shock of most…

October 22-26 was designated "Islamofascism Awareness Week" in a series of events held at college campuses around the United States. The effort was organized by the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Predictably, the program elicited a bad reaction from Islamists. The Saudi daily Shams announced on…

The November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs includes parallel statements on U.S. foreign policy by John McCain and Hillary Clinton. The McCain text is titled "An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom: Securing America's Future." The Clinton contribution is striking in its formulaic banality.…

The November/December 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs includes parallel statements on U.S. foreign policy by John McCain and Hillary Clinton. The McCain text is titled "An Enduring Peace Built on Freedom: Securing America's Future." The Clinton contribution is striking in its formulaic banality.…

RUSSIAN TYRANT-IN-WAITING Vladimir Putin's plan to restore a one-man dictatorship in Moscow has caused anxiety in the thin ranks of Russian liberals as well as among partisans of secure independence in the former Soviet republics. It should also stimulate concern in Europe, the United States, and…

Next Monday, Al-Baqee--a new coalition of American Muslims--will take an initiative that other citizens and leaders of our country should have begun immediately after 9/11: The group has called a protest against Saudi Arabia's support--by preaching, money and recruitment--of terrorism. The…

At this writing, on Friday, September 28, the Burmese military regime has brought its heavy hammer down on the thousands of people demonstrating against the country's 45-year-old dictatorship. Police and troops have fired on protesters, killing at least 13 people. Buddhist monasteries have been…

IN THE IMMEDIATE AFTERMATH of the atrocities of September 11, 2001, Islamist influence in U.S. federal and state prisons came under scrutiny from the Justice Department's Bureau of Prisons (BOP). Officials were informed of pre-9/11 complaints by inmates whose Islam (mainly acquired by conversion)…

THE FOILING OF AN Islamist terrorist plot this week in Germany is noteworthy for several reasons that may not have been obvious from the headlines.

All is not well with the long-standing Saudi-U.S. alliance. In Washington, faint murmurs of discontent may be heard regarding an infusion of $20 billion worth of new U.S. weaponry to the desert kingdom birthplace of 15 of the 19 terrorist hijackers of 9/11. Many Americans resent the proposal to…

The Forgotten Man

ALMOST SIX YEARS after September 11, 2001, and more than four years since the beginning of the U.S.-led intervention in Iraq, the American government and media have begun to admit something every informed and honest Muslim in the world has known all along. That is: the "Sunni insurgency" in Iraq,…

TURKEY'S REELECTION OF incumbent prime minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan's AKP, or Justice and Development Party, has reenergized the low-level debate in Washington about foreign Islamic parties that claim to respect democracy and secularism. But for the AKP--no less than its rivals in the Turkish…

Long accustomed to abusing their power with impunity, the Saudi mutawiyin or "religious police" (more on that misleading translation in a moment) suddenly find themselves on the defensive. Increasingly challenged by critics, they felt compelled early this year to go through the motions of…

A Shadow of Red

AT FIRST GLANCE, the bomb conspiracy in London and Glasgow might be seen as a protest against the British knighthood awarded to the novelist Salman Rushdie. The Rushdie honor elicited violent threats from Pakistan, the place of origin of many British Muslims and perhaps the least stable of the…

A MAJORITY of the American political and media elite appears enraptured with the notion of engagement and dialogue with Islamists. But rather than supporting moderate Muslims as they struggle with radical Islam, "engagement and dialogue" typically takes the form of fretting about the concerns of…

ON MONDAY, June 18, some of Washington's "usual suspects" in the controversy over the Mesopotamian war assembled at the invitation of Sen. Joseph Biden, the Democratic chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and George Washington University professor Amitai Etzioni. The topic for debate…

THERE IS SOMETHING alarming about the way Russian neo-Stalinist Vladimir Putin and his cohort revel in their obstructive behavior on the status of Kosovo. At the G8 summit, Russia blocked a compromise proposed by the French (no surprise there) that would have postponed a United Nations vote on…

ONE OF the most disturbing aspects of the JFK terror plot is its Caribbean roots.

Tirana

SEVEN HUNDRED THOUSAND citizens of the Turkish Republic rallied in Istanbul Sunday. Two weeks ago, 300,000 participated in a similar demonstration. Marchers in the latest protest chanted, "neither sharia nor a coup, but real democracy." They and millions of their peers have found themselves beset…

Prishtina, Kosovo

London

Close observers of Saudi Arabia detect what may be the first faint signs of movement away from tyranny. King Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, who ascended the throne two years ago and is now at least 83, is the apparent instigator of this change. The Saudis are polarizing, some say, between the supporters…

London

Saudi Arabia's monarchy faces increasing problems, all of which lead back to a school system that indoctrinates the country's subjects in Wahhabism, the ultrafundamentalist and violent interpretation of Islam that is the country's official religion.

WHEN THE DEFINITIVE HISTORY of the global war against Islamist extremism is written, it may well be recorded that one of the psychological victories by al Qaeda and its Saudi financiers and commanders was to convince Western governments and media that Wahhabism, the fundamentalist Sunni sect that…

THE MAN WHO CALLS HIMSELF Mullah Krekar and claims to be an Iraqi Kurd is not quite a star of the global jihad, but he is worthy of attention nonetheless. Krekar is the emir, or chief, of Ansar al-Islam, a Sunni extremist network that has distinguished itself with murderous attacks all over Iraq.…

On October 12, the Swedish Academy announced its award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. He is the author of several books that have attained worldwide bestseller status, the most recent in English being last year's Istanbul: Memories and the City. The gifted Pamuk…

IN THE IMAGINATION of Hamza Yusuf Hanson--the American Islamist radical who reinvented himself after September 11, 2001 as a peace-loving spiritual Sufi and alleged advisor to President George W. Bush--no falsehood is too absurd to paraded about as truth.

ENGLISH LIBEL LAW, long a torment for journalists, has changed dramatically, with particularly significant consequences for the investigation of the powerful Saudi subjects who allegedly financed al Qaeda.

Mecca

A GREAT AMERICAN HAS DIED, aged 97, and to the disgrace of our national media, he will not be appropriately honored. Rather, even in death, Roy M. Brewer, former leader of the Hollywood Stagehands Union, has been and will be vilified, as heroes are often defamed in an age marked by apologetics for…

JOSEPH LIEBERMAN, Democratic senator from Connecticut and independent candidate for a new term, shared a remarkable insight in Hartford on August 22. He commented, in an interview with talk radio host Glenn Beck, "Iraq, if you look back at it, is going to be like the Spanish Civil War, which was…

THE ANNOUNCEMENT LAST WEEK that British authorities had arrested 14 people in an inquiry centered on terror training at an Islamic school and adjoining property in the idyllic landscape of Rotherfield, East Sussex, was good news. Then came the bad news: the Jameah Islamiyah school had been used 15…

CONTRARY TO COMMON WISDOM, Muslim radicalism in the United Kingdom is not rooted in grievance against British, American, Israeli, or other Western policies. Nor is it a reaction to fear or prejudice by non-Muslims. It originates in a specific ideology imported to the country by two generations of…

This article originally appeared on TCS Daily.

BRITISH AUTHORITIES have been slow to acknowledge openly the Pakistani-Muslim background of the suspects arrested in the mass terror conspiracy that brought chaos to British and American airports Thursday. At first, official sources in the United Kingdom would confirm only that they were working…

EUROPEANS HAVE BECOME RECEPTIVE to the argument that Israel participates in the global war on terror when it confronts Hezbollah. But the broadening of the context for conflict also means dragging in other issues and constituencies.

SECRETARY OF STATE CONDOLEEZZA RICE, having begun her tour of the Middle East crisis zones, may face a dangerous trap set by a familiar "friend"--the kingdom of Saudi Arabia.

Podgorica, Montenegro

London

LAST WEEKEND MARKED the first anniversary of the horrific events at Andijan in Uzbekistan, a market town in the Ferghana Valley near the border with Kyrgyzstan, in Central Asia. There, a year ago, a protest by local folk against the antidemocratic policies of Uzbek ruler Islam Karimov--a classic…

JEAN-FRAN OIS REVEL, who died at 82 on April 30, was a rarity in the landscape of leftist intellectuals turned conservative. Revel became the first French neoconservative not over policy matters, but as a defender of intellectual nonconformity and of a radical vision of personal freedom.

RADICAL MUSLIM CHAPLAINS, trained in a foreign ideology, certified in foreign-financed schools, and acting in coordination to impose an extremist agenda have gained a monopoly over Islamic religious activities in American state, federal, and city prisons and jails.

THE UPROAR IN EUROPE AND some Muslim countries over cartoons of the prophet Muhammad published in a Danish newspaper last September has once again dramatized several dismal aspects of the conflict between radical Islam and the culture of the West. One is that the so-called Arab or Muslim street…

BRITAIN HAS A PROBLEM with Islam. The British Muslim community is mainly comprised of Indo-Pakistani Muslims. Their mosques are dominated by radical Sunnis, representing Pakistan-based jihad movements, and Saudi-backed Wahhabis. Britain does not want to tackle this problem directly, for a reason…

ON OCTOBER 21, A new message came out of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, the land of Wahhabi Islam, with its commitment to financing jihad, its public beheadings, and its total subordination of women. But rather than the usual extremist preaching, promoting the bloody terrorist acts of Abu Musab…

The Successor

Prishtina, Kosovo

Sarajevo

THE NEW PRESIDENT OF THE Islamic Republic of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, may unintentionally have helped undermine clerical rule in the country with his recent outrageous speeches and remarks against Israel.

ON TUESDAY, November 8, the U.S. Senate Judiciary Committee held a previously-postponed hearing, titled "Saudi Arabia: Friend or Foe in the War on Terror?" The object of the hearing was to air expert comment on the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 (see here). Specifically, the hearing…

Moscow Memoirs

SWEDEN HAS A REPUTATION for a high suicide rate. But a psychological crackup striking an ordinary Scandinavian, brooding in the long, dark winter, is merely a personal tragedy. By contrast, the moral suicide of a whole institution, like the Swedish Academy--which has responsibility for awarding the…

Warsaw

FOUR YEARS AFTER September 11, 2001, the United States government has passed a significant turning point in the war on Islamist terror. In an official report the federal authorities have directly and identified the enemy as "Islamic extremism"--one of the few instances in which they have dared to…

Jakarta

ON AUGUST 2, CROWN Prince Abdullah bin Abdul Aziz, a man in his early 80s, ascended the throne of Saudi Arabia--and all hopes for reform in the Saudi kingdom began to be put to the test.

AYMAN AL-ZAWAHIRI, the second-in-command of Osama bin Laden, has delivered a video statement, broadcast by al Jazeera, threatening more terror by al Qaeda in Britain and in the United States. His rant must be taken extremely seriously.

KING FAHD BIN ABDUL AZIZ of Saudi Arabia has died in Riyadh at 84, after 10 years in a coma. Crown Prince Abdullah, Fahd's half-brother and himself aged 81, has taken the throne.

ON JULY 25, DEFENSE secretary Donald Rumsfeld is scheduled to visit Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan. The topic of discussion will be the continuation of U.S. military activities at Manas, the U.S. base on Kyrgyz territory established after 9/11 propelled Central Asia back to strategic importance.

AS ANNOUNCED ON Wednesday, July 20, Saudi Arabia's long-serving ambassador to the United States, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul-Aziz, is leaving town. Allegedly, he resigned. The dean of the foreign diplomatic corps in Washington will be replaced by Prince Turki al Faisal, the former…

IN THE FIRST FEW DAYS after the horror in London on July 7, media in Britain and abroad focused considerable attention on "Londonistan"--the local zoo of Islamist agitators, almost entirely Arab, who have made headlines for years with their extremist preaching. Analytical lines, many of them…

A GROUP calling itself "the Secret Group of al Qaeda's Jihad in Europe" has claimed "credit" for Thursday's deadly bombings in London. Some refer to the perpetrators of this latest horror as "an unknown group." But there is nothing mysterious about the background of the London atrocities.

The Breaking Point

Sarajevo

IN A FEW DAYS Condoleezza Rice will visit the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. She will not be the first woman secretary of State to visit the territory of Wahhabism, the extremist state religion imposed on the people of historic Arabia. Madeleine Albright preceded Secretary Rice. But of course U.S.-Saudi…

ON TUESDAY, June 7, Sen. Arlen Specter took an action that may substantially improve the difficult--some might say despicable--state of U.S.-Saudi relations. Specter dropped the Saudi Arabia Accountability Act of 2005 into the hopper; the text was designated Senate bill 1171. Its cosponsors, so…

CERTAIN WORLD EVENTS, which at first seem obscure, have the peculiar capacity to illuminate the hidden contradictions of world politics. But the glare they produce often confuses most spectators. The collapse of Yugoslavia in 1991 was such an event. So was the uprising in the Uzbek city of Andijan…

VLADIMIR PUTIN, in his effort to restore the Stalinist legacy in Moscow, exceeds himself as a defender of Russia's totalitarian and genocidal past. In the wake of President George W. Bush's tour of the new post-Soviet democracies, Putin has attempted to revise history.

THIRTY-SIX YEARS AGO, Melvin J. Lasky, editor of Encounter, wrote to a Croatian literary translator living in Canada, B.S. Brusar. The subject was a Bosnian poet of Croat origin, Nikola Sop (1904-1982), whose name is pronounced shop.

THE FINAL OUTCOME OF THE Tulip Revolution--as the political upheaval in Kyrgyzstan has been dubbed--remains murky. But its historic and geopolitical significance is already clear.

ON FEBRUARY 21, THE Cuban exile author Guillermo Cabrera Infante died, at 75, in a London hospital. His passing was an immense loss not only for the anti-Castro diaspora, but for Spanish literature, of which he was one of the greatest recent exponents.

ON TUESDAY, March 15, the U.S. State Department faces a deadline: as previously mandated by State itself, the bureaucrats must show that they have taken action in accord with last year's designation of the kingdom of Saudi Arabia as a "country of particular concern" because of its flagrant…

FOR MONTHS, a behind-the-scenes, seldom-mentioned debate has raged in the West, over the origins of the "foreign fighters" attacking the U.S., coalition, and local anti-jihadist forces in Iraq. Some, including Saudi dissidents like Ali al-Ahmed of the Saudi Institute and myself, have suspected…

IF ARTHUR MILLER TEACHES US anything, it is this: Personal failure is not always a product of social injustice, and resentment is never a noble form of protest. Of course, his writings--from the 1949 Death of a Salesman to last year's Finishing the Picture--always insisted on the opposite. Miller's…

THE SUICIDE of Hunter S. Thompson, aged 65, according to the New York Times, or 67, according to the Washington Post, at his home in Aspen, may definitively mark the conclusion of the chaotic "baby-boomer" rebellion that began in the 1950s and crested in the 1960s, and which was dignified with the…

JUST FOUR MONTHS AGO, thousands of mourners thronged the Grand Mosque in Mecca for the funeral of a famous Sufi teacher. This was an extraordinary event, given the discrimination against all non-Wahhabi Muslims that is the state policy of Saudi Arabia. The dead man, 58-year-old Seyed Mohammad Alawi…

IMAM HAMZA YUSUF, formerly Hanson, is a one-trick pony: He, like other radical Muslims in America, claims discrimination where none exists.

ON December 21, a terrorist blew himself up in the U.S. military mess hall in Mosul, in northern Iraq. Twenty-two people were killed, including U.S. soldiers and contractors.

AS THE NEW YEAR BEGINS, the latest chapter in the remarkable tale of a rich, 47-year old Saudi subject named Yasin al-Kadi offers many lessons, regarding terrorism, responses to it, and the role and responsibilities of Saudi Arabia in fighting it.

AS PRESIDENT BUSH prepares to begin his second term, he has an opportunity to turn a page in U.S. relations with Saudi Arabia. In crafting his policy, the president should draw on American experience with another ideologically expansionist dictatorship--one successfully countered and transformed…

ACCORDING TO ISRAEL'S leading newspaper of record, Yediot Ahronot, fascinating developments are underway in the Arab world. They appear to be stimulated by a possible breakthrough between Israel and the Palestinian leadership, against the backdrop of America's toppling of the dictatorship in Iraq.

The Plot Against America

MOST PEOPLE, both inside the Saudi kingdom and outside it, would agree that it will be a cold, cold day before the rulers of Riyadh grant rights to women. Nevertheless, on a crisp, cold, and clear Saturday, November 13, a protest materialized in front of the fortress-like Saudi embassy in…

FACED WITH the series of beheadings and other grisly crimes committed in Iraq by the followers of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Westerners may wonder why this gang should call itself "Monotheism and Jihad." The group's Arabic name, Tawhid wa'al-Jihad, is often misleadingly translated "Unity and Jihad,"…

THE INFAMOUS SNOBS of the Swedish Academy, brooding in the land of military cowardice, interminable winter, and one of the highest suicide rates in the world, have returned to their habit of awarding the Nobel Prize for Literature to an unknown, undistinguished, leftist fanatic: The 2004 prize has…

THE UNITED STATES took the bold step last week of formally designating Saudi Arabia a "country of particular concern" for its lack of religious freedom. In the words of the State Department's 2004 report on religious freedom worldwide, "basic religious freedoms are denied to all [Saudi citizens]…

EARLIER THIS WEEK, I commented that, as Yusuf Islam, the singer Cat Stevens has held to an extreme Islamic fundamentalist position regarding music. I wrote, "Wahhabism, the state religion in Saudi Arabia, and the inspirer of al Qaeda, is especially known for its hatred of music. In Wahhabi…

ON TUESDAY, U.S. authorities diverted a United Airlines London-Washington flight to Bangor, Maine, where the ex-pop singer formerly known as Cat Stevens, now as Yusuf Islam, was questioned by federal security agents, and then ordered deported back to Britain. Yusuf Islam, it turns out, is on the…

THREE ROADS led to the horror at Beslan in the Russian republic of North Ossetia, in which at least 330 people, most of them children, died: one road beginning in Grozny, the capital of neighboring Chechnya; one road beginning in Moscow, to the north; and one road beginning in Riyadh, the capital…

Sarajevo

THE CHILEAN WRITER Pablo Neruda is "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language." Or so said Gabriel García Márquez, in a line recently repeated by the Washington Post and several other American publications. Readers in the United States seem destined to have Neruda thrust upon them…

MUCH HOPE is presently vested, by friends of a free Iraq, in the 74-year-old grand ayatollah, Sayyid Ali al-Husseini Sistani. Ayatollah Sistani acts as a marja, or religious guide, for many if not most Iraqi Shia Muslims from his residence in the holy city of Najaf. Since the Shia make up about 60…

IN EARLY JUNE, partisans of democracy in China commemorated the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen massacre of June 3-4, 1989--one of the events of a remarkable year that dramatized the accuracy of Ronald Reagan's description of communism as evil. In retrospect, the killing of students and workers…

THE BRUTAL MURDER of Paul Johnson was just the latest atrocity by terrorist Wahhabis--extremist acolytes of the hate cult that's rooted in the heart of the Saudi state. And the lessons are simple:

NELSON ROCKEFELLER is alleged to have described the artwork of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko, famously difficult classics painted shortly after the Second World War, as "free-enterprise painting." And there, in microcosm, we find the conundrum that has bedeviled certain conservative intellectuals…

SAUDI ARABIA, in which Wahhabism is the state form of Islam, has a long history of vandalizing and demolishing historical monuments. Wahhabi doctrine holds that raising gravestones or tombs or maintaining graveyards constitutes idolatry, known in Arabic as shirk, a grievous sin. So does preserving…

BEGINNING THURSDAY NIGHT, May 27, and continuing through Sunday, Washington's Wardman Park Marriott Hotel will host one of the most remarkable events of recent months: the second annual convention of American Shia Muslims, organized by the Universal Muslim Association of America (UMAA). The most…

AS IF THE COALITION in Iraq didn't have enough problems, on May 3 most of the staff of al-Sabah (Morning), the daily newspaper published with support from the Coalition Provisional Authority, walked out. Ismael Zayer, the paper's editor in chief, announced that a new, independent daily would be…

ON APRIL 17, two American women were killed by a Jordanian in Kosovo. With all media eyes focused on Iraq, little notice has been taken of their sacrifice, yet Kim Bigley, 47, of Paducah, Ky., and Lynn Williams, 48, of Elmont, N.Y., apparently fell as casualties in the war on terrorism.

ON APRIL 17, as reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD, two American women and an American man were slain in Kosovo, and eleven people were injured when they came under armed attack by a Palestinian from Jordan. The killer was a member of the same body in which they served: the United Nations police force…

WHY FALLUJA? Why should this relatively obscure Iraqi city of half a million have become the crucible of atrocities against the Coalition in Iraq?

MEDITERRANEAN EUROPE, a borderland between Christendom and Islam since the eighth century, has been the scene of bloody clashes in recent weeks. The March 11 massacre in Madrid, apparently perpetrated by Moroccan Islamic extremists, had no sooner receded from the front pages than riots convulsed…

AN AUTHENTIC and laudable American dissident died at the end of January, his passing almost unnoticed in the mainstream media. William Herrick, 89, was a veteran of the Spanish civil war of 1936-39. He wrote a memoir and 10 novels, one of them a lightly disguised roman à clef about the war in Spain.

SPAIN has now had its 9/11.

THE WEEKEND OF February 6 saw yet another deadly incident in Moscow, when an explosion in the subway killed at least 39 people. Predictably, Russian president Vladimir Putin blamed the bloodshed on "Chechens." Doubts abound, however, among ordinary Russians as well as journalists. Newspaper…

EVIDENCE continues to build that the terrorist "resistance" in the Sunni Triangle, far from being a spontaneous response to new frustrations, has a history and an ideology. The correct name for the main influence inciting Sunni Muslim Iraqis to attack coalition forces is Wahhabism, although its…

Clever Girl

Ferghana, Uzbekistan

Skopje, Macedonia

WHEN AQILA AL-HASHIMI was murdered on her way to work at the end of September, some people cheered. A modern Iraqi Shia woman who wore no headscarf, al-Hashimi was also a former mid-level diplomat for the Baathist regime and as such earned the fury of Iraqi extremists when she joined the…

OCTOBER 19 IS THE DAY the Roman Catholic Church will mark the beatification of Ganxhe Agnes Bojaxhiu, the Albanian woman known to the world as Mother Teresa. Beatification is the last step before canonization, or sainthood, and the occasion is one of celebration for Catholics around the world.…

Abandon

THE HORRENDOUS CRIME carried out at the shrine of Imam Ali in Najaf, Iraq, last Friday has had immediate repercussions, most of them--in the Western countries as well as the East--unfortunate. Numerous Westerners theorized that the blast was caused by rivalries among Shias, by the intrigues of…

THE ANNOUNCEMENT that Simon Haselock has been appointed "media commissioner" for Iraq is bad news for a free Iraqi media. I know Simon extremely well and like him, but there is good cause for considering his appointment to the country's top media administrative position a mistake. Simon Haselock…

THERE COMES A TIME in the history of every oppressive state when the need for change is suddenly and widely understood to be imperative. Inevitably, an incident occurs that illuminates the government's misrule and undermines the legitimacy of the regime. For the government of Saudi Arabia, such an…

THE blacking out of 28 pages on Saudi complicity in the 9/11 attacks isn't the only hole in Congress' report on the terrorist atrocity: The rest of the report skirts issues and evidence that point directly to the desert oil kingdom. Consider the case of 9/11 hijackers Nawaf al-Hazmi and Khalid…

THE POET Archibald Macleish wrote, at the beginning of the Second World War, "How shall freedom be defended? By arms when it is attacked by arms; by truth when it is attacked by lies; by democratic faith when it is attacked by authoritarian dogma. Always and in the final act, by determination and…

IN RECENT WEEKS, most Western media have reported the continuing attacks on U.S. troops in Fallujah, west of Baghdad, as tenacious resistance by defeated Baathists, aided by local Sunni Muslims enraged at the soldiers' alleged mishandling of crowds, which has led to fatal clashes. There is mounting…

TO WHAT DEGREE does the threat of global terror embody the Wahhabi beliefs taught by the official sect in Saudi Arabia, beliefs the desert kingdom still seeks to impose throughout the Muslim world and to spread to the non-Muslim world as well? And what role does the international network of…

Stalin's Last Crime

DENIAL IS A RIVER in Arabia, not Egypt. The proof of this axiom came Friday. In place of a serious assessment of the Saudi kingdom's increasing loss of credibility, deeply aggravated by the bombings in Riyadh this week, the oleaginous Adel al-Jubeir once again held a press conference at the grim,…

WHILE WESTERN MEDIA and politicians peddle their alarums in the aftermath of Iraq's liberation, focusing on Syria and Iran, attention should also be paid to Saudi Arabia. Throughout the military campaign, the royal regime publicly sought to maintain its alliance with the United States without…

A WASHINGTON POST, Style section feature today--Let Slip the Poets of War--manages to completely misrepresent the work of Walt Whitman, recasting The Good, Gray Poet as a patron of the antiwar constituency among versifiers.

THE WAR FOR IRAQ'S LIBERATION began on March19. The fourth anniversary of the NATO intervention in Kosovo was March24. Kosovar Albanians, a majority of whom are Muslims, lead the Islamic world in their enthusiasm for America. But they hate the United Nations and the European meddlers in whose hands…

FRANCE HAS ALWAYS BEEN a country with a divided soul: on one side, a record of humanistic Enlightenment philosophy and modern art unrivalled by any other nation; on the other side, a record of scandals such as the appeasement of the Nazis from the 1930s until the end of World War II. It was only a…

ON THE IRAQI WAR FRONT, Sunday, March 23 was a blood-red day for the terrorist Wahhabi movement, funded by "our Saudi allies" and aiming at control over world Islam.

New York

A FLYER innocuously entitled "Q & A on Islam and Arab Americans" was recently mass-mailed to a list including journalists in Washington. Conspicuous at the top of the first page, the USA Today logo readies the reader to ingest bite-sized morsels of information, simple but reliable--and only then…

THE WORD Konjic, pronounced "Konyitz," means "the little horse" in Bosnian, and the Bosnian town of Konjic, set among green mountains and virgin forests in the valley of the river Neretva, was one of the loveliest I had ever seen, when I first visited it in 1991. I was riding a bus from Dubrovnik…

THE REAL STAR of "Frida," the much-hyped film biography of the Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, is not Salma Hayek, the beautiful Arab-Mexican actress who handles the lead role, but Mexico--in all its legendry, folklore, and intensity of color and passion. Mexico has remained in large part untouched by…

The remarks below were delivered earlier today at the 23rd annual convention of the Assembly of Turkish-American Associations, as part of a panel discussion titled "Reevaluating Democracy and Islam after September 11."--Ed.

THERE IS NO MYSTERY, and there is no need for complicated theorizing, about the scandal that has struck the family of Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abd al-Aziz, the ambassador of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in Washington. U.S. authorities are investigating a financial link between Prince Bandar's…

WITH ALL EYES currently focused on Iraq, the Balkans have mostly faded from view in Washington. This is unfortunate, for events are afoot in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo that starkly illustrate the rigors of nation-building. They demonstrate why, in effecting the liberation of Iraq, the United…

Deep in a Dream The Long Night of Chet Baker by James Gavin Knopf, 416 pp., $26.95 AT THIRTEEN, living in Marin County, California, I worshipped Chet Baker, the trumpet star of "West Coast" jazz. I also idolized the saxophonists Gerry Mulligan, Stan Getz, and Lee Konitz, a sax star I saw repeatedly…

DOWN ON THE RANCH in Crawford last week, President Bush had another courteous chat with a Saudi prince. The guest this time was Riyadh's ambassador, Prince Bandar bin Sultan bin Abdul Aziz, who had come with his family all the way from Washington just for lunch. Some Beltway spin artists, alarmed…

AS THE CRISIS of U.S.-Saudi relations grows, long-hidden American grievances have begun to emerge. For many Americans the problem of Saudi abuse of U.S. citizens on the kingdom's soil is almost as disturbing as the issue of Saudi involvement in September 11. The worst cases to come to light so far…

WHEN THE SHOOTER who chose July 4 to start a gun battle at Los Angeles airport's El Al ticket counter turned out to be Hesham Mohamed Hadayet--an Egyptian native with a "Read Koran" sticker on his apartment door--many people not unreasonably wondered if he had picked up his hostility to America and…

Victor Serge The Course Is Set on Hope by Susan Weissman Verso, 320 pp., $35 WHO NOW READS Victor Serge? The novelist is nearly unknown these days, even among the most literate readers. Few of his titles--"Men in Prison," "Birth of Our Power," "Conquered City," "Midnight in the Century," "The Case…

IF YOU'VE BEEN WONDERING where to find wholehearted Muslim support for the war on terrorism, consider the Balkans. Last week, the authorities in predominantly Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina took further steps to assist the U.S.-led campaign. On June 3, Bosnian police raided seven offices of the…

FEDERAL LAW ENFORCEMENT has kicked over quite an anthill in Northern Virginia. A U.S. Treasury task force, Operation Green Quest, has been investigating the funding of Islamic terror. Raids on March 20 struck an extraordinary array of financial, charitable, and ostensibly religious entities…

PRESIDENT BUSH'S schedule this week includes a visit to Washington by his counterpart from Uzbekistan, Islam Karimov. The strategically located ex-Soviet republic has become an important American ally in the anti-terror war, assuring our military of the availability of bases for operations in…

PRESIDENT BUSH, in his State of the Union address, gave a stirring summation of the values dear to America and its allies in the struggle against global terrorism. Among the "non-negotiable demands of human dignity," Bush included religious tolerance. He did so at a time when American policymakers…

THE INDICTMENTS of American Taliban John Walker Lindh and "shoebomber" Richard Reid will have broader consequences than many Americans imagine. As important as these cases are for the investigation of al Qaeda and related terrorist activities in Afghanistan, they should also make it possible to…

TREASON TRIALS are in the air, as U.S. authorities seek a solution to the case of John Walker Lindh, the Taliban fighter from Fairfax, California. Predictably, misinformation is rife, with amateur experts weighing in on a topic most Americans have enjoyed the luxury of ignoring for the past 50…

IN PAST ERAS of moviemaking, it was possible to combine great entertainment with a moral agenda--matching riveting action with a serious inquiry into contemporary events. But, beginning in the 1960s, Hollywood was transformed, first by counterculture chic and then by political correctness. For…

LAST WEEK President Bush made a long-overdue decision. He ordered the closing of the Holy Land Foundation, a front for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, headquartered in Richardson, Texas, with branch offices in Paterson, N.J., Bridgeview, Ill., and San Diego. The Holy War Foundation would be…

ON DECEMBER 7, 1941, the day the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, the United States government faced an array of internal enemies. These included aliens and Americans of German, Italian, and Japanese ancestry. The Roosevelt administration's handling of Japanese Americans--some 120,000 were sent to…

AMERICANS MAY ENJOY the spectacle of Russian president Vladimir Putin chowing down with President Bush in Crawford, Texas, and take comfort in the knowledge that the old standoff between two continent-sized foes has well and truly ended. But we still have reason for caution in dealing with Russia.…

ON SEPTEMBER 27, a group of Islamic scholars in the Middle East issued a fatwa on the duties of Muslims serving in the U.S. armed forces. The story of this fatwa -- a religious pronouncement with legal force among Muslims -- illustrates both the confused state of relations between American society…

SECRETARY OF STATE Colin Powell thinks "it's a little odd" for the United States to be telling our Saudi allies that they should "muzzle dissent, . . . muzzle those [in Saudi Arabia] who are speaking out against us" and our campaign in Afghanistan. But the main public critics of the United States…

WHAT IS THE ROLE and responsibility of Saudi Arabia in financing Osama bin Laden, poster boy for Wahhabism, the extremist Islamic sect that justifies murder? In some quarters, efforts are emerging to quash discussion of Wahhabism and of the Saudi connection to September 11. The Saudis are unhappy,…

WITH THE COMING of the war on terrorism, the United States acquired an ally about which most Americans know very little: the Central Asian nation of Uzbekistan. The mistakes our government--and supposedly friendly "non-governmental organizations"--have made in the past in relating to the Uzbeks are…

UNTIL SEPTEMBER 11, the American media typically portrayed only two kinds of Arabs and Muslims: rich oil princes and unemployed ranters in the streets. Even after the atrocities in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, the common wisdom has it that we must listen to the "Arab street," because, we…

THE EXTRAORDINARY ACT of destruction seen on September 11 had a noteworthy harbinger in Islamic history. In 1925, Ibn Saud, founder of the present Saudi Arabian dynasty, ordered the wholesale destruction of the sacred tombs, graveyards, and mosques in Mecca and Medina. These are, of course, the two…

I FIRST HEARD OF THE MASSACRE of the Berishas, an extended family of Kosovar Albanians, in June 2000, some 14 months after it happened. A colleague and friend, Shpresa Mulliqi, asked me to polish a rough English translation of her long interview with Shyhrete Berisha for publication in a bilingual…

THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR-the conflict from 1936 to 1939 between the mainly socialist and anarchist militias defending the Spanish Republic, and the right-wing forces headed by General Francisco Franco-is often described as the last purely idealistic cause of the twentieth century. Certainly this is…

TO MANY CONTEMPORARY INTELLECTUALS, especially academics of postmodern outlook, the radical German writer Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) embodies the restless consciousness of the past century. Jewish and Marxist, a critic and philosopher, he was little known during his lifetime. But after his…

NICHOLSON BAKER IS BEST KNOWN FOR HIS NOVELS, but his latest volume is a lengthy rant against our major libraries and their policies regarding the preservation of old newspapers and books. Written in the warm-tapioca style of modern journalism, Baker's Double Fold: Libraries and the Assault on…

"Communazis"

IN THE KIND OF COINCIDENCE on which Africa thrives, but which went unnoticed in most Western media, Congo-Kinshasa dictator Laurent Kabila was shot to death only a few hours before the 40th anniversary of the demise of his presumed revolutionary role model, Patrice Lumumba. Of course, given how…

Hermann and Kate Field, two little-known but quintessential twentieth-century figures, addressed a small gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the other night. The occasion was a belated promotion for Hermann Field's memoir, Trapped in the Cold War:…

Hermann and Kate Field, two little-known but quintessential twentieth-century figures, addressed a small gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the other night. The occasion was a belated promotion for Hermann Field's memoir, Trapped in the Cold War:…

Hermann and Kate Field, two little-known but quintessential twentieth-century figures, addressed a small gathering at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C., the other night. The occasion was a belated promotion for Hermann Field's memoir, Trapped in the Cold War:…

In Washington, D.C., down in the nest of government buildings known as the Federal Triangle, there's a colossus called the Ariel Rios Building. Nowadays it houses the Environmental Protection Agency, but back in the 1930s, it was used by the postal service.

Mitrovica, Kosovo

Djakovica, Kosovo

Sarajevo

ON SATURDAY, JANUARY 8, Ella Goldberg Wolfe died in Palo Alto, California. She was 103. Given her age and infirmities, the news was not a shock. Yet her passing is much more than obituary fodder. To scholars of 20th-century communism, and to a few ex-Communists, her death is a landmark, for Ella…

Gracanica, Kosovo

EDWARD DMYTRYK HAD IT RIGHT. "When I die," he said, "I know the obits will first read, 'one of Hollywood's Unfriendly Ten,' not director of The Caine Mutiny, The Young Lions, Raintree County, and other films." When Dmytryk died July 1, at 90, the New York Times quoted this remark without apparent…

On March 21, a long-standing and bitter injustice will be rectified: That evening, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science is scheduled to award a special Oscar to the 89-year-old director Elia Kazan. How the glittering audience at Oscar Night will greet this controversial presentation is…

ON MARCH 21, a long-standing and bitter injustice will be rectified: That evening, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science is scheduled to award a special Oscar to the 89-year-old director Elia Kazan. How the glittering audience at Oscar Night will greet this controversial presentation is…

Something the press calls a "war" is going on in Kosovo, a southern province of Serbia. Between late February and March 9, the conflict took at least 50 lives and perhaps as many as 80, with dozens missing. Most of the dead were ethnic Albanians, as are 90 percent of the province's people. The…

The very existence of the Albanian novelist Ismail Kadare, given the isolation of his country from the world, has been treated as a kind of miracle. He has been praised by John Updike and championed by the Boston Globe, and was recently the subject of an "At Lunch With" profile in the New York…