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Middle East Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 28, 2012 77 Comments

The successful Navy SEAL raid which killed Osama bin Laden is becoming one of the central themes of the Obama campaign. Almost every other sentence out of the mouth of Joe Biden (who opposed the raid) is about "bin Laden." We know that bin Laden was located as...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 14, 2012 38 Comments

Joel Brinkley, currently a Professor at Stanford who spent most of his career as a foreign correspondent for The New York Times, has a column in the San Francisco Chronicle titled Islamists in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia not democratic. The thesis of the column is that Westerners who took...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on April 07, 2012 15 Comments

No one could have seen this coming. Via The Jerusalem Post: Palestinian Authority security forces in the West Bank arrested over the weekend a Palestinian blogger who launched a Facebook campaign under the title "The people want an end to corruption." The arrest of Jamal Abu Rihan is...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 17, 2012 11 Comments

There's a war going on between hackers in the Middle East: Israeli hackers said they brought down the official websites of Saudi  Arabia's Monetary Agency and Abu Dhabi's Securities Exchange on Tuesday in retaliation for a denial of  service attack on the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 14, 2012 10 Comments

There seems to be a war brewing in the Middle East, if not on the battlefield at least in the political realm. The Wall Street Journal and many others report tension between the U.S. and Israel over a potential strike on Iran.  There also is tension over...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on January 01, 2012 20 Comments

There are two important columns each of which addresses the surge of Islamists throughout the Middle East and Central Asia. The first column, by Andy McCarthy, focuses on reports that the Obama administration is using Sheikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi as a conduit for contact with the Taliban: The surrender is complete...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 25, 2011 19 Comments

First it was Lara Logan.  Then other female journalists: The press freedom organization Reporters Without Borders on Friday cautioned  news outlets on sending female reporters to Cairo’s Tahrir Square, citing three  incidents in which reporters have been assaulted. “It is more dangerous for a woman than a...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on November 01, 2011 10 Comments

Calling Israel an "Apartheid State" and the barrier built to keep out suicide bombers the "Apartheid Wall" is part of the standard lexicon of the Islamist-Lefist Anti-Israel Coalition. In The New York Times today, Richard Goldstone calls the apartheid terminology a slander, Israel and the Apartheid...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 24, 2011 13 Comments

As mentioned earlier, the Obama administration and media are touting Gaddafi's overthrow as a great foreign policy victory. But Gaddafi's body has hardly gone cold, and Libya already has a strict Islamist government, see all the links at Memeorandum.  Andrew Sullivan also rounds up some of the...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on October 20, 2011 9 Comments

There are conflicting reports, as detailed in the live updates at The Telegraph. Updates:  I'll wait a bit before updating the headline, but it appears he's dead (photo at The Telegraph link). DEBKAFile says he's dead, killed in NATO airstrike near his hometown of Sirte. PJTatler has al-Jaeera...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 27, 2011 18 Comments

ABC has an exclusive: video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player Some exclusive. In fact, I ran a post on it earlier this month, Let the Libya “unexpected” consequences begin: Such as a “no fly zone” over all of northern Africa, spreading across the globe, because while we broke Muammar Gaddafi’s...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 22, 2011 4 Comments

There is one worthwhile clause in an otherwise worthless article at The Atlantic by Steve Clemons, Obama Tells Palestinians to Stay in the Back of the Bus. Clemons lays out the fiction that the Palestinian strategic move to take land without peace is something Gandhi-like: Obama's position on this is dangerous in...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 15, 2011 29 Comments

Here's your "Arab Spring" and "Arab Street" for you. From a BBC correspondent (h/t Daily Dish): While walking in the street someone pushed me from behind with such force that I nearly fell over. Turning around, I found myself surrounded by five men, one of whom tried to punch...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on September 08, 2011 5 Comments

Such as a "no fly zone" over all of northern Africa, spreading across the globe, because while we broke Muammar Gaddafi's army, we didn't fix the problem of tens of thousands of mobile surface-to-air missiles. As reported by the Christian Science Monitor: At newly discovered weapons-storage sites,...

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 24, 2011 7 Comments

It's not often I thank Think Progress, but thanks for this video interview of Allen West on the issue of Obama foreign policy in Libya and the Middle East.  Think Progress, with its videographer following West on his trip to Israel, figured they'd get good...

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