via LobeLog
by Marsha B. Cohen
Reuven Rivlin has just been elected Israel’s 10th president. A member of Israel’s parliamentary body since 1988, he served as Speaker of the Knesset from 2003-06 and again from 2009-13. Today, Israel’s parliamentarians, by secret ballot, elected him to a 7-year term after two rounds of voting.
A native [...]
via LobeLog
by Mitchell Plitnick
They were dueling op-eds, one in the New York Times and the other in the Jewish communal magazine, Tablet. The question being bandied between them was whether Israel is becoming a theocracy. Not surprisingly, both pieces missed the mark. It’s not theocracy but unbridled nationalism that is the threat [...]
via LobeLog
by Barbara Slavin
A new poll following the election of Hassan Rouhani says that a majority of Iranians oppose Iran’s intervention in Syria and Iraq and believe that Iran is seeking nuclear weapons despite their government’s claims to the contrary.
The poll, released Friday (December 6) and conducted August [...]
via Lobe Log
When I was living in Cairo, the transition to winter was sometimes smooth. The beastly oven of summer changed slowly into a bearable fall of cool-warm. The fall moved from the cool-warm to a few weeks of cold, or at least what was cold to Egypt. These were smooth changes. It [...]
via Lobe Log
In a recent Fox News article, the American Enterprise Institute’s Michael Rubin presents an issue that will consume Middle East policy makers for decades: “Is There Really Democracy in the Middle East?” He’s apparently not interested, however, in serious analysis of that question. Instead Rubin offers a partisan polemic [...]
via IPS News
This week’s decision by the Bahraini court of appeals to uphold the prison terms against Bahraini opposition activists is a travesty of justice and an indication that Bahraini repression continues unabated.
Bahraini officials, when confronted with angry world reaction to the court’s decision, cynically hid behind the claim they would [...]
via Lobe Log
This past week a couple of articles have been published that hint at the central incoherence of the United States’ Iran policy. The arguments are not necessarily new, but they show in concrete terms how the stated objective of US sanctions, which is to change the calculations and behavior of Iran’s [...]
The following is cross-posted from Max Blumenthal’s blog.
By Max Blumenthal
I spent last week in Amsterdam, where I participated in the “Return of Ghosts” symposium of the Nexus Institute, a discussion/debate about the resurgence of neo-fascism in Europe and anti-democratic trends in the West. Besides providing a forum for debating European politics, [...]
If you haven’t already, head over the website of the Nation and read every last word of Matt Duss’s report from Herzliya, the biggest annual Israeli security conference. The event is best known for being where Israeli rightists and U.S. neocons swoon over each other.
Just look at some of the Americans who took [...]
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Neocons and Democracy: Egypt as a Case Study
via LobeLog
by Jim Lobe
If one thing has become clear in the wake of last week’s military coup d’etat against Egyptian President Mohamed Morsi, it’s that democracy promotion is not a core principle of neoconservatism. Unlike protecting Israeli security and preserving its military superiority over any and all possible regional challenges (which is [...]