“There is no doubt he is our friend,” Turkey’s prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, says of Iran’s president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, even as he accuses Israel’s foreign minister Avigdor Lieberman of threatening to use nuclear weapons against Gaza. These outrageous assertions…

Almost unnoticed, Binyamin Netanyahu won a major victory last week when Barack Obama backed down on a signature policy initiative. This about-face suggests that U.S.-Israel relations are no longer headed for the disaster I have been fearing.

Four months ago, the…

The Obama administration has established an alarmingly naïve and dangerous record on Arab-Israeli issues, leading me to worry about spectacular policy failures ahead. But it has initiated one innovative and positive policy deserving high praise.

Instead of Israel making yet more unilateral…

The Obama administration has established an alarmingly naïve and dangerous record on Arab-Israeli issues, leading me to worry about spectacular policy failures ahead. But it has initiated one innovative and positive policy deserving high praise.

Instead of Israel making yet more unilateral…

What’s new on the niqab and burqa front?

To remind, both garments are designed for the modesty of Muslim females; the niqab covers all but the eyes and the burqa covers the entire face. In "Ban the Burqa – and the…

Barack Obama’s assistant for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, John O. Brennan, conveniently outlined the administration’s present and future policy mistakes in a speech on August 6, "A New Approach for Safeguarding Americans ."

To start with, his address to the Center for…

Highly impressed by the post-9/11 and post-Iraq cohort to enter the field of Middle East studies, I have been predicting for years that by about 2015 the field will begin evolving in a more mainstream direction. The eccentrics and extremists…

In a blog, “Hijabs on Western Political Women,” I displayed a brood of queens, princesses, first ladies, members of congress, foreign ministers, journalists, and even movie stars looking anywhere from faintly ridiculous to outlandishly bad as they wear some variant…

Those of us who argue against Shariah are sometimes asked why Islamic law poses a problem when modern Western societies long ago accommodated Halakha, or Jewish law. In fact, this was one of the main talking points of those who…

The term mahram derives from the Arabic word haram (forbidden) and refers to those persons with whom sex is forbidden. For a Muslim women, these include (1) close male relatives by birth, (2) close male in-laws, (3) men who shared…