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…

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…

I have long argued that the presence of Jews living on the West Bank does not present a problem to a resolution of the Arab-Israeli conflict, for a true resolution would allow them to live peaceably in a Palestinian state.…

American forces departed Iraqi cities last week to parades, fireworks , and chants of "Out, America, out!" and "America has left! Baghdad is victorious!"

They left under a Status of Forces Agreement reached in November 2008 stipulating their "withdrawal from cities, towns and villages"…

A small and routine news item today from the Syrian Arab News Agency, “A Colombian Delegation Condemns Israeli Brutal Destruction of AlQunaitra,” caught my eye. It tells how Carlos Kaveira Diaz, the head of the Democratic Polo Party in Colombia…