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Hélé Béji, a prominent woman writer from an old notable family in Tunis, was outraged by an incident in early January when a small crowd of religious extremists at the airport in Tunis to greet a visiting Hamas leader chanted “Death to the Jews.” She published this cry of the heart in Le Monde on […]

Perhaps 100,000 Egyptians came out on Wednesday in Tahrir Square in Cairo to mark the anniversary of the first massive protest that led to the overthrow of dictator Hosni Mubarak. There was also a huge crowd in Alexandria, Egypt’s second city. But the gathering was not simply a commemoration. The revolutionary youth used the occasion […]

President Barack Obama’s State of the Union Address treated the Middle East at several points, underlining the unusual importance of this region to the United States. Obama began by celebrating the end of the Iraq War and of the presence of US troops in that country. Although Obama might have been open to US forces […]

World military spending in 2010. Note that Iran’s is not a big enough proportion of world arms spending to show up on this graph, which doesn’t show countries that are lower than 2% of the global total. Courtesy Democratic Underground.

Perhaps you’ve heard of “Makin’ Thunderbirds,” a hard-bitten rock & roll song by Bob Seger that I listened to 30 years ago while in college…