Many of the leaders held up as representing the epitome of evil were extraordinarily and spectacularly untalented, incapable and incompetent. With this mediocrity of evil, it is almost a wonder that they managed to rise to the top at all.
Read MoreRather than being allowed to apply for asylum, thousands of refugees and migrants attempting to enter Slovenia and Croatia are being illegally and often violently spirited across the border to Bosnia, and out of the EU.
Read MoreWith greater freedom has come greater unhappiness in Tunisia. Behind this apparent paradox is economic hardship and nostalgia for a past that never was.
Read MoreThe intensifying crackdown on the media and civil society in Egypt leaves Egyptians who are out of the country feeling powerless to help and guilty about the freedoms they enjoy.
Read MoreOnce the mother of our world departed, her ghost arrived, plunging me into the memory hole which grief opens up, where the past becomes its own present and the present morphs into a kind of phantom future.
Read MoreFrustratingly for Arab dictators and despots, no matter how much they try to silence, intimidate or co-opt the media, new loud and critical voices emerge.
Read MoreAs the Middle East stumbles perilously close to its own “world war”, seeds of change are already sprouting hopes of a better century ahead.
Read MoreTribalism and sectarianism afflicts Western societies too. So why is that they seem to be tearing the Middle East apart?
Read MoreThe romantic myth that speaking Arabic meant that Arabs share “one heart and one spirit” led pan-Arabism to talk unity while walking the path of disunity
Read MorePunishing a dictator for killing his own people by killing yet more of them is not the answer. It didn’t work in Iraq, and it won’t work in Syria.
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