Ikhwanweb :: The Muslim Brotherhood Official English Website

Afghanistan and the Outsourcing of War

A worrying two-thirds of the Pentagon’s personnel in Afghanistan are private military contractors, unaccountable to military law or ethics, swaggeringly overbearing, and not in any hurry to help improve the poor security situation that assures their firms’ current and future profits, says Marie-Dominique Charlier...

Jerusalem's Battle of the Graves

The battle over Jerusalem’s Mamilla Cemetery -- a Muslim cemetery (Ma’man Allah) estimated to be over 800 years old and in continuous use until 1948 -- encapsulates many aspects of Israel’s approach to Palestinian rights, notes Nadia Hijab...

Ideological Detox and the Muslim Community

Every single attempt at terrorism by Muslims pointed to an anger sparked by geopolitical actions taken by Western governments. Whether it is the atrocities committed in the Gaza Strip or the invasion of Afghanistan, the perpetrators were driven by on-the-ground facts, not by a poisonous and twisted view of scripture. Their motives were far from theological, notes Steve Zhou...

A Eurocentric Problem

In order to obscure Western Europe’s extensive debt to the Islamicate, they devalued the birth of new cultural formations in western Europe in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, flowing from contacts with the Arabs in Spain, Sicily and the Levant, notes M. Shahid Alam...

Turkey’s Soft Power Successes

He says Turkey is well-poised to play a mediating role in various conflicts, with strong ties with different religious and ethnic groups where there are Turkish speakers...

An Illegal War is State-Terrorism

What aggression did Iraq commit against the US and the UK that could have justified the war? How did the people of Iraq ever cause any harm to the people in the UK or the US? These are questions that should have been asked at toothless Chilcot Inquiry, notes Yamin Zakaria...

Chutzpah: Thy Name is Zionism

One might think that with over a million people dead and almost five million others displaced in Iraq—and not a weapon of mass destruction to be found—that Netanyahu might be showing some remorse. Instead, he’s beating the drums loudest for an even more catastrophic war with Iran, notes Maidhc ? Cathail...

The New Deal in Reverse

On March 4, 1933, the day he took office, Franklin Roosevelt excoriated the “money changers” who “have fled from their high seats in the temples of our civilization [because...] they know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers...

The Good Old Days

United States President Barack Obama's decision to name Robert Ford as the new ambassador to Syria to fill a post that has been vacant since 2005 has been warmly received by the Syrians...

The Useless Logic of Round Numbers

Did Gazans starve less after 100 days of Obama's presidency? Do Palestinians care much for round numbers? I doubt it. Nor do Iraqis, Afghanis, and, now, Yemenis. Misery is misery, any day, every day; war is an inferno. The smell of death, the scenes of blood in Kabul and Baghdad and Gaza, will remain the same on a Friday, or a Tuesday, 100 day into Obama’s presidency or 514 days later, Ramzy Baroud...

Suspicions Linger as Libya and US break the Ice

While the two countries have come a long way, hard work lies ahead if both Libya and the US are serious about final rapprochement. For Libya, it’s far more important to speed up the normalisation at the non-governmental level. Cultural exchanges and training programmes may be more effective in building trust than any official government efforts, notes Mustafa Fetouri...

Turkey Is Moving Past the Past

Turkey’ impresses not only for its flourishing democracy and its growing regional leadership role. It is addressing tough historical issues: establishing relations with Armenia, the Kurds, and the Greek Cypriots, says Wendy Kristianasen...

Mideast Coverage at the New York Times

Palestinians working for the Western media do not have anywhere near the same standing, or influence, as Jewish-Israeli reporters in Jerusalem. The revelation that the son of Ethan Bronner, the New York Times’ Jerusalem bureau chief, is serving in the Israeli military has highlighted an issue that should have been in the spotlight long ago, notes Jonathan Cook...

Dangerous Hysteria over Iran's Nuclear Program

Arab states have no wish to see a nuclear-capable Iran, but they are far more frightened of an Iranian-Israeli war, which could have devastating consequences for the security and stability of the region and for Arab oil exports. The more Iran is threatened, the more defiant it becomes -- and the more remote the chance of an agreement, notes Patrick Seale...

Losing Patience

Even those who dislike Hamas have a sneaking admiration for their courage and determination against impossible odds. How many of their critics could have emerged from what they have been through with colours still flying? We in Britain owe a duty to Palestinians to talk to Hamas as well as Fatah instead of welcoming onto our streets Israelis wanted for mega war crimes, notes Stuart Littlewood...

MI5 chief hits back amid torture cover-up row

British spy chief says UK agencies do not torture nor 'encourage others to torture on our behalf'...

Operation Breakfast Redux

he CIA’s escalating drone war in the Pakistani tribal borderlands and Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign against the Cambodian equivalent, argues Pratap Chatterjee...

30-Second Warnings

For sheer prescience when it came to American foreign policy, nothing has beaten 'Kenyan Runner', a Super Bowl commercial that ran just before Team W led us to eight losing seasons in Afghanistan, Iraq, and at home, notes Robert Lipsyte...

Historical Amnesia: Haiti and Media Presentation

Once in debt, the IMF and World Bank stepped in and as is usual with their actions, demanded trade concessions and internal financial changes that not only increased the indebtedness of Haiti, but forced the diminution of its social infrastructure, and forced many independent farmers off their lands and into slave wage jobs in the urban centres, notes Jim Miles...

Obama's Budget Ducks Pentagon Cuts

The real answer as to why there is no defense spending freeze: Because Democrats are always scared of being called 'wimps' on national security issues — likely the same reason Obama had to support at least one overseas war and thus reluctantly escalated the Afghanistan conflict, notes Ivan Eland...