The United States went through a near-miss terrorist attack during the Christmas holidays. A Muslim, this time a Nigerian Muslim, was involved. Consequently, the country is going through another silly season whereby a number of “experts” with diarrhea of the mouth are eagerly expressing their idiotic views. At the government level, there [...]

President Barack H. Obama’s campaign slogans of “a time for a change” and “yes we can” are filtering into his speeches and his actions toward the world of Islam.  He is serious about bringing an end to the poisonous frame of reference that the concept of “the clash of civilizations” presents for Muslims.  In this [...]

Looking at the tepid global reaction to the massacre of the civilians in Gaza, one wonders whether the conscience of the international community is half asleep or is suffering from something called sympathy fatigue.  Hundreds of civilian casualties, incessantly escalating human misery, and with no end in the Israeli military action in sight, even God [...]

The post-9/11 era popularized the phrases “weak states,” “failing states” and “failed states.”  Those were places where terrorist organizations evolved and eventually took over the country.  Somalia emerged as the archetype (if that is the right adjective) failed state.  Even if the world wanted to forget Somalia, it could not, when that country became a [...]

India has always been a bundle of political, social, and economic paradoxes.  In the post-Mumbai terrorist attack days (which Indians refer to as India’s 9/11, or, to be precise, 11/26), it stands at the crossroads of modest economic growth as well as political chaos.  The developmental aspect of this paradox is related to the promise [...]

Reading about Indonesia from the United States in the post-9/11 era creates a picture of that country that has little to do with realities inside its borders.  One of the reasons is the obsession of the American media and even OpEd writing intellectuals with Jemah Islamiya (JI) at the expense of everything else.  As much [...]

If the 1990s and the first eight years of the first decade of the 21st Century represented an era when transnational terrorism dominated world attention, the remainder of this decade and the next one promise to be a period of a new global crisis, which might be even more obdurate than fighting global terrorism.  Robert [...]