Over the past few weeks, a number of comments related to the now collapsed Israeli-Palestinian peace talks caught my attention. Collectively they establish why the talks failed and make clear what must change if any negotiated settlement is to be successful in the future. To be

A few days ago, I spent an afternoon with members of the Syrian opposition delegation visiting Washington.

I was deeply disturbed last week when US Secretary of State John Kerry, in response to criticism from former Senate colleagues, felt compelled to walk back his warning that Israel risked becoming an “apartheid state” if it failed to make peace with the Palestinia

Like many a “hawkish” liberal before him, former UK prime minister Tony Blair crossed over to the dark side of neoconservatism.

While Palestinians celebrated the reconciliation agreement signed between Fateh and Hamas, the reactions in Washington and Israel were reminiscent of the biblical “weeping and gnashing of teeth”. American political commentators were dumbfounded by the news of the pac

In this November’s mid-term elections, the Democratic Party will be focused on winning back the governorships and legislatures in Wisconsin, Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania.  Democrats lost decisively in these important states in 2010, giving Republicans the opportuni

Because Arab Americans and American Muslims have been waiting to see when theaObama administration would finally act to end Bush-era ethnic and religious profiling guidelines and practices, we were troubled to read press accounts this week indicating that Attorney General Er

I did my doctoral work at Temple University, whose founder was a 19th-century Baptist preacher, Russell Conwell. Conwell was, to be sure, an accomplished writer, a captivating preacher and a visionary entrepreneur, but the theology he helped popularise was, in a word, distu

Western biases are not only transparently self-serving and flat-out wrong, they can also be so annoying.  As an example, a few weeks back, the Washington Post featured a long lament by a British intellectual pointedly suggesting that because Europe was in decline, the world