Moqtada Sadr is known as the maverick of Iraqi politics. While he earned much praise for taking on the Americans, his subsequent somersaults have created many problems. He enjoys widespread support among the masses but his unorthodox political tactics have caused him to lose credibility.
That Israel is a terrorist state and its prime minister, Ariel Sharon, is a war-criminal are undeniable. The murder on January 24 of Elie Hobeika, himself one of the most notorious war-criminals in Lebanon, was almost certainly carried out by Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency.
King Hasan of Morocco, one of the longest-reigning rulers in the Muslim world, was buried in Rabat on July 25, two days after his death in a Rabat hospital. In keeping with recent tradition, his funeral was attended by a large entourage of his foreign masters...
Israel’s chief rabbi, Israel Lau, has been leading an international campaign for the release of 13 Jews arrested for spying in Iran. The case of the 13 Iranian Jews came to light last month when Tehran announced that they are to be tried after an intensive four-month investigation.
Mercenaries, especially operating on behalf of a foreign occupation-force, deserve no mercy. This is the message the Hizbullah have delivered with deadly accuracy in South Lebanon. This has got across clearly to the Zionist occupiers as well as to their surrogates, the South Lebanese Army (SLA).
The constant in Middle Eastern politics is their inconsistancy. Alliances are made and broken regularly. Who would have imagined five years ago that Iran and Saudi Arabia could be discussing the possibility of a defence pact?
Shaikh Jaber al-Ahmed al-Sabah, the amir of Kuwait, dissolved the country’s Parliament on May 4, shortly before the 50-member body was to vote on a no-confidence motion against Ahmad al-Kulaib, the Minister of Justice, Endowments and Islamic Affairs.
Yasir Arafat is perhaps the only person in the world who still clings to the fiction that there is a ‘peace process’ in the Middle East. The Oslo accords which he signed in September 1993 and September 1995 have been an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinian people.
If the Qana massacre of April 18, 1996 was a tragic ‘mistake’, have the Zionists made any effort not to repeat such mistakes? Their three-year record shows that the Zionists have continued to kill innocent civilians.
The Zionists’ altercation with the European Union (EU) over Al-Quds [Jerusalem] which hit newspaper headlines on March 11 was not merely about semantics. While the affair has domestic implications for the Zionists’ forthcoming polls on May 17, the issue is of far wider significance.
An unholy alliance of Christian and Jewish fundamentalist terrorists may bloody the streets of Al-Quds (Jerusalem) far more than anything the Islamic strugglers in Palestine could ever do in their quest to liberate Palestine.
Amid the drum-beating in western capitals as well as some Muslim capitals on the fiftieth anniversary of the universal declaration of human rights, Israel was busy doing what it does best: killing and maiming Palestinians.
The 19th annual meeting of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), held in Abu Dhabi from December 7-9, was a far cry from the heady days of high oil prices when Arab monarchies were awash with petro-dollars.
Like father like son, they say? Well, more like two sons. Saddam Husain’s sons are not the most polite creatures in the world as anyone even remotely familiar with that unfortunate land will testify. Life becomes even more intolerable if the two get into a fight.
The Zionists, it seems, are infatuated with blood. Tainted blood, that is, which they want to spread among the rest of the population in the Middle East.
The Zionist occupation forces have imposed a strict curfew on the southern part of the West Bank town of Hebron. The complete blockade of the city is part of the Zionists’ collective punishment to inflict suffering on 400,000 Palestinian residents while the gun-toting Zionist settlers prowl the streets freely.
‘Till death us do part’ may be a Christian marriage expression long out of fashion but it applies most aptly to rulers in the Middle East. Notwithstanding the constitutional monarchies of Europe which as mere show-pieces exercise little or no executive authority...
Torture, beatings, deceit and theft are the stock in trade of the Zionist occupiers of Palestine. Now Yassir Arafat’s Palestinian Authority, a subcontractor for the Israelis, has also joined the cruelty bandwagon agains the Palestinian people.
With the death on June 2 of Shaikh Sa'id Sha'ban in Tripoli, Lebanon, the Islamic Movement has lost another leading figure. He was 69.
Jordan’s, and perhaps the Arab world’s most popular Islamic activist is under virtual house arrest despite being released from jail on April 16.
The antipathy of regimes in the Muslim world to Islam is no secret. Similarly, the masses’ attachment to Islam is a fact of life that these regimes cannot alter, however much they try.
Shaikh Asad Bayyoud Tamimi, Leader of the Palestinian Islamic Jihad Movement and former Imam of Masjid al-Aqsa, died in Amman, Jordan on the night of March 21.
Twenty years after Israel first invaded Lebanon, and sixteen years after their troops smashed their way to the gates of Beirut before being pushed back to a ‘buffer zone’ in the south of the country, they appear to have had enough and want out.
Shaheed Samer Karameh was buried with full military honours on March 17, the day after he died in a Palestinian hospital.
Nowhere in the Middle East was the anger of the masses at yet another threatened strike against Iraq by US-British forces more apparent than in Jordan.
The anti-Islamic nature of regimes in the Muslim world is daily reflected in their policies - big and small - that impinge on the lives of ordinary people. Clearly, some are more fanatic in their anti-Islamic zeal than others.
Since its creation in 1948, Israel has pursued an aggressively expansionist policy creating new facts on the ground. The aim is to tighten grip on the land it has illegally occupied from the Palestinians.
Not so long ago, Lebanon’s name was virtually synonymous with hostages. Media reports incessantly talked about a handful of westerners held in the war-torn country.
The attempted assassination of Khalid Meshal, the political bureau chief of Hamas, in Amman, Jordan, on September 25 was undertaken by the Israeli terrorist group, Mossad with the knowledge of king Husain of Jordan...
Will the Arab regimes muster enough courage to defy the western-led embargo against Libya imposed through the UN security council since April 1992?
Unable to get away with its bloody-minded policies, the Zionist State of Israel has resorted to the one ploy it knows best: State terrorism.
Nearly four years after the Oslo agreement of September 13, 1993, and numerous kicks in the teeth later, Arab rulers have realised that it is virtually impossible to deal with the Zionist occupiers of Palestine.
There appears no limit to the crimes perpetrated by the Zionists against Palestinians and indeed against Muslims worldwide on a daily basis.
Oslo has been an unmitigated disaster for the Palestinians. They are caught between the Israeli brutes and Yassir Arafat’s thugs. If they fight their zionist tormentors, Arafat’s thugs come after them...
Khalil Ali Abu Daiyya, 37, married with five children, lasted six days at the hands of his Israeli captives in the notorious Russian Compound in Jerusalem before he died on May 21.
The Arab world is not the monolith that Arab nationalists try to project nor is it full of people who want to surrender to Israel at the drop of a hat, as its critics suggest.
The two-year ordeal of Dr Mousa Abu Marzook finally ended when he landed in Amman, Jordan on May 6. Throughout his incarceration in the US on trumped-up charges levelled by Israel, the political head of Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic group, maintained his innocence and said that he was a political prisoner.
How events can spiral out of control in the Middle East is illustrated, yet again, by Turkey’s sudden outburst of rage against Syria.