The World As It Was in 2013

Silvio Berlusconi is out and Angela Merkel was reelected. Nelson Mandela and Hugo Chavez passed away. Fidel Castro didn’t. People took to the streets in Kiev and Bangkok, Cairo and Khartoum. The president of Syria ignored Barack Obama’s red line and used chemical weapons, while Iran was willing to engage in negotiations with the United […]

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Tragedy On The Nile

The divisions in Egypt are deep. Whereas reconciliation had seemed possible, though difficult, until last week, there are now two irreconcilable camps facing off against each other: the military and its secular supporters, on one side, and the Muslim Brotherhood and its supporters, on the other. The young activists and the liberals no longer play […]

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The Deep Saudi Fear

Riyadh was a close ally of Egypt’s former leader Hosni Mubarak, toppled by a popular uprising in 2011 that brought Mursi‘s Muslim Brotherhood to power, and has long feared the spread of the Islamist group’s ideology to the Gulf monarchies. Read Here – Reuters

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The Mistakes Muslim Brotherhood Made

Imagine a government dominated by paranoia, convinced of conspiracies around every corner. That, in short, was the most defining aspect of the Muslim Brotherhood’s year in power in Egypt. Though the country’s first democratically elected government was overthrown in a military coup in July, the Brotherhood made its fair share of critical mistakes. Read Here […]

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A Tale Of Four Cities

Thursday of this week was a bad day in modern Arab history. The four leading Arab cities of recent eras – Baghdad, Damascus, Beirut and Cairo – were simultaneously engulfed in bombings or urban warfare, mostly carried out with brutal savagery and cruelty against civilians in urban settings. Even more problematic is that the carnage was predominantly the work […]

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Killings In Cairo

Egypt‘s army-backed interim prime minister defends the government’s decision to order the crushing of camps of supporters of deposed President Mohamed Morsi, saying the authorities had no choice but to act. Read Here – AlJazeera

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Egypt’s Fear Bubble

More important in my view is the belief expressed by almost half a dozen activists in the course of a week of conversations that the revolutionary movement was never going to be able to defeat both the Brotherhood and the military in a struggle for Egypt’s future. And so to have the army hand such […]

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Let’s Not Celebrate The Egyptian Coup

Nobody should celebrate a military coup against Egypt’s first freely elected president, no matter how badly he failed or how badly they hate the Muslim Brotherhood. Turfing out Morsy will not come close to addressing the underlying failures that have plagued Egypt’s catastrophic transition over the last two and a half years. Read Here – […]

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