Damascus Spring

As expected, no sooner than a couple of weeks from publishing their New Study that criticizes the power of the Israeli Lobby and their die-hard neo-conservative friends, the two professors responsible for it are taking the most outrageous form of academic terrorism from the pundits of the Israeli Lobby. What is so amazing is that some of those criticizing the Dean of Harvard University Kennedy School of Government, Dr. Stephen Walt and his colleague Professor John Mearsheimer of Political Science at the University of Chicago, are the same die-hard supporters of the corrupt political action committee AIPAC. Some like Professors Alan Dershowitz have gone overboard by describing the study as trash that could have been written by Neo-Nazi David Duke, while Democratic Congressman Eliot Engel of New York described the professors as “dishonest so-called intellectuals”. The calls into the Harvard school of Government from ‘pro-Israel donors’ expressing concern about the paper, have forced the

In my current most interesting read for one of the most respected Western Scholars of Islamic and Middle-Eastern history professor Bernard Lewis book " The Middle East, a brief history of the last 2000 years", I have encountered one of the most fascinating fact about the way Islam looked and regulated the trade in humans throughout the middle-ages. Despite the well publicised myth regarding the outlawed position of slavery in Islam since the seventh century, yet to my surprise I found that not only most Islamic States have allowed the salve trade to go on without resriction, but most have also encoureged it and some have even resisted the call for ending it. To illustrate this, I will post this excerpt from the book for the readers to enjoy in the hope that some will find this fact as fascinating as I did. From the book " The Middle East ( A brief history of the last 2000 years ) by Bernard Lewis "The large -scale, long -range commerce in human beings was, in the ma

I have listened and watched some of the latest interview of Dr. Wafaa Sultan last week on Aljazeera TV channel. Despite some of my friends anger and objections to the points Dr. Sultan brought up on the program regarding Islam and Muslim behaviors in general, I can not help but extend my most heartfelt gratitude and thanks to Dr. Sultan on her courageous and articulate thoughts she had expressed. Thomas Payne, the famous American revolutionary, once said "These are the times that try men's souls." I strongly believe without an inner awakening of our people, we as Arabs need our own Payne who can lead us out of the dark ages we are in and towards the lights of knowledge. Kudos to Dr. Sultan, for people like her with honest and straight forward thinking can start to make a difference in our world.