Regions

On Monday, Mar. 24, news broke that South Korea expects to pay around $6.79 billion for 40 F-35 fighter jets. It also confirmed plans to shell out for four of Northrop Grumman’s Global Hawks. According to Reuters, South Korea will likely use the Hawks to “monitor its prickly neighbor North Korea.” South Korea is the […]

One famous singing icon who has a particularly strong following in Latin America and the Middle East due to her cultural connections to both regions is Shakira. Recently, a debate arose worldwide over her boyfriend, famous footballer Gerald Pique “forbidding” Shakira from doing sensual music videos with men, raising the question to whether a partner […]

By Anna Pivovarchuk As Western media focuses on the Crimean crisis, Russia intensifies its assault on civil society. When Nikolai Gogol wrote about the winged troika in his 19th century masterpiece on provincial corruption, The Dead Souls, little did he know that he was creating a perennial image that would come to represent Russia for centuries […]

  In its most hard-worded statement to date, the Libyan government on Mar. 20 vowed to eliminate terrorism and mobilize “the national military force” to confront the threat. According to the release, “the cities of Benghazi, Derna, Sirte and others face a terrorist war led by Libyan and foreign elements that have hostile and sinister […]

In an article entitled “In Defense of Empire” published on March 19, chief geopolitical analyst at Stratfor and national correspondent for the Atlantic Robert Kaplan argues we ought to bring back a form of American “imperialism.” Imperialism, he argues, is both misunderstood and an effective governing tool. While I don’t intend to focus on the […]

From the outset, let me make one thing clear: Al-Shabaab, and its extremist world view is neither constructive nor sustainable. This extremist neo-Islamist group represents one of a two nihilistic worldviews that dominated the twenty first century political discourse—global (dysfunctional) jihadism and global war on terrorism. Both, due to their applied mantra—with hammer, all problems […]

Dr. Mordechai Kedar, the director for the Center for the Study of the Middle East and Islam (under formation) and a lecturer in the Arabic department at Bar Ilan University, believes that the two-state for two-people solution is out of touch with the Middle East reality. He believes that an eight-state solution better reflects the […]

  For the second time in two months, Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon has had to apologize for publicly criticizing the United States. Lecturing at Tel Aviv University on Monday, Ya’alon delivered a speech saying that the U.S. “shows weakness” on the world stage and that Israel should not rely on U.S. efforts to deal […]

Merely a day after the Syrian civil war entered its fourth year the Assad regime scored a major victory against rebels in the town of Yabroud. Located in the Qalamoun region, a mountainous area near the Lebanese border, Yabroud had served as a crucial gateway for the transit of rebel supplies and fighters into the […]

In a recent post on this site, Samantha Quint intelligently analyzed the recent poll on peace issues (among other topics) carried out by the Israel Democracy Institute (IDI). There was one finding in the survey in particular that I would like to expand upon here, because I believe it bears significant weight and could have […]

There has been a recent escalation in the level of violence between Gaza and Israel. The IDF attacked Gaza and Southern Israeli cities have been bombarded with qassam rockets. The root of this recent escalation is the level of incitement that presently exists within Palestinian society. Life in Southern Israel as we speak is very […]

  In the wake of the scandal that broke out in Turkey recently, when it was reported that Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan allegedly instructed his son to hide large sums of cash, demonstrations similar to the Gezi Park protests have broken out throughout the country, demanding Erdogan’s resignation. However, Rafael Sadi, the spokesman […]