Popes unbalanced neutrality in the Holy Land II on June 19, 2014For this purpose, the Pope invited Palestinian and Israeli presidents Abbas and Shimon Peres to pray for peace at “my home in the Vatican as a place for this encounter of prayer” on June 8. The Pope’s spokesman, Federico Lombardi, told the BBC it was “a papal peace initiative”. This was his second message. His […]
Popes unbalanced neutrality in Holy Land I on June 18, 2014Pope Francis’ ‘pilgrimage’ to the Holy Land last week proved to be an unbalanced, impossible mission. The pontiff failed to strike a balance of neutrality between contradictory and irreconcilable binaries like divinity and earth, religion and politics, justice and injustice and military occupation and peace. Such neutrality is viewed by the laity of Christian believers, […]
Assad is here to stay on April 9, 2014Long gone are the days when the US-led ‘friends of Syria’ could plausibly claim that two thirds of Syria was controlled by rebel forces, that Damascus was under siege and that the days of President Bashar al-Assad were numbered. The war on Syria has taken a U-turn during the past year. Assad now firmly holds […]
Counterproductive reactive Saudi policies II on March 20, 2014Obama’s upcoming visit to the kingdom has been described as a “fence-mending” one. Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud Al Faisal, at a joint press conference alongside visiting US Secretary of State John Kerry last November, hinted that fences might not be mended because “a true relationship between friends is based on sincerity, candour, and frankness […]
Counterproductive reactive Saudi policies I on March 19, 2014Writing in The Washington Post on February 27, 2011, Rachel Bronson asked, “Could the next Mideast uprising happen in Saudi Arabia?” Her answer was, “The notion of a revolution in the Saudi kingdom seems unthinkable.” However, on September 30 the next year, the senior foreign policy fellow at the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, […]
Playing the al Qaeda card to the last Iraqi on February 12, 2014International, regional and internal players vying for interests, wealth, power or influence are all beneficiaries of the ‘al Qaeda threat’ in Iraq and, in spite of their deadly and bloody competitions, they agree only on two denominators, namely that the presence of the US-installed and Iran-supported sectarian government in Baghdad and its sectarian al Qaeda […]
Kerrys coup: from mediator to antagonist on December 11, 2013US Secretary of State John Kerry was scheduled to start his ninth trip of shuttle diplomacy between Palestinian and Israeli leaders on December 11. However, the bridging “security arrangements” that he proposed less than a week earlier on his last trip have backfired and are now snowballing into a major crisis with Palestinian negotiators who […]