الأبحاث والتعليقات

Originally posted Noember 2008

One, Two / the Arab army where are you?/ The Arab army where are you?/The Egyptian Arab Army/ resides in an-Nasr [victory] compound/ Wakes up in the afternoon/ to drink its tea/ The Gulf Arab army/ can do absolutely nothing/ “Strategic silence” indeed/ “cut us some slack, man!”/ The Tunisian Arab army/ is green like parsley/ But ‘Aziza loves Yunis/ the wars can wait/ The Sudanese Arab army/ I can hear its clamor in my ears/ “Damn it!

The trials that have faced a sovereign Lebanon as it emerges from a long and bloody civil war, as well as Syrian and Israeli occupations, have been immense. In 2008, Beirut confronted an existential challenge. After years of conflict, the vast majority of Lebanese citizens clamored for positive change to buttress the state and to facilitate prosperity.

The late King Husayn of Jordan, charismatic, compelling, idolized, was regarded, in his mature years, as the West’s best friend in the Arab world. A perspective assessment over the length of his reign, and particularly during the first Gulf War, however, reveals a far more complex figure: courageous, often wise and far-sighted, but preoccupied with lineage, haunted by ambition, and often plagued by poor judgment. During the first Gulf crisis, Husayn’s demonization of his resource-poor country’s traditional financiers, the Gulf States and Saudi Arabia, cost Jordan dearly.

Originally posted August 2008

On August 14, 2007, in the largest single terror attack during the war in Iraq, over 350 Yezidis were killed and two entire villages completely destroyed, leaving over 1,000 families homeless. The two villages, Qahtaniya and Jazeera are located in the Sinjar Mountains, an area in northwestern Iraq that is hotly contested by Sunni Arab insurgents, Kurdish peshmergas, US-led coalition forces, and several minority groups.

Originally posted July 2008

Originally posted July 2008

Originally posted July 2008

Originally posted July 2008

Originally posted July 2008

“The twice-displaced Palestinian refugees are one of the worst-off groups in a country full of desperate people. … They have no country to go to, no valid travel documents, no protectors inside Iraq, and hardly anyone prepared to support them outside either. … It is to everyone’s dishonor that these human beings are still rotting [in border camps] and — worst of all — in Baghdad where one or more is being murdered virtually every day.”1

Originally posted July 2008

Many people view Kirkuk as a microcosm of all of Iraq. The ancient city counts among its inhabitants significant numbers of almost all of Iraq’s ethnic and religious groups — Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Assyrians, Chaldeans, Sunnis, and Shi‘ites. The last semi-reliable census of Kirkuk’s population, from 1957, indicated a slight majority of Turkmen in Kirkuk City and a majority of Kurds, followed by Arabs, in the province as a whole.

Originally posted July 2007

Originally posted July 2008

Nur, an Iraqi refugee who has been in the States for four days, is dipping parsley in a china cup of salt water in Bethesda, Maryland. The salt water signifies tears shed over slavery and displacement; the parsley stands for spring and hope. Another interpretation likens the act in the Passover Seder to a biblical moment of betrayal: Joseph’s brothers sold him into slavery and dipped his striped garment in blood to feign his death.

Originally posted July 2008

Originally posted July 2008