Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu returns to Israel having affirmed the ebullient support of the U.S. Congress and jousted bravely with President Obama — but in terms that analysts warn will only accelerate the Palestinian effort to render Washington irrelevant by taking their case to the United Nations instead. Everything about Bibi’s …
arab uprisings
Obama in London: All Hope and Glory, Signifying Nothing?
President Barack Obama — in a speech before the British parliament that drew approving nods rather than the aerobic repeat ovations that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had elicited on Capitol Hill a day earlier — sought to reassure Britons that the transatlantic relationship remains “special”. More importantly, he wanted …
Obama in the U.K.: Pomp and Circumstance, but What Does It Mean?
Not everyone welcomes the visit by the leader of the free world to London. There was the smartly dressed woman who found herself prevented from crossing Whitehall. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” she said. “Do I look like a terrorist?”
On the opposite side of the road, some 30 demonstrators protested for a different reason. At nearby Downing …
Netanyahu Sets Out His Peace Terms but Is Unlikely to Find a Palestinian Taker
President Barack Obama, currently in Europe trying to muster opposition to the Palestinians who are seeking recognition of statehood by the U.N. General Assembly in September, had hoped Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would help him out — by using his address to a joint meeting of the Congress on Tuesday to offer peace terms …
Bahrain’s Voiceless: How al-Jazeera’s Coverage of the Arab Spring Is Uneven
A couple of weeks ago, the Qatari English language daily the Peninsula ran the provocative headline, “Why Are We So Timid?” in its Saturday special issue. “Freedom eludes the Qatari media even as the country’s top leadership is keen to promote free expression and has lifted all kinds of restrictions on the local press,” opined …
Global Briefing: Bosom Buddies and the Same Old Bad Guys
Anglo Unity: Fresh from his late Monday night arrival in Ireland, President Obama meets U.K. Prime Minister David Cameron in London today, as the White House steps up its efforts to rekindle the much-touted “special relationship” between the across-the-pond allies. As Catherine Mayer writes, they do have a lot to discuss.
Bursting the …
Obama: So Loved in Britain, He Might Consider Staying
The President was supposed to arrive for his two-day state visit to the U.K. on the morning of May 24. Instead, a plume of volcanic ash from Iceland forced a change of plan that saw POTUS curtail his trip to his ancestral homeland, Ireland, and head for London before Air Force One could be grounded. As officials scrambled to find him a …
Obama Warns Netanyahu: It’s Not the U.S. You Have to Convince, It’s the Palestinians
Benjamin Netanyahu seemed last week to have come to Washington to party like it’s 1998. That was the year he came to the U.S. as a rejectionist Israeli prime minister elected on the promise of burying the Oslo Accords, and sought to make an end-run around President Bill Clinton by talking over his head to a joint session of both …
Expect Neither Sparks, Nor Warmth When Obama Meets Netanyahu
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu seemed to be feeling lucky even before President Barack Obama gave him much of what he wanted in Thursday’s Middle East policy speech. There’s little love lost between the two men, of course, but political circumstance forces them to cooperate. And even if Netanyahu was annoyed by Obama’s …
Bin Laden’s Posthumous Tape: The Sad Nothings of a Dead Man
Through an Islamist website, al-Qaeda apparently released a 12-minute audio tape recorded by Osama bin Laden shortly before his May 2 death at the hands of Navy SEALs. In it, the deceased terrorist mastermind lavishes praise upon the protest movements of the Arab Spring, insisting that “the winds of change will envelope the entire Muslim …
Global Briefing: Hollow Rhetoric and Bad Ideas
Obama’s Cairo II: At 11:45am EST, President Obama will deliver his latest speech on the Mideast from the State Department. TIME and Global Spin’s Tony Karon writes that the Washington venue is important: “Obama’s Mideast ‘reset’ speech is not aimed primarily at the newly empowered Arab public; its primary audience is Washington, where the …
Why Obama’s Mideast Speech is For Domestic, Not Arab Consumption
The question among Middle East watchers over Thursday’s planned speech on the Arab Spring by President Obama has been this: Why would he address the Arab world at a moment when his policies have little hope of reversing diminished U.S. standing? After all, the Arab consensus views Obama has having failed miserably to deliver on the …
Al-Qaeda’s Alleged New Leader: Who Is Saif al-Adel?
Terrorism expert Peter Bergen reports on CNN International that the Egyptian Saif al-Adel has been appointed as a “caretaker” leader of al-Qaeda, following the death of its emir Osama bin Laden. A Pakistani newspaper article datelined from Rawalpindi, the bustling city near Islamabad that’s home to Pakistan’s army headquarters, …