Online Symposium: Syria’s Glasnost?

By Jamie Glazov | FrontPageMagazine.com | March 25, 2005

Syria has announced that it will withdraw its troops from Lebanon. The Syrian-leaning government of Lebanon dissolved itself and preparations are being made for multi-party elections. Syria has handed over to the Iraqi government Saddam Hussein’s half-brother, Sabawi Ibrahim al-Hassan, a most-wanted leader in the Sunni insurgency who was operating out of Syria. Syria has also announced that it is shutting down the Damascus office of Islamic Jihad. Continue reading “Online Symposium: Syria’s Glasnost?” →

The oxymoron of “illiberal democracy”

Special to The Daily Star

The term “illiberal democracy,” advanced by some as an acceptable model for future change in many parts of the Middle East, is, in truth, an oxymoron. Real functioning democracies can never be illiberal. Nor can they be at peace with the rest of the world, a fact that makes their appearance quite problematic for many of their neighbors and for the world at large. Continue reading “The oxymoron of “illiberal democracy”” →

The Young Syrian

The Jerusalem Report / page 24

Ammar Abdulhamid hopes to spark an intellectual renaissance and encourage political reform at home in Damascus.

Yigal Schleifer / Istanbul

SYRIAN PUBLISHER AND author Ammar Abdulhamid doesn’t like to think small scale. The founder of a year-old nonprofit Damascus publishing house, Abdulhamid is embarking on a translation project through which he plans to introduce the Syrian public to the classic literary and philosophical works of the Western canon. Continue reading “The Young Syrian” →

The Aftermath of Conquest: Two Possible Scenarios and a Simple Must

The problem with modern Arabs, peoples and governments alike, is not that they have been consistently defeated in almost every war they fought, ever since gaining independence in the second part of the twentieth century. Rather, it is the continuing incredulity with which they choose to deal with these defeats. The central role that the Arab collective memory still assigns to Arab peoples, in both the historical process and the divine scheme, is so out of touch with contemporary reality that Arabs have almost no choice but to continue to fall back upon conspiracy theories to explain this seemingly illogical situation to themselves and make it more acceptable somehow.

Continue reading “The Aftermath of Conquest: Two Possible Scenarios and a Simple Must” →