Right now hospitals are under attack in Syria. According to the Statistics compiled by the Syrian American Medical Society (SAMS), a hospital was attacked every 18 hours during this month. This…

I wrote the first version of this essay in June 2014. Since then, I had over 4,000 hits on it in my blog. I decided to update it partly because…

Every year in Saudi Arabia, misery visits households across the land as the lives of approximately 7000 people are cut short as a result of traffic accidents. Some 39,000 more…

For years rumors of plots and counterplots have eddied around the controversial figure of Mohammed Dahlan, the charismatic Palestinian politician whom PA President Mahmoud Abbas regards as his greatest enemy,…

It is not easy to pigeon-hole Qatar, a stand-alone Middle Eastern state in more ways than one, geographically, politically, economically, influentially.  That Qatar aspires to become a major player in the…

I am an American surgeon who recently spent two weeks working in an underground hospital in eastern Aleppo, Syria. I have been there a few times, and each time I…

Men in Iran are wearing hijabs in solidarity with their wives who are forced to cover their hair The campaign against enforced hijab in Iran has seen women defying morality…

In about 1980 – the exact date is disputed – Hezbollah descended like an incubus­ on Lebanon’s body politic, fastening itself onto a sleeping victim. Subsequently, while it has been…

President Fattah al-Sisi of Egypt is a man of vision.   In addition to his ambitions for his own country, there is mounting evidence that he aims to build a positive…

Jordan’s new smart IDs will no longer indicate the cardholder’s religion. Smart IDs that don’t indicate the holder’s religion are now replacing traditional IDs in Jordan as part of the…