Recent African Coups: End of Françafrique, Need for US Leadership

Since 2020, six African countries have experienced a total of eight coups d’état. With the exception of Gabon, all occurred in the Sahel, the semi-arid band stretching across the continent between the Sahara Desert to the north and the tropical savannah to the south. The conventional narrative of “Africa Rising,” which had only recently replaced that of the “Hopeless Continent,” might be in need of revision or at least qualification. 

“Today, antisemitism is global, not just local,” says Sacha Roytman-Dratwa, CEO of the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM). “It comes from the right, from the left, from radical Islam, and other sources.” Roytman-Dratwa explains that over the past several years, a greater understanding has emerged in countries around the world that antisemitism needs to be aggressively confronted and countered. “Antisemitism must be taken seriously. There are conversations on the subject at the United Nations. The US government, and other countries are all building strategies to combat antisemitism, and are investing a great deal of money, time, and effort. We see legislation across the board.”

After months of waiting, the Biden administration finally released its "National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism." A close look at the document gives the impression that the strategy as a whole is designed to appear to be “doing something” to combat antisemitism while not alienating the party’s intersectional base.

Israel in 1948 was a manifestation of an ideal at the time it was created. Namely, this meant Jewish self-determination in their ancient homeland, a nation-state like all others, brought about by a liberation movement that worked with and ultimately against the world’s greatest imperial power, and which was the culmination of decades of patient organizing and building, all set against the horrific backdrop of the Holocaust.

Arabs citizens today comprise 21 percent of Israel’s population, a significant minority. While their financial situation has dramatically improved over the last 50-plus years, the parties they send to the Knesset are largely “anti-state” in that they reject Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish state.

A Cold War-era federal program has wandered far from its national-security mission and into the woke follies that permeate much of American education. For decades, U.S. colleges and universities have received taxpayer dollars through the Education Department’s National Resource Centers, a program intended to bolster U.S. national security at the height of tension with the Soviet Union. But more recently National Resource Centers are promoting unserious academic research or causes irrelevant to national security.

My personal encounter with academic censorship began in the Fall of 1989 when Smith College’s newly appointed Diversity Officer summoned me to her office asking why I had included the following question on an exam in one of my courses during the second semester of the previous academic year —an action taken, she stated emphatically, at the behest of the College’s President and Provost. The question, one of several I posed on a take-home final on Middle East Politics, read: “Is Islam useful in the modern world? Describe the role of Islam in the political development of two states in the Middle East [one Arab and one non-Arab] since the end of World War II.” Opening a folder with my name, the Diversity Officer also added to her cascade of charges a complaint about mentioning slavery in the Muslim world without comparing it [favorably] to the system in America.

Reading Fouad Ajami’s posthumous memoir, When Magic Failed, was like reading my own life story. Both Ajami and I hail from Shia families who moved from a homogeneous countryside to cosmopolitan Beirut. My journey to Beirut took a bit longer—my father hailed from Iraq, and we fled the repression of Saddam Hussein’s Baathist regime in the 1980s to my mother’s country, Lebanon.

Three days before Russia's President Vladimir Putin ordered the invasion of Ukraine, he assembled his top security staff for a televised charade. At it, he quizzed each in turn if they approved of his plan to recognize two areas of eastern Ukraine as independent states. Squirming and sometimes fumbling, they dutifully all bowed to their supremo's will.

Twin Towers and Ivory Towers, 20 Years Later

In 2001, my book Ivory Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America became a part of a much bigger and heated discussion over what made the United States vulnerable on 9/11. The main argument in the book was that Middle Eastern studies in America had consistently missed the most important developments in the region. One of them was the rise of very radical forms of Islamist extremism. That claim is why the book took off.

As reports of antisemitic attacks rise throughout the West, Jewish life in the East flourishes at an unprecedented pace with an increasing number of Jews visiting and moving to the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries. As a Bahraini Jew, it is particularly upsetting to see the alarming reports of attacks against Jews in the United States. We don’t have an issue with that here.

The phrase “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics” probably was not coined by Mark Twain, as is often claimed, but the Washington Post can claim this update on it: Today, there are four kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, statistics, and opinion polling. Just as polling can be corrupted by, for example, the wording of questions, journalism can be corrupted by “scientific polling,” particularly when it substantiates a publication’s anti-Israel bias. Two such cases appeared in the pages and website of the paper that warns on its front page, “Democracy Dies in the Dark.” Shine the light on these two egregious stories: