Egypt’s Copts: Uncle Boutros and Uncle Tom…Lessons In Arab Tolerance by Gerald A. Honigman Not everyone was celebrating the “Arab Spring”… Don’t get me wrong, I too wished for all peoples–Arabs and non-Arabs alike (yes, there are scores of millions of the latter) to finally gain modern-day freedoms in a region ruled for millennia by [...]

Turks, Arabs, Jews, and Kurds: The Pot & The Kettle Calling The Coal Black… by Gerald A. Honigman Dr. Aaron Klieman’s book, Foundations of British Policy In The Arab World: The Cairo Conference of 1921 (Johns Hopkins Press, 1970), should be “must reading” for those who truly want to make sense out of the conflict [...]

Iraq: What Not To Do… by Gerald A. Honigman Well, for good or for bad, it appears to be official. President Obama recently announced that all U.S. forces will leave Iraq by the end of 2011. We actually lasted there longer than I had predicted. While I did not wish it, back in 2005 I [...]

Qaddafi: The Devil Is Dead…Beware What Comes After by Gerald A. Honigman With Libya’s President Qaddafi now sleeping with the camels, it’s time to take another look at what’s happening on that front. Earlier this year, when the Arab Spring was fresh, I wrote my first assessments of what was transpiring in Libya. Now, given [...]

Those Who Are Kind To The Cruel, In The End Will Be Cruel To The Kind… by Gerald A. Honigman I’m sure other folks have their own version of the above saying. This one is of the Jews. It comes from Qohelet Raba, 7:16, in the Talmud. Too bad the Jews are the least likely [...]

Sarkozy Of Arabia by Gerald A. Honigman France’s Nicolas Sarkozy was recently quoted in the French magazine, Le Canard Enchaine, as saying that the very idea of a Jewish State is silly. Sarkozy has admitted to some Jewish ancestry in the past–not that means much, as you shall see below. The French President was responding [...]

Missing: One Arab Altalena… by Gerald A. Honigman Even though the Egyptian ghoul has been out of the picture for years now, polluting the soil from Jerusalem sprinkled onto his coffin in Ramallah, nothing has really changed. The problem, of course, has always gone far beyond Arafat himself. He was simply carrying a local banner [...]

Jews & Arabs…What Would Ibn Khaldun Say? by Gerald A. Honigman It has become common these days to hear Arabs and their assorted sycophants and anti-Semitic choirs vilifying both Jews and their sole, minuscule nation. Given this state of affairs, it’s useful to see what perhaps the Islamic world’s preeminent scholar of all time had [...]

Some Jews have a medieval custom to sacrifice a chicken before Yom Kippur, “kaporos.” One grabs the chicken’s legs while pinning its wings back and swings it around one’s head. These chickens are packed into crates before this procedure and then usually sent to be slaughtered after. Others are often just left in crates to [...]