On no recent president have more hopes rested than upon Barack Obama. After eight years of war, partisanship, and economic strife Americans are desperate for a saviour. And so they and the media have taken an ambitious and talented politician …
President-Elect Barack Obama has a formidable to-do list. Those who voted for him, and people all over the world as well, expect him to tackle the global economic crisis, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, climate change, and much more.
Editor’s Note: Sidney Hook was a social democratic philosopher, a secular humanist, and an antitotalitarian polemicist – ‘probably the greatest of the twentieth century’ according to Edward Shils. This article was published in the New York Times Magazine, 9 July, …
The argument John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt present in The Israel Lobby boils down to this: there exists in the United States an extraordinarily powerful Israel Lobby which regularly ‘checks in’ with Israeli officials about what Israel’s interests are. Once …
Still aghast in June 2002, Martin Amis witnesses that, ‘September 11 was a day of de- Enlightenment.’ In his book, The Second Plane – collecting essays and short-stories penned between September 18, 2001 and September 11, 2007 – he forcefully …
The contributors to this book are from the North and South and include trainers on development issues, a filmmaker, policy-makers, advisers to large international NGOs (INGOs) and United Nations programmes, as well as academics. In acknowledgement of the frequently uneasy …
Go back, if you will, to what you were thinking and feeling about Afghanistan around October of 2001 – or in any case, what you were thinking and feeling if you had any sympathy for the US-led war against the …
The picture on the front cover of Nathan Weinstock’s book Une si longue presence shows two barred windows. Through the window on the left, the sultan’s lions peer out. In the adjoining cage, the Jews of Fez.
Much of the Winter issue of Democratiya is concerned with four questions.
This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was adopted and proclaimed by the General Assembly of the United Nations on 10 December, 1948.
This is one of the best political biographies for many years. As well as being a book about a sadly forgotten icon of past progressive history, it is bursting with ideas that are still relevant to the future of humanity …
Fedwa Malti-Douglas writes, in her 1995 study Men, Women, and Gods: Nawal el Saadawi and Arab Feminist Poetics that ‘[n]o Arab woman inspires as much emotion as Nawal el Saadawi. No woman in the Middle East has been the subject …
One of the few certainties of the 20th century was that the apostles of Marxist materialism and the adherents of Muslim theocracy were mortal enemies. In Afghanistan, they went to war. But that was the 20th century.
In the annual Poetry Society UK lecture, 2008, Eavan Boland gave a riveting critique of what has happened to the political poem in recent times. One element of the discussion was whether poetry has become too polite, too refined, and …
Dr Andrew Bostom is Associate Professor of Medicine at Brown University. He is the author of The Legacy of Jihad: Islamic Holy War and the Fate of Non-Muslims (2005) and The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism: From Sacred Texts to Solemn …
