Life is friends, and paradise without people is unbearable.
Al-Hayat's ceremony in celebration of the silver or 25th anniversary of its return to publication was thus an occasion to see friends, led by publisher Prince Khaled bin Sultan bin (...)
It is no secret to anyone that Saudi Arabia possesses long-range missiles. Indeed, American spy satellites spotted Prince Khaled Ben Sultan, along a military delegation, in China, where they were purchasing missiles and the Kingdom purchased many (...)
Al-Hayat is celebrating these days the 25th anniversary of its return to publication. I hope we will see it one day celebrating its 50th anniversary, and that people after us would go on to celebrate its centenary.
Al-Hayat – or The Life in Arabic – (...)
"Euro-Arab dialogue in the Twenty-First Century: Towards a Common Vision," was the title of a conference held by the Foundation of Abdulaziz Saud Al-Babtain's Prize for Poetic Creativity in Brussels, attended by more than three hundred invitees from (...)
There is the one hundred meter race in the Olympics, and then longer races in marathons. Then there are horse races and bicycle races like the Tour de France and in many other countries, and swimming races, be they freestyle, chest stroke, back (...)
Nazism is not dead. Hitler has sons, daughters, and grandchildren in the government of Israel. I did not need a Swiss medical report to tell me that Yasser Arafat was poisoned with radioactive polonium 210 to know this, having noted in this column, (...)
I once said to Martin Indyk, as we were going to tape a program on Al-Jazeera in Doha, that I had a theory about the Jews. Perhaps he thought that I was going to say something anti-Semitic, as he asked me, with hesitation, "What is it?" I said, "A (...)
There is a saying in English that the opera is not finished until the fat lady sings. The sarcastic phrase reflects the size of most opera singers.
And so it was that I attended an opera in Bahrain, as the National Theatre celebrated its first (...)
The former Egyptian president found nothing else to say as he was on trial on charges of killing demonstrators other than: I am Dr. Mohamed Morsi. I am the president of the Republic.
This would be like me saying (at a madhouse rather than a court): (...)
During a foreign policy panel discussion last month in the House of Commons, the former British foreign secretary, Jack Straw, said that unlimited funding available to the Israel lobby in the United States was being used to control American foreign (...)
What I saw on television with the start of the trial of Mohamed Morsi was that there were dozens of protesters, or maybe a hundred or two, reflecting the decline in the popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, in a way that does not need much (...)
The policy that America is currently adopting is a policy of disengagement in the Middle East and anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaken.
Just as a reminder, the stated politics of George W. Bush in our region consisted of implementing the "freedom (...)
The policy that America is currently adopting is a policy of disengagement in the Middle East and anyone who thinks otherwise is mistaken.
Just as a reminder, the stated politics of George W. Bush in our region consisted of implementing the "freedom (...)
The novel 1984 by British writer George Orwell, published in 1949, predicted a scary dystopian future where Britain becomes known as Airstrip 1 and is in a permanent state of war, and the government snoops on people and tries to control their (...)
There is a common mistake in the West that holds that the Muslim Brotherhood was once an ally of the Arabian Gulf states, before relations between the two soured.
But the Arab reader knows more about this issue than any "posh" academic, so the (...)
Numbers do not lie, especially if the numbers come from the International Monetary Fund (IMF) that all countries around the world defer to. The numbers say that between 2008, the year the U.S. and global financial crisis hit, and 2012, the Saudi (...)
If the Geneva 2 conference were held today on the basis of the results of the talks of the Friends of Syria group in London this week, it would end in abject failure, followed by escalation in military confrontations. This ultimately means one (...)
Egypt needs a president who has the charisma of Gamal Abdel Nasser, but without his mistakes. Charisma here is in the sense where a man who lost a war, ceding Jerusalem, the West Bank, Sinai, Gaza, and the Golan, dies and yet five million people (...)
"After the Sheikhs: The Coming Collapse of the Gulf Monarchies," is a new book written by Professor Christopher Davidson, who teaches at the University of Durham in the north of England. A few days ago, he wrote an article in The New York Times (...)
Last Monday, on October 14, the International Herald Tribune, the international publication of the New York Times, published its last issue. The newspaper was first issued in Paris in 1887. Its name then changed several times before it became (...)
After a political crisis in the United States that lasted 16 days, the right wing of the Republican Party has been dealt a resounding public defeat. Both houses of Congress have voted to end the U.S. government shutdown by a large margin. Even the (...)
Rabbi Ovadia Yosef is dead.
I say: Good riddance. When he was alive, I did not ask for as much as a flu to befall him, and my objection is limited to that: objection (I refuse to talk to them or shake hands with them).
Yosef was the spiritual leader (...)
I continue today reading on behalf of Arab officials. Yesterday, I chose articles that reflect what Israel wants from Iran, written by pro-Israel commentators who served in or around the U.S. administration. Today, I continue with another set of (...)
Do Arab decision-makers read? I know some do, so I ask: Are there people who read on behalf of those decision-makers who don't read, because there are more important matters?
Over the weekend, I ignored the American Likudnik media and websites such (...)
Recorded history tells us that the world is always divided. When we were young, we studied about the Greeks and the Romans, and before that, Athens and Sparta within Ancient Greece itself. We then lived to see the world split between the socialist (...)