Tag Archives: International relations

Apology: U.S. Response to Egypt Violence

BY RICH GALEN
Reprinted from Mullings.com

If you think the Administration of Barak Obama has its arms around foreign policy, read this from the Associated Press yesterday: “Ultraconservative Islamist protesters climbed the walls of the United States Embassy in Cairo on Tuesday and took down the American flag, replacing it with a black flag with an Islamic inscription to protest a movie attacking Islam’s prophet, Muhammad.”

Did President Obama demand that the Egyptian government provide assurances that our embassy would be protected?

No.

In fact, Obama’s crack foreign service issued an… apology.

He apologized for the presumed existence of a movie that no one on this planet (to my knowledge) has seen in its entirety. Continue reading

From Iran to Advertising: What’s Real?

BY GARY JOHNSON
Reprinted from Loose Change at TCBmag.com

I had lunch the other day with a very successful investor and entrepreneur. He came to the United States from Iran as a young teenager. The extreme dichotomy that is Iran is fascinating to say the least—a huge country of well-educated people who, when given the chance to emigrate to the U.S., succeed disproportionately to the population, much like our friends who emigrate from India.

And yet Persians live in a medieval world, governed by strict Shiite theists who employ fear, suppression, and violence to manage both domestic and international relations. So, which is the real Iran? A wild-eyed, blustering Muslim theocracy, or a country of contemporary people living their lives in spite of—and hopefully out of harm’s way of—the unstable demagogues who control power? Continue reading

Newt, News, & Palestine

BY MICHAEL S. JOHNSON

Newt Gingrich apparently let loose with some puzzling pronouncements  about Palestine and Israel in a cable television interview recently and again in the Iowa debate. Before the debate, the Washington Post quoted him saying, “Remember, there was no Palestine as a state. It was part of the Ottoman Empire…We have invented the Palestinian people, who are in fact Arabs and are historically part of the Arab people…”

The Post reporters went to Ghaith al-Omari, executive director of the American Task Force on Palestine, for this response:  “Besides being factually and historically wrong, this statement is unwise,” and from former national security adviser Elliott Abrams: “There was no Jordan or Syria or Iraq, either, so perhaps he would say they are all invented people as well and also have no right to statehood.”

Gingrich’s remark threw the spotlight on one of the most profound, turbulent and impactful political, religious and human conditions of the 19th,  20th and 21st centuries. The hot and cold wars of the Arab-Israeli conflict have affected the lives of millions of people throughout the world, as dramatically and injuriously as some of the greatest events of our time.

The Gingrich story, then, served as a wonderful opportunity for the Post to both inform and educate its readers on the history and the complexities of the conflict. Continue reading