For four years, French prosecutors strained every sinew to prove that a multinational jihadist conspiracy was behind the attacks on the newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a Jewish supermarket in Paris. A total of 17 were killed in gun attacks that spread across three days and stunned the nation. This was France’s biggest terrorist trial and yet, despite…
Punching above its weight, the United Arab Emirates is wielding a combination of religious soft power, commercial and economic sway, and hard power in its bid to counter political Islam in ways that potentially could threaten pillars of Western democracy as well as US and European strategic interests. The UAE’s footprint is visible across the…
Weakened by Joe Biden’s electoral defeat of US President Donald J. Trump, Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu risks being caught between a rock and a hard place as Jordan, the Palestine Authority and the United Arab Emirates manoeuvre for control of what is to Jews the Temple Mount and to Muslims the Haram ash-Sharif, the…
I won’t even bother repeating it all here, those who are interested in my views of this entire Charlie Hebdo canard can read my article “I am NOT Charlie” here: https://thesaker.is/i-am-not-charlie/ No, what I want to do is to ask a simple question: do you think the French leaders are simply stupid, suicidal or naive? …
Jordanian ruler Abdullah I bin Al-Hussein gloated in 1924 when Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the visionary who carved modern Turkey out of the ruins of the Ottoman empire, abolished the Caliphate. “The Turks have committed suicide. They had in the Caliphate one of the greatest political forces, and have thrown it away… I feel like sending…
The simmering tensions between France’s extreme secularist system and Islamic society’s vehement condemnation of that Western government’s support for what they regard as blasphemous depictions of the Prophet Muhammad increase the likelihood that a “Great Social/Civliizational Reset” — which shouldn’t be wrongly equated with the so-called “Clash of Civilizations” scenario — is in the process…
