Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have followed the United States in funding a five-nation armed force designed to stop the march of Islamist extremists in Africa. But why is the Sahel, a semi-arid region just south of the Sahara Desert, causing alarm? Saudi Arabia pledged US$100 million December 13 towards a special anti-terror force…
Mainstream media in 2013: “Conspiracy Theorists!” Mainstream media in 2017: “ISIS Got a Powerful Missile the CIA Bought!” Years late to the party, mainstream media outlets like USA Today, Reuters, and Buzzfeed are just out with “breaking” and “exclusive” stories detailing how a vast arsenal of weapons sent to Syria by the CIA in cooperation with…
Saudi newspapers have reported that Israel has invited Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to their country to lead peace negotiations between Israel and Palestine as a sign of the rapidly warming relations between the Gulf Kingdom and the Jewish State. In a first-ever for Jerusalem-Riyadh relations, an Israeli minister gave an interview to a Saudi media outlet…
As was expected, once Moscow and Washington started disputing who attained victory over ISIS in Syria, the militants of this terrorist organization decided that they would need to demonstrate that it’s too early to write them off completely. Especially since the last 25,000 of its fighters vanished in the desert, after being stationed for a…
On 21 August 1969, an Australian citizen called Denis Rohan set fire to an 800-year-old wooden pulpit, a gift to al-Aqsa mosque from the Islamic hero Saladin (1137-1193), who led the military campaign against the Crusaders. Apart from being considered mentally ill, Rohan thought he was acting on divine instructions. These were to enable the…
Donald Trump’s rash declaration of Jerusalem as the capital of Israel is so out of whack with global opinion and decades of international legal rulings, one has to surmise that the initiative stems from dubious inspiration. Turns out that the likely authors of the harebrained idea are Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner (36), and 32-year-old Saudi…
