With protests against Tunisian President Zine al-Abedine Ben Ali having succeeded and those against Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak posing an existential threat to his government, there is a growing view that it is only a matter of time before the revolutionary spirit spreads throughout the Middle East and North Africa.
The release of Abdelbaset al-Megrahi was an important foreign policy goal of the Libyan government and, as such, there is little doubt that this issue had a broader impact on the relationship between Libya and the United Kingdom.
The Al-Megrahi Release: One Year Later.
Date: Wednesday, September 29, 2010 Time: 10:00 AM Location: 419 Dirksen Senate Office Building Presiding: Senator Menendez.
One year ago, 10 gunmen from Lashkar-i-Tayyiba (LT) laid siege to multiple targets in India’s financial capital of Mumbai over the course of three days. The group’s target selection revealed a desire to strike not only at India, but also at Western interests in the country. While a strong anti-Western element has always been present in LT’s ideology, the strikes represented the latest evolution of a peripheral jihad against Western interests. This article first examines the nature of LT attacks against India, and then assesses the threat it poses to Western targets in India and abroad.
UK Prime Minister Gordon Brown commented on the controversial move to release Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi, the Lockerbie bomber, Tuesday. Geoff D. Porter from Eurasia Group considers the move.
President Obama is clearly trying to reach out to the Muslim world. I watched his Inaugural Address on television, and was most struck by the line: “We are a nation of Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus, and nonbelievers.” He gave his first televised interview from the White House to Al Arabiya, an Arabic-language television channel.
The Spanish authorities recently intercepted a canoe off the West African coast with 92 passengers. The canoe had set off from Senegal in early October, bound for the Canary Islands, more than 900 miles across the Atlantic Ocean. The boat's motor quit and as it drifted on the high seas for three weeks, 48 people died. The surviving passengers threw the bodies overboard.
During an August 14 news conference organized by Algerian authorities for a select group of Algerian reporters, Benmessaoud Abdelkader, a former Salafist Group for Call and Combat (GSPC) regional commander, confirmed that there was deep disagreement within the former GSPC over national commander Abdelmalek Droudkel's decisions first to merge with al-Qaeda in September 2006 and then later to rename the group the Al-Qaeda Organization in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) in January 2007 (Liberté, August 21).
Fatwas, the legal opinions proclaimed by Islamic scholars, have proliferated in the Muslim world since the 1980's, driven by rising literacy rates and the Internet. The growth in fatwas - some of them contradictory - has led to a debate over who can legitimately issue them and has alarmed governments in the Middle East, since the decrees sometimes challenge state-sanctioned interpretations of Islam.
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