International Features

Middle-east-online.com As civilised people across the world breathed a sigh of relief to see the back of former US president George W. Bush, top American intellectual Noam Chomsky warned against assuming or expecting significant changes in the basis of Washington’s foreign policy under President Barack Obama. During two lectures organised by the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in …

The world needs to get a sophisticated understanding of the problem of Iran’s alleged nuclear ambitions. It has figured so steadfastly in the media for weeks, months, and years, that it has become understandable that the Israeli President Shimon Peres should say “Iran today is really a world problem, maybe the number one problem of the world.” (London Telegraph interview …

Interview with Geert Somsen, a historian of science at Maastricht University. GEERT SOMSEN is a historian of science with the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. He currently directs his faculty’s Graduate School and teaches in several bachelor’s and master’s programmes. He graduated in Chemistry but switched to historical research about 20 years ago. …

It is easy to see why Pakistan has been chosen as the battleground of the century, but it is a real shame to us all that we have allowed our governments so much unsupervised freedom of action that they could get away with the things you are about to read about in the following article.  It is a difficult story …

This is an abridged version of a paper presented by Zafar Bangash, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, at a conference on Islamophobia held in Tehran on October 6 and 7, 2009. Two misconceptions need addressing before proceeding with discussion of the role of Western governments and media in promoting Islamophobia. The first myth is that governments in …

Twenty years ago this month, events unbelievable were happening at an unbelievably rapid pace. As 1989 dawned, few, if any, believed that the Berlin wall that divided post-War Germany would fall. It was intended to be as solid as the Great Wall of China. Such was the animosity between the Soviet Union-led Eastern Bloc and the United States-led Western Bloc. …