NewsTrust - Yemen - Most Recent Stories: Opinion (Independent)

Why Egypt's Naysayers Got It Wrong

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

The Daily Beast - By Laila Lalami - Feb. 13 (Opinion) - Right up until the end, political theorists the world over insisted that what happened in Tunisia couldn't—or shouldn't—happen in Egypt. Laila Lalami on why Westerners often underestimate the Arab world. Plus, full coverage of Egypt’s uprising. It was nearly 20 years ago that Samuel Huntington put forth the idea that major sources of world conflict in the aftermath of the Cold War would be cultural. Certain civilizations could coexist peacefully with one another, he argued, but others were bound to come into conflict because their inherent values and belief systems were polar opposites. The contrast between "the West" and "Islam" provided the clearest illustration of his argument and, after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, it gained an even wider following. Huntington's theory has so pervaded public discourse that when people speak of his "Clash of Civilizations," they usually mean the inevitable clash between the West and Islam.

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The End Of History

Sun, 13 Feb 2011 00:00:00 -0800

TechCrunch - By Jon Evans - Feb. 13 (Opinion) - The world is quaking. Egypt and Tunisia are overthrown; Algeria, Gabon, Jordan, Sudan, Syria and Yemen are rocking. Some say this is thanks to Twitter and Facebook. Others, notably Malcolm Gladwell and Evgeny Morozov, say that social media are politically irrelevant and/or dangerous. China has censored “Egypt”, Syria has legalized Facebook, and the president of Sudan has declared he will use social media to crush his enemies. You couldn’t make this stuff up. What’s going on? Who to believe? Fear not. I can explain. Everyone is right, and what’s going on is nothing more than the end of international politics and history as we know them. Welcome to our brave new world, and about time, too. The old one sure was miserable while it lasted.

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Uprisings in Tunisia, Yemen, Egypt -- America Is Paying the Price for Supporting Corrupt Dictatorships in the Muslim World

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

AlterNet - By Juan Cole - Jan. 26 (Opinion) - Here’s one obvious lesson of the Tunisian Revolution of 2011: paranoia about Muslim fundamentalist movements and terrorism is causing Washington to make bad choices that will ultimately harm American interests and standing abroad. State Department cable traffic from capitals throughout the Greater Middle East, made public thanks to WikiLeaks, shows that U.S. policy-makers have a detailed and profound picture of the depths of corruption and nepotism that prevail among some “allies” in the region.

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Presidential assassinations of U.S. citizens

Wed, 27 Jan 2010 00:00:00 -0800

Salon - By Glenn Greenwald - Jan. 27 (Comment) - Amazingly, the Bush administration's policy of merely imprisoning foreign nationals (along with a couple of American citizens) without charges -- based solely on the President's claim that they were Terrorists -- produced intense controversy for years. That, one will recall, was a grave assault on the Constitution. Shouldn't Obama's policy of ordering American citizens assassinated without any due process or checks of any kind -- not imprisoned, but killed -- produce at least as much controversy?

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