The current round of meetings in the Middle East intended to revive peace talks, coming on the heels of the formation of a Palestinian unity government, offer the possibility to change the course of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Those events provide the United States...

It wasn't just history, but a foreshadowing of the future, when America's first Muslim congressman, Rep. Keith Ellison, took the oath of office. It signaled the entrance of Muslim grassroots politics into the mainstream and embraced a core American value: the ballot box.

With violence across the Middle East fixing Islam smack at the center of the American political debate, an organization partly financed by donors closely identified with wealthy Persian Gulf governments has emerged as the most vocal advocate for American Muslims — and an object of wide suspicion.

That's changing, though. Virginia licensed its first Muslim-owned funeral home last month, in Woodbridge. And Friday, a committee of Maryland lawmakers approved a bill that would open the industry to Muslims by exempting them from embalmings as they learn the trade.

Five years later, despite modest success, the world is a more dangerous place. Anti-Americanism has increased not only across the Muslim world but also globally. Ironically, polls show that many in the world now see the US as "arrogant, ruthless and a danger to world peace".

With a price tag of over a trillion dollars, a casualty list growing by the day and political stability as likely as a Dennis Kucinich presidency, the foreign policy spawning the war in Iraq has been indicted, convicted and sentenced.

"Bush and his neo-con advisors are driven by an insatiable greed to grab oil and money, and if this road to riches is littered with corpses then so be it. The US cannot win in Iraq—Bush has admitted as much, but still insists that the US is “not losing either”...

President Bush will ask Congress for close to three-quarters of a trillion dollars in defense spending on Monday, including $245 billion to cover the cost of fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan and other elements of the "global war on terror," senior administration officials said yesterday.

Russia urged ending the isolation of the anti-Israeli militant group Hamas and including Syria in Middle East peace talks, exposing fissures in a high-level diplomatic group that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice gathered yesterday in Washington to validate her new effort to end the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America as a scholar in residence at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), one of several ideologically narrow think tanks that have colonized the intellectual terrain first opened up by interdisciplinary area studies,...

The Arar Commission findings which cleared him and Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s apology – which came after months of negotiations -- last week go a long way in helping Arar fulfill his first wish. Even though some believe the apology did not go far enough as he apologized “for any role Canadian officials may have played.”

According to Barrett, again, there is “a broad consensus that Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the world and in the country.” As for the world, this assertion would be true only if we excluded many faster-growing smaller religions and measured by rates of growth rather than by absolute numbers;...

George Bush has asked the U.S. Congress for another chance to conquer with an additional 20,000 troops what he could not with 140,000 in the last four years. General Musharraf, on the other hand, is calling for more support in the war of terrorism. Bush and Mush are the classic examples...

It would be unrealistic to expect Israel to move forward within such a framework unless and until the United States takes a more active role in the peace process. The vague announcement last week by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice that she will convene a Palestinian-Israeli conference in the near future is a welcome step in this direction, but much more is nee

Speaking publicly for the first time, senior U.S. law enforcement investigators say they waged a long but futile battle inside the Pentagon to stop coercive and degrading treatment of detainees by intelligence interrogators at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Bush administration, in a surprise reversal, said on Wednesday that it had agreed to give a secret court jurisdiction over the National Security Agency’s wiretapping program and would end its practice of eavesdropping without warrants on Americans suspected of ties to terrorists.

Sixty percent of Americans oppose President George W. Bush's plan to send more troops to Iraq, a new poll found. The Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll found just one-third of those surveyed said they support sending more troops to Iraq and just over half said they want Congress to block the deployment.

A Senate resolution opposing President Bush’s war plan on Iraq put the White House and Republican leaders on the defensive Wednesday as they scurried to prevent a trickle of GOP support for the measure from swelling into a deluge.

George W. Bush has purged senior military and intelligence officials who were obstacles to a wider war in the Middle East, broadening his options for both escalating the conflict inside Iraq and expanding the fighting to Iran and Syria with Israel's help.

The war on terror is, at its heart, a physical fight against extremists. The war of ideas, on the other hand, is a philosophical debate that pits extremist ideology in the Muslim world against tolerance and freedom. So far, however, the United States seems to be losing.

Clearly it's dangerous for historians to wield the "worst president'' label like a scalp-hungry tomahawk simply because they object to Bush's record. But we live in speedy times and, the truth is, after six years in power and barring a couple of miracles, it's safe to bet that Bush will be forever handcuffed to the bottom rungs of the presidential ladder.

It won't help Obama's case that President Bush's lack of foreign policy experience prior to assuming the office, coupled with his post 9/11 foreign policy decisions, could keep us in Iraq for another decade. Despite a more visible opposition to Vietnam than what we see toward Iraq, after Nixon took office in 1969, it took until 1975 to withdraw U.S. troops completely

The Council on American-Islamic Relations demanded an apology for the letter, which Goode, of Rocky Mount, sent to hundreds of constituents and which the council labeled Islamophobic.

If the Bush administration decides to seriously reevaluate its strategy in the Middle East in the wake of the Iraq Study Group's recent report -- and among its recommendations is prioritizing a solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict -- it will have to deal with a minefield of interest groups.

The modern-era Bush family dynasty goes back four generations and was connected to the military-industrial complex of its day during and after WW I much like the most recent two Bush generations are to the present one. It began with George H. Walker and Samuel Prescott acting as duel founding fathers of what turned out to be a criminal...

The declaration was challenged from its very inception. The commission's first draft attracted 168 amendments from various countries. However, the final document was almost unchanged from the initial draft tabled by the commission. Forty-eight countries voted in favour, while eight countries...

Despite President George W. Bush's public focus on spreading freedom and democracy, the State Department has notably toned down its own talk, particularly in the Middle East where Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's comments about seeking a "New Middle East" were panned.

The paranoid wing of the blogosphere continues to go ballistic with joy about the six Muslim imams who were removed in handcuffs from a US Airways flight because one passenger thought it was "suspicious" that they knelt on their prayer rugs and prayed in the airport waiting room before boarding their flight.

The author George Bernard Shaw wrote: “Everything speaks for itself”. But when Arab political analysts discuss situations in the West they sound as though they are analysing situations in their own countries. Whether they are talking about US elections in particular and Western elections in general,...

There have been several important developments in the case of Dr. Sami Al-Arian, a Palestinian ex-University of South Florida professor falsely accused of providing material support to terrorist groups. Last week, Dr. Al-Arian was placed in civil contempt for refusing to testify before a grand jury in Virginia, prolonging his imprisonment by up to 18 months.