by Scott Ruston As details pour in regarding this past weekend’s daring raid in which U.S. Navy SEALs  killed elusive al-Qaeda leader and world’s most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden, the exact details of the events keep changing slightly. The New York Times titled an article covering a recent revision to the sequence of events [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson Recently, the Islamic Republic of Iran has been abuzz over the release of a video entitled “The Coming is Very Near,” a 28-minute production created by a group of Twelver Shi‘a devotees of the Hidden Imam al-Mahdi, known as the Harbingers of the Coming (perhaps associated with the Hojjatieh Society). It [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson and Bud Goodall Muammar Gaddafi, “Leader and Guide” of Libya, and Vladimir Putin, current Prime Minister of Russia and former head of the FSB (formerly KGB), have separately denounced (Putin here ) UN Security Council Resolution 1973, approving military action in Libya, as something resembling “the medieval Crusades.” We understand why [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson Events rapidly accelerated in Egypt on Friday, January 28, as expected. On Thursday night, the regime shut down internet access. This startling graphic by Craig Labovitz shows the precipitous drop in online traffic. Over the course of the day, the U.S. government repeatedly modified its official stance after making questionable remarks [...]

by Bud Goodall The Jasmine Revolution in Tunisia last week beget further democracy uprisings in Egypt and Yemen this week, as well as protests in Jordan and Mauritania.  If the protesters are finally successful in Egypt and President Hosni Mubarak is forced out, this eruption of game-changing scenarios inspired by deep conflicts between the people [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson The protests in Egypt that began on January 25 are the culmination of a long simmering struggle between the police state of Hosni Mubarak and the common people it seeks to control. The state claims that its longstanding “security measures” protect the country from the ever-present threat of Islamist extremists, such [...]

by Lisa Braverman A couple of weeks ago as I skimmed the news, I saw the freshly-released images of the Park51 Community Center (colloquially known as the “Ground Zero Mosque”). In the same sitting, I also performed my semi-regular check of a former professor’s co-authored blog, No Caption Needed. Perusing the two in such short [...]

by Steven R. Corman, Jeffry R. Halverson, and Chris Lundry This series has examined the reaction, mostly in mainstream news sources of foreign Muslim societies, to the recent surge in anti-Islam events in the United States. Part I focused on the Park51 (or Cordoba House) project, the so-called “Ground Zero Mosque.” In part II we looked at [...]

by Steven R. Corman, Jeffry R. Halverson, and Chris Lundry So far in this series we have looked at two high-profile anti-Muslim incidents in the U.S.  Part I focused on the Park51 project, the so-called Ground Zero Mosque.  In part II we looked at the controversy surrounding the “International Burn a Qur’an Day,” scheduled for [...]

The president announced that we were “turning the page” on Operation Freedom; but what he failed to do was close the book.