By Mark Woodward and Inayah Rohmaniyah* Efforts in European countries including France, Belgium, Italy and the Netherlands to restrict or prohibit women from wearing burkah and nikab (face veil) are well known in Indonesia. Reports about these efforts in the Indonesian media are overwhelming negative. There is no visible support for these efforts even among [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson The following is a summary of some arguments  from my new book, Theology and Creed in Sunni Islam: The Muslim Brotherhood, Ash’arism, and Political Sunnism, published by Palgrave Macmillan.  It offers an explanation of why fundamentalist literal interpretations of the Qu’ran have so much influence in contemporary Islamist extremism, and why [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson Apparently I wasn’t the only one thinking about the diplomatic potential of Muslim hip-hop when I posted a blog about it for COMOPS Journal back in September of 2009. Recently we heard from Tyson Amir, one of the Muslim artists that I featured in the blog, and he had some interesting [...]

by Mark Woodward, Ali Amin and  Inayah Rohmaniyah* In recent months, Indonesian security forces, including the US-trained Detachment 88, have proven to be increasingly effective in locating, capturing or killing suspected terrorists. But police power alone will never defeat a deeply entrenched extremist sub-culture.  Soft power is a crucial component as well, perhaps even more [...]

by Mark Woodward and Mariani Yahya* Thai-Buddhist colonialism? That is a strange concept, but it is reality as far as the Malay-Muslims of the “Deep South” of Thailand are concerned. Edward Said noted that the representation of political- and military-subject people as less than fully human is among the basic elements of the culture and [...]

by Bud Goodall One of the important challenges of President Obama’s administration is to sell the continuation of our “overseas contingency operation” (or perhaps FATAVE) in Afghanistan to an increasingly disenchanted audience at home and abroad. But there is a worrisome absence of a good narrative–a coherent collection of stories–about why we are there and [...]

by Jeffry Halverson* In the run-up to today’s Afghan elections, the Taliban have been asserting that participation is un-Islamic.  But this infidel thinks these students (Talib translates as “student”) deserve an F. A recent New York Times Op-Ed by Mirwais Ahmadzai, a program manager with the Afghan Independent Human Rights Commission, reports the appearance of ominous [...]

by Steven R. Corman At last, the AP is reporting, someone is finally going to review our moronic “terror alert system” (TAS). Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano is expected to appoint a panel to reevaluate the system and determine whether it should be changed, or possibly eliminated. Good for her.  The existing system, put in [...]

by Steven R. Corman Last week, while I was recovering from a long stretch of foreign travel, GAO released its latest report on public diplomacy.  Matt thinks it is “interesting and worth reading,”  while Kim says not so much. My own view is that the report is interesting (in a disturbing way) because it clings [...]

by Steven R. Corman I just ran across this “Washington whisper” item in USNWR: President Obama has nominated longtime national security expert Philip J. “P. J.” Crowley as assistant secretary of state for public affairs, a move that suggests that the department’s public diplomacy with foreign nations will be stepped up. Crowley, currently a senior [...]