by Jeffry R. Halverson* “If a group of people feels that it has been humiliated and that its honor has been trampled underfoot, it will want to express its identity.”                                                   [...]

by Steven R. Corman In an apparent budget cutting move, the U.S. Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy was cut from the recently passed budget, and has ceased to exist. The move eliminates an organization over 60 years old. The Commission was established under the United States Information and Educational Exchange Act of 1948 as the [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson Put him in power and see how wise he is. – Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms I have spent an inordinate amount of time studying Islamist ideologues and their ideas during my relatively short lifetime. I’ve never read War and Peace, but I have read Milestones and The Neglected Duty. [...]

by Chris Lundry Last year, my colleagues Steven Corman, Jeffrey Halverson and I wrote a series of blog posts exploring Islamist reactions to anti-Islam and anti-Muslim events in the US, including the debate over the Park51 Islamic Center and an American pastor’s proposal to burn a Qur’an on 9/11, among others. One of the points [...]

By Jeffry R. Halverson Unlike the protests of the Arab Spring in Tunisia and Egypt, the campaigns underway against the Assad regime in Syria have a distinctly sectarian character. The Assad regime is dominated by the Alawites, a little-known esoteric Shi‘ite sect. However, the majority of Syria’s population is Sunni Muslim (approx. 75%). And caught [...]

by Jeffry R. Halverson There are a lot of questions and speculation about the Ikhwan al-Muslimun (The Muslim Brotherhood, or MB) and their role in the future of Egypt. The coverage of the organization in the U.S. media has been better than expected. However, I am still struck by some of the more ominous rhetoric [...]

by Mark Woodward More than a decade ago hundreds of thousands of Indonesians, most of them young people, came to the streets demanding the end to a dictatorial regime that had lasted for more than three decades. Today we see much the same in Egypt. We see also see the same reaction in Western media, [...]

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 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 Steven R. Corman The CSC has released a new white paper by Jeffry Halverson entitled A Counter-Narrative for Iranian Tyranny.  The executive summary is below, and you can find the full paper here. The ruling regime of the Islamic Republic of Iran is increasingly known for a militant foreign policy posture, abuse of the [...]