Saudi duplicity is backfiring royally. The architect of Abdullah’s worst foreign policies Tuwaijri is gone, but does Abdullah’s successor Salman bin Abdulaziz al-Saud have the guts to face Saudi Arabia’s many nightmares? The death of…
Category: Eric Walberg
Eric Walberg is a Canadian writer specializing in the Middle East, Central Asia and Russia. He is a graduate of Cambridge University and has lived in both the Soviet Union and Russia, and then Uzbekistan, as a UN adviser, writer, translator and lecturer. He has been writing on East-West relations since the 1980s, presently for Al-Ahram Weekly and is a regular contributor to several globally-recognized websites, and a commentator on Voice of the Cape radio. His articles appear in Russian, German, Spanish and Arabic and are available at his website http://ericwalberg.com.
Press freedom has been under attack with the deaths in Paris of nine Charlie Hebdo employees, including editor Stephane Charbonnier, and the continued incarceration in Cairo of three Al Jazeera journalists. The circumstances of the…
The highlight to any trip to Tehran—if you can manage it—is a visit to the scene of the most spectacular hostage-taking in recent history, the US embassy, which Iranian students stormed in November 1979, holding…
Review of Morten Storm with Paul Cruickshank and Tim Lister, Agent Storm: My Life Inside al Qaeda and the CIA, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2014. ISBN 978-0-8021-2314-5 Summary: As IS continues to confound the West with…
Thanks to Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s extremism—total subservience to the US and Israel Middle East agenda—Canada now has a thriving Muslim-based extremism. This is a truly frightening development, and the situation will only get worse….
Why can westerners join the IDF while westerners joining IS are despised and killed? In what sense is the IDF scenario any less reprehensible than the IS one? In recent weeks there has been a…
The 2nd conference “New Horizon: the International Conference of Independent Thinkers” was held in Tehran, September 29–October 1 2014, including over 30 journalists, writers and academics from around the world presenting papers and arguing issues…
The declaration by the Islamic State (IS) leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, of a new Islamic civilization on lands where Islam flourished over a millennium ago is a heady call, and has been welcomed by many…
The self-immolation of a 26-year-old Tunisian fruit vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, in December 2010, was the spark that set off the 2011 Arab Spring uprising. Do events there since prove or disprove those who see the…
Osama Bin Laden’s goal in 9/11 was to suck the US into Afghanistan and Iraq, sparking a regional conflagration that would sweep away the imperial legacy and establish a new caliphate. Over a decade later,…