"Political simpletons and sinister people around the world mostly bemoan the post-uprisings violence across the Arab world, wondering why the popular revolts did not lead to democratic transitions beyond Tunisia. A more useful and politically relevant frame through which to view the turbulent Arab world must go well beyond the past five years, and encompass instead the past century, from 1915 until today, for two critical reasons..."

"What do we learn when we actually listen to Arab citizens? Zogby Research Services, headed by the experienced Arab-American political activist James Zogby, just surveyed over 7,400 adults in six Arab countries (Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE), Turkey, and Iran, for an annual gathering hosted by the United Arab Emirates government..."

"Donald Trump and Abu Bakr el-Baghdadi peddle similar fantasies to ordinary people living in diminished and stressed conditions. The fantasy of being born again into a perfect, orderly and triumphant world is hard to resist for ordinary men and women whose ordinary lives have suddenly taken a turn to vulnerability, uncertainty, weakness, humiliation, and even military and terror attacks by hostile foreigners they can neither understand nor neutralize. They are promised, and expect to enjoy, instant personal wellbeing, communal power, and national re-assertion, in Nevada and New Jersey as in Raqqa and Casablanca..."

"Erratic social, political, economic, and administrative accountability mechanisms throughout the Arab region have long marginalized tens of millions of people; this has led to massive unmet human needs, rising poverty, widening income inequality, high unemployment, limited political representation, and the consequent threats to pluralism and social cohesion..."

"Two important new reports in the United States this week clarify the difficulties involved in defeating ISIS or at least reducing its impact around the world. The first is a study by the Program on Extremism at George Washington University that analyzes the range of individuals who were involved in legal action against them, showing that there is no single profile of a typical ISIS recruit. Rather, the very wide range of people who explore ISIS and similar ideologies suggests that no single strategy — like social media counter-narratives or more public activism by “moderate” Muslims — will succeed in reducing this threat..."

"When colonial power structures ravage the lives of ordinary people for decades on end, and those people have no recourse to political, social, or economic redress of grievances, they will usually turn to God and their religion as a last resort to salvage their humanity. If the colonial exploitation continues unabated, that explosive situation will usually end in something dramatic and disruptive — revolution, mass uprisings, civil wars, and large-scale internal displacements and illegal migrations..."

"The major developments in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict last week were simultaneously tragic and comic — tragic at the level of Palestinians and Israelis killing each other by the handfuls each week and more or less on individual whims, and comic at the level of their incompetent governments and the equally failed mediation efforts by U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry. Most political analysts around the world say that the Palestine-Israel conflict is a secondary side show to the much bigger dangers in the region that also threaten the world."

"Throughout many private and public encounters across the United States in the past two months, I have repeatedly heard Americans ask whether they are doing the right thing in their current policy to counter "Islamic State" (ISIS), and whether they should be doing other things besides military attacks. This is now even more urgent since the United States government has issued a worldwide travel alert for Americans traveling abroad. Existing policies to counter Islamist terror groups have not worked very well, it seems, to judge by the last 17 years of non-stop military attacks against Al-Qaeda which have seen Al-Qaeda persist and expand recently, and ISIS come to being and wage terror attacks in several countries beyond its borders."

"Never in my adult life have I ever experienced in the Middle East and the Western world anything like the prevailing disjunction today between the “Islamic State” (ISIS) threat that preoccupies all publics and governments, and the apparent inability of political systems to deal with it coherently. This is a problem everywhere, and I mean literally everywhere, in the world, making Arabs, Americans Europeans, Israelis, Russians, Iranians and all other concerned people equal partners in this astounding example of collective political and strategic transcontinental incompetence."

"While the world has been preoccupied with the “Islamic State” (ISIS) and its global terrorism threat that emanated from the conflicts in Iraq and Syria, 17 countries that met in Vienna last weekend agreed on a stunningly ambitious and impressive timetable to wind down the conflict and move Syria towards a political transition within the coming 18 months. The plan was agreed by all the critical external players, notably the United States, Russia, Iran, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia, all of whom now spend more time funding and fanning the wars within Syria than they do resolving it. I hope dearly that this plan is actually implemented. The odds for that occurring are not high, but neither are they zero."