After years of asserting that no Wahhabist hatred fills the pages of their textbooks (more here ), the Islamic Saudi Academy, owned by the Royal Embassy of Saudi Arabia, has done some backpedaling. From this source : ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) -- An Islamic school in northern Virginia with close ties to t...

Saudi Arabia to whip, jail 75-year-old widow CAIRO, March 10 – The sentencing of a 75-year-old widow to 40 lashes and four months in prison for mingling with two young men who were reportedly bringing her bread has sparked new criticism of Saudi Arabia’s ultraconservative religious police and ju...

Barack Obama’s first choice to head the National Intelligence Council has withdrawn his name for consideration. We can be thankful for his doing so. Freeman is a member of that school of diplomacy that sees the United States as being the root of a lot of the evil in the world. He’s refer...

Intelligence Pick Withdraws Name Amid Controversy - First 100 Days of Presidency - Politics FOXNews.com Chas Freeman, the former ambassador appointed to be the military’s top intelligence analyst, has withdrawn his name following complaints from Democratic and Republican lawmakers who said he ...

Female bloggers from across the Middle East joined hands in marking the International Women's Day with posts reflecting on the occasion and celebrating the lives and achievements of women who have touched them. In Saudi Arabia, American Bedu admits that while many women in the kingdom may not ev...

What a skank. A Saudi Arabian court has sentenced a 75-year-old Syrian woman to 40 lashes, four months imprisonment and deportation from the kingdom for having two unrelated men in her house, according to local media reports. According to the Saudi daily newspaper Al-Watan, troubles for the woman, K...

Discussing the flare up over possible National Intelligence Council chair Chas Freeman, M.J. Rosenberg writes something that deserves some parsing: Now Jonathan Chait of the New Republic is an interesting case. He's liberal on every single issue but Israel (on which he is pure neocon), not only libe...

Israeli media is marking today by taking a hard look at the challenges that Israel women still face on the path to full equality: Statistical reports published to coincide with International Women's Day Sunday reveal that in some aspects, the situation of women in the country has worsened. Weeks aft...

The Gulf Cooperative Council (GCC) hopes to achieve a monetary union, with a common currency, by 2010. Bloggers from the region, which groups Bahrain, Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, Oman and the United Arab Emirates, debate the merits of the union and more importantly what name they want for their new curren...

It's official - Chas Freeman will be in charge of filtering and evaluating the intel that President Obama sees. He'll be using the same kind of analytic nuance that led him to once declare that "Israel excels at war... it has shown no talent for peace." And in case you didn't know - that little piec...