In the week immediately following VP Biden’s visit to Israel and the firestorm of controversy over the announcement of 1600 new settler housing units in occupied East Jerusalem, tensions between the US and Israel bubbled over in a most unusual manner. Administration officials, including Sec. Clinton, used language normally reserved for the likes of Iran and North Korea in order to emphasize how appalled they were at the brazen defiance.

The controversy and confrontation sparked by Israel's announcement of 1,600 new settler housing units in occupied East Jerusalem during VP Biden's trip to the region was probably inevitable. The Obama Administration and the Netanyahu Cabinet, especially its right wing including Interior Minister Yishai of Shas who made the decision and the announcement, have been on a collision course for many months.

[NOTE: I delivered this talk at a luncheon with Tal Becker as the other speaker at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, March 16, 2010.]

Since Joseph Stack flew an airplane into the Austin headquarters of the IRS one of the main questions being asked about the incident is whether or not this should be considered an act of terrorism and Stack himself a terrorist. Many Arab and Muslim Americans, and their allies, have made the point that had Stack been of Arab or Muslim descent, there likely would not be much reticence to apply that label to him, but given his ethnicity there seems to be a much greater reluctance in many quarters to place him in that category. This is not, of course, merely a semantic argument.

I've given a lot of talks at universities and attended plenty of academic conferences over the years, and very few of them have had the emotional and political impact on me that the conference last weekend at Rutgers University, organized by Prof. Golbarg Bashi and her able students, on Iran and the Arab World: New Horizons seems to have caused. Normally I wouldn't think twice about these things: just go in, give your talk, be nice and leave. All in a day's work, and no big deal. Yet I find myself, days later, haunted by this experience in a most unusual way.

[NOTE: I delivered a condensed version of this talk at the excellent Iran and the Arab world conference held at Rutgers University yesterday, February 13, 2010.]

An overview of contemporary Arab attitudes towards Iran

A hostile and no doubt completely garbled account of a talk at UCLA by Joseph Massad on David Horowitz's website, written by one of the ignoramuses employed by Campus Watch (I will not link to this article, but you can easily find it online), has gone viral on the right wing blogosphere, leading to countless accusations that an "Islamist" has again demonstrated his typical "homophobia." I've made my sharp disagreements with Massad very clear in the past, but I just can't let this pass without noting how incredibly idiotic and offensive this garbage really is.

For the past couple of months I have found myself unable to watch almost anything on my hundreds of worthless channels of cable television, including news and public affairs programming. The programs don't engage and the advertisements feel like a physical assault. There are rare exceptions, such as an occasional academic panel or political event on C-SPAN, and one or two other anomalies, but otherwise it's pretty unbearable.

An Ibishblog reader asks me, "Perhaps you would consider following up on your rather remarkable discourse on Hamlet with a defense of your (dubious) preference for David Lynch's feature Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me over the television series Twin Peaks?" I'm delighted to.

Among the most dangerous aspects of the political culture surrounding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on both sides are glib assertions of inevitable victory and the uninterrogated assumptions that inevitably lie behind them. It's an obvious point, but was brought home to me with some force yesterday when a friend pointed out the following passage from a particularly foolish Arab-American blog: