scholarly journals Assassination in Khartoum

1996 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 120-122
Author(s):  
Arthur L. Lowrie

This is a fascinating insider's account of one of the most tragic events in the history of the American Foreign Service. Cleo Noel and Curt Moore were among the Foreign Service's finest professionals- dedicated, hard­working men of impeccable integrity. Although from very different back­grounds, hard work had brought them close to the pinnacle of the service.  Circumstances brought them together on 1 March 1973 at the residence of the Saudi Arabian an1bassador in Khartoum. The ambassador was hosting a diplomatic farewell p????rty for Moore, and newly-appointed Ambassador Noel was anending as a courtesy. As the party was ending around 7:00 p.m., eight heavily anned Palestinians of the Black September extremist organization burst in and seized all diplomats who failed to flee. Most were unhrumed, but Curt Moore. whom they had been told (incorrectly) was the chief CIA agent for the Middle East, Cleo Noel, and (inexplicably) the Belgian charge d'affaires, were singled out, beaten, and tied up. Ironically, as fair-minded and objective professionals, Noel and Moore were dedicat­ed to establishing the best possible relations between the United States and the Arab world and were sympathetic to the Palestinian cause.What happened during the next thirty hours leading up to the brutal assassination is told in chilling detail by Korn, who was then a Foreign Service officer serving in Washington on the task force dealing with the hostage crisis. Mr. Korn also has had extensive experience in Aral>-hraeli affairs and is able to put the subsequent events, personalities involved, and government actions in the context of the early 1970s. For example. he leaves little doubt that Yasser Arafat and Fatah were involved, if not actu­ally directing. the Khartoum operation as part of their effort to refurbish their radical credentials in competition with George Habash 's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), which had carried out most of the airplane hijackings of the early 1970s. In addition, he is able to explain. but with no attempt to justify, the less-than-courageous roles played by Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Sudanese president Jafaar Nimeiry, and others ...

2022 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 131-161
Author(s):  
G. G. Kosach

The paper examines the evolution of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy in the context of wider changes in the Middle East and in the Arab world triggered by the Arab Spring. The author argues that during this decade the Kingdom’s foreign policy has witnessed a fundamental transformation: the very essence of the Saudi foreign policy course has changed signifi cantly as the political es-tablishment has substantially revised its approaches to the country’s role in the region and in the world. Before 2011, Saudi Arabia — the land of the ‘Two Holy Mosques’ — positioned itself as a representative of the international Muslim community and in pursuing its foreign policy relied primarily on the religious authority and fi nancial capabilities. However, according to Saudi Arabia’s leaders, the Arab Spring has plunged the region into chaos and has bolstered the infl uence of various extremist groups and movements, which required a signifi cant adjustment of traditional political approaches. Saudi Arabia, more explicit than ever before, has declared itself as a nation state, as a regional leader possessing its own interests beyond the abstract ‘Muslim Ummah’. However, the author stresses that these new political ambitions do not imply a complete break with the previous practice. For example, the containment of Iran not only remains the cornerstone of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy, but has become even more severe. The paper shows that it is this opposition to Iran, which is now justifi ed on the basis of protecting the national interests, that predetermines the nature and the specifi c content of contemporary Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy including interaction with the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC), approaches towards the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian confl ict, combating terrorism, and relations with the United States. In that regard, the transformation of Saudi Arabia’s foreign policy has, on the one hand, opened up new opportunities for strengthening the Kingdom’s interaction with Israel, but, at the same time, has increased tensions within the framework of strategic partnership with the United States. The author concludes that currently Saudi Arabia is facing a challenge of diversifying its foreign policy in order to increase its international profi le and political subjectivity.


2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-24
Author(s):  
Richard W. Bulliet

The causes and processes of the Arab Spring movements are less important for current political developments than the responses to those movements by states that were not directly involved. After discussing the Turkish, Israeli, Iranian, and American responses, the focus turns to the recently announced military cooperation between Saudi Arabia and Egypt. Did the Saudi government conspire with the Egyptian high command to plot the overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood regime in Cairo? If so, as seems likely, was the United States aware of the conspiracy? More importantly, what does the linkage between the Egyptian army and Saudi and Gulf financial support for President al-Sisi's regime suggest for the future of stability and legitimate rule in the Arab world?


2016 ◽  
Vol 68 (4) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
Max Ajl

Ali Kadri, Arab Development Denied (London: Anthem, 2014), 250 pages, $40, paperback.Perhaps nowhere does violence collapse the horizon as it does in the Arab world. Imperial wars have demolished the Libyan state and turned Syria into a charnel house. Yemen, the region's poorest country, was a U.S. drone shooting gallery before Saudi Arabia…attacked it, sending it spiraling into famine. Iraq shudders under ISIS's car bombs after decades of wars and sanctions. And Palestine continues to bleed and resist under the weight of Israeli settler-colonialism.… Why so much violence? The academic mercenaries of counterinsurgency studies fixate on terrorism as a response to material grievance, and Western war as the response. Others ascribe the region's underdevelopment to a mix of institutional inadequacy and democratic deficits, remediable by the application of U.S. power.… Against this tableau, Ali Kadri in Arab Development Denied offers a coruscatingly intelligent account of how the United States has denied Arab development. Through wars, colonialism, and sanctions, it has sought for decades to prevent working-class sovereignty in the region.Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the Monthly Review website.


Author(s):  
Tuve Floden

Muslim television preachers, also called Muslim televangelists or media preachers, became popular with the rise of television, satellite networks, and the Internet. However, these individuals can trace their roots to earlier preachers who used newspapers, radio, and cassettes, as well as the phenomenon of popular storytellers from the medieval period. Today, Muslim television preachers are found worldwide, both inside and outside the Arab world, in countries such as Egypt, India, Indonesia, Kuwait, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United States, and more. Some of these preachers have traditional religious educations, with degrees from Al-Azhar or elsewhere, but many do not, instead holding degrees in subjects like business, accounting, or engineering. Like their counterparts from other religions, Muslim television preachers have also expanded beyond the realm of television and often spread their message through other means, such as seminars and lectures, book publications, websites, videos on YouTube, and social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter. Prominent examples of Muslim television preachers include Amr Khaled and Yusuf al-Qaradawi, as well as others like Muhammad al-Sha‘rawi and Moez Masoud of Egypt, Muhammad Hassan and Wagdi Ghoneim (Salafi preachers from Egypt), Javed Ahmad Ghamidi and Farhat Hashmi of Pakistan, Zakir Naik of India, Abdullah Gymnastiar (Aa Gym) and Arifin Ilham of Indonesia, Tareq al-Suwaidan of Kuwait, and Ahmad al-Shugairi of Saudi Arabia, to name a few.


2020 ◽  
pp. 119-156
Author(s):  
Daniel S. Markey

This chapter discusses the intersection of Chinese, Iranian, Saudi (and to a lesser extent, American and Russian) interests in the Middle East. It introduces a brief history of China’s links with the Middle East and explains how Beijing’s regional role has, until recently, tended to be relatively limited. But China’s ties to the region have grown significantly, especially in terms of energy trade and investment. The chapter explores how Iranians perceive economic and strategic value in China as a means to sustain the ruling regime, resist pressure from the United States, and compete with Saudi Arabia. It explores Saudi-China ties as well, finding that the monarchy sees China as essential to its strategy for economic development. The chapter concludes that both Tehran and Riyadh will continue to court Beijing and that the Middle East is primed for greater Chinese involvement, less reform, and more geopolitical competition.


Author(s):  
Alma Rachel Heckman

Structured around the stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish Communists (Léon René Sultan, Edmond Amran El Maleh, Abraham Serfaty, Simon Lévy, and Sion Asssidon), The Sultan’s Communists examines how Moroccan Jews envisioned themselves participating as citizens in a newly independent Morocco. It also explores how Communism facilitated the participation of Moroccan Jews in Morocco’s national liberation struggle with roots in the mass upheavals of the interwar and WWII periods. Alma Heckman describes how Moroccan Communist Jews fit within the story of mass Jewish exodus from Morocco in the 1950s and ’60s, and how Communist Jews survived oppressive post-independence authoritarian rule under the Moroccan monarchy. These stories unfold in a country that, upon independence from France and Spain in 1956, allied itself with the United States (and, more quietly, Israel) during the Cold War all while attempting to claim a place for itself within the fraught politics of the post-independence Arab world. Heckman’s manuscript contributes to the growing literature on Jews in the modern Middle East, filling in the gaps on the Jewish history of 20th-century Morocco as no other previous book has done.


2019 ◽  
pp. 51-74
Author(s):  
Marina ◽  
David Ottaway

The 2011 uprisings had a profound impact on the geopolitics of the Middle East due to the vacuum created by the political turmoil consuming its three traditional power centers—Egypt, Syria and Iraq. Two old imperial rivals, Turkey and Iran, competed to fill the vacuum while an emerging new regional power, Saudi Arabia, made a bid for the leadership of the Arab world. At the same time, the United States, despite its efforts to disengage from Middle East conflicts, became more engaged than ever, first with Iran and then in civil wars underway in Syria and Iraq and against Islamic extremist groups. Meanwhile, Russia after two decades of absence, returned to quickly re-establish its influence there.


1992 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 583-584
Author(s):  
George Saliba

In the context of the five-hundred-year anniversary celebrations of the"discovery of the New World" now going on in the United States andSpain, the Syrian Institute for the History of Science (Aleppo University,Aleppo, Syria), organized the Fifth International Symposium of the Historyof Arab Science in conjunction with the lnstituto de Cooperaci6n conel Mundo Arabe (Institute of Cooperation with the Arab World, the ForeignMinistry of Spain). The theme of the conference, which dealt withthe contribution of al Andalus (i.e., Muslim Spain) to the history ofscience and teclmology, was the obvious reason for this international cooperationbetween the agencies of Syria and Spain.The contribution of al Andalus in the realms of science and technologyto both Muslim and European countries is undeniably importantin its own right and should be investigated by similar symposia, not onlyin Spain or Muslim countries. It was, however, ironic that the fivehundred-year anniversary celebrations of the "discovery of the NewWorld" coincided with the expulsion of Muslims from Spain after the reconquista,not to mention the fact that the "New World" had already beendiscovered thousands of years before Columbus by the native Americans ...


2017 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 735-738 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lamya Khalidi

After losing control of the capital Sanaa to Yemen's northern Houthi movement, which is aligned with forces loyal to the former president ʿAli ʿAbd Allah Salih, current Yemeni President ʿAbd Rabbu Mansur Hadi turned to Saudi Arabia for help. In March 2015, Saudi Arabia and its coalition of nine states began a bombing campaign in Yemen, the poorest country in the Arab world. Prior to the conflict, Yemen was already 90-percent dependent on imported food and had been battling a severe water deficit. A twenty-eight-month-long siege of its civilian population has left the country in a situation that some humanitarian groups deem to be worse than the crisis in Syria. The media has barely covered Yemen's catastrophic crisis, partially because of overt censorship by the Saudi kingdom and a shielding of its systemic violations of international law by powerful allies including the United States, the United Kingdom, and France. These countries are clearly more concerned with billion-dollar arms deals with the kingdom than with putting an end to what has been described as the worst food crisis since the establishment of the United Nations.


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