30 Jul
Latest, Uncategorized

Simon Henderson Q&A: Qatar’s Outsized Role in the Middle East

"Qatar does not support Hamas, Qatar supports the Palestinians,” Qatari Foreign Minister Dr. Khalid Al Attiyah declared in a CNN interview that aired this week. Yet some questions remain. The small Middle Eastern country--which now-former Israeli president Shimon Peres recently called “the world’s largest funder of terror”--has been singled out for playing an outsized role in many of the region's current conflicts, including the war between Israel and Gaza. Simon Henderson, a fellow at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy and director of the Institute's Gulf and Energy Policy Program, answers a few questions about the country's involvement with Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and more. Why did Qatar reportedly give Hamas $400 million in 2012? The 2012 visit to Gaza by the then-emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani was the first real evidence that Qatar had decided to support Hamas in preference...

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04 Apr
History, Misc, topics

Escape from Freedom?

By Martin Berman-Gorvine As Passover approaches, I have been reading the psychologist Erich Fromm’s 1941 work, Escape from Freedom. Writing when Nazi Germany was at its height, Fromm sought the reasons why so many people felt their freedom to be “an intolerable burden” that they wished to escape. The questions he raised are still vital. We often think of people who live under tyrannical regimes as helpless victims. This neatly avoids the problem that even the most monstrous regimes enjoy some level of popular support, without which they could not continue to function; and even worse, that a people granted the vote may freely elect a dictatorship, as happened in Germany in 1932 and as appears to be happening in Egypt today. Why does this happen? In the case of Egypt, we can begin with the failure of...

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