Conflicts Forum

Conflicts Forum’s latest Monograph, by Aisling Byrne
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By Khalid Meshaal, June 25, 2009
On June 25, Khalid Meshaal, head of the Hamas Political Bureau gave a televised speech in Damascus and said, in part:
“… The Obama administration brought a change in rhetoric, but the question is what brought about this change. Even just the change on the level of the language, who effected […]

By Alastair Crooke, New Perspectives Quarterly, June 2, 2009
Most Western analysts of political Islam make the same mistake. They instinctively assume that conflict with the West has mainly to do with specific foreign policies, particularly of the U.S. with respect to Israel, the Arab world and Iran, and, if those changed, all would be well.
In […]

By Alastair Crooke, Open Democracy, March 11, 2009
In the mechanistic template imposed by western leaders on the Middle East, of ‘moderates’ who must be supported versus ‘extremists’ who must be isolated and undermined, Hamas has to be painted, by mechanical necessity alone, as ‘extremists’. Hamas has become the ‘extremists’ to answer in neat symmetry to […]

By Alastair Crooke, The Guardian, January 19, 2009
On Saturday evening, Israel announced not a ceasefire - in the sense of an agreement between the parties to end a conflict - but a decision that its forces will unilaterally halt their fire. It said it would await the Hamas response, any timetable for a withdrawal of […]

By Alastair Crooke, London Review of Books, January 15, 2009
‘We have to ask the West a question: when the Israelis bombed the house of Sheikh Nizar Rayan, a Hamas leader, killing him, his wives, his nine children, and killing 19 others who happened to live in adjoining houses – because they saw him as a […]