Kameel Majdali's Road Ahead

The Scottish Independence Referendum was held on September 18, 2014, and the ‘Nays’ won. No doubt, Westminster and 55% of the Scottish electorate heaved a sigh of relief. So did the Queen, Britain’s allies and many banks. The 307 year old union between England and Scotland continues on. The ‘Yes’ campaign made gains in the last days but it was not enough to snatch victory. A barnstorming speech in favour of the Union by former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, a Scot himself, may have tipped the balance among the undecideds. What is not so well known is that the referendum in Scotland did not just affect this nation and the United Kingdom. It had global implications. Had the referendum passed, the changes would, at a minimum, been uncertain. At a maximum, they could have been massive and destabilsing. The United Kingdom comprises England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, hence, the appellation: The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland. While it co...

Reports coming out of Syria and Iraq are harrowing: •   Another journalist is beheaded in a gruesome video, by a man in black; •   Yazidi women are being captured, forced to convert to Islam and marry their fighters; •   Shia Muslims are being lined up and executed en masse, simply because they are the wrong branch of Islam; •   Minorities like the Christians are not faring much better: they have fled by the 10's of 1000's from Mosul & elsewhere. Or they are asked to pay the poll tax called jizya. •   They are imposing such a puritanical form of Islam that they make even the Taliban and al Qaeda look like moderates. No one needs to guess who ‘they’ are. They are the men in black. They wave a black flag. The have blasted into prominence on the world stage in a very short amount of time. They are the men of the Islamic State (IS), also known as ISIS. The men in black have a track record that would be the envy of any terrorist gr...

What a horrible, nauseating scene, reminiscent of the dark days of the Iraqi insurgency ten years ago. An American man dressed in an orange jump suit, shaved head, located somewhere in the Syrian desert. Behind him was the menacing figure of a completely black clad jihadist, knife in hand, who spoke with a British accent. The American prisoner read a prepared statement telling the United States to stop bombing targets of the Islamic State, also known as IS or ISIS. After reading the statement, the jihadist took the knife and beheaded the prisoner. The man in question was free-lance journalist, James Foley, age 40. As an ‘Arab Spring journalist,’ Mr. Foley was no stranger to danger. He had spent 44 days in captivity during the 2011 Libyan civil war. Later on , he went to Syria to report on the war there. In November, 2012, he and his translator were kidnapped but the latter was released. No one knew anything about the whereabouts of James Foley until Tuesday, August 19th 2014, w...

Global mass tourism is one of the big growth industries of our day, generating billions of dollars of revenue and providing employment for 100,000s of people worldwide. Hungry for foreign currency and job opportunities, many countries are doing whatever they can to lure the tourists to their shores.  In the Middle East, the opportunities are available but less universal than elsewhere in the world. Top tourist destinations include Egypt, Jordan, Israel, the United Arab Emirates, and Turkey. If peace reigned, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq could be added to the list. Turkey is becoming a rising star in the region, in geo-politics, economy, military, and tourism. But why should a (Christian) tourist from Malaysia, Singapore, Australia, or elsewhere, consider Turkey as a holiday destination? First, Turkey is truly one of the unique countries of the world. It sits in the middle of Europe and Asia, indeed, it straddles both continents and is considered a land bridge. The fable...

It was a gut-wrenching sense of deja vu. Who could have believed it - Malaysian Airlines encountered its second airplane tragedy in only four months. Both incidents were not just your average airline crashes - they were extraordinary. First was MH 370, scheduled to fly from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing on March 8, 2014. It simply disappeared off the radar and into the history books. To this day, we don’t know what happened to it, though the best guess is that it ran out of fuel and crashed in the Indian Ocean, the opposite direction to Beijing. The presumed death toll was 227 passengers and 12 crew. MH 370 looks set to be the greatest airplane mystery of all-time. Now its MH 17, from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, which crashed in Eastern Ukraine on July 17, 2014, only 40 kilometers from the Russian border. Unlike MH 370, we know much more but that doesn’t make it any less tragic. There were 283 passengers and 15 Malaysian crew members. The dead included 20 family groups, 80 children,...

Nearly two months ago, I commenced a blog series called The Battle for Jerusalem. As it turned out, events in Iraq, Gaza, the caliphate, MH 17, all pushed Jerusalem onto the backburner - temporarily. Make no mistake about it - Jerusalem is and will continue to be the single-most important foreign policy issue, bar none. In summary, for over ninety years, since the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the international question has been ‘Who will own Jerusalem?’ This is known as the ‘Jerusalem Question.’ There have been 5 dozens proposals over the years but one or more of the many parties who have a stake in the Jerusalem Question have said ‘No.’ These interested parties include Israel, Palestine, the Arab League, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC), the Vatican, the European Union, the United Nations, Russia, and the Orthodox Church. With so many stakeholders, 4,000 years of history, and different theologies, no wonder the question of Jerusalem is so difficult to solve. Th...

Hamas, the Palestinian militant organisation that runs the Gaza Strip, has sent over 450 rockets into mostly southern Israel, though the Tel Aviv and Jerusalem have been targeted. Israel has been bombing select targets in the Gaza Strip. Ramadan crowds at the al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem cheered when they heard that Hamas was sending rockets into Israel. Even one rocket went as far as Hadera, 100 kilometers north of Tel Aviv. This is the furthest any rocket has gone from the Gaza Strip. The fact that Hamas rockets are grossly inaccurate, often times causing little or no casualties, while others are intercepted by Israel’s famed iron-dome defense system, still does not take away from the fact that this is a major escalation in the conflict between the Jewish State and Hamas-run Gaza. Furthermore, it has the potential to ignite a third Palestinian intifada or ‘uprising’ (the first was from 1987-1993; the second from 2000-2005). In a region that is already teetering on the edge o...