While all Alawites fear vengeance against their entire community should Assad fall, there are varying degrees of loyalty to the Assads.

Moammar Gaddafi, who has called himself the 'Guide of the First of September Great Revolution of the Socialist People's Libyan Arab Jamahiriya,' should go down in history with the Emperor Bokassa and Idi Amin as a grotesque reminder of why people have the right to change their government.

There are no Muslim ghettos in the U.S.

At the United Nations, a lynch mob for Israel is always just a moment away.

Pundits are used to analyzing the gap between what our ideals suggest and what our security interests require.

On taking office in 2009, U.S. President Barack Obama put Israeli settlements at the center of U.S. policy in the Middle East.

It’s unlikely to change – there’s nothing in King Salman’s past as governor of Riyadh for about forty years that suggests that he was particularly a reformer, not on the role of women, not on democratic development. There’s been a rumor in the last couple of days that he said to someone in an e-mail that he’s in favor of a constitutional monarchy, but I would be surprised if the level of repression started to go down … I think the kind of thing that we would view as significant reforms is unlikely.