The European Union has lost virtually all of its credibility amongst large swaths of the European population.

There are different versions of Islam... it is meaningless to claim to speak in the name of a ‘real’ Islam.

The situation in Turkey is extremely troubling. A panic-stricken regime, desperate to divide the Kurdish population from non-Kurds because it feared the rise of the HDP, has helped to create a huge crisis in the country. Can it be ended while Tayyip Erdogan remains in power? I don't think so. Erdogan may not be a "joker," but he is definitely a political plagiarist.

The European Union is effectively a union dominated by the German political and economic elite. Its main function is to serve as a nucleus for financial capitalism and to ease the road for that capitalism. The other functions just irritate everyone: it's undemocratic; decisions are not made by parliament; the European Parliament is not sovereign.

After flirting with neoisolationism, the U.S. is now deciding it wants to run the world.

Most Iraqis, even if they hated Saddam and suffered, say life was much better under him than it was under the occupation and what's going on today.

Dear old al-Maarri was a great skeptic poet. He wrote a parody of the Koran, and his friends would tease him and say, "al-Maarri, but no one says your Koran." And he said, "Yes, but give me time. Give me time. If people recite it for twenty years it will become as popular as the other one."