The Global Eye : Hisham Melhem

For my generation of Arabs, the “Asia Minor Agreement”, better known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement, came to symbolize imperial betrayal and treachery, a secret scheme signed in May 1916 by Mark Sykes, a British diplomat, and François Georges-Picot his French counterpart representing the two victorious European Empires in WWI to divide the imperial inheritance of the dying Ottoman Empire. In the collective mind of the peoples living in what used to be called Asia Minor and the Fertile Crescent, Sykes and Picot became names that shall live in infamy, for they imposed an imperial construct by etching arbitrary lines and coloring zones of influence on a map, and establishing artificial entities over these regions that have been inhabited by a rich mosaic of peoples, ethnicities, cultures, and religions over millennia of successive civilizations

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/05/21/Sykes-Picot-The-centennial-of-an-imperial-curse-.html

Sunday, 8 May 2016

Les enfants terribles of Barack Obama (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

The world according to President Barack Obama described recently in the Atlantic Magazine and the portrait of Ben Rhodes, deputy national security advisor for strategic communications, in the current issue of the New York Times Magazine reveal an insular White House suspicious of the foreign policy establishment entrenched in Washington and New York, including senior members of Obama’s cabinet, contemptuous of traditional allies and friends in Europe and the Middle East, and disdainful of what they see as the very gullible American Media they became very adept at skillfully manipulating and ventriloquizing its narratives.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/05/07/Les-enfants-terribles-of-Barack-Obama-.html

Sunday, 1 May 2016

The world according to Donald Trump (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

It was a strange sight to be marveled at and remembered in amazement. Donald Trump addressing the foreign policy establishment in Washington, reading from a prepared but meandering speech, obviously written by a committee of advisors. The man who mocked President Obama for delivering his speeches by reading them with the help of a teleprompter, stood behind a teleprompter, and was ill at ease reading for 40 minutes without wildly gesticulating, or making exaggerated poses, and refraining from hurling insults at large groups of people.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/05/01/The-world-according-to-Donald-Trump.html

Saturday, 23 April 2016

To Putin or to Pout (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

The much vaunted “cessation of hostilities” in Syria is collapsing, under the relentless violations of the Syrian regime’s conventional forces and its auxiliary Shiite Jihadi fighters, mostly in the form of aerial bombardment of civilian targets, designed in part to make it impossible for the representatives of the opposition forces to continue the “peace talks” in Geneva.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/04/23/To-Putin-or-to-Pout-.html

Saturday, 9 April 2016

When someone whispered to me from his grave (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

Someone whispered to me from his grave. Quietly but steadily he chronicled his short happy life and quick violent lonely death. At times I had to press my cheek to the damp ground, smelling the earth trying to listen to the slow, faint stream of words coming from the beyond. I was lying over his grave in the dark, facing the headstone listing only his name under the word Martyr, holding a flash light in one hand and trying with the other to wipe a tear.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/04/09/When-someone-whispered-to-me-from-his-grave.html

Sunday, 20 March 2016

Syria, between ashes and roses (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

When I think of Syria, I often remember Adonis’ poetry. I imagine him in a state of total bliss, reciting the poems of transformations, of the journeys between the provinces of day and night, of preaching the great disruption and anticipating the new beginnings, poems that ruptured the stagnant language and with it the stagnant world of the Arabs, and made him the greatest Arab poet and visionary of modern times.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/03/19/Syria-between-ashes-and-roses.html

Saturday, 12 March 2016

Thus spake Obama, with malice toward Arabs…(Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

President Obama is an admirer of President Abraham Lincoln, indisputably the greatest of all American presidents. Obama draws inspiration from Lincoln’s life experiences; he frequently quotes the speeches of the eloquent Lincoln, and aspires to be a good orator like him. There are other similarities between the two presidents and their times, from their legal background to their state of origin and humble beginnings.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/03/12/Thus-spake-Obama-with-malice-toward-Arabs-.html

Sunday, 21 February 2016

Syria’s seventh circle of hell (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

It has been five years, since Syria began its slow, agonizing descent into an inferno that makes Dante’s seventh circle of hell with its river of boiling blood and barren burning sands ignited by flakes of fire, look like a tolerable trail. Aleppo, Syria’s largest and one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, is about to fall into the hands of invaders from the East; Russians who are raining fires from the skies, and on the ground cutting swaths of desolation are Iranian-led Lebanese and Iraqi Shiite militias and the disheveled forces of their local lisping and pathetically delusional satrap holed up in Damascus.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/02/20/Syria-s-seventh-circle-of-hell.html

Sunday, 14 February 2016

The year of voting dangerously (Hisham Melhem, Al Arabiya)

It’s the year of the outsiders. It’s the year of the angry voter. It’s the year of the insurgents with pitchforks marching on Washington to take it back from the oligarchs. It’s the year where the rebel yell has drowned the little civility that remained in the political discourse. It’s the year when vulgarity, crassness and obtuseness were celebrated as courageous rejection of stale convention and political correctness, and when authentic passion exposed political expediency and cold calculus. It’s the year when Americans engage in the most ritualistic and longest election season in the world. No other country choses a leader with comparable pump and circumstance, splendid colors, outlandish expenses, exaggerated promises, and strange assortments of good, bad and ugly contenders, as America. It’s the season I admire the most, and dread the most.

https://english.alarabiya.net/en/views/news/middle-east/2016/02/13/The-year-of-voting-dangerously.html