By Ali Al-Ahmed

Washington DC - President Barack Obama is certainly not going to see the dismembered body of a beheaded convict in the center of the Saudi capital Riyadh, when arrives there today to meet the Saudi king Abdullah.  Sadly, the risk is high that Obama is likely to repeat the mistakes of his predecessors by allowing the Saudi side to divert the agenda away from US- Saudi relations to other, less central issues such as the Palestinian Israeli conflict, or the Iranian nuclear program.

By Matthew Mainen

In recent weeks, it has become evident that President Obama is attempting to link coercive action against Iran to a resolution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. While conventional wisdom invariably holds that Israel will have to make deep and painful concessions to the Palestinians if it does not want to see its survival at stake, a close examination of the situation reveals otherwise.

By Matthew Mainen

March 24, 2009

As the rightwing Likud party’s Benjamin Netanyahu prepares to assume the Israeli premiership for the second time in his career, he inherits a Middle East drastically different than that inherited during his first tenure (1996-1999). At the time, Israel was battling a Hamas heavily funded by Saudi Arabia and other Gulf states. In Israel recent operation against Hamas, however, it received some of its strongest tactic support from Saudi Arabia, who perceives Hamas as an Iranian proxy.

By MATTHEW BARAKAT

ALEXANDRIA, Va. (AP) — An Islamic school in northern Virginia with close ties to the Saudi government has revised its religious textbooks in an effort to end years of criticism that the school fosters hatred and intolerance.

By Ali AlAhmed

When President Barak Obama said in his inauguration speech that "Our nation is at war against a far-reaching network of violence and hatred," he didn't expect that in the immediate future such a network would be operating from American soil, in royal fashion and lodge, from one of its poshest hotels, the Waldorf Astoria.