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Unmasking Juan Cole Was Not Easy
Shedding Light on Juan Cole’s Rethinking the Qurʾān in Late Antiquity (2025)
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Dominance: Donald Trump’s Art of Humiliation as Statecraft
By Khaled Salih How Trump turned diplomacy into theater, and humiliation into the grammar of global power. At Sharm el-Sheikh in 2025, Donald Trump transformed a peace summit into a masterclass in public domination. His gestures, jokes, and calculated delays exposed how performance, not policy, now defines international relations.
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“I, Donald J. Trump,” Love Israel and the Middle East
By Khaled Salih I watched President Donald J. Trump’s speeches in Jerusalem and Sharm el-Sheikh. On his way back to the United States, I imagined he had asked me to draft a personal message for him. This is what I would have written. A Message from the President
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When the War Ended, the Silence Began
By Khaled Salih “The choice with which humankind is faced in every age is between the idea of power and the power of ideas.” — Jonathan Sacks I was at a small clinic with my elder son, waiting for a doctor to treat an ordinary infection. The waiting room was crowded
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The cilantro leader: A review of Amit Segal’s A Call at 4 AM
By Khaled Salih There is a scene at the beginning of Amit Segal’s new book that feels almost too perfectly allegorical. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, sits in a small office in his official Jerusalem residence, not with a foreign dignitary, but with detectives from the national
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How Bridget Phillipson’s Gaza Interview Exemplifies Institutionalised Functional Stupidity
By Khaled Salih In the high-stakes theatre of international diplomacy, where the lives of millions hang in the balance, we might expect leaders to wield intellect like a scalpel, precise, probing, and unafraid to cut through the fog of politics. Instead, we often witness something far more banal: the
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hudna, Hamas’s signal to the world
By Khaled Salih “Eric Hobsbawm was an English historian who was probably one of the last true Marxists —and he was totally unrepentant about it at that. One of his parting shots through the 1980s was that if Marxism had killed millions, it would have been worth it if they
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A Mirror Shattered
Danny Burmawi’s Islam, Israel and the West: A Former Muslim’s Analysis
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islām’s 6 Doctrinal Truths Hidden in Plain Sight
By Khaled Salih “Every man, wherever he goes, is encompassed by a cloud of comforting convictions, which move with him like flies on a summer day.” Bertrand Russell In the West, discussions about islām are often framed by simplified, reassuring narratives that emphasise peace, tolerance, and shared values. This version
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NYT and the Art of Blaming the Victims
By Khaled Salih Note: This article was first published by Guerre and Shalom. I urge you to subscribe to this valuable publishing house. On October 6th, 2025, just as the world marked the second anniversary of the October 7th terror attacks, Roger Cohen of The New York Times published a
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“I am Eli the survivor.” Eli Sharabi’s Hostage
By Khaled Salih Eli Sharabi’s Hostage is not merely a chronicle of captivity; it is a profound and harrowing cartography of the human spirit under absolute duress. Sharabi charts the unforgiving terrain of loss, terror, and dehumanisation, but also maps the intricate psychological structures he built to withstand the
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Israel’s Black Swan and the Jump to Antifragility
By Khaled Salih Redefined by Shock The Hamas-led attack on October 7th, 2023, represents a defining moment in Israeli history, a catastrophic failure of intelligence, military posture, and strategic imagination that challenges the nation’s core security doctrines. An event of such profound and unexpected scale, it must be