I move countries every three or four years. I was born in London, and we lived in Canada. Then we lived in Saudi Arabia until the Gulf War broke out, when we were forced to leave. Then we hop-scotched for a while from Holland back to Canada back to S...
[A] common denominator in European wars going back to the Crusades--no matter who won or lost, the one fairly reliable constant was that Jews somewhere were going to suffer.
The Sufi Islam practiced in northern India is quite different from the Shi'a Islam practiced in Lebannon, which in turn is different from the Sunni Islam practiced in Pakistan. Even within a single branch of Islam there are customs and practices that...
History is often the tale of small moments—chance encounters or casual decisions or sheer coincidence—that seem of little consequence at the time, but somehow fuse with other small moments to produce something momentous, the proverbial flapping o...
T.E. Lawrence: No prisoners! No prisoners!
What unites conservatives and modernizers and young and old, is a hunger not for freedom but for justice; for genuine rule of law, not rule by royal whim. They want a government that is a transparent and accountable, one that provides standards servi...
Lawrence of Arabia is the ultimate movie, deeply cinematic.
For 22 years, Bandar bin Sultan was Saudi Arabia's influential, irrepressible ambassador in Washington.
Auda abu Tayi: Thine mother mated with a scorpion.
Over the course of his wartime service, Lawrence was awarded a number of medals and ribbons, but with his profound disdain for such things, he either threw them away or never bothered to collect them. He made an exception in the case of the Croix de ...
Prince Feisal: What I owe you is beyond evaluation.
Losing their reproductive rights is the first step to how women live in Saudi Arabia and Afghanistan.
Oil they would buy from anyone. From Satan.
The idea that Arabia is best run by Arabs is no more palatable to Western leaders today than it was to Napoleon or Churchill.
On the whole, it is the rights and freedoms of all citizens that are crucial in Saudi Arabia and from those the rights of women will emanate.
There comes a time in a man's life, if he is unlucky and leads a full life, when he has a secret so dirty that he knows he never will get rid of it. (Shakespeare knew this and tried to say it, but he said it just as badly as anyone ever said it. 'All...
[…] One night, five men from Nuweiba were travelling past the mountain, and one of them fell behind, and was separated from his companions. As the man – whom we will call Ahmed – wandered in the darkness, wondering where his friends had gone, a...
'Lawrence of Arabia' is a film that anyone wanting to become an actor should watch at least six hundred times.
The way women today are treated in Saudi Arabia is a direct result of the education our children, boys and girls, receive at school.
I mean, it was a mummy movie. It was a good film independent of its source. It that looks like Lawrence of Arabia on steroids in a lot of ways.
If China was like the moon, then arriving in Saudi Arabia was Mars. At least you can see the moon from Earth.
