If Lebanon's unprovoked attack on an Israeli maintenance team was premeditated, it points to something darker on the horizon

‘Then the beating began. One of the new arrivals punched Christopher hard in the face. Two others grabbed his arm and started dragging him across the street. For the first time the Hitch looked scared’

A disciple of Ayatollah Khomeini's apocalyptic ideology, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is about to turn Iran into a nuclear rogue state

‘Obama will try to succeed in the Middle East where Clinton and Bush failed’

The story of al-Qaeda's lost leader, Abdullah Azzam, illuminates the murderous nature of global jihad

‘The notion that talking to the enemy avoids war—a position otherwise known as appeasement—is a dangerous fallacy’

The deadliest but least understood Middle Eastern faultline is between Sunni and Shia

‘Obama would be an American, not European, president, and Livni would be an Israeli leader, not a Brussels bureaucrat’

‘To realise that Syria deserved the cold shoulder did not require the life of a prime minister’

Lebanon's celebration of a brutal killer's release illustrates the extent - and the limitations - of Hizbullah's power