This article considers how Arab intellectuals represent the United States and American foreign policy in their editorial contributions to Arabic newspapers. As a case study, it examines Arab intellectuals’ reactions to the George W. Bush Administration’s campaign to effect democratic change in the Middle East, as articulated in the Administration’s 2004 Greater Middle East Initiative (hereafter GMEI or Initiative). I argue that the predominantly hostile reactions to the GMEI stemmed mainly from a closed and negative image of the United States permeating Arab intellectual circles.

This article focuses on the Axis of Evil metaphor that was used by President George W. Bush in his State of the Union Address in 2002 to represent Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. After describing “axis” as a metonym for fascism and Nazism, and “evil” as a metonym for Satanic forces that implies an alliance of Iran, Iraq, and North Korea that is collectively responsible for evil deeds, the authors analyze the impact of this metaphor on Iranian self-image and politics. The data for this analysis are drawn from in-depth interviews conducted with 18 members of the Iranian oppositional elite.

This article challenges the static approach to Hamas as a simple fundamentalist organization by analyzing its political documents. It shows that Hamas’ Islamist ideology has not prevented it from moving from fundamentalism to radicalism. Hamas has innovated ways of allowing its leaders to declare or acquiesce in political positions that contradict its fundamentalist creed. Hamas accomplished this change in the course of a domestic debate. The international boycott of its government did not create the change — Hamas began to talk in two voices before winning the 2006 elections.

The combination of pessimism regarding the possibility of a negotiated settlement and a recognition that maintaining the status quo in the Occupied Territories is impossible has led leading Israeli policymakers to advocate a policy of unilateral withdrawal. This policy is at least partially based on the assumption that nationalist movements inevitably adapt to externally imposed realities.

In this article, some conceptual and empirical relations between Islam, sovereignty, and democracy will be examined, with comparisons to Christianity. In the first part of the article, the historical conditions of the formation of the dualist (Christianity) and monist (Islam) political theories of the two religions will be examined.