The U.S. Senate Foreign Relations Committee yesterday unanimously passed along to the floor a resolution affirming U.S. support for Israel in the event Israel has to militarily take action to degrade Iran’s nuclear infrastructure. According to the text of the resolution on the U.S. Congress’ website, the goal of the resolution...

The Syrian opposition yesterday called on Lebanon to “exert control over its borders and put an immediate stop to Hezbollah’s military operations on Syrian territory.” Reports indicate that the Iran-backed terror group, having gone all-in on behalf of the Bashar al-Assad regime, recently poured thousands of fighters into Syria. “The Syrian National Coalition...

Rockets fired from the Sinai Peninsula slammed into Israel today and were claimed by a jihadi Salafist group operating in the territory. Hard-line Islamist groups have increasingly infiltrated the Sinai Peninsula since the 2011 overthrow of then-Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. Most of the rockets were fired from Sinai, which has become increasingly...

Human rights and civil liberties groups are blasting Turkey after a Turkish court convicted one of the country’s top composers on charges of denigrating Islam. Pianist Fazil Say – a noted critic of the ruling Islamist government of Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan – was given a suspended sentence for making...

Egyptian satirist Bassem Youssef – arrested last month for insulting Islam and the country’s Muslim Brotherhood-linked President Mohamed Morsi – triggered a new round of controversy over the weekend with a sketch in which he compared the Muslim Brotherhood to the Nazis. In his Saturday sketch, Youssef, who is regularly described as...

A Lebanese member of parliament is slamming Hezbollah for failing to protect Lebanese territory from increasingly regular attacks by the Bashar al-Assad regime, on behalf of which Hezbollah is fighting in Syria. Basem Shabb blasted the group for being “an Iranian-sponsored Shiite organization that is embroiled in sectarian conflicts throughout the region.”...

The State Department is emphasizing that a planned trip by Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan to the Gaza Strip next month is “counterproductive.” Speaking to reporters at a briefing yesterday, State Department Acting Deputy Spokesperson Patrick Ventrell added that U.S. officials consider the Iran-backed group to be a “foreign terrorist organization [and]…...

A new poll [PDF] released late Friday by the Arab American Institute shows that American views on Egypt and on the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood have plummeted to their lowest in at least twenty years: For most of the past two decades, American opinion of Egypt has been overwhelmingly favorable. In the...

Israel and Cyprus will hold joint military exercises in the Mediterranean Sea later this month. The exercise will focus on search and rescue operations and on protecting the two countries’ natural gas assets: The Ministry of Defense in Cyprus announced that in the context of the cooperation between the Republic...

The Gulf Cooperation Council is calling for international inspectors to be dispatched to Iran to inspect the country’s Bushehr nuclear plant. The declaration comes after a Tuesday 6.3-magnitude earthquake in the area, and the GCC called attention to concerns over radiation leaks: GCC Secretary-General, Abdulatif al-Zayani, said that Gulf Arab states...