Summary In the aftermath of the September 2001 terrorist attacks on New York and Washington D.C., U.S. attention to terrorism in Latin America intensified, with an increase in bilateral and regional cooperation. Latin American nations strongly condemned the attacks, and took action through the Organization of American States (OAS) to strengthen hemispheric cooperation. In June 2002, OAS members signed an Inter-American Convention Against Terrorism. President Bush submitted the convention to...

Former Dearborn, Michigan, resident Mahmoud Youssef Kourani was a secret Hezbollah agent sent to infiltrate America in February 2001. He stole over the Mexican border into California with a skill set that court records would later describe as “specialized training in radical Shiite fundamentalism, weaponry, spy craft, and counterintelligence,” picked up in Lebanon and Iran. Kourani got caught in 2004 and thrown in federal prison for raising money and recruits for Hezbollah, which...

When you think of medieval Europe, you usually think of knights, castles, and the church. Rarely, though, do you think of the Moors, the powerful, benevolent rulers of Spain for nearly 700 years. While the rest of Europe was still struggling with Feudalism and food shortages, Moorish Spain was a center of culture, science, and trade. The illustrious Moors brought to the dry Spanish plains irrigation systems imported from Syria, transforming the area into a rich agricultural cornucopia. Foods...

After four years of Evo Morales swearing in, Bolivians live anguished, while what was predicted is complied with - opposition persecution, state terrorism, vandalism, despotism, nepotism, racism, corruption, plunder to the country, lack of basic products, poverty on the rise, unlimited drug-trafficking, murder, lynching, torture, overbearing threats from members of the government, law violation in a bulk. Everything and more that happened with the worst de facto regimes that usurped power in...

The terms Caribbean and South American refer to aggregations of countries, not to specific areas within legally defined boundaries. Thirty-one countries form the Caribbean, which is divided into English, French, Spanish, and Dutch linguistic regions. The majority of the countries are English-speaking. The total Muslim population by country varies from 4 to 15 percent. The largest Muslim populations are in English-speaking countries such as Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago. There are small...

بِسْمِ اللّهِ الرَّحْمَنِ الرَّحِيمِ قُلْ يَا عِبَادِيَ الَّذِينَ أَسْرَفُوا...

"We have to be very careful about what is going on in Venezuela, especially what is going on in the private universities," Mario Silva asserts on his pro-Chávez television talk show La Hojilla ("The Razor Blade") in late November 2007. The provocative host points out that in television news footage of a recent student march against proposed changes to the Venezuelan constitution, which were voted down December 2, a leader of the marchers crosses a police barricade...

VENEZUELAN President Hugo Chávez, who says he intends to remain in office for decades to come, lost a referendum 14 months ago that would have removed the constitutional limit on his tenure. When he announced another referendum in December, the first polls showed him losing again by a wide margin. Yet, as Sunday's vote approaches, his government is predicting victory -- and some polls show him with a narrow advantage. How did Latin America's self-styled "Bolivarian...

I was fortunate, by the grace of Allah, to travel with a group of 6 Muslim brothers to the country of Bolivia. Our mission there was to visit the Muslims in Bolivia so that they can establish the effort of the Prophet Mohammed (SAW), and spread the word of Allah-to give Dawah. The word Dawah means to invite. In this particular case, we were inviting the Bolivians to the word of Allah, to the deen of Islam. I was very excited to be leaving. For the next 40 days, I would be leaving my family,...

Migrants from the Middle East have been circulating to the Americas for over a century. Scholarship on the subject, though rich, has often fallen through the cracks of academic geographical divisions. Clearly, this is a topic that merits further scholarly attention and debate, especially in the post-9/11 era. Middle Eastern migrants to Latin America traveled predominantly from the eastern Mediterranean region variously known as the Arab East, the Levant, or the Mashreq. Part of the Ottoman...