Conference Call with Rep. Eliot Engel (D-NY) Chairman of the House of Representatives, Foreign Affairs Committee, Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere Rep. Eliot Engel Congressman Engel serves on the Energy and Commerce Committee including the Subcommittees on Health, and Energy and the Environment. He also serves on the Foreign Affairs Committee and is the Chairman of the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, as well as serving on the Subcommittee on Europe, and the Subcommittee on the...

US President Barack Obama underestimates the threat Iran poses to global security. Were this not the case, he would not have sent CIA Director Leon Panetta to Israel ahead of Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu's visit to the White House. Panetta was reportedly dispatched here to read the government the riot act. Israel, he reportedly told his interlocutors, must not attack Iran without first receiving permission from Washington. Moreover, Israel should keep its mouth shut about attacking Iran....

Iran’s leader will not be visiting Latin America this week after all. The Iranian press reported that President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad made a last-minute decision to indefinitely postpone his trip indefinitely in advance of his country’s elections. Still, the prospect of his visit to Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela has raised questions about Tehran’s influence in Latin America. During a May 1 Town Hall meeting, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton called Iran’s inroads...

Earlier this month, the United Kingdom announced that it is reopening dialogue with the political wing of Hezbollah. Unlike the United States, the United Kingdom has only banned Hezbollah's terrorist (External Security Organization) and military wings. The ban on the terrorist wing came in 2000, while the ban on the military wing only came in June 2008 in response to Hezbollah's "providing active support to militants in Iraq who are responsible for attacks both on coalition forces and on...

Ronald Reagan helped to usher in a hopeful wave of democratization in Latin America. In one country after another, multi-party elections ended decades of single-party rule and military dictatorship. But today, that legacy is under threat - and so is our own homeland. The southern front in the War on Terror, which runs through Latin America’s institutions of state, is cracking under a combined assault of political revolution, Islamist terrorism, and the world’s most heavily armed...

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...

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...

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...

Hezbollah could be one of the first security challenges faced by the new Obama administration. An official government report concludes the Iranian-backed Islamic terror group has been forming sleeper cells throughout the United States that could become operational. The report estimates Hezbollah could become a much more potent national security threat by 2014. The group was responsible for the 1983 Beirut Marine Barracks bombing, which killed 241 U.S. Marines and 58 French servicemen. ...

The Israeli incursions into Gaza have triggered protests all over the world with demonstrators calling for an immediate ceasefire. Public fury at the Israeli violence targeting the residents of Gaza has brought thousands of people in Turkey, Argentina, Mexico, Bolivia, Lebanon and Austria to the streets. Austria Austrian demonstrators gathered outside the United Nations Office in Vienna to protest Israel's incursion into Gaza. Protesters slammed Arab states for their silence...