Hisham Melhem's Gloomy Prognosis on the State of Arab Civilization

My very old friend Hisham Melhem  ("very old" in the sense of friends for a very long time, since graduate school, not in the geriatric sense, since he's a couple of years younger than I am), the Washington Bureau Chief of Al-Arabiya, is a veteran Arab journalist in Washington; in fact, the very first post on this blog dealt with his interview with President Obama just days after his first inauguration, the first granted to an Arab journalist.

He has had a series of rather gloomy columns of late at Al-Arabiya, including one that has drawn US attention because it appeared at Politico: "The Barbarians within Our Gates: Arab civilization has collapsed. It won't recover in my lifetime."

It's a grim prognosis and I hope he's wrong but fear he's right. He calls himself a Cassandra, but of course, Cassandra turned out to be right. He's addressing the Arab world from within. I urge you to read the article, but here's a capsule version from an MSNBC interview.