CAIRO — A night of street fighting between hundreds of Muslims and Christians left at least 12 people dead and two churches in flames on Sunday in the latest outbreak of sectarian tensions in the three months since the revolution that ousted President Hosni Mubarak.
Labor party politician Isaac Herzog, who was Israel's Social Affairs Minister until he resigned last month, compared the recent outbreak of racial tensions in Israel to Alabama in the 1940s.
Even before the latest outbreaks of violence escalated tensions, the country was already in a precarious position due to decades of civil strife.
The latest outbreak of violence "shows that inter-communal tensions are still very high and that the prospect of early elections is adding fuel to the fire," ICG's acting Africa director, EJ Hogendoorn, said in a statement on Monday.
Authorities traditionally blame extremists for outbreaks of violence, while Uighur activists point to tight Chinese control as a cause of tensions.
We have followed up a cohort of adolescents first studied during the period of increasing international tension before the outbreak of the Persian Gulf War in January 17 , 1991 and report here on the relation between fear of nuclear war at that time and incident common mental disorders five years later.
"Since the intelligence report concluded that the region demanded high-level attention to defuse tensions and prevent the outbreak of conflicts that could escalate, the politics of the trip dovetailed perfectly with the intelligence assessment," he said.
Vali S. Nasr, adjunct senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, said in an interview posted on the council's Web site that the outbreak of fighting reflected failures to address sectarian tensions during the lull in violence.
These tensions have fueled an outbreak of violence by individuals squeezed by taxes and by radical groups modeled on the domestic terrorists who tried to destabilize Italy in the 1970s and early 1980s.
He was blamed by Lord North (the British Prime Minister at the time) for being a significant contributor to the tensions that led the outbreak of the American Revolutionary War.
