The degeneration of Muslim societies has gone so far that nothing is considered sacred any more, not even the honour of Muslim women. On December 17, when six soldiers attacked and wrestled a young girl to the ground in Cairo, ripping her ‘abayah and exposing her body, it sent shock waves throughout Egypt as well as the broader Muslim world.

One of the most striking events in post-Revolutionary Iranian history unfolded in early December 2011 when Iranian state TV showed a captured RQ-170 Sentinel, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used by the US for spying. It is one of the most sophisticated planes in the US arsenal and had been kept largely hidden from public eye in order to not risk its top secret spy missions.

How long this standoff will continue is debatable but what we need to consider is how this situation has deteriorated to a point that the US feels it can attack and kill Pakistanis at will.

American hubris is predicated primarily on its claim to technological superiority. This is best reflected in the radar-evading stealth technology used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) called drones. To be sure, these are deadly weapons.

For many Muslims and Islamic activists around the world, in so many different places and fields of work, the unity of the Ummah is a basic premise of everything we do. At the same time, differences of understanding, approach and methodology are inevitable in a global Ummah of more than 1.5 billion people.

The world is babbling with news about Iran being on the threshold of going nuclear, in a military sense. Israeli words are coming out of American mouths. US Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told CBS news that Iran could build a nuclear bomb in a year or less (music to Israeli ears).

We must define the term “independence” accurately to fully grasp the Muslim world’s current situation. Possessing territory, having a government, army, etc, do not necessarily mean independence.

With his December 12 outburst against niqab, Canadian Immigration Minister Jason Kenney confirmed that the rightwing government he serves is rabidly Islamophobic. This is not the first time Kenney and other members of the Conservative government led by Stephen Harper have attacked Muslims.

In the post-9/11 theatrics of George W. Bush, one of the more memorable is his explanation for why the dastardly terrorists chose to attack the glorious symbols of US power: “They hate us for our freedoms,” or in another version, “They hate us for our civilization.”

Russia’s grip on the North Caucasus is becoming more complicated and therefore, loosening up as a consequence of recent developments.

Who says the Americans hate all the Haqqanis? Take the case of Husain Haqqani, the recently disgraced Pakistani ambassador to Washington, who was such a darling of the Washington neocons that he was publicly feted as a close ally.

Pakistan’s relations with the US have never been easy but recent developments have brought them to such a point that even the polite and usually soft-spoken Pakistani Prime Minister Yusuf Raza Gilani was forced to concede: “we do not trust the Americans.”

Pakistan’s boycott of the December 5 US-sponsored conference on Afghanistan in Bonn, Germany reduced it to little more than a farce. It was like a wedding without the groom. Pakistan boycotted to protest the November 26 US-NATO attack.

Ultimately, even the great rhetorical skills of Barack Obama could not hide the fact that the US military had been defeated in Iraq. American troops sneaked out of the country into Kuwait on December 15, a full two weeks ahead of the stipulated deadline.

It is now well established that foreign powers are deeply involved in destabilizing the regime of Bashar al-Asad in Syria. Such interference is not confined merely to anti-regime propaganda, although it plays a significant role by presenting misleading reports about civilian casualties to stoke anti-regime sentiment.

Exactly a year after peoples’ uprisings shook the Muslim East (Middle East) driving three dictators from power, considerable uncertainty still prevails. Elections have been held in Tunisia (October 23), Morocco (November 25) and Egypt (November 28–29; December 14–15 and the next round scheduled for January 9–10, 2012), but they have failed to stem unrest.