A key part of Western propaganda is the creation of the myth of the good life in modern Western societies. At the same time, the Western media machine regularly reports on the conditions of poor parts of the world, particularly in Asia, Africa and other places.
Two major elections took place earlier this month. On June 7 general elections took place in Britain, the supposed birthplace of Parliamentary democracy. Tony Blair’s Labour party was returned to power for a second term by a ‘landslide’.
The controversy surrounding Kuwaiti women’s struggle to obtain the right to vote yet again raises serious questions for Muslims everywhere. The question of the fundamental rights of Muslim women being raised by the women of Kuwait lies at the very foundation of our social, religious and economic progress and development as Muslim peoples.
The Islamic movement is a multi-faceted and multi-dimensional entity, as broad and as varied as the Ummah itself. Most Muslims instinctively recognise which groups are part of the movement, and which are not, but the multiplicity of voices, within the movement can be bewildering.
Throughout his rule, president Husni Mubarak has governed Egypt under an emergency decree, using his dictatorial powers to persecute the Islamic groups that have always constituted the most vocal opposition to his regime.
On June 4, when members of the United Nations security council failed to reach agreement on a new sanctions plan proposed by the US and Britain, they decided to extend by one month, instead of the usual six months, the programme under which Iraq can sell oil to raise funds to buy food and to pay “reparations” to western governments.
Iraq won a significant political victory on July 4, when the US and Britain were forced to abandon their ‘smart sanctions’ proposals and agree to a five-month extension of the ‘oil-for-food’ programme.
The US made a hasty return to its Middle East imbroglio this month, when CIA director George Tenet returned to the region to act as a mediator for “security co-ordination” between Israel and Yasser Arafat’s Palestinian Authority.
For some Americans, the ‘information revolution’ has transformed life radically. Yet for others the new technology and the ‘new economy’ it has helped to set in motion have only created a new dividing line between the information “haves” and “have-nots.”
For nearly a decade Canada has been regarded by the United Nations as the best country in the world to live in; this may be true, but there are persistent problems reflected in statements of officials and organizations that mar this image. The most obvious is racism, an attitude almost universal in European and North American societies.
When the Muslim Central Asian countries became independent in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, their leaders — who had been regional heads of the KGB in most cases — promised prosperity and democracy.
Iranian president Sayyid Mohammad Khatami was re-elected to office on June 8, in the country’s eighth presidential elections since the Islamic Revolution in 1979.
The excitement generated by Indian prime minister Atal Behari Vajpayee’s invitation last month to Pakistani chief executive general Pervez Musharraf, for peace talks in Delhi, quickly proved hollow when the very different positions of the two sides were made clear.
The Albanian Muslims of Macedonia, who constitute more than a third of the country’s population, are fighting for the constitutional rights enjoyed by the Slav majority but denied to them, and for autonomy only in the regions inhabited predominantly by them.
Among the few notable results in Britain’s general election on June 8 was the strong showing of the British National Party (BNP) in the constituencies of Oldham East and Oldham West in Lancashire.
