Since April 1978, the Afghans have experienced nothing but war. An entire generation has grown up with violence, murder and mayhem. First it was the Russians, followed by various Afghan factions fighting it out among themselves, then came the Taliban and now the Americans and their NATO allies.
The Islamic awakening sweeping the Muslim East has affected many parts of the world. Malaysia may not be the most likely place to experience revolutionary change of Middle Eastern proportions, but it nonetheless has not remained unaffected.
Beyond the drum-beating and chest thumping about what a great job the Canadian soldiers did in Afghanistan, the question that needs to be asked is: what exactly did they achieve despite spending $20 billion on a war that is still raging and the Afghans are no better off today, in fact much worse, than they were 10 years ago?
Over the past year the political scene in Azerbaijan has been dominated by two centers of power: the autocratic regime centered around Aliyev and the Islamic movement centered around activists, journalists, scholars, lawyers and the wider Azeri population.
Given the straightjacket in which Abbas and his disgraced cohorts operate, not only is it entirely unlikely for him to defy Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, but it is hard to imagine he possesses any courage to defy his paymasters.
An estimated 138 million people live in places other than their country of birth. Many are forced by circumstances, especially wars, to flee to safer havens. The overwhelming majority, however, are economic migrants seeking a better life elsewhere.
Turkey’s policy vis-à-vis the uprisings in the Muslim East (Middle East) have left many observers bewildered. It has not only joined the US-NATO assault on Libya but Ankara has also recognized the Libyan rebels in the opposition National Transitional Council (NTC) as “legitimate representatives” of the Libyan people.
Disturbing evidence has emerged of continued abuse and torture of prisoners by sadistic American guards in Guantanamo Bay (Gitmo), the American gulag in the illegally occupied Cuban island. To protest mistreatment and continued illegal detention, many prisoners resort to hunger strikes.
Successive US regimes have claimed that al-Qaeda is their enemy number one and that no effort would be spared in costs or human lives to eliminate it. Does empirical evidence support this claim? Let us examine the facts.
Held for three years at a local school without incident, it suddenly became an issue last month when a Hindu group objected to Muslim students praying in the school cafeteria. Valley Park Middle School in Flemingdon Park, in the Toronto suburb of Don Mills inhabited predominantly by Muslim immigrants from Pakistan and India, became the centre of controversy when a group calling itself Canada Hindu Advocacy (CHA) raised objections.
Afghanistan’s most powerful warlord, Ahmed Wali Karzai, half brother of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, was shot and killed by Sardar Mohammed, a trusted family friend and security commander, at his home in Qandahar on July 12.
Minutes after the Norwegian neo-Nazi terrorist Anders Behring Breivik launched his atrocious plan on July 22 — blowing up a government building by a car bomb in the center of Oslo that killed seven people and then moving on to Utoya Island for a two-hour rampage shooting dead 84 youths — it became uncomfortable and even unsafe for people with Middle Eastern features to walk in the streets of Europe.
Peter King’s recent attempt to assert cultural legitimacy, through his June 2011 Congressional witch hunt on Islam’s presence in the prison industrial system, has unfortunately fizzled.
A full year after the mayhem that gripped Toronto during the G20 summit, Torontonians still do not have answers to many questions. Who ordered the police to go berserk arresting more than 1100 people...
The Israelis have used the partial opening of Gaza’s Rafah border crossing with Egypt as a pretext to say the Palestinians’ suffering has ended and no aid need be sent any more. This has come about as hundreds of peace activists attempt to deliver boat loads of goods to alleviate, even if partially, the suffering of the long oppressed people of Gaza.
It should be clear even to the most diehard optimists that relations between Pakistan and the United States have hit an all time low. A series of recent events has led to this development although from the very beginning the relationship was based on false premises and unrealistic expectations.
The removal — real or fake — of Osama bin Laden from the equation in the US war on terror has opened up new possibilities for what could be achieved in Afghanistan. While much attention is focussed on US moves, no doubt an important consideration, Washington is quickly losing control, thanks to its military defeat in Afghanistan.
When voting ended on the night of June 12, most people in Turkey did not have to wait for official results of the general elections. Turkish and foreign experts had already anticipated that Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) would win a third consecutive victory. A few hours later when early results came in, a landslide victory was confirmed for the AKP.
From February to June, 40-year-old married American student Tom MacMaster published his Gay Girl in Damascus blog with the ambition of “being celebrated as the unlikely voice of Syrian revolution.” Apart from a mild scolding for his duplicity, the media has dismissed the case as a species of oddity variously described as a freak of vanity to the typical fascination nursed by white heterosexual men for lesbianism.
Returning from the northwestern Black Sea city of Kastamonu, Prime Minister Recep Erdogan’s convoy was attacked on May 4. As part of his election campaign Erdogan had visited the city to address its residents urging them to vote for his Justice and Development Party (AKP). He then flew by helicopter to a nearby city to continue his campaign, while his election convoy, including his campaign bus from which he usually delivers speeches and greets the people, was returning to the AKP headquarters in Ankara. When Erdogan’s campaign bus was 25 km from the city centre, around the Ilgaz Mountains, a sudden burst of machinegun fire targeted the police car escorting the convoy. After the initial shots, the attackers came closer to the police car and threw a grenade which set the car on fire, injuring one police officer and killing another in the vehicle. After a brief exchange of gunfire with the prime minister’s bodyguards, the attackers fled the scene without suffering any casualties.
