Arab governments and their media claimed last month to have helped Iraq on the road to international rehabilitation by allowing it to chair the Arab League foreign ministers’ conference held in Cairo on September 11 - 12.
Dr Yusuf Abu-Safiat, the Palestinian Authority’s ‘minister for the environment’, has accused Israel of turning the Palestinian Authority-ruled area of the West Bank into a vast dumping-ground for its domestic industrial, chemical and nuclear waste, thereby creating a potentially catastrophic environmental nightmare.
After 30 years as a false revolutionary, Colonel Mu’ammar Qaddafi is now marketing himself as an African hero and a hater of ‘everything Arab’, opening a racial can of worms with the potential of dividing the Muslims of the continent and setting ‘Arab’ against ‘African’ on a larger stage.
Hamas, the Palestinian Islamic movement which is the most popular political group among Palestinians, and is also the leading critic and opponent of the ‘peace process’, suffered a major blow on August 30, when the Jordanian government closed down its offices in Amman.
Sudan officially became an oil exporting country on August 30, when it shipped its first barrels of high-quality crude oil from the Bashair oil terminal on the Red Sea. The oil was from the Hegleig oilfield in western Kardofan, and had been transferred to the Bashair terminal through a 1,610km pipeline.
The new agreement between Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and Palestinian ‘president’ Yassir Arafat, signed at Sharm al-Shaikh, near Alexandria, on September 5, was widely greeted as a new start to the ‘peace process’ that had appeared on the verge of stalling during the premiership of Benyamin Netanyahu.
Palestinians in Zionist-occupied Jerusalem last month marked the 30th anniversary of the arson attack on the Masjid Al-Aqsa on August 21, 1969. Palestinian Islamic leaders used the occasion to highlight continuing threats to the mosque, as well as other Islamic sites under Israeli rule
The routine bombing of Iraq by the US and Britain, and the UN sanctions kept in place by their vetoes, have taken a heavy toll of Iraqi lives, destroyed the country’s once-thriving economy, and reduced its people to poverty.
Arab interior and justice ministers met in Jeddah, in the Hijaz, on August 1 to establish structures for the implementation of the Arab treaty against ‘terrorism’ which came into force on May 7 following its ratification by seven Arab League member states.
King Hasan of Morocco, one of the longest-reigning rulers in the Muslim world, was buried in Rabat on July 25, two days after his death in a Rabat hospital. In keeping with recent tradition, his funeral was attended by a large entourage of his foreign masters...
The outlines of a catastrophic cave-in to Israel are becoming clearer every day, and prospects of a separate peace treaty between Syria and the Zionist state become stronger. Islamic as well as secular groups opposed to a deal are being increasingly suppressed...
Will the American killing- machine ever be satisfied? How long must the entire world remain hostage to the American ambition for supremacy and its reckless quest for power? Even the dreaded monster in children’s fairy-tales retreats to his cave once he has kidnapped a child from a nearby village.
Shaikh Ahmad Yassin, the leader of the Islamic resistance in Palestine (Hamas), has renewed his recent warning of an even greater sell-out to Israel. He dismissed the hope for a Middle East ‘peace’, that Arab leaders have been pinning on the recently-confirmed Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak, as ‘baseless’...
If the reports that Saddam Hussain has joined the exclusive club of the world’s billionaires, boasting an estimated fortune of $6 billion, are even partly true, he will then have even greater contempt for the Iraqi opposition-groups in exile whose proudest possessions are fax-machines and an expensive rented office in London provided by the US.
There are two faces of Israeli justice: a counterfeit and untrue face that is arranged only to play a part in Zionist media propaganda; and a real face that moves mainly in the dark when TV cameras are turned off.
Any person - or for that matter, any group of people - anywhere in the world, who, being under pressure for whatever reason, declares himself or herself to be Jewish, and is accepted as such by the rabbinical authorities in Israel, acquires an automatic right to Israeli citizenship and can look forward to being settled in lands being ruthlessly confiscated from indigenous Palestinian owners.
The Islamic Salvation Army (AIS), the armed wing of the banned Islamic Salvation Front (FIS), announced on June 6 that it would end its armed struggle against the government permanently, and place its forces under the states’s authority.
Unprecedented political euphoria engulfed the Middle East and western political circles during the days before the Israeli general elections, and as Ehud Barak’s strong victory over Benjamin Netanyahu unfolded. Despite the war in the Balkans, major international news networks, including CNN, BBC World Service...
The world’s probably most obsequious elite is still celebrating the Egyptian parliament’s nomination of president Husni Mubarak for a fourth term in office on June 2, with ‘representatives of Egyptian society’ - from Sheikh-ul-Azhar and the Coptic patriarch, to chairpersons of feminist organisations - trekking to the presidential palace to declare their mabaya’ah for the ‘national hero’.
The six member-states of the Gulf Co-operation Council marked the 18th anniversary of the pact’s signing on May 24. Only two days later, two members, Qatar and Bahrain, announced that they would continue to pursue their border dispute before the International Court of Justice...
