Tag Archive | Middle East
Horror in Homs: speaking truth to power
One of those moments tonight when, following the daily routine of watching the night’s TV news, you are pulled up short. Channel 4 News broadcast outstanding video footage, filmed by an anonymous French photojournalist, that revealed graphically what is happening in the Syrian city of Homs, under siege for days now from shelling by government […]
Egypt: it’s not finished yet
This shocking image reveals as starkly as any could that the struggle in Egypt is not yet over. It was taken over the weekend and shows a young woman being dragged away from protests in Tahrir Square on the third day of clashes between the Egyptian military and protesters demanding that Egypt’s military rulers give […]
2011: the year a generation found its voice
It’s been a year since Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in a provincial Tunisian town - an event that triggered a year of revolt that has flared not just across the Arab world but the entire planet in what has turned into the most potent year of protest since 1968. This is Sidi Bouzid, […]
Bankers are the dictators of the West: Robert Fisk
For once I’m going to reproduce an entire article because of its excellence and importance. This is Robert Fisk in today’s Independent: Writing from the very region that produces more clichés per square foot than any other “story” – the Middle East – I should perhaps pause before I say I have never read so […]
Cairo: Notes to the Future
The brave, dignified, resolute, peaceful and determined people of Egypt have made history today. The Egyptian revolution – the most hopeful event of this century so far, likely to be as defining a moment as the Russian Revolution was for the last. Lenin once coined the phrase, ‘Revolution is the festival of the oppressed’. It […]
Racism in Israel
Why keep returning to the issue of Israel? Because, firstly, the Israel-Palestine conflict is the most serious threat to stability in the Middle East and, relatedly, because the Israeli state is coming increasingly to resemble apartheid South Africa with its coralling of Palestinians into bantustans surrounded by an obscene Wall, military oppression andviolence, and deepening […]
Israeli terror and the Gaza flotilla
My anger and my sadness are so great that I have to deliberately draw a deep breath from time to time to ease the bands I feel around my chest. It doesn’t matter. What does matter is that millions of people in the world are feeling the same. People everywhere see and understand what is […]
Palestine: A Personal History
Karl Sabbagh’s mother was English, his father was Palestinian, the descendent of a long line of Christian Arabs whose history he traces here as far back as the 18th century, when Palestine was an Ottoman province and his ancestor Ibrahim served at the Ottoman provincial court. In Palestine: A Personal History, Karl Sabbagh has combined […]
Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922
I’ve just finished reading Paradise Lost: Smyrna 1922 The Destruction of Islam’s City of Tolerance by Giles Milton. Smyrna had had a Greek population since about 1000 b.c. It was one of the cities which claimed to be the birthplace of Homer. For centuries, as part of the Ottoman Empire, it was a prosperous trading […]
