Egypt – Features

This is no ripping yarn but a murder to fan more conflict

January 1, 2013January 6, 2014

By Seumas Milne

(source: Guardian)

The media may revel in a Mossad hit, yet Britain’s response to a plot that could threaten its own citizens has been craven

Imagine for a moment what the reaction would be if Iranian intelligence was almost unversally believed to have assassinated a leader of one of the organisations fighting the Tehran government in a western-friendly state. Then consider how Britain, let alone the US, might respond if the killers had carried out the operation using forged or stolen passports of citizens of four European states, including Britain, with dual Iranian nationality.

You can be sure it would have triggered a major international storm, stentorian declarations about the threat of state-sponsored terrorism, and perhaps a debate at the UN security council, with demands for harsher sanctions against an increasingly dangerous Islamic republic.

10 myths about Iran driving the insane push for war and why theyre dead wrong

January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Jasmin Ramsey (source: Information Clearing House) As the push for war with Iran rolls on, rhetoric demonizing the Iranian… Read More »10 myths about Iran driving the insane push for war and why theyre dead wrong

Open synagogues is just rhetoric

January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

By Judge Richard Goldstone

(source: BusinessDay, 22 April 2010)

I read with dismay Chief Rabbi Goldstein’s article in yesterday’s Business Day. I was dismayed that the chief rabbi would so brazenly politicise the occasion of my 13-year-old grandson’s bar mitzvah to engage in further personal attacks on me.

I am prepared to respond fully to those attacks, but not in the run-up to my grandson’s bar mitzvah.

He and his family have been working for close to a year preparing for the once-in-a-lifetime rite of passage into the Jewish community. Of all people, the chief rabbi should be aware of the importance of this. Yet, for whatever reasons, Chief Rabbi Goldstein would rather focus on me.

The unnecessary war

January 1, 2013July 25, 2013

The unnecessary war
By Roedad Khan

child
A internally displaced girl, who fled a military offensive in the Swat valley region, holds her pot while awaiting a serving of tea at the UNHCR (United Nations High Commission for Refugees) Yar Hussain camp in Swabi district, about 120 km (75 miles) northwest of Pakistan’s capital Islamabad June 7, 2009.
REUTERS/Akhtar Soomro

Somehow, our history has gone astray. We were such good people when we set out on the road to Pakistan. What happened?

Marx once said: "Neither a nation nor a woman is forgiven for an unguarded hour in which the first adventurer who comes along can sweep them off their feet and possess them". October 7, 1958 was our unguarded hour when democracy was expunged from the politics of Pakistan, perhaps forever, with scarcely a protest. The result is the mess we are in today.

"Liberty once lost", Adams famously told his countrymen, "is perhaps lost forever". We Pakistanis lost our liberties and all our democratic institutions in October 1999. Sadly, Pakistan also lost her honour and became a ‘rentier state’ on General Musharraf’s watch when he capitulated, said yes to all the seven demands presented to him at gunpoint by Secretary Colin Powell and joined the "Coalition of the coerced". Regrettably, this situation remains unchanged even though the country is now under a democratic dispensation!