Last night, outraged by the announcement that the Red Arrows would be flying over London Pride this year, a coalition of queer and anti-war groups protested both in and outside London City Hall. A peace vigil was held, while activists distributed flyers and held “No Pride in War” placards. (More…)
In this first installment of a three-part series, we explore the threats faced by female refugees, especially Syrian women – including the risk of being trafficked into the sex trade on their journeys to Europe and even after reaching its shores. (More…)
Ahmadiyya Muslim Asad Shah was stabbed to death on March 24 outside of his shop on Minard Road, in Shawlands, Glasgow. Tanveer Ahmed, a 32-year-old taxi driver from Bradford, has been arrested for what has been reported as a religiously-motivated killing. (More…)
If you’re tuned into the BBC, you may think the recent elections were a complete disaster for Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party. The truth is Labour held its own in England, while it lost out in Wales and Scotland. Naturally, the SNP and Plaid Cymru made gains where Blairism was strong. Yet the press has it on record that Labour’s losses confirm the failures of the new leadership. (More…)
There is no upsurge of anti-Semitism in the Labour Party. There is a moral panic being instigated by the media due, to a handful of cases, almost all of which took place before Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in the summer of 2015. In fact, the Corbyn leadership has demonstrated it is not afraid to investigate allegations of anti-Semitism against Labour figures, including allies like Ken Livingstone. But this is not all there is to say. (More…)
“So Erdogan, Aliyez, and Nazarbayez are on a boat …” It reads like the set up to a joke, but all three men – the leaders of Turkey, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan – did meet on board the Turkish presidential yacht MV Savarona last week. President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan used an Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) summit as occasion to again show off the luxurious vessel, originally presented to President Mustafa Kemal Ataturk in 1938. (More…)
Yesterday, my city was hit. My city of “zinnekes”, those people from everywhere on earth who, like me, become “Brusseleirs” in the remarkable cosmopolitan cauldron that makes Brussels the (small) New York of Europe. (More…)
Despite the Islamic rhetoric fused with their actions, the mujahideen in Brussels, like those in Paris before them, are less a threat to Europe than a product of it. As details are released about the attackers, it will be crucial to remember that in nearly every case, their sense of societal exclusion, and willingness to organise violently to assert themselves, is distinctly European. (More…)
The power to become habituated to his surroundings is a marked characteristic of mankind. Very few of us realise with conviction the intensely unusual, unstable, complicated, unreliable, temporary nature of the economic organisation by which Western Europe has lived for the last half century. (More…)
It is (currently) illegal in Germany to call Jürgen Elsässer an anti-Semite, and by all accounts, he has very good lawyers. This article merely suggests that articles published in his magazine utilize components of anti-Semitic rhetoric. About what he is or isn’t, the reader is invited to make up her own mind. (More…)
You often hear the BBC described as having a ‘left-wing’ bias. This is despite all the evidence to the contrary. The logic behind such accusations seems to be that the state and its institutions are inherently ‘left-wing’. Although the BBC is somewhat removed from the market pressures heaped upon private companies, it is still subject to the same sorts of political pressures facing state bodies. (More…)
Some 22 million Europeans watched the debate on 19 January, when Polish Premier Beata Szydło defended her government against EU allegations of breaching the rule of law. (More…)