Pakistanis love Gaza. The intense brutality of Israeli military campaigns there has always elicited our sympathy. As a result, we offer our solidarity, in the hopes that we can help change things for the better. Things aren’t that simple, though, and many Pakistanis fail to recognize that our tendency to view the conflict in religious terms isn’t helpful. (More…)
Sometimes, after we’d made the turn off Slifer Valley Road and passed through the covered bridge, my mother would take her right hand off the steering wheel, point out the passenger-side window, and inform me, “That’s where the glass house is.” Even though I never managed to see this marvel, I never tired of her commentary. Because I needed to know who couldn’t throw stones. (More…)
Demonstrators filled the Kurfürstendamm for miles, or so it seemed. From block to block, all one could see were hijab-clad Arab women, holding aloft yellow and green Hezbollah banners, punctuated by the furry hats of Neturei Karta ultra-orthodox. For tourists, the sight was confounding. Terrorist sympathizers, walking arm-in-arm with religious Jews? In Germany’s capital? (More…)
As I read the article, I started shaking. Tears streamed down my face. It was about an old man in Beit Hanoun, Gaza. On Friday night, eight members of his family, including his sons, daughters and grandchildren, had finished their Iftar meal and sat down to watch a popular television show. A few minutes into it, an artillery shell ripped through their home, killing them all, including children aged six, two, and one. (More…)
It was only a matter of time before Birmingham’s Muslim minority was thrust into the headlines. The hammer fell when local educational leader Tahir Alam was linked to an alleged “blueprint of Islamization” that would co-opt the city’s schools. It didn’t seem to matter that the entire document may have been a hoax. (More…)
The Onion has a sister publication called Clickhole that described current violence in Gaza pretty well. It parodied .GIF listicles with a piece called “The Current Crisis In Gaza Explained Using GIFs From Previous Crises In Gaza.” The satire was underlied by the fact that it seems like we’re stuck. (More…)
As the death toll mounts in Gaza and images of the carnage spill onto our computer screens, anti-war Jews are bombarded with accusations of betrayal, acquiescing to global anti-Semitism and blaming oneself. It’s not the first time violence between Israel and the Palestinians has pitted Jew against Jew. But Operation Protective Edge shows how blind devotion to Israel, for many, trumps all other Jewish concerns. (More…)
On a hot Monday, I made a call to a woman who was a bridge between Eduard Shevardnadze, the Soviet Foreign Minister during the Gorbachev era, to check if the bad news about his possible death was real. “Helena, its true..” She wept. “He died at 12 today.” (More…)
Should the West intervene in Syria? The answer is more than simply “yes” or “no.” The complex power struggles and aspirations that define the Syrian civil war almost mock those who think there is an easy solution. (More…)
There are a few reasons to be annoyed that Germany won the World Cup, and one of them is the weird sexism that is coming out about the FIFA “WAGs” (wives and girlfriends.) An article about them in the Daily Mail is part of an internet trend that showcases them as the softer side of a robust national team. Basically, the angle is, “the men won the game, and then they went home with hot women.” (More…)
In the late nineties The Cook Report secretly filmed Nick Griffin at a BNP rally. These were the first days of New Labour, when multiculturalism was replacing multiracialism as the umbrella term for diversity and tolerance. In one clip he says, “And they call it multiculturalism, they call it love, they call it respect for others… I’ll tell you what it is, it’s genocide!” (More…)