It has been a full year since a quartet of Arab countries – the UAE, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and Egypt – tried to silence Al Jazeera as part of their subsequent 13 arbitrary demands: demands that specifically included shutting down our news network, Al Jazeera. This particular demand is absurd, given that Al Jazeera has […]
The exposure and arrest of @ShamiWitness, one of the “most-followed” ISIS-fan accounts on Twitter, is indicative of the problems inherent in trying to monitor the Islamic State’s activities from afar.
Over the last several decades, a variety of movements have arisen in the Arab and Islamic countries–a radical nationalism (Baath socialist, Marxist, pan-Arab, and so forth) and a series of Islamist movements (meaning Islamic fundamentalism in a political version). The movements have varied hugely and have even gone to war with one another–Iran’s Shiite Islamists […]
In the fight against terrorism, not everything is about violence. That is the general idea behind material support provisions included in anti-terrorist legislation, first introduced in 1996 and strengthened in the US PATRIOT Act. Such provisions prohibit providing any support to groups designated as terrorist organizations by the Secretary of State, regardless of whether the […]
Yesterday Human Rights Watch released their annual World Report for 2010, detailing the state of human rights affairs around the world for the previous year. Many of the stories they focused on were also covered and editorialized here throughout 2009, from government abuses in Eritrea and Sri Lanka to increased civilian casualties in the Democratic […]
While flipping channels, I noticed the difference between the coverage on Pakistani channels and BBC and CNN. The local channels are reporting about the 40th anniversary of Libya’s so-called revolution. And of course, BBC and CNN were reporting about the elections in different parts of the world. I couldn’t help, but notice that Pakistan’s channels […]