“The Americans have taken the Shia Muslim side in the Middle East’s sectarian war,” Robert Fisk declared in The Independent on July 15, a day after the US and five major world powers reached a landmark agreement with Iran about its nuclear programme.Fisk’s proclamation is quite c

Another row is brewing between Israel and the Palestinian resistance movement, Hamas, over the release of Avraham Mengitsu, an Israeli citizen who, according to Israeli military sources, “slipped into Gaza” on September 7, 2014.The circumstances of Mengitsu’s entry into Gaza rema

On the “BBC This Week” programme, historian Tom Holland laboured to counter the argument that Daesh, self-called Islamic State, should not be labelled as such.Holland’s logic seemed more philosophical, concerned with dialectic and logic of language, and hardly situated in any pro

It would be fair to assume that Gershon Baskin’s recent article in The Jerusalem Post, “Encountering peace: Obviously no peace now, so what then?” (June 24), is not a mere intellectual exercise aimed at finding creative solutions to the Israeli occupation of Palestine.Baskin is a

Over the years, I realised that the term “left” does not apply exclusively to a political ideology, but is a mode of thinking championed mostly by self-tailored “leftist” Western intellectuals.I grew to dislike it with intensity.

When the United States government declared war on Afghanistan in October 2001, thus taking the first step in its so-called “war on terror”, following the devastating attacks of September 11 earlier that year, Iran jumped on board.Then Iranian president Mohammed Khatami, dubbed a

Writing about and reporting on the Middle East is not an easy task, especially in these times of turmoil and upheaval.

No matter what Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas does, his popularity is declining.In some ways, Abbas’ popularity rates were really never impressive to begin with, and that is unlikely to change in the near future.But now that a power struggle in his Fateh Party is l

 “Nope, nope, nope,” was Australia’s Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s answer to the question whether his country will take in any of the nearly 8,000 Rohingya refugees stranded at sea.Abbott’s logic is as pitiless as his decision to abandon the world’s most persecuted minority i