Save us. The ever-increasing closeness between business and government is almost guaranteed to ignore human rights. In other words, another day at the Foreign Office: Businessmen could be recruited as British abroad under a shake-up of the Foreign Office to put diplomats in the front line of winning orders for UK firms and inward investment…
Showing all posts tagged human rights
Smoking ladies cause divorce, Hamas laughably claims
Isolate a territory, target its rulers and don’t wonder why Islamism breeds (though it must be condemned and plays directly into Israeli hands): Gaza’s Hamas rulers are banning women from smoking water pipes (nargilas) in cafes, claiming it violates tradition and leads to divorce. The new order went into effect last week, and several cafe…
Can we please hear Muslims when writing about Muslims?
The recent move in the French parliament to ban the public wearing of the burka was a major story that showed the growing intolerance of Western Europe towards Islam. It wasn’t really about women’s rights as much as subjecting Muslims to boundaries. Furthermore, much of the American press while reporting the story couldn’t even bother…
Growing worldwide pressure on Iran only worsens lives inside the Islamic Republic
A worrying story in the New York Times that indicates Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s government is cracking down even harder on those not sharing his fundamentalist reading of Islam. The paper regularly publishes propaganda against Tehran but this report correspondents with other stories in the blogosphere.
“They want us to be loyal to the occupation”
Jewish American journalist Max Blumenthal interviews one of the Palestinian politicians targeted by the Israeli occupation forces, a world away from the “only democracy in the Middle East”: On 9 July, as Israeli Border Police officers brutalized demonstrators at the weekly protest in the Sheikh Jarrah neighborhood of occupied East Jerusalem, forcing them away from…
Israel’s Better Place continues its human rights-free push into Australia
In June I wrote about the Israeli electric car company Better Place and serious questions over its human rights record in Palestine and the Middle East. Today’s Australian features the following story about the company and proves how human rights so rarely enters the corporate media’s understanding of “progress”: The California-based Better Place electric car…
Where’s the outrage over Sri Lanka?
The media silence on Sri Lanka’s descent into a brutal dictatorship is shameful. Edward Mortimer, a board member on UK-based Sri Lanka Campaign for Peace and Justice (alongside me and many others), writes in the Guardian: It is now over a year since the president of Sri Lanka, Mahinda Rajapaksa, claimed victory over the Liberation…
Rabbis of hate
Israel, 2010: The letter circulated by three rabbis in south Tel Aviv in which they direct residents not to rent their apartments to migrants and refugees trying to settle in the city makes a pretense of concern for the welfare of the residents and compassion for asylum seekers. But it hardly manages to conceal the…
Civilised nations don’t stone people to death
The mindset at the heart of Iran is one of deep concern. There’s no doubt about the brutality of the leading mullahs: Iran’s hard-line government holds fast to the belief that relenting under international pressure is a great blunder because, ultimately, it just invites more pressure. But, apparently, there are exceptions to the rule. In…
Israel is drifting and the future looks bleak
The US Presbyterian Church continues to gently push for effective change in Palestine and the New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof rehashes the tired line of finding a Palestinian “Gandhi” (do these Western commentators simply feel the need to repeat predictable talking points over and over again?) Max Blumenthal finds increasing Israeli violence at Sheikh…