Mohammed Omer writes in the New Statesman: As the 456,000 schoolchildren in the Gaza Strip start their academic year, they face chronic shortages of everything from paper, textbooks and ink cartridges to school uniforms, school bags and computers, the result of the Israeli blockade. At the same time, severely overcrowded classrooms are having to accommodate…
Showing all posts tagged Egypt
”˜Anti-Zionist’ Jew: author of ”˜My Israel Question’ heads for Bali
The following article by Katrin Figge is published today in one of Indonesia’s largest English newspapers, The Jakarta Globe: For a person who gets hate mail and death threats on a regular basis, Antony Loewenstein remains surprisingly cheerful. The Jewish-Australian journalist, activist, blogger and author, who is based in Sydney, has stirred up plenty of…
Letting refugees die in the name of punishing Hamas
I heard constantly during my recent visit to Gaza that the Egyptians were as complicit in the blockade as the Israelis. This news is therefore shocking but unsurprising: Rights groups such as Amnesty International have called on the Egyptian authorities to “urgently rein in their border security forces” after seven African asylum-seekers were killed in…
Is a Shia revolution the best way forward?
The founder of Conflicts Forum, a site that discusses Islamism in all its form, is interviewed by Mother Jones. Alastair Crooke is an intriguing fellow: Crooke understands today’s Middle East as similar to Sarajevo in 1914, where a random event could precipitate a cascade that changes the world. Someone will overreach—Israel, Syria, Lebanon…—and then everything…
The time to implement a boycott is now
The following interview by Stu Harrison appears in this week’s Green Left Weekly: “The war could have finished the day before I arrived”, independent journalist and author Antony Loewenstein told Green Left Weekly of his recent trip to the besieged Palestinian territory of Gaza. His trip in July was months after the December-January war, in…
Truth proves elusive in a confusing trouble spot
My following book review appears in this week’s Sydney Morning Herald Spectrum section: Fit to Print: Misrepresenting the Middle East By Joris Luyendijk Scribe, 241pp, $29.95 “A journalist who limits himself to the role of middleman,” writes Dutch reporter Joris Luyendijk, “is actually siding with the team that is best able to influence the news…
Living as normal a life in Gaza as possible
Ramadan in Gaza is a celebration (like everywhere in the Muslim world) but even more so in a land blockaded by Israel and Egypt. One blogger has posted some photographs of “normal” life in the Strip:
With mates like this, being enemies is maybe more honest
A relationship between “friends” in the Middle East is predictably contemptible. I remember speaking to countless Egyptians during my visit there in 2007 and hearing support for cutting off any relationship with Israel. This story is therefore unsurprising: To say that Farouk Hosni doesn’t much like Israel is putting it lightly. According to the Anti-Defamation…
US aims to convince Muslims that killing them is for their own good
Barack Obama films a Ramadan message and tells the Muslim world that he cares deeply about Pakistan, Afghanistan and a two-state solution between Israel and the Palestinians. Yet again, this is effective PR dressed up as policy. Muslims across the globel aren’t going to be seduced by pretty words from the US President when Israel…
‘If You Don’t Agree With Us You’re Antisemitic’
My latest New Matilda column, co-written with Independent Australian Jewish Voices blogger Michael Brull, responds to predictable charges of political bias by the Zionist lobby: Labor MP Michael Danby’s accusation of antisemitism against two Jewish writers is a false and dangerous misuse of that term, write the accused, Michael Brull and Antony Loewenstein Sometimes, people…