Articles

When leaders of the six-nation Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) held their 22nd summit on December 30-31, the air of achievement and success that once marked such occasions was nowhere to be seen.

Israel went on the offensive, both militarily and in propaganda terms, on January 9 after a Hamas operation inside 1948 Palestine (Israel) in which 4 Israeli soldiers were killed and two Hamas activists martyred. Israeli soldiers responded by demolishing 73 homes in nearby Ghazzah, according to the Islamic Association of Palestine (IAP), making 123 families — adding up to more than 800 people — homeless.

As the world’s nations line up with the US in its ‘war against terrorism’, another war has also begun. The “other” war is against Afghan women and children, and is being waged by the infamous United Nations Family Planning Agency (UNFPA).

America’s policy vis-a-vis its declared enemies — real or imagined — is clear: first demonize, and then attack and destroy them. Interestingly, even those who are considered “friends” for a while are not spared...

Two kinds of air wars have been waged in Afghanistan. One, with planes and bombs, has been conducted exclusively by the Americans, against which the Afghans and supporters of Usama bin Ladin have had no protection...

President Putin has intensified military operations against the Chechen people, trying to break their spirit. But the Chechens refuse to be intimidated: Putin now privately admits that the war is unwinnable and is proving a severe strain on Russian military resources.

India has moved quickly to cash in on the anti-terrorism frenzy sweeping the world by branding the struggle in Kashmir as terrorism.

The US and its allies have intensified military activities in Somalia and along its 2000-mile coastline to prevent ‘al-Qaeda terrorists’ from finding refuge or setting up new bases there, according to American officials.

To the chagrin of Sudanese president Omar Hassan al-Bashir, there is growing evidence to suggest that it makes little difference (perhaps none) in Washington whether Khartoum stands with or against the US-led “war on terrorism.”

In the past human beings lived very close to nature and it was unthinkable to be separate from nature, including animals, weather patterns, and other things that are rarely part of "human" life today. We have enveloped ourselves in cities and buildings, living in so many boxes, controlling every feature of temperature and light, in an artificial environment. We no longer have a sense of where our food comes from. If we have contact with animals, they are for the most part domesticated. I think the Qur'an presumed a kind of human existence that was somehow closer to nature than most of us are today.