Articles

Georgia, a member of the former Soviet Union, is in Moscow’s own back yard. So when America’s military links with Georgia were first announced, senior Russian officials were outraged by the prospect of the forces of their former cold war adversary being so close.

Soon after September 11 reports surfaced of Arab and Muslim men being arrested, shackled, denied access to lawyers and families, refused medical attention and sometimes even beaten, while in the custody of United States authorities.

As the fighting on March 2 in the Arma mountains showed, the war in Afghanistan is far from over. On March 4th, the Pentagon admitted that eight American soldiers had been killed and 50 injured in the latest US offensive.

The five Central Asian Muslim countries — Kazakhstan, Turk-menistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kirghizstan — dropped out of the Soviet belly almost by accident after Gorbachev’s reform of the old Soviet Union. At the time, a few naive, over-optimistic Muslims saw their ‘liberation’ as another sign of the rise of Islamic civilization after the lean years of the twentieth century

The attacks on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon on September 11 gave the US a pretext to attack Islamic movements far more directly than would previously have been possible. Tens of thousands of people in Afghanistan may have died (and more are continuing to die) in the US’s military operations...

After the establishment of the Islamic State, Imam Khomeini (ra) issued annual messages to the Ummah as the hujjaj gathered in the Hijaz. Ayatullah Sayyid Ali Khamenei has maintained the tradition.

Saudi crown prince Abdullah bin ‘Abd al-‘Aziz had more than the Israeli-Arab conflict on his mind when he staged his latest subterfuge. This was to disclose that he might propose that the Arab world offer Israel “normalization of relations” in exchange for withdrawal from the territories that Israel occupied in 1967.

The middle of last month saw yet another upsurge in the intensity of the violence in Palestine. From February 14 to February 20 at least 60 people were killed, two-thirds of them Palestinians. At the same time, the West found yet another approach to trying to disarm the Palestinians politically, with a new peace proposal from Saudi crown prince Abdullah.

Almost eighteen months after the launching of the second Palestinian intifada in September 2000, many observers continue to argue that it is achieving nothing, and that a return to the ‘peace process’ is inevitable.

Flushed with their success in controlling news at home about the ‘war’ in Afghanistan, some Pentagon planners want to extend such manipulation to other parts of the world. The name of the game is deception: planting lies in newspapers, and on radio and television channels around the world...