Articles

For more than a year irrefutible new evidence of war crimes committed by French forces during the Algerian war of independence has been surfacing in French newspapers and in memoirs by senior French generals. These men personally directed the atrocities now being revealed...

The Israeli war against the Palestinian people reached new heights on May 18, when Israel used F-16 fighter aircraft supplied by the US to attack targets in Nablus and Ramallah. A total of 10 people were killed in the two attacks.

There appears to be no method in George W. Bush’s madness; since becoming president in a dubious presidential election, he has unleashed a flurry of policy statements and directives that have irked friend and foe alike.

With the transnational corporate news media increasingly legitimizing ideas and informing people, it becomes increasingly important to scrutinise what is left out of the stories being told. The global news media uniformly trumpet the virtues of ‘globalization’...

Colin Powell, the first black US secretary of state, began a tour of four African countries on May 22. He gave the continent first place on his schedule over Asia and Latin America, which are at first sight far more vital to US interests.

A Japanese foreign office committee, called the Committee for Islamic Studies (CFIS), has issued its first report. It accuses Japan of failure to study and relate to a faith “embraced by a fifth of the world’s population”.

Tatarstan, the semi-autonomous Muslim republic in the Russian Federation, is dropping the Cyrillic alphabet imposed on it by Joseph Stalin in 1939, adopting instead the Latin alphabet.

Mention of the Tablighi Jama’at often conjures up images of ascetic Muslims with long beards and loose dresses. Such steoreotyping is not always inaccurate.

The issue of Palestine is central to the Islamic movement. Obviously, the occupation of Islam’s third holy city by the greatest enemies of Islam and the greatest powers of kufr that history has ever known is a situation that Muslims can never accept. But the experience of opposing that occupation is proving a severe testing-ground for the Ummah.

The New York-based Committee to Protect Journalists held its Press Freedom Day on May 3, issuing its list of countries and rulers where journalists are either being killed or incarcerated. Iran was blamed, as were China, Cuba, Malaysia and Tunisia.