Tag Archives: protests

By Ramzy Baroud When my book ‘Searching Jenin’ was published soon after the Israeli massacre in the Jenin refugee camp in 2002, I was quizzed repeatedly by the media and many readers for conferring the word ‘massacre’ on what Israel has depicted as a legitimate battle against camp-based ‘terrorists’. The interrogative questions were aimed at relocating the narrative from a …

  King Hamad of Bahrain has pardoned the leading human rights activist “Nabeel Rajab” who is serving a six-month jail sentence. Rajab was imprisoned for allegedly posting offensive tweets about the ministries in the country. He was sentenced in January for posting comments on the social networking site about Bahrain’s interior and defense ministries alleging that many officers serving in the security …

Thousands of supporters of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh and Shi’ite rebels on Friday took to the streets to protests the threatened UN sanctions against insurgent chiefs and Saleh. The ex-strongman, who stepped down in 2012 due to Arab Spring-inspired protests, is considered as the chief backer of the Huthi rebels that have seized capital city Sana’a, among other …

Prominent Saudi Shiite cleric and anti-government protester Nimr al-Nimr was condemned to death by a Saudi court on Wednesday on charges of sedition. He has been on trial since March 2013. According to his family, Nimr, who was one of the leaders in the protests against Sunni authorities in 2011 and Shiite protests in neighbor Bahrain, was convicted of seeking …

Around 70 social justice activists last weekend protested at the intersection of Maritime and 20th Street at Tampa, Florida against the docking of Israeli shipping company ZIM’s vessel Alabama.  They then marched to the port itself and successfully stopping the docking of the ship. Their actions were a part of the Block the Boat movement, which aims to put economic …

On Tuesday, several thousands marched to the Pakistani parliament as a part of their bid to force Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif to resign, using bolt cutters and a crane to break barricades of containers blocking the way in the capital city of Islamabad. Paramilitary forces and riot police tried to barricade the government and diplomatic zone before the march …

On Wednesday, Paris braced itself for a protest against Israel’s aggression in Gaza after other similar rallies ended in looting and violence. The French government had banned several weekend rallies, but the ban had failed as the rallies went ahead despite the ban; the rallies descended into violence and chaos. The government subsequently decided to permit Wednesday’s protest after talks …

On Wednesday, Yemeni warplanes struck tribesmen suspected of damaging power lines on Tuesday, an act that left the country without any electricity and caused angry protests in the capital city of Sana’a. Officials had also accused the tribesmen of blocking the road that connects Sana’a to the province of Marib to the east, thus making it almost impossible to carry …

Rights group Amnesty International on Tuesday said that Turkish authorities were “as abusive as ever” in their handling of protesters in the country. Only a year ago, allanti-government demonstrations in the country were brutally crushed by the government. Salil Shetty, Secretary General of Amnesty International, said, “The Turkish authorities have been relentless in their crackdown on protesters — be it …

In a recent Slate article, Anne Applebaum makes the case that Egypt’s presumptive president-to-be ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Sisi should look to India, Brazil or South Africa, rather than the United States or other industrialized states, for examples of how to “do” democracy. She rightly notes that Sisi’s argument that Egypt isn’t ready for democracy is an old standby for authoritarian regimes. …