CJ Werleman- MEE In an interview on CNN, Suzanne Barakat, the sister of one of the Chapel Hill shooting victims, said the film American Sniper has helped to not only “dehumanise Muslims” but also has created an atmosphere that is akin to an “open season” on Muslim Americans. Barakat says it was this climate of anti-Muslim bigotry that led to …
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When Fear Triumphs over Rationality: Harper Anti-Terror Legislation
By Monia Mazigh In the Oxford English Dictionary the definition of the word “fear” reads as follows: “an unpleasant emotion caused by the threat of danger, pain or harm.”Stephen Harper must have learned this definition by heart. The way he uses fear on the Canadian population to pass his proposed new anti-terror legislation is working to perfection, as least so …
Read More »Parking Space Terrorism: Time for Action after Killing of Three US Muslims
By Ramzy Baroud The murder of three American Muslims at a University of North Carolina condominium on Tuesday, 10 February, was no ordinary murder, nor is the criminal who killed them an ordinary thug. The context of the killings, the murder itself and the media and official responses to the horrific event is a testimony to everything that went wrong …
Read More »There are no excuses for ‘American Sniper’
By Amer Zahr By most accounts, American Sniper depicts its Arab Iraqi subjects in a simplistic and shallow fashion. No one has accused director Clint Eastwood of portraying the Arab characters of the film in a manner that is nuanced or layered. And I don’t mean to be too elementary, but that is really all that matters. When a movie …
Read More »Lessons that Hollande Failed to Learn from W. Bush’s Plunders
By Ramzy Baroud Francois Hollande is not a popular president. No matter how hard the ‘socialist’ leader tries to impress, there never seems to be a no solid constituency that backs him. He attempted to mask his initial lack of experience in foreign affairs with a war in Mali, after his country enthusiastically took on Libya. While he succeeded at …
Read More »‘Dos’ and ‘Don’ts’: Things I Learned Writing about the Middle East
By Ramzy Baroud Writing about and reporting the Middle East is not an easy task, especially during these years of turmoil and upheaval. While physical maps remain largely intact, the geopolitical map of the region is in constant influx. Following and reporting about these constant changes without a deep and compassionate understanding of the region will achieve little but predictable …
Read More »‘I Can’t Breath’: Racism and War in America and Beyond
By Ramzy Baroud America’s ruling elites are blatant in their intentions of maintaining “white privilege” at home and economic dominance by military means abroad. Their “democracy” in both of these regions is a ruse, and it is yet to deliver any degree of social justice and equality to the millions of disadvantaged Americans which are comprised mostly of black and …
Read More »The Man from Oran
WELCOME TO ALGIERS, BABY. Joobin Bekhrad- Reorient Overshadowing, perhaps, even the bloody civil war that subsumed the country throughout the 90s and seeped insidiously into the early 2000s, the War of Independence remains, as one could well argue, the single most important and defining event in modern Algerian history. Beginning in the mid-1950s, only a short while after Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise …
Read More »Russia: Syrian delegation discuss UN “freeze” plan in Sochi
The Syrian regime, along with key ally Russia, on Wednesday agreed to support the UN’s proposal to suspend fighting in the city of Aleppo. Second city Aleppo, which was once Syria’s economic hub, is now divided between rebel and regime forces. State news agency SANA reported Syrian Foreign Minister Walid Muallem saying so after a meeting between a Syrian delegation …
Read More »The Age of TV Jokers: Arab Media on the Brink
By Ramzy Baroud As I was finalizing my research for this article, I found myself browsing through a heap of hilarious videos by mostly Egyptian TV show hosts Tawfiq Okasha and Amr Adeeb. In one of his numerous videos on youtube, Okasha, the star and host of the Cairo-based privately funded al-Faraeen channel, tries to explain the differences between the …
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