Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Anjuman Rahman
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Teacher revives art of letter writing to connect students across the world with children in Gaza
Before this digital age of social media texts and direct messages, it was commonplace to receive heartfelt handwritten letters from a pen pal, a postcard from overseas or annual colourful festive cards. It is an experience the Berkeley, California-based teacher, Heather La Mastro, aimed to rediscover with her students at...
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Meet the first Egyptian, Arab female to blast into space
In a field among the stars, where Egypt had no markers, engineer Sara Sabry became the first Egyptian, Arab and African woman to blast into space. The view of Earth from outer space has utterly transformed perspectives on civilisation, the planet, and the world’s relationship to the universe beyond l. And...
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‘Kurdish women burn themselves, surrender to death out of despair,’ says head nurse Nigar Marf, 1 of BBC’S 100 most influential women 2022
“The most difficult part of my work is when I face women who are forced to lie about their cause of burn injuries because they’re being threatened with their lives by their husbands or family.” “But the stench of the oil gives away the foul truth,” said the chief nurse...
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Morocco won a bigger prize than the World Cup trophy
The 2022 World Cup has been an occasion of many historic firsts. It began as the first tournament to be hosted in an Arab nation, the first to be held during the winter season and the first to feature an Arab and African team in the semi-finals. Defying the odds to...
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‘It’s imperative that more voices like mine are at the table’: Georgia first Muslim Palestinian rep
A hijab-wearing Palestinian American woman was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives for the first time. Ruwa Romman has made history earlier this month as the first Muslim and Palestinian-American elected to any office in the State, following ten months of actively campaigning. Having worked in local politics for quite...
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Yusra Mardini: The Syrian Olympic athlete who swam for three hours to save lives
The Swimmers is a new film based on the story of two Syrian sisters that literally swam to Europe as war refugees...
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Meet the Egyptian photographer who is at home among the wildlife in Kenya
For close to 300 days a year, Abdelrahman Hassanein’s workmates are lions, cheetahs, buffalo and elephants. Not for him a desk, computer and colleagues engaged in mundane work. Instead, the 39-year-old Egyptian naturalist and wildlife photographer, is the safari director at Talek Bush Camp in Kenya, and usually keeps...
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‘We will stay here until Palestine is free,’ says farmer beaten by Jewish settlers
Last month, a 51-year-old Palestinian farmer was tending to his family land on the outskirts of the village of At-Tuwani, where they grow olives, figs, tomatoes and zucchini. A group of five masked Israeli settlers, armed with MI6 rifles, bats and metal pipes, emerged suddenly from the nearby illegal...
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Liz Truss is following in Trump’s footsteps, but more boldly and blindly
In just less than a month after she became Britain’s newly appointed Prime Minister, Liz Truss declared her unwavering support for Israel. At a Conservative Friends of Israel event in Birmingham, Truss, in the boldest terms, proclaimed herself as “a huge Zionist and huge supporter of Israel” and pledged that...
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‘In Middle Eastern culture, food and hospitality are a love language’
Syrian-American Ahmad Alzahabi has turned the skills he learnt helping his mum make family dinners into recipes that followers can use to discover their own palette ...
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Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear: Poems from Gaza
Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear defies order and structure. It is a staggeringly diverse collection and as deep, heavy and haunting as the very days Israel rains down bombs and drones on Gaza. Some of Mosab Abu Toha’s subjects in this recently published poetry collection are vast...
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Rachel Corrie wanted to ensure she could always return to Gaza, says her mother. ‘In a way, she never left’
The murder of 23-year-old American Rachel Corrie on 16 March 2003 started a global conversation about how Israel gets away with its terrorism against civilians and human rights defenders in the occupied Palestinian territories. Nineteen years later, Israel is still denying Rachel’s family justice and any sign of accountability...
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How many times must Gaza be rebuilt, to be bombed again?
Israel is infamous for bombing the innocent in the Gaza Strip. During Israel’s latest three-day military offensive against the besieged enclave on 5 August, 49 people, including 17 children and four women were killed. Israeli air and artillery strikes also struck various targets across Gaza that it claimed belonged to...
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Reclaiming humanity in Palestinian hunger strikes: Revolutionary subjectivity and decolonizing the body
The deployment of the physical body into a site of struggle and resistance remains one of the most poignant and controversial methods of protest. Due to its tremendous toll, practising hunger strikes have always provoked extreme reactions, from bitter irony to deepest admiration. In just a matter of days, physical...
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‘Fear must be used as motivation to keep moving forward’, says first Arab woman to summit K2
Lebanese Nelly Attar was driven by the memory of her father to reach the top to the world’s second highest and most deadly peak, K2...
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The Chinese gov’t arrested my Uyghur husband, jailed him for 25 years for visiting Turkiye
Every now and then, the world is fed a dizzying kaleidoscope of tormenting Uyghur accounts. There are millions. In May, the BBC published a damning report proving up to 1.2 million Uyghur Muslims have been detained and mistreated “not for what they’ve done but for who they are”. A catalogue of...
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‘International impunity is the backbone of Israel's occupation,’ says rights group
Every year, Defense for Children International - Palestine collects hundreds of statements from Palestinian children who were arrested and subjected to long periods of interrogation without the presence of a parent, guardian or lawyer, and Israel is never held to account for these abuses, its director tells MEMO. ...
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‘We can use the power and beauty of music against colonial forces,’ says Palestinian-Japanese soprano
When asked what has been the most exciting international appearance, Palestinian-Japanese soprano, Mariam Tamari, quipped that there was nothing like performing with her fellow Palestinian musicians. “We work with the unspoken understanding that music is our intifada, and that urgency, that longing, our shared visions of liberation course through the...
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The Palestinian flag will be raised and waved in all corners of the world
The colonial-settler state of Israel has stolen more than three-quarters of Palestine and the mass thefts of land by Zionist militias are still ongoing. As if occupying Palestinian land wasn’t enough, Israel also appropriates Palestinian culture by claiming hummus and couscous as “Israeli” dishes and hosting beauty pageants that misrepresent...
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Hollywood's Mark Ruffalo praised for calling out PayPal’s discrimination against Palestinians
Hollywood A-lister, Mark Ruffalo, has called out PayPal Holdings for its discrimination against Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied West Bank and the Gaza Strip, who are denied access to its digital payment platform. A vocal critic of Israel’s apartheid against Palestine, he wrote on Twitter: “Friends: PayPal operates in Israel’s illegal...
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Palestinians with links to the PA are becoming billionaires while the rest are living in poverty, rights activist says
Director of the Bisan Centre for Research and Development Ubai Al-Aboudi talks to MEMO about the group’s designation as a terror group by Israel and its work to highlight injustices at the hands of the occupation and within Palestinian society...
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The pro-Israel lobby is colonising British academia with one smear campaign after another
Pro-Israel groups and lawmakers are orchestrating a politically motivated smear campaign against the recently elected President of the National Union of Students (NUS), Shaima Dallali. As part of this campaign, aggressive Zionist groups, including the Union of Jewish Students (UJS), published an open letter expressing concern about a social...
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Female engineer: ‘We can take Palestine to space and beyond’
When Bayan Abu Salameh enrolled in a mechanical engineering degree, she was one of only four women in an intake of more than 70 students at Birzeit University, north of Ramallah. Her career choice had previously encountered doubts among her schoolteachers and peers, who questioned whether it was suitable for...
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Palestinians are #not_budging from Al-Aqsa
Pictures of Palestinian worshippers staring down Israeli occupation forces during raids on Al-Aqsa Mosque while also looking bemused amid mass incursions by groups of illegal Jewish settlers in the occupied East Jerusalem have gone viral on social media. The defiant look in a young Palestinians woman’s eyes as she stares...