Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Bill Law
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Saudi Arabia: A police state of which Stalin would have approved
The phone call to the family lasted just one minute. It came 23 months after aid worker Abdulrahman Al-Sadhan had been arrested at the offices of the Red Crescent in Riyadh, where he worked co-ordinating rescue operations and emergency relief. He was held incommunicado despite numerous efforts by the...
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MBS and the kingdom of fear
21 May marked UNESCO’s World Day for Cultural Diversity and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a heavy contributor of UNESCO, released a beautifully shot and edited one-minute video that concluded with the words: “Saudi Arabia’s diversity is a rich and evolving story.” The following day, Saudi media outlets released...
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In memory of Alia Abdulnoor
On 4 May last year, an Emirati woman died in Abu Dhabi’s Tawam Hospital. Her name was Alia Abdulnoor. She died chained to a bed in a windowless room with an armed guard her only companion. Her family had already been denied permission to take her home to die...
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A Downing Street coup for Egypt’s Sisi
Although the British media made little of it, the 21 January meeting at 10 Downing Street between Prime Minister Boris Johnson and Egypt’s President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi was a diplomatic coup for the latter, one that was heavily reported in the Egyptian media. Typical of the comments made were...
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A new Amnesty report has harsh words for Qatar
“For five months I had to live with very little food and no salary. My family was really affected. Tears come to my eyes when I remember where we used to go to find food… in the bins.” That’s Jack, a migrant worker from Kenya describing what happened to...
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The steal of the century: stolen land, stolen water, stolen images
Jared Kushner and Benjamin Netanyahu must have considered it the longest of long shots but what if the Palestinians by some wild stretch of the imagination had called their bluff on the “deal of the century”; what if they had suddenly decided to turn up in Bahrain for the...
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Jared Kushner’s peace deal: Sailing into failure
In early May Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and the lead architect of the so-called “deal of the century” gave a lengthy interview to Robert Satloff, the executive director of the pro-Israeli Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). In it he expressed disappointment with the Palestinians. “It’s been...
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Weaponising anti-Zionism to drive through the ‘deal of the century’
On 2 May Jared Kushner, US President Donald Trump’s son-in-law, was playing his cards very close to the chest at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP), a pro-Israeli think tank. Kushner is the man charged with delivering the “deal of the century” that will supposedly secure peace...
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Saudi women activists return to court
On 27 March, 11 Saudi women return to court, among them some of the kingdom’s best known women’s rights activists including Aziza Al-Yousef, Loujain Al-Hathloul, Eman Al-Nafjan and Hatoon Al-Fassi. Their first court hearing was on 13 March. Journalists and foreign diplomats were banned from attending that hearing. Human...
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Women activists and 5 men who have disappeared in the Saudi prison system
With Human Rights Watch releasing a statement on 21 March on behalf of Saudi women activists brought to court in Riyadh a week earlier, world attention remains focused, and rightly so, on the appalling treatment the women are receiving at the hands of a Saudi regime determined to crush...
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The Middle East is armed and dangerous as never before
The latest data from the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) on global arms sales, released on 11 March, is a sobering acknowledgement that the Middle East and, in particular, key Gulf States are arming themselves to the teeth with the latest and best high-tech weaponry that money can...
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The UAE’s torture in the shadows
As the world’s media has once again picked up on the story of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman’s involvement in the brutal murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, another story is receiving scant attention. Alya Abdulnoor is a young Emirati woman who was arrested in July 2015 and...
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In the time of Trump, repression flourishes in Bahrain
On 28 January, Bahrain’s Supreme Court upheld the conviction and life sentence of Sheikh Ali Salman, the leader of the banned opposition Al-Wefaq party. He, along with two colleagues – Ali Alaswad and Sheikh Hassan Sultan, both sentenced in absentia – were found guilty of plotting, with Qatar, to...
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An extraordinary tale of courage from a woman in jail in the UAE
It is a shocking two minutes and fifty-five seconds of audio that was smuggled out of Abu Dhabi’s Al Wathba prison. In the audio, a young female prisoner – Maryam Al Baloushi – recounts a grim story of abuse, threats and coercion at the hands of Emirati security officers...
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Bin Salman is in a reckless race of his own making
Back in September, before the disappearance and murder of the Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Arabian Consulate in Istanbul on 2 October, I came across a story about a new electronic visa system introduced by the Kingdom that promised a lightning fast response: “Applicants simply need to...
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The UAE and the Washington Post: Democracy dies in hypocrisy
If I was the Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor I would be a trifle annoyed. I enjoy his “Today’s World View” column on a daily basis. He is a very talented journalist who writes incisively, wittily and sometimes sardonically about issues of concern such as the humanitarian disaster that is...
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Jared Kushner is wrong; collective punishment will not lead to peace
Last week, exactly 25 years after the signing of the Oslo Peace Accord, Jared Kushner commented on the punitive measures that his father-in-law, the President of the United States, had taken against the Palestinian people. “There were,” said Kushner, “too many false realities that were created — that people...
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Bahrain’s economic crisis is an urgent sign that change must come
The warning signs are clear and unmistakable: the Kingdom of Bahrain is in serious financial difficulty and its economy is tumbling into crisis. The country’s bond ratings are listed as junk. It’s gross debt as a percentage of GDP stands at 94.9 per cent, nearly four times the Gulf...
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Nabeel Rajab: a true patriot of Bahrain
On 4 June this year the Bahrain High Criminal Court of Appeal upheld a five-year sentence handed out to the prominent human rights defender Nabeel Rajab for tweets he had made that were critical of the government. Nabeel Rajab is my friend. He was arrested in June 2016 and...
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Exploited and abandoned, the Palestinians are truly the betrayed
Writing in the New York Times less than a week after 61 Palestinians had been shot dead by Israeli soldiers, and nearly 3,000 were wounded, the political editor of the Jewish Journal, Shmuel Rosner, had this to say in an opinion piece entitled “Israel Needs to Protect Its Borders:...
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Bahrain: On the outside looking in
Khalil Al-Marzook, a senior leader in Bahrain’s main opposition party Al-Wefaq, didn’t pull any punches when he was asked about the way the west is responding to the Bahraini government’s claims that it is committed to reform: “they are misleading themselves and misleading the international community.” Earlier, Britain’s foreign...