Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Muhammad Hussein
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Remembering the Israeli withdrawal from south Lebanon
In 1978, Israeli military forces finally withdrew from Lebanon three months after their invasion of southern Lebanon in an effort to hunt down and eliminate the Palestinian Liberation Organisation (PLO). It was essentially an extension of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict spread into neighbouring borders, drawing in multiple other players and...
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Will Syria’s opposition defeat Assad while Russia is tied down in Ukraine?
Pivotal moments in history rarely present themselves, but when they do, that is exactly what they turn out to be. The power dynamics of an entire region can be altered, the interests of governments can be shifted, and the geopolitical arena can be at least partially dominated by former...
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MEMO launches ‘Our Vision for Liberation’ Ramzy Baroud’s latest book in London
In Middle East Monitor’s first in-person event two years since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a panel of speakers came together to discuss the future of Palestine from a grassroots perspective....
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The UK will be complicit in the rise of far-right terrorism if it adopts the Shawcross review
It was only a matter of time before a right-wing figure in the West finally revealed the true depth of their agenda by deliberately drawing attention away from the extremists at their end of the political spectrum. That is exactly what William Shawcross, appointed by the British government to...
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The EU continues to blackmail Palestinians through the weaponisation of anti-Semitism
Over the past year, the European Union has delayed the transfer of hundreds of millions of Euros in its annual aid to the Palestinian Authority (PA), solely over the allegations that the PA’s school textbooks contain some content deemed “anti-Semitic”. The restriction of the annual funding – last year’s as...
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A new age of transnational terrorism threatens the West after Ukraine’s foreign fighters return
There are many impacts of the Russian invasion of Ukraine that have been almost forensically analysed over the past month. From the laying bare of the European community’s blatant racism and selective solidarity to the threat to international order, the subject has been drained and the cow can no...
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The Great Starvation is coming, and the world must prepare for it
While the world endured global supply chain issues and delays for over two years throughout the course of the Covid-19 pandemic, markets suffered, economies buckled, and there were real fears that it would mean potential shortages of essentials, and even food across the globe. Such a fate is finally arriving...
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Remembering Israel’s Siege of Jenin
What: The Israeli military’s siege and invasion of the Palestinian Jenin refugee camp during the Second Intifada, resulting in at least 52 Palestinians being indiscriminately massacred and over 13,000 made refugees again. When: 3 April – 11 April, 2002 Where: Jenin, northern West Bank What happened? As the Second Intifada raged on throughout...
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After decades of status quo, can Pakistan remain a neutral player on the world stage?
When Pakistani Prime Minister, Imran Khan, hit out at the European Union and Western envoys who urged him to condemn the Russian invasion of Ukraine, asking if they thought Pakistan was their “slave” and enquiring why similar demands were not made to India, it cemented a precedent that had...
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Russia is daring to destroy the current world order, like Daesh and others before it
A fortnight into Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the advance of the “special operation” is not going as rapidly or easy as the Kremlin thought it would. While Russian forces – whose losses stand at over 11,000 already – still desperately attempt to take the capital, Kyiv, and are resorting...
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Remembering the Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait and the Highway of Death
What: The withdrawal of Iraqi forces from Kuwait, resulting in Iraq’s acceptance of UN terms and resolutions following seven months of its occupation of its small Gulf neighbour. This led ultimately to the decline of Saddam Hussein’s power and set the stage for his fall and death over a...
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Amid an American decline, China is winning the Middle East
Ever since the fall of the Soviet Union and that bastion of communism just over thirty years ago, the United States and the western world have still not lost their fascination with that old rival superpower. Throughout the three decades as a proudly interventionist force with near-total supremacy on...
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UK government welcomes genocidal apartheid upholders
When hundreds of students at the University of Cambridge gathered on Tuesday to protest the Israeli ambassador to Britain Tzipi Hotovely’s speech at the Cambridge Union, cutting it short and causing her to flee the grounds, it became clear that her track record would not be forgotten any time...
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To prevent a second Bosnian genocide, Turkey may finally militarily intervene
Many see Turkey as an increasingly interventionist force in its surrounding regions, but also as a mediating force. From its military interventions into Syria and Libya to its backing of Azerbaijan in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, Ankara has worked to establish its own assertive foreign policy using new military capabilities...
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Under biomedical security states, Israeli apartheid may soon go global
Almost two years ago, I penned an article highlighting the possibility of governments around the world – particularly Western democracies – using the spreading Covid-19 pandemic to implement a series of harsh restrictions on their populations in order to grant themselves sweeping new powers in a taste of totalitarianism. Back...
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Despite his gratitude to Soleimani, Assad is clamping down on Iran’s presence in Syria
Two years after the assassination of Qasem Soleimani in a US missile attack at Baghdad Airport, the legacy of the late commander of the Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) is still disputed. His critics insist that he was a war criminal who was responsible for the deaths of...
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The West is engineering a neo-colonial starvation of Afghanistan, for women’s sake
Barely eight decades ago, while it was fighting the Nazis’ fascism, the British government under Winston Churchill was simultaneously orchestrating and engineering one of the worst famines in human history. As a result of Britain’s imperial policies, and with the excuse of wartime in 1943, around 3 million natives...
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Cryptocurrencies may be the last hope for those in the Middle East
Everything in existence will be assimilated into the online world. Some things already have been. This has proven true with business, shopping, services, social life, journalism, warfare and with the recently-announced ‘metaverse’, perhaps even our lives. So it was only a matter of time before money itself was integrated...
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Winners of Palestine Book Awards 2021 announced
Middle East Monitor’s flagship annual literary awards ceremony – the Palestine Book Awards (PBA) – has entered its 10th year today, as awards were handed out to the winning authors and books in the much-awaited event....
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One politician is steering Britain to the far-right
Few politicians in Britain’s ruling Conservative Party are as controversial and unpopular as Home Secretary Priti Patel. Not the former health minister Matt Hancock, not the housing and communities minister Michael Gove, not even the notoriously blundering Prime Minister Boris Johnson, but Priti Patel. In just two years as home...
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The Middle East looks likely to be a focal point for the post-pandemic ‘Great Reset’
Almost two years since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic it is worth reviewing what has happened. With lockdowns around the world, preventative measures varied from country to country; theories about the origins of the coronavirus and its consequences were many. Apart from the development of vaccines and the...
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Places of Mind: A Life of Edward Said
If there was one figure central to postcolonial studies and the intellectual force behind the Palestinian meeting with Western academia, it was undoubtedly the late Edward W Said. Although he was an American citizen –his father having fled to the US to escape Ottoman conscription in World War One...
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Remembering the Wadi Araba Treaty and Jordan’s ‘cold peace’ with Israel
What: The signing of a peace treaty between Jordan and Israel, which ended over four decades of conflict. When: 26 October 1994 Where: Wadi Araba, Jordan-Israel border What happened? The major role of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan in the 1967 war it fought with its allies Egypt and Syria against Israel (known...
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The world will regret bringing Assad in from the cold
When Jordanian King Abdullah II spoke with Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad, on the phone earlier this month, it set a precedent that thawed a decade of ice between the two. A week prior to that, Amman had fully re-opened its main border crossing with Damascus, and the intelligence chiefs...
