Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Muhammad Hussein
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Gaza revived: how an Irishman is giving hope to Palestinian amputees
Gaza. The very name evokes images of Israeli bombardment, crumbling infrastructure, keffiyeh-clad protestors standing defiantly with Palestinian flags and slingshots, and screaming children shot by snipers in a fog of tear gas and smoke from burning tyres. All of these images are the unfortunate reality of the Palestinians in...
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Will Turkey be kicked out of NATO?
A plethora of unflattering phrases litters the discourse surrounding relations between Turkey and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO), including “strategic liability”, “loose cannon”, “reckless, aggressive ally” and “fifth column”. For years, the country has been alienated by its fellow members — the EU, for example — which view...
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Has Turkey sold out Idlib to Russia?
When a ceasefire was negotiated in September last year between Russia and Turkey for the purpose of setting up a buffer zone in Idlib province – the last opposition-held stronghold in Syria – there was little doubt that an assault on the area and attempts by the regime to...
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Israel’s war against press freedom: The plight of Palestinian journalists
Imagine your home being raided at pre-dawn hours by gun-wielding soldiers, your laptop and devices which connect you to the world being confiscated, your dignity stripped from you as you are arrested and taken to a prison to undergo “enhanced interrogation techniques”, and then you discover the crime you...
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Remembering the revelations of US torture at Abu Ghraib
The infamous Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq was revealed to be the centre of an extensive network run by the US military after the coalition’s invasion of the country in 2003. Abuse and torture of largely innocent civilian Iraqi detainees at the hands of American soldiers were common....
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What the student debating culture could mean for a future Palestinian state
Between 16 and 20 March, the debating team of Jerusalem’s Al-Quds University was at the forefront of the 5th International Universities’ Debating Championship held in Qatar. The team, made up of five Palestinian students studying at the university – Dalia Alayassa, Yasmin Arda, Ahmad Toukan, Amani Ahmad and their...
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America’s New Year’s resolution: Kill off the Palestinian potential for statehood
To make a resolution for self-development and personal aims at the start of the New Year is a natural thing. Those resolutions, however, usually range from going to the gym to starting a long overdue diet plan. Rarely, if ever, do those resolutions consist of degrading an entire people...
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Identity, Conflict and Politics in Turkey, Iran and Pakistan
Imagine that you were a state in which the unruly masses of an ethnic minority rebelled in one of your provinces. Would you crush it with your own security forces or would you set another minority under your control to do the job for you? Put another way, if...
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Saudi Arabia: the new Kingdom of secular morals and Israeli tactics
Throughout the last month the world has been gripped by the murder of the acclaimed Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi in the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. After his disappearance on 2 October, when he entered the consulate in order to obtain documents for his marriage to his Turkish fiancée, there...
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Propaganda, kebabs, and international sex scandals: Turkey’s soft power at play
As the call to prayer echoed throughout the vast valley that encompasses the city of Bolu, I thought to myself how 1,000 people from all around the world being mixed up, separated into groups of around 20, assigned roommates at random, made to learn Turkish and live by a...
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Is Turkey’s destiny in Syria that of a saviour or a tyrant?
Turkey has thought long and hard about intervention in neighbouring countries. Throughout the first five years of the conflict on its southern border in Syria, for example, it was cautious about direct intervention, and it was right to be so. In a conflict tainted by the involvement of the...
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Is the UAE the Gulf's 'Little Sparta' or a mercenary outpost?
Gone are the days when an innocent little cluster of Emirates lay on the east coast of the Arabian Peninsula with a flourishing economy, an open-for-business attitude and the only thing tainting its name being the abuse and exploitation of its South Asian labourers. One thing that it was...
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Vision 2023: Turkey and the post-Ottoman anniversary
A century after the establishment of the modern Turkish Republic, the country is looking to celebrate its hundredth birthday in a way that has become popular throughout the Middle East today. Turkey’s ambitious Vision 2023 aims to put the country in the world’s top ten economies within the next...
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The Kurdistan referendum is the prelude to a new, as yet nameless, Sykes-Picot
“We flew over the making of a new country which one day, if the Kurds weren’t betrayed again – as I rather thought they might be – would be a nation called Kurdistan. The first break-up of Iraq.” Those were the words of Robert Fisk, the renowned, award-winning British journalist...
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Daesh is not dead and buried; it is another tool in the war on terror
As the pick-up trucks and black-clad soldiers of Daesh overran the city of Raqqa in northern Syria and declared the establishment of a new ‘Caliphate’ in 2014, the world watched in astonishment. Some were taken in by the emergence of this shadowy group, seeing it as the new saviour...
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The US has set the stage for a new Gulf War
Not all incidents in international relations are cataclysmic or game-changing; most are simply another thread woven into the web of history. The blockade imposed on Qatar by Saudi Arabia – along with the UAE, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain – on 5 June, however, was. Cutting off all diplomatic ties...
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The myth of Trump’s war on Iran
Iran: The great Islamic Republic, a state that has defied the West, the guardian of the Islamic world, the helper of the Arab world, and the saviour of Palestine. Or is it? Ever since Iran’s “Islamic” revolution in 1979, the relationship between the West – the US in particular...
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Where is the outcry over Israel’s ‘Trojan Horse’ in Britain?
Put yourself in the shoes of a country, economically rich, culturally diverse, and relatively stable in terms of government. Now imagine that a senior diplomat of a foreign country conspired with like-minded individuals to interfere in your affairs and influence who runs your government. Along with that, imagine that...
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The European clique and the Turks
The Republic of Turkey has for over half a century been enduring a crisis of identities and a struggle of political association between Asia and Europe, the two continents it has both influenced and partly ruled back in its Ottoman era a mere century ago. Indeed, the general impact...
