Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Alastair Sloan
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Britain’s approach to Yemen has been both naïve and duplicitous
The British government resigned itself to war in Yemen long before the Saudi-led coalition carried out its first sorties against Houthi-held targets in March this year. That’s according to a series of damning British government documents I have seen regarding “Friends of Yemen”, a diplomatic effort supposedly spearheaded by Britain…
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Corbyn must oppose an attack on Syria; lives may depend on it
The Labour Party has changed forever the way that British foreign policy is conducted. This process has taken nearly fifteen years and began with Tony Blair’s hysterical reaction to the 9/11 attacks in 2001. It continued with Ed Miliband’s unprecedented parliamentary victory against Syrian intervention in 2013. It has been…
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Right-wing newspapers are leading anti-refugee agenda, but politicians should know better
A week ago, David Cameron capitulated to humanitarian rather than political instinct. Twenty thousand places in Britain are to be offered to Syrian refugees over the next five years. From a leader who had previously called off boat rescues in the Mediterranean, possibly allowing hundreds of migrants to die unnecessarily,…
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Help the people as well as the government, plead Bahraini activists as human rights abuses continue
The days surrounding my interview with Khalil Almarzooq are frantic. Shaikh Ali Salman, the Secretary General of Bahrain’s main opposition party, Al-Wefaq, is shortly to appeal against his conviction on charges related to inciting violence and advocating the overthrow of the ruling monarchy, the notorious Al-Khalifa family. As Assistant Secretary…
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The Sun has blood on its hands
Tony Gallagher is an excellent newspaper editor. He oversaw the Telegraph‘s admirable scoop on the Westminster expenses scandal, a fine piece of investigative journalism which rightly saw MPs thrown in jail and forced to pay back their excesses gleaned at the expense of the taxpayer. Gallagher’s reputation is as a…
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Europe must help refugees, but America has plenty of room to spare
Europe is guided by buffoons, bigots and bumblers. That’s all I can conclude from the refugee crisis. It has taken a photograph of a dead child on a beach, rather than the hundreds of dead children who went before, to rouse the consciousness of the continent. In Britain, the Labour…
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Yemen: The war nobody is talking about
Al-Baghdadi, Al-Assad, Al-Sisi, Netanyahu, Rouhani – these regional goliaths with their recent adventures have swallowed up the available column inches. So when Human Rights Watch, the United Nations and Amnesty International yell: “WAR CRIMES IN YEMEN”; nobody, sadly, is listening. This has to change. As it stands, British taxpayers are…
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Could Cameron be embarrassed again on Syria?
Jeremy Corbyn, the Leftist candidate on track to become Labour Party leader next month, has real potential to redden the prime minister’s cheeks as the government bids to extend the Iraq bombing campaign into Syria. There is no doubt where the Conservative Party stands on this issue. Defence Secretary Michael…
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The media should reconsider its international coverage; lives may depend on it
In the age of easyJet, Ryanair, AirBnB and TripAdvisor, why does the news media still devote so little attention to international news? Unprecedented numbers of British tourists are now travelling abroad; low cost travel has made the world available to us; and yet the international pages of most newspapers have…
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Address legitimate injustice first, then see if the ideologues need to be bombed
The case of Liam Lyburd, a British teenager currently recovering in a prison cell from his Valium addiction and ideological radicalisation, can teach David Cameron valuable lessons on how to address the problem of Daesh. This young man was found guilty last week of buying a Glock pistol, ninety bullets,…
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Let’s be realistic about Kurdistan; it’s a deeply unpleasant autocracy
In May last year, who in the West had heard of the “Peshmerga”? Wasn’t that a kind of scarf? No, the BBC, CNN and Sky News told us, these were warriors for freedom, brave Kurds, rallying against the ISIS threat when the Iraqi army had fled in disarray. Even Marie…
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Sale of Uzi manufacturer highlights Israeli hypocrisy towards arms trade
Israeli Military Industries (IMI), the state-owned weapons designer and manufacturer, has been put up for privatisation. If there is one company that encapsulates Israel’s hypocritical approach to the arms trade, crime and human rights, it is IMI; and if there is one weapon, it is IMI’s “Uzi”, the iconic sub-machine…
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Losing influence in the Middle East
It is the end of an era in the Gulf – for the United Kingdom at least. Once an imperialist power that used gunboats and clever diplomacy to push local wealthy families into supporting the British Empire, the formerly Great Britain has been reduced to little more than a useful…
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When the system is inherently biased, it’s all too easy for justice to evade foreigners in the UAE
Jennifer Aresgado Dalquez is like any one of the million Filipinos living in the United Arab Emirates; she’s working hard to send money home for her two children back in General Santos City, a large city in the southern Philippines. Employed as a domestic worker, in December 2014 she stabbed…
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Were Western hostages left to die?
It looks as if official reviews concerning Iraq aren’t being treated as all that urgent by the British establishment these days, with seemingly endless delays in publishing the Chilcot Inquiry. It may, though, be time to ignore this depressing precedent of failed accountability and start a new inquiry, into the…
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A cry for help from inside a Saudi detention centre
Last week a short video clip made its way onto my desk, taken on a mobile phone in Saudi Arabia. It was only a few seconds long, but it showed a large crowd of young men held in a single room, the floor covered in blankets. The men were mainly…
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Nostalgic imperialists may weep, but UK mission creep in Iraq, or anywhere else, is highly unlikely
There is no risk of mission creep in Iraq, for Britain at least. This is worth saying as speculation mounts in the media each time even a handful more troops are deployed there. As a Mirror headline put it, “Fears UK could be dragged into war against ISIS as more…
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America’s role in the rise of ISIS is down to incompetence not conspiracy
As night follows day, a violent catastrophe is followed by a conspiracy theory. How do they begin and why do they spread so quickly? The first factor is simple market economics. Conspiracy theorist David Icke can make an estimated £300,000 per night for a speech. According to Forbes magazine, Alex…
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A planned EU military deployment in Libya is ‘delusional’
I have just published a short expose for Newsweek, in which a British government adviser called the European Union plan to deploy force against people traffickers along the Libyan coast “moronic and delusional.” A separate leaked document shows that senior military planners and EU chiefs have also been warned that…
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UAE makes terrorists out of artists and academics
“After a fortnight’s work he will swagger about for a month or two with a sword at his side and a servant following him, from one ball-court to the next, ever ready to engage in a fight or an argument, so that it is most awkward to get along with…
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A Rugby League World Cup in the UAE would be both political and criminal
The idea that sporting events should be apolitical is an excuse used by nasty people to get away with doing nasty things that they shouldn’t be doing to people who deserve better. Politicians don’t shy away from sports. They arrange themselves on the front row, taking selfies with their slack…
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Conkers, cluster bombs and American double standards
Playing conkers is a formative experience in any self-respecting British playground. For curious foreign friends who haven’t heard of this brilliant game, it requires two conkers — nuts which fall each autumn from horse chestnut trees — each with a small hole drilled through the centre so it can be…
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Anti-Semitism is not inevitable
Holocaust Remembrance Day has just been commemorated in Israel. In Europe, Holocaust Memorial Day is held earlier in the year and is, for many reasons, an extraordinary annual event of reflection that is led primarily by representatives of the Jewish faith – done so with a courteous and noble spirit…
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Leaked emails reveal Hollywood execs at work for Israel
Top Hollywood bosses enjoy a strong relationship with the Israeli government and various pro-Israel lobbying groups across the United States, according to a cache of Sony internal emails leaked to Wikileaks and published for the first time last week. The emails reveal a dinner between Sony executives and Prime Minister…