Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Amelia Smith
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Film Review: Mandela – Long Walk to Freedom
In apartheid South Africa marriage between black and white people was prohibited and white-only jobs sanctioned. Areas designated as white were destroyed by bulldozers and the black population living there forced into segregated townships. Thousands of protestors who challenged this system died after being imprisoned and tortured. It was Nelson…
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Syria: The Reckoning
“He was a man seeking power. He would do anything to achieve his goals, regardless of anyone. Even if you were a close friend he’d send you to jail. Or even kill you in order to implement his will.” Though former Baath party leader Dafi Al-Jamaani is referring to Hafez…
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Al Nakba at the Bristol Palestine Film Festival: The ongoing catastrophe of 1948
“If the Nakba signifies the expulsion of the Palestinian citizen from his land, and seizing his land by force, then the Nakba began decades before 1948.” It is this concept that Al Nakba, an Al Jazeera network production set to be screened as part of the Bristol Palestine Film Festival…
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Gaza Lives On at the Bristol Palestine Film Festival
“The Israeli blockade may have taken a heavy toll on Gazans, but this film reveals life and hope among the devastation.” Kamal Khalaf is a construction worker and father of five from Gaza who lost his job in 2007 when Israel imposed a land, sea and air blockade on the…
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A world not ours
Today around 300,000 Palestinian refugees live in Lebanon, yet only 2% of them have work permits. Lebanese law bans Palestinians from working in most professions; those that do work earn less than the minimum wage. They are not allowed to own property and have restricted access to the legal and…
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Film Review: The Law in These Parts
“In the film I will document a legal system; a system which organizes the rule of law in the territories we conquered in 1967. This is a unique system. Very few people understand it in depth.” This system, as narrator and director Ra’anan Alexandrowicz tells us in ‘The Law in…
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The Coalition between Israeli Prime Minister Benyamin Netanyahu’s Likud Party and Avigdor Lieberman’s Ultranationalist Yisrael Beitnu party
,p>Prior to Operation Pillar of Defence, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s party Likud had been declining in popularity. Netanyahu was also threatened by an opposition alliance of the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert, former foreign minister Shaul Mofaz, leader of Kadima Shaul Mofaz and Yair Labed. In light of…
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The olive tree: a symbol of Palestinian steadfastness, subject to systematic destruction
The supreme judge in Palestine, Tayseer Al-Tamimi, has denounced what he calls the “repeated crimes of the Israeli occupation authorities against all things Palestinian, be they human beings, stones or trees”. The judge was speaking after dozens of olive trees in the town of Burin, south of Nablus, were destroyed…
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Co-Director Nick Denes on the upcoming cinema and gallery series, ‘The World is With Us, Global Film and Poster Art from the Palestinian Revolution, 1968 – 1980’
“We want to capture this sense of their being ‘living’ media rather than artificially sacralised or displayed with a gallery-style reverence that was never their original intention, and which jars with their very nature as political ephemera, however wonderful their artistic content might be.” Some 50 years ago the Palestinian…
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Ethiopia’s Renaissance Dam is making waves in Egypt
When the Merowe Dam in Sudan was built Ali Askouri, his family and their community were flooded out of their homes 80 kilometres from where it was being constructed to make way for the project; part of his family were pressured to move to resettlement housing and part of them…
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Report Review: The Britain Israel Communications and Research Centre: Giving peace a chance?
In a recent debate in parliament, it was reported that former British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw had said that the greatest obstacle to peace between Israel, Palestine, and its Arab neighbours are the unlimited funds available to the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC and other Jewish organisations in the UK. In…
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Special Report – Egyptian government infected by mad Israeli wall disease
The Arab Organisation of Human Rights in the UK Special Report – Egyptian government infected by mad Israeli wall disease The UK-based Arab Organization for Human Rights (AOHR) confirms that the Egyptian government have started to build a steel wall along the Philadelphia route and that approximately 5.4 kilometres have…
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Statement on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory
p style=”text-align: left;” mce_style=”text-align: left;”>ANALYSISStatement on Israeli settlements in the Occupied Palestinian Territory While the decision of the United Nations (UN) of 1947 (Resolution 181) to establish two states in the land of Palestine was partially achieved with the creation of the state of Israel, the second part of this…
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Living with a disability and the occupation
“When it takes you two whole days to cross a border, whereas it only takes a matter of hours to arrive in London; that is one meaning of freedom. When you are searched three times between the Palestinian and Israeli border, and don’t get searched once when you’re inside London,…
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Destroying artefacts in the Middle East and wiping out thousands of years of history
During Egypt’s 2011 revolution, protestors joined hands and forged a human chain outside the Egyptian museum to protect the ancient artefacts inside. But looters taking advantage of the collapsed security situation managed to steal a statue of Tutankhamen, and went on to illegally dig near the pyramids of Giza and…
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Al-Assad: learning lessons from Serbia’s Milosevic
This week the most conclusive evidence of Syria’s brutal regime was smuggled out of the country, into the hands of leading international lawyers and released to the public; photographs of 11,000 detainees, some covered in blood, some with no eyes and others bearing the signs of strangulation, brutal beatings and…
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Saudi Arabia’s new laws curb challenges at home and abroad
In January the ruler of Dubai, Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid al-Maktoum, told the BBC that sanctions on Iran should be lifted, a sentiment welcomed by Oman but opposed by Saudi Arabia. Whilst the Kingdom has pushed for a closer alliance within the Gulf Cooperation Council, Oman and Dubai’s position suggests…
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Al-Mutanabbi Street Starts Here: rebuilding Iraqi literature
Seven years ago Iraq’s writers would gather in Al-Mutannabi Street, the literary district in Baghdad, sip coffee and consider the latest publications. Named after the classical 10th-century poet, the street was home to an abundant array of bookshops, market stalls, publishers, printers and cafes. But in March 2007 a car…
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Egypt excluded from the US-Africa summit
The military-backed regime in Cairo has not been invited to a summit of African leaders set to take place in Washington this August because Egypt’s membership in the African Union (AU) has been suspended. In July the AU suspended Egypt days after the coup that ousted democratically elected president Mohamed…
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The Muslim Brotherhood convenes London Press conference
Yesterday Egypt saw its third bloody massacre in the six weeks since their democratically elected President Mohammed Morsi was removed from power by a military coup. A press conference today on the bloody crackdown opened with a minute’s silence for all those who died yesterday. Over 2,000 were killed, said…
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Support for protestors in Kiev or Cairo depends on what their government has to offer you
For the last two weeks Independence Square in Kiev, Ukraine has been the stronghold of anti-government protests; thousands have gathered in temperatures as low as minus fifteen to express their dissatisfaction with the President Viktor Yanukovych. Lined with makeshift tents and warmed by log fires and soup kitchens, volunteers distribute…
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A long and unpredictable relationship: South Africa’s ties to Israel
South Africa has announced that it will label products made in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories as “made in occupied Palestine” rather than “made in Israel”. It has provoked fear amongst some and hope amongst others that a boycott of such goods will take off within the international…
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An old enemy, a new dictator
In Egypt, General Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi of the Egyptian armed forces is now the most powerful man in the land. While Hitler and Mussolini were invited, or voted into office, Sisi took power for himself in a military coup in July that toppled the first democratically elected leader – Mohammed…
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A rough ride for Egypt’s economy
Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece are enjoying a healthy flow of tourists, thanks to turmoil in the Middle East which has driven holidaymakers away from the Red Sea resorts of Egypt and towards the Acropolis in Athens, reported The New York Times recently. Once badly affected by the euro debt…