Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Nasim Ahmed
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MEMO in conversation with Dr David H. Warren: The Gulf contest over the Arab Spring narrative is shaping regional geopolitics
Dr David H Warren spoke to MEMO this week about his new book Rivals in the Gulf: Yusuf al-Qaradawi, Abdullah Bin Bayyah and the Qatar-UAE Contest Over the Arab Spring and the Gulf Crisis. His work details the relationships between the influential Egyptian-born cleric Al-Qaradawi and the Qatari royal house…
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Why did the United States add Israel to CENTCOM?
A major reorganisation of US military operation in the Middle East was announced last month in a momentous decision reflecting the seismic geo-political shifts underway in the region. The move, the last of many gifts granted by Washington to Tel-Aviv under former President Donald Trump, saw Israel’s inclusion inside Central…
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Reviewing US policy on Palestine, with Professor Rashid Khalidi
Professor Rashid Khalidi of Columbia University joined MEMO for a live conversation on Wednesday to discuss what the Joe Biden administration holds for Palestine and to review the past four years under Donald Trump. The discussion opened with the Palestinian American historian fielding questions about his most recent book, The…
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Israel is an apartheid state, says B’Tselem; time to ditch the IHRA definition of anti-Semitism?
When B’Tselem described Israel as an apartheid state in a position paper last week, it did more than just dispel long held delusions about the Zionist state. In saying that Israel “promotes and perpetuates Jewish supremacy between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River,” the country’s largest human rights group…
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Trump’s dictatorial impulses have been indulged, now the chickens have come home to roost
How the mighty have fallen. In the space of a few months, Donald J Trump, the 45th President of the United States, has gone from the dizzy heights of Nobel Peace Prize chatter to the infamy of instigating the most disgraceful act of domestic terrorism in the country’s history. Americans…
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MEMO in conversation with Jeremy Wildeman
Dr Jeremy Wildeman is an expert on Middle East politics and has extensive knowledge and experience of state development. MEMO interviewed Dr Wildeman to discuss the issue of the “de-development” of Palestine. The conversation centred on aid; state development under the Oslo Peace Process; the failure of the 1993 Oslo…
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Starmer’s refusal to challenge a far-right conspiracy theorist was shocking
British Labour Party leader Keir Starmer is facing fierce criticism for failing to challenge a caller to a radio phone-in who advanced a racist conspiracy theory that has inspired several far-right terrorist attacks. The same caller then hailed Israel as an ethnonationalist utopia which Britain should seek to replicate. Listeners…
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Starmer is failing to unite Britain’s Labour Party
The UN’s International Day of Solidarity with Palestinian People — commemorated on 29 November every year since 1977 to remind the world that the question of Palestine remains unresolved — could have been an occasion for Britain’s Labour Party leader Sir Kier Starmer to unite his party. But it wasn’t.…
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Barack Obama and the shattered hopes of a new Middle East
In his new book, A Promised Land, former US President Barack Obama admits that he has a lot to say. So much so, that he felt the need to explain why he was unable to tell the story of his presidency in a single 900 page volume. “I’m painfully aware…
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Obama follows in Jimmy Carter’s footsteps and speaks out against Israel and AIPAC
Upon leaving office, US Presidents have, on occasion, mustered the courage to speak their mind about America’s relationship with Israel and the influence of the Zionist lobby in Washington. Jimmy Carter is perhaps best known for this. The 39th President of the USA, despite his role in mediating the 1979…
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There Where You Are Not
On the very day that Jerusalem came under Israeli occupation in 1967 “exile became a central reality in my life,” recollects Kamal Boullata in the opening passages of the colossal volume that brings together the writings of celebrated Palestinian artist. Only 25 years of age, as Israeli occupation forces rolled…
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Biden’s victory shows Starmer what is needed to defeat the Tories at the polls
Joe Biden’s victory in the US Presidential election has sparked a flurry of commentaries on its meaning and significance. The general tendency of such reflection has been to overstate the magnitude of the moment, as though the world has been saved from the brink of disaster allowing us all to…
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MEMO in conversation with Prof Salman Sayyid
Has Islamophobia gone global? Can it be said that there is a common thread connecting Uyghur Muslims held in concentration camps in China; the genocide of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar; the rise of Hindu nationalism and the systematic attacks on Muslims in India and Kashmir; Israel’s ongoing occupation and brutal…
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As democracy dies in the Arab world, ‘where is the US?’
A debate that is sure to resurface in Washington in the new year is the question over the promotion of democracy. Will it once again be reinstated in its traditional place within US foreign policy? With his “America First” agenda, President Donald Trump moved away from what had been a…
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Salman Abu Sitta introduces us to ‘Arab Palestine before the Zionist colonisation’
Few have documented Israel’s erasure of Palestine better than Dr Salman Abu Sitta. Best known for his ground-breaking project mapping historic Palestine and developing a practical plan for implementing the right of return of Palestinian refugees, Abu Sitta, who was born in the Palestinian town of Be’er Sheva during the…
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Co-option of religion by Saudi’s MBS spells disaster
The misuse of religion has become something of an art form in the Middle East. On the one hand many of the region’s autocrats and dictators, calling for greater secularism, warn of the dangers of mixing religion with politics, pointing to Daesh and the Muslim Brotherhood. One the other, the…
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Navigating Palestine in a post BLM world: a conversation with Prof. Mark Ayyesh
The killing of George Floyd by a police officer just over two months ago sparked protests across his home city of Minneapolis and major cities around the world. These mainly peaceful protests inspired by the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement put the topic of police brutality and, more broadly, racism at the…
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Remembering Israel’s 2014 attack on Gaza’s universities
What Six years ago, Israeli occupation forces targeted the Islamic University of Gaza (IUG) in one of the deadliest military offensives against the two million Palestinians living within the besieged enclave. The conflict left 2,251 people dead, with more than 11,000 wounded, according to Palestinian and UN sources. A further…
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Pro-Israel groups are out in force to unseat Ilhan Omar
Pro-Israel lobby groups in the US have come out in force to unseat Ilhan Omar in the August Democratic primary elections. The freshman lawmaker is locked in a bitter race with Antone Melton-Meaux, who is said to be a “moderate” candidate backed by lobbyists. An investigation by Mondoweiss into Federal…
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The fact that Peter Beinart ‘no longer believes in a Jewish State’ tells us a lot
The irreconcilable tension within Zionism has been laid bare once again by prominent columnist and commentator Peter Beinart. For a number of years, the 49-year-old has had the status of America’s pre-eminent liberal Zionist intellectual. His trenchant essays and books buttressed the hope of liberal Jews in the possibility of…
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Let’s ’embrace’ Israeli annexation and work towards a single democratic state
Supporters of Israel would have breathed a sigh of relief when the Zionist state postponed its 2 July annexation of the West Bank, in what was a humiliating about-turn. The formula for peace envisaged in the two-state solution is considered the last chance to redeem the Zionist project from tipping…
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The definition of anti-Semitism has been weaponised for Israel’s benefit
The Ryerson Centre for Free Expression hosted a virtual forum earlier this month on the definition of anti-Semitism drafted by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). With governments and institutions around the world encouraged by pro-Israel groups to adopt the IHRA guidelines, four experts debated whether the IHRA definition is…
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Israel will be a target for #BlackLivesMatter as long as it believes that ‘might is right’
Last year, I wrote that a new global civil rights movement was uniting Palestinians and Black Americans. I argued that the Palestinian struggle had undergone many dramatic changes over the decades and that there was a new dawn in the long campaign to free themselves from the Israeli occupation’s structural…
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Trump’s war on black Americans is a desperate political gamble in election year
Seeing US army boots on foreign ground has been commonplace over the past seven decades. According to one estimate, Washington’s proclivity for military solutions has seen US troops deployed in 150 countries around the world. It is not something done on the US mainland though. That is why the sight…