Muhammad Idrees Ahmad

Mass slaughter perpetrated by the big powers, from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan, is normalized through labels such as “counterinsurgency,” “pacification” and “war on terror,” while similar acts carried out by states out of favor result in the severest of charges. It is this politics of naming that is the subject of Mahmood Mamdani’s explosive new book, Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics and the War on Terror. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad reviews for The Electronic Intifada.

While nowhere in his invaluable diplomatic history of eight presidencies, A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East, does Patrick E. Tyler use the phrase “the Israel lobby,” it nevertheless looms largest among the reasons why all US efforts to feign balance between the competing concerns of good relations with Arab-Muslim states and unwavering allegiance to Israel have foundered. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad reviews for The Electronic Intifada.

”The BBC cannot be neutral in the struggle between truth and untruth, justice and injustice, freedom and slavery, compassion and cruelty, tolerance and intolerance.” Thus read a 1972 internal document called Principles and Practice in News and Current Affairs laying out the guidelines for the BBC’s coverage of conflicts. It appears to affirm that in cases of oppression and injustice to be neutral is to be complicit, because neutrality reinforces the status quo. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad comments.

To establish evidence of the BBC’s journalistic malpractice one often has to do no more than pick a random sample of news related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict currently on its website. In a time of conflict BBC’s coverage invariably tends to the Israeli perspective, and nowhere is this reflected more than in the semantics and framing of its reportage. Muhammad Idrees Ahmad analyzes for The Electronic Intifada.

Mordechai Vanunu may have been forgotten by the rest of the world; Israel may have used the death of Yasir Arafat as a diversion to arrest Vanunu again, but the students of the University of Glasgow are intent on bringing him back to the limelight. Mordechai Vanunu, the man who risked it all to draw the world’s attention towards the nuclear ambitions of Israel and was thrown into prison for an extended period, has been nominated to run for Rector at this institute which is one of the four oldest in Britain, and one of its most prestigious.