Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Amelia Smith
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Doria Shafiq won the vote for Egyptian women, and kicked the Brits out
“To know, to be able, to want and to dare,” Doria Shafiq Britain today is celebrating the centenary of the Representation of the People Act, passed on 6 February 1918, which gave women over the age of 30 who owned property the right to vote. The outcome was a...
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‘As a Palestinian on the stage I feel I’m fighting, I’m resisting’
Palestinian actor and director Momin Swaitat looks at life under occupation and the contemporary refugee experience in his latest work 'Alien Land'...
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1,000 days of Saudi war on Yemen, backed by the UK
This week marks 1,000 days since the Saudi-led coalition launched a bombing campaign in Yemen. What followed was the world’s worst cholera epidemic and horrific human rights abuses on the ground yet Yemen has been dubbed the forgotten war because much of the world has ignored it. Data gathered...
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The UK supported Saleh and every other Middle East tragedy
Shortly after photos of former Yemeni President Ali Abdullah Saleh, wrapped in a red blanket bearing a fatal head wound, were circulated on Twitter, a shot of him flanked by Tunisia’s Ben Ali, Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi and Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak also did the rounds. It was a reminder of...
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‘The Syrian conflict is a very big money machine’
Manaf Halbouni tells me that the price of tomatoes in Syria has increased 80 fold since the start of the conflict: “When I left Syria you used to pay five Syrian pounds for one kilo of tomatoes and at the moment it’s around 400… if you want to buy...
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Code Name: Butterfly
Butterfly is not your average schoolgirl; at least not if you went to school in the UK. One of her best friends calls herself Dalal Mughrabi after the female Fatah fighter who played a central role in the 1978 Coastal Road massacre. Another classmate, Fida, is nicknamed Al-Khansa after...
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The million-dollar boat ride across the Mediterranean
By the end of August 2017, 112,450 Eritreans were registered as refugees and asylum seekers in Sudan...
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Balcony on the Moon: Coming of Age in Palestine
Ibtisam Barakat’s house in Ramallah is made of memories, not stone, she tells us. It is made of birds migrating in the sky, of her mother and father, of the skateboards her brother made from wooden vegetable boxes and of musical instruments shaped from rubber bands. It is these...
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‘The military plan to wipe out all Muslims in Myanmar’
“This village is a Muslim-free zone,” reads a sign hanging at the entrance to a village in an area of Myanmar outside Rakhine state. The orders are directed at the country’s Rohingya population, an ethnic group of around 1.3 million that live mainly in Rakhine and who have been...
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Momentum builds to end human rights violations in Egypt
Last week the UN put into words what many human rights organisations and activists have been saying for years now: that they are gravely concerned about Egypt’s ongoing assault on freedom of expression including the blocking of hundreds of websites and the detention of journalists in the country. Special...
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Remembering the gassing of Egypt’s protesters
Four years ago today 37 Egyptians were gassed to death in a police van outside the Abu Zaabal prison in Cairo. Temperatures outside topped 31 degrees and many had already lost consciousness in the overcrowded vehicle. After around six hours policemen fired teargas through the windows and the prisoners...
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Israel is squeezing press freedoms, like Arab dictators do
The announcement of Israeli communications minister Ayoub Kara this weekend that he would revoke the press credentials of journalists working at Al Jazeera ’s office in Jerusalem and shut down the channel’s cable and satellite transmissions has been met with outrage. The Association for Civil Rights in Israel has...
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Egypt’s war on Sinai
An Egyptian army tank ran over a car bomb in the Sinai Peninsula and didn’t hit the international press until a week after the incident ...
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‘The victims of international terrorism are the Uyghurs’
Amelia Smith interviews Abdugheni Sabit, a Uyghur activist who left China in 2007 and settled in the Netherlands. Sabit is currently appealing to the international community to put pressure on the Egyptian government to stop the forced deportation of Uyghur students to China where they will be imprisoned. Three...
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Impending executions, mass trials: Egypt’s corrupt judiciary
Lofti Khalil was arrested outside a shop in Kafr El-Sheikh on 19 April 2015. His mother searched for him for over two months but heard nothing until eventually she was told he was in Tanta prison. When she went to visit her son he told her he had been...
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How Palestinians won the Nakba
A new play tells the story of Palestinian poet Taha Ali and how he rebuilt his life after the Nakba...
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Sister of Egyptian Grenfell Tower victim: ‘I have hope she is still alive’
Amelia Smith interviews Rasha Ibrahim, the sister of Rania who lived with her two children on the 23rd floor of Grenfell Tower in west London, which suffered a devastating fire two weeks ago....
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From Grenfell to Palestine: The media has never been more out of touch with ‘real’ people
Days after the tragic fire at Grenfell Tower, Nadia, a resident in the area, asked a reporter at Press TV why the media is refusing to report the real number of deaths from the tragedy. “Everyone’s died and no one wants to say it,” says Nadia, pointing out that...
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Is Sisi really Egypt’s strongman?
The hypocrisy of Egypt’s decision to join Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the UAE in cutting off diplomatic ties with Qatar on the grounds that the Gulf state supports terrorism would be astounding were it not for the blatant level of denial Egypt has already shown over its role in...
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‘Young people in Tunisia feel betrayed by politicians’
In February 2016 Lina Ben Mhenni began an initiative to open libraries inside prisons across Tunisia as a way to counter extremism. When she announced the initiative on her Facebook page she was inundated with phone calls from people across the country – from all social classes, ages and...
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Egypt’s Coptic Christians face persecution at home and apathy abroad
When Shenouda became Pope of the Coptic Church in 1971 there were only two Coptic churches in the US – one in New York and one in Los Angeles. When he died in 2012 there were 202 churches. Today there are 250. “That tells you something about the wave,...
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Macron has been praised by leaders across the Arab World, now he has to win over the people
It’s hard to put your finger on where exactly the ‘Muslim vote’ stood vis a vis the French election. Even though Le Pen stirred up plenty of Islamophobic sentiment by campaigning on promises to bring in restrictions on halal meat, religious clothing and burkinis, numerous articles circulated about ‘the...
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Coptic soprano: ‘Christianity originated in the Middle East ... We keep forgetting that.’
How familiar are you with Middle Eastern Christian chants?...
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Even extrajudicial killings won’t stop US support for Egypt
These brutal killings were caught on video, along with the bodies of other men who appear to have suffered the same fate....