Human Rights

Joe Stork Deputy Director, Middle East and North Africa Division (Human Rights Watch ) – Ahmed Mansoor, the United Arab Emirates’ (UAE) best-known human rights defender, has been arbitrarily imprisoned, in isolation, since security forces raided his home just before midnight on March 20, 2017. Local media reported he was arrested and convicted for publishing […]

Israel/ Palestine

I saw Israel’s ‘final solution to the Palestinian problem’ in Lebanon 41 years ago, and I see it again today

Mondoweiss

By Rev. Dr. Don Wagner ( Mondoweisss ) – Forty-one years ago, I was in Lebanon leading a group of ten U.S. relief and development directors hoping to introduce them to the extensive needs of impoverished Lebanese and Palestinian refugees. On June 4, 1982, around 3:00 p.m., we were on our way to the crowded […]

Gay rights

Anti-Trans Politicians Are Following the Nazi Playbook

OtherWords

By Mitchell Zimmerman ( Otherwords ) – The 1920s were both good and bad times for the Jews of Germany. They’d been granted the same legal rights as other Germans and were established in respected professions. They were mostly treated as worthy of dignity. But that changed as antisemites scapegoated Jews for all of Germany’s […]

China

Is China trying to supplant Washington as Peacemaker between Israel and Palestine?

Ramzy Baroud

Dr Ramzy Baroud RamzyBaroud ( Middle East Monitor ) – Remarks on 24 May by China’s Ambassador to the UN on the situation in Occupied Palestine were impeccable in terms of their consistency with international law. Compared with the position of the US, which perceives the UN and the Security Council in particular as a […]

Gay rights

Israeli Protesters fear for the Future of their Country’s precarious LGBTQ Rights Revolution

The Conversation

By Orit Avishai, Fordham University | – Demonstrations against the Israeli government’s efforts to radically overhaul the country’s judicial system have become a weekly occurrence. Often rainbow pride banners pop with color amid the sea of blue and white national flags. LGBTQ allies are hardly the only groups protesting the new government: Secular Jews, liberals […]

censorship

Iranian Journalists Who Broke Mahsa Amini Story Stand Trial Behind Closed Doors

Golnaz Esfandiari

I’m RFE/RL correspondent Golnaz Esfandiari. Here’s what I’ve been following during the past week and what I’m watching for in the days ahead. The Big Issue ( RFE/RL ) – A revolutionary court in Iran this week began the trials of two female journalists who helped break the story of Mahsa Amini’s death. Amini’s death […]

Climate Crisis

Looking for Home in an Overheating World: If Emissions continue, Will We all be Migrants Someday?

Tomdispatch

By Jane Braxton Little ( Tomdispatch.com ) – Greenville, CA — Pines and firs parched by a three-year drought had been burning for days on a ridge 1,000 feet above my remote mountain town. On August 4, 2021, the flames suddenly flared into a heat so intense it formed a molten cloud the color of […]

Gay rights

Pride Month 2023: Erasing LGBTQI+ People is a Crime against Humanity

Pennsylvania Capital-Star

By Susan Dicklitch-Nelson ( Pennsylvania Capital-Star ) – Twenty-five years ago, at the Christmas table, my uncle suggested that “all gay people should be sent to a desert island, covered with fertilizer, and set aflame.” His proposed method may have been novel, but he certainly was not the first person to suggest the extermination […]

Bahrain

Saudi Arabia Executes Two Shia Bahrainis on Terrorism Charges in “Grossly Unfair” Trial

Human Rights Watch

By Leila Saad | – ( Human Rights Watch ) – Two Bahraini Shi’a men have been executed in Saudi Arabia following what Amnesty International described as a “grossly unfair trial” on terrorism-related charges. Jaafar Sultan and Sadeq Thamer were arrested in May 2015 and held incommunicado for more than three months, according to Amnesty International. […]