Author Archives: Arab America

Amal Clooney, the human rights barrister, has accused Turkey of double standards on freedom of expression for defending a Turkish Leftist who described the Armenian genocide an “international lie”.

Mrs Clooney, who is representing Armenia on behalf of Doughty Street Chambers along with Geoffrey Robertson QC, said Turkey’s stance was hypocritical “because of its disgraceful record on freedom of expression”, including prosecutions of Turkish-Armenians who campaign for the1915 massacres to be called a genocide.

She took on the case against Doğu Perinçek, chairman of the Turkish Workers’ Party and an MP, who was found guilty of genocide denial and racial discrimination in Switzerland in 2007, but had his conviction overturned by the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) after being defended by Turkey’s government.

The ECHR upheld his right to question in a “debate of clear public interest” and questioned if it was possible to define as a genocide, a policy of deliberate extermination, the massacres and deportations of Armenians by the Turks a century ago.

The human rights lawyer, who married George Clooney her Hollywood film star husband last September, accused the Strasbourg’s court’s human rights judges of being “simply wrong”.

Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Like other first ladies, Michelle Obama’s clothes have been scrutinized endlessly for what type of messages they convey.

And she gets high marks for her “fashion diplomacy,” as she engages with foreign leaders at home and abroad. Her choice to go with a suit rather than a dress for the first time at this year’s State of the Union address “was a glimpse of the self-aware, tough-minded, straight-talking lawyer who took a brief hiatus from the public eye,” according to Robin Givhan.

So it is with Obama’s attire in Saudi Arabia — a country with a very strict dress code for Saudi women, who can’t drive and who exist under a system of male guardianship. In a country that demands women adhere to a strict dress code in public (face and hair covered, and long, flowing robes), Obama went with a flowing blue top, black pants and no head covering.

Obama’s choice is not without precedent. Laura Bush in a visit with King Abdullah made the same choice in 2006.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

“Most of the international airlines flying to Iraq canceled flights to Baghdad on Tuesday after bullets hit a plane as it was landing, injuring a child passenger and raising fears for the safety of travelers.

Iraqi officials described the incident Monday as “minor” and urged carriers not to cancel flights, which are considered lifelines for the capital.

They said that the three shots that hit a Flydubai flight during its descent were fired from an area south of Baghdad International Airport — located west of the capital — and that forces had been dispatched to investigate.

Many airlines swiftly suspended services, including Royal Jordanian, Lebanon’s Middle East Airlines and Turkish Airlines, as well as Flydubai and three other United Arab Emirates-based airlines: Etihad Airways, Air Arabia and Emirates. The airlines did not say when flights would resume.

Transport Minister Bakr al-Zubaidi, speaking at a news conference at the airport, insisted that the facility is safe and urged the airlines to return. He said the pilot had not even been aware of the incident until after the plane landed.

The national carrier Iraqi Airways continues to operate, he said, and flights from Iran were expected later Tuesday.

Baghdad airport is one of the few ways out of the country for people living in and around the capital because the Islamic State insurgency has made road travel dangerous. Air service remained in place at other Iraqi cities with international connections: Irbil in the semiautonomous Kurdish region in the north, and Najaf and Basra south of Baghdad.

The Baghdad airport’s importance was underscored last summer by President Obama, who identified its defense as one of the main missions of the first 700 troops dispatched to Baghdad in response to the escalating Islamic State threat.

A U.S. Embassy spokesman refused to comment on whether the incident would affect diplomatic or military operations, which also rely on the airport as a transit hub.

A spokesman for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi blamed strong winds, which forced the pilot to stray from the usual flight path toward an area where insurgents are known to operate.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

The number of foreign fighters traveling to Iraq and Syria, mostly to fight alongside the Islamic State, has grown to 20,000 — up more than 5,000 from previous estimates made in October, according to the International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence (ICSR).

These new figures are alarming, inasmuch as they indicate that the conflict has attracted more foreign militants than the conflict in Afghanistan in the 1980s. The last time this many militants traveled to fight in a foreign conflict was in 1945.

Another key takeaway from the new data is that, at 4,000, a fifth of the foreign fighters come from Western nations. While estimates from countries in the Middle East, such as Saudi Arabia and Tunisia, fluctuated a little, there were huge increases in fighters coming from European nations.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

Look, if it’s going to have any chance of stirring in us that warm, giddy, life-saving thrill of love actually working out, a romantic comedy with a happy ending probably has to cheat a little bit, to inflate its obstacles, to make those final moments truly momentous. To honor that feeling that, in real life, might spread over months, the romantic comedy must cram into minutes its lovers admitting, to themselves and each other, that they are in fact in love, and then their realization that it’s reciprocated, and then their certainty that this very second right now is the one in which they must decide on what the rest of their lives will look like.

It’s ridiculous, but there’s a reason it’s formula: It can work. Neither my wife nor I believed that the last ten minutes or so of the smashing new rom-com Amira & Sam could have actually happened, yet there we sat, dry-throated but misty-eyed, swallowing our lumps. The film’s final moments don’t feel like life itself, but they can pass for a highly romantic fantasyland bouillon reduction of it: Here’s everything you felt when you first knew you were together for real, just all crammed into two scenes on an Earth that’s not our own.

Source: www.villagevoice.com

For months, the ex-wife of perhaps the most wanted man in the world used Lebanon as a base to secretly transfer cash to Islamist militants, according to Lebanese military officials.

They say that she concealed her identity with fake documents, which listed her as a Syrian citizen named Mallak Abdullah. Eventually, officials say, they discovered that she was Saja al-Dulaimi, an Iraqi who had been briefly married six years ago to the man who now heads the Islamic State, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. In November, the army detained Dulaimi with a girl who is Baghdadi’s biological daughter, the officials say.

The expanding investigation into Dulaimi has offered a rare peek into the family lives of Islamist extremists. Organizations like the Islamic State are known for portraying women in traditional roles — like cooking and cleaning for men. But the allegations against Dulaimi reflect how some women have assumed more dangerous jobs in militant Islamist groups.

Dulaimi has had at least three husbands and lived in several countries in the region, according to the military officials. They describe her as strong-willed and independent. Military officials say that she transferred hundreds of thousands of dollars over the past year to Sunni militants operating along Lebanon’s border area with Syria.

Source: www.washingtonpost.com

As a nurse, nonprofit founder, insurance exec and wife of the Moroccan ambassador, Fatiha Bennani Bouhlal has always strived to help others.

Source: www.washdiplomat.com

London, United Kingdom – Muslims and Jews living in the same North London neighbourhood are making a stand together against hate crime amid concerns of an increased threat to both communities in the aftermath of the Paris attacks.
Jewish communities in the UK have been on a heightened state of alert since a siege orchestrated by a gunman at a kosher supermarket in the French capital left four hostages dead, with police and Jewish neighbourhood watch groups stepping up security around synagogues and schools.

The government also pledged police support for mosques amid reports of an increase in anti-Muslim hate crime following the linked attack by gunmen claiming allegiance to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula on the offices of the satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo.

Meanwhile, a widely reported survey conducted earlier this month by the Campaign Against Antisemitism, a lobbying group established last year, suggested that increased numbers of British Jews were questioning their place in their own country.

More than half of respondents said they were fearful that Jews had no long term future in Europe, and one in four said they had considered leaving the UK because of rising anti-Semitism.

Although subsequently criticised as methodologically flawed, and described as “incendiary” by the Institute of Jewish Policy Research think-tank, senior politicians expressed alarm at those conclusions.

“I never thought I would see the day when members of the Jewish community would say they were fearful of remaining here in the United Kingdom,” said Theresa May, the home secretary. Boris Johnson, the mayor of London, vowed the city would remain a “safe haven” for Jews.

Source: www.aljazeera.com

Adam Horowitz interviews Norman Finkelstein on the work and legacy of Joan Peters, the author of “From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Israeli Conflict over Palestine”.

Source: mondoweiss.net

Tom Hayes’s brilliant new documentary Two Blue Lines explores the passionate dispute among Israeli citizens about their government’s Occupation of Palestine.  The film deftly splices together dueling creeds and the result is electrifying, because it’s a split so rarely displayed on U.S. screens.  Zionist “settlers” claim all of historic Palestine, asserting, variously: “This is our territory returned by God”; “The Arabs are trespassers in the land of Israel: it’s not their country”; “This [land] is ours in every sense of the word”; It’s a “Jewish and democratic state.”

Human rights’ advocates counter such maxims, deploring the contradiction between a “Jewish state”–with “Apartheid” privileges for Jews in an “ethnocracy”–and a democracy with equality for all.

Source: mondoweiss.net

An Israeli rights group has criticised the government for what it called a deliberate policy of launching air strikes on homes that killed hundreds of civilians during last year’s Gaza war.In a report examining 70 raids on residential buildings in the besieged

Palestinian territory, B’Tselem said on Wednesday that Israeli officials were responsible for a large number of civilian casualties during the 50-day conflict that killed nearly 2,200 Palestinians.

“A hallmark of the fighting in Gaza this summer was the numerous [Israeli] strikes on residential buildings, destroying them while their occupants were still inside,” the 49-page report said.

“This aspect of the fighting was particularly appalling” and was “the result of a policy formulated by government officials and the senior military command.

Source: www.aljazeera.com

Foreign airlines flying to Baghdad have cancelled flights landing at the city’s international airport after a FlyDubai passenger jet was shot at while approaching the Iraq capital.

An aviation official and a security official told Reuters news agency that two passengers were lightly injured when three or four bullets hit the body of the plane on Monday evening but they were unable to specify the source of the gunfire.

Flydubai, Emirates, Sharjah’s Air Arabia and Abu Dhabi’s Etihad were the first to suspend flights following the incident, in line with a directive from the United Arab Emirates’ civil aviation authority.

Source: www.aljazeera.com