Creating new perspectives since 2009
Items by Amelia Smith
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‘I am steadfast,’ says Egyptian preacher on death row
Sheikh Fadl Al-Mawla Hassan was at work at the Engineer’s Syndicate in Alexandria when Egyptian forces raided the building. Everyone, including the security guards and officials working for the company, were arrested. Once they had everyone in custody police started to investigate their background – were they active in politics,...
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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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‘Abdulrahman confessed when security forces threatened to rape his mother’
In 2015 six young men were sentenced to death in Egypt for killing a policeman in what became known as the Mansoura Six case. Amelia Smith interviews family members and friends of the ‘six oppressed’ about conditions inside the prison and how their sentencing was more about settling political...
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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 Procedure...
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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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Remembering the Rabaa massacre
In mid-August 2013, the Egyptian army stormed a sit-in at Cairo’s Rabaa square and slaughtered 1,000 people who were protesting against the removal of the country’s first democratically elected President, Mohamed Morsi. People were shot, burnt alive and suffocated with tear gas. Security forces blocked the entrances so that...
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Rabaa field doctor: 'They burned them dead and alive'
Dr. Hanan Al-Amin was in a makeshift operating room in the Rabaa field hospital when security forces burst into the room and ordered her and another doctor to leave. A patient was on the table with his abdomen open – they had found six bullets in his liver, his...
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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 described...
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‘Refugee detention centres cause terrible mental consequences’
In September 2015 three-year-old Alan Kurdi was photographed lying face down on a beach wearing a bright red t-shirt and blue shorts. The young Syrian boy had been washed ashore close to the fashionable Turkish resort town of Bodrum after his family attempted to reach the Greek island of...
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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 months...
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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 stripped,...
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Remembering the Republican Guard shooting in Egypt
Shortly after dawn prayers on 8 July 2013 Egyptian security forces shot dead 51 protesters who had camped out at the Republican Guard headquarters in Cairo to call for the reinstatement of deposed President Mohammed Morsi. Four hundred and thirty-five were injured. What: Republican Guard shooting When: 8 July 2013 Where: Egypt What happened? Following Friday prayers...
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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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Remembering Egypt’s bloody military coup
On this day: The Egyptian army overthrew the country’s first democratically elected leader, Mohammed Morsi...
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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, the...
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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....
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In times of terror, world leaders put their allies first and civilians second
Over the past two months, the world has witnessed some truly gruesome attacks and the loss of innocent civilian lives around the world. On 22 March, four people were killed in London when a car was driven on the pavement across Westminster Bridge and the driver stabbed a police...