by P. K. Niaz

The virulent hate campaign by Hindutva forces promoted by the ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and subsequent rise in public and institutional Islamophobia, have combined to create panic among India's 204 million Muslims, the country's largest minority community.

by Nasim Ahmed

British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said at the weekend that he had "never seen such a stark division between good and evil," as he charged Russian president Vladimir Putin of "trying to crush a blameless, innocent civilian population." What on earth did he mean?

Putin's invasion and its effects are horrific, and the humanitarian crisis will be around for some time. However, like many others, when I hear politicians talking about "good" and "evil" it is almost always evidence of propaganda.

By Asim Ali

Vivek Agnihotri once told us facts are not facts. He was onto something.

by M Yousef

Russian forces have invaded Ukraine on 24 February, and the battles are still going on in the vicinity of the Ukrainian capital with the aim of controlling it and changing the regime there, according to what was spread by the media and Western officials.

by Dr Amira Abo el-Fetouh

They have always stressed the importance of human rights, the right of all people to live a free and dignified life, and equality among all human beings, but when it actually comes down to it, this mask has fallen, and the true face and hateful racism of Western states has been exposed. Such slogans about equality have been revealed to be a sham by the Russian invasion of Ukraine. They are so hollow that they are clearly not even believed in, never mind applied equally.

by Dr Idlir Lika

Eleven days into the Kremlin's invasion of Ukraine, a wave of cultural backlash against Russians (in a sense, a wave of Russophobia) seems to have swept over Western countries. Russian artists, musicians and filmmakers are being excluded from European events and competitions.

by Mauri Cruz

The world is terrified to watch the war in Ukraine, which has global importance because it involves the second largest nuclear power. But the world did not go to war with Russian military operations. There are other wars going on, though not reported. Starting with the unauthorised occupation of Palestine, the Israeli military killed 219 Palestinians, including 63 children in May 2021 alone.

by Nizar Milbes

Israel has benefited greatly from the lack of consensus among the Palestinian factions in occupied Palestine and the diaspora in terms of the solution that they actually want to see. The occupation state is skilled at divide and rule, allowing Hamas to thrive in Gaza for decades and strengthening the Palestinian Authority while preventing any kind of reconciliation between the two.

A couple of weeks ago, I stood in front of my most diverse group of students and the largest class I have had since I began teaching in 2020. It was my first face-to-face cultural content seminar since the start of the pandemic, and I hesitated for a second, knowing that what I was about to say would shake the students out of their comfort zone.

Reuters

Syrian refugee, Ahmad Al-Hariri, who fled the war in his country for neighbouring Lebanon 10 years ago, spent the last decade hoping in vain to escape to a new life in Europe, Reuters reports.

Watching European nations open their arms to hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians in less than a week, the father of three cannot help but compare their fates.

By Ken Moritsugu

BEIJING (AP) — Three weeks ago, the leaders of China and Russia declared that the friendship between their countries “has no limits” as they met in Beijing on the eve of the Winter Olympics. But that was before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, a gambit that is testing just how far China is willing to go.

by Peter Smith

Ukraine’s tangled political history with Russia has its counterpart in the religious landscape, with Ukraine’s majority Orthodox Christian population divided between an independent-minded group based in Kyiv and another loyal to its patriarch in Moscow.

But while there have been appeals to religious nationalism in both Russia and Ukraine, religious loyalty doesn’t mirror political fealty amid Ukraine’s fight for survival.