Author Archives: Linda S. Heard

Imagine being obliged to sleep shivering on the street or under canvas in the dead of winter. For most of us curled-up and cosy under our duvets with the TV remote at the ready such a dreadful scenario is so alien that it rarely crosses our minds. Continue reading →

The nuclear deal with Iran initiated by US President Barack Obama, sealed after seven years of negotiations, was certainly flawed. It was the worst deal ever negotiated pronounced President Donald Trump who had a point because it served to embolden, enrich and legitimise the Iranian regime for very little in return. Continue reading →

During an interview published in the Economist France’s President Emmanuel Macron accused the White House of inflicting “brain death” on the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO) and accused the US of “turning its back on us” citing America’s withdrawal of troops from northern Syria to pave the way for a Turkish incursion without consultation with allies. Continue reading →

Ethiopia’s Grand Renaissance Dam (GERD) has been a bone of contention between Cairo and Addis Ababa since 2011 when construction began without consultations or environmental and impact studies. Continue reading →

The idea that one individual can unilaterally decide the fate of a population 10,000km away on a whim and, worse, surrender even an inch of a state’s sovereign territory to a third entity is illegal, immoral and downright dangerous. Continue reading →

Hundreds of thousands of Kurds, Syriac Christians and Arabs are fleeing Turkey’s bombs and ground forces that include hardcore Islamist ‘rebels.’ Continue reading →

It is a facet of human nature to gravitate towards the underdogs of this world and when covering mass anti-government uprisings, wherever they take place, the media and human rights groups tend to reflect that sentiment. Continue reading →

Today, Israelis will cast their ballots for the second time in five months due to the inability of the incumbent, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to form a coalition following elections in April. A high turnout looks unlikely when many voters complain of election-fatigue and the two front-running parties sing from a similar dirge-like song book. Continue reading →

It’s a crying shame that ‘refugee’ and ‘migrant’ have almost become dirty words from one side of the Atlantic to the other. Desperate families fleeing conflicts, violence or abject poverty have been dehumanised, turned into scapegoats and in some cases locked-up, treated worse than cattle. Continue reading →

I cannot count the number of times I’ve heard Israeli officials boasting that their country is the only democracy in the Middle East even as it flouts all democratic principles whose mainstays are equality, free expression, human rights, civil liberties and the rule of law. Continue reading →

Enough meandering around the bush! Palestinians have right on their side both morally and legally. Yet Israel is able to trample upon these victims of an illegal 52-year-long occupation with absolute and utter impunity, more so now than ever before. While it is the case that almost all US administrations swayed towards Israel’s side, at the very least they erected a non-biased facade for public consumption and at least two, that of Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, worked towards a two-state-solution with sincerity. Continue reading →

On Saturday, Britain’s flagship carrier British Airways disappointed holidaymakers with boarding cards heading to Egypt with letters announcing cancellation of flights to Cairo for a week to allow for security assessments. No alternative flights were offered. Continue reading →

With two dyed-in-the-wool Tory Brexiteers vying to replace Theresa May as prime minister, Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union now looks inevitable. The hopes of Britons who resented their country being under Brussels’ sway will come to fruition. Freedom from foreign constraints is on the horizon. “Britons never, never, never shall be slaves,” go the stirring words of the patriotic song Rule Britannia children of my generation sang in school. Continue reading →

Where is the international outcry in response to reports that asylum seekers, among them children and newborns, are being crammed tightly into detention centres on America’s southern border without basic facilities? Does American exceptionalism extend to treating 2,500 human beings worse than animals with impunity? Continue reading →

Elements of the Western media and human rights groups are guilty of exhibiting egregious double standards, making offensive unsubstantiated accusations against the Egyptian state in response to the death of the country’s former Muslim Brotherhood president. Those claims are based purely on conspiracy theories concocted by Cairo’s pro-Brotherhood enemies and disseminated by the usual suspects CNN, BBC, the Washington Post and the New York Times among others. Continue reading →

As a new bipolar world order emerges pitting the United States and its Western allies against Russia and China’s growing influence, the geopolitical deck shares are being rearranged. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan would prefer to straddle the fence. He insists he seeks good relations with every nation but in reality he is veering away from Washington towards Moscow. Continue reading →

It takes two hands to clap and neither side in this 70-year-long saga is shaking hands. Instead, naked hostility reigns largely engendered by the Trump administration’s biased approach serving the Jewish state. Bad enough that according to leaks there is no two-state or even one-state in the offing. Instead a demilitarised, non-contiguous Palestinian enclave on 30 per cent of the occupied West Bank has allegedly been proposed with its ‘capital’ on [occupied] Jerusalem’s outskirts. Continue reading →

Britain’s fortunes are inextricably entwined with those of the mighty United States. They will be even more so after the UK leaves the European Union in respect to a coveted US-UK trade deal as well as heightened diplomatic and military cooperation. Continue reading →

The UK is undergoing its severest crisis since the Second World War. The country is rudderless. Its politicians are self-serving and at each other’s throats. The people are divided, angry and confused. The world looks on aghast at the mess created three years ago when Prime Minister David Cameron’s reckless bet to appease his Conservative rivals failed to pay off. There’s no other way of putting it. Great Britain has become a global laughing stock. Continue reading →

On Friday, Germany’s Bundestag voted to brand support of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement (BDS) as anti-Semitic in response to a motion submitted by the Christian Democratic Party, the Greens and the Free Democrats. The resolution cited stickers urging consumers not to buy Israeli goods and appeals to blacklist Israeli artists as echoing Germany’s dark Second World War history. Continue reading →

The US president’s ‘Deal of the Century’ is due to be unveiled after Ramadan. However, chances are it will be no monumental gift to the region but rather a futile attempt by a dishonest broker to impose a settlement that likely contradicts decades of United Nations Security Council Resolutions and U-turns on America’s long-held adherence to a two-state solution. Continue reading →

The United States and its vassal-state type allies the UK and Sweden have seemingly conspired to punish the WikiLeaks founder for exposing war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan. Dragged out of his embassy sanctuary ostensibly for jumping bail after seven long years of self-imposed isolation, Julian Assange is now incarcerated in Britain’s high-security Belmarsh prison. Continue reading →

Haven’t Western powers done enough damage to Libya without poking noses into the current power play? It was military intervention on the part of France, Britain and the US that in 2011 succeeded in overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi who, despite his eccentricities, presided over a stable and prosperous nation whose nationals enjoyed a high standard of living. Continue reading →

The US president’s ego has reached dangerous heights. Bad enough that he overturned decades of American policy by unilaterally declaring occupied Jerusalem as the capital of the Jewish state, now with a tweet he has presented his buddy Benjamin Netanyahu struggling to be re-elected with the long-coveted icing on the cake, the occupied Golan Heights. Continue reading →

Unless the squabbling Parliament can get its act together, the United Kingdom could automatically crash out of the European Union on March 29, an event generally perceived as a disastrous course of action setting back the nation’s economy for years to come. Continue reading →

Anti-government protests spearheaded by Algerian youths—calling for democracy, an end to corruption and job opportunities—elicit feelings of deja vu. We’ve seen it all before. The misnamed Arab Spring in 2011 that toppled long-serving leaders Tunisia’s Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali, Egypt’s Hosni Mubarak and the Yemeni president Ali Abdullah Saleh, plunged Libya, Syria and Yemen into bloody civil wars. Continue reading →

The Trump administration’s concern for the economic plight of the Venezuelan people is based purely on compassion for the hungry or so we are meant to believe. The country poses no threat to the US or its neighbours, so what other reasons could there possibly be for Donald Trump’s efforts supported by US western and regional allies to topple socialist President Nicolas Maduro? Continue reading →

Israel’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, is fighting tooth-and-nail to cling to his lofty seat in the run-up to Knesset elections scheduled for April 9. For the first time in many years, his Likud Party faces a serious challenger. Kahol Lavan (Blue White), a centrist alliance formed in December last year, led by Benny Gantz, a former armed forces chief-of-staff-turned politician, is edging ahead in various polls. Continue reading →

You came, you saw but you failed to conquer hearts and minds. Egypt welcomed you in friendship. You and France’s First Lady were treated as honoured guests with genuine warmth. Your visit was meant to cement economic, strategic and cultural relations and, indeed, officials signed agreements worth €1.6 billion (Dh6.72 billion) but that’s where the good news ended. Continue reading →

‘Aren’t I lucky to be Canadian, we get to choose other countries’ leaders,” was a tongue-in-cheek post on social media which says it all. Canada, Brazil, Argentina and Columbia were among the first to hang on to Washington’s coat-tails with its anointing of Venezuela’s opposition leader Juan Guado to temporarily replace President Nicolas Maduro. And Guado wasted no time in swearing himself into office. Continue reading →

Tunisia, which sparked mass uprisings throughout swathes of the Arab world, is still being hailed by the Western media as the Arab Spring’s lone success story, uniting secular and Islamist political strains. Sad to say, there is just as much discontent in the country than there was prior to the 2011 revolution that deposed President Zine Al Abidine Bin Ali. People did win a new constitution and the right to participate in free and fair polls but improvements in standards of living and security are lacking. Continue reading →