There is a Palestinian woman we know, who lives nearby, who just learnt that thirteen members of her immediate family were killed in Gaza today. May God ease her pain and compensate her loss.

Professor Haim Bresheeth speaking in September last year. I should introduce my old classmate to this chap. Let them compare notes.

All those terrifying dystopian movies of the 80s and 90s have been brought to life. The only question left to answer is which side is playing the good guys.

The propaganda of decades, utilised to sell wars without end, has come tumbling down. All the world can now see who the terrorised are, as death and destruction is rained down on them without pause. The warmongers no longer control the narrative. The world now sees the truth. The lies upon lies unmasked.

For two decades, you vehemently condemned terrorism without pause, mourning the innocents killed and maimed in every attrocity. Then you watched a nation rain destruction down on a civilian population, murdering eight-thousand children, six-thousand women and an unknown number of innocent men. Your response? You shrugged your shoulders. Muttered something about regrets, while nevertheless continuing …

You create a monster, then say, “This monster must be destroyed!” How? By destroying everything but the monster. And the monster you created? Yes, of course, that will live on, enabling you to go on destroying everything but the monster. Who dares whisper, “Are you sure you’re not the monster?”

In truth, we’re all just pawns in Great Games between global powers, north and south. The United States and Russia, Saudi and Iran, Britain and France, each of them vying for dominance. In these Great Games, the common man is merely cannon fodder. When elephants fight…

Dare to humanise them in your heart.

“There’s no room at the inn. We’re only a small country. We can’t take all these people.” Our nation in home to about one percent of the world’s 27 million refugees. Turkey hosts 3.7 million of them. Germany hosts the highest number in Europe. However, most refugees are hosted by states neighbouring areas of displacement. …

There is no moral high ground in war. The best you can do is limit harm. The moral high ground was ceded weeks ago, and all the world could see it. Only politicians and the arms industry (usually intertwined) had any trouble articulating that truth. The moral high ground was lost the moment the corrupt …

Is it really so hard to say, “Yes, we condemn all attacks on civilians, whoever they are and whoever the perpetrator”?

Wearing his finest suit, articulating the most horrific sentiments in his best Received Pronunciation, England’s respectable racist pleads that you turn away. No, dislocate the enemy from their humanity, he demands: wreak wholesale vengeance on their innocents, multiplied twenty-fold, for the crimes of the militant scourge. England’s respectable racist insists there are no innocents on …

We love binary representations of the world, even though we know from experience that the world is not like that. At times of heightened conflict, it’s a battle of us versus them. Our side — suddenly united — versus their side — likewise apparently united. But really we know that’s a gross simplification of reality. …

Six years ago, during the Rohingya crisis, I was roundly condemned for pointing out that Bangladesh was in the midst of its own humanitarian crisis resulting from unprecedented floods at the very moment the online ummah believed it should be opening its doors to the streams of desperate refugees fleeing from neighboring Myanmar. It’s strange, …