Category: Opinion

The latest opinion from those committed to making our region fair, just and democratic.


Burma undergoes quasi-Balkanization and the embattled junta resorts to mass conscription

No Burmese in their right minds have bought into the spin “service to the nation” from the junta leadership. Reportedly, young men and women are frantically finding ways to exit the country.

/ February 23, 2024

The Arakan Army and a “Divided Myanmar”

The spectre of a divided Myanmar is often raised, both out of a genuine fear of the consequences for everyday people or the admitted complications it would raise for international security or out of a less scrupulous desire to maintain the status quo or to challenge it out of self-interest.

/ February 13, 2024

Gayatri Chakraborty Spivak on Israel

Drawing on one of the world’s most influential anti-colonial scholars and revolutionaries, Frantz Fanon, Professor Spivak speaks on the root cause of the unceasing waves of violence against and by Israel when she points out that the violence by the colonizer/oppressor violence generates violence by the colonized/oppressed. To end this, the colonial conditions must first end.

/ February 9, 2024

A Global Rally Against US-led De-funding of Palestinian Aid Agency UNRWA: Pre-recorded Messages of Protest

This compilation of pre-recorded messages of solidarity with Palestinian people follows the stand-alone recording by the world-renowned feminist scholar and black revolutionary thinker Angela Davis of the University of California at Santa Cruz.  

/ February 7, 2024

Angela Davis’s special message of solidarity

A global YouTube rally in protest of the defunding UN Aid to Palestinian people.

/ February 3, 2024

Israel has the right to exist, but not this genocidal, expansionist Israel

Amidst the talk of “the two-state solution”, the United Nations or Nations United Against Evil, must first address the fundamental question: Should this Israel exist, as “the most aggressive, expansionist, overtly racist, Jewish supremacist government in Israel’s history?”

/ February 1, 2024

Ecolibrium, On Humans, Animals and Nature in Islam

According to the Quran, … humans are not unique as sentient forms of life but are a class of species in the cosmos who can either be a creative or a destructive force in nature. They are responsible for the safekeeping of the intrinsic balance of nature.

/ January 31, 2024

NOT THIS ISRAEL, NOT THIS JEW: A Jewish Voice for Peace

Uncritical support of Israel is destroying the spiritual core of Judaism itself – a dagger in the Jewish heart. Christians had to reckon with their deeds after the Holocaust. Jews need to do that now. Israel may have a right to exist, but not this Israel. It’s counter-intuitive and difficult to digest but conscience can be seduced and obscured: even our own.  I promised never again. Never again is now.

/ January 22, 2024

“Depopulating” Palestine: Israel Through the Bifocal Lens of Hitler and Lemkin

As a human rights campaigner and a student of genocides, in my attempts to understand Israel’s physical destruction of Gaza in particular, and its foundational Zionist policies in Palestine, I find most helpful to turn to Raphael Lemkin’s grounded and multi-faceted conception of genocide and Hitler’s “blood-based” ideas of “race-state” and racialized land.

/ January 20, 2024