Harry's Place

Read Ezzedine Choukry in the Financial Times.
Since February, the Muslim Brothers have indeed out-manoeuvered their competitors, locking the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces (SCAF) into an ill-conceived plan that positions them to dominate the nascent political institutions. The military adopted a minimalist approach to change. As predicted, liberal forces failed to ready themselves to [...]

St Petersburg law makers have been trying to introduce legislation designed to severely restrict freedom of expression and assembly for LGBT people. The ‘promotion’ of homosexuality could lead to fines of up to £1,000 and there would be a complete ban on Pride events. The need to ‘protect’ minors is being invoked as justification for [...]

The Government is considering introducing legislation which will make it harder for employees working in small business to pursue claims of unfair dismissal.  It has been proposed that firms with fewer than ten employees should be able to sack staff without facing the risk of an industrial tribunal. The consultation period on planned redundancies may [...]

From Terry Glavin’s book Come from the Shadows: The Long and Lonely Struggle for Peace in Afghanistan, pages 154-155:
…In October 2006, the Canadian Peace Alliance joined with the Canadian Islamic Congress, the nominally left-wing Canadian Labour Congress and some of the most reactionary Muslim clerics in Canada in a nationwide protest demanding that Canada [...]

This is a guest post by Hadar Sela
On November 23rd the official Twitter account of the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office sent out a Tweet promoting a Youtube video produced by that government office ahead of the 2012 Olympic Games.

Here is the video

“British born Palestinian singer Shadia Mansour discusses what it means to her to [...]

We recently reported the welcome news that Labour Friends of Israel has produced a book called “The Progressive Case for Israel.”
Among the contributors to that book is our comrade David Hirsh, who blogs at Engage. He has posted his piece there, and it is worth reading in full.
But really, as David suggests, the progressive case [...]

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney is adding another ad to the great canon of American political advertising that is based on a lie.
This spot running in New Hampshire takes a 2008 clip of Barack Obama as he first ran for the White House and said: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going [...]

This was my first post about the Roma on Harry’s Place. The idea that people’s ability to leave their country might depend on their ethnicity seemed a real concern.  This important issue is the subject of an article by Thomas Hammarberg, Commissioner for Human Rights at the Council of Europe in Strasbourg, which you can [...]

The folk musician Karl Dallas writes on Twitter:
Extraordinary Zionist virulence twds Raise Your Banners, Bradford, cos we’ve invited anti-Zionist Israeli jazzman Gilad Atzmon to play Fri.
Karl Dallas is leading a Political Songwriting workshop at Raise Your Banners. Dallas is an organiser of the Bradford PSC, dealing with media enquiries, and sends out emails on behalf [...]

Remember those distant days when you’d come to a blog like this, or similar places, and find a longish lament to how the democratic left had lost it’s bearings, forgotten its moral compass and allowed the shockwaves of the post-September 11 world to jolt it into a world of fantasy? That time when George Bush [...]