Analysis & Opinion

Against the backdrop of the 9.0-magnitude man-made earthquake that was the disastrous US pullout from Afghanistan, two Christian leaders, Pastor Johnnie Moore and Juliana Taimoorazy, convened a news conference last week under the auspices of the Simon Wiesenthal Center.

Morocco’s moderate Islamist party suffered major losses in parliamentary elections on Wednesday, a stinging setback in one of the last countries where Islamists had risen to power after the Arab Spring protests.

The Taliban took over Afghanistan with great ease that few expected. Now that all foreign troops have withdrawn, the group faces the more difficult task of governing the country. Will it be able to cope?

Pashtana Durrani knows that she is on the Taliban’s radar. The 23-year-old teacher has been fiercely advocating for girls’ education since the group started making advances in Afghanistan after the U.S. announced it would withdraw troops from the country by Aug. 31. But despite being told that she is not safe, Durrani is staying put.

While Taliban atrocities are widely understood, those committed by western forces and their allies have been wilfully ignored. As the author and Afghanistan expert Anand Gopal told me, the Taliban all but evaporated in 2001. But Afghan politicians in the new government exploited a US desire to eliminate “bad guys” by falsely claiming their opponents were Taliban supporters.

As the Afghan government and the Taliban continue their struggle over who will control Kabul, they ignore the fact that they will not wield any legitimacy unless the Afghan people grants it to them. The Afghan people are the sole sovereign over the country and as such, the power is in their hands.

Libya is racing against the clock to hold elections in late December. A July 1 deadline for resolving the constitutional (or legal) basis to hold the elections came and passed. A key meeting of the 74-member Libya Political Dialogue Committee meeting whose January roadmap set the election timeline ended indecisively on July 2.

Earlier this month, the European Court of Justice (CJEU) issued a scandalous ruling which practically made it legal for employers to discriminate against their  Muslim employees in workplaces across Europe.

Her revelation triggered memories of my own experience with an IUD and reminded me of how angry I am that women are just expected to embrace these invasive devices – in many cases inserted without any sort of pain relief (as Caitlin Moran so elegantly explained in her Times column).

This crime has been going on for decades. We see its effects in the horrific heat and wildfires unfolding this summer in the American West; in the megastorms that were so numerous in 2020 that scientists ran out of names for them; in the global projections that sea levels are set to rise by at least 20 feet (6 metres).