Middle East Follow

The US's attempt to "democratise" the Middle East - or, to put it bluntly, to create puppet regimes - has had two spectacular failures recently.

The bigoted outburst by the magazine of the Gay and Lesbian Humanist Association calling Islam a 'barmy doctrine' is the clearest example of the co-option of many in the gay liberation movement into the barmy doctrine of the clash of civilisations.

This is a country occupied by a murderous foreign power for decades. A country split apart by a 1,600 mile series of fortified walls backed by soldiers, heavy weaponry and millions of landmines.

Exclusive to Socialist Review, we print extracts from award-winning journalist Robert Fisk's forthcoming book The Great War for Civilisation

Guerrilla graffiti artist Banksy has recently branched out from his normal east London haunts and taken a trip to Palestine, where he applied his talents to the apartheid wall being built by Israel.

Robert Fisk explains to Simon Assaf why there can be no peace in the Middle East until Britain and the US get out.

Modern language, science and culture owes much to the Muslim empire of the early Middle Ages.

Tom Hurndall, the British peace activist who was shot in the head by an Israeli soldier in April last year, died last week.

The Cairo conference brought to a close a momentous year for the global anti-war movement. Over 1,000 activists from Europe, North America and around the Middle East met on 13 and 14 December at the Egyptian Journalists' Union headquarters to debate strategies for building worldwide resistance to imperialism and globalisation.

Zionists accuse anti-Zionists of being anti-Semitic. The reasons for this, they say, are (1) some anti-Zionists express anti-Semitic ideas, and (2) the very fact of denying the right of "the Jews" to have a "homeland" is anti-Semitic.

Those fighting for justice around the world lost one of their most eloquent voices when the Palestinian writer and critic Edward W Said died last week. Said was in many ways an improbable radical. He was born in Jerusalem in 1935. His family were conservative Anglican Arabs who called him after the then Prince of Wales.

AFTER 111 days in detention, ten of them on hunger strike, Egyptian anti-war activist Ashraf Ibrahim was finally charged on 7 August. Alongside four other activists-Nasser Farouq, Yehia Fakry, Mustafa El Basiony and Remoan Edward Gendi-he stands accused of forming an illegal left wing organisation.