Azad Essa

1 month ago | middleeasteye.net | Azad Essa

Around her, members of the UN Security Council. Picasso's Guernica, among his most famous anti-war works, screams off the walls. The caption reads: "December 8, 2023: US blocks UN Security Council demand for humanitarian ceasefire in Gaza."In another black and white illustration drawn with pencil, smoke billows over a child as she holds on tight to her terrified companions: a terrified donkey and a malnourished dog. Meanwhile, a dead cat lies stretched out at her feet.

1 month ago | middleeasteye.net | Azad Essa

On the evening of 17 March, masked federal agents from the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) surrounded Badar Khan Suri in Rosslyn, Virginia, just as he returned home from opening his fast. Suri, an Indian citizen and a post-doctoral scholar at Georgetown University, was told that his student visa had been revoked and that he faced imminent deportation. Suri's wife, Mapheze Saleh, a Palestinian with American citizenship, watched as the masked agents took him and his passport and drove off.

1 month ago | middleeasteye.net | Azad Essa

Mahmoud Khalil, the Palestinian activist who played a prominent role in the Columbia University student protests over the past year, was picked up on Saturday by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents from his apartment in New York City. In the hours that followed, a machinery of disinformation went to work, as the Trump administration began accusing him of being a supporter of "terrorism" and for having "led activities aligned to Hamas, a designated terrorist organisation".

1 month ago | middleeasteye.net | Azad Essa

The arrest and detention of a prominent Palestinian over the weekend from his home in New York City marks Columbia University's shift from a complicit actor to a collaborator with Donald Trump's policies, student activists have warned.

2 months ago | middleeasteye.net | Azad Essa

In the summer of 2010, the prominent Jewish American writer Peter Beinart dropped a bombshell on America's liberal elite. He observed, as Israel continued to build illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank and completed the first round of what it called "mowing the lawn" - the name given to the periodic bombing of Gaza - that attitudes towards Israel were dramatically shifting among young American Jews. The winds were changing, Beinart noted in the New York Review of Books.