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This past week, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad was the latest victim of the West’s cancel culture, as she was disinvited from a book event by Canada’s Toronto District School Board. Alongside colonialism, imperialism, and nation-building, “cancel culture” is the latest of toxic Western ideas to be foisted upon the Middle East. This past week, 2018 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Nadia Murad was the latest victim of the West’s cancel culture, as she was disinvited from a book event by Canada’s Toronto District School Board. This may sound trivial, but it’s a big deal. Murad is a member...

The Toronto District School Board (TDSB) is not allowing its students to attend a book club meeting featuring author Nadia Murad Murad's book details how she escaped the Islamic State, where she was ripped from her home and sold into sexual slavery aged just 14 years old The superintendent Helen Fisher said Muslim students would be offended and the book 'promotes Islamophobia' Book club founder and TDSB parent Tanya Lee said the book 'has nothing to do with ordinary Muslims. (TDSB) should be aware of the difference' The Board later issued an apology but still won't let the students attend...

“You can’t handle the truth,” the famous line uttered by Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, could well be the motto of many educrats. Sheltering students from the truth when it offends the politically correct sentiments of favored minorities is all too common. And this phenomenon is not limited to the United States. Consider this from the UK Daily Mail: A Canadian school has cancelled an event with ISIS survivor Nadia Murad, saying her visit would be offensive to Muslims and foster 'Islamophobia'. Murad was scheduled to sit down with students from the Toronto District School Board (TDSB) -...

he US State Department is now urging all Americans in Ethiopia to leave the war-torn country “as soon as possible”. This after the US Embassy in Addis Ababa previously posted a “do not travel” advisory to its official website and began making preparations of its own to evacuate non-essential staff. At the start of this week, the Ethiopian government went so far as to tell residents of the capital city of some 5 million people to start arming themselves as rebel Tigrayan fighters began a march southward from their northern enclave, with plans to overthrow the government under Prime Minister...

A delegation led by the mayor of Banibangou was ambushed on Tuesday about 50 km (30 miles) from the town, near the border with Mali. The area is overrun by militants associated with a local affiliate of Islamic State that has killed hundreds of civilians in rural communities this year. A poverty-stricken, arid zone of west Africa encompassing the borderlands of Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso has been racked by violence in recent years as armed groups, some linked with al-Qaeda, have sought to establish control over communities and rid the region of local and international military forces. Thousands of...

Tunisia’s Central Bank is in “advanced talks” with Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) to obtain financial aid for the cash-strapped country, a senior banker has confirmed. Abdelkarim Lassoued, the head of financing and foreign transactions at the Tunisian regulator, told local Shams FM radio on Friday that an agreement with the two Gulf states may be reached soon. He added that talks with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) were also ongoing, without giving details on the amount of aid being discussed. The North African country has seen years of political deadlock since its 2011 revolution, with fractious...

Islamic State militants stormed Afghanistan’s main military hospital, now housing injured Taliban fighters and veterans of the former Afghan military, and killed at least 23 people in the latest eruption of violence since the country’s U.S.-backed government collapsed in mid-August. Though there was no immediate claim of responsibility, the Taliban’s chief spokesman, Zabiullah Mujahid, said that five Islamic State militants participated in Tuesday’s complex attack and were all killed. The extremist group has intensified the tempo of strikes against Taliban targets and the country’s Shiite minority in recent weeks. It stormed the same hospital, in Kabul’s Wazir Akbar Khan neighborhood,...

It was supposed to be a joyful occasion. Young men and women gathered in a circle, displaying their dance moves as they celebrated Mali’s independence day in the country’s western region of Kayes. But things took a dark turn when a group of people carrying thick wooden sticks and machetes appeared all of sudden. The celebrating crowd – people from the so-called “slave” class – were brutally attacked and publicly humiliated by the descendants of slaveholder families who consider themselves “nobles”.

A large explosion tore through a Shi'ite mosque in the southern Afghan city of Kandahar during Friday prayers, killing at least 33 people and wounding 73, officials said, the second massive attack in a week targeting worshippers from the minority sect. A local reporter in Kandahar told Reuters that eyewitnesses had described three suicide attackers, one of whom blew himself up at the entrance to the mosque with the two others detonating their devices inside the building. ... The blast took place just days after an attack claimed by Islamic State militants, which killed scores of Shi'ite worshippers at a...

BAGHDAD (AP) — Iraq said on Monday it has detained a top leader of the Islamic State group and a longtime al-Qaida operative in a cross-border operation. Iraqi Prime Minister Mustafa al-Kadhimi tweeted the news, identifying the man as Sami Jassem, who oversees the Islamic State group’s financial operations and served as the deputy leader of IS under the late Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. He described it as “one of the most difficult” cross border intelligence operations ever conducted by Iraqi forces. Iraqi intelligence officials told The Associated Press that Jassem was detained in an identified foreign country and transported to...

The Taliban said on Saturday they will not work with the U.S. to contain extremism in Afghanistan. Taliban political spokesman Suhail Shaheen told The Associated Press the group will independently deal with extremist groups such as the Islamic State. “We are able to tackle Daesh independently,” Shaheen said, using an Arabic acronym for the group. The position comes ahead of talks between senior Taliban officials and U.S. officials in Doha, Qatar. These are the first direct talks the two groups will have since the U.S. evacuated Afghanistan in August, with the U.S. saying the talks are not a sign the...

A suicide bomb attack on worshippers at a Shiite mosque in the Afghan city of Kunduz killed at least 55 people on Friday (Oct 8), in the bloodiest assault since US forces left the country. Scores more victims from the minority community were wounded in the blast, which was claimed by the Islamic State group and appeared designed to further destabilise Afghanistan in the wake of the Taliban takeover. The extremist group, bitter rivals of the Taliban, has repeatedly targeted Shiites in a bid to stir up sectarian violence in Sunni-majority Afghanistan.

WELLINGTON, Sept 4 (Reuters)- New Zealand supermarket group Countdown said on Saturday it has removed knives and scissors from its shelves, a day after a man the authorities called an Islamist extremist stabbed six people in one of the company's stores. "Last night, we made the decision to temporarily remove all knives and scissors from our shelves while we consider whether we should continue to sell them," said Kiri Hannifin, Countdown's general manager for safety....

Islamic State militants have been blamed for a series of deadly attacks in recent years - like this one on a wedding hall in Kabul in 2019 Isis-K - or to give it its more accurate name, Islamic State Khorasan Province (ISKP) - is the regional affiliate of Isis (or so-called Islamic State) that is active in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is the most extreme and violent of all the jihadist militant groups in Afghanistan. It was set up in January 2015 at the height of IS' power in Iraq and Syria, before its self-declared caliphate was defeated and dismantled...

This morning, Iraq hanged 36 men in Nasiriyah prison for a 2014 sectarian massacre perpetrated by the emerging Islamic State (ISIS or ISIL). After months’ gestation in the Syrian civil war, the Sunni ISIS in June 2014 burst out of its enclaves and in the course of a few jeep-racing weeks gobbled upper Mesopotamia. It publicly declared its border-straddling conquests the Caliphate on June 29, 2014. Iraq’s army mostly melted away ahead of the onrushing threat that summer, abandoning weapons and fleeing while ISIS overran Mosul on June 10, then advanced another 200 km to snatch Saddam Hussein‘s birthplace of...

Hate preacher Anjem Choudary has had his Instagram account suspended — just days after he was also booted off Twitter and Facebook. The 54-year-old joined the social networking site as anjemchoudary1967 and began posting on Monday. But within hours, Instagram’s parent company Facebook moved to take the account down for violating its policies. It comes days after Choudary’s accounts on Facebook and Twitter were “permanently suspended for violating the rules” of its violent organizations policy. The firebrand preacher began setting up online profiles two weeks ago after legal conditions that prevented him from speaking publicly expired on July 18. He...

Austria has become the first country in the European Union to ban the Muslim Brotherhood as part of a new anti-terrorism law. The law bans the Egyptian-founded Muslim Brotherhood by adding it to a list of organisations linked to “religiously motivated crime”. It sets a punishment of a month in prison and a €4,000 (£3,407/$4,717) fine for those who propagate the group’s literature or disseminate its slogans. The law also allows the government to place electronic tags on convicted terrorists for monitoring . The ban comes as part of an anti-terrorism package the Austrian parliament passed and which was created...

Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline judge who is under U.S. sanctions for human rights abuses, secured victory as expected on Saturday in Iran’s presidential election after a contest marked by voter apathy over economic hardships and political restrictions... Turnout in Friday's four-man race was a record low of around 48.8% and there were 3.7 million invalid ballots that were likely to have been mostly blank or protest votes. Appointed by Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to the high-profile job of judiciary chief in 2019, Raisi was placed under U.S. sanctions a few months later over human rights violations. Those included the...

Democracy, by definition and in its most general form, is a system of government in which the people ‎have the power to choose their rulers. Of the main indicators for democracy is the existence of free and ‎fair elections. In addition, a free press, freedom of expression, and adherence to freedom of religion and ‎beliefs are some of the other pillars of democracy that enable the people of a country to consciously and ‎voluntarily elect government officials. There are democratic or parliamentary governments in which the ‎president or prime minister is determined by parliamentary elections or by direct popular vote.‎...

Military officers in Mali detained the president, prime minister and defence minister of the interim government on Monday, deepening political chaos just months after a military coup ousted the previous president, multiple sources told Reuters. President Bah Ndaw, Prime Minister Moctar Ouane and defence minister Souleymane Doucoure were all taken to a military base in Kati outside the capital Bamako, hours after two members of the military lost their positions in a government reshuffle, the diplomatic and government sources said. Their detentions followed the military ouster in August of President Ibrahim Boubacar Keita. The development could exacerbate instability in the...