Saudi Gazette/ Opinion/ Editorial

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Thursday December 12, 2019 / 15 , Rabi' ath-thani , 1441

Opinion

1 - 10 from 764 . In "Opinion / Editorial"

December 10, 2019

Does Russia enjoy being thought unreliable?

THERE will be those who feel some sympathy for Russian athletes who are now subject to a new ban by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada), meaning that they will not be able to compete under their national colors at next year’s Tokyo Olympics nor at the 2022 football World Cup in Qatar.However, it is not a blanket ban. Wada’s edict means that individual athletes who have not been caught up ...

December 9, 2019

Erdogan involves Libya in his maritime claims

INTERNATIONAL diplomacy is about making friends and influencing people. Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan seems determined to turn the principle on its head by making enemies and annoying them.He has championed the Muslim Brotherhood and quietly sponsored Daesh (the so-called IS) terrorists by allowing them to move men and supplies through Turkey. He has betrayed NATO and his alliance with the United States by buying Russian anti-aircraft missiles and threatening ...

December 6, 2019

A rocky NATO alliance

THE 70th birthday party of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has been a shambles. But then this Western military alliance has been showing its age for the best part of two decades. The problem has been that this alliance of 29 countries ran out of a reason to exist when the Soviet Union collapsed and the countries of Eastern Europe threw off the Communist yoke.The Soviet Union’s Warsaw Pact ...

December 5, 2019

Climate change and panic

BECAUSE they believe so ardently in what they say, the warnings emerging from the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference known as COP25 are largely apocalyptic. To listen to some of the 29,000 attendees at the Madrid climate summit, the future of the human race, if not of many other life forms, is already doomed.Over the last twenty years the environmentalist lobby has been outstandingly successful. The argument has moved from ...

December 4, 2019

Iraq in angry turmoil

IT now seems possible that at least 500 protesters have been gunned down in two months of anti-government riots in Iraq. Though police and soldiers have been responsible for some of the killings, much of the slaughter has been done by Iranian-backed militiamen. In Najaf this week, unidentified thugs attacked demonstrators with knives and batons as well as guns.Resignation of Prime Minister Adel Abdul Mahdi has been accepted by parliament ...

November 29, 2019

The grim story in the “China Cables”

THANKS to leaked documents, there now seems no doubt that the Chinese authorities are holding upward of a million Muslims in detention camps in the supposedly autonomous Xinjiang region in the far West of the country. Within these forbidding installations, with multiple high walls and concrete watch towers inmates are being “reeducated”.Beijing has always pretended that all those in these high-security prisons were there voluntarily for education and training. A ...

November 28, 2019

Trump and Mexico’s narcoterrorists

PRESIDENT Donald Trump’s apparently sudden decisions often bring confusion in their wake. But there ought to be no mistaking the significance of his plan to designate Mexican drugs cartels as “terrorists”. When these death-dealing gangsters are legally defined as “terrorists,” it will be possible to deploy a whole new panoply of organizations and measures against them.There is, in truth, little to choose between the sadistic and gross violence of Daesh ...

November 21, 2019

Third World lessons for the First

THE devastating fires in California and Australia have had an added horror, in that they have not simply consumed relatively scattered rural properties, they have actually reached the very edges of Los Angeles and Sydney.The iconic Australian city is this week covered in a thick haze of smoke from the inferno licking at its suburbs. Exhausted firefighters are being relieved by crews brought in from other parts of the country. ...

November 20, 2019

The masks come off

The Palestinian politician Saeb Erekat was surely wrong on Tuesday to describe the US endorsement of illegal Israel settlements as “the law of the jungle”, because even jungles have laws. What Israel has long been doing, and what the Trump administration has so foolishly accepted, flies in the face of every tenet of international law. It trashes the long-standing claim by the United States that what the Israelis have been ...

November 19, 2019

The EU must act on Iran

IRAN’S ayatollahs are once more on the ropes. Swingeing fuel price rises have so far triggered four days of rioting across the country which are thought to have left scores of dead, though officially the government only admits to a dozen killings.Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei has backed the increases in fuel prices of up to 50 percent and blamed the protests on “hooligans” and “counter-revolutionaries”. The fact that the ...

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