It is my intention in this brief article to raise several issues regarding the lack of female elected representatives in the political institutions of Europe, with a particular emphasis on the UK.
There are many reasons people choose to convert. Some do so for love and marriage, others because they are looking for spiritual meaning. However, there are also those who convert to Islam as an alternative to the current liberal ideology. Especially after the terrorist attacks on the Twin Towers, converts tend to lean more towards political choices rather than spiritualism and personal choice.
“Our greatest investment is in our intellectual assets” working to address “challenges from the environment to medicine” proudly proclaims University College London (UCL) Provost, Malcolm Grant. UCL runs an MSc Systems Engineering course in partnership with BAE Systems, Britain’s largest arms company, responsible for producing artillery guns, munitions and missiles, even warships and nuclear submarines, and whose customers include the repressive Saudi Arabian secret services, the Israeli Defence Forces, the US army and the Indonesian forces responsible for violently extinguishing West Papua’s secession movement.
The question can be posed as follows. The Unites States went to war in Iraq to destroy Weapons of Mass Destruction that did not exist, and we fight a War on Terror now despite virtually no evidence whatsoever that a serious terrorist threat to the American homeland exists. “Why,” then, “do we fight?”
Much of development has historically been directed by colonial powers and more recently by the neo-liberal consensus. This has led to a situation whereby developing countries have had little control over their own resources, policies, economies and futures.
The phrase “Russian energy politics” is dangerously close to a redundancy; in Russia, politics is energy and energy is politics. To be sure, energy is politicized in virtually every country, but nowhere is the nexus between petroleum and politics tighter than in the Russian Federation.
There are few more circular arguments than those that spiral around the impact of media upon politics. And as soon as you mention New Media that circle turns in to a vicious or virtuous cycle depending on your view. Internet Evangelists like Joe Trippi claim that blogging, email, websites, and social networking are transforming political communications. That in turn is changing the process of politics and politics itself.
While Europe’s carbon-footprint aware heads of states, their administrators, advisors, bureaucrats, translators and drivers have been preoccupied with two back to back summits in Lisbon and Brussels, smaller cogs in the EU machine have been whirring away less noisily.
Pakistan came into being out of a nationalist cause; the ethnic Muslim minority felt that its rights would be better preserved and served under a separate democratic setup, rather than among an overwhelming majority of Hindus. Great Britain also wanted a buffer state between the Muslim belt and India to save the Sub-Continent (which contained a quarter of the world’s population) from the effects of ‘Islamization’ and to ensure that it never emerged as a challenging power to British ambitions in the East (the Middle East, Hong Kong, Burma and Japan to name a few).
During World War II, the BBC represented a crucial arm of UK foreign policy, broadcasting allied propaganda across occupied Europe. Sixty years later the organisation has developed an international reputation for impartiality, yet ‘BBC World Service’ still plays an important role in transmitting ‘British’ values across the globe.
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