Jawad Iqbal is a broadcaster and ex-television news executive. Jawad is a former Visiting Senior Fellow in the Institute of Global Affairs at the LSE
The Foreign Office is making a big mistake in failing to designate Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRGC) as a terrorist group. The 100,000 strong organisation, the most powerful wing of Iran’s security apparatus, was established after the 1979 Islamic revolution. For decades it has been at the heart of Iranian support for global terrorism on
The world of cricket suffers from an unjustified moral superiority complex. This explains the periodic howls of outrage when a player or team is caught acting in a manner summed up by the phrase ‘it’s not cricket’ — a catch-all sentiment that purports to speak of some higher purpose than just winning. The self-appointed cricket
The self-serving ethical blind spots of some of those in charge of running international sport never ceases to amaze. Step forward Andrea Gaudenzi, a former top 20 singles player who now leads the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP), the global governing body of the men’s circuit. Gaudenzi recently revealed that tennis officials have been in
Ben Wallace, the defence secretary, has conceded defeat in his bid to succeed Jens Stoltenberg as secretary-general of Nato. Wallace had been a strong contender for the job, owing to his role in supporting Ukraine after Russia’s invasion. But now it seems the role will go to a character in the mould of the incumbent,
On taking office, Joe Biden promised a new approach to foreign policy based on prioritising democratic values and human rights. The US president spoke of ‘the battle between democracy and autocracy’ as the defining struggle of the time, effectively dividing the world into two clear and opposing camps. Now Biden is having to eat his
What is it that India’s rulers find so objectionable about Charles Darwin and his evolutionary theory that they’ve banned his work from some school classrooms? Firstly, Darwin is not a Hindu and in India’s ruling circles that appears sufficient to cast doubt on his merits as a scientist. Secondly, his cause is not helped by
Some of football’s biggest names are revealing themselves to be shameless mercenaries on a scale that is staggering even by the sport’s abysmally low standards. Karim Benzema, the Real Madrid striker, is the latest superstar to answer the siren calls of one last big pay day plying his waning talents in Saudi Arabia. Benzema will
The vicious racist abuse of Vinícius Jr – the Real Madrid and Brazil star – points to something rotten at the very core of Spanish football. La Liga, marketed worldwide as the glamorous pinnacle of club football, is riddled with racism and racist attitudes at every level of the game: from the pitch to the
Britain’s cinemas are in danger of becoming the new front line of protests from angry religious mobs demanding the cancellation of any film that meets with their disapproval. The latest disturbing example of this form of attempted censorship by diktat came when angry Muslim protesters disrupted the screening of a controversial Bollywood film in Birmingham
India has not yet got its hands on the Koh-i-Noor, despite the county’s many efforts to retrieve the diamond from Britain’s crown jewels. But the ongoing controversy over the jewel has obscured the success of the country’s wider efforts to repatriate cultural and historical artefacts. Since 2014 India’s leader Narendra Modi has made it his personal
The government is making a mistake in turning a blind eye to China’s plans to send a high ranking politician responsible for crushing democratic freedoms in Hong Kong to the King’s coronation. Han Zheng, who was appointed President Xi’s deputy last month, is due to represent China at the historic event on 6 May. In
Indians now make up the second-biggest cohort of Channel migrants: 675 Indians arrived in small boats in the first three months of this year, according to Home Office figures. This amounts to almost a fifth of the total 3,793 crossings made in the first quarter of this year. The number represents a stark rise: only
It must rank as some form of political satire that Angela Merkel has been awarded Germany’s highest political honour. Not least because the former Chancellor will most likely be remembered foremost for turning a blind eye to the security threat posed by Russia. The Grand Cross of the Order of Merit has previously been given
No one really expects much in the way of principles or morality from those charged with running international sport. The Qatar World Cup was merely the latest, most blatant example of the iron rule that money and greed conquers all in sport. But for a brief moment — 16 months to be precise — the
The Unesco world heritage status award is a curious kind of international beauty contest in which historic locations vie to be anointed worthy of special recognition by a committee of UN cultural bigwigs. This supposedly brings with it some form of wider symbolic cultural validation through international acclaim. In fact what it really brings —
Elon Musk, the Twitter owner, is in his own words a ‘free speech absolutist’. He promised to combat censorship and allow a broader range of voices on the social media platform as part of his pitch for acquiring the company last October. It is, then, hard to square his free speech bombast with recent events in
On 2 August 1939, Albert Einstein – at that time the most famous scientist in the world – put his name to a letter addressed to President Franklin D Roosevelt. In it he warned that the Nazis might be developing an atomic bomb and could bring about a chain of events that would lead to
Humza Yousaf, the new First Minister of Scotland after his victory in the SNP leadership election, deserves his moment in the sun. Yousaf is Scotland’s first ethnic minority leader and the first Muslim leader of the governing party. Legitimate questions about whether he is up to the job must wait while credit is given for
Democracy and the rule of law have always struggled to take hold in Pakistan, a country in which no elected prime minister has yet completed a full term in office and where the military has been in power for nearly half of its history. The latest antics of Imran Khan, the former prime minister, do
It is something of a mystery why being named UK City of Culture is seen in some quarters as a great civic accolade, a glorious first step on the road to social, economic and cultural regeneration. The experience of Coventry (the winner for 2021) reveals the many downsides to winning this dubious cultural prize. It
