The immediate recent history of the Middle-East, North Africa and Gulf region right through to present day, has seen a period of extreme instability, the rise and fall of groups, of political parties, and the establishment of entities that are a cause for significant concern within those host nations, and within the international community at large.
This period of instability, highlighted by the Arab Spring, has been inappropriately characterised by many western media outlets, as being as a result of Islam and its followers, thus fostering a deep mistrust and suspicion of any of those individuals or groups who identify themselves as Muslim or following an Islamic or Islamist ideology.
The word ‘Muslim’ is no longer simply synonymous with a religion of the Middle East, as Christianity and Judaism is in the West; it has become synonymous with the emergence of radical and extremist groups that espouse a wholly warped and unrecognisable interpretation of Islam.
It appears that any action can be justified if announced that it is under the auspices of the ‘War on Terror’. Actions such as the removal of the most basic of human rights and fundamental freedoms such as a fair trial. Actions that many of us take for granted such as the freedom of speech and the freedom to protest have effectively been removed all under the anti-terror rhetoric. Rhetoric that in reality is nothing other than the thinnest of veils over a nationwide power grab; rhetoric solely designed to attempt to lend credibility to a regimes anti-civil society, anti-human rights, and ultimately anti-democratic policies.
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