Reconstruction of Nahr el-Bared Refugee Camp

First established in the 1940s to accommodate refugees from the Lake Huleh area of northern Palestine, the 19-hectare Nahr el-Bared refugee camp was almost entirely destroyed during the 2007 conflict between the Lebanese Armed Forces and the extremist group Fatah Al-Islam. Thousands of families were forced to abandon their homes and seek temporary refuge at another nearby camp.

In 2008 the United Nations Relief & Works Agency embarked on an ambitious project to replace the buildings that had been destroyed.

READ MORE AT Deezeen

*Photo Credit: Silvio Arcangeli 

Even if it was a Muslim, So What?

The New York Post has been receiving serious and justifiable criticism for their reporting on the Boston Marathon. Citing police sources, the paper reported that 12 people had died in the attacks and that a "Saudi national" had been taken into custody. Of course, the death toll was thankfully a (still horrifying) quarter of that, and the police later disconfirmed that the "Saudi national" was a suspect -- he was a student tackled by a concerned citizen and taken to the hospital. He was fully cooperative, denied all involvement, and isn't a suspect. The New Yorker has released an important and harrowing story of the way this young man, barely out of his teens, was treated.

READ MORE AT Huffington Post

The Shiite Scare in Egypt

“No to Iranian tourism in Egypt.” “We reject the existence of Iranian Shiites in Egypt.” “Islam has no Shiites.” These sentiments were among the messages on signs held by some of the several dozen Salafis protesting in front of Al-Azhar University against an Iranian official visiting Cairo to attend a Sufi conference commemorating the birthday of Aisha, the wife of the Prophet Muhammad. Some Egyptian newspapers reported that the Salafis stormed the conference, causing it to end earlier than expected.

In November 2012, Shiites had been prevented from entering Cairo's al-Hussein Mosque to commemorate Ashoura, the martyrdom of the prophet’s grandson Hussein at Karbala. The decision was made after a group of Salafi and Sunni movements filed a petition to bar Shiites from entering the mosque.

READ MORE AT Al-Monitor

*Photo Credit: James Gordon

Afghanistan's Increasingly Restricted Media

The Afghan government, having lost legitimacy over the past 12 years due to corruption, clientelism and brutal repression, and aware of the impact the exposure of official malfeasance can have on public opinion, is increasingly cracking down on critical reporting.

At the end of March, the Afghan media organisation, NAI published their annual statistics on attacks against local journalists. They recorded 71 cases - defined as killings, threats, beatings or arrests - over the course of the previous year, an increase of almost 10% on 2011, and in the majority of the cases the responsibility could be traced to members of the government. According to NAI’s figures, attacks have increased again this year...

READ MORE AT Doha Centre for Media Freedom

*Photo Credit: isafmedia

Is Media Freedom in Sudan on the Right Rrack?

Consistently ranked among the bottom ten countries in the annual Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index, (170th since 2011), Sudan seems to have a long way to go before it eventually reaches acceptable press freedom standards.

Omar Al-Bashir’s 1989 coup d’état started an era of ethnic-based civil war in the country’s frontier regions – namely South Sudan and Darfur – tragically characterised by blatant human rights violations. Since then, journalists have been dissuaded from criticising the government.

READ MORE AT Doha Centre for Media Freedom

*Photo Credit: Norsk Folkehjelp Norwegian People's Aid

Fault Lines, Not Red Lines

Why the earthquake near Iran's dated and unproven nuclear reactor at Bushehr should scare you.

A 6.3-magnitude earthquake shook Iran's southern shores on Tuesday, April 9, on the afternoon that the country was celebrating its National Nuclear Technology Day. Nearly 800 homes were destroyed, killing 37 people and injuring more than 900. Iran's sole nuclear reactor, located in Bushehr, almost 100 miles from the quake's epicenter, was, according to Iranian and Russian officials, unaffected. But there's no way of knowing until the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) report comes out in May. Either way, they got lucky.

REAR MORE AT Foreign Policy

*Photo Credit: IAEA Imagebank

Tunisia's Last Jews at Ease Despite Troubled Past

Murdokhai Izra will celebrate his 60th birthday next month at his home on Tunisia's south-eastern island of Djerba.

A Tunisian Jew, Mr Izra only left the place of his birth when he turned 18 to enrol at the University of Gabes, still not too far away from his roots.

"When I left Djerba to study commerce, I felt more and more homesick," said Mr Izra, as we met in Djerba's Ghriba synagogue as Tunisian Jews marked the annual pilgrimage to Africa's oldest Jewish temple.

His son and two daughters did not follow in his footsteps. They received their university education in France, which they have since made their home. They are like thousands of other Tunisian Jews, whose number in the country nose-dived from 100,000 in 1960s to around 1,500 today.

READ MORE AT BBC

*Photo Credit: Tab59

Geller's Speech Echoes Anti-Semitism

The Jews Against Islamophobia Coalition (JAIC) strongly reaffirms its commitment to challenging Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism and calls on the rest of the Jewish community to do the same. While the Great Neck Synagogue has decided not to host Pamela Geller, JAIC is outraged by those synagogues and Jewish institutions that are now offering platforms for Geller's hate speech. JAIC also condemns those who have been targeting individuals speaking out against hate speech.

READ MORE AT Mondoweiss

Did We Get the Muslim Brotherhood Wrong?

The academic community also saw it as important to distinguish the Muslim Brotherhood from the al Qaeda strands of extremist Salafi-jihadism that were the focus of the "war on terror." The Brotherhood had a different ideology, a different conception of its place within the broader Egyptian public, a different strategic vision, a different social constituency, a different view of controversial concepts such as jahiliyya and takfir, a different view of the legitimacy of violence. Brotherhood and Salafi-jihadist figures argued with each other constantly, denouncing each other over ideology and tactics. Lumping together the Brotherhood with al Qaeda would have been a major analytical error with serious policy consequences. Academics helped to sort out such confusion, and were right.

...But getting the Brotherhood's pre-2011 ideology and behavior basically right is no cause for comfort given the dizzying and disturbing developments since the revolution.

READ MORE AT Foreign Policy

*Photo Credit: thierry ehrmann

No Room for Radicals

Just hours after the two suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing were identified as Muslims, Representative Peter T. King of New York, the Republican chairman of the House Subcommittee on Counterterrorism and Intelligence, called for an “increased surveillance” of Islamic communities in the United States. “I think we need more police and more surveillance in the communities where the threat is coming from,” he told National Review. “The new threat is definitely from within.”

Mr. King’s hypothesis, and the widespread surveillance policies already in effect since 9/11, assume that the threat of radicalization has become a matter of local geography, that American Muslims are creating extremists in our mosques and community centers.

But what we’re learning of the suspects, the brothers Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, suggests a different story...

READ MORE AT The New York Times Opinion Pages

*Photo Credit: David Shankbone