By BENJAMIN BARTU In a Berkeley church, past earth-toned pews, beneath a foyer reserved for community events and club gatherings, on the other side of the wall from a soup kitchen that promises a free chicken curry meal come Friday,…
Tag: People
I AM BRAINWASHED (OR NOT): A MONOLOGUE
BY MINQI SONG Nov 15, 2019. I woke up at 6 a.m, and checked my phone as usual. The first message was from Julie, sent ten minutes earlier. Julie is a core leader of Education Without Barriers (EWB), an education…
New York City’s Generation 9/11: Growing up Muslim and American
BY SARAH SAKHA My father goes by “Fred”; his real name is Farzad, which sounds distinctly non-white and Muslim. My mother goes by “Sarah”; her name is Soheila. They named me Sarah, so I would blend into my predominantly white,…
Taif Jany Brings Reality to U.S. Immigration Policy
BY MARJORIE TOLSDORF “On November 9, 2006, my father left for work in Al Hillah, a city below Baghdad, but never returned,” said Taif Jany. “He was kidnapped on his way home while in a car with two of his…
UN Insider Fights for Peacekeeping Reform
BY CAROLINE KORNDORFFER In 1993, a truck with a few American soldiers and a United Nations political official aboard was headed back to Mogadishu after visiting a remote post. Along the side of the road, the soldiers saw a woman…
A Career in Counterterrorism
BY JACK STONE TRUITT Throughout his 26 year career in counterterrorism at the FBI, John Anticev experienced some of the most significant failures and successes in American counterintelligence. He saw Islamic terrorism shift from a back-burner issue to the bureau’s…
Reflections on an Asylum Seeker in Cairo
BY MARJORIE TOLSDORF I was hopelessly lost in the center of Old Cairo with a dead phone, a handful of useless Arabic words floating around in my head, and an escalating fear that I would not find my way back…
‘Organizational Interest Comes First’: One Intelligence Officer’s Experience with Interservice Rivalry
BY JENNIFER KELTZ Just because two officers are fighting for the same cause does not mean that they will work together. As a boy in New York, John Gentry never pictured that he would one day spend over twenty years…
Kidnapped by a Libyan Militia: One prominent gay rights blogger recounts his detention by a conservative militia.
BY SEAN HANSEN “Are you a mule, or not?!” His kidnappers shouted, using a derogatory slang word for a gay person in Libyan Arabic. Abdough Ilbosiphi cowered in the back of a blacked-out Toyota, as it drove away from his…
El Parche: Art to Change Colombia
BY STIG ARILD PETTERSEN The smiling face of a tanned young woman with short black hair suddenly peeps out of the apartment door next to the bell I’ve just rung. She’s Olga and I’m Stig and we’re both happy to…