Interviews

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Canada’s reputation as a cultural mosaic that enables the mingling of people from different backgrounds and pedigrees and empowers them to actualize their potentials has been a popular attraction for the dreamers aspiring to live more dignified lives in a country that values their capabilities and offers them opportunities for growth. The Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, in power since 2015, has been endeavoring to depict Canada as a welcoming nation that is receptive to skilled labor force and international students planning to transform their future in a multicultural, inspiring environment, and happy to shelter refugees fleeing persecution, war and insecurity at home. But contrary to the conventional...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: A convoluted conflict that has triggered the world’s worst humanitarian crisis, the war in Yemen is now in its seventh year, with a staggering death toll of more than 100,000 and dire economic repercussions that have made life in the most impoverished Arab nation additionally painful. International efforts to extinguish the conflict have so far made little success and humanitarian assistance is supplied with great difficulty. Nearly 24 million Yemenis, constituting four fifths of the entire population, require urgent humanitarian aid. A child dies every 10 minutes due to malnutrition or disease, and the country’s health sector, reeling from a massive loss of human capital and demolition of infrastructure,...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: In 2020, a string of unprecedented extreme weather events across the globe highlighted the exigency of taking meaningful action to tackle the climate crisis more seriously than ever. From record rainfalls in Indonesia forcing some 62,000 people from their homes to wildfires in Australia killing nearly 3 billion animals and demolishing 3,000 homes, from the Chinese province of Yunnan reporting the worst drought in 10 years to devastating floods in Kenya and Uganda displacing at least 400,000 people, the twinge of the heating Earth and changing climate was felt excruciatingly. Experts say 2020 was an apocalyptic wildfire season, with the global direct cost of forest fires standing at USD17 billion. Aggregately,...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Islam is now the world’s second largest religion after Christianity and the fastest-growing faith tradition globally. Spiraling fear of, and antipathy toward Muslims, which some scholars argue is a historical phenomenon with a pedigree stretching back to the 18th and 19th centuries, has been intensified and elevated to new heights in the recent decades, particularly with developments that have brought the Western civilization and the Muslim world into closer contact, including the rising tide of immigration from Muslim countries to Europe and North America in the late 20th century, and the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing project of War on Terror. A 2019 survey by the Pew Research Center found people in...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: On March 15, the International Day to Combat Islamophobia, the United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres voiced his concern over the spiraling surge of anti-Muslim discrimination and bigotry worldwide, calling on governments and stakeholders to play a more consequential role in containing this byzantine form of racism that has impaired harmony and stability in multicultural settings. As far-right discourses gain traction and ultra-nationalist politics pick up steam internationally, fissures between the Muslim communities and Western societies tend to become deeper and more resistant to healing. Throughout the European Union, aversion to Muslims is cropping up in a panoply of ways and shapes....

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Facts that corroborate the world is entangled in a climate emergency are abundant. Scientific evidence paints a clear and unambiguous picture of what lies ahead for the humanity: climate change is happening, it is almost entirely triggered by harmful anthropogenic activity, and in the decades to come, its impacts on human life will be scorching and at times irreversible. 2020, the second hottest year on record since 1880, witnessed unfortunate natural disasters almost unvaryingly linked to climate change. Record-setting wildfires engulfing Australia, California, Brazil and Siberia; an unprecedented hurricane season in the Atlantic marked by 30 named storms; massive floods overwhelming India and Bangladesh,...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Nearly 73 years after it began to unleash havoc on the Middle East, little has changed in the dynamics of the intractable Israeli-Palestinian conflict. World powers and international organizations seem to have thrown in the towel, conceding that they are incapable of remedying the impasse, and as time goes by, diplomacy and fence-mending prove more evasive. In the final days of the US administration of Donald Trump, the dawning of the Abraham Accords, through which a handful of Arab countries initiated diplomatic relations with Israel, offered solace to the Jewish state, boosting its foothold at the doorstep of its arch-nemesis, Iran. To the Palestinians scrambling for sovereignty, though, the...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s Guardian Council, the powerful body in charge of electoral oversight, caught the public by surprise by announcing that women may run for the presidency in the 2021 polls that will decide the successor to Hassan Rouhani. Some women’s rights activists welcomed the announcement as a harbinger of change in a highly conservative, patriarchal society. Others suggested the gesture was grandstanding by the government to draw more voters to the ballot box and polish its image. More than 60% of university students in Iran are female. Some of the country’s most brilliant authors, academicians, scientists, artists, philanthropists and media personalities are women. Global examples are 2003 Nobel...

Kourosh Ziabari - Fair Observer: Ever since his inauguration in 2017, US President Donald Trump has placed an emphasis on unilateralism and the rejection of international organizations and treaties as the hallmarks of his foreign policy. Trump has assumed an aggressive modus operandi in dealing with US partners worldwide and alienated many allies. He repealed US participation in the UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, the 2015 Paris Climate Accord, the Treaty on Open Skies, the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, and the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). Even in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, he pulled the US out of the World Health Organization. The president has pledged to draw an end to the “forever...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: With less than two weeks to the US presidential election, Iranians, like much of the world, are carefully watching the heated contest between the incumbent Donald Trump and his Democratic rival Joe Biden, who has opened up significant leads in the pre-election polls and many observers say has the potential to make the Republican president a one-termer. Although foreign policy is not usually a determining factor in how the American people elect politicians, the outcome of the November 3 ballot will have reverberations beyond the US borders, and America’s friends and foes have already begun contemplating the contours of their future relations with the United States under the two possible scenarios:...

Kourosh Ziabari - ODVV: Conflict in Yemen, one of the most impoverished nations on the face of the earth, is well into its sixth year. The United Nations has warned about the acuteness of the world’s biggest humanitarian emergency gripping the Arab country owing to a multisided fighting that has not yet subsided despite intervention by global powers and international organizations. The combined death toll from the conflict, hunger, diseases and lack of health facilities has surpassed 235,000 while nearly 20 million people, representing around 70 percent of the population, suffer from sever hunger, including 2 million children under five who are critically malnourished. University of Denver researchers estimate the ongoing war...

Kourosh Ziabari - Asia Times: Iran’s economy has never been more vulnerable and fragile. Last month, President Hassan Rouhani complained that the United States has been waging an “economic warfare” against Iran by slapping sanctions on the country’s energy, finance, banking, industrial and shipping sectors. In a bid to isolate Iran further, amputate the remaining ties between its financial institutions and the global banking system and prohibit the access of the government in Tehran to much-needed hard currency, the United States on Thursday introduced a new set of sweeping sanctions targeting 18 Iranian banks that were not previously targeted with punitive measures. Cyrus Bina is a distinguished research professor of...