AS Europe reels from its debt disaster, and the Arab Spring turns into an exciting summer, Israel faces a crossroads. With its political house stagnating in a quagmire of right-wing coalitions, its leadership now finds itself out-of-step in the region, and besieged by imaginary demons such as Iran – a[…]

THE Protection of Information Bill or “Secrecy Bill” – its surreal passage through parliament now extended for a further two months – is an Orwellian creation befitting Animal Farm and 1984 as well as being a chilling shadow of the Apartheid era. As an attempt to re-write the clumsy Access[…]

The poem below was an answer to a challenge by colleague Irfaan Abrahams. “Write a poem for the inaugural Cape Slave in Cape Town hosted by Itheko Athletics Club,” he said. Sure. Except I forgot that I gave up trying to write verse over 20 years ago, realising that my[…]

THE other day on the Voice of the Cape radio station a maulana condemned a well-known Shaikh, a man regarded as a Grand Shaikh of the Naqshbandi Sufi Order. His central beef was that this Shaikh had supposedly claimed amongst other things – via a website – that he was[…]