P U L S E

I am a  journalist, writer and musician, born in Chitral, raised in Peshawar, living in Leicester. I have a doctorate in Sociology from the Strathclyde University in Glasgow, Scotland, where I lived for 8 years. Over the past 6 years I have lectured in sociology, politics, international relations, philosophy, journalism, religion, media and cultural studies at the Universities of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Sheffield and Stirling. Currently, I am a Senior Lecturer in International Journalism at De Montfort University in Leicester.

I write for Al Jazeera English, Le Monde Diplomatique, Asia Times, IPS News, and Political Insight. My writings have also appeared in Adbusters, Mondoweiss.net, Canadian Dimension, The Electronic Intifada, Variant, The Drouth, etc. I have appeared as an on-air analyst on Al Jazeera International, the BBC, and several Pacifica Radio channels.

I am the former captain of the American University in Dubai’s tennis team. In 2004, I was the co-winner of the University of Pittsburgh’s Dubai Jazz Talent Hunt, selected by a panel that included Larry Coryell and James Moody.

My favourite authors include Lev Tolstoy, William Faulkner, J.M. Coetzee, Ernest Hemingway, Gore Vidal, Kurt Vonnegut, Cormac McCarthy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Jose Saramago. My favourite playwrights are George Bernard Shaw, Tom Stoppard, Henrik Ibsen, and — of course — William Shakespeare. I love the films of John Ford, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood (as director), and Alejandro González Iñárritu.

Selected Journalism

• ‘Romney’s indiscreet advisor’, Al Jazeera, 28 October 2011.
• ‘Fighting back against the CIA drone war’, Al Jazeera, 30 July 2011.
• ‘Gunboats and Gurkhas in the American Imperium’, Al Jazeera, 14 July 2011.
• ‘The virtue-less war of the Nintendo bomber’, Al Jazeera, 28 June 2011.
• ‘Between a rock and a hard country’, IPS News, 20 June 2011.
• ‘The magical realism of body counts,’ Al Jazeera, 13 June 2011.
• ‘Insurgent Pakistan’, Political Insight, April 2010
• ‘Pakistan Creates its Own Enemy’, Le Monde Diplomatique, November 2009 (translations appeared in all foreign language editions in the December 2009 issue).
• ‘Why Paksitanis see US as a bigger threat’, Asia Times, 3 November 2009; Inter Press Service, 30 October 2009
• ‘Peshawar: A Journey Home’, Le Monde Diplomatique, 14 October 2009
• ‘The Darfur Deception’, The Electronic Intifada, 8 June 2009
• ‘The End of Israel’s Impunity?‘, Variant 34, Spring 2009
• ‘The way of Izvestia: The BBC’s nadir’, Counterpunch, 3 February 2009
• ‘Another Chorister for Israel (The BBC: Eyeless in Gaza)’, Adbusters, January 2009
• ‘Fortress Britain’, Variant, Number 32, Summer 2008
• “Anyone Can Go to Baghdad, Real Men Go to Tehran”, Variant, Number 28, Spring 2007
• ‘The Friendly Atom’, Variant, Number 28, Spring 2007
• ‘Baker-Hamilton and the Myth of the Oil War’, Antiwar.com, December 17, 2006
• ‘Motive and Precedent in the Gemayel Assassination’, Spinwatch, November 28, 2006; Dissident Voice, November 30, 2006
• ‘Manufacturing Discontent: The Case of the Danish Cartoons’, The Drouth, Summer 2006
• ‘Behind the Façade of Israel-Pakistan Rapprochement’, Spinwatch, April 20, 2006; Scoop (New Zealand), April 26, 2006

Reviews

• Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven, IPS News, 20 June 2011.
• Shadow Elite by Janine Wedel, IPS News, 26 May 2010
• Resurrecting America’s Defense Line by Grant F. Smith, The Electronic Intifada, 1 May 2009
• A World of Trouble: America in the Middle East by Patrick Tyler, The Electronic Intifada, 13 April 2009
• Humanitarian Imperialism: Using Human Rights to Sell War by Jean Bricmont, Canadian Dimension, November/December 2008
• Beyond the Green Zone: Dispatches from an Unembedded Journalist in Occupied Iraq by Dahr Jamail, Indymedia UK, 10 September 2007; Spinwatch, 11 September 2007
• Israel-Palestine on Record: How the “New York Times” Misreports Conflict in the Middle East (Richard Falk and Howard Friel), Spinwatch, 24 June 2007
• Challenging the New Orientalism: Dissenting Essays on the “War Against Islam” (M. Shahid Alam), Scoop (New Zealand), March 13, 2007
• Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid (Jimmy Carter), Spinwatch, January 25, 2007
• US Foreign Policy in the Middle East (Janice J. Terry), Spinwatch, January 18, 2007
• The Politics of Denial (Nur Masalha), Spinwatch, January 16, 2007
• The Power of Israel in the United States (James Petras), Spinwatch, Janauary 15, 2007
• The Record of the Paper: How the New York Times Misreports US Foreign Policy (Howard Friel & Richard Falk), Spinwatch, November 14, 2006

Films

• Iraq in Fragments (James Longley), Electronic Iraq, January 30, 2007