Noor Salahuddin

We live in the age of over-sharing. Anyone and everyone with access to the internet can post whatever they feel like and blast it to their followers on Twitter or friends on Facebook in a matter of seconds. While this new-found freedom of expression has its benefits, it most definitely has its failings too. Anyone with five minutes and a...

Is Pakistan truly a democracy? In order to answer that question, one has to explore what democracy means. According to the Merriam Webster dictionary, democracy is defined as: “a government in which the supreme power is vested in the people and exercised by them directly or indirectly through a system of representation usually involving periodically held free elections.” So, for Pakistan to truly...

As a Pakistani-American connected with her roots, I feel strongly about the political and socioeconomic situation in the country. With the general election approaching on May 13th, Pakistanis at home and abroad are closely following updates and news reports about the political happenings there. Most Pakistanis are certain they want a drastic change from the status quo with unemployment...

The International Criminal Court was established in 1998 to prosecute war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression, under the Rome Statute. Based in the Hague, Netherlands, the ICC has till date worked on eight cases, all of which originated in African nations. Today, 122 nations are party to the ICC, including half of the African and all...

On February 14th, paralympian Oscar Pistorius, South Africa’s sprint runner and sports star, was charged with murdering his girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp. What makes this case especially intriguing is that Pistorius uses custom-made “running blades.” Born with fibular hemimelia (absence of fibula in both legs), Pistorius underwent an amputation at the age of 11, and has since used prosthetic legs to...

The night of December 16th, a 23-year-old medical student named Jyoti Singh Pandey and her male friend boarded a bus to take them home after watching Life of Pi in Delhi, India’s capital. The six men already on board the bus, including the driver, beat the girl and her friend with a metal rod for more than an hour, gang-raped...

"This has been my dream ever since I was a kid." Noor Tagouri, a 19-year-old college student, wants to become the first Muslim hijabi anchorwoman in America. Two weeks ago, she was a relatively unknown entity on Facebook who posted a picture of herself sitting at the presenter's desk at ABC News. Since then, Tagouri has become somewhat of a...

I started watching Homeland, knowing that the high-energy political thriller had won critical acclaim and several Emmys last month. I got hooked right away - pulled in by the fast-paced story, compelling performances, and the unrelenting tension between the “good guys” and the “bad guys” – as they are so aptly called in the show. As a viewer, I...

I would like to start off by stating that there is no excuse and no justification for violence against innocent civilians. I am not here to act as an apologist for violence or criminal behavior of any sort whatsoever. This is an attempt to gain understanding of the supposedly inexplicable and largely violent reaction from so many Muslim countries...

Recently, I read an article in the New York Times, titled “Syrian Children Offer Glimpse of a Future of Reprisals." In it, David Kilpatrick wrote of the hundreds of Syrian children in Jordan’s Zataari camp who are forced to spend their days in tents, away from home, without the food, shelter, and education they desperately need. Mr. Kilpatrick’s thesis was...