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Today, like millions of people in the world, I walked to defend our democracies' values. I took the streets in Périgueux having decorated my bag with the words "Je Suis Charlie" especially for the occasion. This walk meant so many different things to me. People walked to honour the memory of the 17 victims of different terrorist attacks, to show the world they care, to defend freedom of speech, freedom of thought, freedom of cult, people stood together as one in Paris and several other cities in France and the world. Today millions of people were Charlie. As well as regular citizens, 50 country representatives joined the French president, François Hollande, in Paris to show their support to France. Among them were representatives of Greece, Israel, Algeria, Turkey, Egypt, Palestine, the Emirates, all of which walked arm in arm in the name of Freedom of speech. All day in the press I heard no mention of the 12 Palestinian journalists who died in the last 4 weeks in ...

When talking about homophobia and horrible countries that pass anti-gay laws we often think about Putin's Russia, Uganda, Mugabe, and such. These places are more or less far and their society are perceived as traditional, old fashion, nothing like our Western society that is so amazing. Yet we needn't look so far from home... We forget homophobia is on the rise everywhere, even in Europe. I feel awful whenever I tell my girlfriend I can't hold her hand when we're walking in the centre of Brussels, the capital of Europe. She doesn't hold it against me but I get angry at our society where I can't feel safe because of who I love. A week after Kansas almost did the same but gave up at the last minute, Arizona passed a bill that would allow businesses to refuse to serve or give medical treatment to gays on religious grounds . First off if you want to get biblical, according to the scriptures, you should hate the sin, not the sinner (Matthew 5:43-44, 6:14-15, ...

"What is your name?" is always the first question I get when an official opens my passport in Israel, looking at me with this incredulous look on their face, eyebrows raised, waiting for my confirmation that my name is Surya which to them, pronounced the way my parents call me, sounds like the word for Syria in both Arabic and Hebrew. (What it really is, or the way my parents intended it anyway, is the sun ) Today I also learnt from someone that apparently, I look like what could be interpreted by many Israelis as a left-wing extremist student come to do activism in the country. And I certainly don't look like the typical intern that would walk into the office, which is a good thing. I do agree, I don't like looking like the norm, I like looking like what I want to look like. Anyway, I was in no way offended by this, I found it rather amusing and very insightful. I was told this, and it was later confirmed to me by someone else, as I said I was always detained at...