Yasmin Alibhai-Brown - Career and Views

Career and Views

A journalist on the New Statesman magazine in the early 1980s, Alibhai-Brown now contributes a weekly column to The Independent. She has also written for The Guardian, The Observer, The New York Times, Time magazine, Newsweek and the Daily Mail, and has appeared on the current affairs TV shows Dateline London and The Wright Stuff. Alibhai-Brown has won numerous awards for her journalism, including the EMMA Media Personality of the Year in 2000, the George Orwell Prize for Political Journalism in 2002 and the EMMA Award for Journalism in 2004.

Alibhai-Brown was a research fellow at the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR), a think tank associated with New Labour, from 1996 to 2001, though she ended her connection with the Labour Party over the war in Iraq and other issues, and supported the Liberal Democrats in the 2005 and 2010 general elections. She is Senior Research Associate at the Foreign Policy Centre, an Honorary Fellow at Liverpool John Moores University and Honorary Visiting Professor at Cardiff and Lincoln Universities.

Alibhai-Brown was appointed to the Order of the British Empire (MBE) in 2001, but in 2003 Benjamin Zephaniah's public refusal of an OBE inspired her to return the award. She wrote that her decision had been made partly in a growing spirit of republicanism and partly in protest at the Labour government, particularly its conduct of the war in Iraq, and has since criticised the British honours system as "beyond repair".

In May 2011, Alibhai-Brown wrote in the Independent that Muslims and others should stop focusing solely on the wrongdoings of Israel, saying that, "We Muslims need to accept our burdens too." She also said that, "It is no longer morally justifiable for activists to target only Israel and either ignore or find excuses for corrupt, murderous Arab despots. That kind of selectivity discredits pro-Palestinian campaigners and dishonours the principles of equality and human rights." Brown previously condemned ethnic minority campaigners against racism failing to mention white victims of racially motivated crimes, suggesting they were guilty of double standards. Highlighting cases such as the murder of Ross Parker, Alibhai-Brown wrote: "Our values are worthless unless all victims of these senseless deaths matter equally", adding "to treat some victims as more worthy of condemnation than others is unforgivable and a betrayal of anti-racism itself".