Tarek Fatah2013-05-24T02:04:30-04:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.ca/author/index.php?author=tarek-fatahCopyright 2008, HuffingtonPost.com, Inc.HuffingtonPost Blogger Feed for Tarek FatahGood old fashioned elbow grease.U.K. Beheading Shows: It's Time To Fight the Doctrine of Jihadtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.33253632013-05-23T09:45:42-04:002013-05-23T16:15:11-04:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
In that the jihadis were successful.
One would have expected the British authorities to not just hunt down the terrorists, but also to fight the cancer of Islamism that lies at the ideological roots of jihadi terrorism. Instead, successive governments in London have tried to pussyfoot around the challenge, hoping the jihadi terrorists and their ideology would melt away with time as Downing Street funded so-called "moderate" Muslim groups and "former" extremists to do the government's bidding.
As the brutal hacking death of a British soldier by two fearless jihadis chanting "Allah O Akbar" has shown, this strategy has failed. Muslims who see the West as the enemy and seek its destruction have become even more emboldened by the lack of resolve, which they see as cowardice. In addition, jihadis in the U.K. are no longer restricted to the second generation Pakistani Britons; they now come from places as far apart as Chechnya and Nigeria.
While the run-of-the-mill jihadi terror attack relies on suicide bombers and remote-controlled improvised explosive devices, Wednesday's attack came straight from medieval times, with the two jihadis using knives and cleavers to hack away at the victim and then beheading him. If this was not enough, they played to the gallery, demanding they be filmed as they chatted with passers-by, proudly defending their actions and promising more attacks on non-Muslims to come.
If the latest act of jihadi terror was different in nature, the reaction by mainstream Islamic groups and prominent Muslims in Britain was not. It was exactly the same as it has been after every tragic incident. Old press releases were brushed off and sent afresh to the media.
While ordinary Britons and non-Muslims around the world are bewildered by these never-ending acts of terrorism, the response of the leaders of the Islamic community is the tired old cliche -- Islam is a religion of peace, and jihad is simply an "inner struggle."
The fact these terrorists are motivated by one powerful belief -- the doctrine of armed jihad against the "kuffar" (non-Muslims) -- is disingenuously denied by Islamic clerics and leaders.
Yesterday, instead of calling on Muslims to shelve the doctrine of armed jihad, predictably, the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) issued a quick press release claiming the "barbaric" attack has "no basis in Islam."
Not true, MCB. As a Muslim, I can say without fear, the latest terror attack has a basis in Islam and it's time for us Muslims to dig our heads out of the sand.
Hundreds of British Muslims tweeted their condemnation of the act, but not one individual or organization had the courage to point out and admit the fact Sharia-backed doctrine of armed jihad does permit holy war on non-Muslims, specially in the land of the "kufaar."
This was an opportunity for the Muslim leadership to confess they have failed and that the time has come to admit that jihadis cannot be fought without fighting the doctrine of jihad.
It is worth noting that not a single Muslim cleric since 9/11 has mustered the courage to say the doctrine of armed jihad is defunct and inapplicable in the 21st century. They rightfully denounce terrorism, but dare not denounce jihad.
On the contrary, we keep hearing the propaganda that "Jihad" has nothing to do with warfare. Here is what the "Shorter Encyclopedia of Islam" has to say about Jihad:
The only Muslim group that has come to this conclusion are Ahmadi Muslims, whose founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad in the nineteenth century had the wisdom to declare:
For uttering these words, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad was deemed to have blasphemed and was declared an apostate by the orthodoxy in Islam; the same school of thought that provides intellectual sustenance to the Muslim establishment in the West today.
The armed jihad launched against the infidels, is clearly promoted by the 20th-century writings of such Islamists as Syed Qutb and Hassan al-Banna of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood and the late Syed Maudoodi of Jamaat-e-Islami of Indo-Pakistan.
In his book Towards Understanding Islam, Maudoodi exhorts ordinary Muslims to launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims. "Jihad is part of this overall defence of Islam," he writes. In case the reader is left with any doubt about the meaning of the word "jihad," Maudoodi clarifies:
"In the language of the Divine Law, this word (jihad) is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims."
Maudoodi goes on to label Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:
"Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful. He is plainly a hypocrite who fails in the test of sincerity and all his acts of worship are a sham, a worthless, hollow show of deception."
If Maudoodi's exhortations are not enough to motivate Muslims to conduct acts of terror, we have the words of the late Hassan al-Banna being distributed in our schools and universities. Al-Banna makes it quite clear that the word "jihad" means armed conflict. He mocks those who claim jihad is merely an internal struggle.
Al-Banna says this redefinition of the term "jihad" to depict it as a non-violent act of self-examination, is in fact a conspiracy so that "Muslims should become negligent."
And here is what Syed Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, writes in his seminal work on Islam and its relationship with the West, Milestones:
"A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it (non-Muslim country), whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located."
Unless the leaders of British mosques as well as the Islamic organizations in the U.K. denounce the doctrine of jihad as pronounced by the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, and distance themselves from the ideology of Qutb, al-Banna and Maudoodi, they stand complicit in the havoc that these jihadis are raining down on the rest of us.
They cannot have it both ways: promoting the teachings of Maududi and Qutb among Muslim youth, while concealing the same teachings from the rest of Britain.
]]>While Jihadi Terrorists Plan Our Murder, the West Remains Paralyzedtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.31380462013-04-23T17:22:35-04:002013-04-23T17:18:56-04:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
In the fight against the "malaria" of this jihadism, Obama and the West have been successful in killing many of the top "mosquitoes" including OBL, but their reluctance to drain the swamps for fear of offending the swamp keepers -- Pakistan and Saudi Arabia -- has ensured every jihadi terrorist killed leaves behind enough larvae to harvest millions more.
From the attack in Algeria involving Canadians to the Boston and Bangalore bombings and now the Canadian alleged Via Rail terror plot, there is no sign that the worldwide jihad launched against the "kufaar" (non-Muslims) is going to abate in the near future.
The effort against jihadi terror is further handicapped by the conventional wisdom prevalent in most of the West that suggests some sort of appeasement will let us off the hook.
Just look at the way the RCMP handled the latest terror plot. They invited most of Canada's Islamist leadership, mosque leaders and clerics to a private briefing on the impending announcement of arrests, but shut the doors to Muslim organizations like the Muslim Canadian Congress and the Somali Canadian Congress that are actively fighting the jihadi ideology inside Canada.
Not only were liberal and secular Muslims shunned by the RCMP, one witness at the briefing tells me that the Islamic clerics at the meeting loudly protested any time the RCMP press release referred to the suspects as Muslim.
One of the participants who wishes to remain unnamed said, "the imams stood up and started protesting in an aggressive manner, demanding the RCMP change the text of their press release and not distribute it until they had approved it."
The leadership of the Islamic communities continues to believe that by simply bullying, and playing the race and victim card, they will be able to stem the anger against Islamic terror. But you can only fool so many for so long.
I was in India when I learned of the Boston bombing. What shocked me was how the terror attack was celebrated on the Facebook fan page of one of India's leading Islamist politicians, Akbaruddin Owaisi.
The first comment about the Boston deaths was "Very Good." Another exclaimed, "Allah hu akbar." The response from the administrator of the "Akbaruddin Owaisi -- Youth Icon" page was at first glance, quite reassuring... until the Jews were slammed:
"Innocent people killed in this, so sad...US is rule by jews (sic)".
And in Inspire, the English-language online magazine of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), some jihadis expressed jubilation. One wrote on the Shumoukh Al-Islam forum that even if it turns out that Al-Qaeda (i.e., AQAP) was not behind the attack, the mere possibility that someone out there might have used information from Inspire to carry out the attack is itself an achievement for Al-Qaeda. He went on to consider what would happen if similar IEDs were to be placed in stadiums and movie theatres.
Another jihadi on Shumoukh, "Turkestan1," posted graphic images of the aftermath of the Boston bombing, including one of a young man with both legs blown off being rushed from the scene; on this image, he commented, "Best image from Boston explosions."
On the Ansar Al-Mujahideen English Forum (AMEF), jihadis welcomed the attack, calling it "great news," and prayed that it was "the result of planning from our Mujahideen and Ansaar [i.e. supporters]."
While the online jihadis celebrated, others were busy creating a smokescreen. In a panel discussion on India's NDTV a professor of Islamic Studies at India's Jamia Milli Islamia University told me I was wrong in my assessment of the attack:
"It is not certain that these people are Jihadis."
Prof Akhtarul Wasey, who is a prominent Indian Muslims scholar and who was instrumental in shutting down my talk at his university, then went on to repeat the now familiar mantra of every Islamic leader:
"This [bombing in Boston] is not jihad... jihad is waged against oneself."
Prof. Wasey is not alone. Across the globe, apologists of Islamism have repeated this line ad nauseum -- Jihad is not holy Islamic war, but rather a struggle of a Muslim against his own self.
The trouble is this explanation is not true, yet is repeatedly emphasized to journalists as means of deflecting the real challenge while leaving the non-Muslim either confused or bitter.
To understand the conventional and political meaning of the word "jihad," we need to go to the sources of political Islam or Islamism. In his book Towards Understanding Islam, the late Syed Maudoodi, the Benito Mussolini of the world Islamofascist movement, exhorts ordinary Muslims to wage war and launch jihad, as in armed struggle, against non-Muslims.
Maududi clarifies:
"Jihad is part of this overall defence of Islam," he writes. In case the reader is left with any doubt about the meaning of the word 'jihad.' In the language of the Divine Law, this word (jihad) is used specifically for the war that is waged solely in the name of God against those who perpetrate oppression as enemies of Islam. This supreme sacrifice is the responsibility of all Muslims."
Maududi goes on to label Muslims who refuse the call to armed jihad as apostates:
"Jihad is as much a primary duty as are daily prayers or fasting. One who avoids it is a sinner. His every claim to being a Muslim is doubtful. He is plainly a hypocrite who fails in the test of sincerity and all his acts of worship are a sham, a worthless, hollow show of deception."
If Maududi's exhortations are not enough to motivate Muslims to conduct acts of terror, we have the words of the late Hassan al-Banna being distributed in our schools and universities. Al-Banna makes it quite clear that the word "jihad" means armed conflict. He mocks those who claim jihad is merely an internal struggle. Al-Banna says this redefinition of the term "jihad" is a conspiracy so that "Muslims should become negligent."
And here is what Syed Qutb, another Egyptian stalwart of the Islamist movement and the Muslim Brotherhood, writes in his seminal work on Islam and its relationship with the West, Milestones:
"A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it [a non-Muslim country], whether it be his birthplace or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located."
If the Indian professor was playing word games with me to throw a smokescreen over hard facts, a cleric in Egypt was more forthcoming.
In an interview on Tahrir TV on April 16, 2013, Egyptian cleric Sheikh Murgan Salem told the host:
"Obviously, I do not know who carried out that operation, but if it was done by the mujahedeen [jihadis], it serves as a message to America and the West: We are still alive. Contrary to what you say, we have not died. The [Americans] wanted to send a message to the entire world that they had finished off the mujahedeen -- not just the mujahedeen of Al-Qaeda, but the mujahedeen all over the world. I do not know who carried out this attack, but if it was indeed the mujahedeen, it was meant as a clear message to America and to the West."
While the jihadi terrorists plan our murder, it seems the West is paralyzed and unable to muster the courage to stand up to the ideology of jihad and confront it with vigour.
Liberal leader Justin Trudeau may be searching for "root causes," but some of us Muslims who are not blinded by a hate of the West know the root cause is Islamism -- political Islam -- that seeks to destroy the West and establish an Islamic supremacist caliphate.
Far fetched, you may say, but who would have believed in the days after 9/11 that 12 years later the enemy would still be able to strike inside our country, a feat even the Nazis could not accomplish?
Its time to pay attention to the likes of Andrew McCarthy, the man who headed the 1995 terrorism prosecution against Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and 11 others.
Last week McCarthy wrote:
"We are in a war driven by ideology. 'Violent extremism,' which is the label the government and the commentariat prefer to put on our enemies, is not an ideology -- it is the brutality that radical ideologies yield. Our enemies' ideology is Islamic supremacism. To challenge and defeat an ideological movement, you have to understand and confront their vision of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and biases will not do. Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian nation-states. They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames matters as Dar al-Islam versus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war -- which is everyone and everyplace else."
]]>Pakistan: A Bloody Terror to Itself and the Westtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2013:/theblog//3.24624822013-01-13T00:00:55-05:002013-03-14T05:12:01-04:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/ coffins to block a road to protest the slaughter of Shia Muslims by Sunni Muslim terrorists allied with the Taliban.
On Thursday night, January 10, twin bombings targeting Pakistan's tiniest ethnic minority, the Hazaras -- descendants of Central Asians and who are distinguished easily by their unique facial features -- killed over 100 young men at a snooker club.
The attack was the latest in a slow-motion genocide of minority Shia Muslims in Pakistan by Sunni-Muslim extremists who consider the Shia as infidels, thus worthy of death. Many attacks against Shia Muslims are carried out by Lashkar-e-Jhangvi (LeJ), a militant Islamic group allied with al-Qaida and the Taliban. This time too the LeJ promptly claimed responsibility for the slaughter
So far the Hazaras have endured every killing and attack with silent suffering, hoping their lack of response would be rewarded by a cessation of targeted attacks. But not this time.
The sight of 100 mangled bodies, including that of Pakistan's leading Shia youth activist for human rights, Khudi Ali seems to be the straw that broke the camel's back.
Instead of burying the dead, as is required by Islamic law, the Hazara Shia Muslims have taken the coffins to the streets and refused to bury the deceased unless the government assures them of protection against jihadi groups tied to the Taliban.
For over 24 hours now the Hazara Shias of Quetta have braved sub-zero temperatures that dropped to -10C, and are refusing to vacate the blocked road or to bury the dead. So far there has been total inaction by all levels of government. Frightened by the Islamic terrorists, it seems the country's president, prime minister and the provincial chief minister, have all cowered down in their respective shelters, not knowing if it would be safe, exposing themselves among the ordinary mourning Hazaras.
Although the Baloch nationalists seeking separation from Pakistan are sympathetic to the plight of the Hazara Shia and make common cause against the Taliban, they view the demand for military intervention with justified suspicion and cynicism. One Baloch activist summed it best when he tweeted:
If Pakistan's men in uniform wished to help, they could easily cut off all ties to the jihadi terrorists and liquidate them. Instead, they perform a strip-tease for America and the Pakistani population, acting as if they are fighting the jihadis while giving the Taliban leadership of Mulla Omar shelter in Quetta.
Destabilizing Pakistan before an election
The fresh slaughter of the Shia in Pakistan comes in the wake of other events unfolding in Pakistan that seem to suggest its part of an attempt to destabilize the country and thwart parliamentary elections due in a few months.
Clashes with Indian Army on the volatile Kashmir border plus a planned "long-march" by a Tahir-ul-Qadri, Sunni cleric who has arrived from Canada, point to a concerted effort to pave way for the military to step in and take over as an "interim government" to conduct "proper" elections -- a tactic used in the past by army commanders.
The Sunni Islamic terrorists of the LeJ, who proudly claimed responsibility for the Thursday night massacre, are a product of the Pakistan Army in its strategy to use non-state actors to create mayhem in India and Afghanistan. No one will be surprised if it turns out the latest slaughter of Shias was merely one act in the larger theatrical play to bring democracy into disrepute and making it palpable to endure another phase of military authoritarianism in Pakistan.
No matter how this play unfolds, the Pakistan created by a Shia Muslim, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, today lies in ruins, being torn apart as vultures gnaw at its carcass. It was near Quetta, Balochistan that MA Jinnah came to die and it is perhaps Balochistan where the country he created will finally unravel into dust.
Had it not been a nuclear power with 200 missiles pointed at India and unknown western interests in the region, we could have shrugged off the failed experiment. But Pakistan today needs to be watched as the single largest source of anti-Western terrorism and the nurturing ground for the ideology of global jihad.
The Shia and Ahmadi Muslims that are being killed, together with Pakistan's beleaguered Hindu minority as well as traumatized Christian community, should be seen as canaries in the mine. In their demise is a warning to the rest of us. A nuclear power is about to collapse.
---
This blog was first published in the on-line magazine, The Baloch Hal]]>A Dark Christmas in Balochistantag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.23702062012-12-27T16:40:30-05:002013-02-26T05:12:01-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
Most of the country was distracted by the frenzy of a cricket match against rival India, while its tiny Christian population was observing one of their darkest years ever.
But the condition of Pakistan's Christians on this, their "dark Christmas," paled when compared to what was unfolding in the country's southwest region at the mouth of the Persian Gulf.
In fact, on Christmas Eve, the Pakistan Army launched a military operation in Balochistan that resulted in a massacre in the city of Mashkay.
Balochistan is home to a 60-year-old, on-again, off-again armed insurrection fought by three generations of guerrillas seeking independence from Islamabad's clutches. Deccan Walsh of the Guardian describes the conflict as "Pakistan's secret dirty war."
While the world observed Christmas and Pakistanis were glued to their TV sets watching cricket, Pakistan troops in armoured personal carriers backed by helicopter gunships circled the town and claimed the FC (Frontier Corps) had "killed many BLF [Baloch Liberation Front] men." Baloch politicians, bloggers and exiles, however, claimed the army action resulted in the death of 32 civilians.
The Pakistan Military claims Mashkay had harboured guerrillas of the Balochistan Liberation Front (BLF). The fact is, Mashkay is the hometown of the leader of the BLF guerrillas, physician Dr. Allah Nazar, who has given up his practice and has fled to the mountains from where he and his group of mostly urban nationalist youth have staged hit-and-run attacks on army checkpoints.
The Pakistan Army, frustrated by its inability to quell the rebellion that has widespread support among the civilians of Balochistan, has now resorted to tactics of the U.S. Military in Vietnam, where entire villages were destroyed if it was suspected they had given sanctuary to the Viet Minh and later the Viet Cong.
In the adjoining village of Mehi, birthplace of Dr. Nazar, the army is said to have expelled the population and set fire to several mud huts.
Sporadic protests against the military operation have taken place in Pakistan's major cities, but most of the country stays unaware of the massacres taking place in Balochistan, where over 14,000 young men have died or have disappeared in the last 10 years of conflict that has seen the assassination of many political leaders while others have fled the country into self-imposed exile.
The most significant reaction came from the former chief minister of Balochistan, Akhtar Mengal who also heads the Balochistan National Party (BNP) and seeks a peaceful settlement.
Mengal has written to Senator John Kerry, chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the next U.S. Secretary of State, asking him to invoke "The Enhanced Partnership with Pakistan Act of 2009," to immediately suspend all American aid to Islamabad. Mengal is referring to the U.S. law that carries John Kerry's name and is better known as the Kerry-Lugar Bill.
It authorizes the release of $1.5-billion per year of American aid to the government of Pakistan, but with one caveat: Every six months the Secretary of State has to provide assessments of whether Pakistan's civilian government has effective control over the country's armed forces, including "oversight and approval of military budgets."
In the letter, former chief minister Mengal told Senator Kerry, "there is clear evidence that Pakistan's civilian government has lost 'effective control and oversight' over a military that is committing widespread atrocities and war crimes inside Balochistan."
Other exiled leaders in Toronto, London, Geneva and Dubai have expressed alarm at the Christmas Day campaign that is still underway, with no coverage in any of the national or international media.
Zaffar Baloch, President of the Baloch Human Rights Council (BHRC) in Canada, condemned the Pakistan Army's operation in Mashkay, Balochistan, saying it "is part of a broader plan of action to curtail the freedom struggle of the Baloch nation... and inflict a slow-motion genocide on the Baloch people," echoing the words of scholar Selig Harrison in Le Monde.
One tweet from an exile in Dublin, Ireland summed up the frustration of the Baloch. Faiz Baloch tweeted:
"Dear America, your recent $700 million aid to Pakistan will be used for death & destruction in Balochistan. Jets bombarding from last 3 days."
]]>For Malala: The Girl who Brought Canada Togethertag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.21759832012-11-22T17:39:05-05:002013-01-22T05:12:01-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/Change.org, we got every single party leader to get behind the campaign to unanimously nominate Malala Yousufzai for the 2013 Nobel Peace Prize.
Sitting at my breakfast table on Sunday, October 12, when I started the online petition I had hoped for a few hundred signatures and maybe find one or two politicians to nominate Malala. I had never imagined that not one, but all of our federal parties and leaders, including the Prime Minister, who hardly ever agree on anything, would end up supporting the campaign to support a girl halfway around the world.
Here is what they had to say:
"Laureen and I are pleased to support Malala Yousufzai, a determined young woman who has done so much to promote education and women's rights in her native Pakistan. All Canadians salute her courage and tenacity and wish her well in her recovery." - Prime Minister Stephen Harper
"Around the world, from country to country, we are seeing the emergence of a growing movement in support of Malala...(She) is an inspiration to us all."
- Liberal Party Leader Bob Rae
"I am so inspired by her bravery and idealism. We must all re-commit to ensure the rights of all women and girls."
- Green Party Leader Elizabeth May
"Tens of thousands of Canadians, Quebeckers and people from other countries have signed this petition. Malala's courage and tenacity have inspired people around the world and awarding her the Nobel Peace Prize would take us one step closer towards a more peaceful and just society."
- Bloc Quebecois Leader Daniel Paillé
Guess what else we did?
We started a global phenomenon. Canadians have inspired people from all around the world to start "Nobel for Malala" campaigns in their own countries. Petition pages have gone up in the U.K., Pakistan, France, India, Italy, Germany, Ireland, and more are on the way.
The counter on all of the pages reflects the cumulative efforts of these petitions from around the world. Over 160,000 people have signed the petition!
As it says in the petition, getting Malala nominated was only the first step. We still need to get as many signatures as possible to:
Encourage political leaders in all of the other countries to support the campaign.
Show the Nobel Foundation how important it is for them to select Malala for the Nobel Peace Prize.
For these reasons we hope that you will ask your friends and family to keep signing. Click here to share the petition on Facebook.
Together, we've accomplished something very special and I know that by continuing to work with girls' education supporters around the world we can get Malala the Nobel Peace Prize. Moreover, we will send this message to the Taliban who tried to assassinate her: you cannot bully and terrorize little girls and get away with it. The whole world is watching.
]]>Ontario's Queen's Park Set to Welcome an Annual Hate Festtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17716902012-08-14T05:14:51-04:002012-10-14T05:12:02-04:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
Canadians who take their cue not from our constitution or the values we have developed over the past 400 years of western civilization, but from the words of a hate-monger whose sinister image to this day instils fear and casts a shadow of misery wherever his tentacles reach.
Indeed, there are such Canadians, and on Aug. 18 they'll defile the lawns of the Ontario Legislature to rally to the call of Ayatollah Khomeini for the destruction of the State of Israel -- the observance of "Al-Quds Day."
Khomeini first introduced Al Quds Day rallies in Iran in 1979, ostensibly to show solidarity with the rights of Palestinians.
However, the real agenda was to undermine and sabotage the Camp David Accords signed by Egyptian President Anwar El Sadat and Israeli Prime Minister Menachem Begin on Sept. 17, 1978.
Khomeini's message was not one of peace and reconciliation. He was not fighting for the right of the Palestinians for a state of their own, at peace with Israel. In fact, he declared:
Palestine merely became the fig leaf behind which Khomeini and his fellow Islamists -- ranging from Shia Hezbollah to the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood -- camouflaged their deep-seated Jewish hatred.
This is why most of the people who attend these rallies are not Palestinian or Iranians, but Shia Pakistanis, radical backers of the Muslim Brotherhood, pro- Hezbollah Lebanese and a scattering of left-wing useful idiots.
Last year when this motley crew of Khomeini cheerleaders descended on Queen's Park, they were led by a lifetime backer of the Iranian Islamic regime and a fan of Osama bin Laden, Zafar Bangash.
Mocking U.S. President Barack Obama as "that black man in the White House" and Israel as a "parasitical state," Bangash declared amid cheers of Allah O Akbar:
"Wherever you see injustice happening, understand that there is a 1%, 2% or 100% involvement of the 'Zionist Regime'. The same Zionist regime that sucks the resources, the blood that belong to the people all across the world.
"
These words are vintage hatred with barely concealed threats to eradicate the state of Israel from the map of the world. Seeped in anti-Semitism, such language had not accorded respect in the West after the 1940s, until now.
Dennis Clark, the Sergeant-at-Arms at Queen's Park, has given his blessing to this hate fest to continue in the tradition of last year, despite a year-long protest by human rights organizations.
A shameful decision that speaks of the lack of a spine among so many in positions of power, who when confronted with Islamist rhetoric simply succumb. The fear of being labelled as racist trumps all other concerns.
Lost in this is the question of the Palestinians. When will they see their independent state and live as free citizens like the rest of us? From East Timor to Eritrea; Bosnia to Bangladesh, countries have emerged from occupation, so why not Palestine?
It seems Iran and its Islamist puppets are the last people who wish to see an Independent Palestine. For if that ever happens, how will these anti-Semites satiate their hatred of the Jew?
-
*This column originally appeared in the Toronto SUN]]>Why Michelle Bachman Is Right to Question Muslim Brotherhoodtag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2012:/theblog//3.17073622012-07-27T12:31:25-04:002012-09-26T05:12:33-04:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
That request, however, backfired into a furious denunciation of the five, especially Rep. Michelle Bachmann, who is being depicted as a latter-day Joe McCarthy.
What upset U.S. lawmakers, ranging from Republican Sen. John McCain to Democrat Rep. Keith Ellison -- America's first Muslim congressman -- was Bachmann's reference to Hillary Clinton's deputy chief of staff, Huma Abedin, whose parents are said to have affiliations with organizations linked to the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood.
In the letter, the five members of Congress wrote:
"Given that the U.S. government has established in federal court that the Muslim Brotherhood's mission in the United States is 'destroying the Western civilization from within' -- a practice the Brothers call 'civilization jihad' -- we believe that the apparent involvement of those with such ties raises serious security concerns that warrant your urgent attention."
To put this in context, imagine a political aide to Henry Kissinger being the daughter of two members of the Soviet communist party politburo. There would have been hell to pay.
If the international communist movement posed an ideological threat to the foundational values of the USA and its allies, the challenge posed by the Islamofascist ideology of the jihadi movement is no less. Embedded across the Islamic world as political parties and terrorist groups, the most sophisticated manifestation of their activity is the role of the Jamaat-e-Islami in the Indo-Pakistan sub-continent and the Muslim Brotherhood in the Arab World, with both political movements active inside the United States, Canada and Europe.
So far the allegations about Huma Abedin's parents is coming from the Center for Security Policy headed by Frank Gaffney, the former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan Administration; an Egyptian newspaper al Liwaa al Arabi; Andrew McCarthy, the lead prosecutor at the 1995 World Trade Center terrorism trial, and some other right wing blogs. In summary, here is what they allege:
The father: Prof. Zainul Abedin
Huma's father, Syed Zainul Abedin moved from the US to Saudi Arabia in 1977 with his wife, Saleha, and their two-year-old daughter. In Jeddah, Prof Abedin founded the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), with offices in both Saudi Arabia, and London, England. In addition, he was a counselor of the Râbitat al-'Alam al-Islâmî, also known as the Muslim World League (MWL) during the 1980s. Both organisations were Islamist in nature and shared the philosophy of the Muslim Brotherhood. The senior Abedin died in 1993.
The mother: Prof. Saleha Abedin
Huma's mother Saleha Abedin took over IMMA after the death of her husband while serving as a Professor in the Department of Sociology, at King Abdul Aziz University in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. More recently, she has been part of the administration of Dar Al-Hekma Women's College, which she helped to create. Earlier this year the Egyptian newspaper al Liwaa al Arabi made the claim, Prof Saleha Abedin belongs to the Brotherhood's secret women's division known as the Muslim Sisterhood also known known as the International Women's Organization (IWO). Significantly, Huma Abedin's mother leads the Sisterhood alongside the wife of president Muhammad Mursi of Egypt.
This allegation may very well be untrue, but the fact remains the writings of Huma Abedin's mother in the IMMA journal are for all to read. In her work, Prof. Abedin promotes the Muslim Brotherhood Islamist ideology without any hesitation, and his harshly critical of western culture and civilization that ostensibly her daughter wishes to serve.
If there was any doubt about the extremist nature of the Muslim Brotherhood, it was cleared by FBI Director Robert Mueller who told a sitting of the US House Select Committee on Intelligence:
"I can say at the outset that elements of the Muslim Brotherhood, both here [USA] and overseas have supported terrorism. To the extent that I can provide information, I would be happy to do so in closed session, but it would be difficult to do it in open session."
It is therefore no surprise that some American lawmakers have raised the alarm about a jihadi anti-American political party having influence on U.S. foreign or domestic policies.
And if there was a single event that triggered suspicions the Muslim Brotherhood was influencing American foreign policy in the Middle East, it was at a congressional hearing in February 2011.
As stunned members of the U.S. Congress looked on in disbelief, the head of the U.S. Department of National Intelligence, James Clapper, portrayed the Muslim Brotherhood as a "largely secular" group.
What made the quote more disturbing was the fact Clapper was not caught making an off the cuff remark, but was relying on prepared notes. The question that remains unanswered is, who in the State Department or the White House prepared the briefing note for Clapper?
Had this been an isolated incident, it could easily be shrugged off, but it was not.
In April 2009, during the G20 Summit, while greeting Saudi King Abdullah, President Obama stooped low and took a deep bow to hold the monarch's outstretched palm with both of his hands. What was Obama thinking? Not even Pakistani rulers who live off Saudi largesse have ever shown such servitude.
Who advised Obama to subject himself and America to that humiliation?
The same year, Obama decided to reach out to the Muslim world. However, instead of going to Indonesia, which is the largest Muslim country and where the president was raised, he chose Egypt.
In Cairo he insisted that the Muslim Brotherhood be invited to hear him speak and that they be given prominent seating positions among the audience. In doing so, the American president sent a clear message that the U.S. was bestowing official recognition to a banned group as the true representatives of Muslims as against those Muslims who aspire a liberal secular democracy, free from the oppressive authoritarianism of medieval sharia law.
Who in his administration was responsible for according the Brotherhood recognition at the expense of other Muslim political parties?
If this gesture to the Brotherhood was not enough, in 2010 the State Department followed it with the lifting of a visa ban on Tariq Ramadan, a known supporter of the Muslim Brotherhood and grandson of Brotherhood founder, Hassan al-Banna. Someone, somewhere in the State Department and the White House made the decision to lift the ban on Tariq Ramadan. Is it too much to ask who influenced this decision?
Among the Islamist clerics who actively pursue a campaign of hatred towards the West, the most prominent is the Qatar-based spiritual head of the Muslim Brotherhood, the wealthy Sheik Yusuf Qaradawi.
We now learn that this hate-monger's daughter Siham al-Qaradawi was awarded the State Department's Fulbright scholarship for the academic year 2010-2011. Is it too much to ask how the daughter of the world's most anti-American cleric managed to get the U.S. tax payers to fund her higher studies? Perhaps she does not support her father's hateful ideology, but in the absence of any evidence, is it McCarthyism to ask how the Qaradawi daughter became a guest of the US State Department or who was responsible?
It is not just the Qaradawi daughter. Just last month, the U.S. State Department intervened to issue a visa to a known jihadi radical, Egyptian politician Hani Noureddin, a member of the banned Gamaa Islamiya. Who authorized the visa Hani Noureddin, the man who in his meetings with U.S. officials demanded that the Blind Sheik serving a life sentence for his role in the 1993 WTC bombing, be released.
And from Pakistan, the Islamist politician Imran Khan was given a visa to speak at a July 4 fundraiser in Houston to fund his anti-American campaign to block supplies to NATO troops. Is it not the right of a any American, let alone a member of the House of Representatives to ask who authorised an anti-American jihadi politician to do fund-raising in America, and that too on the auspices day of July 4?
Michelle Bachman may not be America's brightest politician, but she and her colleagues are asking legitimate questions, which it seems, are making the Washington establishment very uncomfortable.
It is patently unfair to mock Bachman for her incredulously ridiculous statements on other matters, and project that idiocy of her past to evade the question she has raised. To label her a right-wing racist and a latter-day McCarthyist may deflect attention away from the issue and 50 years from now when State Department papers of our time are made public, the truth will come out. Some of us would like to see that truth today.
As far as Huma Abedin is concerned, she is a bright woman and a role model for Muslim Americans, especially young women who have not succumbed to the pressures of wearing the hijab. So little is known about this stunningly beautiful child of Indo-Pakistani parents that one aide to then Senator Clinton told a reporter, "No one knows anything about her ... She's like Hillary's secret weapon."
Her ability to leave a lasting impression extends beyond politicians. The legendary designer Oscar de la Renta once said, "This might seem too over-saccharine, but I love Huma." He recalled that she had great style, but hastened to point out that "she's a Muslim" and "she's very conservative."
No wonder Senator John McCain, who also knows Huma Abedin well, went against his own party colleagues to bat for the woman who seems to have bowled over much of DC by her poise and beauty as well as her brains. As early as 2007, Sen. McCain was quoted as saying, "She is a person of enormous intellect with in-depth knowledge on a number of issues -- especially issues pertaining to the Middle East."
Just a year ago McCain had thrashed the Muslim Brotherhood in an interview with the German magazine, Der Spiegel, describing the Islamist political party as "a radical group that first of all supports Sharia law ... [who] have been involved with other terrorist organizations."
In the interview titled, "Dangers of the Muslim Brotherhood," McCain said he believed "they should be specifically excluded from any transition government [in Egypt]. He then went to say, "I am deeply, deeply concerned that this whole movement could be hijacked by radical Islamic extremists."
It seems Senator McCain simply could not entertain the idea that the fashionable 5'6" Huma Abedin could possibly share the political ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood that he himself so abhors. One would have expected him to say "I have talked to Huma about Islamism and she is no apologist for the Brotherhood," but he didn't.
For him, it did not matter that Huma was raised as a child and educated in Saudi Arabia's strict segregated sharia-based society, or that her parents chose to abandon the USA after getting American passports to settle down and serve the most archaic and misogynist societies on earth. For him, it seems, Huma's political or ideological bent of mind was inconsequential. All that mattered was that she broke every stereotype of the Muslim woman and did it in style. That alone seemed to have won him over. He is not alone.
Few if any know anything about Abedin's ideological leaning. The Democratic super-fundraiser Robert Zimmerman is so impressed by her, he says, "I'm so fond of Huma, if she were to run for office, I would volunteer for her campaign." But when pressed for any biographical details about his prospective candidate, Zimmerman said, "I really don't know much of her back story."
But now her "back story" needs to be told. Many Americans would like to know more of Huma Abedin and her political leanings, not just the way People magazine portrayed her, but as the centre of a political storm. She owes it to America to tell it whether she shares her parents' ideological affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood or not.
This is important because lost in the din of media attacks against the Bachman Five is the fact that both her parents have been closely associated with Saudi-based organisations that were and are Islamist in nature and reflect the ideology and political doctrine of the Muslim Brotherhood. Both were members of the Muslim Students Association (MSA) while studying in the US. MSA is, by the Muslim Brotherhood's own admission, one of their organisations.
The argument that Huma Abedin should not be judged on the political leanings of her parents is absolutely valid. After all the son of another leading Islamist, Syed Maududi turned out to be his harshest critic. Didn't Stalin's daughter turn against her own father?
The problem is that we now find out that Huma Abedin herself was, until late 2008, not only a member of her mother's Islamist organization, the Institute of Muslim Minority Affairs (IMMA), she was an assistant editor.
Andrew McCarthy, who was the lead prosecutor at the 1995 terrorism trial of the Blind Sheik writes that past mastheads of the IMMA's journal have Huma Abedin listed as an assistant editor (to her mother, the editor-in-chief) as far back as 1996, the year she began interning at the Clinton White House.
"The IMMA," he writes "was started in Saudi Arabia in the 1970s by Huma Abedin's parents, with the backing of Abdullah Omar Naseef ... former secretary-general of the Muslim World League, which... has long been the Muslim Brotherhood's principal vehicle for the international propagation of Islamic supremacist ideology. Under the auspices of the MWL, Naseef not only backed the IMMA, he founded the Rabita Trust, which ... is a specially designated international terrorist organization under federal law."
The sooner Huma Abedin steps up to the plate and clears the air, the better it will be for all of us who have admired her rise in stock in the toughest capital of the world. No child should have to pay for their parents' writings or politics, and neither should Huma.
All she needs to do is say she does not share the Islamist political ideology of her mother and that mother and daughter differ comprehensively in their views about the role of women in society. Once that is done, this father of two Muslim daughters will once again celebrate Huma Abedin as my own, as a shining example of what North America offers to its Muslim citizens, if they deserve it.
[An abridged version of this article was first published in The Toronto SUN on July 25, 2012]]]>RIM Asked to Hand Over Memogate Data to Pakistan Courttag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11770422011-12-31T00:45:07-05:002012-02-29T05:12:01-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
In a decision on Friday, the Supreme Court of Pakistan ordered the country's attorney general to demand RIM hand over BBM messages allegedly exchanged between the former Pakistan ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, and American businessman Mansoor Ijaz. The exchanges involve an unsigned memo handed over to to former American Chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, requesting U.S. intervention to stave off a military coup in Islamabad.
The latest tug of war between the government of President Zardari and his generals erupted on Oct. 11, 2011 when the Financial Times ran an op-ed titled "Time to take on Pakistan's Jihadis."
In the article, Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American businessman, claimed he was contacted by a Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., Husain Haqqani, and asked to contact Admiral Mullen to prevent a military coup from taking place in Pakistan. The military was outraged and wanted heads to roll. Ijaz wrote:
Early on May 9, a week after U.S. Special Forces stormed the hideout of Osama bin Laden and killed him, a senior Pakistani diplomat telephoned me with an urgent request. Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, needed to communicate a message to White House national security officials that would bypass Pakistan's military and intelligence channels.
As evidence, the American businessman handed over copies of his alleged BlackBerry message exchanges with Haqqani to Pakistan's feared military intelligence force, the ISI. On his part, Haqqani categorically denied that he had asked Ijaz to draft any message and dismissed the messages cited by Ijaz as a fabrication.
As a result of the controversy, Ambassador Haqqani -- a man not liked by his country's jihadis, whether civilian or military -- was forced to resign his post and ordered back to Pakistan, where he was placed under security watch and barred by the military from leaving the country.
The country's parliament set up a commission to get to the depth of the matter, but this inquiry was upstaged by opposition politician Nawaz Sharif who took the matter to the country's Supreme Court that is closely allied to the country's military generals.
Pakistan Supreme Court
Last Friday, the Supreme Court ruled that there was merit in the complaint against Haqqani and set up a three-member judicial commission that will report back in four weeks to determine the guilt or innocence of the former Boston University professor and Pakistan's most prominent diplomat in the last four years.
At the crux of the matter is the authenticity of of the BlackBerry messages that were allegedly exchanged between the two men.
In its decision on Friday, the Pakistani Supreme Court ordered the country's attorney general to get in touch with Research In Motion in Waterloo, Ontario to secure from RIM the data verifying the validity of the alleged BlackBerry conversation between Haqqani and Ijaz.
In an unprecedented move, the Pakistani Supreme Court stepped beyond its jurisdiction to direct the Canadian High Commissioner in Islamabad, ordering it to facilitate in the securing the data from RIM.
In August 2010, Research In Motion was pressured by the Indian government to allow it access to data exchanged on its BBM messenger service. RIM resisted that pressure and the two parties came to a resolution. However, that involved BlackBerry messages within India, not overseas.
RIM ended up ready to compromise on the privacy of corporate customers to placate Indian regulators. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates too threatened to shut off BlackBerry services unless RIM opened its encrypted client data for the sake of national security.
However, in this case, the alleged exchanges between the Pakistani Ambassador and the American businessman were conducted in the United States, not Pakistan. Unlike the Indian request, this involves the private messages between two individuals and as such RIM is unlikely to share this data -- if it exists -- with Pakistan's Supreme Court.
In addition, the Supreme Court ordered former ambassador Husain Haqqani to not leave the country, thus placing him in virtual house arrest. Haqqani, fearing for his life at the hands of the military and jihadis, has now taken refuge inside the Prime Minister's residence in Islamabad.
Dark day for Pakistan
Haqqani's counsel in the case, prominent human rights lawyer Asma Jahangir reacted with shock at the Supreme Court decision, labelling it a "dark day" for the country's judiciary.
Ms. Jahangir a former president of the country's Supreme Court Bar Association and the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Freedom of Religion, said the decision was evidence Pakistan's civilian government had for all practical purposes come under the thumb of the army.
Speaking to the media outside the Supreme Court on Friday, Ms. Jehangir said that the court's judgment in the "memogate scandal" had forced her to wonder whether Pakistan's judiciary represented the people of Pakistan or the country's (military) establishment.
Two days later Jahangir announced that in protest at the high-handedness of the Pakistan Supreme Court, she was stepping down as counsel for Husain Haqqani. She alleged the judges of the Supreme Court were acting "under the influence of the [Military] establishment" and not in the cause of justice or due process.
A noose around Haqqani's neck
She told Karachi's DAWN Television she was stepping down because the only outcome left was a noose around Haqqani's neck. She said:
"If nine judges of the Supreme Court can be under their [military] influence, then I am sorry to say I cannot have any expectations from three judges, who are subordinate to the same Supreme Court judges."
"Should we close our eyes? Should we allow ourselves to be fooled?... I have told my client [Haqqani] he can appear before the commission if he wishes to -- and he will go--but I have no confidence at all in the [judicial] commission."
Research In Motion has not yet stated whether it will abide by the order of the Pakistan Supreme Court or not and whether it accepts the jurisdiction of a foreign court on RIM.
]]>A Tree Called 'Kennedy': Happy 40th Birthday Bangladesh!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11532082011-12-16T07:54:38-05:002012-02-15T05:12:01-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
Dhaka University had been a hotbed of political activism for decades. To the generals of the Pakistan Army led by president Yahya Khan and his feared commander in then-"East Pakistan," General Tikka Khan, it had to be vanquished. The army also had a score to settle with an old tree on the campus grounds that was rumoured to have cast magical spells of rebellion on the young men and women who mingled underneath it.
After the first massacres, soldiers were sent to kill the giant banyan tree, lovingly known as "Bawt Tawla." Under its branches, many generations of Bengali students had gathered, conspired and then gone out to change the world.
It was under this tree that the language movement of 1953 was launched. Here in 1968, students had risen up against the military rule of General Ayub Khan, leading to his humiliation.
By the time the sun set on March 25, the Pakistan Army had blown up Bawt Tawla, ripping the very heart out of Dhaka University.
"It was a sad day--as if someone had destroyed the very essence of our lives," says Fuad Chowdhury, a Canadian filmmaker who witnessed the carnage:
"I saw the random killing and shooting of civilians. Canon fire destroyed part of my house, but the next morning when we saw the tree gone, we were devastated. Bawt Tawla was gone forever, we thought. But we were wrong."
A million lives and two years later, after the Bangladeshis had defeated the Pakistan Army and achieved independence, a white American politician would come to the spot where the old tree stood and plant a new sapling.
Today, forty years later, that sapling has grown into a new Bawt Tawla, and under it students mourn the passing of the man who planted that sapling: Senator Edward Kennedy.
Ted Kennedy had a huge following all over the world. Some admired him for his charisma, others because he was the brother of JFK and RFK. But in Bangladesh, he was revered because he spoke up when no one else in the U.S. dared to say a word.
In 1971, when the Pakistan Army began its genocide, Islamabad was a close ally of the U.S. President Yahya Khan had facilitated the Nixon-Mao meeting and the White House was not interested in damaging relations with a military junta that provided an effective counter balance to the growing India-U.S.S.R. relationship.
As Pakistani atrocities mounted, the U.S. consul general in Dhaka, Archer Blood, sent an urgent message to the State Department. It read:
"Our government has failed to denounce the suppression of democracy. Our government has failed to denounce atrocities... But we have chosen not to intervene, even morally, on the grounds that the ...conflict, in which unfortunately the overworked term 'genocide' is applicable, is purely an internal matter of a sovereign state."
Blood said that Dhaka University students were "either shot down in rooms or mowed down when they came out of building...estimated 1,000 persons, mostly students, but including faculty members resident in dorms, killed... At least two mass graves on campus, one near Iqbal Hall, other near Rokeya Hall. Rain [on the night of] March 29 exposed some bodies. Stench terrible."
Instead of paying attention to the news about the bloodletting, the "Blood Telegram," as it came to be known, was reclassified as secret, and Archer Blood got transferred out of Dhaka.
As the world seemed to have abandoned Bengalis, one man had the courage to defy his own government, thumb his nose at the Nixon administration, and go to the teeming refugee camps where ten million people were living in appalling conditions. This man was then 39-year-old Senator Ted Kennedy.
Kennedy toured the camps and heard eyewitness stories of the massacres all over East Pakistan. Back home, Senator Kennedy wrote to the Senate Judiciary Committee on Refugees about "one of the most appalling tides of human misery in modern times." He wrote,
"Nothing is more clear, or more easily documented, than the systematic campaign of terror -- and its genocidal consequences -- launched by the Pakistani army on the night of March 25th ...All of this has been officially sanctioned, ordered and implemented under martial law from Islamabad. America's heavy support of Islamabad is nothing short of complicity in the human and political tragedy of East Bengal."
Despite obstruction from the Nixon White House, Kennedy worked both sides of the house, pleading for the end of U.S. support for Pakistan. This finally led to the U.S. Congress passing a bill that banned all arms sales to Pakistan.
On December 16, 1971, the war ended and Bangladesh seceded from Pakistan to become an independent country.
Fuad Chowdhury recalls when two months later, Senator Kennedy came back to Bangladesh and planted a tree at the site of the original Bawt Tawla.
"There were thousands of students chanting "Joi Kennedy" (long live Kennedy) as he spoke to us, comparing the Bangladesh revolution to the American Revolution.
"For us, he was a hero then and will always be remembered as the man who stood by us in our darkest days. The banyan tree should now be re-named as the banyan tree called Kennedy."
Today, the tree Kennedy planted in 1972 has grown as large as the original Bawt Tawla. ]]>Burka Ban Triggers Feminist-Islamist Hysteriatag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11498242011-12-15T11:19:25-05:002012-02-14T05:12:02-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
Immigration Minister Jason Kenney's words had barely echoed across the country when the usual apologists of the Muslim Brotherhood agenda in Canada were churning out press releases denouncing the minister. The liberal media joined in with the Toronto Star falling just short of labelling Minister Kenney a bigot, referring to his action as "bigotry."
However, the Toronto Star's hysteria was mild compared to the reaction of a prominent Calgary cleric and a feminist academic from Kingston. First the cleric. Imam Syed Soharwardy is better known as the man who locked horns with then-publisher of the Western Standard Ezra Levant, and lost.
Reacting to Minister Kenney's announcement, Imam Soharwardy, who leads the grandiose-sounding Islamic Supreme Council of Canada, implied the minister was an Islamophobe and likened his action to that of the Nazi treatment of Jews in Germany. CTV News reported him as saying:
Muslims are going through that situation right now that the Jews faced before the Holocaust. Because intimidation of their faith, bad mouthing of their faith, bad mouthing about their book, bad mouthing about their beliefs. That was going on in Germany before the Holocaust, same thing is happening now about Muslims. So this is absolutely an alarming situation that a few Islamophobes are winning.
Soharwardy's outlandish statement drew a quick rebuke from the Friends of the Simon Wiesenthal Center. CEO Avi Benlolo, expressing "outrage," said in a statement:
Soharwardy has debased the memory of six million slaughtered Jews with a facile comparison to a new rule with which he, but not all Muslims, disagrees. To draw a parallel between a government decision requiring new immigrants to respect a basic value of this country - a decision supported by many Muslims, including the Muslim Canadian Congress, and the horrific experiences of European Jewry at the hands of the Nazis, demonstrates a complete insensitivity to and total lack of comprehension of the genocidal intent of Hitler's Final Solution. Sadly, the Canadian media seems to have given him a pass instead of confronting these outrageous statements.
If Imam Soharwardy invoked the Holocaust to denounce Minister Kenney, feminist professor Bev Baines, of Queen's University, was not far behind when she accused Kenney of "undressing" Muslim women to deny them citizenship of Canada.
Appearing on the SUN News Network's show Byline, Baines defended wearing the burka or niqab as an act of feminism. She told host Brian Lilley, "Minister Kenney wants to undress them." As a visibly shocked Lilley repeated her words, Baines reiterated her position, saying, "Absolutely. When you take off their niqab, you undress them."
Listening to this feminist defence of the burqa and niqab simply floored me. Was this the same Baines who had once warned that the intrusion of religion in public policy would dilute gender equality?
Back in 2006, in a research paper titled "Equality's Nemesis?" that appeared in the Journal of Law and Equality, the same professor who was defending the Islamist niqab had warned against what she referred to as the "threat" religions would pose for "women's equality rights."
The feminists who fought to strengthen the guarantee of sex equality in section 15(1) of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms never suggested that the state was the only threat to women's equality. We were concerned that the multiculturalism provision might be interpreted to limit women's equality and this concern led us to lobby for the second sex equality provision that ultimately became section 28. However, I don't think we fully grasped the threat that the major religions - Christianity, Islam and Judaism - would pose for women's equality rights.
How can an Imam who only last week was celebrating Hanukkah with a Rabbi show such insensitivity towards the Jews? How could a feminist who only recently warned of the threat religious law posed to women's equality, support the niqab?
It seems we are living in an era of mediocrity where the merging of leftist and Islamist narrative has numbed our ability to see the obvious contradictions this unholy alliance poses to our civilization. How long will this era continue? Will Minister Kenney find allies from across the political divide?
One day I hope to see the Liberals and New Democrats join the Conservatives to say out loudly that they find the niqab to be a medieval monstrosity that is a manifestation of misogyny that has no place in Canada and that this ghastly attire is not a religious requirement, but a political statement thumbing its nose at Canada and its Western allies. Quebec has produced such cross-political consensus against the burka and niqab. Will Canada?
]]>"A Man's Honour Lies Between the Legs of a Woman"tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.11333492011-12-07T13:02:28-05:002012-02-06T05:12:02-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/A Thousand Splendid Suns, the character Nana, a poor unwed mother, tells her five-year-old daughter, Mariam: "Learn this now and learn it well, my daughter: Like a compass needle that points north, a man's accusing finger always finds a woman. Always. You remember that, Mariam."
Hosseini's novel is about life in Afghanistan, but in the 30 words above he sums up the way men govern the lives of women across most of the Muslim world. Like Mariam, millions of Muslim girls are told very early in life by their mothers that their place in society is one of submission; submission, not to God, but to man.
This ownership or possession of Muslim women by the men in their families was summed up best by professor Shahrzad Mojab of University of Toronto as "the crude Arabic expression that 'A man's honour lies between the legs of a woman.' "
Hosseini could not have imagined that the fictional characters he created in his novel about Afghanistan in 2007 would come to real life in Canada two years later. Since 2009, the country has been caught in the drama unfolding in court where a father, brother and mother are being tried for the alleged honour killing of three daughters and their step mother. In hushed voices and measured commentary, the media is shedding light on the practice of honour killing and its relationship to Muslim culture and Islam.
Rosie DiManno of the Toronto Star sums up the question all non-Muslim Canadians have on their lips, but dare not ask:
"What did the females do that was so deplorable, so unendurable, in the eyes of their family accusers -- if not to the point of homicide, which is for the jury to decide, but to engender the chronic mistreatment that made their existence a misery, as attested to by a slew of witnesses?
Zainab pushed for marriage to a Pakistani man deemed unsuitable -- a union that was dissolved within 24 hours. Sahar had a boyfriend. Both teenagers dressed provocatively when they left the house. Geeti was caught shoplifting. All three chafed against severe restrictions imposed, wanted to be more like their Canadian friends; to date, to socialize, to discard the hijab. And Rona, after two decades in the ménage à trois, reduced to a peripheral role in the family and ejected from her husband's bed -- purportedly, at Tooba's insistence -- had requested a divorce."
Despite the propensity of facts that show honour killings as most prevalent in Islamic societies (with some occurrence among non-Muslim Indians and Christian Arabs) the Muslim leadership in Canada has once again tried to deflect attention from the evidence and denied any links.
First it was the Canadian Council of Muslim Women (CCMW) who came out with a statement denouncing the use of the term "honour killing," suggesting the use of the phrase "customary killing" instead, as if this would make any difference.
Then on Dec. 2, 60 Muslim organizations came together to denounce the deaths of the four women. However, they refused to acknowledge the links between Islamic teachings and honour killings, instead describing the tragedy as "Domestic violence... in the extreme." They said, "practices such as killing to restore family honour violate clear and non-negotiable Islamic principles."
These self-anointed leaders had a great opportunity to come clean about the links between honour crimes and Sharia law, but instead, they tried to deflect attention and spin-doctor the truth.
Sanction of wife beating
Of course they are right in that the Qur'an does not address the issue of honour killing, but it does sanction the right of a husband to beat his wife. Verse 4:34 of The Qur'an is quite explicit:
"Men are in charge of women by [right of] what Allah has given one over the other and what they spend [for maintenance] from their wealth. So righteous women are devoutly obedient, guarding in [the husband's] absence what Allah would have them guard. But those [wives] from whom you fear arrogance - [first] advise them; [then if they persist], forsake them in bed; and [finally], strike them."
Without addressing this verse, which gives sanction to the second-class status of women in Muslim male eyes, a discussion cannot lead to any resolution. The 60 Muslim leaders ducked the issue altogether while not a single reporter from the mainstream media asked them if there was a contradiction between their stated position against domestic violence and their belief in the said verse as God's direction to Muslim men on how to discipline errant wives.
The 60 leaders could have stated explicitly that in the era of the nation state of the 21st century, the verse should not apply and be seen strictly in a historic context. Instead they relied on the timidity of the reporters to escape scrutiny.
Stoning to death for adultery
Wife beating is just one behaviour sanctioned by Sharia law that has led to male violence against Muslim women. The other is the sharia law that sanctions the stoning to death of women committing adultery. Stoning is not sanctioned by the Qur'an, but has been part of Sharia law ever since the wife of Prophet Muhammad; Aisha claimed that a goat inadvertently ate up the Quranic verse sanctioning the stoning to death of women.
Stoning women to death is not restricted to allegations -- proven or otherwise -- of adultery; it is applied to all male-female relationships outside marriage, whether it is teenage girls dating boys or mature single men and women in a civil union.
The fact is many Muslim families in Canada do not permit their teenage daughters to have boyfriends, let alone to fall in love in a serious relationship. Dating boys leaves these girls living in a state of terror because this act alone, or the fact that they held hands with a boy or dared kiss him, let alone have consensual sex, is enough to be considered a transgression that can leave a Muslim girl or young woman vulnerable to harassment, beating, or in the case of Aqsa Parvez and the Shafia sisters, death.
The right to date boyfriends
The mosque leadership in Canada and the 60-odd Muslim leaders should have stated explicitly that Muslim teenage girls or young women have the right to date boys or men, but they didn't. It seems in the eyes of these Canadian Muslims, falling in love can only happen in fiction or the movies, poetry or prose, never in real life.
In their ossified state of mind these leaders of Muslims consider these girls or young women, committing an act of sin and that justifies being reprimanded by the men in the family. Is it any surprise that their fathers, brothers and even mothers beat these girls in their homes? Is it any surprise that Aqsa Parvez died, to be followed so soon by the Shafia family's daughters and stepmother?
At the trial of the alleged killers of the four Afghan women, the crown's honour killing expert, Prof. Mojab, told the court that women embody the honour of the men to whom they belong -- first fathers and brothers, later husbands.
"A woman's body is considered to be the repository of family honour. Honour crimes are acts of violence committed by male family members against female family members who are held to have brought dishonour onto the family.''
She said, "Cleansing one's honour of shame is typically handled by the shedding of blood. It's really about men's need to control women's sexuality and freedom.'' Yet mothers, too, will participate in the crime, Mojab added.
Many Muslims, including the liberal Muslim Canadian Congress, stayed away from the charade put up by Canada's leading Islamist groups. They reminded us of the Muslim leaders who met with then prime minister Paul Martin in the wake of the London bombings to assure him that jihadi terrorism had little to do with Islam. Within months we had the Toronto 18.
Not until the 60 so-called Islamic leaders state that Sharia laws against women's rights are no longer applicable, will they be seen as speaking the truth. Until then, they may be able to fool the gullible liberal media, but not those of us who have witnessed the horrors of Islamist misogyny at close quarters.
]]>Is a Palace Coup Unfolding in Pakistan?tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10959602011-11-16T10:36:41-05:002012-01-16T05:12:02-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
First indications that something foul was afoot in Islamabad came on the weekend when Pakistan's top four military officials, including powerful Chief of Army Staff Gen. Ashfaq Parvez Kayani became conspicuous by their absence at a state banquet hosted by President Zardari for the visiting President Gurbanguly Berdymukhammedov of Turkmenistan.
For Pakistan watchers, the presence or absence of the top military leadership at events organized by a civilian government is an indication of the state of relations between the Pakistan's poweful power-hungry military and the weak civilian administration in Islamabad.
The obvious boycott of a state dinner hosted by Pakistan's president by his top generals and admirals, who are supposedly answerable to him, was not the only signal that something sinister was taking place. The absence was followed by the resignation from the ruling party by the former foreign minister, which too was suspected to have come after prodding by the military.
The latest tug of war between the government of president Zardari and his generals erupted on October 11, 2011 when the Financial Times ran an op-ed titled "Time to take on Pakistan's Jihadis."
In the article, Mansoor Ijaz, a Pakistani-American businessman, claimed he was contacted by a senior Pakistani diplomat close to President Zardari and asked to contact Admiral Mullen to prevent a military coup from taking place in Pakistan. The military was outraged and wanted heads to roll. Ijaz wrote:
"Early on May 9, a week after US Special Forces stormed the hideout of Osama bin Laden and killed him, a senior Pakistani diplomat telephoned me with an urgent request. Asif Ali Zardari, Pakistan's president, needed to communicate a message to White House national security officials that would bypass Pakistan's military and intelligence channels.
The embarrassment of bin Laden being found on Pakistani soil had humiliated Mr Zardari's weak civilian government to such an extent that the president feared a military takeover was imminent. He needed an American fist on his army chief's desk to end any misguided notions of a coup - and fast."
Ijaz further claimed that a memo was drafted and delivered to Admiral Mullen on May 10.
"In a flurry of phone calls and emails over two days a memorandum was crafted that included a critical offer from the Pakistani president to the Obama administration: 'The new national security team will eliminate Section S of the ISI charged with maintaining relations to the Taliban, Haqqani network, etc. This will dramatically improve relations with Afghanistan.'"
The pro-military media in Pakistan suggested the diplomat in question was Pakistan's ambassador the U.S., former Boston University professor, Husain Haqqani --a man not liked by his country's Jihadis, whether civilian or military.
Both Admiral Mullen and Islamabad denied that any such back door diplomacy had taken place, but the denials could not put out the fire. What was ostensibly written as a critique of Pakistan's jihadi extremists in fact turned out to have the exact opposite effect. In a country where anti-Americanism is rife, the elected civilian government was made out to appear as lackeys of the U.S.
Could the writer have intended to weaken the government and strengthen the military? Mansoor Ijaz is not new to controversy. According to the International Herald Tribune's Pakistan edition, "a deeper look into Ijaz's background provides evidence that this hasn't been the first time the influential businessman has raised controversy concerning his alleged role as a secret international diplomat."
The IHT discloses that :
"In 1996, he was accused of trying to extort money from the Pakistani government in exchange for delivering votes in the US House of Representatives on a Pakistan-related trade provision. Ijaz, who runs the firm Crescent Investment Management LLC in New York, has been an interlocutor between U.S. officials and foreign government for years, amid constant accusations of financial conflicts of interest. He reportedly arranged meetings between U.S. officials and former prime ministers Benazir Bhutto and Nawaz Sharif. He also reportedly gave over $1 million to Democratic politicians in the 1990s and attended Christmas events at former President Bill Clinton's White House. Ijaz has ties to former CIA Director James Woolsey and his investment firm partner is Reagan administration official James Alan Abrahamson."
Anywhere else a civilian diplomat warning directly or indirectly against a military coup would not be deemed wrong in itself. But in Pakistan, a civilian Prime Minister was toppled and arrested (Nawaz Sharif, in 1999 by General Musharraf) for simply trying to assert civilian control over the military. Even if Zardari and his diplomat had, as Ijaz claims, asked Ijaz to contact the American government to use its influence against a military coup, there was nothing unlawful or unconstitutional in what he did. But in Pakistan, Ijaz's claims have provoked circumstances that are threatening at least the sacking of a respected ambassador and possibly undermining civilian rule.
Knowing the workings of Pakistan's intelligence services, Ijaz's article could have been part of a plan by the ISI to destabilize Pakistani democracy once again.
On Monday, the moves by the military triggered a closed-door meeting between President Asif Ali Zardari and the country's dour Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani followed by another meeting between Zardari and the Chief of Army Staff Gen. Kayani.
The generals are adamant. President Zardari has being asked to summon his ambassador to the U.S. back to Islamabad for a full dressing down by the junta. According to the Pakistani newspaper The News, President Asif Ali Zardari and Prime Minister Syed Yusuf Raza Gilani decided on Monday to call Hussain Haqqani, Pakistan's Ambassador to Washington, to Islamabad to brief the country's leadership on a host of issues impacting on Pak-U.S. relations and recent developments."
Long before Haqqani was appointed as Pakistan's ambassador to the U.S., he had exposed the close links between the Pakistan military and the country's Islamist jihadis in his book, Pakistan: Between Mosque and the Military. For that sin, the men in boots have never forgiven the man they cannot control.
Haqqani, described by Bloomberg as the "hardest working man in DC," has been in the sights of the Pak Army and its intelligence wing, the ISI, who do not trust the academic. They fear he has exposed their attempts to double-cross the USA and as such want his skin as a price for allowing Zardari to stay in power.
The developments in Islamabad and the demand by the army to fire Haqqani should also be seen in light of the sudden rise in the profile of Pakistan's leading pro-Taliban politician, former cricketer Imran Khan. The establishment in Pakistan has run a brilliant campaign to project Khan as both a patriotic Islamist as well as a liberal. Using his Oxford background, he cultivates the ultimate anti-American modernist who has charmed the urban middle classes as the 'non-politician.'
Because of the Kerry-Lugar Bill, the army cannot overthrow an elected government as it used to do in the past, but the generals and the ISI are propping up a Khan and demanding the firing of the liberal Haqqani.
The sad part is that Islamist influence inside the U.S. State Department may result in a nod of approval to the Khakis to trigger a civilian coup. If Ambassador Haqqani is fired, can president Zardari be far behind? ]]>Hey Sikhs: Happy 543rd Birthday!tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10852122011-11-10T12:24:32-05:002012-01-10T05:12:01-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/Gurpurab, but few outside India know the significance of this day or its history. It's the 543rd birth anniversary of Guru Nanak Dev, the founder of the Sikh faith and one of the greatest symbols of pluralism and tolerance in the world.
The 5,000-year old Indian civilization, born on the banks of the Indus and nurtured for many millennia by the Ganges, still enchants the rest of the world. With a cacophony of cultures and a myriad of languages, India is truly incredible. A place where diversity is not just taught, but experienced as life itself. The land of Krishna and the Vedas is the natural home to Hinduism, but under its umbrella Hinduism has nurtured the other major religions of the world and provided refuge to those fleeing persecution. Be they Zoroastrians from Persia, Thomas the Apostle, or the descendants of Prophet Muhammad escaping the Arab Umayyad Armies, India has accepted all without any conditions and stands a power that has never once invaded its neighbours throughout its chequered history.
Mahatma Gandhi may epitomize India in the West, but he is just one of the many towering figures of history that have shaped the land, its culture and its religions. Poets such as Tagore and Iqbal immortalized India in verse while emperors like Asoka and Akbar ruled over dazzling domains that stunned the visitor. Among the great philosophers and thinkers that India gifted to the world are two men who tower above the rest- Buddha and Guru Nanak Dev, the founders of Buddhism and Sikhism. While Buddha is well known in the West as a result of his creed and followers, Guru Nanak, whose birthday we celebrate today is yet to be discovered.
Let this Muslim introduce you to the man who founded the world's youngest religion, Sikhism and who had a profound role in shaping my Punjabi heritage, alas, one that was torn to shreds by the bloody partition of India in August 1947.
Today, the place where Guru Nanak was born in 1469 is a city that was ethnically cleansed of its entire Sikh population during the bloodbath of 1947. Nankana Sahib, a place where the Guru spent his childhood with Muslim and Hindu friends is a Bethlehem without Christians; a Medina without Muslims. For a few days the town will bustle with Sikh pilgrims from all over the world, but soon they will depart and nary a turban will be seen until the Sikhs return next year.
The city of Nankana Sahib lies near Lahore, my maternal ancestral home, where my mother and father were born. My mother told me how she as a Muslim girl grew up with Sikh neighbors and how she was part of the Sikh family's celebrations at the time of Gurpurab and how she would travel with her friend to Nankana Sahib. Decades later she would still recall her lost friend who left Pakistan to seek refuge across the border. Today Nankana Sahib celebrates, but there are no Muslim girls accompanying their Sikh friends. None. It is sad.
Sad, because Sikhism and Guru Nanak were intertwined with Islam and Muslims. The Guru's closest companion was a Muslim by the name of Bhai Mardana. It is said when Mardana was dying, the Guru asked him, how would you like to die? As a Muslim? To which the ailing companion replied, "As a human being."
Five hundred years later, a border divides Muslim and Sikh Punjabis. A border where two nuclear armies and a million men face each other. As a Muslim Punjabi I feel the British in dividing Punjab separated my soul from my body and left the two to survive on their own. Muslim Punjabis lost their neighbours and family friends of generations. Most of all they lost their language that today languishes as a second-class tongue in its own home. We kept Nankana Sahib, but lost the Guru.
However, the tragedy that befell the Sikhs was far more ominous and deserves special mention. For Sikhs, the Punjabi cities of Lahore and Gujranwala, Nankana Sahib and Rawalpindi were their hometowns and had shared a history with their gurus. With the 1947 Partition, not only was Punjab divided, but the Sikhs were ethnically cleansed from Pakistan's Punjab.
As a result of the creation of the Islamic State of Pakistan, the Sikhs lost absolute access to the following holy sites: Gurdwara Janam Asthan, the birthplace of Guru Nanak, in Nankana Sahib; Gurdwara Panji Sahib in Hasan Abdal; Gurdwara Dera Sahib in Lahore, where the Fifth Guru, Arjun Dev, was killed; Gurudwara Kartarpur Sahib in Kartarpur, where Guru Nanak died; and, of course, the Shrine of Maharaja Ranjit Singh in Lahore.
When the killings and cleansing of 1947 ended, not a single Sikh was visible in Lahore. Of course, Muslims too were chased out of the eastern parts of Punjab, but they were not losing their holy places of Mecca or Medina.
Even though we Muslims despair the occupation of Jerusalem, we still have the comfort of knowing that Muslims still live in and around the Dome of the Rock and the Al-Aqsa Mosque. But what about the Sikhs?
To feel their pain, Muslims need to imagine how outraged we would feel if, God forbid, Mecca and Medina were cleansed of all Muslims and fell under the occupation of, say, Ethiopia. How can we Muslims ask for the liberation of Muslim lands while we institutionalize the exclusion and ethnic cleansing of all Sikhs from their holy sites inside an Islamic state? Muslims who cannot empathize with the loss of the Sikhs need to ask themselves why they don't.
Before 1947, Punjabi Muslims did not consider Sikhism as an adversarial faith. After all, from the Muslim perspective, Sikhism was the combination of the teachings of Sufism, which was rooted in Islamic thought and the Bhakti movement, an organic link to Hindu philosophy. It is true that Moghul emperors had been particularly vicious and cruel to the leaders of the Sikh faith, but these Moghuls were not acting as representatives of Islam. Not only that, the Moghuls inflicted even harsher punishments on their fellow Muslims.
With the creation of Pakistan, the Sikhs lost something even more precious than their holy places: diverse subcultural streams. One such stream flourishing in Thal region (Sind Sagar Doab) in what is now Pakistan, near Punjab's border with Sind and Baluchistan, was known as the "Sewa Panthis."
The Sewa Panthi tradition flourished in southwest Punjab for nearly 12 generations until 1947. This sect (variously known as Sewa Panthis, Sewa Dassiey, and Addan Shahis), is best symbolized by Bhai Ghaniya, who aided wounded Sikh and Muslim soldiers alike during the Tenth Sikh Guru's wars with Moghuls. Sewa Panthis wore distinctive white robes.
They introduced a new dimension to the subcontinental religious philosophies. They believed that sewa (helping the needy) was the highest form of spiritual meditation -- higher than singing hymns or reciting holy books. The creation of Pakistan dealt a devastating blow to the Sewa Panthis and they never got truly transplanted in the new "East" Punjab.
The organic relationship between philosophies and land, indeed, requires native soil for ideas to bloom. Other such sects and deras (groups) that made up the composite Sikh faith of the 19th and early 20th centuries included Namdharis, Nirankaris, Radha Soamis, Nirmaley, and Sidhs -- all were pushed to the margins, or even out of Sikhism, after the partition.
The tragedy of the division of Punjab is best captured in a moving poem by the first prominent woman Punjabi poet, novelist, and essayist Amrita Pritam, "Ujj akhaan Waris Shah noo" (An Ode to Waris Shah), which she is said to have written while escaping in a train with her family from Pakistan to India. Pritam wrote:
ujj aakhaN Waris Shah nuuN,
kithoN kabraaN vichchoN bol,
tay ujj kitab-e ishq daa koii aglaa varkaa phol
ik roii sii dhii punjaab dii, tuuN likh likh maare vaen,
ujj lakhaaN dhiiaaN rondiaN,
tainuN Waris Shah nuN kahen
uTh dardmandaaN diaa dardiaa,
uth takk apnaa Punjab
aaj bele lashaaN bichhiaaN te lahu dii bharii Chenab
(Today, I beckon you Waris Shah,
Speak from inside your grave .
And to your book of love, add the next page .
Once when a single daughter of Punjab wept, you wrote a wailing saga.
Today, a million daughters cry to you, Waris Shah.
Rise, O friend of the grieving; rise and see your own Punjab,
Today, fields lined with corpses, and the Chenab flowing with blood.)
As I celebrate the birth anniversary of Guru Nanak I read some profound words of wisdom he left for his Muslim friends. He wrote:
Make mercy your Mosque,
Faith your Prayer Mat,
what is just and lawful your Qu'ran,
Modesty your Circumcision,
and civility your Fast.
So shall you be a Muslim.
Make right conduct your Ka'aba,
Truth your Pir, and
good deeds your Kalma and prayers.
Photo courtesy of Hermitage17 on Wikimedia Commons .{PD-release}
]]>The Enemy of America Is My Friend, No Matter Whattag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10776922011-11-09T08:58:41-05:002012-01-09T05:12:02-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/
It seems we Muslims have developed an entirely new doctrine that determines who is friend or foe and have added it as a new tenet of our faith.
A country could ride roughshod over its Muslim population, jail us, ban our language and religious practices, send tanks to crush our fight for fundamental human rights. Yet, such a nation could escape any criticism from the world's one billion Muslims if it met one condition: It should be seen as anti-American. All sins seem to be forgiven and forgotten if our oppressor hates the USA.
On the other hand, no matter how Muslim-friendly a power, no matter how much it tries to accomodate its Muslim population, if it happens to be a U.S. ally, e.g., Canada, it'll be seen as an adversary, if not an enemy.
China
Take for instance China. It has a history of crushing the rights of its Muslim Uighur population. Hundreds have died over decades. Their country, Kashgaria, remains occupied by the Chinese with impunity, but there is nary a word of protest anywhere in the Muslim majority countries.
As long as China postures as a nation standing up to the USA, my Muslim co-religionists, especially the Islamist variety thriving in the West, couldn't care less what China does to its Muslim citizens.
However, next door in Pakistan, Islamists as well as the government didn't utter a word of protest. Imagine if 140 Gazans or even 14 had died in an Israeli incursion. Just imagine the reaction. However, in the Arab World, Iran, Pakistan or Turkey, the hundred dead Chinese Muslims didn't create as much as a ripple. After all, China was an ally against the Great Satan, America.
It is not just Muslim Kashgaria. China has occupied Tibet for the last over 50 years, but this occupation does not bother the conscience of any American Islamic organisation when they obsessively talk about other occupations.
This year, as millions of Muslims worldwide went to Saudi Arabia for the annual pilgrimage of Hajj, guess which country placed hurdles in the way of its Muslim citizens. The hated USA? Not. It was China. Beijing barred its Uighur Muslims from Hajj by denying them passports to travel.
"We cannot get a passport," the father of Mehmet Ali, not his real name, told the Indian newspaper, The Hindu. "If we want to go on a government trip, we will have to pay 70,000 Yuan. Even we can afford it, it's difficult to get the approval."
Russia
Then there is Russia, where Russian nationalists have often marched in Nazi uniforms demanding an end to Muslim presence in Moscow. It is not uncommon for Russian Muslims to be beaten or harassed in Russia's major metropolitan areas.
On the eve of the anniversary of the Bolsehvik Revolution this year, 5,000 young men chanting "Russia for Russians" and "Migrants today, occupiers tomorrow," marched through a working-class neighbourhoods on the outskirts of the capital where Russian Muslims from the Caucasus live.
The Associated Press reports that violently xenophobic groups kill and beat non-Slavs and crudely denounce the influx of Muslims from the Caucasus and from Central Asian Muslim countries that were once part of the Soviet Union. Among the banners carried during one demonstration was, "Stop feeding the Caucasus."
None of this blatant anti-Muslim hysteria is ever condemned at the UN or by the OIC, the Organization of Islamic Countries. If governments of Muslim majority countries were silent, so are the ordinary Muslims living in the West.
So brainwashed are we Muslims about our supposed victimhood and the rise of "Islamophobia" in the USA that we overlook what is happening to our co-religionists in Russia or China. The lingering hatred of the West and its values that seek to end gender apartheid among Muslims, is so ubiquitous that both Russia and China's crimes against Muslims are set aside as long as both countries undermine American policies.
America
Are Muslims who live in the West blind to the democratic rights and equal citizenship we enjoy? Sure, we Muslims have faced obstacles, but they are dwarfed when when compared to the struggles of Christian African-American or the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. Today we Muslims are part of the fabric of Western civilization, even if many of us come to these shores as tired masses from the East--Pakistan, Egypt, Iran or Indonesia. In fact, one son of a Muslim immigrant from Kenya rose to become the president of the USA.
Can we ever imagine a Fareed Zakaria or an Ali Velshi on Moscow or Beijing Television network? Could Khaled Hosseini ever be a best-selling author in Russia? Where else but in the West could a Muslim woman become a baroness and head the ruling Conservative Party in the UK. Could my friend the Danish parliamentarian Naser Khadr ever get elected in China, or French feminist Rachida Dati become an MP in Moscow? Impossible.
But it is Russia and China that are eulogized in the Muslim media while America, France, Canada and the UK are derided as the evil empire out to destroy Islam.
It used to be said that to become a Muslim one had to make a single declaration affirming the oneness of God. Today, however, it seems Islam has been reduced to a single declaration: Death to America.
]]>Sharia Comes to Libya (Thank You America)tag:www.huffingtonpost.com,2011:/theblog//3.10329112011-10-27T09:05:08-04:002011-12-27T05:12:02-05:00Tarek Fatahhttp://www.huffingtonpost.com/tarek-fatah/Dumb and Dumber could hardly ask for a better cast.
After over 5,000 dead American soldiers and over a trillion dollars spent fighting the "war on terrorism," what happened in Benghazi on Sunday, Oct. 23, 2011 sums up the colossal failure of U.S. foreign policy vis-à-vis the Muslim world.
Standing before cheering crowds, and in the shadow of war crimes committed by his troops, the new interim leader of Libya, Mustafa Abdel Jalil, declared in his 'liberation' address that Sharia law would govern the new Libya. Sharia is of course the source of the doctrine of jihad that triggered the attack on America on 9/11.
Mustafa Abdel Jalil was careful in not uttering the word 'jihad' that is obligatory to anyone following the application of Sharia in the public domain. Jalil instead trumpeted the more salacious aspect of Sharia:
"We as a Muslim nation have taken Islamic Sharia as the source of legislation, therefore any law that contradicts the principles of Islam is legally nullified. This includes changing marriage laws to allow men to more easily take on a second wife."
America and NATO had not just helped place an Islamist regime in Tripoli, but had driven the country a full 40 years back by introducing polygamy in a society that had long ago rejected the institution. As if the prospect of multiple wives was not enough, Jalil sent the crowds into what the Washington Post reporter Mary Beth Sheridan described as "thunderous applause" when he proclaimed the introduction of Sharia banking. "The interest [on loans] will be ruled out. You will not pay it anymore," he promised. (Ironically his promise of interest-free banking came at a time Canada's leading interest-free Sharia institution went bankrupt.)
Free money and free sex; new Libya was on a roll. Jihad, or holy war against the infidel, an integral part of Sharia, would have to wait and better remain unsaid. Al-Qaeda supporters were smiling. The most prominent among them is Abdel Hakim Belhaj, the bearded former emir of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group.
As for the secular liberal Libyans, people like Mahmoud Jibril, Mahmoud Shammam, and Ali Tarhouni, who sold the revolution to the West and made NATO intervention politically palatable, they were now in the back seat or totally eclipsed. Remember Iran in 1979?
U.S. and Sharia in Libya
For the U.S., this is not the first time it has had to deal with Tripoli invoking Sharia as its guiding principles in foreign and domestic policy.
The two countries first made contact in 1785 when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had to deal with Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, the representative of the pasha of Tripoli to sort out a dispute the Libyans felt was their right under Sharia's laws of jihad.
What transpired between the two American founding fathers and the nobleman from Tripoli would be the United States' first exposure to the sense of entitlement with which most Muslim rulers governed -- and still do. These caliphs and sultans considered their rule to be a God-given trusteeship, with an obligation to conduct first dawah* and then jihad† as part of Sharia.
In the late 18th century, the United States had no navy, while the North African Muslim states, including Tripoli, had a combined naval strength that rivalled their European neighbours and facilitated the largely undocumented European slave trade -- white men enslaved to work in Africa.
In the 1780s American merchant ships in the Mediterranean, having lost the protection of the British Navy, were subject to attack by pirates and slave traders from Morocco, Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers. Jefferson and Adams, recognizing the limits of U.S. naval power, were meeting with Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar to offer him a tribute of $25,000 in exchange for his protection. The French were already paying. Jefferson told al-Ajar that although the United States was "eager to avert bloodshed" and therefore willing "to offer a treaty of lasting friendship with Tripoli," he was intrigued and wanted to know under what moral authority the Muslim nobleman was demanding the bribe.
Tripoli's ambassador gave the two Americans a crash course in Sharia as laid into law by medieval Muslim theologians, who did not consider such a tribute as a bribe, but rather an interim arrangement until the non-Muslim party accepted the invitation to Islam or was conquered by force of arms.
"It was... written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [Muslims'] authority were sinners, that it was their [Muslims'] right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle would surely go to paradise."
Jefferson and Adams were taken aback. They had just glimpsed the mindset that drew inspiration from the medieval application of jihad. Most Muslim rulers from the earliest caliphates to the Ottomans of the 18th century self-righteously saw themselves as saviours of the human race, "Shadows of God on Earth," and thus entitled to rule.
From the perspective of the Tripoli official, the United States was a non-Muslim Christian entity. It was perfectly justifiable for him to ask for the tribute, since the United States had not accepted the Muslim caliphate's invitation to Islam.
The link between "inviting the infidels" to the fold of Islam and demanding a tribute if they turned the invitation down was sanctioned by most medieval Islamic scholars in the ninth and 10th centuries. Imam Muslim (d. 875) -- in his collection of the sayings of Prophet Muhammad, Sahih Muslim -- indicates that a dawah is the first of three "courses of action" to be undertaken prior to war with non-Muslim enemies. In 1368, Ahmad ibn Naqib al-Misri wrote the classic work of Shafi Islamic law, Umdat as-salik (Reliance of the Traveller). In his book, al-Masri is quite frank about the link between dawah and jihad:
"The caliph makes war upon Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians (provided he has first invited them to enter Islam in faith and practice, and if they will not, then invited them to enter the social order of Islam by paying the non-Muslim poll tax jaziyah -- which is significance of their paying it, not the money itself -- while remaining in their ancestral religions) and the war continues until they become Muslim or else pay the non-Muslim poll tax in accordance with the word of Allah Most High."
The doctrine of Sharia sanctioned armed jihad against the non-Muslim "enemy" would take on a more robust and political form in the early 20th-century interpretations among such Islamist scholars as the trio mentioned earlier in this chapter: Hassan al Banna, Abul Ala Maudoodi, and Syed Qutb.
These men have laid the foundation of a new form of jihad, patterned on the tradition of the underground communist parties of Europe and at times resembling the anarchists of the 19th century. Today, it has evolved into a form of a death cult, where the highest level of Islamic worship is to die and leave this world to its "satanic existence." This blending of the death cult and jihad has translated into the martyrdom sought by so many brainwashed young Muslim men and women.
While many Islamists in the West are careful about what they say to the media, Islamists from the Muslim world are not so guarded. Justice Muhammad Taqi Usmani was a Sharia judge in Pakistan's Supreme Court and one of the world's most respected Islamic scholars. The learned judge, who advises many multinational companies on Sharia banking and halal investments (like the one proposed by the new Libyan leadership) is a regular visitor to Britain, where in 2007 he declared in a The Times interview that Muslims should wage military jihad "to establish the supremacy of Islam" worldwide.
He told the newspaper that Muslims should live peacefully in countries such as Britain, where they have the freedom to practise Islam, but only until they gain enough power to engage in battle. He told the prestigious Times:
"The question is whether aggressive battle is by itself commendable or not. If it is, why should the Muslims stop simply because territorial expansion in these days is regarded as bad? And if it is not commendable, but deplorable, why did Islam not stop it in the past?"
He then proceeded to answer his own question:
"Even in those days... aggressive jihads were waged... because it was truly commendable for establishing the grandeur of the religion of Allah."
The booklet Call to Jihad by the founder of Jamaat-e-Islami is sold in most Islamic bookstores in North America and is distributed by Muslim youth organizations on campuses. Maudoodi urges young Muslims to consider themselves under attack if any Muslim country is threatened.
He writes that it is "the categorical injunction of the Islamic shariah that whenever an enemy attacks any part of darul Islam (the Muslim world), Jihad for its defence becomes obligatory (fard) on every Muslim."
Maudoodi makes another significant clarification. He writes that even though jihad is separate from qetal (warfare), they are complementary. He says warfare may end, but jihad does not. He writes:
"In terms of Shariah or Islamic Law, Jihad and Qetal are two separate things. Qetal is actual warfare and clash of arms of the fighting forces against the armies of the enemy. The Jihad on the other hand means the struggle as a whole -- the entire war effort which the nation collectively puts forth in order to achieve the objective for which war takes place. In the course of Jihad, Qetal is, at times, put off or temporarily suspended, but Jihad goes on and continues until the object for which it was undertaken is realized."
Another prominent Islamist, the Egyptian Syed Qutb had this to say about sharia in his book, Milestones:
"Any place where Islamic shariah is not enforced and where Islam is not dominant becomes the Home of Hostility (Dar-ul-Harb)... A Muslim will remain prepared to fight against it, whether it be his birth place or a place where his relatives reside or where his property or any other material interests are located."
With the installation of Islamists in Libya, the election of so called "moderate" Islamists (whatever that means) and the upcoming Muslim Brotherhood takeover of Egypt, Osama bin Laden must be smiling in his watery grave at the bottom of the Arabian Sea. With Dumb or Dumber at the wheel, the American ship is headed for disaster while the rest of us cannot get up from our slumber.
]]>
It was under this tree that the language movement of 1953 was launched. Here in 1968, students had risen up against the military rule of General Ayub Khan, leading to his humiliation.