Category Archives: Politics

‘Extremist Ideas’ By Amia Srinivasan in LRB

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The proclamations by the West that terrorists cannot change our way of life seems hollow considering the self-punishment and flagellation the West is inflicting upon itself to prevent terrorism. The West is gradually peeling away at its civil liberties that distinguished it from repressive regimes and made it what it is today. Below is a Security Bill being passed in London and soon may be passed by other European countries. These measures are hardly a solution to integrate minorities and seem more likely that it will further alienate and agitate the angry minority youths under scrutiny. There is dire need to provide jobs to these minority youths rather than double down on measures that are more problematic rather than solution. (F. Sheikh )

The Counterterrorism and Security Bill 2014-15 has all but completed its swift passage into law. Sponsored by Theresa May and Lord Bates of the Home Office, it promises to expand the state’s paranoid reach in predictable ways: new powers to seize passports and bar UK citizens from returning home; a requirement that internet service providers collect data on users; a provision that airlines and rail and shipping companies may have to seek permission from the Home Office to carry certain groups of people.

More novel is the bill’s requirement that schools and universities conduct surveillance on their students. Section 25.1 states that education institutions are among the ‘specified authorities’ – along with councils, prisons, hospitals and police chiefs – that must ‘have due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’. The Home Office has published guidance notes on how this duty is to be fulfilled. Administrators must conduct ‘risk assessments’ to uncover ‘where and how’ their students might be drawn to extremist ideology, including ‘non-violent extremism’. All staff members should be trained in ways to ‘challenge extremist ideas’, and if they find anyone who appears ‘vulnerable to being drawn into extremism’, refer them to local anti-terrorism panels for ‘support’. It isn’t only students who will get the benefit of these panels; the bill will mean that any member of the public can be referred to them by a specified authority.

In addition, all visiting speakers must be vetted for their anti-extremist credentials at least two weeks in advance, and their lecture notes and slides scrutinised. Maybe this will help procrastinating academics to plan their lectures ahead of time. Or perhaps they will just stop speaking. Lords Macdonald and Pannick have moved an amendment to Section 25 pointing out that, in addition to the duty to fight terrorism, educational institutions ‘shall also have due regard to the maintenance of academic freedom and freedom of expression within the law’

http://www.lrb.co.uk/blog/2015/02/03/amia-srinivasan/extremist-ideas/?utm_source=newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=3704&hq_e=el&hq_m=3618742&hq_l=10&hq_v=f5173e6065

‘Murder of Young Muslims In Chapel Hill’ By F. Sheikh

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Three innocent young Muslims were killed in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Our sincere sympathies to the family and friends of the victims. We strongly condemn this hideous act. The media is reporting a parking dispute, but it is hard to believe that parking dispute alone can lead to murder of three innocent young individuals. The murderer claims to be an atheist and hates all religions but it is no accident that the killer chose Muslims as his target. I do not think it is unfair if some Muslims are calling it terrorism against Muslims in this charged environment and asking political leaders to step up and condemn it like any other act of terrorism.

Acts like these are no accident when media stars like Bill Maher and Sam Harris spew poisonous hatred against Muslims at large every day and even Hollywood has joined in this spread of hatred and Islamophobia.  Movie “Sniper” motivated many individuals to write threatening comments in social media. Below is a sample of tweets;

1-Portal Hudson   dochudson 15 Jan16

“American Sniper has me wanting to go shoot some ragheads.”

2- Sabrina Ho

” nice to see a movie where muslims are portrayed for who they really are vermin scum intent on destroying America# AmericanSniper “

3- Connor Besnikari

“American Sniper make me appreciate the work American soldiers do and also made me hate camel riding rag heads load more#AmericanSniper ““.

 

One of my relative applied for internship in one of the media outlet and was told blankly” we do not hire Muslims”, and it was even before Paris incidence. Muslims at large are as much victims of Islamic extremism and acts of terrorism as non-Muslims. Spreading hatred against all Muslims, as it is happening now, is a self-defeating endeavor. It ends up pushing some angry and frustrated young Muslims to choose the wrong side. When hatred is spread by media or non-media outlets, by Muslims or non-Muslims, it is bound to claim innocent victims from all sides. World has to join all hands to combat hatred and extremism in all its forms and from every quarter.  

 F. Sheikh

President, TFUSA

Muslims Of Early America By PETER MANSEAU

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IT was not the imam’s first time at the rodeo.

Scheduled to deliver an invocation at the Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo last week, Moujahed Bakhach of the local Islamic Association of Tarrant County canceled his appearancebecause of the backlash brought on by a prayer he had offered a few days before. The imam had been asked to confer a blessing on horses, riders and members of the military. He was met with gasps from the audience and social media complaints: “Outraged at a Muslim prayer at an all American event!” “Cowboys don’t want it!”

Vocal anti-Islamic sentiment is undergoing a revival. Four days before the imam’s canceled benediction, protesters at the State Capitol in Austin shouted down Muslim speakers, 

claiming Texas in the name of Jesus alone. In North Carolina two weeks earlier, Duke University’s plan to broadcast a Muslim call to prayer was abandoned amid threats of violence. Meanwhile Gov. Bobby Jindal, Republican of Louisiana claimed that if American Muslims “want to set up their own culture and values, that’s not immigration, that’s really invasion.”

No matter how anxious people may be about Islam, the notion of a Muslim invasion of this majority Christian country has no basis in fact. Moreover, there is an inconvenient footnote to the assertion that Islam is anti-American: Muslims arrived here before the founding of the United States — not just a few, but thousands.

They have been largely overlooked because they were not free to practice their faith. They were not free themselves and so they were for the most part unable to leave records of their beliefs. They left just enough to confirm that Islam in America is not an immigrant religion lately making itself known, but a tradition with deep roots here, despite being among the most suppressed in the nation’s history.

In 1528, a Moroccan slave called Estevanico was shipwrecked along with a band of Spanish explorers near the future city of Galveston, Tex. The city of Azemmour, in which he was raised, had been a Muslim stronghold against European invasion until it fell during his youth. While given a Christian name after his enslavement, he eventually escaped his Christian captors and set off on his own through much of the Southwest.

Two hundred years later, plantation owners in Louisiana made it a point to add enslaved Muslims to their labor force, relying on their experience with the cultivation of indigo and rice. Scholars have noted Muslim names and Islamic religious titles in the colony’s slave inventories and death records.

The best known Muslim to pass through the port at New Orleans was Abdul-Rahman Ibrahim ibn Sori, a prince in his homeland whose plight drew wide attention. As one newspaper account noted, he had read the Bible and admired its precepts, but added, “His principal objections are that Christians do not follow them.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/09/opinion/the-founding-muslims.html?action=click&contentCollection=Europe&module=MostEmailed&version=Full&region=Marginalia&src=me&pgtype=article

Posted By F. Sheikh

Andrew Small on the China-Pakistan Relationship

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Andrew Small, a policy researcher at the German Marshall Fund of the United States in Washington, explores China’s ties with Pakistan in a new book that delves into the relationship’s history, the Chinese origins of Pakistan’s nuclear weapons, extremism in the two countries and how the future might develop as the United States recedes from Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In his book, “The China-Pakistan Axis: Asia’s New Geopolitics,” Mr. Small argues that although China has long been close to Pakistan — thanks in part to shared mistrust of India — there have always been irritants below the surface. The presence in remote areas of Pakistan of the East Turkestan Islamic Movement, founded by separatists from the Uighur ethnic minority native to the western Chinese region of Xinjiang, is especially troubling to Beijing. China is suspicious, he says, that elements in the Pakistani Army harbor sympathies for the Uighurs.

The book is especially timely as President Xi Jinping is expected to visit Pakistan soon, perhaps for Pakistan Day celebrations at the end of March. Chinese presidents do not visit Pakistan often, only about once a decade. If, as expected, Mr. Xi goes to Pakistan and bypasses India, the trip could open a new chapter in the relationship. Following are excerpts from an interview with Mr. Small:

Q.

What prompted you to write about Pakistan and China, an important relationship but rarely written about in full?

I was frustrated with the lack of authoritative material on a friendship that I believe is so important to the understanding of Chinese foreign policy, the future of Pakistan and Afghanistan, and the prospects for the U.S.-China relationship. The Pakistani Army’s assault on Islamabad’s Red Mosque in 2007, the incident that opens the book, pulled many of these strands together. While the United States had been pushing Pakistan for years to mount a crackdown on various extremist groups, it was pressure from Beijing that ultimately played the decisive role, following the kidnapping of Chinese “massage workers” by Red Mosque militants. For all the tensions between Washington and Beijing in East Asia, the region to China’s west is an area where the two sides have important interests in common and where Chinese assertiveness, especially in dealing with its Pakistani friends, is generally very welcome. But in practice it has been extremely difficult to draw China out on these issues, not least because of Beijing’s close, secretive and carefully protected relationship with Pakistan.
I wanted to figure out how the rising threat of Islamic militancy was reshaping China’s approach in this region, and to try to get to the facts behind the most mythologized stories — China’s nuclear relationship with the Pakistanis and the Saudis, China’s dealings with the Taliban, China’s plans for naval bases in the Indian Ocean, and so on — that affect calculations about so many different global security concerns, but where definitive answers have been so hard to come by.
Q.

China is quite worried about the terror threat from Pakistan, and particularly dislikes the fact that the East Turkestan Islamic Movement operates in Pakistan’s tribal areas. Why does China not exert more pressure on the Pakistanis about harboring the ETIM? Was the recent Pakistani offensive into North Waziristan inspired in part by the Chinese?

A.

The ETIM issue has been the biggest source of tension between China and Pakistan in recent years, and behind closed doors the pressure from Beijing at a number of different junctures has been pretty strong. Among the examples are the run-up to the 2008 Olympics, the run-up to the 60th anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and after various incidents in Xinjiang that appeared to have cross-border involvement.

Nevertheless, there are plenty of officials on the Chinese side who bought the argument from the Pakistanis that an operation in North Waziristan was difficult to mount and potentially ill-advised. There were also doubts about whether a rather small number of ETIM fighters could really do very much harm sitting out there in the tribal areas. As the terrorist violence in and beyond Xinjiang has worsened though, especially after the attacks in Beijing and Kunming over the last 18 months, patience has worn thin. While the direct involvement of ETIM in the attacks on the Chinese mainland remains in doubt, North Waziristan had become a propaganda hub. And, although there were many reasons for the launch of the offensive there, it was certainly encouraged by China. There are even recent stories that Beijing has suggested conducting joint military operations with the Pakistanis. China is suspicious that, in the lower ranks of the Pakistani Army, there are sympathies with the Uighurs, and has complained in recent years about warnings being given before operations are conducted, a phenomenon that is quite familiar to the U.S. side.

http://sinosphere.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/02/06/q-and-a-andrew-small-on-the-china-pakistan-relationship/?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=first-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0