Shared by Nasik Elahi A sobering view of what is destroying the Islamic world. People like Donald trump feed off this ancient feud. Nasik Elahi http://news.yahoo.com/saudi-iran-war-look-don-165834881.html?soc_src=mediacontentsharebuttons&soc_trk=ma
Shared by, Syed Ehtesham.
United States Secretary of State John Kerry (R) meets Adel Ahmed Al-Jubeir, Foreign Minister of Saudi Arabia. (Photo: Reuters)
The brutal Saudi execution of Shia cleric Sheikh Nimr Al-Nimr has led to protests around the globe, as well as the burning of the Saudi Embassy in Tehran, followed by the Saudi severing of relations with Iran. This exacerbation of Sunni-Shia tensions is the result of the reckless Saudi action against a popular, nonviolent Shia leader. Also reckless is the US government’s response, which has failed to condemn the Saudi government and distance itself from the abusive regime.
On January 2, the Saudi government executed 47 people, most of them by beheading. Those executed included Sunnis convicted of Al Qaeda-affiliated attacks, as well as Shia opponents—Sheik Nimr Al-Nimr and three others arrested when they were still juveniles. The killing of Al-Nimr has sparked a massive reaction because he was a prominent religious leader who defended the Shia minority and criticized the abuses—both domestic and foreign—of the Saudi regime. He supported the 2011 anti-government protests in the Eastern Province, protests that erupted in the wake of the Arab Spring. The oil-rich Eastern Province is home to some 2 million Shiites, who have long complained of discrimination by the Sunni government.
In response to increasingly vocal demands for reforms from Shiites, who constitute about 15 percent of the total population, Saudi authorities waged a harsh crackdown. Al-Nimr was arrested and imprisoned in 2012, then convicted of sedition, disobedience and bearing arms. He did not deny the political charges against him, but insisted he never carried weapons or called for violence.
He also distanced himself from sectarian divisions. He called for people to stand up to tyrants regardless of their sect, from the Sunni rulers in Bahrain to Syria’s Assad, who is from the Alawite sect of Shia Islam. “Sheikh al-Nimr preached that we should support the oppressed against the oppressor, regardless of religion,” said Gulf scholar Ali al-Ahmed. To add insult to injury, Sheik al-Nimr’s nephew, Ali al-Nimr, was targeted and arrested at the age of 17 for protesting government corruption, and his since been sentenced to beheading and public crucifixion.
The Saudi government was well aware that killing Sheikh al-Nimr would enrage Shia both inside and outside the country. Their actions abroad have already raised sectarian tensions, such as the 2011 Saudi military intervention in Bahrain to crush a democratic revolt dominated by the country’s majority Shiites. The Saudi military intervention in Yemen against the Houthis (a Shiite sect), an ongoing intervention that has killed thousands of innocents and caused a humanitarian crisis, has also angered the Shia community. And Saudi efforts to topple the Iranian-backed Assad regime in Syria also fuel tension between Saudi Arabia’s Sunni leadership and its Shiite citizens.
An additional factor fanning ethnic hatred has been ISIL attacks on Shiite mosques in the kingdom. Many Shiites hold the kingdom’s religious establishment responsible for the attacks and maintain that Saudi officials turn a blind eye to ISIL’s sectarian agenda in the kingdom.
The cleric’s execution will also complicate Saudi Arabia’s relationship with the Shiite-led government in Iraq, where the Saudi embassy was just reopened for the first time in nearly 25 years.
The US government has expressed concern that al-Nimr’s execution risked “exacerbating sectarian tensions at a time when they urgently need to be reduced.” The government understands that the explosive reaction to the al-Nimr execution has the potential to bring even more bloodshed to the Middle East, from derailing Syria peace talks to prolonging the war in Yemen to rekindling uprisings in Bahrain.
But instead of insisting on al-Nimr’s release during his years in prison and echoing Amnesty International’s condemnation of his “deeply flawed” trial, the US government was silent. Even after the execution, the US refused to issue a strong denunciation.
For decades US governments, both Democratic and Republican, have backed the kingdom. The US-Saudi alliance dates back to World War II, when US officials started to see Saudi’s oil as a strategic advantage. Since then, the US has blindly supported the Kingdom in almost every political and economic effort, despite the fact that Saudi Arabia is an ultraconservative monarchy rife with human rights abuses.
Saudi Arabia has consistently been ranked by Freedom House as one of the worst humans rights violators in the world. Earning the lowest possible score in all three categories of freedom, civil liberties and political rights, it is one of only ten nations considered “not free.”
The killing of Sheikh Al-Nimr should serve as a prime moment for the U.S. to reconsider its alliance with the Saudi regime, a regime that not only denies human rights to its own people but exports death and destruction abroad. An upcoming activist-based Saudi Summit, which will be held in Washington DC on March 5-6, is an effort to build a campaign to support challenge this toxic relationship.
Under ancient Jewish law, if a suspect on trial was unanimously found guilty by all judges, then the suspect was acquitted. This reasoning sounds counterintuitive, but the legislators of the time had noticed that unanimous agreement often indicates the presence of systemic error in the judicial process, even if the exact nature of the error is yet to be discovered. They intuitively reasoned that when something seems too good to be true, most likely a mistake was made.
n a new paper to be published in The Proceedings of The Royal Society A, a team of researchers, Lachlan J. Gunn, et al., from Australia and France has further investigated this idea, which they call the “paradox of unanimity.”
“If many independent witnesses unanimously testify to the identity of a suspect of a crime, we assume they cannot all be wrong,” coauthor Derek Abbott, a physicist and electronic engineer at The University of Adelaide, Australia, told Phys.org. “Unanimity is often assumed to be reliable. However, it turns out that the probability of a large number of people all agreeing is small, so our confidence in unanimity is ill-founded. This ‘paradox of unanimity’ shows that often we are far less certain than we think.”
Unlikely agreement
The researchers demonstrated the paradox in the case of a modern-day police line-up, in which witnesses try to identify the suspect out of a line-up of several people. The researchers showed that, as the group of unanimously agreeing witnesses increases, the chance of them being correct decreases until it is no better than a random guess.
In police line-ups, the systemic error may be any kind of bias, such as how the line-up is presented to the witnesses or a personal bias held by the witnesses themselves. Importantly, the researchers showed that even a tiny bit of bias can have a very large impact on the results overall. Specifically, they show that when only 1% of the line-ups exhibit a bias toward a particular suspect, the probability that the witnesses are correct begins to decrease after only three unanimous identifications. Counterintuitively, if one of the many witnesses were to identify a different suspect, then the probability that the other witnesses were correct would substantially increase.
The mathematical reason for why this happens is found using Bayesian analysis, which can be understood in a simplistic way by looking at a biased coin. If a biased coin is designed to land on heads 55% of the time, then you would be able to tell after recording enough coin tosses that heads comes up more often than tails. The results would not indicate that the laws of probability for a binary system have changed, but that this particular system has failed. In a similar way, getting a large group of unanimous witnesses is so unlikely, according to the laws of probability, that it’s more likely that the system is unreliable.
The researchers say that this paradox crops up more often than we might think. Large, unanimous agreement does remain a good thing in certain cases, but only when there is zero or near-zero bias. Abbott gives an example in which witnesses must identify an apple in a line-up of bananas—a task that is so easy, it is nearly impossible to get wrong, and therefore large, unanimous agreement becomes much more likely.
On the other hand, a criminal line-up is much more complicated than one with an apple among bananas. Experiments with simulated crimes have shown misidentification rates as high as 48% in cases where the witnesses see the perpetrator only briefly as he runs away from a crime scene. In these situations, it would be highly unlikely to find large, unanimous agreement. But in a situation where the witnesses had each been independently held hostage by the perpetrator at gunpoint for a month, the misidentification rate would be much lower than 48%, and so the magnitude of the effect would likely be closer to that of the banana line-up than the one with briefly seen criminals.
Read more at: http://phys.org/news/2016-01-evidence-bad.html#jCp
posted by f.sheikh
Thinkers Forum USA
Cordially invites all participants to the monthly Meeting / Discussion
On Sunday, January 31, 2016
( Please respond By January 24, 2016 of your attendance)
Time
11: 30 AM
To
2: 30 PM
Speaker
Author & Prof. Mirza Ashraf
Topic
“Western Muslims and Impact of Conflicts in Muslim World”
Moderator
Fayyaz A. Sheikh
Location
Karavelli Restaurant
416 Nanuet Mall South, Nanuet, N.Y. 10954
845 215 9794
Brunch served after lecture
DIRECTIONS
From Upstate NY and NJ Garden State Pkwy
Take 87 South Towards NYC. Take Exit 13 S ( Palisades Pkwy South). Take Exit 8W ( Route 59 W ). At 4th traffic light take Left on S. Middletown Road. Then at 2nd traffic light make right on Nanuet Mall south. The restaurant is on the left in a small mall strip. There is a board sign of Market Street on the mall strip.
From Tappan Zee Bridge. Take 87 North , then Exit 13 S and follow upstate directions.
From NYC, NJ- Take Palisades Pkwy North , then exit 8W ( Route 59 W ) and follow the above directions.