Author Archives: Effendi

More Arab Racism against South Asians

By Effendi | Published: May 18, 2013

This video is extremely distressing. If you bother to watch it you will see a Bangladeshi cab driver in Saudi Arabia being racially harassed and abused by a Saudi passenger.

“Saudi Arabia Is Your Owner You Dog!”

What would be the outcome of this kind of attack had it been perpetrated by a white non-Muslim Briton? It would be “Islamophobic” and rightly condemned. But when we see it perpetrated by Arabs on South Asian Muslims, it will be dismissed at best – or the victim will be considered to have “asked for it”.

Posted in Racism, Sharia | 3 Responses

Lord Ahmed resigns

By Effendi | Published: May 13, 2013

Say goodbye to Lord Nazir Ahmed as he rides off into sunset to pastures new. We hope he takes his entourage of “10,000 Muslims” and his collection of Nazi paraphernalia with him.

Posted in Antisemitism | 20 Responses

Two of the “Atheist Bloggers” Released

By Effendi | Published: May 12, 2013

Subrata Adhikari Shuvo and Russel Parvez

Some good news from Bangladesh on the plight of the “Atheist Bloggers” who were associated with Shahbag movement and were subsequently detained without trial for allegedly “defaming Islam”.

Dhaka Senior Special Judge Mohammad Zahurul Haque granted bail to Shuvo and Rasel after taking into cognisance the charges against the three bloggers arrested.

The court’s Additional Public Prosecutor Tapash Paul told bdnews24.com that the other blogger – Mashiur Rahman Biplab – had submitted no bail petition. “That is why the court granted bail to the two.”

These bloggers were accused of ‘inciting religious passions’ through their postings on the Internet. These bloggers were arrested from Dhaka on Apr 1 following persistent demands by Hifazat-e Islam to punish ‘atheists’.

Shuvo, Biplab and Pervez were sent on remand under article 54 as suspects.

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Posted in Censorship, Civil Rights, Freedom of Expression | Leave a comment

Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin Indicted

By Effendi | Published: May 12, 2013

The BBC report on the “UK Muslim community leader” namely Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin has been indicted in Bangladesh has a statement by his lawyer Toby Cadman.

Chowdhury Mueen-Uddin strongly denies any role in the murder of 18 intellectuals in December of that year.

He is alleged to have been a member of the Al-Badr group, which identified and killed pro-independence activists.

He is accused with another alleged Al-Badr member, Ashrafuzzaman Khan, a United States citizen.

His lawyers have rejected all the allegations against him. They say that none of the accusations have ever been formally put to him and there has been no attempt to question him.

“The statements made by members of the government of Bangladesh are grossly defamatory to my client, wholly untrue and are refuted in their entirety,” his lawyer Toby Cadman told the BBC.

Cadman’s statement is covered more extensively in the Telegraph:

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Posted in 1971 War, Tower Hamlets, War Crimes | Leave a comment

Disappearing stories and evidence

By Effendi | Published: December 19, 2011

Gita Sahgal on on Bangladesh’s struggle against the impunity of 1971 war criminals and historians who want to preserve their impunity. In particular, the historical revisionist, Sarmila Bose.

At a December 8th presentation at SOAS, London, Sarmila Bose presented a talk “The legacy of 1971 – 40 years on,” at the invitation of the Center for the Study of Pakistan. During the Q&A session I asked her directly why, in her book Dead Reckoning, she had been dismissive about Razakars, as if it was a figment of fevered Bengali imaginations. She had treated them as a “discourse” rather than a fact on the ground that needs examination. Why was there no discussion of their actions, no mention of peace committees or their political linkages to the Jamaat e Islami? In reply, she simply said that these issues were not her concern and the book dealt with only certain incidents. This evasive response is elaborated in her just-published essay “The question of genocide and the quest for justice in the 1971 war” (Journal of Genocide Studies, November 2011), where she states: “It may be argued that the groups doing the killings were the creation of the regime, but their exact identity and motives remain shrouded.”

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Posted in 1971 War | 8 Responses

Farewell Christopher Hitchens

By Effendi | Published: December 16, 2011

Christopher Hitchens has died at the age of 62. An obituary here, there are many more.

Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Responses

On Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh on Radio 4

By Effendi | Published: December 15, 2011

On the eve of the 40th anniversary of  the 1971 War of Independence and the break up of West and East Pakistan, BBC Radio 4 has produced two remarkable programmes which are still available on iPlayer and are both well worth a listen.

The first is ‘The Blood Telegram‘

In 1971 U.S. diplomat Archer K. Blood took a heroic stand against Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Blood was the U.S consul general to East Pakistan – now the independent nation of Bangladesh. Blood and his team were witnesses to a brutal military crackdown and asked for the U.S to denounce the atrocities on humanitarian grounds, but the Nixon team remained silent. Finally Blood’s team sent a dissent telegram accusing the government of being “morally bankrupt”. The ‘Blood Telegram’ marked the first time a whole U.S mission had dissented from their own government.

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Posted in 1971 War | 3 Responses

Hamza Yusuf: ‘If you hate the west, emigrate to a Muslim country’

By Effendi | Published: December 14, 2011

Hamza Yusuf is probably one of the pre-eminent Muslim scholars alive today. So it is pleasantly surprising when he talks straight and honestly about the situation as it stands. There is nothing he says in this interview which contains any of the postmodernist dissimulation, the special pleading, the theological victimhood and the question begging we get by the bucketload from Muslims across the board from extremists, moderates and their apologists.

In an interview with the Guardian, he makes a series of cogent but knockout statements about the status quo, the collapse of a body of theology to square with the modern world, the intellectual capitulation to extremists and the preponderance of ignorance and conspiracy-theory mindsets. No doubt he will now be vilified and his good name associated with everything from a “neocon”, a “fitnah spreader”, a “sell-out” (but maybe not a “coconut” since he is white) and any number of other knee-jerk (but “halal”) epithets will follow.

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Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Responses

The Rise of the Salafists

By Effendi | Published: December 4, 2011

The unexpected victory of the Salafists in the Egypt and Tunisia elections has caught many by surprise, not least the Muslim Brotherhood who once thought that they would clean up, but now are faced with the prospect of having to share power with a segment they regarded as marginal. The rise of the Salafists is seen by some as the authentic reaction to the repression of Islamic practice by secular Arab despots. The Salafists regard the first century of Islamic history as the perfected state for humanity,  and now they see themselves as the real inheritors of the voice of the repressed Muslim majority. Their stake has been under-reported because attention has always been directed on the Muslim Brotherhood as the stakeholders of the Islamist vote.

The rise of the Salafists is arguably the most alarming dynamic unleashed by the Egyptian revolution.

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Posted in Democracy, Islamism | 3 Responses

Why Press TV Should be Closed Down

By Effendi | Published: December 4, 2011

Nick Cohen spells it out:

If whites ran Press TV, one would have no difficulty in saying it was a neo-Nazi network. It welcomes British Holocaust-deniers such as Nicholas Kollerstrom, fascist ideologues such as Peter Rushton, the leader of the White Nationalist party – an organisation that disproves the notion that the only thing further to the right of the BNP is the wall – along with, until recently, Ken Livingstone, Labour’s candidate for mayor of London, who showed no embarrassment about the company his Iranian paymasters kept.

Press TV is not just a home for those with exterminationist fantasies about wiping Israel off the map, but a platform for the full fascist conspiracy theory of supernatural Jewish power. Other fantasies follow. The 9/11 attacks on Washington and New York and 7/7 attacks on London were inside jobs, according to its commentators. Plots emanating from Buckingham Palace, and orchestrated by that sinister figure, the Queen, threaten its journalists.

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Posted in Fascist Propganda | 10 Responses

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