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.”

Looking at how she responded to various questions at SOAS, she appears to be going through a central shape shifting in the face of mounting criticism of her book. At the time of launch, she claimed Dead Reckoning was groundbreaking, a new account of the war, showing that the major narrative was not merely flawed or incomplete but fundamentally wrong. By now, after months of published criticisms of her book (Mookherjee, Mohaiemen, in EPW, among others), she says it is only a “few incidents” and when key issues like Razakars are brought up, she says these are “not her concern.”

When the book was first launched, the Pakistanis were gentlemen and the Bengalis were racist and nasty towards them. Now, she states, she was not intending to be rude, but rather to display “the richness of the vocabulary” of Bengalis criticising Pakistanis. Then, there was no genocide (except of Biharis). Now, she says she has written an article saying that there might have been some genocidal killings.

That is why I call her a shape shifter.

One method used by her is to look at written narratives, and then take them apart by “checking” with the Pakistani army. She clearly started out with a great deal of access, but she uses none of the material which could help make a case against the Pakistan army. In several cases, people are alive and she could have talked to them directly rather relying on hearsay. Bose has certainly not attempted to raise the shroud she referred to, although she had the perfect opportunity to do so.

In Dead Reckoning, Bose quoted General Niazi, who wrote that sanction to set up al Badr and al Shams was given at the end of August 1971 and they were drawn from well-educated students from schools and madrassas. But by the time she writes this new article on genocide, she has apparently forgotten this citation and all mention of al Badr. In the book, she discusses accounts of “the killing of the intellectuals.” Now, in the article, she concludes that there is no evidence that the Pakistani army was involved. In neither the book nor the article does she connect al Badr and al Shams to the Jamaat e Islami or examine their ideology, intentions or actions. There is a blackout in her book about the peace committees and the role of the Jamaat in systematic killings and torture.

The most striking thing about the book is the complete absence of any framework, theoretical or political. Some of her material clearly shows an uprising in progress. Fear, rumours and exaggeration are well known features of uprisings, but you don’t get any sense that she understands this, or has read anything about the behaviour of crowds. There is also a non-discussion of genocide, war crimes or crimes against humanityeither legal or political movements for accountability, or the case that has developed through international tribunals

Now it is true that only certain incidents are discussed, so she may argue she does not need to cover every incident. But the book claims to dismiss the genocide allegation based on these selective incidents. In her book, she summarily denied genocide allegations against Pakistanis. For instance, she makes no determination on the crimes committed at Dhaka University, though she doesn’t deny the direct accounts of targeted attacks on civilians. But she mocks them for “cowering” instead of fighting. There is a strong whiff of admiration for the military, instead of these paltry people who hid when the army launched a massive attack. Her main concern is numbers and other issues of burial and evidence.

There was an emphasis in her EPW article on rape (preceding this book) on randomness, as she keeps calling rape “opportunistic.” In the book, there is a refusal to see any patterns targeting of civilians, even where it is described, it is not commented on. After being challenged on the EPW article (by Mookherjee, Mandal, Rahman and others), she excluded some of the rape material from the book. Although Yasmin Saikia is cited as a reliable source, none of Saikia’s information about rape, or contrition of Pakistani soldiers, is used. Other secondary sources are frequently used, so why not this one? My film The War Crimes File is cited, but very little of the material in it, except for footage of the killings in Dhaka University, is discussed.

One of the difficulties of the definition of genocide is that there is a requirement to prove “intent.” That, along with the requirement to show that a group (for instance, religious or ethnic but not political) is being destroyed is of paramount importance. This requirement does not have to be met in the case of war crimes or crimes against humanity. But evidence that crimes are either “widespread” or “systematic” would be crucial in determining a crime against humanity. As the Rwanda tribunal showed, inflammatory speeches calling for extermination of a group, can be an element in genocide. It would be important to show whether there were organised groups, whether they were acting on their own or under military command. Bose’s failure to gather and present such evidence, in a book and subsequent article on genocide and other grave crimes, is inexcusable.

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.

On the fortieth anniversary of the birth of Bangladesh Jonny Dymond unravels Blood’s story to uncover one of the most courageous diplomatic stands in history. Dymond speaks to Blood’s family and signatories of the telegram to unpick the events leading to Blood’s decision to risk everything and make his stand, and finds out why Nixon and Kissinger remained silent. He reveals that Blood was a victim of a grander cold war game driven by the realpolitik of Nixon and Kissinger.

And the second is ‘Boundaries of Blood‘

Shahzeb Jilani, now the BBC World Service South Asia Editor, returns to the region to find out how these traumatic events have shaped contemporary Pakistan. It is a personal journey of discovery to challenge the contradictions in the Pakistani narrative he was taught while at school.

Of the second, Tendence Coatesy, who also listened to the show says:

He describes how nine months turmoil in ‘East Pakistan’ Bangladeshi “separatists” (fighters for national liberation), India intervened. The war then lasted 13 days.

Jillani, who was born in Sind, Pakistan,  summarises this, “The defeat of the Pakistani army on 16 December 1971was a triumph for India and the Bengali insurgents it had assisted.”

Although the programme was sensitive and throughly researched it is unlikely to appeal to all Bangladeshis or supporters of their great war of national liberation.

The atrocities committed by the Pak army were reported, but ‘balanced’ by reference to attacks on supporters of Pakistan. The scale of the genocide was left undecided - over 2, 3 million deaths? or less?

It was left uncertain.

Above all there was no reference to the present trial of Bangladeshi collaborators with Pakistan. That is, those who enrolled in the mass-murdering Razakars. They stand accused of War Crimes.

This perhaps summarises some of what took place (here):

“…… we were told to kill the hindus and Kafirs (non-believers in God). One day in June, we cordoned a village and were ordered to kill the Kafirs in that area. We found all the village women reciting from the Holy Quran, and the men holding special congregational prayers seeking God’s mercy. But they were unlucky. Our commanding officer ordered us not to waste any time.”

Assisting the Army were Bangladeshi Islamists, such as supporters of the Jamaat-e-Islami, a brother party of the Pakistani Party of the same name.

They continue to have a strong domestic base, with support in the UK. Here they enjoy a role in ‘community leadership’  in the East End of London.

It is to the Pakistan’s great honour that a man like Lt Col Abdul Qadir Baloch can criticise the army’s actions during this war.

But sadly there is little evidence that this honesty is widespread. Some of the interviewees on the programme spoke of the reports of killings and other atrocities as “propaganda”.

In Pakistan Jillani reports,

One might expect that the Pakistani army’s failure in 1971 would have diminished its power in the country. But in my lifetime, its influence in shaping and running the country has grown exponentially.

In Pakistan: A Hard Country by Anatol Lieven (2011) one can detect absolutely no Pakistani remorse for the army’s mass murders. No apologies for its racism – that the regarded the Bangladeshi people as inferior, tainted by Hindi culture, and, clearly disposable.

And here’s the editorial view of New Age on where Bangladesh is now:

Be that as it may, on the fortieth anniversary of the victory, we must ask ourselves whether or not the objectives of our independence, for which so many people laid down their lives, have been realised over the past forty years. The 24 years of political struggle of the Bengalis within Pakistan clearly suggests that the objectives behind the liberation war were to establish a representative democracy, economic prosperity of all the citizens and a secular society and a state free from religious communalism. It is common knowledge that the successive regimes, civil or military, have not been able to deliver in the light of the political, economic and cultural dreams that inspired the people at large to fight the war and make enormous sacrifices for the victory.

Economically, Bangladesh has been growing at a rate of over five per cent, but economic disparity between the poor millions and the rich few has been widening every day. On the political front, a kind of oligarchy of a few families and interest groups, under the banner of two inherently undemocratic camps led by the Awami League and the Bangladesh Nationalist Party, has been dominant. Culturally, the state has drifted far away from its secular-democratic promise. Gender discrimination remains a crude reality at all levels of life. The ethnic minority communities are yet to be freed from racial discrimination. Bangladesh needs to defeat all these anomalies to become really victorious.

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.

Surely this is the kind of deradicalising sentiment that should be made in the ISOCs of British universities? Instead we are gifted with a series of half-literate hate-spouting religious right-wingers radicalising young and impressionable Muslims with a message calling for the destruction of the “West” that they would, in actuality, rather never leave.

But the time has now come to do or die, put your benefit money where your mouth is. There are a number of nascent Islamic states spouting up in the Middle East at the moment and all of them present the once in a lifetime opportunity to leave the “evil West” and contribute towards recreating their lives in a glorious  new Islamic state. And all this is available to our  dear Islamist friends without having to shed a drop of blood in any of  that obligatory but messy “defensive jihad” business. Isn’t that what they have always said they wanted? So why don’t they go?

Muslims who claim Islam transcends political and geographical boundaries are the first to tell you that they belong to this or that nation state (and almost always a Western nation state) particularly when they are faced with the sentiment that Hamza Yusuf makes here. They can’t have it both ways.

Indeed, he sympathises with Margaret Thatcher’s statement that British Muslims have not been loud enough in condemnation. “There may be some truth in it,” he says. “Some Muslims tried to explain what has happened. But if you say you condemn something and then try to explain the background, it can mistakenly sound like a justification, as though this is their comeuppance.”

His hard-line attitude to extremists in Britain would be unsayable for any mainstream politician keen to retain any respectability. “I would say to them that if they are going to rant and rave about the west, they should emigrate to a Muslim country. The good will of these countries to immigrants must be recognised by Muslims.”

It is as though he has gone through a second, possibly more radical conversion than the first from Christianity. He regrets speeches he himself has made in the past, peppered as they were with the occasional angry statements about Jews and America that are a staple of much Muslim oratory. Days before the September 11 killings, he made a speech warning that “a great, great tribulation was coming” to America. He is sorry for saying that now.

“September 11 was a wake-up call to me,” he says. “I don’t want to contribute to the hate in any shape or form. I now regret in the past being silent about what I have heard in the Islamic discourse and being part of that with my own anger.”

His great concern is that Muslim thinking has sunk into theological shallowness that allows violent fundamentalists to fill the vacuum. Colonialism and successor powers, he contends, dismantled the great Islamic learning institutions, leaving a poverty of great scholarship.

“We Muslims have lost theologically sound understanding of our teaching,” he says. “We are living through a reformation, but without any theologians to guide us through it. Islam has been hijacked by a discourse of anger and the rhetoric of rage. We have lost our bearings because we have lost our theology.”

He has been examining the backgrounds of the extremists. The consistent feature, he says, is that they have been educated in the sciences rather than the humanities. “So they see things in very simplistic, black-and-white terms. They don’t understand the subtleties of the human soul that you get, for example, from poetry. Take the Iliad, for example. It is the ultimate text on war, yet you never know whether Homer is really on the side of the Greeks or the Trojans. It helps you understand the moral ambiguities of war.”

So hats off to Mr Hamzah Yusuf. Please do read the interview.

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.

But this story has been muffled by an upbeat media narrative that describes the anti-Mubarak movement as dominated by secular youth (in a country of 85 million with median age of 24, the revolution naturally contained many young people). Media coverage was also fixated on the perceived or real dangers contained in the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood.

But as revolutionaries and Mubarak loyalists fought for Tahrir Square, the Salafis maintained an aggressive but low-profile presence at its barricaded entrances.

Part of the bias in coverage has been created by protest organisers. An effort by Sheikh Hassan to enter the square and proclaim his support for the revolution was thwarted by protesters concerned that he would compromise the secular atmosphere they were feeding the western media. That version of the story put the secular users of social networks at the front and centre of coverage.

“I’m not worried so much about the Muslim Brothers as about the Salafis,” said Mohammed ElBaradei, the Nobel peace prize winner and presidential candidate, last month, voicing the fears of secularists. “Some of them, well, there is no common ground with them. They want a completely theocratic state. One of their spokesmen said the other day that democracy is against Islam, and the ultimate authority should be the Quran – as, of course, interpreted by him.”

We miss these signposts of the times at our peril. The 1979 Iranian revolution’s religious roots were largely ignored by the international press, which preferred to interview foreign language-speaking Iranians rather than the less sophisticated crowds supporting Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini.

Similarly, the great popularity of a religious figure such as Sheikh Hassan did not fit the feel-good narrative of Tahrir Square.

The Mubarak regime had suppressed Islamists in many ways, from banning political parties like the Muslim Brotherhood to consistently harassing devout Muslims in Cairo’s streets. But that was not much mentioned. Mr Mubarak was a staunch western ally and so, as with the Shah of Iran, his record of repression was airbrushed.

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.

As pertinently, the hatreds it fosters are as much directed against Iranians as the regime’s enemies. Press TV shows once again that the first task for servants of a dictatorship is to control their own people. Writing on Gozaar, an invaluable website from Iran’s democratic opposition, a former journalist described how eager his colleagues were to justify the suppression of Iran’s 2009 uprising. A handful of anchors and photographers quit their jobs, he said, but most had no problem churning out reports that labelled protesters as terrorists.

The loyal hacks were not only Iranian mozdoor – “mercenaries” – as they are known in Tehran, but foreign journalists too. “The majority of the American-Iranian and British-Iranian staffers championed Press TV’s coverage as a counterbalance to what they considered biased warping of the story by western media,” the ex-reporter said. “Iranian knee-jerk conspiracy thinking was embossed in their minds.”

Not much “due impartiality and due accuracy” in Press TV’s reporting of the Iranian revolution then: it was all cover-up and no coverage. Nor did the network give due prominence or right of reply to those who opposed Iran’s support for Syria’s suppression of its revolutionaries. Jody Sabral, who by her own account was a rather naive reporter, took a job as Press TV’s Istanbul correspondent. She thought it would be her “lucky break” into broadcasting. She wised up fast and appealed to liberal-leftists who make excuses for anti-western tyrannies – come on, you know who you are – to hear her out.

After months of ignoring the Syrian revolt against Iran’s clients in the ruling Alawite clique, a Press TV editor allowed her to go to Turkey’s border with Syria to talk to the refugees running for their lives. On no account was she to discuss their suffering, however. The real “story” was that Turkey was smuggling weapons to the Syrian revolutionaries. “When I asked what our source was, he couldn’t answer, and instead he replied, ‘Turkey will do anything to get into the EU.’ It was a laughable response and I obviously refused to go.”

She resigned and told tyrannophile westerners that the “next time you blindly back an alternative voice such as Press TV because it suits your own political view take a moment to question the quality of that information”.

Read the whole piece.

Statistics obtained under the Freedom of Information Act about such violence – which can include threats, abduction, acid attacks, beatings, forced marriage, mutilation and murder – show that in the 12 police force areas for which comparable data was available, reports went up by 47% in just a year.

The figures, shared with the Guardian by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation (Ikwro), also reveal that a small number of forces – including four in Scotland – are still not collecting data on how often such violence occurs.

The 39 police forces that gave Ikwro figures recorded 2,823 incidents in 2010. Ikwro estimates that another 500 crimes in which police were involved were committed in the 13 force areas that did not provide data.

But this is likely to be only the tip of the iceberg, campaigners say, as so many incidents go unreported because of victims’ fears of recriminations.

Jasvinder Sanghera of victim support group Karma Nirvana said the real figure could be four times as high.

Would you be just a little bit concerned by that prospect or would you rather be celebrating it as a victory of “the democratic process”? Over at the Guardian (naturally) the Director-General of al-Jazeera Wadah Khanfar goes for the latter option in the case of Arab countries from Egypt to Tunisia.

It’s titled “Those who support democracy must welcome the rise of political Islam”. Should we really? It also contains this execrable pre-emptive get-out clause:

However, political Islam has also faced enormous pressures from dictatorial Arab regimes, pressures that became more intense after 9/11. Islamic institutions were suppressed. Islamic activists were imprisoned, tortured and killed. Such experiences gave rise to a profound bitterness. Given the history, it is only natural that we should hear overzealous slogans or intolerant threats from some activists. Some of those now at the forefront of election campaigns were only recently released from prison. It would not be fair to expect them to use the voice of professional diplomats.

Prepare to suspend your disbelief and your principles.

This is my third visit this year to Bangladesh to learn about your International Crimes Tribunal and to offer ideas to ensure that the trials it holds will be fair and open.

I know of the horrible crimes committed in the country in 1971– of the hundreds of thousands of victims who were murdered and raped, of the pain inflicted and the property destroyed. The victims of these crimes deserve justice, and those accused of these acts deserve trials where they can test the evidence and present witnesses on their own behalf. Those who are innocent should be found not guilty and be freed. Those who are responsible for these crimes should be found guilty and punished. Given the historic importance of these trials to Bangladesh, the region, and the world, the proceedings should be conducted in a manner that is open and accessible to all.

In March, I made a number of suggestions on how the rules for these trials could be amended to ensure fair and transparent proceedings. Some of these suggestions were incorporated in amendments adopted in June. I regret to say that many were not.

Now the first trial has begun with the opening statements of the prosecution last

week, and with witnesses due to begin testifying on December 7.

The focus of my present visit is on how the International Crimes Tribunal will conduct these trials. The statute and the rules are in place; the question now is how they will be interpreted in actual practice. Much can still be accomplished to ensure that justice is done and is seen to be done in these historic proceedings.

First, it is important that the judges, at the first opportunity, define what “crimes against humanity” means. The term “crimes against humanity” has been defined in the statutes and cases of international courts. It has not been defined in Bangladesh. In their charge framing order in the first case, the judges said that they would interpret the statute according to Bangladesh law but look for additional guidance in the decisions of international tribunals. But it is not clear whether the prosecution must prove whether the alleged murders and rapes were committed as part of a widespread and systematic attack against a civilian population; whether they were committed on a racial, religious, or political basis; whether the alleged perpetrators would need to have knowledge of the larger attack. At other courts, the elements of the crimes have been defined by the judges in an early ruling. The same can be done here.

Second, it is important that the same rights be accorded to these accused as are guaranteed to Bangladeshi citizens who are charged with other violent crimes. The Bangladesh constitution and laws provided that this was to be a special court responsible for its own rules and procedures. As the judges have amended the rules to incorporate concepts like the presumption of innocence and proof beyond a reasonable doubt, it is also important that they conduct these trials to ensure that the accused have the same right to consult with their counsel, the same time and ability to prepare their defense, and the same time and ability to challenge the process as they would have in other cases.

Third, while the rules amendments provided for the protection of witnesses, it is important that a system of protection of witnesses be developed in practice and available to both sides. In the first trial, witnesses for the prosecution have already been listed. The defense must file a list of witnesses by December 7. Witness protection measures must be in effect to ensure that those willing to come forth and tell the truth will not be subject to threats and intimidation.

Finally, and most importantly, the process must be accessible to all. It is not easy for members of the public to attend court sessions. Ideally, the trial sessions should be broadcast on television or radio, or weekly reports be aired that would show key testimony, arguments, and rulings. This is being done now in the trials in Cambodia of those alleged to be responsible for the atrocities committed in that country in the 1970s. If this is not possible in Bangladesh, neutral observers should be permitted to follow the trials and produce daily and weekly reports that would be available through the internet and other media.

These trials are of great importance to the victims of these horrible crimes. What happens here will send a message to others who would commit these crimes anywhere in the world that it is possible for a national system to bring those responsible to justice.

I am here because the people of the United States wish to help ensure that this is a process that is fair and transparent. We will continue to work with all those involved in this process to achieve justice in these historic trials.

My right hand is so swollen I can’t close it.

5 or 6 surrounded me, groped and prodded my breasts, grabbed my genital area and I lost count how many hands tried to get into my trousers.

They are dogs and their bosses are dogs. Fuck the Egyptian police.

Yes sexual assault. I’m so used to saying harassment but those fuckings assaulted me.

The past 12 hrs were painful and surreal but I know I got off much much easier than so many other Egyptians.

God knows what wuld’ve happened if I wasn’t dual citizen (tho they brought up detained US students) & that I wrote/appeared various media.

The whole time I was thinking about article I would write; just you fuckers wait.

She asks what would have been her fate if she did not have US citizenship,

‘God knows what wuld’ve happened.’

I think we know the answer to that already. And this:

On the first day, we had multiple gun shot wounds as well as gassings; one young man was dead by the time the hospital gurney came. As far as I know he was killed by multipled wounds from rubber bullets. Another young man had an entry and exit wound from a bullet in his ankle which I don’t think could have been a rubber bullet. The small metal pellets in rubber bullets (or bean bag rounds) don’t tend to lodge in the flesh, but they can do. Sometimes they can be removed with forceps but sometimes the doctors have to cut in to get them out. Most of those cases are taken to hospital.

There have been a few fractures and head wounds. One young woman, who may have had a history of psychiatric illness, who knows, was catatonic when brought in and then came to and screamed and thrashed, smacking her head against a wall so badly she needed several stitches, which was only possible after she’d been given IV sedation.

Many of the staff are traumatised, weeping in corners or losing control and screaming and shouting. A lot of the younger doctors and medical students have had no experience at all to help them cope with what they are facing. We don’t have much of a problem with supplies: stuff runs short but people are donating everywhere. Even if they cannot come to the square they are giving money and aid. We are fed and watered in the mosque; volunteers, sometimes the staff themselves, circulate with snacks and drinks and there is an on-going cleaning and clearing effort.

The mood in the square is dangerous. People are angry in a different way, me included: all that was given and sacrificed, including so many young lives, seems to have been for nothing, and that is just not bearable. I cannot imagine how and where it will end. Yet all over Cairo life continues as if nothing is happening.

While this is a good initiative for the British workforce, let’s hope it doesn’t turn into this:

The new “curry college” initiative is bound to generate hilarity. No scheme which Pickles leads will fail to engender a good deal of good humoured ribaldry, but there is a serious side to these plans.

In addition to the jobs angle, this initiative also has some worthwhile and far reaching motives for the increasing integration. So instead of the New Labour language of “promoting local community cohesion” will be simpler and tighter ideas like “promoting integration” and increasing “tolerance” as the new watchwords.

The draft paper confirms the strategy will be broken down in four separate strands: establishing common ground; increasing social mobility; improving participation and countering intolerance and extremism. Among its proposals are believed to be:

• A new drive against “anti-Muslim hatred” in Britain and a recognition antisemitism is also growing.

• Events to celebrate the Queen’s diamond jubilee and the Olympic Games that bring together different communities.

• An online integration forum, which includes a “barrier-busting site” to emove bureaucratic barriers and encourage different community and faith groups to come together.

• An initiative to establish common ground with Gypsy and Traveller communities.

If Pickles’ Curry Colleges can manage to work these ideas into the community then this an inititative worth getting behind.

After serious deliberation and consultation, officials from the Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) have come up with more than 50 phrases using the word “fuck” and 17 involving “butt”.

The list includes several apparently innocuous words and phrases, including “flatulence”, “deposit” and “fondle”. Others would likely only make sense to frustrated teenagers.

Among the more printable terms are “strap-on”, “beat your meat”, “crotch rot”, “love pistol”, “pocket pool” and “quickie”.

By and large the reaction has been ridicule and all of it directed at the PTA. Not least from Pakistanis themselves:

Shoaib Taimur in Karachi (@shobz) tweeted, “Thanks to PTA I can now curse like a Sailor. Thank u for helping me ‘improve’ my vocabulary and giving me a reason to laugh.”
Shakir Husain, also from Karachi (@shakirhusain) wrote, “the #ptabannedlist has ruined my evening plans.”
The choice and spelling of certain words and phrases is also the source of much humor. “Budweiser” made the list, as did “Gonorrehea” [sic].
Pakistan bans ‘monkey crotch’, ‘Jesus Christ’ and obscene words in text messages
But the agency’s decision to implement a ban in the first place has some Pakistanis worried.
Fahad Rehman, a 30-year old event planner in Lahore who often uses text messages to advertise his events, sees it as an attempt by “out-of-touch” officials to placate the more conservative sections of Pakistan’s highly-polarized society, by dictating what is and is not appropriate.
“The word ‘sexy’ is on the list? It’s ridiculous!” says Rehman. “There is, unfortunately, a large number of people who think like this. But this is a complete waste of time. It just diverts attention away from the real problems in Pakistan.”

Beyond the well deserved ridicule, some of the criticism has been thoughtful such as this comment by Umair Tariq:

Rather than putting emphasis on character building and progressiveness, the government threw us into confusion that ultimately led us to religious intolerance and extremism. We have given up regard for the privacy of an individual and we have forsaken the golden rule of religious tolerance on which Islam was founded.

According to these people, the liberty currently enjoyed by the minorities of our country is “enough” – the same liberty where Christians are raped and forcibly converted to Islam, where innocent Hindus are killed and where Ahmadis are unnecessarily targeted. I wonder how these people will react if the West suddenly replaces the liberty currently offered to Muslims and introduces this concept of “enough” liberty to them. How would they feel then?

I truly wonder at the hypocrisy of our nation.

Here are the complete lists of the banned words:
English Offensive Words (pdf)
Urdu Offensive Words (pdf)

Regular readers of HJS will know it’s not often I find myself in agreement with either the Federation of Student Islamic Societies (FOSIS), the umbrella group for Islamic societies that in the words of the Prevent strategy, “has not always fully challenged terrorist and extremist ideology within the higher and further education sectors”; or even CagePrisoners, former Guantanamo inmate Moazzam Begg’s advocacy group with a history of supporting radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki killed in a US-drone strike in September.

But this morning I found myself becoming the 120,748th person to sign an e-petition calling for Babar Ahmad, currently fighting extradition to the US on terrorism offences, to be tried in the UK, a campaign which both groups strenuously support. Ahmad, who’s been held in maximum security prisons for seven years without trial, is waiting for a final ruling on his case from the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR).

His family want him to be tried in the UK, where his alleged offences occurred. They point out that the US is seeking to extradite him under “the controversial no-evidence-required Extradition Act 2003”. The legislation, referred to by the campaign group Liberty as “undermin[ing]  longstanding safeguards against unfair removal,” allows for the extradition of British citizens to many jurisdictions, including the US, without the need for a court to hear that there is any evidence against them.

In June this year, the Houses of Parliament Joint Committee on Human Rights urged the government to amend the law, to allow a British judge “to refuse extradition where the alleged offence took place wholly or largely in the UK,” and called on the requesting country to “show a prima facie case”.

The charges against Ahmad, however, are serious: conspiracy to provide material to support terrorists; providing material to support terrorists; and conspiracy to kill, kidnap, maim or injure persons or damage property in a foreign country. Were he found guilty in a US court he would face life imprisonment.

The US District Court for the District of Connecticut indictment alleges that Ahmad and his co-accused, Syed Talha Ahsan, provided, and conspired to provide material support and resources to terrorists in Afghanistan and Chechnya, through Azzam Publications, an internet based platform with multiple websites, and through email communications.

Ahmad is accused of using the websites to fundraise and recruit individuals for the Taliban and Chechen mujahideen; and to provide justification for violent jihad and advertise videotapes for sale depicting fighters in Bosnia, Chechnya and Afghanistan. The US further alleges that the websites revealed links to Shamil Basayev – the leader of the Chechen terrorist group Riyadus-Salikhin Reconnaissance and Sabotage Battalion of Chechen Martyrs, who claimed to be behind the Beslan school massacre in 2004.

Ahmad and Ahsan are also suspected of communicating by email with members of both the Taliban and Chechen mujahideen and conspiracy to provide support to terrorists seeking temporary residence in London. In November 2000, Ahsan and Ahmad are alleged to have assisted in coordinating the shipment of gas masks to the Taliban. They are also accused of attempting to recruit Pakistani nationals in November 2001 to travel to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban against the US, and instructing Pakistani nationals in how to submit false and fraudulent visa applications for those travelling to Pakistan. In April 2001, they are suspected of gaining possession of a then classified document, which discussed the vulnerabilities to a terrorist attack of the US Navy operating in the Straits of Hormuz.

Putting these charges aside for one moment, Ahmad has also been treated atrociously by the British justice system: arrested in the middle of the night in December 2003, Ahmad was hauled into Paddington Green police station with 73 injuries to his body before being released a week later without charge. The Metropolitan Police then offered Ahmad £60,000 by way of an apology for what they called a “serious, gratuitous and prolonged attack”.

By signing the e-petition I am not making comment on Ahmad’s innocence, nor am I seeking to downplay the severity of the allegations or abuse listed above or turn him into another cause célèbre of the “War on Terror”. Being the victim of gratuitous human rights abuses – by the very people charged with protecting you – will no doubt affect one’s belief in their country and its institutions. I would not blame Ahmad for never trusting the authorities again.

But, it does not make him innocent – that’s not for me to judge. All I believe is that no one should be forcibly removed from the own country without their courts first hearing the evidence against them. To that end, Ahmad should be tried in the UK.

The petition is available here

Love is...

Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi has an important and well-argued piece on the Charlie Hebdo firebombing and the failure of the liberal-left to stand up for it’s own liberal traditions. Last time it was the Guardian which capitulated to religious obscurantism in reaction to the Mo Toons. This time round it’s Time magazine (yes, that esteemed current affairs journal) which propped up a disgusting and cowardly justification of the incident by Bruce Crumley, on the basis that Muslims should not be expected to tolerate any form of offence to their prophet or their religious politics; not so much because Charlie Hebdo crossed the line of offence but because Muslims are incapable of rational self-critique. Disrespect Muslims at your peril. They might be inarticulate by ‘our’ standards, implies Crumley, but violence is the lingo of the offence takers.

The contrast with the debate in English-speaking circles is quite telling. Already the Guardian has put up an article by one Pierre Haski – a “co-founder and CEO of the French independent news website Rue89″ — who does not explicitly condemn the attack andeffectively urges readers to understand the firebombing in light of the fact that “for many French Muslims, religion has become a cultural identity, a refuge in a troubled society where they don’t feel accepted.” Thus, the attack on the publication’s office is merely “a disturbing reminder of the underground tensions in society.”

So back in 2006 and 2007 the Guardian went out of its way to publish articles by the likes of Karen Armstrong, a leading non-Muslim apologist for Islam. Her words speak for themselves: “But equally the cartoonists and their publishers, who seemed impervious to Muslim sensibilities, failed to live up to their own liberal values, since the principle of free speech implies respect for the opinions of others.” The result is that in Britain, this subject has often become a partisan left-right issue, even though it should transgress political boundaries.

It would appear some American outlets are following theGuardian‘s lead. For example, Bruce Crumley, the Paris correspondent for Time magazine, asked Charlie Hebdo‘s editors: “Do you still think the price you paid for printing an offensive, shameful, and singularly humor-deficient parody on the logic of ‘because we can’ was so worthwhile?”

Incidentally, at Karen Armstrong’s alma mater – St. Anne’s College, Oxford University — it would appear that some students and staff are following in her footsteps. At a minor interlude during a seminar I attended last week, several students were placing the blame squarely on Charlie Hebdo for the vandalism, stressing the need to “respect” the religion of others; and one supervisor argued that Charlie Hebdo deserved to be held partially responsible if a violent response was predictable.

Unfortunately, the persistence of such sentiments only invites one to state principles that might seem obvious, but never grow unworthy of affirmation. There is no moral equivalence between those exercising their right to free speech and Islamists who wish to impose the standards of traditional Sharia (Islamic law) on society and are prepared to harm physically others and their property to achieve that end.

More generally, this affair — along with the attack on a Tunisian TV station for broadcasting the film Persepolis, and the  death threatsthat forced the flight from Pakistan of the judge who convicted the assassin of Salman Taseer, the Punjab governor who opposed the blasphemy law — demonstrates that Islam as a whole still has a long way to go to come towards accepting basic standards of toleration of criticism.

In short, one hopes that the following principle – well summed up by a prominent Melkite Greek Catholic deacon — will come to be accepted as mainstream in Islam: ‘[O]ne’s response to someone else’s provocative action is entirely one’s own responsibility. If you do something that offends me, I am under no obligation to kill you, or to run to the United Nations to try to get laws passed that will silence you. I am free to ignore you, or laugh at you, or to respond with charity, or any number of reactions.’

Read the rest here.

Rania Hafez

When this article was published this morning, the subs at the Indpendent gave it the title ‘Why we have to get over our fear of Islamophobia‘. Twelve hours later, they’ve renamed it to ‘Islamophobia: Why we have to get over our fears‘. Whatever they choose to call it, this is an amazing article. The author of the piece is Rania Hafez, a teacher educator and academic and founder and director of ‘Muslim Women in Education’.

‘Islamophobia is the new racism’ is now a seeming truism, or so Baroness Warsi and many others would have us believe. She claims that Islamophobia has ‘passed the dinner table test’ and that anti-Muslim prejudice is now normal and uncontroversial in respectable society. Warsi’s views are echoed by many British Muslims, who claim to experience such prejudice daily.

Like many a clever coining, the term ‘Islamophobia’ remains undefined and its existence uncontested. The first recorded use dates back to 1990 in the American magazine Insight, although its etymology can be tracked to the mid 1920s. Since then after being a sociological concept largely restricted to Britain its use increased exponentially when it was declared a new form of global racism by the UN in 2001.

In its simplest form, and just going by the term itself, ‘phobia’ can be defined as ‘an intense but unrealistic fear that can interfere with the ability to socialize, work, or go about everyday life, brought on by an object, event or situation’. Adding the prefix ‘Islam’ therefore implies that this irrational fear is triggered by Islam and directed at Muslims.

But are we conflating run of the mill prejudice that a few may encounter with a national epidemic of irrational hatred against Muslims? Or is the cry of ‘Islamophobia’ simply a way of deflecting legitimate criticism of certain backward ideas associated with religion in general; and conservative Islam in particular? When we talk about Islamophobia, what is it we are really talking about?

Neither the simple definition nor the forensic academic investigation of the concept help to explain what we are really dealing with. Both mask the real issues behind Islamophobia. The easy appropriation of psychoanalytical approaches to fear suggest that indeed fear is the key issue. However, ‘Islamophobia’ expresses not a primitive fear of Muslims and Islam but several deeper anxieties that dominate British and Western political culture.

The first of these is a fear of conviction. Contemporary ‘post-modern’ morality encourages us to reject certainty in ourselves and others. We fear to confidently state our own convictions in case we are accused of bigotry, and we are anxious about others expressing their beliefs in case they are forced upon us. We may repeat the mantra that all perspectives and philosophies are equal, including beliefs held by others, but we shy away from a close examination of these beliefs for fear of losing the moral high ground of being non-judgemental.

In this cultural climate, Islam presents the West with a double challenge. Its adherents display a remarkably strong and not the slight bit ‘post-modern’ conviction in their faith, and its tenets seemingly contradict social and political Western values. Unwilling and unable to engage either with the faith or its followers, Islamophobia becomes a useful subterfuge.

This fear of strong ideas is connected with another fear. Fear of free speech.

There is no doubt that there is a deep-rooted ‘phobia’ in our society, but it is not of Islam. The fear that has gripped people is a fear of open debate and free speech. Across the spectrum, politicians may advocate for liberty and freedom of speech, but with caveats and ever stricter limits.

Both sides of the Islamophobia debate have argued for curbs on freedom of expression and free speech. The free speech of Muslim ‘extremists’ is curtailed in the interest of community cohesion. And the freedom to criticise Muslim fundamentalists or even Islam is chilled by charges of Islamophobia.

Fundamental to the fear of free speech is the fear of giving offence. We live in a culture where giving offence is deemed worse than grievous bodily harm. Some even argue that ‘hate speech’ itself harms the very being of those at whom it is directed. This doesn’t just betray the fear of argument and debate, but also the diminished view of individuals and groups particularly Muslims as not being capable of rational argument.

Not immune from the same fears, some British Muslims have jumped onto that very bandwagon, seeing it both as a useful way of deflecting criticism and an avoidance of defending their ideas. Much easier to hide behind the charge of Islamophobia! The danger for them is that in rejecting argument and debate they start to lose the ability the express their ideas with conviction and claim a legitimate public space for their beliefs.

Fear of conviction, fear of free speech and fear of offence are the hidden fears in the cry of ‘Islamophobia’. Overcoming these fears is the real challenge to all of us: Muslims and non-Muslims alike.

Here’s an understated savaging of Bose’s thesis by Maskwaith Ahsan:

Let’s recap ’71. The Awami League led by Bongobondhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman won the general elections of 1970 and according to the constitution he was supposed to form a government as prime minister. But Zulfikar Ali Bhutto couldn’t accept defeat and was not ready to hand overpower to anyone else. President Yahya Khan sided with Bhutto by delaying the process of power-transfer. Mujib in good faith took part in the negotiation process and continued his non-violent movement for the acceptance of his six-point demand.

During his historical address of March 7,1971, Mujib had urged the Pakistani military junta to show respect to the will of majority voters and requested the people of Bangladesh to get ready for freedom struggle in case the election mandate was violated.

Yahya Khan discontinued the dialogue process with Mujib and left Dhaka on the evening of March 25, 1971. By midnight his army, under the command of General Tikka Khan, launched Bengali genocide. That led Mujib to declare Independence on March 26, 1971, just before his arrest.

Mujib’s followers formed an interim government on April 17 to fight back the occupying forces of Yahya Khan, and soon the freedom struggle turned into War of Independence. The fight between a civilian Bangladesh interim government and the entire army of Pakistan was in no way just a civil war, a reality which Ms Bose has failed to identify.Bangladesh lost almost 3 million people and almost 2 to 4 lakhs of women were brutally raped and tortured by the Pakistan Army and its native collaborators.

Ms Bose has tried to create another controversy by challenging the number of death and rape victims, just like Nazi-sympathetic researchers dispute the number of Jews killed in Holocaust. There is no area of Bangladesh that did not face the brutality of Pakistani Army and its Bangladeshi collaborators. If Ms Bose was sincere she would have stayed in Bangladesh long enough to seek the truth and not just be satisfied with the accounts of the selected few she chose as her research sample.

How could she not realize that Bangladesh itself is a mass graveyard as almost every family lost their beloved ones in 1971? Her field research is heavily biased because the 30 war criminals she interviewed in Pakistan would obviously never confess to their crimes. So instead she has highlighted the killing of pro-Yahia Biharis while overlooking the massacre of Bengali Muslims and Hindus.

Ms Bose has tried to distort history under the disguise of academic neutrality. Her biased research sampling in fact is a beacon of some hidden agenda clearly favouring the war criminals of ‘71.

Lobbyists have organized book readings of Dead Reckoning (The return of Goebbels) at reputed western universities to buy recognition for Ms Bose’s em-bedded version of history. Influential dailies are raving about her book and sugar-daddy columnists are patting her back, conveniently forgetting that this is no longer an era of government controls over media and/or censored journalism. Truth is now just a click away. Ms Bose needs to keep herself more updated in this age of internet, when social media is enough to unleash every truth distorted by interest groups. She should also be ashamed of her colonial hangover and Goebbels syndrome.

The people of Bangladesh have neither forgotten their relatives killed in 1971, nor are they ignorant of the fact that justice has been denied to them for so long because of the machinations of the pro-Jamaat cult. That’s why they voted Awami League into power in 2008; to get justice and closure.

If Ms Bose continues to take her 15 minutes of fame seriously, she might end up making a fool of herself and in the process lose her credibility. She reminds me of a blind woman trying to understand what an elephant looks like….

Last week SpinWatch gave Bob Lambert space on their website to apologise for his “former” career as a Police spy. But that was then. It now transpires that SpinWatch has retracted its support for Lambert in a new statement. The reasons for their abrupt turnaround are these:

The delay of the publication coincided with the publication of the SpinWatch open letter and a comment piece by Lambert himself. This was followed by a flurry of stories in the Guardian featuring further details about his infiltration and the damage done by the 18 month relationship he pursued as part of his cover (for an overview see the Lewis and Evans’ Undercover blog).

Lambert’s past with Special Branch helps to confirm that the recently exposed police spies (such as Mark Kennedy) were not ‘rogue officers’. They were part of an unacceptable pattern of infiltration of environmental and other activist groups, which seems to have been condoned at the highest level. While Special Branch was undercover in London Greenpeace, the group was also infiltrated by private spies hired by McDonald’s – as was discovered in the McLibel court case. Intelligence gathered was shared between private spies and their corporate clients on the one hand and Special Branch on the other. This kind of cooperation continued until very recently – and may still be happening. The undercover units of ACPO, the supervisors of Mark Kennedy and other current infiltrators, shared information on climate campaigners with power companies and their hired spies, as the Guardian revealed in 2009.

Let’s look at the chronology of events here.

Reports of Lambert’s 18-month affair with a woman which he had while he was undercover, along with a number of other revelations, were published in the Guardian on the 23rd October. Lambert’s “apology” on the SpinWatch site came a full day after, on the 24th of October. Now SpinWatch are using these very same reasons, already published in full in the Guardian, as a pretext for distancing themselves from him.

Is there something SpinWatch isn’t telling us? Has David Miller woken up to the realisation that his outfit has been the subject of a ‘Bob Lambert Special’ (police infiltration and spying)?

Have the Jamaat Lobby groups which SpinWatch collaborates with through association with Lambert also been spied on? The Islamist groups close to Lambert have been very quiet on the matter. There have been no rambunctious defences of their favourite Police Spymaster since Uncle Daud’s effort.

This is Bright on Livingstone’s favourite Islamist copper, Bob Lambert:

Bob Lambert, the Islamist copper, completed his doctorate on his own police work when he left the force but soon established himself as a regular Guardian commentator. He also set up the European Muslim Centre at Exeter University, with money from the Islamist Cordoba Foundation and Islam Expo, although he had to issue an apology for the first piece of work there after complaints from councillors in east London and local MP Jim Fitzpatrick who were wrongly described as Islamphobic.

More recently Dr Lambert was exposed by the Guardian as ‘Bob Robinson’, an undercover officer who exposed violent extremists within the animal rights and environmental movement in the 1980s. He has since publicly apologised to a woman who thought she had a relationship with him but was in fact being used to maintain his cover. At the same time, Dr Lambert has issued a statement to reassure British Muslims that he has not been playing a similar double game with his Islamist friends.

Ken Livingstone has always been over-impressed by clever people. He is clearly in awe of his former aide John Ross, whom he describes in his memoirs as a “workaholic professional revolutionary” and a “statistician of formidable intelligence”. His use of Dr Lambert’s muddled thinking as justification for his invitation to a Muslim cleric noted for his anti-Jewish, misogynistic and homophobic outbursts is part of a wider problem for a man who wishes to return as London mayor.

There’s an old Jewish joke designed to prick the academic pretensions of people like Dr Lambert. “What is a phudnik? A nudnik with a PhD”. Dr Lambert is a classic phudnik.

Read it in full.

100 lashes if you don't die of laughter

From the Huffington Post:

The Paris office of the satirical French MagazineCharlie Hebdo has been firebombed and its website has been hacked. It follows the announcement thatthe magazine would be ‘guest edited’ by the Prophet Muhammad.

It has been reported that the office was gutted by fire at around 1:00am Paris time, but there were no injuries.

Patrick Pelloux, a witness to the attack, told the AFP news agency that a molotov cocktail was thrown through the window.

“Everything was destroyed,” he said.

According to the Associated Press the director of the magazine said “the material damages are large”.

On Tuesday the magazine said that the Prophet Muhammad would be editing the magazine in “honour” of Islam’s role in this year’s uprisings in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other Islamic countries.

“In order fittingly to celebrate the Islamist Ennahda’s win in Tunisia and the NTC (National Transitional Council) president’s promise that sharia would be the main source of law in Libya, Charlie Hebdo asked Muhammad to be guest editor,” the editorial team said in a statement.

On Wednesday morning the magazine’s website had also apparently been hacked by an Islamist group.

From the Telegraph:

Ennahda won the most seats in Tunisia’s October elections and is now trying to form a coalition caretaker government.It has promised to work with more liberal parties, and respect gender equality.

“To fittingly celebrate the victory of the Islamist Ennahda party in Tunisia… Charlie Hebdo has asked Mohammed to be the special editor-in-chief of its next issue”, the magazine said in a statement.

“The prophet of Islam didn’t have to be asked twice and we thank him for it,” the statement said.

The cover of this week’s issue, out on Wednesday, shows Mohammed saying: “100 lashes if you don’t die of laughter”.

It also includes an editorial by the Prophet entitled Halal Aperitif and a women’s supplement called Madam Sharia.

Behind the humour, the editorial’s message is serious: “No religion is compatible with democracy from the moment a political party representing it wants to take power in the name of God”.

“What would be the point of a religious party taking power if it didn’t apply its ideas,” it goes on. “Hello, we are the Bolchevik party and if you vote for us we promise never to speak of Communism…Come on.”

French politicians and religious leaders were swift to condemn the attack.

Nathalie Kosciusko-Morizet, minister of economy, said: “Those who did this designate themselves as enemies of democracy.”

“You don’t negotiate the freedom of the press with bombs…If you are not happy with what’s in a newspaper, you take it to court.”

The Guardian: