Author Archives: Effendi

Pakistan: Islamist Infiltration of the Military

By Effendi | Published: June 22, 2011

More information of Islamist infiltration, this time of the Hizb-ut Tahrir kind, into the top brass of the Pakistani military revealed in the Indy today.

Brigadier Ali Khan, Hizbie

Fears of Islamist infiltration of the Pakistan army’s ranks have been heightened after it was revealed yesterday that a senior officer is being held on suspicions of links with a banned extremist group.

Brigadier Ali Khan, a senior officer at the army’s general headquarters, was detained on 5 May and is being interrogated by military intelligence for suspected links to Hizb-ut-Tahrir (HT), an extremist outfit that has been attempting for the past 15 years to infiltrate the army’s ranks to effect a military coup that would precipitate the establishment of a nuclear-armed caliphate.

“We follow a zero per cent tolerance for any breach of discipline or indulgence of any illegal activity,” said Major General Athar Abbas, the military’s chief spokesman.

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Posted in Islamism | 3 Comments

More “Noble and Courageous” Revolutionary Jihad

By Effendi | Published: June 21, 2011

The title describes the mindset that permits some Muslims to view this story as a form of “defensive jihad” waged against “the West”. This is in fact the type of thing that a Muslim commentator of this blog would have us believe Pakistanis want to have inflicted on them because, apparently, the “West is at war with Islam”. Their message is clear: Pakistanis would much prefer to have bombs strapped to a child for a suicide mission than have Islam “demonized” in the West. Go figure.

An eight-year-old Pakistani girl was kidnapped by militants who forced her to wear a suicide vest to attack security forces, police said on Monday.

Police produced the girl, identified as Sohana Javaid, before a news conference broadcast on Pakistani television channels.

The girl recalled how she was kidnapped in her hometown of Peshawar by two women and a man who pulled up in a car.

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Posted in Terrorism | 5 Comments

Baroness Cox and the Shari’a Law Bill

By Effendi | Published: June 20, 2011

Baroness Cox’s Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill, which will hopefully scale down the remit of shari’a courts (to civil disputes only), will uphold the primacy of English law and the rights of Muslim women. She is interviewed by the Indy:

Take a look through the Arbitration and Mediation Services (Equality) Bill and you realise what Baroness Cox is trying to do is not actually that radical. Other than a new criminal offence for anyone caught falsely passing themselves off as a bona-fide judge, the main thrust of the Bill is to ensure the judgments of arbitration panels – be they Muslim, Jewish of any other variant – are only enforceable in civil disputes, not in family law or criminal law.

Technically that is what the law already says but there is growing concern that religious courts are suffering from “jurisdiction creep” and are ruling on issues such as domestic violence and child custody when they have absolutely no right to do so.

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Posted in Sharia | 8 Comments

An-Na’im on Islam and Secularism

By Effendi | Published: June 18, 2011

Professor Abdullahi An-Na’im of Emory University on Islam and the secular state and how the two must co-exist to preserve values such as equality for men and women, freedom of speech and religion. This is increasingly valid in the light of the Arab spring and the role of Islamists in the political future of Egypt, Sudan, Tunisia, Libya and others.

Posted in Secularism | Leave a comment

PressTV Celebrate US Muslims Who Honour Khomeini

By Effendi | Published: June 18, 2011

Here is Press TV, a Khomeinist propaganda TV station and media outlet, propagandising Khomeini:

American Muslims have assembled at Iran’s interests section in Washington to commemorate the anniversary of the passing of the late leader of Iran’s Islamic Revolution, Imam Khomeini.

The mourners honored the life and legacy of the founder of the Islamic Republic of Iran, a Press TV correspondent reported.

“Imam Khomeini … was not tainted by any Western ideological orientations or Western forms of governance,” Afeef Khan from the Contemporary Islamic Thought told Press TV.

Among the issues discussed at the gathering was the impact that Imam Khomeini had on world affairs and the global shift in power politics in favor of Muslims.

“He showed that one person who motivates a society that may not necessarily have the military prowess [like that of] its adversaries, that, one person … can stand up to the entire world,” said Afeef Khan.

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Posted in Islamism | Leave a comment

Naeem Mohaimen’s riposte to Sarmila Bose, genocide denier

By Effendi | Published: June 17, 2011

Naeem Mohaimen, artist, writer and activist (and good friend), has been featured on the BBC in a riposte to Sarmila Bose, genocide denier.

Already Bangladeshi academics at home and abroad are lining up to attack her book. One, the Dhaka and New York based writer Naeem Mohaiemen, told the BBC that she was guilty of “pushing her conclusions to an extreme” by arguing that the war was fought between two equally violent sides, “with the Pakistan army using only justified and temperate amounts of retaliatory force”. He has accused her of lacking sufficient curiosity to unpack the more complex issues behind 1971, “such as why the killings began, why the Pakistan state behaved so brutally and why Bengalis reacted violently”.

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Posted in War Crimes | 2 Comments

Hugo Schmidt pwns Germaine Greer

By Effendi | Published: June 15, 2011

Hugo Schmidt writes about Germaine Greer’s recent ignorant and maniacal performance in inimitable style in Germaine Greer Strikes Again:

I have no idea whether Greer has ever met any British soldiers, or whether, as is usually the case, she cannot move a millimeter beyond the confines of her narrow skull, but this charge is simply insane. As a member of the Officer Training Corps, I have had the good fortune to meet soldiers from many branches, including the hyper-testosterone Royal Marine Commandos, and the idea of any of them going feral in such as way is simply nuts. Not to mention the fact, that were any single individual to go mad in such a way, he would be prosecuted by the full force of the entire armed forces.

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Posted in The Regressive Left | 48 Comments

Germaine Greer: How to leave your credibility in tatters on live television

By Effendi | Published: June 13, 2011

An appalling segment from last Thursday’s Question Time when “legendary left-wing feminist”, Germaine Greer, in a demented self-contradictory rant, stated that the rape of women in Bangladesh in 1971 “never stood up” and was “another urban myth” in order to justify another mass-rape of women, currently in perpetration by Gaddafi’s forces in Libya today.

So let’s follow her line of reasoning:

She starts off by asserting that “Rape is always present where you have slaughter and you don’t have to have a government fiat to do it”.

She then attempts to diminishes the severity of the Libyan rapes by Gaddafi’s soldiers with this shameful and appalling mock irony:

“What’s wrong with these Libyans. Everyone else did without [viagra], as far as I can see. Give them enough viagra and they’ll be raping each other”

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Posted in The Regressive Left, War Crimes | 25 Comments

Remembering Maqbool Fida Hussein

By Effendi | Published: June 10, 2011

Maqbool Fida Hussein, India’s best known painter, died in London on Wednesday, aged 95.

M F Hussein. Photo Courtesy: Continuum/Delhi Art Gallery

Here are two thoughtful, though not uncritical, assessmentsof his life.

The first by Girish Shahane in Mint:

He studied at the JJ School of Art, though the myth of M.F. Husain, as it later developed, excluded this formal training. By the late 1940s, he was widely recognized as one of India’s leading talents. He reached the peak of his creativity in the 1950s and 1960s, crafting seminal canvases such as Man, Zameen, and Between the Spider and the Lamp. Having come to believe that shakti, the female principle, was the essence of Indian culture, he fell under the spell of Indira Gandhi in the 1970s and Mother Teresa in the 1980s. By this time, he was, by some margin, India’s most expensive painter. His prolific output was as crucial to the nascent market as Amitabh Bachchan’s films were to the movie industry. Well past his prime as an artist, the complex interaction of figure and colour of his best work increasingly replaced by easy symbolism, Husain became a media star, and enjoyed the attention. His flowing hair and beard, preference for walking barefoot, and humble background as a hoarding painter made a winning combination.

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Posted in Freedom of Expression, Hindu Fundamentalism | 12 Comments

Liberal Hangup?

By Effendi | Published: April 6, 2011

Jonathan Friedland on the Goldstone Report furore which ultimately is a obsession which occludes other issues which are as worthy of the world’s attention as Israel/Palestine. If this a notion that is worth repeating it is most certainly worth repeating on the Guardian.

Many respectable folks have spent decades insisting that the “core issue” in the Middle East, if not the world, is the Israel-Palestine conflict – that it is the “running sore” whose eventual healing will heal the wider region and beyond.

That was always gold-plated nonsense, but now the Arab spring has come along to prove it. Now the world can see that the peoples of Egypt, Tunisia, Libya, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain have troubles aplenty that have nothing to do with Israel. There could be peace between Israelis and Palestinians tomorrow, but it wouldn’t relieve those in Damascus or Manama or Sana’a from the yoke of tyranny. For them, Israel is not “the heart of the matter”, as the cliche always insisted it was. The heart of the matter are the regimes who have oppressed them day in, day out, for 40 years or more.

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Posted in International Affairs, Moral relativism, The Left, War Crimes | 4 Comments

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