This is the text of a speech by Gita Sahgal at AIUSA Public Round-table on 16 Feruary 2007 cross-posted from Human Rights For All
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In 1993, at the UN World Conference on Human Rights in Vienna, a group of feminist advocates held a now famous tribunal on Violence against Women. And in that moving event which reflected the experiences of thousands of women across the world, a challenge was posed to governments and to the leadership of the formal human rights movement. It was not a challenge to abandon the principles of human rights, or to dilute them. It was a challenge to embrace them more fully by accounting for the experience of a whole category of excluded victims.
This is a cross-post of an article by habibi from Harry’s Place
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This post from earlier this week covered the men the Young Muslim Organisation (YMO), the youth wing of the Islamic Forum of Europe, recommends for spiritual advice about Ramadan. Every single one of them is an extremist. Three of the nine have been convicted or charged with serious terrorism offences.
So it is no surprise to come across a page that the YMO lists as its most popular, “Du’a (prayer) for Gaza”, and find a video of this man first on the list: Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh.
There are five more videos on the page. Four have been removed from Youtube “due to terms of use violation” and one has been deleted. Hmm, why might that be?
This is a guest post by The Professor first posted on Harry’s Place
Two days ago the Pakistani Sufi organisation Minhaj-ul-Quran launched their remarkably comprehensive fatwa (religious ruling) against terrorism and suicide bombing.
Since then the Muslim Brotherhood’s Azzam Tamimi has been on a one-man mission to discredit it.
On the BBC, he mocked al-Qadri for not preventing suicide bombings in Pakistan before saying that he himself believed that suicide bombing was allowed in “self-defence” (but not against “innocent civilians” – as opposed, presumably, to guilty civilians) and saying that:
‘Then there is the question of utility and whether this is actually good for the cause or bad for the cause and in most cases it’s not good for the cause. And I think this is the argument we need to push forward rather than resorting to fatwas because for every fatwa, there is a counter fatwa.’
Mosab’s father is Sheikh Hassan Yousef, senior Hamas figure in the West Bank, currently serving a 6-year prison sentence in an Israeli prison.
Mosab helped Israel’s security forces kill and arrest members of the Islamic militant group, Hamas. He is probably marked for death and but he has published his story in his new book, ‘Son of Hamas’.
A fromer deputy of Israel’s Shin Bet intelligence service said he was one of their agents, helping to prevent Hamas attacks on Israel. This will be an embarrasment for the militant group, which prides itself on its tight discipline.
Mosab has renounced his Muslim faith, converted to Christianity and denounced his father’s organisation. By doing so, he has exposed his family to persecution in his home town of Ramallah and endangered his own life.
Shaykh Dr Tahir ul-Qadri is a scholar of repute who has following across the East and the West. He is a Muslim scholar who had the likes of the al- Azhar institution of Cairo advocating his scholarship and knowledge. Al-Azhar in fact is seeking for the first time to have a college in Pakistan under Qadri’s auspices.
Today he launched his extensive fatwa, religious edict addressing all of the basic issues of terrorism, taking civilian life, tactics of terror but also details and ancillary issues that relate to Islamist terror tactics such as taking civilian hostages, attacking people in “occupied territories”, “resistance” and foreign policy and defining rules of conduct during warfare.
Indian nationals were specifically targeted in three separate suicide bomb attacks in Kabul on Friday. The death toll came to 18 with 32 seriously wounded. Two of the buildings were guesthouses for Indians who worked in NGOs. The third blast was huge and most of the victims were Indians.
India is also a significant provider to Afghanistan of development aid and investment, and so is helping build up the government of Hamid Karzai. Having offered $1.2 billion in reconstruction aid, India is the largest regional donor. There are some 4,000 Indian workers in the country, some of them “security personnel,” according to the US Council on Foreign Relations.
Several prominent Tajik (Persian-speaking Sunni) politicians have long-standing ties to New Delhi because India’s Research and Analysis Wing (RAW, the equivalent of the CIA) provided aid to the old Northern Alliance at a time when it was under siege in the late 1990s by the Taliban. These Tajiks are die-hard enemies of the Taliban, who had committed massacres against them. The Taliban animus against India thus is multifaceted.
This is a cross-post of an article by Alexander-Meleagrou Hitchens
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In yesterday’s Sunday Times, CagePrisoners (CP) was criticised for promoting al-Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaki on their site. The group’s head, Moazzam Begg, responded by saying that ‘I don’t consider anybody a terrorist until they have been charged and convicted of terrorism.’ The only problem with this is that his organisation’s website is replete with profiles and sympathetic interviews with convicted terrorists. Rightly, Begg follows the ‘innocent until proven guilty’ line, but when they are convicted, CP seem to give the terrorists a lot of sympathy.
CP’s website, for example, reproduces and publishes letters and poems written by people who have been convicted on terrorism charges in the UK. What is the justification for this? Begg has never addressed this issue, and it is about time that he did. I have already covered the materials on the CP site inprevious blogs.
Moazzam Begg of Cageprisoners has issued a reponse to the charges made of him and Amnesty International by Gita Sahgal in Richard Kerbaj’s article in the Sunday Times.
We are posting it in full here, but before we do so, here is a video by Asim Qureshi of Cageprisoners, pontificating on the “religious obligation” on Muslims to wage violent jihad.
We embrace the mercy. We embrace every single thing that is set upon us and we deal with it because we have no fear. So when we see the example of our brothers and sisters fighting in Chechnya, Iraq, Palestine, Kashmir, Afghanistan then we know where the example lies. When we see Hezbollah defeating the armies of Israel, we know what the solution is and where the victory lies. We know that it is incumbent upon all of us to support the jihad of our brothers and sisters in these countries when they are facing the oppression of the west.
Two bombs were detonated within an hour of each other in Karachi, targetting the Shia.
A motorcycle fitted with explosives rammed into a bus carrying Shias near the Nursery bridge in Karachi, killing 12 people and wounding close to 50. The injured were taken to Jinnah Hospital. About an hour later another explosion outside the ward of the Hospital was detonated.
Shia-hatred is a mainstay of hardline Wahhabi-inspired ideology as promulgated by those darlings of the Islam Channel, Yasir Qadhi and Anwar al-Awlaki. Advocates of this line of takfiri thinking maintain the Shia are heterodox therefore lesser Muslims or, worse, not Muslim at all and even just simply kfar (“unbelievers”). They (wrongly) claim the doctrine of takkiyyah or dissimulation is embedded into Shia liturgy, they regard the practice of mutah to be degenerate and claim their texts are heretical.
CBS News is breaking an exclusive story over in the United States. It seems that Anwar al-Awlaki did indeed direct the abortive Christmas day attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. Here’s what CBS are reporting:
The suspect in a failed Christmas Day airliner bombing attempt told federal investigators that radical Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki directed him to carry out the attack, CBS News has learned.
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The source said Abdulmutallab told investigators he was guided by al-Awalki to detonate the bomb over U.S. soil, unlike the failed British bomber plot in 2006 when the bombers were instructed to detonate bombs on airliners over the ocean on the way to the U.S. so that there would be no evidence left behind.
