There is to be a demonstration for calling for protection of the Pahari people and peace in Chittagong Hill Tracts on Sunday 28 February.
On Saturday 20th February, an outbreak of violence against the Jumma people of Khagrachari in Rangamati caused the deaths of 4 people, hundreds of homes torched, destruction of a temple and a church, and many dozens still missing.The random violence against the Pahari people has continued unabated.
The oppression of the Chakma and Pahari peoples has been going on for decades and incidents of this kind form part of a long-standing conflict.
We urge the end to the attacks and violence against the Paharis in Bangladesh.
Please come and show your support and solidarity for the Jumma people in Bangladesh.
The extent of the intertwined linkages between the East London Mosque, the Islamic Forum Europe, the Muslim Council of Britain and the South Asian far-right Islamist party, Jamaat-e-Islam is to be the subject of 2 Channel 4 Dispatches programmes, to be shown on Monday 1st and 8th of March. An accompanying article on the documentay by Andrew Gilligan, who will front the documentary, is in today’s Sunday Telegraph.
The mosque and IFE are inextricably intertwined. Dr Mohammed Abdul Bari, the chairman of the mosque, and its vice-chairman are former IFE presidents.
The director and imam of the mosque are trustees of the group. Of 22 IFE trustees in recent years, only five have not also been trustees or officeholders of the religious centre.
The mosque calls the IFE a “social welfare organisation” and the IFE presents itself as committed to “community cohesion” and “tolerance”.
“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he did not exist.” ~The Usual Suspects
The Telegraph has published news of a six-month investigation which it undertook with Channel 4’s Dispatches on the Islamic Forum Europe (IFE). The IFE is a Jamaat-e-Islami entryist organisation which now commands a sizeable vote bloc and is physically located in the East London Mosque (ELM) with which it is closely linked. The chairman of ELM is Mohammed Abdul Bari, who is a former president of the IFE and is the current Secretary General of the Muslim Council of Britain.
IFE activists boasted to the undercover reporters that they had already “consolidated … a lot of influence and power” over Tower Hamlets, a London borough council with a £1 billion budget.
This is a cross-post of an article by habibi from Harry’s Place
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Earlier this week Moazzam Begg was due to address the SOAS Islamic Society. His topic was “Justice in Islam”.
He didn’t show up and was replaced by Humza Qureshi of Cageprisoners.
I understand from a SOAS student who attended the talk that Qureshi said people should be brought together according to their religious beliefs rather than in nation states. This will achieve justice. In other words, a caliphate is needed. He also hailed “no peace without justice” Malcolm X and said the penalty for apostasy under a caliphate could be death.
Here is something else Qureshi has done at SOAS: seconding a student union motion that trashed the CSC’s report on Islamist extremism on campus. There’s no problem but neocon scaremongering, don’t you know:
L-R: Hasan Le Gai Eaton who passed away today, Fuad Nahdi, the late Martin Lings (Shaykh Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din), Shaykh Hamza Yusuf and Peter Sanders.
Charles le Gai Eaton, also known as Hasan Abdul Hakeem, died today. He was 89.
Born in Lausanne, Switzerland in 1921 and raised as an agnostic by his parents. Gai Eaton was educated at Charterhouse and King’s College, Cambridge. He worked for many years as a teacher and journalist in Jamaica and Egypt, and joined the British Diplomatic service in 1949. He converted to Islam in 1951.
Gai Eaton’s books include Islam and the Destiny of Man, King of the Castle and Remembering God. Many British Muslims regard his books as influential.
I had the pleasure of keeping a correspondence with sidi Hasan when I was a younger man, and met him a number of times. He was a gentle, generous man with a very bright, wry sense of humour. I shall miss him.
Amnesty International has raised awareness by calling for an immediate investigation into the human rights violations and state-sponsored violence in the Chittagong Hill Tracts (CHT) in Bangladesh.
Amnesty International calls on the government of Bangladesh to:
Carry out prompt, impartial, and independent investigation into these attacks and killings to identify individuals who set houses on fire and army personnel who may have used excessive force, and bring those responsible to justice in a fair trial without resort to the death penalty;
Ensure that the detainees have access to lawyers of their own choice, can challenge the legality of their detention, have access to family visits and medical treatment, and are not at risk of torture;
Compensate the victims and survivors of the attacks, rehabilitate the people who have lost their homes and belonging and provide them with medical treatment for their injuries;
Allow independent observers to visit the sites of the violence, and ensure the security of the Jumma indigenous people in the Chittagong Hill Tracts.
This is a cross-post of an article by the estimable Lucy Lips from Harry’s Place
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Michael Weiss writes (subscription required) in the Wall Street Journal:
Mr. Begg does not hide his own Islamist convictions. In his memoir, “Enemy Combatant,” he recalls his interrogation at Guantanamo, in which he credits his emigration to Afghanistan to his desire “to live in an Islamic state—one that was free from the corruption and despotism of the rest of the Muslim world.” The Taliban, Mr. Begg insists in his book, were “better than anything Afghanistan has had in the past twenty-five years.” Elsewhere he has cited and sold the works of the “charismatic scholar” Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, erstwhile mentor to Osama bin Laden.
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Amnesty continues to defend its affiliation with Mr. Begg and Cageprisoners. Last week, on a Canadian radio program, Amnesty’s interim Secretary General Claudio Cordone described Mr. Begg’s politics as benign, saying there was so far no evidence to suggest that the organization should severe ties with him.
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.
Good news (that’s sarcasm) for people who feel their right to be religiously offended trumps freedom of expression:
Renowned Indian artist MF Husain, under attack from hardline Hindus for his paintings of nude Hindu goddesses, has been offered Qatari nationality.
The artist made the announcement in The Hindu newspaper. It is not clear whether he will accept the honour.
Since 2006, 95-year-old Mr Husain has been living in Dubai and in London.
The Hindu said that his “impending change of nationality brings to a close one of the sorriest chapters in independent India’s secular history”.
Correspondents say that Mr Husain – who has been forced to flee the country – is one of India’s most pre-eminent artists.
In 2006 he apologised for a painting in which he represented the country as a nude goddess. In the mid-1990s there were huge protests in Mumbai (Bombay) after he painted a whole series of nude Hindu goddesses.
Hindu nationalist groups accused the artist of hurting their religious sentiments and defiling their religion.
Jews, gays and kaffirs are “filth” says fanatical cleric
Universities fail to block “gateways” to fundamentalism and terrorism
Sheikh Quick
London – 24 February 2010
In defiance of its own equal opportunities policy, King’s College London (KCL) is hosting the Muslim fundamentalist fanatic, Sheikh Abdullah Hakim Quick, this Thursday, 25 February, at 6pm in the Raked Lecture Theatre, The Strand, London.
He is anti-Semitic and homophobic. He denounces the “filth” of Jews (Yahood) and kaffirs. See here (about 3.50 minutes into the video):
Inayat Bunglawala may no longer be on the MCB’s payroll, but he’s still an ardent evangelist for the organisation, which he claims is the “the UK’s largest Islamic umbrella body”. Or more accurately, an arbitrary collection of Muslim Brotherhood sympathisers and alleged war criminals.
He’s very unhappy that at the gala dinner the ‘Jamaat-e-Islami Council of Britain’ laid on earlier this week, no “frontbencher from the Conservative party deemed it worthwhile attending”.
The Tory no-show was a shame
Yes, boohoo, but you should have thought of that when your genocidalist organisation infamously snubbed Holocaust Memorial Day.
He follows with a stern lecture:
I think they [the Tories] would have strongly agreed with the keynote speaker, Professor Tariq Ramadan, as he emphasised to the audience the importance of what he called the “three Ls”: loyalty, law and language.
