The OIC does not speak for Muslims

Books You Should Read, Islam in America, Islam in Europe, Islamic Law, Pakistan, Terrorism Issue

The OIC does not speak for Muslims

by Tarek Fatah, Muslim Canadian Congress, UN Geneva

I speak to you as a Muslim who was born in Pakistan and lived there for 30 years and moved to Saudi Arabia where I worked for 10 years. Since 1987 I have called Canada my home. As an author, journalist and Muslim activist, I have seen the role and agenda of both the soft and hardcore jihadis unfold before my eyes and across the Muslim world.

I approach the issue of freedom of speech and freedom of expression embodied in the 1948 UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights as defending a treasured right that few of my co-religionists can dream off, let alone cherish or possess. We are over a billion strong, but almost all of us live under varying forms and degrees of dictatorship and oppression. Barring a few exceptions such as Turkey, Malaysia and Indonesia, and very recently Pakistan, Muslims live under the tyranny of rulers like those of Iran and Saudi Arabia who have used the religion of Islam as a tool to secure absolute power, and to trample all over the human rights of their citizens.

Barely a day goes by without news of gross violations of human rights of Muslims living in so-called Islamic countries. Whether it is honour killings of sisters and mothers or the harassment of gays and calls for their death; whether it is imprisonment of political opponents or attacks on minorities, we Muslims who live in the West are constantly reminded of the rights we enjoy under secular parliamentary democracies as individual human beings. Continue reading The OIC does not speak for Muslims →

Are Suicide Operations Losing their Mass Appeal?

Ethics, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism Issue

Are Suicide Operations Losing their Mass Appeal?

By Abdul Rahman Al-Rashed, Asharq Alawsat, Tuesday 23 September 2008

Why are Suicide operations no longer a cause for admiration and awe among those that are usually indignant?

The answer is that the same propaganda weapon that the Al-Qaeda organization used has turned against it. The Al-Qaeda used to promote their explosive-laden heroes as they read their last will and testament and smiled to the cameras. After their operations multiplied, the pictures of these victims – children, women, and elderly – became popular on every road on which their vehicles passed and exploded. Without the need for a survey, we can say that only a few continue to support suicide-operations, I mean among the Muslims in whose name these operations and used and justified.

The figures shown in the latest scientific study confirm the results of previous surveys. They show a continuous and consistent drop in all the Muslim countries with the exception of Egypt where, according to the study, support for such operations rose 5% over last year. Continue reading Are Suicide Operations Losing their Mass Appeal? →

The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama

Apocalypse Watch, Election 2008, Islamophobia


Examples of the Islamophobic hate campaign against Senator Obama

[Webshaykh’s Note: The following op ed column by Nicholas Kristof should set off alarm bells in all concerned citizens, especially Muslims. The ugly Janus of racial prejudice and religious bigotry is on full display. I invite comments on what we as concerned citizens and scholars can do to combat this Islamophobic hate, which will not go away after the election, no matter who wins. To paraphrase a wise saying, the only thing needed for such Islamophobic evil to prevail is for the rest of us to do nothing. I invite all who read this to send me comments on how best to counteract this hate. If you know of good resources online or in publications, please let me know.]

The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama

By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF, The New York Times, September 20, 2008
Here’s a sad monument to the sleaziness of this presidential campaign: Almost one-third of voters “know” that Barack Obama is a Muslim or believe that he could be.

In short, the political campaign to transform Mr. Obama into a Muslim is succeeding. The real loser as that happens isn’t just Mr. Obama, but our entire political process.

A Pew Research Center survey released a few days ago found that only half of Americans correctly know that Mr. Obama is a Christian. Meanwhile, 13 percent of registered voters say that he is a Muslim, compared with 12 percent in June and 10 percent in March.

More ominously, a rising share — now 16 percent — say they aren’t sure about his religion because they’ve heard “different things” about it. Continue reading The Push to ‘Otherize’ Obama →

Reading Bin Laden

Anthropology/Sociology, Osama Bin Laden, Terrorism Issue


Flagg Miller, an assistant professor of at UC Davis, translated and analyzed about 20 tapes of Osama bin Laden. Photography by HECTOR AMEZCUA

UC Davis researcher delves into the mind of bin Laden

By Bobby Caina Calvan, The Sacramento Bee, Thursday, September 11, 2008

For five years, a University of California, Davis, researcher has been replaying hundreds of hours of audiocassettes that, he says, yield deeper – and more complex – insights into the intellectual development of Osama bin Laden.

A collection of 1,500 audiocassettes was carted away from bin Laden’s compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, in 2001 and provides a glimpse into bin Laden’s rise leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

Certainly, few would dare humanize the man the United States calls its most wanted, who seven years after the country’s deadliest terrorist attacks is still being sought dead or alive.

On the seventh anniversary of the attacks, the most brazen ever carried out anywhere in the world, bin Laden still looms large on the American psyche, its politics and public life. Continue reading Reading Bin Laden →

Tzipi Livni is Israel’s Barack Obama

Arab-Israeli Conflict, Gender and Sexuality, Israel


Mahmoud Abbas and Tzipi Livni, 2006

Tzipi Livni is Israel’s Barack Obama

By Neri Livneh, Haaretz Correspondent, September 18, 2008

If, as John Lennon and Yoko Ono said, “Woman is the N—-r of the World,” then Tzipi Livni is Israel’s Barack Obama.

Unlike Hillary Clinton, Livni did not exploit the fact that she was a woman in order to get elected. She is also not married to one of the most beloved individuals in the world.

Instead, Livni won the Kadima primary despite being a woman, and despite being married to a private man who prefers to steer clear from the limelight. (Israeli comics – all of them men, of course – are now busy thinking up new puns on the old “Mr. Tzipi Livni and Mrs. President.”)

And all this while Livni is zealously trying to protect the privacy of her family, and is probably the last person anyone would turn to for a Rosh Hashanah cake recipe. Continue reading Tzipi Livni is Israel’s Barack Obama →

Bomb Attack on U.S. Embassy in Yemen

Sanaa, Terrorism Issue, Yemen


Smoke is seen billowing outside the U.S. embassy in Sanaa September 17, 2008. A car bomb set off a series of explosions outside the heavily fortified embassy in Yemen on Wednesday and a Yemeni security source said at least 16 people, including six attackers, were killed. Collapse
(Yemen News Agency, via Reuters)

U.S. Embassy in Yemen Attacked

By Ellen Knickmeyer, Washington Post Foreign Service, Wednesday, September 17, 2008

SANAA, Yemen, Sept. 17 — Attackers exploded a vehicle bomb outside the main gate of the U.S. Embassy in Yemen on Wednesday in what appeared to be a well-coordinated assault that triggered more explosions and heavy gunfire around the compound.

Yemen’s official Saba news agency said 16 people died in the incident, including six Yemeni soldiers, four civilians and six attackers. One of the civilians was an Indian woman at the embassy on business.

There were no immediate reports of American casualties. The embassy is located in the center of Sanaa, Yemen’s capital, but the building is set far back from an outer security wall.

There was no immediate claim of responsibility. Continue reading Bomb Attack on U.S. Embassy in Yemen →

The Mecca Railway

Islamic Rituals, Ottoman Empire, Photography, Saudi Arabia, Turkey


Engine “Abdul Hamid” on the Mecca Railroad; Source: National Geographic Magazine XX(2):158, 1909

[A few years before World War I, when the Ottoman empire was still an empire, the Sultan Abdul Hamid sponsored a railway link between Damascus and Mecca for the pilgrim route. Although the Hijaz Railway is little known today, it has already merited a Wikipedia article. The following is from a report published a century ago on the opening of the railway. Webshaykh.]

The gauge of the line is the somewhat curious one of 1.05 meter (3 feet 5 1/4 inches), which was necessary, when the line was first commenced, to correspond with the gauge of the Beirut-Damascus line, over which the rolling stock had to be brought. The branch to the Mediterranean, at Haifa, was constructed subsequently. The rolling stock has been obtained principally from Belgium, with the exception of the engines, which are made by a German firm. The rails were supplied by the American Steel Trust, but a French firm domiciled in Russia, and by the firm of Cockerill, in Belgium.

The engineers in charge of sections were also of various nationalities — French, Poles, Hungarians, etc. — while the guiding spirit in the construction has been Meissner Pasha, a very able German engineer. Continue reading The Mecca Railway →

Making America Stupid

Election 2008, Journalism and Media

Making America Stupid
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN, The New York Times, September 14, 2008

Imagine for a minute that attending the Republican convention in St. Paul, sitting in a skybox overlooking the convention floor, were observers from Russia, Iran and Venezuela. And imagine for a minute what these observers would have been doing when Rudy Giuliani led the delegates in a chant of “drill, baby, drill!”

I’ll tell you what they would have been doing: the Russian, Iranian and Venezuelan observers would have been up out of their seats, exchanging high-fives and joining in the chant louder than anyone in the hall — “Yes! Yes! Drill, America, drill!” — because an America that is focused first and foremost on drilling for oil is an America more focused on feeding its oil habit than kicking it.

Why would Republicans, the party of business, want to focus our country on breathing life into a 19th-century technology — fossil fuels — rather than giving birth to a 21st-century technology — renewable energy? As I have argued before, it reminds me of someone who, on the eve of the I.T. revolution — on the eve of PCs and the Internet — is pounding the table for America to make more I.B.M. typewriters and carbon paper. “Typewriters, baby, typewriters.”
Continue reading Making America Stupid →