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WHAT DOES THE AYODHYA VERDICT MEAN FOR INDIAN MUSLIMS, HINDUTVA AND THE FUTURE OF INDIA. THIS WILL BE ANALYSED IN DEPTH HEREAFTER
BABRI MASJID AND ASADUDDIN OWAISI
INDIAN TOP COURT GIVES DISPUTED SITE IN AYODHYA TO HINDUS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=37_SFJUgs6c
BABRI MASJID DISPUTE : RELIGION OR POLITICS?
TENSIONS IN INDIAN CITY OF AYODHYA AHEAD OF BABRI MOSQUE VERDICT
BABRI MASJID VERDICT
November 10, 2019
https://www.dawn.com/news/1515939/babri-masjid-verdict
FEW events in the history of modern India have been as polarising as the 1992 destruction of the Babri Masjid in the Hindu holy city of Ayodhya. In an episode of unabashed ugliness, a frenzied mob of thousands of Hindu extremists — including some of the leading lights of the BJP, which now rules India — stormed the 16th-century mosque and reduced it to rubble, guided by the belief that the spot where the masjid was built was Ram Janmabhoomi, the place where Hindus believe the deity was born.
Communal riots followed the desecration of the mosque in many parts of India, while the demolition was condemned by major Muslim states. This event has poisoned Hindu-Muslim relations in India since, and has served as a battle cry for the Hindu hard right, that has now captured state power in New Delhi.
On Saturday, the Indian Supreme Court says that a temple would be built on the site of the razed mosque. While the apex court did say that the demolition was illegal, by allowing the building of the temple, it has, through this verdict, indirectly supported the vandalism by the mobs. It is also a tad ironic that the decision came on the day when the Kartarpur Corridor was opened for Sikh pilgrims, indicating Pakistan’s intentions to facilitate other religious communities.
Perhaps it would have been better had the court given the site to neither side, considering the sensitivity of the matter and its impact on communal relations in India. Moreover, on matters of faith and devotion, it is best if state institutions maintain a non-sectarian outlook to ensure justice for all citizens. Looking back at the events since 1992, it can be argued that the destruction of the mosque marked the beginning of the end of the Nehruvian ideal of a secular India, and the triumphal, raucous arrival of the Sangh Parivar on the national stage. Some of the most fanatical fringes of the Hindu hard right participated in the orgy of violence in Ayodhya on that December day; today, many of these elements are in positions of great power in India.
Undoubtedly, the verdict will embolden the foot soldiers of Hindutva and send a message to India’s minorities — particularly its Muslims — that religious triumphalism and violence tactics by the majority are condoned in modern India. The Indian establishment never ceases to boast about the claim that it is the world’s ‘largest democracy’. However, the post-Babri Masjid trajectory of the country has been anything but democratic, and especially with the election of Narendra Modi, it is clear that the national narrative is being shaped by Savarkar and Golwalkar rather than Nehru and Gandhi. Now, it is for the Indian people to decide whether they wish to adopt a democratic course, or build a Hindu rashtra where minorities are either hounded out, or forced to live as second-class citizens.
SUPREME COURT VERDICT: WHAT IF RAM TEMPLE WAS DEMOLISHED IN 1992 INSTEAD OF BABRI MASJID ?
Abhay Kumar, The Milli Gazette Online
Published Online: Nov 11, 2019
What if the Ram temple were demolished on December 6, 1992 instead of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya? Do you think the Supreme Court judgement would have been the same?
Do you think the demolished structure would have been given to the party that was involved in razing it to the ground or supporting its demolition? These questions are unlikely to be raised in debates and TV shows.
Would you not share the apprehension that the mainstream Indian media, the opposition parties and civil society members lack courage to go against the majoritarian frenzy?
The so-called secular and liberal forces have also disappointed us. They, too, do not want to appear "unpopular" and "insensitive" to the so-called astha (belief) of the majority community.
In a long-awaited verdict, finally delivered on November 9, the Supreme Court allowed the Hindus to build a Ram Temple on the disputed site in Ayodhya. Muslims, the other party to the dispute, were asked to build a mosques at another place in Ayodhya.
The Hindutva forces have argued that the Babri Masjid, built in the 16th century, stood at the exact place of the demolished Ram temple. In their fabricated history, "the Muslim invaders" demolished the temple to build the mosque. Muslims as well the eminent histrorians have denied these allegations.
Abondoned by the secular parties, the minority Muslim community is perhaps most vulnerable today. They are increasingly being told to appear "tolerant", "friendly" to the majority Hindus, "loyal" to the country and become "rooted in the Indian (read Brahminical) culture.”
Perceiving a possible threat to their security, the Muslim minority is trying to keep a smile on their face even if they feel hurt and let down by the apex court of the country.
For example, the All India Muslim Personal Law Board, following the SC ruling, is giving contradictory statements. The Board says that they respect the judgement, yet they feel disappointed with it. The Board, which is under huge pressure, is trying to keep "quiet".
Muslims perceive a threat to their safety. They are also doing best to avoid any provocation. As a result, a large number of Muslims have put up messages on social media, welcoming the judgment. Some others are taking part in processions organised by Hindutva outfits. Some of them have also appeared before media to "congratulate thier Hindu brothers" over this "historical" judgement.
Unlike the minority community, the majority community is celebrating the judgement. The celebration includes chanting and writing 'Jai Sri Ram' on social media. "If temple was not built in Ayodhya where it would be built!", argues one of them. The extremists among them say the time has come to solve the controversy of Kashi and Mathura as well. While the so-called liberals, among them, deny use of coercion in this process, saying that there is nothing wrong in building the temple after the Supreme Court has upheld the position of the Hindus.
Note how the position of the majoritarian forces is being justified by invoking the ruling of the apex court of the country. However, one should not forget that till recently the Hindutva forces were saying that the question of building a temple is a matter of "faith".
Even if the majority of the majority community is celebrating the Temple-Masjid judgment by the Supreme Court, my conscience does not allow me to celebrate it.
My conscience does not allow me to forget the gross injustice done in broad-day light on December 6, 1992.
How could we forget that thousands of fanatic Hindu mobs were mobilised to demolish a centuries-old religious place of the minority community?
How could we forget that the Ram Temple mobilisation sparked off violence and riots, taking the lives of thousands of Muslims before and after the demolition?
How could we forget that innocent people were injured, displaced and killed in the name of building a temple at a place where no historical evidence can prove that it ever existed there? How could we forget this tragedy?
My conscience, let me repeat it, does not allow me to celebrate a judgement that appears to "honour" the so-called majoritarian sentiment. The judgement that does not show courage to challenge the brute power of a majoritarian government cannot appeal to my conscience.
Irrespective of what the mainstream media and the ruling elite say, I think that December 6 was one of the darkest days in the Indian history. On that day, not only the dome of mosque was razed to the ground but also the pillars of secularism and democracy were brought down.
Justice, therefore, cannot ignore the questions of majoritarian tyranny, violation of law and order and the Constitution and mindless murder and violence. But the SC judgment hastened to please the majoritarian sentiments constructed and maintained by the Hindutva forces. The so-called bench comprising several judges made a historical blunder to paint a false picture of 'India (read Hindus) is tolerant and secular'.
Would the judgement bring peace in society and put an end to communal politics? I doubt.
I wish I were proven wrong. But I doubt if communal conflicts are going be be a thing of the past in the wake of the judgment. I do not think the majoritarian forces are going to be contented with winning the Ram Temple and Babri Masjid case.
I am afraid the judgement of the day is likely to boost the morale of communal forces to take law into their hands. If this happens, the attitude of the Indian state would become more aggressive and hostile towards the minorities.
I am afraid the Ayodhya judgment may encourage the majoritarian forces to make a claim on other religious places of the minority community.
I know my views are against the majoritarian frenzy. At the time of writing this note I am sitting next to a bonfire. People around me are greeting me with 'Jai Sri Ram'. I also received a message last night to my Whatsup number in which I was alleged to be "a certain local friend" of Babur who would "start his long journey back home to Samarkand", following the verdict.
Contrary to all these allegations and the frenzy of the Hindu India, I want to register my dissent. I know my statement does not have much impact today but I am confident that history and posterity would understand the pain of my heart.
Abhay Kumar recently submitted his PhD at Centre of Historical Studies, Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. A regular contributor to newspapers and web portals, Kumar has been working on the broad theme of the Indian Muslims and Social Justice. His other writings are available at abhaykumar.org. You may write to him at debatingissues[at]gmail.com
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INDEPENDENT MUSLIM MEDIA NETWORKS HAVE STARTED REACTING GLOBALLY TO AN ORGANISED PUBLIC DEPLORABLE QURAN BURNING INCIDENT BY RACISTS AND ISLAMOPHOBES WHICH TOOK PLACE IN NORWAY. ONCE AGAIN WE SEE NONMUSLIMS ON THE ATTACK. THESE ATTACKS RANGE FROM INVASIONS, SANCTIONS, FFTs, DEMONISATION AND NOW DESECRATION.
THE RESPONSE TO THESE ATTACKS NEEDS GLOBAL UNITED
AND CONCRETE RESPONSES TO NEUTRALISE THE ENEMIES AND THEIR AGGRESSION. NONMUSLIMS NEED TO BE REMINDED THAT TOLERANCE AND MUTUAL RESPECT OF RELIGIOUS SYMBOLS, VALUES AND SACRED BOOKS IS A RESPONSIBILITY OF THE STATE AND DESECRATION OF RELIGIOUS SANCTITIES CAN ONLY LEAD TO SOCIAL COHESION OF SOCIETY TO BE DESTABILISED.
TOLERANCE IS A TWO WAY THING. HAVING COME BACK FROM A VISIT TO PAKISTAN I ACTUALLY MADE A SHORT SPEECH AT A PACKED PAKISTANI CHRISTIAN SUNDAY SERVICE TO EMPHASISE THE COMMON VALUES MUSLIMS
AND CHRISTIANS HAVE IN BELIEF IN GOD AND A SPIRITUAL LIFE STYLE. HOWEVER, I ALSO STATED THAT ANY DISCRIMINATION THEY MAY BE FACING IN A MUSLIM MAJORITY COUNTRY NEEDS TO BE CONDEMNED AND ELIMINATED. JUST AS ISLAMOPHOBIA NEEDS TO BE ROOTED OUT WHICH MUSLIMS IN EUROPE AND THE WESTERN WORLD ARE CONFRONTING.
THE AUTHORITIES NEED TO REALISE THAT WHEN CERTAIN RED LINES ARE CROSSED MUSLIMS WILL STAND UP FOR THEIR SANCTITIES AND RIGHTS FORCEFULLY AND THE AUTHORITIES WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR NOT UPHOLDING THE LAW AND WHATEVER FALLOUT RESULTS. WE SALUTE THE MUSLIM HERO ILYAS FOR COMBATTING NONMUSLIM PREACHERS OF HATRED WHO HAVE DISTURBED THE PEACE AND TRANQUILITY OF NORWAY. THIS MODEL OF CIVIC ACTION IS TO BE APPLAUDED AND HE SHOULD BE HONOURED WITH A SPECIAL DEFENCE OF ISLAM AWARD. THESE STREETS BELONG TO ALL THE PEOPLE AND MUSLIMS WILL NOT TOLERATE HATE SPEECH AGAINST ISLAM.
SO WHERE ARE THE MYOPIC SECULAR LIBERAL MAINSTREAM MEDIA NOW. WHY DO THEY NOT SHOUT AND SCREAM AT NONMUSLIM HATE SPEECH. MAYBE WE ARE DEALING WITH THE DEAF DUMB AND BLIND WHO NEED TO BE TREATED LIKE THE OSTRICH BURYING IT'S HEAD BENEATH THE SAND.
IT NEEDS TO BE NOTED THAT THIS INCIDENT HAS PRIMARILY COME TO THE SURFACE BECAUSE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS MAINSTREAM MEDIA IGNORED AND SUPPRESSED THE STORY. INDEED THE LOCAL NORWEGIAN POLICE SHOULD BE CONDEMNED FOR PERMITTING THIS PROVOCATION AND THEY SHOULD BE MADE AN EXAMPLE OF. A MESSAGE SHOULD GO OUT TO RACISTS AND ISLAMOPHOBES THAT RED LINES WHEN CROSSED WILL BE PUNISHED. LEADERS SUCH AS ERDOGAN, KHAN AND MAHATHIR SHOULD USE THEIR CLOUT TO CONDEMN THIS ACT AND ENSURE THE NORWEGIANS RECTIFY THIS ERROR AND STAMP THIS OUT. THIS INCIDENT CLEARLY HAD THE AUTHORITIES COLLUSION AND THEY NEED TO BE BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.
THIS EVENT BY SION- STOP ISLAMISATION OF NORWAY IS NOT ONLY A JOKE BUT PROVOCATION. HOW CAN THE MINISCULE 2.5% NORWEGIAN MUSLIM POPULATION "ISLAMISE" NORWAY. THIS CLEARLY ISLAMOPHOBIC RACIST PARTY WAS GRANTED PERMISSION TO DEMONSTRATE AND RALLY BUT WERE WARNED NOT TO BURN THE QURAN WHICH THEY DID. THIS PROVOKED MUSLIMS DEMONSTRATING AND LED TO A BREAK DOWN OF LAW AND ORDER. AUTHORITIES HAVE A RESPONSIBILITY TO CLAMPDOWN ON THIS ACTIVITY WHICH THEY COULD HAVE EASILY DONE AND THEY NEED TO BE MADE TO ACCOUNT. THEY NEED TO IMMEDIATELY RELEASE ANY MUSLIMS ARRESTED AND SION'S LEADER SHOULD BE ARRESTED FOR DISTURBING THE PEACE AND FOR RACIAL AND RELIGIOUS HATE SPEECH. NONMUSLIM EXTREMISTS, FANATICS AND TERRORISTS NEED TO BE IDENTIFIED AND HUNTED DOWN BY THE AUTHORITIES. THERE IS A WARNING HERE FOR EUROPE THAT NONMUSLIM VIOLENT EXTREMISTS NEED TO BE CONTROLLED AND BANNED OTHERWISE THERE WILL BE AN INEVITABLE COUNTER REACTION.
ALSO MUSLIM STATES NEED TO BE MUCH MORE PROACTIVE IN DEFENDING MUSLIM MINORITIES. A STARTING POINT WILL BE FOR MUSLIM AMBASSADORS IN OSLO TO BE WITHDRAWN IN PROTEST. IT IS TIME TO STAMP OUT ISLAMOPHOBIA AND THERE ARE SEVERAL WAYS TO DO IT BUT ACTION MUST BE TAKEN.
SOCIAL MEDIA HEAPS PRAISE ON ILYAS FOR PREVENTING QURAN BURNING IN NORWAY
https://dunyanews.tv/en/World/520005-Social-media-praises-Ilyas-for-preventing-Quran-burning-in-NorwayThe man manages to grab Thorsen's jacket, twisting him around.
Muslims across the world have been praising the Muslim man – now being called the ‘Defender of Quran’ – who attacked Lars Thorsen, the leader of the ‘Stop Islamisation of Norway (SIAN)’, for burning a copy of the Holy Quran during an anti-Islam rally in Norway. The incident happened in the city of Kristiansand despite apparent warnings from local police officials when the anti-Islam group said it planned to do so. Netizens took to the social media to praise Ilyas, though his exact identity could not be ascertained at the moment. In a video circulating on the social media, he could be seen jumping into the barricaded circle to save the holy book from being desecrated. The man manages to grab Thorsen’s jacket, twisting him around. However, the assailant falls to the ground after attempting to kick the anti-Islam activist. Police then scramble to break up the fight as several other people rush at Thorsen. The police immediately took Thorsen and his attackers into custody after a scuffle broke out, according to local media reports. In one video clip, Thorsen is led away by police with his hands behind his back, while his initial attacker is wrestled to the ground by a group of cops.
According to reports, two copies of the religious text at first were thrown in a trash can during the rally, while Thorsen set fire to another one. #ilyas_Hero_of_Muslim_Ummah, #Norway, #Defender_of_Quran, #TheGloriousQuran and Muslims started trending on Twitter in Pakistan. The Pakistan Union Norway (PUN), an important social and cultural organisation, strongly condemned the incident. PUN Chairman Chaudhry Qamar Iqbal, in a statement, referred to Lars Thorsen, and said he has hurt the sentiments of Muslims by desecrating the Holy Quran. He said that Norwegians were peaceful people and Norway enjoyed a good reputation around the world as it respected the rights of other religions.
Iqbal said that the people of Norway and its Muslims were also hurt over the fact that the desecration took place in broad daylight and the police did nothing to stop it. He condemned the police for springing into action only when the man jumped in to stop the desecration and, instead, came to the aid of the agitator. The PUN chairman urged the government of Norway to stop people who instigated and hurt the sentiments of others through extremism. Muslim leaders in Norway announced that they plan to press hate crime charges against SIAN for burning Quran as well as for verbal assault.
DG ISPR salutes ‘Defender of Quran’
Later, Inter-Services Public Relations Director-General Major General Asif Ghafoor, through his personal account, saluted the bravery of Ilyas for jumping through the fence and saving the Holy Quran from burning. Asif Ghafoor tweeted “Salute to brave Ilyas for displaying courage to stop an absolutely deplorable action. Such Islamophobia based provocations only promote hatred & extremism.” DG ISPR further added “All religions are and must stay respectable. Islamophbia is threat to global peace and harmony.”
Ilyas is now a social media sensation, and users are regarding him as the hero and one of the greatest defenders of Islam in modern times. In his weekly news briefing in Islamabad on Thursday, Foreign Office Spokesperson Dr Muhammad Faisal said the Muslims respect other religions and they expect the followers of other religions to also respect their religious sentiments. In a written statement, the Turkish Foreign Ministry called on Norwegian authorities to stop anti-Muslim and xenophobic attacks, adding that Turkey is “expecting those responsible to be brought to justice as soon as possible.”
NORWEGIAN ANTI-ISLAM RALLY TURNS VIOLENT OVER KORAN BURNING
The leader of a group against the “Islamization” of Norway was attacked by several men after setting fire to a copy of the Koran during a demonstration. Footage shows police intervening to stop the skirmish.
A demonstration held by Stop Islamization of Norway (SIAN) in the city of Kristiansand turned violent after the group’s leader, Lars Thorsen, defied a police order against burning the holy Muslim book. The rally had been approved by local authorities, but police had warned SIAN against desecrating the Koran, after the group said it planned to do so. Two copies of the religious text were thrown in a trash can during the rally, while Thorsen set fire to another one. The unsanctioned actions infuriated counter-protesters, who vaulted over a fence and attacked SIAN’s leader. Video of the altercation shows Thorsen tossing away a burning Koran as an unidentified man charges at him. The man manages to grab Thorsen’s jacket, twisting him around. However, the assailant falls to the ground after attempting to kick the anti-Islam activist. Police then scramble to break up the fight as several other people rush at Thorsen.
Both Thorsen and his attackers were detained by police, according to media reports. In one video clip, Thorsen is led away by police with his hands behind his back, while his initial attacker is wrestled to the ground by a group of cops. Muslim leaders in Norway announced that they plan to press hate crime charges against SIAN for burning Korans as well as for verbal assault. Thorsen is no stranger to political controversy. He recently received a 30 day suspended jail sentence and a fine for distributing pamphlets in Oslo that accused Muslims of being “notorious sexual predators” who “rape in epidemic proportions.”
DISGRACE OF THE QURAN IN NORWAY
WHO IS UMAR ILYAS
Zamana Gawah Hai Ep #184
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MODI'S BJP GOVERNMENT PUSHES HIS ANTI-MUSLIM CITIZENSHIP LEGISLATION WHICH EXCLUDES MUSLIMS ONLY SEEKING REFUGE IN INDIA. HOWEVER IT HAS TRIGERRED NATIONAL PROTESTS AGAINST SECULAR NATIONAL LAWS WHICH ARE DISCRIMINATING AGAINST INDIAN MUSLIMS. THIS LEGISLATION CAN NOT BE VIEWED SEPARATELY FROM WHAT IS HAPPENING TO KASHMIRI MUSLIMS, NOR THE SUPREME COURT DECISION ON THE BABRI MASJID NOR THE NATIONAL REGISTER FOR CITIZENSHIP WHICH IS ALREADY MAKING MUSLIMS IN ASSAM STATELESS. INDIA IS BECOMING AN INTOLERANT HINDU RASHTRA STATE AND IT IS BECOMING A NATION AT WAR WITH ITSELF. NEHRU'S INDIA IS BEING DISCARDED IN FAVOUR OF A INDIAN HINDU NATIONALIST ENTITY. THE TWO NATION THEORY AND VISION OF QUAID I AZAM MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH IS PROVING TO BE RIGHT COMPARED TO THAT OF GANDHI AND NEHRU. WILL INDIA BE ABLE TO SURVIVE AS ONE NATION? THIS URGENT QUESTION WILL BE REVIEWED.
INDIAN POLITICIAN TEARS UP CONTROVERSIAL CITIZENSHIP BILL IN PARLIAMENT
LOK SABHA PASSES CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT BILL
Indian parliamentarian Asaduddin Owaisi tore up a copy of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill intended to grant citizenship to religious minorities from neighbouring countries, except Muslims.
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MODI'S BJP GOVERNMENT PUSHES HIS ANTI-MUSLIM CITIZENSHIP LEGISLATION WHICH EXCLUDES MUSLIMS ONLY SEEKING REFUGE IN INDIA. HOWEVER IT HAS TRIGERRED NATIONAL PROTESTS AGAINST SECULAR NATIONAL LAWS WHICH ARE DISCRIMINATING AGAINST INDIAN MUSLIMS. THIS LEGISLATION CAN NOT BE VIEWED SEPARATELY FROM WHAT IS HAPPENING TO KASHMIRI MUSLIMS, NOR THE SUPREME COURT DECISION ON THE BABRI MASJID NOR THE NATIONAL REGISTER FOR CITIZENSHIP WHICH IS ALREADY MAKING MUSLIMS IN ASSAM STATELESS. INDIA IS BECOMING AN INTOLERANT HINDU RASHTRA STATE AND IT IS BECOMING A NATION AT WAR WITH ITSELF. THE ZIONIST MODEL AND PRESCRIPTION IS BEING APPLIED TO INDIA BUT THIS IS NOT PALESTINE AND NEHRU'S INDIA IS BEING DISCARDED IN FAVOUR OF A INDIAN HINDU NATIONALIST ENTITY. THE TWO NATION THEORY AND VISION OF QUAID I AZAM MUHAMMAD ALI JINNAH IS PROVING TO BE RIGHT COMPARED TO THAT OF GANDHI AND NEHRU. WILL INDIA BE ABLE TO SURVIVE AS ONE NATION? IS THIS INDIA OR END-IA? THIS URGENT QUESTION WILL BE REVIEWED.
'PEOPLE DYING': MALAYSIA's MAHATHIR SLAMS INDIA's CITIZENSHIP LAW
Amid protests in India, Malaysian PM Mahathir Mohamad questions 'necessity' of new citizenship law seen as anti-Muslim.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2019/12/d...25226.html
Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad has criticised India's new citizenship law, which is seen as discriminatory against Muslims and has sparked deadly protests across the South Asian country. Speaking on the sidelines of the Kuala Lumpur Summit 2019 on Friday, Mahathir questioned the "necessity" of the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), when Indians have "lived together for 70 years".
"People are dying because of this law. Why is there a necessity to do this when all the while, for 70 years, they have lived together as citizens without any problem?" he asked.
"I am sorry to see that India, which claims to be a secular state now is taking action to deprive some Muslims of their citizenship," said the 94-year-old leader. "If we do that here, I do not know what will happen. There will be chaos and instability, and everybody will suffer."
Mahathir's comments came amid deadly protests in India over the CAA, in which at least nine people have been killed so far. On Friday, tensions prevailed throughout the country, including in capital New Delhi where several metro stations were closed and internet suspended in some areas to prevent demonstrations. Thousands of people in a Muslim-dominated district of the capital marched after the Friday prayers, some carrying a huge Indian flag, raising slogans against the Modi government. Protests continue to be organised in various Indian cities as authorities impose a ban on public gatherings and arrest hundreds of people. The United Nations has called the CAA "fundamentally discriminatory" while the United States's State Department has urged India to "protect the rights of its religious minorities".
INDIAN POLITICIAN TEARS UP CONTROVERSIAL CITIZENSHIP BILL IN PARLIAMENT
INDIAN MUSLIMS ARE READY TO FACE NARENDER MODI AND AMIT SHAH
LOK SABHA PASSES CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT BILL
Indian parliamentarian Asaduddin Owaisi tore up a copy of the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill intended to grant citizenship to religious minorities from neighbouring countries, except Muslims.
EXPERTS DECODE THE RAGING PROTEST AGAINST CITIZENSHIP LAW ACROSS INDIA
India Today Exclusive
PROTESTS PARALYZE INDIA AFTER RACIST ANTI-MUSLIM LAW PASSED
December 18, 2019
https://therealnews.com/stories/protests...law-passed
Modi's government using brutal violence against students and workers to stop demonstrations. Professor Sumit Ganguly examines the legal, moral and political significance anti-Muslim laws and the growing movement to oppose Hindu nationalism.
CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT BILL AGAINST INDIAN MUSLIMS
Zamana Gawah Hai Ep #188
SNATCH FREEDOM IF NOT GIVEN
AIMIM LEADER WARIS PATHAN SPARKS ROW WITH THESE REMARKS | India First
IS BOLLYWOOD COMPLICIT IN PUSHING MODI's RIGHT-WING AGENDA? | UpFront
INDIA HEADING TOWARDS RACIAL SUPREMACIST IDEOLOGY
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2121000/1-i...rs-article
Prime Minister Imran Khan, in a tweet on Thursday, shared an article of prominent Indian author and journalist Khushwant Singh, who foresaw where India was headed with its racial supremacist ideology. The premier termed Singh’s words as prophetic who “foresaw where India was headed with its racial supremacist ideology.” In the article, Singh said every fascist regime needs communities and groups it can demonise to thrive.
“It starts one group or two but it never ends there. He said a movement built on hate can only sustain itself by continually creating fear and strife,” added the Indian author. Singh categorically said, “Those of us [Indians] today who feel secure because we are not Muslims or Christians are living in a fool’s paradise.” The premier had time and again condemned his Indian counterpart Narendra Modi and the country’s Bharatiya Janata Party-led government over their illegal and unconstitutional moves aimed at minorities particularly Muslims.
He had termed the Indian government “fascist” and “supremacist” when it removed the special status of Indian-occupied Kashmir (IOK), making it a part of India forcibly. Amid protests in India against a controversial new citizen bill, Prime Minister Imran said on December 11 that millions of Muslims could flee India due to the curfew in the disputed territory of Kashmir and India’s new citizenship law, creating “a refugee crisis that would dwarf other crises”.
PAKISTAN RUBBISHES INDIA’s FUDGED NUMBERS ON SHRINKING MINORITIES
https://tribune.com.pk/story/2117873/1-p...minorities
Foreign Office spokesperson Dr Muhammad Faisal has rejected fudged numbers churned out by leaders of India’s ruling BJP on Pakistan’s “dwindling minority population”.
During the parliamentary debate on the controversial Citizenship Amendment Bill, the Prime Minister Narendra Modi-led party repeatedly claimed that population of religious minorities in Pakistan had declined from 23 per cent in 1947 to 3.7 per cent in 2011. The Indian government has introduced a controversial bill offering citizenship to illegal immigrants from three neighbouring countries if they belong to non-Muslim minority groups. Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Parsis and Christians who have entered India illegally can apply for citizenship if they can prove they originate from Muslim-majority Pakistan, Bangladesh or Afghanistan.
The BJP government claims that minorities in these countries are dwindling, and that they face persecution due to their faith. Dr Faisal, while speaking to [i]The Express Tribune[/i] on Saturday, said the claim is contrary to historical facts and census results. He said the number of non-Muslim population drastically dropped due to creation of Bangladesh. “Therefore, blaming Pakistan for persecution against the non-Muslim population is unfounded and a lie,” he added. “The white part of Pakistan’s flag is equally sacred to us as its green,” he said. The white colour in Pakistan’s national flag reflects non-Muslim population of the country.
During the debate on the controversial bill in the Indian parliament, Home Minister Amit Shah alleged that Pakistan’s non-Muslim population had shrunk from 23% in 1947 to 3.7% due to persecution. However, Shah, in his animosity against Pakistan, quoted the combined data for both East and West Pakistan (now Bangladesh).
There is no official data available for the country’s population based on people’s religious beliefs at the time of partition in 1947. However according to 1951 census, the country’s non-Muslim population was 14.20 per cent (both for East and West Pakistan). It may be noted that Pakistan’s non-Muslim population was not evenly distributed according to 1951’s census. In West Pakistan, the non-Muslim population was just 3.44 per cent, while in East Pakistan (today’s Bangladesh) it was 23.20 per cent of the total population.
The data on religious background for the recently-held census in 2017 is yet to be released by the government. However, according to the previous census carried out in 1998, Pakistan’s non-Muslim population stood at 3.7 per cent of the total population, signalling that the share of non-Muslims has remained at or around 3.5 per cent from the time of first census in 1951.
TUMULT IN INDIA
https://www.dawn.com/news/1523502/tumult-in-india
OVER the past week, Hindutva backed by the brute force of the state has bared its fangs in India. Hundreds have taken to the streets to protest the BJP-led government’s ill-planned moves of passing the Citizenship Amendment Act — which allows only non-Muslim refugees from some of India’s neighbouring states to apply for citizenship — and the introduction of the National Register of Citizens, widely seen as a fig leaf for stripping Indian Muslims of citizenship.
Clearly, there is an Islamophobic agenda behind these diabolical moves by the Modi clique, which is why India’s Muslims as well as conscientious citizens from other communities are protesting. Violence continued on Friday; at least 13 people have been killed in various cities so far, while hundreds have been temporarily detained as the state tries to put a lid on the protests. Curfew has also been enforced in certain areas, while the internet has been shut down in many cities.
While the Sangh Parivar was largely shunned in the post-independence era, because M.K. Gandhi’s assassin was an ideological child of the RSS, in today’s India, the storm troopers of Hindutva control the levers of state. It is no surprise then that ever since coming to power, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sought to remake India in the image of the Sangh — a Hindu rashtra to be built on the model of a fabled Vedic golden age. In this programme, there is no place for minorities, specifically India’s Muslims, hence the legal efforts to disenfranchise the community. However, though the Sangh ideologues are trying their best to label Indian Muslims as ‘outsiders’, history points to another reality. Islam has existed in the subcontinent for over a millennium, while Muslims have been living in what is now India for centuries. That should remove any lingering doubts about the right of India’s Muslims to citizenship of that country. No bigoted law can be allowed to deprive them of their identity and dispossess them from the land of their ancestors.
As India drops the facade of a secular democracy and champions the politics of hyper-nationalism, the international community needs to speak up. Under the Modi regime, Muslims have been lynched by vigilante mobs on suspicions of consuming or transporting beef and the world has kept silent. Under the BJP dispensation, India-held Kashmir has been under lockdown for months and its people held prisoner, but the world has looked away.
Now, as New Delhi lights the fires of communalism by disenfranchising millions of Muslim citizens, will the international community still keep silent? Moreover, questions of identity and citizenship are best left to academics to discuss. If zealots — guided by imagined histories — are put in charge of such sensitive matters, and worse, given the legal powers to decide who is and who is not a citizen, disaster is sure to ensue.
ITS NOW OR NEVER: WHY YOUNG, URBAN INDIAN MUSLIMS PLUNGED INTO THE ANTI-CITIZENSHIP ACT PROTESTS
https://www.dawn.com/news/1523363/its-no...t-protests
‘It’s now or never’: Why young, urban Indian Muslims plunged into the anti-Citizenship Act protests
Some drew strength from the broad-based student protests, others decided it was time to speak up against injustice. Rehan Sheikh had been disturbed by the prospect of a nationwide National Register for Citizens since April when he first heard Indian Home Minister Amit Shah announce plans to bring in the Citizenship Amendment Bill. Addressing a public meeting then, Shah said the legislation would grant citizenship to non-Muslim refugees from Bangladesh, Pakistan and Afghanistan, and then flush out “infiltrators” through the NRC.
In the following months, as the NRC was implemented in Assam and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party government became more vocal about a nationwide citizenship register, Sheikh realised how closely it was linked to the passing of the Citizenship Amendment Bill. Yet, when the Bill was passed by Parliament and became an official Act on December 12, Sheikh was taken by surprise. “It happened so suddenly,” said Sheikh, a 30-year-old investment advisor working with a bank in Mumbai. “I always knew this was going to be a dangerous law, but I did not expect to be passed so quickly after they tabled it in Parliament.”
Since then, like almost every other Muslim he knows, Sheikh has been brimming with feelings of anger, indignation, dread and a sense of urgency. These feelings have intensified after December 15, when the Delhi police unleashed an unprovoked assault on students of Jamia Milia Islamia University in Delhi, and students around the country began to protest in response.
For young, urban, middle-class Muslims like Sheikh, who had been more invested in their community’s educational and economic development than politics, the Citizenship Amendment Act and the police crackdown on protests have been an eye-opening jolt.
“We have been silent about a lot of things for the sake of peace, including the Supreme Court verdict about the Babri Masjid,” said Sheikh, referring to the court’s decision on November 9 to hand over the disputed land in Ayodhya to the Hindu side. “But now it is a question of our very existence in this country. We have to speak out now.”
'The community that was silent over the Babri Masjid being snatched has come out over the Constitution being taken away. What can be a greater sign of patriotism?,' the poster says. —
‘I cannot believe this is happening’
This “now or never” sentiment was palpable at Mumbai’s August Kranti Maidan on Thursday, when thousands of people across communities turned up to protest the Citizenship Amendment Act. Several protesters had never considered stepping out on the streets to raise slogans before, but now, for the first time, they felt compelled to raise their voices. “My family has never been interested in politics before,” said Alam Khan, a travel agent in his 30s. “My wife did not watch the news even when the Ayodhya verdict came out or when Article 370 was removed [in Jammu and Kashmir].” “But this time our community is directly being targeted, so many of my family members wanted to protest,” he said.
Protesters at Mumbai's August Kranti Maidan on Thursday. — Photo by writer
Khan’s personal desire to be vocal is rooted in both fear for his community and a rising sense of patriotism. “Muslims from my grandparents’ generation were not literate enough to preserve documents. How will people like us show proof of residence in India from the 1950s and 70s?” he said. “I cannot believe this is happening in my country – we cannot let it happen.”
Firdos Farooqui, a medical doctor from South Mumbai, said that the protest at August Kranti Maidan was only the second time she ever felt the need to participate in a public agitation. “I had protested triple talaq last year because it is an un-Islamic practice, and now I am protesting CAA and NRC because they are against India,” she said. “I did not expect that the law would be passed so easily, without much opposition in the Parliament.”
Like Farooqui, Farzana Khan, who had travelled for the protest all the way from the northern suburb of Mira Road, was also rattled by the idea of Indian Muslims being asked to prove their citizenship. “My father was a freedom fighter who won medals for this country,” she said. “What more do I need to prove?”
Firdos Farooqui and Farzana Khan at the protest against the Citizenship Act in Mumbai on December 19. — Photo by writer
Wearing religion on one’s sleeve
According to 39-year-old Javed Sayed, it is the support of non-Muslim Indians that helped Muslims across the country to step out in large numbers and protest visibly in public.
“I think Muslims had resigned themselves to a lot of injustice towards the community, so there were hardly any protests against NRC in these last few months,” said Sayed, a graphic designer from Mumbai. “But after CAA [Citizenship Amendment Act] was passed, when so many non-Muslims came out to speak for us and to support the students of Jamia, we found it easier to protest.”
A banner at the protest against the Citizenship Amendment Act in Mumbai on Thursday. — Photo by writer
Indian Muslims’ discomfort with public dissent is rooted in a history of bitter experiences with street protests, particularly since the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992. But some Muslims are now ready to discard the past and take control of their narratives. Journalist Humaira Ansari, for instance, said that after the Citizenship Amendment Act was passed, she decided to “stop giving a damn” about how other people perceive her political stances. “Earlier, whenever there were terror attacks and Muslim groups went out of their way to condemn the violence, I always felt uncomfortable about it,” she said. “I always questioned, why should we have to do it? Why should I have to wear my religion on my sleeve?” Ansari, 33, has had sleepless nights since the Act was passed. “Now I feel it is time for us to embrace our religion, to step out and say yes, I am a Muslim and I have a problem with the way Muslims are mistreated and targeted in this country.”
MUSLIMS IN INDIA: A BRIEF HISTORY
Adnan Rashid.
SOLEIMANI- HINDUTVA HISTORY
Adnan Rashid
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THIS IS JUST A STARTER ON THE ROLE OF ISLAM IN THE BRITISH ISLES BOTH BEFORE THE ESTABLISHMENT OF ENGLAND AND LATER ON THE UNITED KINGDOM OF GREAT BRITAIN AND NORTHERN IRELAND. IT IS CLEAR THAT THE UK'S ROLE WITH ISLAM IS LONG AND COMPLEX. IT'S ORIGINS ARE REVEALED WITH THE ABBASSIDS WHO WERE TRADING WITH THE RULERS OF THESE ISLANDS AS REVEALED BY THE GOLD DINAR MINTED BY KING OFFA. IT REACHES INTO THE MODERN ERA AND THE RISE OF INDUSTRIAL BRITAIN AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE WITH THE BRITISH EAST INDIA COMPANY. AND NOWADAYS WHEN ISLAM HAS BECOME THE SECOND LARGEST RELIGION IN THE UK.
IT IS CLEAR THAT THERE HAS BEEN GREAT PERIODS OF PEACEFUL MUTUAL COEXISTENCE AS WELL AS CONFLICT. THIS HAS BEEN FULLY DOCUMENTED IN ISLAM AND THE WEST THE MAKING OF AN IMAGE BY DANIEL NORMAN AND THE RISE OF COLLEGES: INSTITUTIONS OF LEARNING IN ISLAM AND THE WEST BY GEORGE MAKDISI. THESE ARE REFERENCES WHICH HAVE BEEN THERE SINCE THE 1980S.
IN THE PAST IT WAS THE PAPACY AND CHURCH WHICH MALIGNED ISLAM WHILST NOWADAYS IT IS THE SECULAR FORCES AND MEDIA PROMOTING THE GLOBAL WAR OF TERROR TARGETTING ISLAM AND THE MUSLIM WORLD. FROM THIS HISTORY IT IS CLEAR THAT ISLAMOPHOBIA IS ENACTED BOTH BY OMISSION AND COMMISSION. THE ISLAMIC INFLUENCE ON BRITAIN AND BRITISH CIVILISATION IS IMMENSE AND IT'S ROLE HAS TO BE FULLY ACKNOWLEDGED. AN EQUAL AMOUNT OF FINANCING THE UNDERSTANDING OF ISLAMIC CIVILISATION'S ROLE IN THE RISE AND FUTURE OF BRITAIN IS REQUIRED ESPECIALLY IN THE EDUCATION SYSTEM TO CANCEL OUT THE FINANCING OF COUNTER TERRORISM AND SPECIFICALLY ISLAMIC TERRORISM WHICH IS AN OXYMORON. IT IS TIME TO DECONSTRUCT THE OFFICIAL ISLAMOPHOBIA INDUSTRY ESPECIALLY THE ORIGINATORS.
ISLAM AND BRITAIN: THE FORGOTTEN HISTORY
Adnan Rashid.
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THE SHISHA MASSACRE IS ANOTHER SHOCKING EXAMPLE OF WHITE EUROPEAN EXTREMISM AND TERRORISM. IT IS CLEAR THAT IT WAS TARGETTING MUSLIMS TO CREATE FEAR AND SEND AN ISLAMOPHOBIC SHOCKWAVE IN GERMANY AND EUROPE. WHILST THE GERMAN AUTHORITIES HAVE WARNED OF A CRACKDOWN ON THESE WHITE RACE TERRORISTS WE SHALL SEE WHAT TRANSPIRES. BUT EUROPEAN SOCIETY WILL PAY THE PRICE OF CIVIL STRIFE IF WHITE SUPREMACISTS AND RADICALISATION IS NOT PUNISHED SEVERELY. IT IS ALSO CLEAR THAT ACTS OF MURDEROUS VIOLENT TERRORISM CARRIED OUT BY WHITE EXTREMISTS ARE NOT LABELLED AS TERRORISM. IT APPEARS THAT TERM IS DELIBERATELY RESERVED FOR MUSLIMS ENGAGED IN SIMILAR ACTS WHICH
ARE LET TO HAPPEN OR MADE TO HAPPEN. LET THERE BE NO DOUBT THAT THIS IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE DEMONISATION OF MUSLIMS AND ISLAM THAT IT IS CREATING. I WILL NOT CRY AT THE DEMISE OF THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA AS THEY CAN BURN IN HELL FOR BEING PEDLARS OF DECEIT , PROPAGANDA AND HATRED.
ALSO IT IS NOT ENOUGH TO CONDEMN DOUBLE STANDARDS AS WE NEED TO LOOK AHEAD AND REALISE THAT THE CRISIS OF CAPITALISM AT LEAST SINCE THE CRASH OF 2007-8 IF NOT EARLIER IS MORPHING INTO SOMETHING SINISTER. BY THIS I AM REFERRING TO THE FACT THAT WE ARE ALL NOT LIVING IN A DEMOCRACY BUT DEMONOCRACY. YES INDEED.
THIS RAISES QUESTIONS AGAIN ON THE ROLE AND THE NATURE OF THE INTER ACTION OF INTELLIGENCE AGENCIES, MAINSTREAM FAR RIGHT RACIST PARTIES AND THE RISE OF THE EUROPEAN SECURITY STATE. ALSO IT SHOULD BECOME CLEAR THAT THE ROLE OF THE EU, NATO AND THE RISE OF THE SECURITY STATE IS INTERTWINED. THIS NEEDS TO BE DECONSTRUCTED AND ATTENTION WILL BE DEVOTED TO THIS HEREAFTER.
ALSO WITH GROWING INTOLERANCE OF MINORITIES AND MUSLIMS IN EUROPE. IT IS TIME DISCUSSION AT POPULAR LEVEL ARISES ON WHETHER EUROPE IS FIT FOR PURPOSE TO REMAIN AND RESIDE IN AS EUROPEAN CITIZENS. WE NEED TO SERIOUSLY EXAMINE HOW TO TRANSFORM EUROPEAN SOCIETY. HOWEVER IT NEEDS TO BE STATED THAT IF ANY SOCIETY IS ON THE ROAD OF SELF DESTRUCTION AND IS NOT REFORMABLE WE NEED TO LOOK AT WHAT ALTERNATIVES EXIST SUCH AS DUAL NATIONALITY CITIZENSHIP AS WELL AS HIJRAH. I WILL NOT DISGUISE THIS TERM AND MAKE IT CLEAR THAT HIJRAH MEANS EMIGRATION. IN A HOSTILE ENVIROMENT THE SHARIAH DEMANDS THAT THE BELIEVERS DEPART AND LEAVE IF CONDITIONS DETERIORATE AND MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO PRACTICE ISLAM AND LIVE AS MUSLIMS. IT IS TIME TO DISCARD PASSIVITY AND FEAR OF THE FUTURE.
IN THE MEANTIME WE OFFER OUR CONDOLENCES TO THE MASSACRED VICTIMS AND THEIR FAMILIES.
HOW WILL GERMANY TACKLE RACIALLY MOTIVATED
ATTACKS ? I Inside Story
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zhWPWGb2rJc
AFTER HANAU RIGHT WING RACISM NEEDS TO BE VIEWED AS RADICALISM
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/after-h...lism-33969
For decades now, Western states have ignored the threat within, rooted deeply in racist ideology and scientific racism, for how much longer can it ignore the danger of far-right terrorism?
With the sickening Christchurch, New Zealand anti-Muslim terrorist attack still fresh in our minds, radical white supremacist terror has struck again, this time in the heart of Europe. The terrorist, named as Tobias R with his last name omitted as is the German practice, attacked two shisha lounges in Hanau near Frankfurt in Germany. Tobias was carrying legally licensed firearms and proceeded to shoot dead nine victims before escaping the scene. He was later found by German police after he had apparently also killed his elderly mother at home before shooting himself and ending his life, perhaps in an attempt to escape justice.
Racism roots
Before he so brutally ended the lives of almost a dozen people, including himself, the 43-year-old terrorist had left behind a video and a letter of confession where he expressed racist views towards non-whites including ethnic minorities in Germany such as Turks. Indeed, Turkish Presidential Spokesman Ibrahim Kalin confirmed that some of the victims were of Turkish origin and called on the German authorities to fully investigate.
It's no secret that racist and destructive views are being popularised and introduced by mainstream political parties across Europe. There is a strong argument to be made that, just as abhorrent political views expressed by extreme but non-violent Muslims are assessed as being signs of radicalisation, so too then must racist views expressed against ethnic minorities be viewed as signs of right-wing extremism with possible violent tendencies taking root. Before the anti-politically correct brigade pile in with their faux outrage, it is probably worth pointing out that the perpetrators of the largest genocidal act in Europe were also avowed racists and despised anyone who was different to them.
Germany’s history with Nazism should not be overlooked as the horrors of the Holocaust, a racist, antisemitic crime the likes of which has rarely been matched in history, was tragically not that long ago. If it happened once, it can quite easily happen again, and this time with Muslims being the primary victims. Such right-wing bigots always remember their ancient hatred of the Jews and other minorities even when distracted by new “racial threats” from Muslim-dominant minority groups.
I am the first person to say that not all discussion on radicalisation within Muslim communities is born of racism, and indeed it has shown itself to be a problem time and again with extremist clerics like Abu Hamza and Anjem Choudary in Britain alone. I have myself worked to curtail the influence of extremist Muslims within British Muslim communities, so I am all too aware of the dangers there. However, just as radical Muslims are a grave danger, there can be no doubt that right-wing terrorism and radicalisation is just as bad and in fact, feeds the propaganda of groups such as Al Qaeda and Daesh.
Well-known Dutch Islamophobic politician Geert Wilders is a prime example of this, as he actively heaping hateful opprobrium on Islam’s Prophet Muhammed and the Quran, the prophet and holy book of 1.8 billion Muslims from different ethnic groups and cultural backgrounds. Wilders' harsh views towards Islam, while not strictly and properly defined as racism, cannot simply be called criticism as they are so venomous, and they do feed racist views because it then opens up other characteristics to abuse.
Growing up in the United Kingdom, I have lost track of the number of times I have been slurred as a “Paki”, “Taliban”, “dirty Muslim”, and “terrorist” from complete strangers. This all happened despite the fact that they had no way of knowing for certain that I was Muslim apart from the “Muslim-ness” of my appearance. Yet, they linked me to an ethnic group I am not a part of, radical Muslims, and terrorism as a default. Why? Because in the right-wing lexicon, “Muslims” look a certain way, making them easy to stereotype and even easier to target. I am not the only example of this, with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson himself believing Muslim women wearing veils look like bank robbers and letterboxes, a position the Conservative party found to be “respectful”.
Time to punish racism as radicalism
Racism has not only been behind attacks on Muslims, but it has also been behind terrorist attacks against Jews. Again in Germany, two people were shot dead in October last year after an attack on a synagogue in Halle by neo-Nazi Stephan B. The white supremacist terrorist attempted to break into the synagogue where 50 people were observing Yom Kippur, one of the holiest days in the Jewish calendar. When he failed to enter, he killed a woman on the street outside before shooting another man dead in a nearby shop.
As I have argued elsewhere, there appears to be very little difference between the far-right and Daesh. Their methods are similar, they espouse similar extreme views but from opposite sides of the trenches, and their understanding of the culture and the ideas they claim to be defending is often remarkably superficial. But the increasing spread of right-wing terror and radicalisation is now too large to ignore, and it has its roots in the actions of the media and politicians who have popularised hateful rhetoric and allowed it to become part of the mainstream consciousness, further emboldening such attacks.
The far-right politicians who feed such hatred and popularise it in the mainstream need to be held to account. It is no longer feasible to say that they should be allowed to freely express their views and discuss their political progammes in a democracy. Hitler also had political views and programmes and it ultimately led to the brutality of World War II and the Holocaust. This is no exaggeration, as the threat is very real.
Only last Friday, German police arrested 12 members of a right-wing terror cell who were actively planning on attacking mosques and asylum seekers to “incite a civil war”. This is absolutely no different to the ideological underpinnings of the Nazi-era concept of Rassenkrieg, or Race War, and seeks to mobilise the masses against minorities.
Only when extreme expressions of racism, particularly by politicians, are criminalised and actively curtailed will we see a slow removal of racist and violent tendencies that have infested the European mainstream. Another outcome of inaction is for another genocide to take place in Europe, a continent that has tried so very hard to prove that its violent history had long since passed.
'THIS WOULD BE A TOP NEWS STORY IF THE SHOOTER WAS MUSLIM'
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/02/social-media-users-claim-double-standard-german-attack-200220151136406.html?utm_source=website&utm_medium=article_page&utm_campaign=read_more_links
After massacre at shisha bars in Germany, critics decry media double standard in covering attacks by far-right suspects.
A deadly shooting in the German city of Hanau on Wednesday by a far-right gunman has sent shock waves around the world. At least nine people were killed in two attacks targeting customers at shisha bars, many of whom had migrant backgrounds. The suspect, identified as Tobias R, a 43-year-old white male, was found dead at his apartment along with his mother, according to officials.
Germany's federal prosecutor said the suspected perpetrator's 24-page manifesto and video messages pointed to "deeply racist views". Despite strong reactions from world leaders, including German Chancellor Angela Merkel, some social media users pointed out that the
response to the story was somewhat muted - suggesting it would have gained more traction had the attacker been a Muslim.
Others questioned why some news outlets had chosen to simply refer to the assailant as a "deranged gunman" and not a "terrorist" - or refused to describe the incident as a case of "Islamophobia". United States President Donald Trump, who is quick to condemn attacks by people of Muslim background, was yet to comment on the incident at the time of publication.
'Hated non-whites'
Peter R Neumann, a professor at King's College London, analysed the suspect's 24-page manifesto in which he revealed that "he hated foreigners and non-whites".
"Although he doesn't emphasise Islam, he calls for the extermination of various countries in North Africa, Middle East and Central Asia (which all happen to be majority Muslim)."
There have been several far-right attacks in recent years in Germany, with violence rising sharply in 2015 when the country took in more than one million migrants. The German domestic intelligence agency estimated that the number of violent crimes with far-right elements rose by 3 percent in 2018, although attacks on centres for asylum seekers fell after a spike in 2015 and 2016.
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AND WHAT IS HAPPENING IN FRANCE WHERE ISLAMOPHOBIA FESTERS UNDERMINING THE SOCIAL COHESION OF THE FRENCH REPUBLIC. THIS WILL BE REVIEWED HEREAFTER AS IT IS CLEAR THAT FRANCE'S MUSLIMS AND EUROPEAN MUSLIMS NEED TO ASSERT THEIR COLLECTIVE IDENTITIES AND STRENGTH AGAINST THE FORCES OF INTOLERANCE AND EXCLUSIVITY.
FRANCE’s ‘MUSLIM’ PROBLEM AND THE UNSPOKEN RACISM AT ITS HEART
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/france-s-muslim-problem-and-the-unspoken-racism-at-its-heart-33939
French Muslims continue to struggle with unemployment, social immobility and systemic racism, in spite of the French government’s calls for integration, which runs into deep-founded racism with every turn.
A young Muslim man of North African descent leans against a graffiti-filled wall in Felix Pyat, Marseille’s poorest and third quarter. With a loosely-held cigarette in hand, his shaved head and worn leather jacket are entirely at odds with his education: a biotechnology engineer, graduating fifth in his class. “I got fifth because I was too smart for my own good,” jests Mohammed with a pained smile. “Not smart enough to remember that I’m Arab, and there’s no point to school.” Mohammed Laarbi, whose last name has been changed due to his request for anonymity, has been on the hunt for a job for three years to no avail. The reason?
“Discrimination,” he claims. “When they hear your last name, you can see the interviewer’s face change. Sometimes they’re extra-polite, in an unnatural way. But you can see in their eyes they’re not interested in an Arab,” he adds.
Laarbi’s situation is hardly unique. Muslim immigrants in France, some third- and fourth-generation, have yet to integrate into a country that doesn’t really want them. One of the most famous Algerian folk songs ‘Ya Rayah’ (Oh departing one), encapsulates the feeling of entire generations of disenchanted Algerians who arrived for France for employment, only to find despair in diaspora.
Oh departing one, wherever you go, you’ll only tire and return... How many developed countries and barren lands will you see? How much time have you wasted, and how much will you still lose? Oh absent one, in the country of others How tired can you be and still run? Why is your heart so sad? And why is the miserable one like this? Hardship will end, but days don't last, and neither will my youth, just like yours
Dahmane Harrachi, "Ya Rayah"
Kamel Messoudi, another classic Algerian folk singer laments in one song: "Oh strangeness in the land of others / Whoever sees me, says he's is a 'foreigner' / After once being silver, today I revert to copper."
But since the release of these songs in the 1970's, circumstances remain highly similar.
“Modern France and Colonial France haven’t really changed”, says Dr Hamed Benseddik, a professor of Decolonial Studies who spoke to TRT World.
Benseddik believes that modern France “continues to struggle with the failed integration and assimilation of Muslims, largely due to its own internal contradictions”.
“How does a country that allegedly stands for liberty, equality and fraternity reconcile itself with internal racist undercurrents that deny the liberty of religion, generate inequality, and regard Arabs and Muslims as second-class citizens?” asks Benseddik.
“It can’t, because it would have to first acknowledge its white saviour’s complex, the genocide of millions, its nuclear testing in colonies, systemic racism, rape, torture, muder and its industrialisation at the expense of entire nations and peoples in the name of Mother France and all that she stands for. That’s not going to happen anytime soon.”
France has always had a ‘Muslim’ problem
Once known as Francia, the Frankish Empire was Europe’s foremost imperial power and the first and largest barbarian kingdom to emerge from the Dark Ages following Rome’s fall. The same empire would one day give birth to France and Germany. Charles Martel, one of France’s oldest heroes had his moment of glory unifying Francia in a fight against Andalusian Muslims, when he defeated them in the crushing battle of Tours which many Europeans see as the continent’s first repulsion of Islam.
With tens of thousands dead, Andalusian history mournfully describes the battle as ‘the Court of Martyrs’. Historian John Henry Haaren describes it as, “One of the decisive battles of the world. It decided that Christians and not Muslims should be the ruling power in Europe.” His sentiment is widely shared.
But this was only the beginning of France’s story. Martel was thrust into the spotlight of heroism for his victory, gaining notoriety and immense power for having saved Christendom from the Moors. His grandson, Charlemagne was idolised not just in France but throughout Europe as the first pan-European figure, becoming the first self-proclaimed Holy Roman Emperor of Western Europe after waging countless wars against the Arab Saracens and Moors.
The actions of Martel and his grandson gave rise to France, and a perception of Islam as a threat since the nation’s conception. This propagated worldview would guide France’s colonial wars, and the consequent colonisation of the Middle East itself.
Forgotten history, whitewashed crimes
In France today, the name of the game is integration. French Muslims are often the subject of heated debates and simplifications overlooking religious and cultural diversity. The common cry remains that Muslims in France have not adopted French ways, culture and norms. Instead, the very meaning of what it means to be French is portrayed at risk by pundits, right-wing politicians and patriots alike. But few question the reason for Muslims’ lack of integration, or the ‘mere history’ of racism, colonialism and social factors, which are often dismissed by the mainstream. Abdelmalak Sayad, renowned Algerian-French sociologist and author of the The Suffering of Immigrants describes multiple reasons Muslims are marginalised in France, particularly North Africans.
Bitter legacies
“At the forefront is France’s laissez-faire attitude and unapologetic stance towards its bloody role as a colonial power and brutal subjugator of peoples,” says Sayad. “This included dehumanisation, torture, rape, exploitation and outright genocide, as in the case of over 5,000,000 Algerians killed throughout 132 years of French colonial rule.” To the present day, France has yet to formally acknowledge its use of widescale torture, population cleansing, nuclear testing or the exploitation of resources in Algeria. Often lost on many modern pundits and analysts, France’s exploitative colonial history left a bitter legacy for many Muslims.
In Algeria for instance, settlers took control of cities, vast tracts of the best arable agricultural land, and often rented out plots to Algerians at prohibitive rates. By the Third Republic, there were no limitations left on settler activity in Algeria. In one of the largest land-rushes recorded in history, Algeria’s structures, wealth and society were effectively eradicated. Algerians were not provided with education, given the likelihood it would lead to resistance or demands for higher wages.
For many North African Muslims, the ultimate hypocrisy was that France did not adhere to the very principles of the ‘Rights of Man’ it created as far back as 1789. But Algerian Muslims were nominally French citizens. If anything, that didn’t grant them more freedoms. It presented more burdens. Muslims paid heavier taxes, had little to no rights, and nearly no legal protection according to the infamous ‘Code of Indigenes’. To acquire French citizenship, one had to give up their ‘Muslim status’ through an intentionally difficult process. Most Algerians were officially legally identified as ‘Muslims’. To this day, immigrant Algerians in France continue to identify as Muslims, rather than give up their faith and adopt a French identity.
“To put it simply,” says Benseddik. “France’s republican ideals were permanently tarnished in the eyes of people who knew its truth.”
Muslims quickly became an undercaste in Algeria itself, in spite of being the largest majority. Algerian Jews were granted speedy citizenship under the Cremieux decree, and given every right a citizen of the French republic enjoyed.
Stranded without hope
It wasn’t long before Algerians would seek out France for temporary work, remittances being the only means by which they could save entire villages from ruin and abject poverty. France in turn, was in need of unskilled industrial labourers, and was already accustomed to using North African indentured conscripts on its front lines throughout World War I and II. By the 1970s, Algerian migration for work was no longer a phenomena, but a reality. With the end of industrialisation, unemployment soared in France. Labour was no longer an upwards path to integration in French society, leaving many stranded.
This wasn’t to last. France was already in the process of shifting into a post-industrial economy, leaving many Muslim immigrants out of a job, lacking education or other skills and leaving them economically marginalised and stranded on the wrong side of the the social ladder. This wasn’t all too long ago. The French Institute for Demographic Studies reports that unemployment only worsened in minorities as discrimination increased. Among the first wave of immigrants, 15 percent of male Algerians, 11 percent of Moroccans and Tunisians, and 10 percent of Turks were unemployed. By the second generation, unemployment had gone from bad to worse. Among Algerians, Moroccans and Tunisians unemployment had risen to 17 percent. For Turks, it nearly doubled to 19 percent. Immigrant unemployment was much higher than the native French average.
Housing for the masses
Soon after World War II, France implemented mass low-cost public housing development projects. To indigenous French citizens, they were described as ‘shoddily-built, uniform and aesthetically unappealing’.
But to Muslim immigrants, they were a blessing compared to housing lacking heat, water, private and bathrooms. They would soon discover the new cites were isolated from public transportation, social areas, and presented difficulties getting to work.
With the lack of a better alternative, the enclaves were predominantly lived in by immigrants, as the socially-mobile French moved into better neighbourhoods. In time, they would become ghettos. Rising immigrant rates meant most working-age immigrants relied on some form of welfare. Schools filled with immigrants became less and less a means to social mobility, as the dream of ‘making-it’ died out.
Dead dreams
Second and third-generation immigrants became more susceptible to gangs, drugs, and antisocial behaviour; reducing prospects for immigrants as a whole to dig themselves out of poverty and squalor. In a vicious cycle, French social welfare ensured the ghetto’s marginalised and isolated survived. Disenfranchisement would rise further, as ghetto culture and mannerisms became the perfect targets for police crackdowns. “Prison populations jumped significantly with this ghettoisation. More than half of the French prison population is Muslim,” says Marouane Mohammed, former director of the Muslim Association for Islam in France, speaking to TRT World. “They don’t feel alive. They live in purgatory. No parks. No cafes. Their jobs don’t pay enough for them to feel like they are real jobs. Even if you are academically successful, you’re not likely to go far. Discrimination based on your name and area code is the norm,” says Mohammed.
Collapsing centre
But this is no longer limited to France’s Muslims. The gilet jaune (yellow vest) movement reflects growing discontent with pervasive economic insecurity. As with the disruptive end of the industrial era, the rise of the knowledge economy put industrial and post-industrial jobs in dire conditions. With a new economy reliant on global financial instruments, technology and specialized skills; the beneficiaries are few, at the expense of the many.
With rising costs of living, housing and a shrinking middle class, Muslim immigrants and the indigneous French alike face the same challenges. For second and third-generation Muslim immigrants in the banlieues, this serves as yet another confirmation that the path upwards and out is blocked. Denied a necessary middle class, Muslim immigrants are socially immobilised, cash-strapped, and discriminated against. French calls for creating a 'French Islam', is seen with widespread suspicion given France’s legacy of using religion as a means of social control in colonial territories.
Colonial France promoted pacifist religion to minimise resistance, while nearly eradicating the practice and memory of Islam by cracking down on schools and religious instruction. If it weren't for the efforts of reformist scholars such as Abdelhamid bin Badis over more than a century who collectively struggled to keep religion and literacy alive; it's likely Algerians would speak only French today and know nothing of Islam.
Meanwhile, genuine efforts at engaging Muslims have long since collapsed. Under French President Sarkozy’s term, authorities created the French Council of the Muslim Faith in 2003, which would represent major immigrant groups (Algerian, Moroccan and Turkish) as well as Islamic organizations. With low credibility to begin with, the council has developed the reputation of being an arena of rivalries and in-fighting between ideological factions.
While some Muslim immigrants are making their way into the middle class, an uphill battle remains where they must not only prove themselves, but feature their ‘Frenchness’. For North Africans who witness firsthand how ‘Frenchness’ treats them daily, or recall the tales of deprivation and bloodlust their forefathers paid for; the price is a bitter one for survival. For the majority still in the ghettos, there is no path ahead for the taking: just bleak, second-class existence.
FRANCE’s ISLAMOPHOBIA AND ITS ROOTS IN FRENCH COLONIALISM
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/france...lism-25678
[/url]The Australian who carried out the terrorist attack in Christchurch was influenced by French Islamophobes, but just how far back does the country’s antipathy towards Islam go? More than two weeks have passed since the terrorist attack in the New Zealand, which killed at least 51 people, and topics such as white supremacy and Islamophobia have found themselves in the media limelight. Acts of terror are committed by individuals actings under a range of influences but in the weeks following the attacks, it has become clear the attacker drew inspiration from the European far-right, particularly the Identitarian movement, and the ideas of French far-right author, Renaud Camus.
A number of analysts have zeroed in one country that seems to have played an important role in nurturing such ideologies: France. Camus’ book Le Grand Remplacement (The Great Replacement) became an inspiration for the Australian terrorist to such an extent that his own 72-page manifesto had the same title. The French influence on the white supremacist terrorist is far from limited to just one racist thinker. France’s New Right or Nouvelle Droite (ND), a post WWII far-right movement, became an inspiration for Austria’s Identitarian movements with whom the Australian terrorist had close contact and financial links.
Today’s Identitarians have found a huge support base in France, where they have become closely linked to the far-right Front National (FN), one of the countries main opposition parties. The Australian who carried out the terrorist attack in Christchurch was influenced by French Islamophobes, but just how far back does the country’s antipathy towards Islam go?
A recent history of anti-Muslim hatred in France
“France has had a hostile attitude towards Muslims and Islam since the first headscarf cases started in France in 1989,” Abdelaziz Chaambi, President and Founder of Coordination against Racism and Islamophobia (CRI) in France, told TRT World. Since the 9/11 attacks, senior officials, including the mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi, and other politicians have not shied away from labeling Muslims as a 5th Column (Cinquième Colonne). Invectives against Muslims over their religious attire, eating habits, and supposed inability to integrate are commonplace in mainstream media, as well as in political discourse.
And it’s not just limited to words. The country banned headscarves in public schools in 2004, followed by a ban in private schools. More bans followed with former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s controversial Niqab ban in 2011. And municipal bans on burkini swimwear designed for Muslim women. The controversial move was supported by then Prime Minister Manuel Valls. “2004 was the opening of the Pandora Box when Islamophobia became a legal form of discrimination and not just an opinion,” Yasser Louati, a French human rights and civil liberties activist, told
Colonial roots of French Islamophobia
Such policies are not a recent phenomenon, according to the activists, but instead are intimately tied to France’s history of empire. France’s colonial past determines how French elite and a large group of natives regard Muslims,” said Chaambi. “The perception of Muslims as second-class citizens like in the days of French Algeria is still significantly dominant,” he added. According to Louati, it was France’s Algerian experience that helped define its approach to Islam today. For much of the 20th century, France was a colonial power, which occupied largely Muslim-majority lands in Africa and the Middle East. While most of these lands were ruled as colonial territories, Algeria was integrated into the French state as a constituent part of the country.
The rights of citizenship of that state though rarely extended to its Muslim Algerian subjects. Muslims were seen as too attached to their religion and unqualified to participate in a state built on strict adherence to an ideology built on the separation of state and church, known as laicite. French occupiers urged a detachment from symbols of Islamic culture and religion, which entailed sometimes forcible campaigns urging women to unveil, and the relegation of the Arabic language to the private sphere.
This was also the period during which the foundations of the modern French state were set in stone. “The current Fifth Republic was proclaimed with the 1958 constitution, in the midst of the bloody repression in Algeria and while France was still dreaming of keeping its grip on its colonies”, Louati said. The impact of such thought continues to this day, he explained. In 2005, Sarkozy attempted to pass a law changing the school curriculum to “recognise the positive role of the French presence overseas”. Though the legislation was since cancelled following academic opposition, according to Louati, it demonstrates the continuing post-colonial mentality of many politicians and the elite in France. “The end of colonialism brought no assessment of what had gone wrong and what lessons needed to be learned,” Louati said, describing the present French Republic as the ‘Colonial Republic’. “Rather, the country entered into voluntary amnesia without addressing this poisonous legacy.”
The ‘anti-colonial’ struggle continues in France
Algerians are one of the largest diaspora communities with up to four million Algerians or French citizens with Algerian roots living in the country. The total number of Muslims is estimated at between six and seven million. Muslims have been more assertive in protesting for their rights given the France’s reputation for labour discrimination, police brutality, and hate crimes against, mainly, Muslim Arab and African migrants. But, for Chaambi and other activists the idea of France’s imperial ‘Civilisation Mission’ continues, laying the soil for more extremist thoughts, such as Camus’. The latest attempt by President Emmanuel Macron to launch his French Islam initiative, in which he and his government take on state-appointed representatives of the French Council of Muslim Faith (CFCM) as primary counterparts, is not including but excluding local Muslims.
IS ‘FRENCH ISLAM' AN ATTEMPY TO CONTROL MUSLIMS IN FRANCE?
https://www.trtworld.com/europe/is-french-islam-an-attempt-to-control-muslims-in-france-25522
French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated for a ‘French Islam’, a controversial term that was also used by former presidents. We spoke to French Muslim activist Abdelaziz Chaambi, on how words politicians use impact everyday life for Muslims. French President Emmanuel Macron has advocated for a “French Islam” to address the issues of radicalisation and extremism in the country. But the plan has drawn immediate controversy, with French Muslims at the forefront of the criticism.
But the use of the term is not new and previous French leaders have also announced plans for an indigenous Islam.
We spoke to Abdelaziz Chaambi, the president and founder of Coordination against Racism and Islamophobia (la Coordination contre le Racisme et l’Islamophobie), also known by the acronym, CRI. He spoke about the problem with government-led initiatives to redefine Islam, and how current policies towards French Muslims have helped contribute towards anti-Muslim attitudes.
What role have politicians and the media played in the ‘demonisation’ of Muslims and Islam in France?
ABDELAZIZ CHAAMBI: In France there is a category of journalists, politicians and intellectuals who are real arsonists: they are people who position themselves against our own country, who position themselves against France by demonising Muslims, and who sabotage peace and civil harmony. Some people hate Muslims and want to raise people against each other by presenting Muslims as a threat to the country's identity and culture. They consider them a fifth column, as the devil himself. (People) who would have come for the great replacement or who have a secret plan to destabilise the Republic, impose their way of life and impose polygamy, etc.
All these delusions and slander have no basis since Muslims have been (in France) for decades, even centuries, and have never sought to impose their way of life or their culture or tradition on anyone. In France, there is indeed a category of influential men of opinion makers who are arsonists who are people who light fires to endanger civil peace.
What are your thoughts about the term ‘French Islam’?
AC: Islam is unique, it is not French or German or Turkish or Russian or English: Islam is Islam. There are indeed specificities, there are social, historical, and traditional characteristics. When you live in Senegal, when you live in France, Russia, or the United States, these are different contexts. So French Islam lives well in a context and we take that into account. We were the first in Lyon at the UJM (Union des Jeunes Musulmans) to fight for a ‘contextualised’ Islam that takes into account social relations and the specificities of the country in which we live.
For example, we imposed the French language in religious instruction courses, we asked that the Friday sermon be translated into French, we asked that the speakers at the conferences be able to speak in French, so that the young people of this country could understand the message we have to convey to them and the message of Islam. We have started working on unions with Christians, with atheists, with people of different political tendencies to say we are together in a society called French society and we will try to improve it all together. Islam is also about thinking about the public interest and the common interest, not about selfishness and individualism.
French President, Mr Macron, uses the formula of ‘French Islam’, but it is not in the same terms that we hear them at all. When we talk about French Islam, we are talking about a committed, free, independent Islam that can enable Muslims to organise themselves as they wish, to talk about the problems that interest them, that concern them. Whereas Mr Macron in his intention, when he talks about French Islam, he means effectively controlling, guiding, and directing Islam and Muslims as he wishes by trying to put them in a mould.
Mr Macron is no exception to the rule, since he is like his predecessors; Mr (Jean-Pierre) Chevenement, Mr (Nicolas) Sarkozy, or Mr (Francois) Holland, who all had to control Islam, to impose spokespersons who speak on behalf of Muslims though they have never been elected. It is the reproduction of the colonial pattern when docile and helpful people were designated as the representatives of Muslims. And not much has changed since the colonial period; in the 1920s there was the Interministerial Commission for Muslim Affairs which included soldiers, politicians, people representing the Muslim faith and appointed by the colonial forces. They were supposed to speak on behalf of Algerian Muslims: so we had the same thing with Mr Sarkozy in 2003 with the French Council of the Muslim Faith (CFCM).
With Mr Sarkozy, we were entitled to the CFCM in which there were people appointed by the government, to the detriment of secularism, which prevents it from interfering in religious affairs. Also to the detriment of democracy, which encourages citizens to vote to appoint their representatives. So there is indeed political control on the issue of Islam in France.
How can politicians and Muslims cooperate more closely? What do Muslims expect from politics?
AC: Policies will only be able to take Muslims into account when they are organised or engaged at the very least, that is, when Muslims become citizens who fulfil their duties by voting, electing representatives, applying for positions of responsibility themselves, and getting elected. To become a political strike force so that the political class respects them. Otherwise they will remain instruments in the hands of politicians; Muslims have every interest in occupying the political field, because for the time being, they are only objects of manipulation, demonisation, and political exploitation. There is no way for us other than taking responsibility.
What is missing in politics to offer constructive solutions to key problems? What role does the culture of secularism play in this question?
AC: What is missing in politics in order to offer constructive solutions is that the people concerned, the groups concerned, are involved in the search for solutions, that they are involved in the reflection, are considered as people capable of providing solutions.
The current problem is that the problems are hidden by society and the media, when you talk to a girl wearing a headscarf, for example, a veiled Muslim woman, she will tell you about the difficulties she faces in school, university, work, commerce, on the street, public services, and when you hear her you discover things you don't think about because you don't belong there. I think if you want to solve these difficulties, you have to involve the actors.
The book La laïcité dévoyée ou l’identité comme principe d’exclusion, (Secularism corrupted or identity as a principle of exclusion), written by Jean Bauberot, sheds light very well on this manipulation used by politicians, journalists, and intellectuals to transform a political and social legal framework into a prison for Muslims. Secularism is the neutrality of politics vis-à-vis the religious and vice versa, and it is freedom of conscience and freedom of worship, yet these things are not respected when it comes to Muslims. While lawfulness means respect for belief and non-belief, and the possibility of living one's religion without being disturbed in public in private, individually and collectively, this is confirmed by the Constitution and the European Convention on Human Rights.
What can Muslims and Islamic organisations do to master the policies linked to establish a ‘French Islam’?
AC: Muslims must become actors in the French political arena with their organisations, this is the only method that can enable them to influence what is called ‘French Islam’. There are more than 2,500 mosques or places of worship, there are also thousands of Muslim associations, there are between five and six million Muslims in France and they can have a decisive influence in political life in this country if they ever get involved.
They must also take a stand against and express themselves against radicalisation, extremism and terrorism, so that they can have clear positions to explain that Islam is not a concern and that Islam refuses radicalisation, extremism and terrorism. They must do a lot of teaching to explain to the population what Islam really is, which remains very little known in this society.
LIBERTE, EGALITE , FRATERNITE - JUST NOT FOR TARIQ RAMADAN?
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/liberte-egalite-fraternite-just-not-for-tariq-ramadan-20034
If Tariq Ramadan can not get due process, then there is no hope for other Muslims living in France. The case of Professor Tariq Ramadan, who faces rape charges in France, ceased to be a normal case several months ago. The dire treatment of Ramadan has led to an outpouring of support for the accused. Whether it’s because of the lack of due process, the absence of an impartial judicial framework, the skewed media coverage led by the same French media and cultural ‘icons’ who spearheaded smear campaigns against Ramadan over the past two decades, and above all the inhumane treatment – there is every reason to believe now that the case against Ramadan is politically motivated.
From the outset, a string of judicial irregularities occurred including: the complete isolation of Ramadan during the first 45 days of detention without even granting him access to family members; denying him access to his own court records; denying him the right of a presumption of innocence; the court's failure to provide him with appropriate medical treatment as he suffers from multiple-sclerosis according to several medical reports, including that of the prison’s chief-doctor, and the judges’ refusal to question the credibility of the plaintiffs’ shaky version of events.
The first plaintiff‘s case (Henda Ayari) is a flagrant example since she [url=https://www.facebook.com/FreeTariqRamadanCampaign/videos/2166938126667964/]changed her version of the alleged events twice and failed to provide an exact date and place of the alleged rape. In the second case, the plaintiff Paule-Emma A. (designated as Christelle) hasn’t been able to prove any of her allegations against Tariq Ramadan. As for the third case, Mounia Rabbouj, the court dropped the charges against Ramadan after the plaintiff failed to provide credible evidence.
To make matters worse, the French court continues to dismiss all requests for bail submitted by Ramadan's lawyer, under the pretext that he could either flee abroad or put pressure on plaintiffs and witnesses. These factors cast serious doubt on the credibility of the investigation and the impartiality of the judges in charge of the case.
This begs the question, if this is not an attempt of political assassination conducted by the French intelligentsia, judiciary and the state against Ramadan, what could it be then?
Another equally important question is: why Tariq Ramadan? And who stands to benefit from keeping him in detention and thus silencing him?
Why Tariq Ramadan?
Ramadan represents a school of intellectual thought that challenges and dismantles the anti-Islam discourse propagated by the Islamophobic French elite. One of the key characteristics of Ramadan's doctrine is to encourage French and European Muslims to act as full citizens, to question their governments on socioeconomic policies, to refuse injustice and discrimination, and to demand social equality. He also calls on governments to pursue policies of social equality and adopt anti-discrimination laws.
In his book, “Islamic Ethics: A Very Short Introduction”, Ramadan highlights the need to initiate interfaith and intercultural dialogues with regard to common moral values in order to question the role of religion, the state and economy in dealing with issues surrounding social and economic inequality. With the exception of a few fine minds like the prominent French sociologist Edgar Morin or the writer Alain Gresh, French media and the intellectual corpus oscillated between ignoring Ramadan, to publicly questioning his role as a Muslim in the public sphere.
Those who benefit from keeping Ramadan in detention
For almost two decades now, a number of French politicians and media pundits have tried to undermine Ramadan's discourse by accusing him of ambiguity, demagoguery, doublespeak and anti-Semitism. They have strived to keep his intellectual contribution to the public debate in France limited to only matters pertaining Islam. Framed as the ‘Muslim intellectual’ by most French media outlets, the aim being not only to alienate his French audience but also to distort Ramadan’s image and weaken his intellectual credibility and narrative.
Apart from the French far right party (Le Front National), which upholds racist and Islamophobic views, the overwhelming majority of those who systematically oppose Ramadan’s ideas, and who regularly carry out smear campaigns against him whenever he takes a stand for the rights of France’s discriminated Muslim citizens or condemn Israeli crimes against Palestinians, happen to be close to pro-Israel circles in France.
They include figures such as Bernard-Henri Levy, Alain Finkielkraut, Eric Zemmour, Frederic Encel, Gilles Kepel, Jean-Pierre Elkabache and many others. Some, like the journalist Caroline Fourest, who for years has been leading a smear campaign against Ramadan, are directly involved in the case against him. Since the beginning of the affair, she has been actively promoting the plaintiffs’ version of events on media platforms. Another media pundit who played a key role, among others, in demonising Ramadan is the French-Israeli paparazzi journalist Jean-Claude ElFassi who closely collaborates with the French magazine l’Express. He went so far as to threaten the third plaintiff’s brother in the event he provides to the court exculpatory elements in favour of Tariq Ramadan.
It is worth pointing out here that l’Express is among the most widely circulated publications and is owned by French-Israeli Patrick Drahi, also the owner of a media empire, including the Israeli TV channel “i24”, French newspaper “Liberation”, “RMC” radio and “BFM” TV channel. These outlets have relentlessly been promoting the plaintiffs’ allegations and attacking Ramadan.
Accordingly, keeping Ramadan in detention, and therefore silencing him, is serving the very interests of those who for years struggled to shut him out and discredit his reputation among his audience. The reason being; during countless debates, media encounters and interviews, Ramadan was cleverly able to expose their hypocrisy and double standards towards France’s Muslim citizens and the Palestinian cause. Therefore, Ramadan’s absence allows them to have a free reign to spew their Islamophobic, racist and anti-Palestinian narratives, since Ramadan is almost the only intellectual who dares questioning and dismantling their lies and propaganda.
However, the way Ramadan’s case has been handled – or rather mishandled- by the French judiciary will likely have serious consequences for the justice system in France. By embracing, or being influenced by, the anti-Ramadan narrative propagated by the anti-Ramadan lobby, French justice risks losing its credibility. Ramadan’s case proved that the principle of impartiality, intrinsic to any judicial institution, is at stake in France today due to attempts to politicise the justice system or allowing political considerations to override the need to uphold justice.
This might result in a loss of confidence in how the French justice system operates, in the short, medium and long term, especially among French citizens of Muslim faith. Muslims will no doubt wonder, if justice can be withheld for someone so high profile as Tariq Ramadan, what chance do they have? Is France aware that the case against Ramadan may result in a serious social crisis as a segment of French society, already facing discrimination, may feel that even the justice team may one day work against them. Many could not help but compare Ramadan’s case with that of the two ministers Darmanin and Hulot, both accused of sexual assault and yet remained in office.
Going forward the serious lack of due process in Ramadan’s case opens the door to a dangerous era in French history. In a so-called free democracy, which France prides itself on, the justice system has began to appear flawed and politicised. The court of well funded media campaigns trumps the court of law. A dangerous precedent with far reaching consequences.
Will France be able to put an end to this farce that has become Ramadan’s case?
The answer to this question depends almost exclusively on the political mindset that runs France today, and that does not seem to be aware of the disastrous long-term social consequences that this affair might leave behind.
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WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON IN MODI'S HINDUTVA NAZI INDIA? AND WHERE HAVE THE INTERNATIONAL HUMAN RIGHTS BRIGADE DISAPPEARED? THESE HYPOCRITICAL ORGANISATIONS SEEM TO CARE MORE ABOUT ANIMALS THAN MUSLIMS. WHEN IT COMES TO MUSLIMS BEING VICTIMS OF TERRORISM THE WORLD IS SILENT. IT IS TIME THE MUSLIM WORLD AT LARGE PAYS URGENT ATTENTION ON HOW DO WE STOP STATE SPONSPORED HINDUTVA TERRORISM RUNNING RAMPAGE AGAINST INDIAN MUSLIMS. THE DELHI POGRAM WAS SPARKED BY RELIGIOUS HATRED AND INCITEMENT BY BJP LEADER KAPIL MISHRA IN DELHI. THE CLEAR OBJECTIVE WAS TO END THE PROTESTS AND SIT-IN TAKING PLACE IN DELHI BY MUSLIMS AGAINST THE RELIGIOUSLY DISCRIMINATORY CITIZENSHIP AMENDMENT ACT.
THEREAFTER MUSLIM AREAS IN THE INDIAN CAPITAL WERE SET ON FIRE BY RSS THUGS WHO WERE SET LOOSE WITH THE INDIAN ARMY AND DELHI POLICE LOOKING ON. THE DELHI POLICE ARE UNDER CONTROL BY THE CENTRAL GOVERNMENT SO IT HAS BLOOD ON IT'S HANDS. AS MUSLIM AREAS WERE SET ABLAZE AND HOMES, BUSINESSES AND MOSQUES WERE SET ON FIRE LEAVING DOZENS MASSACRED AND HUNDREDS INJURED AND IN HOSPITALS.
IT IS DESPICABLE THAT THIS HAPPENED EXACTLY WHILST TRUMP WAS IN TOWN AND SHOWING HIS TRUE ISLAMOPHOBIC COLOURS BY BACKING MODI'S EFFORTS IN UPHOLDING RELIGIOUS FREEDOM IN INDIA. THIS IS LIKE MUSSOLINI SAYING WHAT A WONDERFUL CHAP HITLER IS WHEN JEWS WERE BEING TARGETTED IN NAZI GERMANY IN THE 1930s.
LET US BE CLEAR THAT THERE ARE OVER 200 MILLION MUSLIMS IN INDIA AND THEY ARE AT A CROSSROADS. THEY NEED TO REALISE THEY ARE ON THE FRONTLINE AND NEED TO RADICALLY RE-ORGANISE THEMSELVES AND THEIR LEADERSHIP IF THEY ARE GOING TO DEAL WITH HINDUTVA INDIA. THEIR SITUATION IS LIKE THAT OF 1947 WHEN INDIAN MUSLIMS IN BRITISH INDIA DECIDED TO CREATE A HOMELAND FOR THEMSELVES AND CREATED PAKISTAN.
THE HINDUTVA CONTROLLED INDIAN STATE IS ENGAGED IN AN ANTI-ISLAMIC AGENDA AND IS INSTITUTIONALISING ISLAMOPHOBIA IN ITS LAWS AND IT IS NO LONGER GUARANTEEING EQUALITY BEFORE THE LAW NOR PROTECTING LIFE AND PROPERTY. THE INDIAN STATE IS DIGGING IT'S OWN GRAVE. INDIAN MUSLIMS IF THEY WANT TO SAFEGUARD THEIR FUTURE NEED TO PREPARE AND GEAR THEMSELVES TO SECEDE FROM A HINDUTVA INDIA BY FORMING NEW STATES. WHEN THERE IS OPPRESSION IN THE LAND THERE IS ONLY ONE ANSWER WHICH IS HIJRAH AND JIHAD. MORE ON THIS WILL FOLLOW SOON.
CAN RELIGIOUS VIOLENCE IN INDIA BE CONTAINED?
Inside Story
WHAT IS MY DIGNITY WHEN I SEE SAFFRON FLAGS BEING ERECTED ON MY MASJIDS?
Asaduddin Owaisi
ASADUDDIN OWAISI ON DELHI RIOTS: THIS WAS A PREPLANNED POGROM
OWAISI: DELHI RIOTS WERE PRE-PLANNED GENOCIDE
WHY IS PM MODI SILENT?
MAYBE IT IS TIME FOR A REPEAT OF 14TH AUGUST 47 ?
ON THE INDIAN CRISIS
Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi
HOW INDIAN MUSLIMS SHOULD RESPOND TO THEIR PRESENT GRAVE DANGER
WHAT'S HAPPENING TO MUSLIMS IN INDIA 2020
GENOCIDE IN INDIA AND CRISIS IN SAUDI ARABIA
[/url]
FIGHT INJUSTICE WITH WISDOM AND UNITY
Maulana Waliullah Sayeedi Falahi
AMIT SHAH ON DELHI VIOLENCE : A REALITY CHECK
INDIA’s RACIST LAWS 0-02-01
https://crescent.icit-digital.org/articl...acist-laws
The Indian economy is tanking under Narendra Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) rule. The promise of creating 12 million new jobs annually for people entering the market is fast receding. The Modi regime has thus resorted to a dangerous policy of religious and ethnic discrimination to divert attention from its failed policies. But it is not merely a diversionary tactic. It targets India’s 200 million Muslim citizens. Modi has a pathological hatred of Muslims, having honed his anti-Muslim skills while he was chief minister of Gujrat state before he became prime minister in 2014.
Two instruments are being used: The Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and the National Register of Citizens (NRC). India’s Home Minister Amit Shah introduced the bills in parliament at the end of December 2019. He said the BJP government will pass the Citizenship Amendment Act. The bill seeks to grant citizenship to Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, Christians, Zoroastrians, and Buddhists — who have come illegally to India from Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan — but excludes Muslims. This is a drastic change in the Citizenship Act of 1955 that does not define citizenship on the basis of religion.
The NRC, originally confined to Assam in the northeast, is now being applied to the whole of India. In Assam, the state that borders Bangladesh, there was widespread belief that illegal immigrants had come from Bangladesh. They should be identified and deported. The NRC idea emerged in the wake of the Assam Accord of 1985 that ended a separatist insurgency that had raged during the 1970s and 1980s. On August 31, 2019, Assam’s NRC was published declaring 1.9 million people stateless, a far cry from the tens of millions alleged illegals bandied about earlier. These people have no documents to prove their Indian citizenship. Internment camps have been set up; others are being built.
In a country of 1.2 billion people, most of them rural dwellers, the notion of birth certificate or identity card is alien. Coupled with the ubiquitous caste system that divides people along caste lines — a form of religious apartheid — the vast majority of people are already disenfranchised. Launching a campaign against Muslims is another nail in the coffin of India’s self-proclaimed secularism and the constitution.
There is, however, pushback, especially from students who have braved attacks from RSS thugs as well as the police. The students have transcended religious and caste boundaries and have stood shoulder to shoulder to defend fundamental rights. Their activism has attracted other civil society groups including members of the Bollywood fraternity that had previously cozied up to Modi.
Student activism to defend their fundamental rights has exacted a price. At least 20 students have been killed and hundreds injured in attacks by BJP-affiliated masked thugs armed with sticks, iron rods, and acid bottles. Protests started at Aligarh Muslim University (AMU) on December 13 and then spread to Jamia Millia Islamia (JMI). The police barged into the university campus on December 15 and attacked students as well as vandalized the library. When news of the attack on JMI spread, students at Delhi’s Jawaharlal Nehru University (JNU) and Ambedkar University also joined the protests. These have now assumed a life of their own. They are ongoing and despite attacks by the police injuring and arresting hundreds of students, they are held on a daily basis.
JMI has become the hub of student activism. Interestingly, this is spearheaded by female Muslim students. While the Modi regime has vowed to press on with implementing the divisive CAA and NRC bills, a number of states in India have said they would not participate in the registration process. This is a hopeful sign and may yet dissuade the fascists from pressing ahead full force with their nefarious agenda. Unfortunately, given corruption in the judiciary (as witnessed in the Babri Masjid verdict), the police, and the bureaucracy, it would be unrealistic to repose too much hope in the movement for sanity. What is more likely is that internal and external pressure may force a delay in the implementation of these divisive laws.
If the movement can be sustained until the next election due in 2024, the BJP can be consigned to the dustbin of history. It is a long struggle and will not be easy but with continuing strikes, the economy will suffer greater blows turning more people against the Modi regime and his fascist storm troopers.
ANTI-MUSLIM VIOLENCE IN INDIA REACHES ALARMING PROPORTIONS
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/anti-mu...ions-34129
The ongoing brutality in New Delhi dubbed 'communal violence' is the live unfolding of a pogrom against Muslims.
The international media fixated on the pomp and ceremony, or rather glitz and glam of what was a two-day extravaganza of right-wing populist and ultranationalist odes and slogans. US President Donald Trump and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi went about their business pretending as though the country’s second-largest city wasn’t literally and actually on fire.
On Monday, pro-government Hindutva thugs responded to the city’s ongoing and growing protests against recently legislated anti-Muslim citizenship laws, otherwise known as the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) and National Register of Citizens (NRC), by attacking protesters and setting Muslim owned homes, cars and businesses alight.
Eerily, the same Hindu nationalist goons had marked Hindu-owned properties with saffron-coloured flags to help attackers identify Muslim targets, borrowing a sinister measure used on the eve of the 2002 Gujarat riots, which left more than 2,000 Muslims killed and thousands more battered, raped, and abused. Starting in the Muslim-majority areas of northeast Delhi, the violence spilt into Monday evening, culminating with the deaths of at least two anti-CAA protesters, and the injuries of dozens more.
Footage shows Delhi Police officers firing tear gas shells into a crowd, followed by baton large charges. By Wednesday morning, the death toll had risen to at least 20. Among the dead are a 22-year-old rickshaw driver, a labourer, and a father of six. A video that went viral on social media shows a dozen or so Muslim males being kicked and beaten before being forced by police to recite Vande Mataram — India's national song and a nationalist ode of sorts — as they lay defenceless on the ground. Another shows an isolated Muslim man being mercilessly punched and kicked by a mob of dozens of pro-government street thugs, as cars and shops around him are vandalised, while another shows a Muslim shrine being torched with a petrol bomb.
“Hindus have woken up after long [passivity],” one man, who identified as a pro-CAA protester, told a local journalist as he carried out an arson attack. On Tuesday afternoon, a mob chanting Jai Shri Ram (victory to Lord Rama) and Hinduon ka Hindustan (India for Hindus) surrounded a mosque in Ashok Nagar, before setting it alight, while a man placed a Hanuman flag atop its minaret. That footage also shows Delhi Police officers participating in the violence, joining pro-CAA protesters in throwing rocks at Muslims, underscores the dangerous new reality the country’s largest religious minority now face. “The police is with us,” a Hindu man says in a video posted on Twitter, as his colleagues throw rocks toward mostly Muslim anti-CAA protesters.
Chillingly, these moments of violent mayhem and madness, which evidently enjoy the tacit and implicit approval of the Modi government, are perpetrated to an ode to a Hindu deity, but one now heard as a death chant to victims of this violence. Today, Jai Sri Ram is typically the last three words a Muslim hears the moment before he or she is attacked or murdered.
All across India, Modi radicalised saffron terrorists are assaulting, raping, and lynching Muslims with impunity, as government leaders openly refer to the religious minority as "termites" and "pests,” while they declare an urge for another 1947-scale Muslim exodus. Earlier this month, hundreds of right-wing nationalists converged on New Delhi’s Jamia Millia Islamia University (JMI), chanting anti-Muslim slogans and shouting, “shoot the bastards” as police stood by as idle onlookers. Recently, the international watchdog group Genocide Watch recently issued genocide alerts for Muslims in both Kashmir and Assam. “Preparation for genocide is definitely underway in India…The next stage is extermination – that’s what we call a genocide,” said Professor Gregory Stanton, the author of the 10 Stages of Genocide in a speech to US lawmakers in December.
Certainly, both territories are ground zero in the government’s effort to marginalise and make invisible the country’s persecuted religious minority, with eight million Muslims in Kashmir living under a military lockdown and communications blackout that has now surpassed 200 days. Three million Muslims in Assam face the prospect of deportation or detainment as a result of measures implemented as a result of the NRC. “My mother gave birth to me at home. My birth was never registered, so how do I produce a certificate?” a Muslim resident of Assam told Foreign Policy. “Nor do I have land ownership or tenancy records dating back five decades. Although we’re law-abiding citizens, having lived peacefully in India all our lives, we might be thrown out of the country.”
The events of the past 48 hours have demonstrated that the safety and well-being of India’s 200 million Muslims have never been in greater peril since the Gujarat pogroms and the violence of partition. Should they become the target of overt state-sanctioned violence, recognising they always been the target of covert violence in the country, then the international community would be presented with a catastrophe of unprecedented proportions, resulting in the world’s largest pogrom and humanitarian crisis. At the helm is Narendra Modi, a man accused of direct involvement in the country’s most recent anti-Muslim pogrom during his capacity as Gujarat’s chief minister. If these realities aren’t enough to give rise to global alarm, then what is?
INDIA BURNING
https://www.dawn.com/news/1537334/india-burning
This week witnessed Hindutva mobs killing and torturing Muslims, burning homes, mosques and ransacking entire Muslim neighbourhoods while the Delhi police stood by or aided and abetted them. With blood in their eyes — and on their hands — Hindutva marauders owned the streets of the Indian capital as the body count piled up by the hour. Loathing lurked in open sight.
Some people say Prime Minister Narendra Modi has weaponised India’s majority by stoking the latent fires of communalism for political gains; others say he has merely given voice to brute majoritarianism that has always been an organic part of India; while still others argue that the pogrom in Delhi represents a freak streak of Hindu anger boiling over into violence. The reality may be a combination of all three, but one thing most India-watchers agree on:
India is sick. Very sick. For sickness to be cured, it first needs to be acknowledged. Communalism manifesting itself in Muslim (and other minorities) bloodletting is almost an Indian tradition. Except for a few years since Partition, communal riots have broken out on a regular basis across diverse geographical parts of India. Invariably, Muslims have been the victims. All through these decades, India has pretended that its officially sanctioned secularism has spawned an ‘Indian-ness’ that has enveloped in itself Hindu and Muslim identities. This delusion has ingrained in most Indians an air of misplaced arrogance dripping with condescension for Pakistan and its post-independence struggles.
In the early 1990s Manmohan Singh, as India’s finance minister, unfurled sweeping economic liberalisation reforms that unshackled India from the constraints of a regimented public-sector driven system. As the years rolled by, India’s economic strength kept on growing under successive governments. This economic muscle spawned confidence, which spawned insolence, which spawned hubris. The slogan of ‘India Shining’ showcased this newfound imperiousness as more and more Indians began to digest the narrative that they were the next big global thing.
And yet something bubbled under this thin glitzy surface of India’s newfound self-image. The toxic currents of communal hate, other-isation and socio-religious divisiveness raged with an intensity that could, perhaps, be felt more than seen. These currents gurgled across into the new millennium unbeknownst to a world besotted by the exotic charms of a billion-strong nation flinging open its markets for all those with strong capitalist urges. India, it seemed, could do no wrong. Pakistan could do no right.
Today, the picture that Modi’s India paints is a frightening one. It is a society where Hindutva maniacs will lynch Muslims, tear them from limb to limb and the government will do nothing; where Hindutva maniacs will threaten genocide and ‘ethnic cleansing’ against Muslims and the government will do nothing; where Hindutva maniacs will savage Muslims on the streets, torch entire neighbourhoods and the government will do nothing. India will get worse. Modi’s majoritarian project is rolling across the country with a ferociousness that gains intensity with every anti-Muslim pogrom. Through a combination of state power and street power, Hindutva is on the march and Muslims face an uncertain and bloody fate.
An unstable, unhinged and unbalanced India is a danger for the region and for the world. Like most uber-nationalist and fanatical regimes, Modi’s India excretes aggression and militarism. Bloodlust fuels its fervour. The sickness grows stronger by the day. A diagnosis requires some answers.
What do you call a country that officially sanctions the persecution and killing of its minorities? What do you call a country that dehumanises an entire Muslim population? What do you call a country that converts an area into an open prison and sanctions torture on men, women and children? What do you call a country that converts its media into a groveling lapdog and a tool of state propaganda against minorities? What do you call a country that aims to disenfranchise an entire minority and threatens to lock them in camps? What do you call a country that forces the judges to do its bidding and punishes them for refusal? What do you call a country in which the judges agree to fall in line with the executive? What do you call a country whose normal rhetoric is laced with threats of war?
Today you call it India. It is a remarkable reversal. As India slips into the abyss of fascistic mayhem, Pakistan must rise as a country determined to become more progressive, tolerant and democratic. As India satisfies its bloodlust against minorities through greater repression and persecution, Pakistan must hug its minorities tighter and provide them with all the rights, protections and privileges that a state can offer. As India gnarls and snarls and waves its weaponised fist, Pakistan must be willing to unclench its fist into a handshake. And as India’s democratic structure begins to crack under the weight of its Hindutva ideology — with a controlled media, pliant judiciary and collapsing rule of law — Pakistan must strengthen the credibility of its media, reinforce the independence of its judiciary and make a concerted effort to enhance and improve its rule of law. That time is upon us. While India is busy chopping off its own limbs, we may want to grow our own wings.
INDIA's MUSLIMS ARE PUNISHED FOR ASKING TO BE INDIAN
The Delhi violence opens a new dark chapter in India's modern history.
[url=https://www.aljazeera.com/profile/vidya-subrahmaniam.html]Vidya Subrahmaniam
https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinio...42176.html
On February 24, Hindu nationalist mobs descended on the northeastern parts of India's capital, New Delhi, and wreaked havoc for four days, targeting Muslim businesses and homes. More than 50 people were killed and hundreds were injured in the violence.
In the aftermath of the attacks, I visited one of the worst-affected neighbourhoods, Shiv Vihar, and witnessed the destruction. While Hindu shops and residences looked largely intact, most Muslim houses and businesses were gutted down to their bare bones. The burnt remains of the possessions of Muslim families - fridges, TV sets and cars - were scattered across the neighbourhood's narrow lanes.
While one local mosque was charred to the ground, another named Auliya looked largely unaffected from the outside. But inside, I found that it, too, was a charred, mangled mess. Hindu residents seemed to be carrying on with their lives as normal, but Muslims were nowhere to be seen - they had all left, seeking safety in relief camps set up by the government. The unrest that left Shiv Vihar in ruins was triggered after the weeks-long sit-ins in Delhi against the new Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA), which opponents say discriminates against Muslims, who were attacked by Hindu nationalists.
Anti-CAA protests in Delhi had been peaceful from the beginning. People got together to sing patriotic songs, wave Indian flags, recite from the Indian constitution and listen to speeches on freedom, solidarity and secularism. The protesters - many of them women - demonstrated nothing but loyalty to their country, but this did not stop the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) from portraying them as "traitors" and making them prime targets for vigilante attacks.
In the run-up to the February 7 Delhi assembly elections, for example, the BJP ran a vicious campaign targeting the city's Muslims. Anurag Thakur, the junior finance minister, incited the crowd at an election rally to shout "shoot the traitors". Another minister, Parvesh Verma, swore the protesters would be "sent packing" within hours of a BJP victory, adding that if left unchecked, they would "rape and kill". Prime Minister Narendra Modi and Minister of Home Affairs Amit Shah, meanwhile implied
the protesters were anti-India and pro-Pakistan. Modi termed the ongoing protests a "conspiracy"
designed to undermine "India's harmony". Shah claimed protesters had raised slogans like "Jinnah wali azaadi (We want Jinnah-style independence)", suggesting they demand the disintegration of India.
When the inevitable happened and the protesters were attacked, the violence quickly spread across Delhi. The authorities did little to ease the tensions, while the police faced accusations of looking the other way. Many observers compared the attacks in Delhi to previous episodes of communal violence. Indeed, India's post-independence history is bristling with such incidents.This most recent episode was neither the biggest nor the most violent in India's recent history.
Yet, for careful India watchers, what happened last month was in a different category. To understand what makes these attacks unique and therefore more frightening, let us recall two other episodes of intercommunal violence in India's recent history: the 1984 massacres of Sikhs in Delhi and the 2002 pogroms targeting Muslims in the state of Gujarat.
The roots of the anti-Sikh violence of 1984 can be traced back to a separatist armed uprising that formed in the state of Punjab in the mid-1970s. As the movement grew in power, fighters started staging violent attacks in Delhi and other northern cities. In 1983, the leader of the movement, Jarnail Singh Bhindranwale, and some of his most prominent followers took refuge in the Golden Temple, the holiest of Sikh shrines located in Amritsar in Punjab, to escape arrest. In June 1984, then-Prime Minister Indira Gandhi ordered the Indian military to flush out the Sikh fighters from the temple. More than 500 people were killed during the operation, including many Sikh civilians. Then on October 31, 1984, two Sikh guards assassinated Gandhi at her residence in New Delhi in retaliation. Her assassination set off a fury: at the end of three days of non-stop butchery, 2,800 Sikhs were dead.
The 2002 Gujarat pogroms followed a similar scenario. On February 27, 2002, a blaze in a train carrying Hindu pilgrims killed 59 people in Godhra, Gujarat. The passengers were Hindu pilgrims, returning from Ayodhya after a religious ceremony at the site of the Babri Mosque. The mosque was demolished 10 years earlier by Hindu mobs claiming it was built on the ruins of a temple dedicated to Ram, a major deity of Hinduism. One official enquiry concluded that the fire in the train was accidental, caused by someone cooking or smoking inside a coach, but this report was later dismissed by the Supreme Court as "invalid". The Indian authorities eventually concluded that the train was set ablaze by Muslims. The incident caused an explosion of rage in the Hindu community and led to the killing of more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims.
The 1984 massacres of Sikhs and the 2002 pogroms against Muslims in Gujarat had a lot in common. In both cases, the police were accused of abandoning their supervisory duties, by either remaining passive or, in some cases, aiding and abetting the killings. Both instances were also marked by acts of extreme violence previously unseen in communal clashes in India. In 1984, Sikh men and boys were fitted with burning tyres around their necks so that their deaths would be slow and painful. Sikh women, on the other hand, were repeatedly raped and forced to watch their husbands and sons die. In 2002 in Gujarat, many men and boys were dismembered and burned. Ehsan Jafri, a former member of Parliament, for example, was hacked to pieces and burned despite repeatedly seeking help from people he knew in the state government. Another important similarity between these two horrific episodes of violence was accusations of government complicity.
In 1984, local Congress leaders in Delhi were accused of aiding and abetting rioters, while the central government faced accusations of turning a blind eye to the violence. In 2014, a fact-finding team jointly organised by two prominent civil society organisations, the People's Union for Democratic Rights and the People's Union for Civil Liberties, found that the attacks on members of the Sikh Community in Delhi and its suburbs "were the outcome of a well-organised plan marked by acts of both deliberate commission and omission by important politicians of the Congress". Four years later, Sajjan Kumar, who was a prominent MP at the time of the riots, was sentenced to life in prison for "inciting crowds to kill Sikhs".
In Gujarat, similar accusations were directed at the state's BJP government. Modi, the then Chief Minister of Gujarat, was accused of failing to halt the violence and indirectly encouraging some of the Hindu rioters. During its deliberations on the Gujarat riots, India's Supreme Court even likened Modi's government to that of Nero, the Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. In 2012, Modi was cleared of complicity in the violence by a Special Investigation Team appointed by the Supreme Court, but rights groups continue to accuse him of tacitly supporting the rioters.
Last month's anti-Muslim attacks in Delhi had all of these characteristics. There is, however, one aspect that sets the events of last month apart from the historic cases of communal violence. Both the Sikh massacres and the Gujarat pogroms started in response to alleged atrocities committed by the members of the targeted communities. Last month's anti-Muslim violence in Delhi, however, was not "revenge" for anything. It was not preceded by a major infraction against the Hindu majority. The Muslim community did nothing that could even remotely warrant retaliation. The only thing they had done in the weeks prior to the attacks was to peacefully protest against the country's new, discriminatory citizenship law. Thus, unlike in 1984 and 2002, there was no ostensible cause for the violence. This time, Muslims were punished, only for being Muslim and asking to be Indian.
And because of this, last month's attacks mark the beginning of a new, frightening chapter in Indian history. The Hindu mobs, empowered by the Hindu-nationalist central government, no longer appear to need a reason to attack minorities. This signals that for minority communities in India, the future is now darker and more frightening than it has ever been before.
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THE ISLAMOPHOBIC INDIAN MEDIA HAS DECLARED THE RIOT ACT ON THE ISLAMIC TABLEEGHI JAMAAT GATHERING IN DELHI FOR BEING A SUPER SPREADER OF COVID 19 BUT TURNS A BLIND EYE ON LARGE HINDU AND SIKH GATHERINGS. IF THEY WANTED TO INVESTIGATE CORONA VIRUS LOCKDOWN VIOLATIONS THEY SHOULD REVIEW ALL SUCH GATHERINGS INCLUSIVE OF INDIAN HINDUS, SIKHS AND CHRISTIANS. ANY NATION DEALING WITH A PANDEMIC NEEDS NATIONAL UNITY AND DISCIPLINE OF WHICH THERE IS NO DOUBT OTHERWISE IT WILL FAIL IN CONTROLLING IT AND MILLIONS MAY DIE.
AIMIM AN INDIAN MUSLIM BODY CLAIMS THAT THE RELIGIOUS EVENT IS BEING EXPLOITED AND IS ANOTHER MUSLIM BASHING INCIDENT. IT CLARIFIED THAT WHEN THE DAY THE EVENT BEGAN IN DELHI THE UNION HEALTH MINISTRY HAD DECLARED IT AS NOT BEING A HEALTH EMERGENCY. IT IS CLEAR THAT THERE HAS BEEN CONFUSION AND LACK OF CLARITY ON ADVICE AND POLICY AS IN MANY OTHER COUNTRIES.
BUT IT IS CLEAR NOW THAT HINDUTVA INDIA HAS 2 EMERGENCIES ON ITS HANDS JUST NOW. THE BIGGER VIRUS THAT HINDUTVA INDIA NEEDS TO RECOGNISE AND DEAL WITH IS ISLAMOPHOBIA WHICH MAY ENGULF IT AT IT'S PERIL. THE FALSE ALLEGATION AND INDIAN HINDUTVA MSM TONE SUGGESTING MUSLIMS INVENTED THE VIRUS AND HAVE DELIBERATELY SPREAD IT AS A FORM OF JIHAD IS OUTRAGEOUS AND POISONOUS FOR INDIA. THOSE PEDDLING THIS MALICIOUS PROPAGANDA NEED TO RETRACT THESE ALLEGATIONS.
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I WANT TO MAKE IT CLEAR THAT THIS IS JUST A CASE STUDY IN ISLAMOPHOBIA AND IS NOT ABOUT DEFENDING THE ORGANISATION WITH WHOM WE HAVE NO CONTACT. IF THERE IS ANY VIOLATION IT NEEDS TO BE INVESTIGATED BUT IT SHOULD BE ACROSS FAITH COMMUNITIES AND NOT TARGET ONE FAITH COMMUNITY. IT IS ANOTHER EXAMPLE OF THE DEMONISATION OF INDIAN MUSLIMS AND ISLAM WHICH NEEDS TO BE REVERSED.
GIVEN THE CURRENT HIGHLY CHARGED ATMOSPHERE IN INDIA OVER DISCRIMINATORY CITIZENSHIP LAWS AND REGISTRATION AND RECENT POGROM. THERE IS A DANGER OF FURTHER POLARISATION AND FUELLING OF ISLAMOPHOBIA. IT IS WITH STRONG RESERVATIONS WE ARE POSTING A LINK TO AN INDIAN TV SHOW ANCHORED BY A MODI STOOGE AND HINDUTVA EXTREMIST. THE METHOD OF HIS DEBATE IS A SICK JOKE AND MORE LIKE A HINDUTVA EXTREMIST INQUISITION. IF HE CROSSES MY PATH THE FIRST THING I WOULD EDUCATE HIM IN WOULD BE NOT TO ABUSE THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE BY CALLING HIS SHOW A DEBATE AS IT IS AN INQUISITION. ALSO HE SHOULD NOT CALL HIMSELF A HOST AS HE REVEALS AND REVELS IN HIS ROLE AS AN INTOLERANT HINDU FANATIC FUELLING HATRED OF INDIAN MUSLIMS AND FUELLING ISLAMOPHOBIA.
FINALLY I WOULD WARN HIM THAT THE TONGUE IS A MEDIUM FOR SPEECH AND NOT HATE SPEECH AND HE WOULD BE HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR PROMOTING HATRED OF MUSLIMS AND ISLAM. IF HE REPENTS FOR HIS HATRED MONGERING AND ASKS FOR PARDON ALL WELL AND GOOD AND IF NOT HE SHOULD BE SUBJECT TO A CITIZENS ARREST FOR HATE SPEECH AND UNDERMINING NATIONAL UNITY AND COHESION.
BRASH AND BIGOTED : HOW ARNAB GOSWAMI CHANGED INDIA's TV DEBATE
The Listening Post
MARKAZ LOCKDOWN VIOLATION : HOW CAN ONE GROUP PUT ALL AT RISK?
The Debate With Arnab Goswami
NIZAMUDDIN CORONAVIRUS SCARE:
DID TABLIGHI JAMAAT HAVE A GOVERNMENT PERMIT?
Newstrack With Rahul Kanwal
INDIA HAS PUT THE WEIGHT ON TABLEEGHI JAMAT FOR EVERYTHING
INDIA's FAR RIGHT LINKS COVID 19 OUTBREAK TO A MUSLIM CONGREGATION
https://www.trtworld.com/magazine/india-...tion-35024
An Islamic missionary group in India's capital New Delhi is facing a torrent of right-wing abuse after accusations that its recent congregation became the main carrier of the coronavirus. Many far-right groups were trending #CoronaJihad on Tuesday and pro-government news channels demanded action against Nizamuddin Markaz, a key institution for Muslim missionaries in South Asia, where a religious congregation was held in mid March.
"After #Nizamuddin, those Tiktok videos and Islamists' speeches worldwide, Indian agencies should seriously probe if #CoronaJihad is a ground reality," Indian journalist Abhijit Majumder tweeted. Majumder has earned the reputation of being one of those journalists who propagates the views of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) through his journalistic work and Twitter posts. While slamming the Nizamuddin Muslim gathering, he hinted at a 'larger conspiracy' against India.
Bollywood actor and right-wing commentator Anupam Kher chipped in like he always does when it comes to bashing Indian Muslims, and sought action against Nizamuddin Markaz, telling a pro-state news channel that "what has happened today in Nizamuddin is criminal" and demanding stern action against the organisation.
Uzair Hasan Rizvi
@RizviUzair
Seizing an opportunity after a lapse from an Islamic center during the #CoronavirusLockdown
in India.
The media comes to hound with the Islam bashing stance, one of the taglines of the show read:
'Save the country from Corona Jihad'
Missionary group headquarter sealed
India sealed off the headquarters of a Muslim missionary group and ordered an investigation into accusations. India has registered 1,251 cases of the coronavirus, 32 of whom have died. The numbers are small compared with the United States, Italy and China but health officials say India, the world's second most populous country, faces a huge surge that could overwhelm its weak public health system.
One of the coronavirus hot spots that the government of the capital, New Delhi, has flagged is a Muslim quarter where the 100-year-old missionary group, called Tablighi Jamaat in Urdu, after dozens of people tested positive for the virus and at least seven died. Authorities said people kept visiting the Tablighi centre, in a five-storey building in a neighbourhood of narrow, winding lanes, from other parts of the country and abroad to attend religious sermons, despite government orders on social distancing.
Hundreds of people were crammed into the group's building until the weekend when authorities began taking them out for testing. More buses arrived on Tuesday to take them away to quarantine centres in another part of the city.
"It looks like social distancing and quarantine protocols were not practised here," the city administration said in a statement. Authorities are trying to trace the movements of the Tablighi members after the meetings in Delhi and the people who were exposed to them. Media reports said there were also Tablighi members from Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Nepal, Myanmar, Kyrgyzstan and Saudi Arabia. The director general of Malaysia's health ministry told a news conference in Kuala Lumpur that they were investigating the presence of Malaysians at the Delhi meeting.
"Obviously there is a high risk if they attended the [Delhi] gathering," Noor Hisham Abdullah said.
Tablighi centre denies charges
India, with a population of more than 1.3 billion and a poor health infrastructure, is under a 21-day lockdown that will end in mid-April, to try to stem the spread of the coronavirus, but tens of thousands of out-of-work migrants are fleeing to the countryside, undermining the restrictions. The group's main annual meeting in New Delhi's Nizamuddin area took place on March 8, 9, and 10, while the lockdown was announced on March 24. Musharraf Ali, one of the administrators of the Tablighi centre in Delhi, said the group had been seeking help from police and the city administration to deal with people streaming in. But the lockdown had made things more difficult.
"Under such compelling circumstances there was no option ... but to accommodate the stranded visitors with prescribed medical precautions until such time that the situation becomes conducive for their movement or arrangements are made by the authorities," the Tablighi said in a statement. The Tablighi said the programme in Nizamuddin Markaz was discontinued immediately after Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's 'civil curfew' call for March 22.
"However due to sudden cancellation of rail services across the country, a large group of visitors who had to depart by way of railways got stuck in the Markaz premises," the statement said. It said the guests were not allowed to violate medical guidelines by thronging bus terminals or roaming on streets, and offered the entire premises to be used as a quarantine facility "to help the authorities tide-over the challenge of current pandemic." Modi's curfew and lockdown announcement sparked a wave of migrations of daily wage labourers who are abandoning cities for countryside homes. On Monday, the Indian federal government asked states to disallow such migrations and quarantine migrant workers in shelters and relief camps.
Jamia Coordination Committee @Jamia_JCC
Their only fault is not abandoning their people unlike the govt which abandoned the migrant labourers and left them to die. We will not let the failures of this bigoted govt be washed over with Islamophobic fantasies and communal tantrums. We stand with the Nizamuddin Markaz.
BJP deflecting failures?
The Jamia Coordination Committee, a group comprising students and alumni of the popular university, backed the Tablighi centre saying: "Their only fault is not abandoning their people unlike the government which abandoned the migrant labourers and left them to die."
"We will not let the failures of this bigoted government be washed over with Islamophobic fantasies and communal tantrums. We stand with the Nizamuddin Markaz," it said.
Syed Sadatullah Hussaini, president of Jamaat-e-Islami Hind, a religious and social organisation of Muslims with a strong network of members and scholars across India, slammed the "targeting" of Tablighi Jamaat, saying "bigger and more irresponsible gatherings" were being ignored.
"Playing dirty politics of communal polarisation on such a huge health crisis… reflects shamefully low level of our public discourse," he said.
India ranks 184th out of 191 in terms of percentage of GDP spent on healthcare, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). It spends slightly over one percent of its total GDP on health care. There's one state-run hospital for every 55,591 people on average and one hospital bed for every 1,844 people. India needs about 10 times more doctors to meet the norms prescribed by the WHO, a shortfall of at least 500,000 doctors. Many commentators say the Hindu right-wing's tirade against the Muslim seminary was aimed to deflect nationalist government of Bharatya Janata Party's failure to address the disease.
"Trending of #CoronaJihad by BJP/Sanghi IT cell is not just a disgusting communal act but also planned strategically to divert public and media attention from humungous disasters by the BJP & Modi government in handling of #coronavirusindia," writer and filmmaker Amit Mehra tweeted.
"Expect more such diversions on a daily basis."
Marginalising Muslims?
Islamic groups, the opposition and others at home and abroad fear India's BJP government under PM Narendra Modi aims to marginalise India's 200 million minority Muslims and remould the country as a Hindu nation, something BJP denies.
In recent days, these worries have morphed into angry protests sparked by the passage of a new law giving non-Muslim migrants from Afghanistan, Pakistan and Bangladesh an easier path to citizenship. Muslims fear the law will complicate their citizenship status, disempower them as second class citizens in their own country. In August last year, New Delhi revoked the semi-autonomy of India-administered Kashmir and annexed the disputed region, where Muslims fear demographic changes by Hindu settlers. In November, Indian Supreme Court allowed a Hindu temple to be built in the flashpoint town of Ayodhya where Hindu zealots demolished a 16th-century Babri mosque in 1992.
Source: TRTWorld and agencies
ASADUDDIN OWAISI's AIMIM LASHES OUT OVER 'COMMUNALISING' NIZAMUDDIN MEETING AMID COVID SPREAD
https://www.republicworld.com/india-news/politics/covid-19-asaduddin-owaisi-lashes-out-for-communalizing-nizamuddin-i.htmlPolitics
Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Musilmeen (AIMIM) on Thursday lashed out alleging "communalising" of the Nizamuddin incident, amid a Covid spike
Asaduddin Owaisi's All India Majlis-e-Ittehadul Musilmeen (AIMIM) on Thursday lashed out alleging "communalising" of the Nizamuddin incident. According to him, the Tabligh Jammat incident where several people had gathered for the religious event is being exploited to "blame all the Muslims." He further clarified that when the day the event began, the Union Health Ministry had declared it as "not a health emergency." There is no reference, however, to the irrefutable fact that the meeting, which was held after prohibitory orders had been issued, has led to a sharp spike and spread of Covid cases in the country.
A case was registered by the Delhi Police against Maulana Saad and other officials of Tablighi Jamaat for violating the restriction pertaining to a religious gathering. Sections under the Epidemic Disease Act,1897 and Section 269, 270, 271 and 120-B of the Indian Penal Code have been invoked. In the FIR, it has been stated that the congregation failed to take safety measures for the prevention and treatment of COVID-19. Furthermore, In an alleged audiotape of the Markaz accessed by Republic, a preacher is telling people that the Coronavirus is a conspiracy to disrupt their way of life, going on to make statements against science and general guidelines of public health at a time like this.
YESTERDAY JEWS WERE DEMONISED FOR SPREADING DISEASE.
TODAY IT'S MUSLIMS
In countries like India and Israel Muslims are being scapegoated for the spread of Covid-19. When the Black Plague ravaged Europe in the middle of the 14th Century, killing roughly 50 percent of those infected and one-third of the continent's population at the time, rumours spread that Jewish people were poisoning wells to spread the disease. It ultimately led to
the massacre of thousands of Jews in several waves of anti-Semitic pogroms, leaving entire predominately Jewish villages wiped out.
Six hundred years later, Adolf Hitler's Nazi Party characterised typhus as the Jewish plague, which became the rationale for the delousing baths, a "camouflage for the gas chambers." "When there are big epidemics, people get scared," Martin J. Blaser, a historian and professor of medicine and microbiology at Rutgers University told The Jewish News. "They often look to blame some kind of intruder or stranger. It has happened especially with the Jews."
In the age of a viral pandemic, specifically Covid-19, Muslims have replaced Jews as the world's most scapegoated religious minority. It's a clear demonstration of how anti-Semitism and Islamophobia remain inextricably tied, and also emphasises how the coronavirus crisis is not only a health issue but also one that poses an existential threat to social cohesion, given it's weaponised to exacerbate long-standing hatreds – but particularly against Muslims.
Pretty much wherever you find persecuted Muslim minorities, you find Covid-19 related conspiracies and fake news stories being weaponised to further their persecution, which has been the case in Israel, India, Europe, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
In Israel, the Netanyahu government is laying the groundwork to blame Palestinians for the spread of Covid-19 by associating the virus with predominantly Muslim Palestinian Israeli citizens, and he said as much in a recent address, telling a delegation of doctors that "unfortunately instructions are not strictly adhered to in the Arab sector." "I ask for the cooperation of all Arab citizens of Israel. I ask you, for your sake and for the sake of our shared future, please follow the orders, [otherwise] a lot of people will die, and these deaths could be prevented with your help," said the Israeli Prime Minister.
This was Netanyahu's subtle way of pinning an impending catastrophe on Palestinian Israeli citizens by suggesting they, and they alone would be held responsible for the deaths of Jewish Israeli citizens. It is a naked attempt to absolve his government of any wrongdoing or missteps in the event the Covid-19 crisis becomes measurably worse. Elsewhere in the world, Muslims are already being blamed for the spread of coronavirus – and unsurprisingly it's producing violent and deadly outcomes.
In India, a 22-year-old Muslim man from New Delhi was lynched and viciously assaulted on Sunday after a mob of Hindu thugs falsely accused him of plotting to spread coronavirus in his home village. Last Tuesday, a young Muslim man was beaten to death in Jharkhand after a mob accused him and two of his friends, who survived their injuries, of spitting on surfaces to spread Covid-19 to Hindus. These attacks didn't take place in a vacuum but within the context of a well-orchestrated and sophisticated campaign by pro-government Hindu nationalists to blame Muslims for the spread of the virus. This claim of a concerted campaign is supported by an investigation conducted by Voyager Infosec, a New Delhi based digital lab, which identified more than 30,000 videos targeted at Muslims on the social media platform TikTok. When ten Indonesian nationals tested positive for the virus on March 19 – roughly ten days after attending an annual gathering held by the Tablighi Jamaat, a Muslim missionary movement – Hindu nationalist groups and individuals seized the moment as an opportunity to falsely hold Muslims solely responsible for spreading the deadly virus throughout the country. Hashtags like #CoronaJihad and #BioJihad were shared almost instantly across social media platforms, hundreds of thousands of times.
In the past week, dozens of videos and fake stories that allege Muslims are spreading Covid-19 have gone viral, translating to tens of millions of views, including; Muslim Man Spitting on Fruits to Spread Corona, Muslims Denying Hindus Rations in Karachi, Muslim Worker in Restaurant Spitting in Food to Spread Coronavirus, and Muslims Sneezing in Unison to Spread Corona. These fake stories are doing what they're creators intended to do: incite violence and discrimination against Muslims, which they hope will make life so unbearable for adherents of the Islamic faith that they will have no choice but to self-deport eventually. "Eliminating the greyzone of coexistence" between Muslims and non-Muslims has become the goal of all extremist ideological groups, including ISIS (Daesh) and the European far-right.
In the United Kingdom, British counterterrorism police are investigating far-right groups accused of using the coronavirus crisis to fuel anti-Muslim sentiment, after dozens of incidents of were recorded by Tell Mama, a UK based hate crime-monitoring group. "These extremists are using coronavirus to get their pervasive message across that somehow the Muslim communities are to blame for the spreading of the virus," Iman Atta, director of Tell Mama, told Arab News. "It is mainly repeat offenders — individuals who are already known to hold anti-Muslim views — who are repeatedly seeing this as a way to cause community turmoil and tension." Last week, Tommy Robinson, the former leader of the English Defense League who has built his fame on anti-Muslim bigotry, shared a video on Telegram that alleged Muslims in the city of Birmingham were meeting at a "secret mosque" in defiance of stay-at-home orders, inferring that the religious minority is somehow plotting to sabotage British society by spreading the virus. The video was shared more than 10,000 times, according to The Guardian.
The undeniable truth, however, is this – no Muslim anywhere has ever hidden in a mosque, spat or sneezed to spread the coronavirus. What's also true is scapegoating 'undesirable groups' has been a staple of pandemics. Where most see crisis, others, particularly the bigoted, see an opportunity, and one that shouldn't go to waste. Demonising an already otherised cultural, religious or ethnic group remains a powerful weapon for those who profit from fear and uncertainty.
While the targets may change from crisis to crisis, the racist and xenophobic tropes remain constant. Yesterday it was the Jewish people who were demonised for spreading disease. Today it's Muslims.
THE PLIGHT OF MUSLIM MINORITIES AMIDST
WAR AGAINST CORONAVIRUS
https://www.trtworld.com/opinion/yesterd...lims-35395
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FOR THE FIRST TIME UAE POLICE AUTHORITIES CRACK DOWN ON INDIAN HINDU NATIONALS( EXPATS) ENGAGED IN ENGLISH MEDIUM ANTI-MUSLIM HATE SPEECH AND ISLAMOPHOBIA IN THE UAE. INDEED A MEMBER OF THE UAE ROYAL FAMILY HAS COME OUT AGAINST THIS. THIS IS ONLY THE TIP OF THE ICEBERG AS THERE ARE MILLIONS OF INDIAN HINDUS WORKING IN THE UAE. SOME OF WHOM USE THEIR OWN INDIAN REGIONAL LANGUAGES FOR COMMUNICATING AND DISSEMINATING HATRED. THIS LANGUAGE COVER NEEDS TO BE RIPPED OFF TO EXPOSE THE EXTENT OF THIS HATRED TO SUPPRESS IT. THIS IS LONG OVER DUE AS THERE IS A COORDINATED ISLAMOPHOBIA HATE CAMPAIGN BY INDIAN HINDU BJP-RSS EXTREMISTS RAGING AGAINST MUSLIMS. AS CURRENTLY INDIAN MUSLIMS ARE BEING BLAMED FOR A BOGUS CORONA VIRUS JIHAD IN INDIA.
THIS WILL BE INVESTIGATED FURTHER AS IT IS TIME TO ISOLATE, TARGET AND EXPEL INDIAN HINDU EXTREMISTS EXPLOITING MUSLIM TOLERANCE IN THE ARABIAN GCC STATES. WE NEED A GLOBAL ANTI-ISLAMOPHOBIA CAMPAIGN AGAINST THIS VIRUS WHICH IS ON THE RAMPAGE. SIMILAR MEASURES ARE REQUIRED TO LOCKDOWN AND QUARANTINE ANTI ISLAMIC REGIMES. IT IS HIGH TIME INDIAN HINDU FANATICS PAY A HIGH PRICE AND FACE SEVERE ECONOMIC SANCTIONS. THERE ARE PLENTY OF MUSLIMS IN THE INDIAN SUBCONTINENT TO REPLACE THEM. INDEED THIS DOES NOT GO FAR ENOUGH AS IT IS LONG OVERDUE THAT ARABIAN GCC STATES IMPOSE SANCTIONS AGAINST THE INDIAN HINDUTVA REGIME FOR IT'S ANTIMUSLIM AND ANTIISLAMIC POLICIES IN INDIA AND INDIAN OCCUPIED KASHMIR. IT IS TIME FOR ISLAMIC SOLIDARITY AND ISLAMOPHOBES NEED TO EXPERIENCE THE ECONOMIC PAIN AND SUFFERING THEY INFLICT ON OTHERS.
INDIAN MIGRANTS FACE UNCERTAIN FUTURE AS UAE WANTS THEM TO LEAVE
A REFLECTION ON THE CURRENT SITUATION
Dr. Zakir Naik & Shaykh Dr. Yasir Qadhi
WHY ARABS ARE SPEAKING OUT AGAINST ISLAMOPHOBIA IN INDIA
Anger in Gulf region as right-wing Hindus target Muslims, accusing them of a 'conspiracy' to spread coronavirus.
Bilal Kuchay
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2020/04/a...02197.html
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