Quote:[url="http://www.newkerala.com/news/fullnews-13914.html"]Madhya Pradesh village calm day after violence[/url]



Bhopal, Dec 18 : Madhya Pradesh's Suptara village remained calm Friday, a day after communal tensions flared up over a piece of meat being allegedly thrown inside a temple premises, police said.

Quote:Girl, 15, pregnant when murdered by father in honour killing

Monday, December 21, 2009



A 15-year-old British girl murdered by her father in so-called honour killing was reportedly pregnant at the time of her death.



Tulay Goren disappeared in January 1999, shortly after her father told his eight-year-old son to kiss his sister goodbye as he would never see her again. Her body was never found.



Mehmet Goren, 49, was last week handed a life sentence for killing his daughter because of her relationship with an older man who belonged to a different branch of Islam.



As detectives admitted police had ignored “tell-tale signs” before the murder, an old school friend of Tulay’s told the BBC the teenager had admitted to being pregnant.



“One day she came in and said, ‘I’m pregnant and I’m going to run away,’ but I didn’t know if she was serious or not,” Nadia Mahmood recalled.



“I thought it was just one of those things you say.”



Tulay’s mother Hanim, who had suffered three decades of abuse at her husband’s hands, was among those who gave evidence against Goren, weeping and screaming in the witness box and demanding he reveal where the body was so she could bury it.



One of his other daughters, Nuray Guler, also testified against him, screaming: "Even animals would not do what you have done."

[color="#800080"](Shouldn't bring up animals in a situation that doesn't involve any. Of course animals aren't vindictive <--- aargh I can't spell - and they wouldn't do such a thing. But faithful islamics regularly do. For the honour of the invisible non-existent allah and its puppet and the glory of islamania, islamaniacs are programmed to do any despicable act of inhumanity.)[/color]



Prosecution lawyer Jonathan Laidlaw told the court that the Goren case was a "terrible reminder of what honour-based crime can involve" and a "wake-up call" to the existence of so-called "honour killings" in Britain.



Police had become involved with the family in the weeks before the murder, when Goren beat up his daughter's boyfriend, Halil Unal, then complained about their relationship to officers and demanded she take a virginity test.



Tulay ran away and told police her father had beaten her and she would rather go into care than return home, but her mother persuaded her to go back.

[color="#800080"](Big mistake by Mrs Goren.)[/color]



Goren attacked his daughter's boyfriend for a second time just 13 days after Tulay went missing, this time with a [color="#0000FF"]hatchet[/color], and it was while in hospital that Unal reported his girlfriend missing.



But police failed to put two and two together and it was two months before they began to suspect Tulay had been murdered. They submitted a file to prosecutors in 2000 but were told there was not enough evidence for charges.



Goren was finally arrested in 2008, along with his two brothers, after a review.



Both his brothers were cleared of wrongdoing in court Thursday.



An ethnic Kurd from Elbistan in Turkey, Goren had moved to Britain claiming asylum in 1996. He was jailed in 2000 for his hatchet attack on Unal but escaped deportation because his family all lived in Britain.



The 49-year-old admitted hitting his daughter and wife but denied murder, saying he still believed Tulay was alive and "will turn up one day".

[color="#800080"](Oh yeah sure. And the hatchet attack on his daughter's heretic lover Unal was just to scare him off.)[/color]

Quote:Mohammedans torch 1100 cars across France (again!)

jan 5th, 2010



this is a national sport for mohammedan youth. last year they torched 1167, this year 1100. so the french police are claiming there is progress!



---------- Forwarded message ----------

From: Arvind



Mohammedans in France torched more than 1100 cars in France but the media has suppressed that they are Mohammedans.



http://www.jihadwatch.org/2010/01/youths-torch-over-1000-cars-across-france-overnight.html





Posted by nizhal yoddha at 1/05/2010 09:27:00 AM 0 comments Links to this post

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Quote:Unreconciled to its ancient Hindu lineage and still groping for a valid Islamic identity, Malaysia is in the throes of yet another sectarian conflict, this Time with Christians over who owns Allah.



Many Muslims (more than 60 per cent of the 29 million population) insist he is their exclusive property. Christians, a mere eight per cent, as well as more liberal Muslims recognise Allah as the Arabic word for god that was in use before Prophet Mohammed and the birth of Islam. The Catholics of Sabah and Sarawak (both in what was known as Borneo) referred to their Christian god as Allah long before they joined the Malay Federation in 1963 (like Chinese-majority Singapore) to form Malaysia. No one objected.



The argument did not begin until a few years ago as part of an Islamic revival that reinforced the Malaysian quest for a distinctive identity. But it was not until January 2009 that Mr Hamid Albar, then Home Minister, ordered the Catholic weekly, Herald, which is published in English, Malay, Tamil and Chinese, not to call the Christian god Allah in its Malay edition. The reason was that such use would confuse simple Muslims and by blurring the distinction between the two religions, encourage them to convert to Christianity.



The charge seemed a little far-fetched since the Herald is distributed only in church after weekend Mass, which means to those who are already Christian. The editor, Father Lawrence Andrew, strongly denies any conversion campaign. Archbishop Murphy Packiam, head of the Catholic Church, filed for judicial review of the order in February last year and was rewarded on the last day of 2009 when Kuala Lumpur High Court’s Judge Lau Bee Lan — a Chinese from his name, not a Malay Muslim — ruled that Article 10 of the federal Constitution gave the Herald the “constitutional right” to call god Allah. However, when Prime Minister Najib Abdul Razak intervened, the court issued a stay order.



Militant Muslims have been mustering their forces since then. More than 12,000 people promptly joined an Internet Facebook group titled Menentang Penggunaan Allah Oleh Golongan Bukan Islam (Opposition to Non-Muslims using the word Allah) with Mr Mukhriz Mahathir, whose father, Mr Mahathir Mohammad, was Malaysia’s longest-serving Prime Minister, vociferously supporting the campaign. But not all Muslims are with him. Some acknowledge the right of those who believe in the Old Testament to use the word. Others take a universal view. “All of mankind, regardless of their religion, should say that Allah created the world, that Allah tells us to do good,” says Mr Asri Zainul Abidin, a respected Islamic scholar and former Mufti of Perlis State. “It is not appropriate for a Muslim to protest when he hears non-Muslims say such things.”



The most curious aspect of this heated debate is not that it has divided Muslims but that the two main political groups have switched sides. The fundamentalist Parti Islam SeMalaysia which formerly ruled Kelantan State and argued at one time that chopsticks were un-Islamic now maintains that Allah is no religion’s exclusive property. The party president, Mr Hadi Awang, a conservative cleric, issued a written statement after a recent three-hour conclave with his peers to say that “based on Islamic principles, the use of the word ‘Allah’ by the people of the Abrahamic faiths such as Christianity and Judaism, is acceptable.”



But fearing erosion of its political support, the ruling United Malays National Organisation seems to have stolen the PAS’s fundamentalist clothes. Traditionally, the UMNO prides itself on its liberal approach to matters concerning race and religion. It is in partnership with Malaysia’s Chinese and Indian political organisations. But roles have changed. “PAS is holding on to the more plural and moderate position while UMNO is digging itself into an intolerant hardline position that has no parallel that I know of in the Muslim world,” a veteran UMNO dissident, Tengku Razaleigh Hamzah, a prince of Kelantan State, declared at a Singapore meeting the other day.



It’s not as if the Malaysians have suddenly discovered religion. Islam has always been a force and the Westernised Mohammedali Currimbhoy Chagla describes in his autobiography how he had to make excuses to avoid having to accompany Tengku Abdul Rahman, Malaysia’s first Prime Minister, to the mosque for Friday prayers when he visited Kuala Lumpur in the 1960s as Mrs Indira Gandhi’s External Affairs Minister.



But Malaysians were then a carefree people who enjoyed contrasting their relaxed attitude to life with the stern Mr Lee Kuan Yew’s disapproval of long hair and chewing gum in Singapore. Now, however, Malaysia is becoming a land of rigid taboos. The crime of ‘khalwat’ (unmarried men and women caught in ‘close proximity’), the decision to cane a woman for drinking beer in public, and recent attacks on Christian churches testify to a creeping fundamentalism.



If Mr Mahathir’s son represents the new drift towards bigotry, his daughter, Ms Marina Mahathir, speaks for the opposite camp with some understanding of the national psyche. “A confident Muslim will not walk into a church, hear a liturgy in Malay or Arabic where they use the word ‘Allah’ and think he or she is in a mosque,” she wrote in her blog. “A confident Muslim knows the difference.”



Confidence is in short supply. Many attributed Mr Mahathir’s complexes to the part-Indian parentage that was never publicly mentioned. Tiny Singapore’s prosperity is like a constant pinprick. But as I discovered when researching my book on South-East Asia, Malaysia’s insecurity goes much deeper, partly explaining why the federation expelled secular Singapore in 1965.



Describing the fourth century Hindu deities found in the Bujang Valley, Malaysia’s richest architectural site, Anthony Spaeth wrote in Time that “the official literature does its best to downplay, even denigrate, the Indian impact on the region”. Spaeth thought “an Indian Malaysian visiting the Bujang Valley might come away feeling demeaned rather than proud — and that would be no accident”.



About 40 per cent of Malay words, including the all-important ‘bumiputera’ (son of the soil), the political concept that sustains Malaysian nationalism, are borrowed from Sanskrit. The nine Malay sultans who take turns to be king are descended from Indian royalty. Their rituals are recognisably Brahmanic.



It could explain why Hindu temples and Indian Malaysians are targeted for attack. Malaysia is trying to erase its past.

Quote:A jawan of 6th India [ Images ] Reserve Battalion, who deserted the force's camp with a service gun, was shot dead after he was confronted by police commandos in Imphal East district of Manipur on Saturday, police sources said.



The jawan, identified as Abjal Ali, who took away a light machine gun with six magazines and 150 rounds of ammunition, was shot dead at Nongmajing in Irilbung police station area.



The gun and ammunition were recovered from the spot.



The sources said it would be investigated whether the jawan had links with any militant outfit.

A case has been registered at the Irilbung police station.

Quote:It is often assumed that Sufism stands opposed to Wahhabism. Wrong. Sufism and Wahhabism, in fact, share a fatal characteristic – they are religions of the status quo. In Pakistan, Sufism legitimises barbarities of inequality and starvation – ‘do nothing, it’s god’s will’ - while at the same time justifying structures of oppressive power, Pirism and landlordism, rather like Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia. Contemporary Sufism, rather than being a solution to Pakistan’s problems, is the cause.



I was sitting at the shrine of Shah Kamal in Lahore, with the dhol beats and whirling dervishes dancing to connect to the ‘centre of the universe in themselves’, when a friend turned and pointed to an old German fellow sitting a few meters from us. “He just delivered a lecture on Sufism. He is an expert on the subject, and talked about how it’s a religion of peace and love.”



I replied curtly: “Have you ever been in love? Have you had your heart broken? What peace is there in that state? What peace was there when Mansur had his head chopped off on the orders of the Baghdadi Emperor? What peace was there when Shah Inayat was fighting against the Mughal emperor for his life and that of his commune? What peace is there in Sassui’s peeling feet as she searches for her beloved through the desert of Sindh?”



My friend agreed and said: “But they pay me – I have to go along with them.”



Western and Pakistani policymakers think Islam can be codified as either a religion of peace and love and given the brand of Sufism, or as a religion of violent jihad. They think it’s better, at this point in time, to promote the peaceful religion of Sufism.



Note how the word Islam is taken out – Sufism is codified as not really Islam. Thus Sufism is considered a perfect native antidote to [size="7"][color="#FF0000"]the violent religion of Islam[/color][/size].



Why are dollars, pounds, rupees and Euros going to promote Sufism? What is it about today’s Sufism that allows it to serve a purpose for the American empire, and what function does it play locally in Pakistan?



The answer was hard for me to stomach. I had spent much time researching aspects of Sufism, and I thought I’d found a touchstone from which to articulate a spirituality that was socially radical and politically challenging to Pakistan’s parasitic elite and the US/Nato invaders. Ziauddin Sardar, polymath writer and scholar of Islam, forced me to face the facts.



He called Sufism “docile”, acting as an opiate for the masses, with most Pirs/Syeds/Sufis amounting to nothing short of “confidence tricksters”. And indeed, Sufism is docile. A shopkeeper in Main Market, Gulberg, had an emblem of the Sufi saint Lal Qalandar hanging in his shop, which he had got from Sehraw Sharif, Sindh, the town where the saint is buried. He said that “what these people do not realise is that 80 per cent of what we pray at the shrine [of Lal Qalandar] comes true.” A popular song sung across the Punjab at Sufi shrines tells women that if they light a lantern at the shrine of saints, their desire for a ‘son’ will be answered.



[color="#FF0000"]Items given by holy Pirs - threads, rings, blessings, [size="6"]and even sexual induction before marriage[/size][/color](in the case of a notorious Sindhi landlord/Pir) - are taken as altering the universe and leading to the granting of prayers of health, wealth, and other worthy claims by this mass of the wretched that is the Pakistani citizen. It is not only candles and lanterns that are lit at the shrines; money is exchanged and power is sustained. It is this power that has created a “docile” Sufism.



Pakistan is a vastly unequal society. Government figures put those below the poverty line at close to 40 per cent of the population, though the true figure may be closer to 50 per cent. Inequity is the hallmark of the Sindh province of Pakistan, which is celebrated as “the land of the Sufis” and is where Sufis and Pirs hold power. A recent World Bank report noted that Sindh has the narrowest distribution of land ownership, with the richest one per cent of farmers owning 150 per cent more land than the bottom 62 per cent of farmers put together. Feudal landlords in vast parts of Sindh have holdings of thousands of acres, and most of them are Syeds or Pirs. These lands were sometimes acquired during the Mughal era but were largely consolidated during the British colonial rule in India. The British, looking for local collaborators, found Sufi Pirs willing to oblige.



Sarah Ansari, in her book, Sufi Saints and State Power: The Pirs of Sind, 1843-1947, notes: ‘the Sindhi Pirs participated in the British system of control in order to protect their privileges and to extend them further whenever and wherever possible’.



Today’s feudalists are keen to protect and promote “docile” Sufism to sustain their wealth and power – this time with US help.



Wealth is created by a pool of landless serfs who toil thousands of acres for their spiritual masters, while seeing their own children starve. These serfs create the wealth that sends the Bhuttos and the Gilanis to universities such as Oxford and Harvard, while their children get “blessings” and threads of “Pirs”. This stream of inequity from generation to generation is based on a lame theological idea, which nonetheless has been promoted by the Mughal Empire, the British Empire, the landlords themselves, and now by the American Empire, and thanks to such patronage has gained far more ground than the Taliban. It states that the Prophet was given divine light/knowledge, which passes on to his descendents. These descendents append the honorific title of ‘Syed’ [literally, ‘master’], and claim divine and material privileges.



Pirs justify their superiority on a similar argument – they were given the light, and this light continues to radiate in their descendants. At a recital of the poetry of the radical Sufi Waris Shah held each year in Lahore, the descendents of Iman Bari Sarkar (a Pir) enter the arena to be received with awe and sought for blessings by the crowd. The recital stops and they are escorted to the front and seated. All eyes are on these holy men who are not only descendents of a Pir but also Syeds – thus, doubly blessed with ‘light’! And then they begin expounding their ideology: “We the Syeds get different treatment from God Almighty, for our good deeds we get double the reward compared to ‘murids’ [non-Syeds] who only get single reward for a single good deed … but, it’s not easy to be a Syed … [he laughs] … we have to suffer double the punishment for our any wrong deeds whereas you [non-Syeds] get only single punishment for a single wrong deed!”



There you have it! Our holy man explains why he has a Land Cruiser jeep and “non-Syeds” have donkey carts. He explains why most Pakistanis are living in poverty while he and his Syeds and Pirs are lapping it up in luxury.



Contemporary Sufism is the ideology of Sindh’s landlords. It is the ideology that is used to uphold their wealth and despotism, and keeps millions in serfdom. A similar pattern is repeated throughout Pakistan. Given the lack of proportional representation and the vast inequality in power in each district between Pirs and the rest, it is almost always the case that elections flood parliament with Pirs/Syeds/landlords. The current Pakistani Prime Minister (Syed Yousaf Raza Gilani) and Foreign Minister (Makhdoom Shah Mehmood Qureshi) are examples. Both have the claim of being descended from Holy Pirs as the basis of their wealth and distinction. As a result, we cannot expect parliament to challenge inequity and injustice in Pakistan.



Parliamentarians know that lack of education, coupled with the obscurantism of contemporary Sufism, sustains their power. Like the British before them, the Americans don’t care about Pakistan’s growing multitude of serfs and the underclass, they don’t care whether the Prime Minister and the Foreign Minister of Pakistan are deeply rooted in the cause of inequity and injustice in the country and part of the promotion of a system of starvation – a Sufism that tells people to take a blessing instead of demanding food, education, justice and liberty. Like the British, they will fund whoever furthers their interests. We, however, must care.



This is an article by Qalandar Bux Memon, editor of Naked Punch, from the



[url="http://www.thesamosa.co.uk/index.php/comment-and-analysis/politics/224-bad-sufi-the-client-faith-of-the-american-empire.html"][color="#FF0000"]The Samosa[/color][/url], a new UK-based politics, culture and arts journal, campaigning blog and website.

Quote:From: Kaleem Kawaja <kaleemkawaja@gmail.com>

Date: Jan 31, 2010 4:44 AM

World rejects India's Taliban stand



ASAK

I never understood why the Muslim countries neighouring Afghanistan allow India to interfere in Afghsanistan. The Hindu lobby in India has very skilfully created friction between Iran and Pakistan with Afghanistan. India is said to have 14 consulates in Afghanistan. Muslim countries have money, knowhow and relationship with Western countries to solve the problems of Afghanistan. When the Soviets occupied Afghanistan for 10 years (1979-89) and brutalized the country, India kept quiet, not once protesting.



Today the West and the whole world is rightly acknowledging that there are two factions in Taliban; one that represents the Afghan nationalism and the other that are radical Muslims. The first type are not for the obscurantism that we saw during the erstwhile Taliban rule. The West is also realizing that the Muslim culture in Afghanistan is their basic way of life and Islamic civilization is their lifeblood. The West can never import westernization and permissive way of life in Afghasanistan. Hillary Clinton has made a categorical statement to that effect.



How can the Muslim brothers in Iran, Pakistan and Tajikistan be divided from their fellow brothers in Islam in Afghanistan? How can the Muslim ummah be divided by the idol worshippers? It was the folly of these Muslim countries that they allowed the munafiqeen to divide them and then betray each of them. I Hope this time they are able to pursuade Taliban that there is no future in obscurantism and that in fact that is a contradiction of Islam.



was salam.



Kaleem Kawaja

Quote:No French citizenship to men who make wives wear veil

Paris, Feb 2 : French Immigration Minister Eric Besson said Tuesday that he had transmitted a decree to the government that would ban from French citizenship any man who makes his wife wear the all-body Islamic veil.



In a statement, Besson said that preventing a spouse from going around with her face unveiled would be equivalent to rejecting "the principles of secularism and equality between men and women".



The measure is the latest move in the continuing attempt by the French government to limit or ban women from wearing the garment, which is known here by the Afghan term burqa.



Last week, a parliamentary commission recommended measures to prevent women from wearing the burqa on public transport and in other state venue, but stopped short of calling for a law to ban the veil.



But Monday, the head of the Catholic French Council for Interreligious Relations, Bishop Michel Santier, came out against a ban on the burqa, saying in a statement that it would only marginalise the few women who did wear the garment and would "stigmatise Moslem believers".

Police estimate that fewer than 2,000 women in France wear the burqa.