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Bangladesh: The Witness Speaks
Saturday 18th May 2013
HRW reports on a key witness who was contradicting the case being made by Bangladesh's Haseena Government to criminalise Jamaat Islami leadership : "...Bali was due to appear to give evidence as a defense witness before the ICT, a court expressly set up to try people suspected of war crimes during Bangladesh’s 1971 war of independence. He had previously been listed as a prosecution witness. Bali claims that on November 5, 2012, he was abducted by people in plainclothes at the gates of the ICT, put into a police van, and then taken away to the offices of the police....Bali had been expected to counter prosecution allegations about the involvement of Delwar Hossain Sayedee in the 1971 murder of Bali’s brother. Saydeee has since been sentenced to hang, in part for the murder of Bali’s brother.
...Bali claims that he was abducted at the courthouse by police, held in government custody for several weeks, and then pushed across the border to India. Human Rights Watch has documented how the BSF routinely kills Bangladeshis who cross the border illegally. In April, Bali was sentenced by an Indian court to 110 days in jail for entering the country illegally. He has already completed his term but is
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Hanif Muhammad's Take on Pakistan Elections
Thursday 16th May 2013
"...Many of his political opponents say that if Sharif wasn't from the dominant province Punjab, where most of the army elite comes from, if he didn't represent the trading and business classes of Punjab, he would still be begging forgiveness for his sins in Saudi. But he returned just before the last elections and has been behaving like a statesman. A very rich statesman.
It has yet to be proven whether eight years of exile in Saudi Arabia can make anyone wiser but it has never made anybody poorer. Sharif was rich before he got into politics, then he became fabulously rich. Even in exile the Saudis gave him a palace and, on his return, a fleet of bulletproof limousines. His campaign proved that poor people don't really vote for somebody who understands poverty, or wants to do anything about it. People have voted him in because he talks money, talks about spending money, talks about opening a bank on every village street and who doesn't like that? He has promised motorway connections and airports to towns so small that they still don't have a proper bus station. Poor people, who couldn't afford a bicycle at the time of the elections, like to be promised an airport. You never know when you might need it...."
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The inheritance of Abraham
Tuesday 14th May 2013
PressTV reports: "In a new report titled “The Inheritance of Abraham? A Report on the ‘Promised Land,’” the church said Israel’s claim to the occupied territories could be invalidated by its treatment of Palestinian people.
The report also calls for the church to consider backing “economic and political measures involving boycotts, disinvestment and sanctions against Israel focused on illegal settlements.
Moreover, it calls on Christians to lobby the UK government to put pressure on the Tel Aviv regime to halt its illegal settlement activities in the occupied Palestinian territories.
“Christians should not be supporting any claims by Jews, or any other people, to an exclusive or even privileged divine right to possess particular territory,” the report said. ”
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Pankaj Mishra on the British colonial record
Sunday 12th May 2013
...The British had slaughtered the Kikuyu a few years before. But for Ferguson "it was a magical time, which indelibly impressed on my consciousness the sight of the hunting cheetah, the sound of Kikuyu women singing, the smell of the first rains and the taste of ripe mango"....
Perhaps narcissism and despair about their creeping obscurity, or just plain madness explains why in the early 21st century many Britons, long after losing their empire, thought they had found a new role: as boosters to their rich English-speaking cousins across the Atlantic.
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Joseph Harker in the Guardian
Friday 10th May 2013
...I'm beginning to feel sorry for whites. I have many white friends and I know most of them are wholly opposed to sexual abuse. But they must be worried that their whole community is getting a bad name. I can imagine that, every day, with each unfolding case, they must be hiding their face behind their hands, pleading: "Please, God, don't let it be a white person this time."
And with so many senior community figures implicated, many of us are starting to wonder what will happen to the next generation of whites. How will today's young whites learn that abuse is wrong when their role models are so tarnished?...
But all of the above arguments were made within various parts of our print and broadcast media when similarly small numbers of Muslim men were revealed to be grooming young girls for sex. If you think the claims about white people are wrong, then so is the stereotyping of Britain's Muslims, and the widespread questioning of their culture and their religion, because of the perverted actions of a few.
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Harker's Irony
Tuesday 07th May 2013
Joseph Harker in the Guardian: ...I'm beginning to feel sorry for whites. I have many white friends and I know most of them are wholly opposed to sexual abuse. But they must be worried that their whole community is getting a bad name. I can imagine that, every day, with each unfolding case, they must be hiding their face behind their hands, pleading: "Please, God, don't let it be a white person this time."And with so many senior community figures implicated, many of us are starting to wonder what will happen to the next generation of whites. How will today's young whites learn that abuse is wrong when their role models are so tarnished?... But all of the above arguments were made within various parts of our print and broadcast media when similarly small numbers of Muslim men were revealed to be grooming young girls for sex. If you think the claims about white people are wrong, then so is the stereotyping of Britain's Muslims, and the widespread questioning of their culture and their religion, because of the perverted actions of a few.
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Childhood
Saturday 04th May 2013
Ebrahim Moosa on Children's Rights: "...the absence of a strong disposition toward autonomy in the rights of the child in Muslim teachings can in part be accounted for by the prevalence of a communitarian template in Musim ethics inherited from tradition....one of the major shortcomings in the literature on Muslim notions of children and childhood is the absence of specific case studies that give texture to such understandings within specific contexts...
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Loads of Money
Thursday 02nd May 2013
John Quelly in CommonDreams.org: Confirming what many policy experts have known for some time, a New York Times headline in Monday's print edition describes how the most corrupting influence within the Afghan government of Hamid Karzai is not innate cronyism or tribal favoritism, but rather the suitcases full of US cash delivered to the Presidential Palace over the last decade by the CIA.
“The biggest source of corruption in Afghanistan was the United States,” one unnamed US official told the Times' Matthew Rosenberg, who described "wads of American dollars packed into suitcases, backpacks and, on occasion, plastic shopping bags" being delivered to Karzai's door.
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A crucial moment, 1948
Monday 29th April 2013
Richard Norton-Taylor in the Guardian: The British government knew from the moment it planned to withdraw its forces from Palestine more than 60 years ago that partition of the territory and the founding of the state of Israel would lead to war and defeat for the Arabs, secret documents released make clear.
...A report dated October 1947 refers to Menachem Begin, commander of Irgun, stating in a press interview that "the fight against the British invader would continue until the last one left Palestine".
...The state of Israel was proclaimed on 14 May 1948. The following day, the last remaining British troops withdrew and the first Arab-Israeli war began.
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Chinese Muslims
Friday 26th April 2013
From BBC: "Clashes in China's restive Xinjiang region have left 21 people dead, including 15 police officers and officials, authorities say...Dilxat Raxit, a spokesperson for the World Uighur Congress, an umbrella organisation of Uighur groups, told the BBC the incident was caused by the killing of a young Uighur by Chinese "armed personnel" as a result of a government clean-up campaign. Uighurs make up about 45% of the region's population, but say an influx of Han Chinese residents has marginalised their traditional culture....Image acknowledgement: ChinaHeritageQuarterly.Org
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