Abuses against Muslims in US

Obama needs to improve Washington’s relations with six to seven million American Muslims - relations badly damaged in the previous administration's "war on terror" and by its invasion of two Muslim countries.

Delinda C. Hanley

The day US President Barack Obama reached out to Muslims around the world through his speech at the Turkish Parliament, saying the United States "is not and will never be at war with Islam," Muslim Americans described what looked like a war on their community in the US. The American Muslim Taskforce (AMT) on Civil Rights and Elections, a coalition of major national Islamic organizations, discussed their concerns at a briefing at the National Press Club on April 6.
"This is a very important message to the American people, to the West and to the Muslim world in general," said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). "We appreciate Obama's efforts to bring peace and justice to the Muslim world and American Muslims are not only willing but they are ready to help," he said.
Obama needs to improve Washington's relations with six to seven million American Muslims - relations badly damaged in the previous administration's "war on terror" and by its invasion of two Muslim countries.
"We support and we do encourage the president to reach out to the Muslim world," added Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society's Freedom Foundation, "but as my grandmother used to say, charity begins at home."
During the presidential campaign Obama visited numerous churches and synagogues, but never a mosque or Islamic Center. In fact, according to post-election polls, 95 percent of eligible Muslim voters turned out to vote in 2008, and nearly 90 percent voted for Obama.
AMT Chairman Agha Saeed cited provocative domestic practices and civil rights abuses which began during the Bush administration but which continue today. These abuses include mistreating Muslim activists; labeling as "unindicted co-conspirators" such respected mainstream Muslim organizations as CAIR and the Islamic Society of North America in connection with trials of Muslim charities; and sending FBI agents and informants into mosques to spy on worshippers.
In one case, the FBI hired Craig Monteilh, a felon, to spy on mosques in Orange County, California, from early 2006 through late 2007. (While he was collecting thousands of dollars for his FBI work inside mosques, Monteilh conned two women he met at the gym out of nearly $150,000 in pharmaceutical scams.)
Ahmadullah Niazi, a 34-year-old Afghan immigrant, and another member of the Islamic Center in Irvine, CA, reported the con artist to the FBI in June 2007, claiming that Monteilh was espousing terrorist rhetoric and trying to draw them into a plot to blow up shopping malls and other buildings. When the FBI refused to investigate, Islamic Center leaders realized Monteilh must be an agent provocateur, and won a restraining order to prevent him from returning to the mosque.
An FBI agent allegedly told Niazi that the agency would make his life a "living hell" if he did not become an informant. Sure enough, the FBI arrested Niazi on Feb. 20 of this year and charged him with perjury and passport fraud. The following day Monteilh bragged to the Los Angeles Times that he was the paid informant who had helped nab Niazi. Another recent FBI sting, which captured headlines and fueled Islamophobic fires across the country, involved the June 23, 2006 arrest of the "Liberty City Seven," named for the poor, predominantly Haitian and African-American Miami suburb where the targeted men lived. Prosecutors accused the seven "radical African-American Muslims" of plotting to attack Chicago's Sears Tower and other US buildings. The defendants, who turned out to belong to a Moorish religion blending Christianity and Islam, said they thought they were tricking an Al-Qaeda member into giving them $50,000.
What other elaborate sting operations are under way? Who else is providing special surveillance of Muslim Americans? In May 2006, seeking to allay fears of FBI spying in their community, 11 Muslim American leaders, mosques and local organizations filed a joint Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request. They asked for all FBI records of the agency's surveillance and investigations of themselves and other groups since January 2001. A year later the agency turned over only four pages of documents.
In 2007, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Southern California filed a lawsuit on behalf of the Muslim American leaders and groups who had made the FOIA request, seeking a court order that the FBI comply. Since then, the government has provided hundreds of heavily redacted pages of documents, which show that the FBI has conducted surveillance on lawful First Amendment activities of Muslim Americans. On April 20, 2009 a federal judge ordered the FBI to release nearly 100 more documents that detail the bureau's surveillance of Muslim leaders and organizations in southern California.
Soon it may not just be FBI agents gone wild who are watching and reporting on the activities of Muslim Americans. Big brother may also include private sector agencies, including health care workers, credit card and telephone companies, banks or meter maids, building inspectors, or postal workers and librarians who help compile information on American citizens for the government agencies.
Since 2006, the federal government and the Department of Homeland Security have helped states and major cities set up a network of some 58 "fusion centers." These institutions were originally created to improve the sharing of "anti-terrorism intelligence" among various state, local and federal law enforcement agencies.
According to a 2007 ACLU report, these new fusion centers "raise very serious privacy issues at a time when new technology, government powers and zeal in the 'war on terrorism' are combining to threaten Americans' privacy at an unprecedented level."
According to a Texas fusion center's "Prevention Awareness Bulletin" produced on Feb. 19, 2009, it is "imperative" that law enforcement officers report the activities of lobbying groups, Muslim civil rights organizations and anti-war protest groups in their areas.
A Missouri report says that law enforcement officers may be able to spot potential terrorists by their political bumper stickers, such as those for US Rep. Ron Paul, or by their subversive literature. A 200-page Virginia fusion center report notes that terrorists are likely to use Twitter, podcasts and social networking sites as communication tools.
Critics, Muslim and non-Muslim alike, accuse the centers of collecting uncorroborated allegations and, on occasion, inaccurate and incomplete information on individuals and organizations.
However, most Americans believe authorities should stick to investigating criminal and violent activities, and not wage a war on Muslim Americans and others engaged in constitutionally protected civil rights advocacy and peaceful political activities. President Obama would be well advised to visit an American mosque and listen to the Muslims next door.


Courtesy: www.arabnews.com

   View: Politics of absolutes

The question is, how long will it take for the leaders of Malaysia’s political parties to realise that difference and alterity are living realities in a complex world.

Farish A Noor

Studying Malaysian politics is tough and tedious but also rewarding because the country is one of the most plural, complex and complicated states in the world. Among all the countries that I have worked on, it is Malaysia that continues to challenge my capacity to think (and relax). Its communitarian mode of sectarian politics is an odd blend of modernity and primordialism seldom equalled anywhere else.
At present the opposition coalition known as the Peoples Alliance (Pakatan Rakyat) is once again in a state of crisis - or rather manifold crises - as the component parties bicker over the mode of governance in the states (provinces) they won after the elections of March 2008. Bringing together the predominantly Chinese-Malaysian Left-leaning DAP, the multiracial PKR and the overwhelmingly Malay-Muslim Islamists of PAS was never an easy task; and it was said from the outset that the coalition was an instrumental one.
Today, however, the coalition is once again at breaking point after the DAP threatened to leave the coalition over a dispute over the destruction of a pig abattoir in the state of Kedah, squabbles over contracts awarded to development projects in Penang and Selangor, and the lingering fear that the Islamists of PAS will push their Islamisation agenda in the states that have come under their control. Seemingly trivial matters such as the sale of pork and alcohol have forced all three parties to go on the defensive and dig in.
For political scientists, situations such as these - which are by no means unique to Malaysia - are worthy of further study as they raise the question of how a mode of representative politics can be developed and institutionalised in the context of plural societies with ethnic, religious and linguistic differences enshrined in the constitution as well as in the institutions of state. For this reason what happens in Malaysia is of interest to countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Singapore, South Africa et al.
The root of the problem seems to be that despite the introduction and imposition of modern institutions of statecraft such as Parliament, the Constitution, Judiciary etcetera, the operative mode of politics in Malaysia - like in many other post-colonial societies - remains pre-modern. Feudal, essentialist and primordial loyalties to race, religion and culture predominate and determine the norms of political praxis, and are still being used by all political parties to maintain the support of their respective sectarian constituencies. Hence the Islamist party's attempts to defend and foreground causes deemed relevant to Muslims; while other ethnic-based parties continue to foreground the interests of their respective ethnic communities.
Despite decades of rhetoric about building a united Malaysia around its pluralism, none of the political parties and political elite of Malaysia has done much in terms of bridging the cultural, religious and ethno-linguistic gulfs between them. This ensures the predominance of a mode of absolutist politics where no single party or leader can even begin to accept the idea of genuine difference and alterity in their midst.
It is for this reason that trivial matters like the sale of pork and alcohol have become so contentious in states like Selangor, and why even the simplest of things like linguistic differences can make or break the fragile coalitions we see in the country.
The question is, how long will it take for the leaders of Malaysia's political parties to realise that difference and alterity are living realities in a complex world, and that successful politics arises when parties can accept these differences and transcend them?
At present, it is clear that some of the parties in the country have yet to learn the lesson. The Islamists of Selangor, for instance, are still bent on pursuing their mode of religiously-inspired politics with all its attendant dangers of moral policing. While all the parties of the country talk on and on about the much-lauded image of Malaysia being a diverse and plural nation, we see little respect for pluralism on the ground.
Religious minorities such as the Shias and Ahmadis are routinely described as deviants and deprived of their status as Muslims, moral policing is still the norm; and now even the sale of pork for non-Muslims has become an issue.
What holds true for the conservatives among the Islamists also holds true for representatives and leaders of other parties. As long as this situation pertains, there can be little hope for a genuinely plural and democratic politics in Malaysia.
Plural societies are not the best place to play out the politics of absolutism, with its maximalist ambitions. In so many developing countries today, the hope of creating a singular national vision with a singular narrative has been eclipsed by the very real fact that these societies are too complex to be simplified and essentialised.
There can be no singular image or identity for Malaysian society any more than there can be a singular Indian, Pakistani, Indonesian or even American nation, for the simple reason that the processes of social differentiation have grown so far advanced that the appeal of a singular unifying narrative is lost.
Perhaps a healthy dose of relativism - tempered by the awareness that relativism per se cannot be a licence for all sorts of cultural particularism of the Taliban variety - is required to get us out of the present impasse that stands before most plural societies.
In the Malaysian context this may be more difficult for those political parties that use religion as the basis of their ideology and think of themselves as God's lieutenants on earth to gain control over the Parliament of Heaven. But sooner than later all politicians who claim to be representative - rather than authoritarian - will have to accept the fact that not all communities live and believe as their own, and that dealing with difference is a requirement built into modern constitutional politics.


Dr Farish A Noor is a Senior Fellow at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore; and one of the founders of the www.othermalaysia.org research site
Courtesy: www.dailytimes.com

  Chernobyl children

Remarkably, children born years after the disaster still suffer physical consequences of the meltdown that irradiated large parts of Ukraine and Belarus.

Andres Schipani

Eleven-year-old Olga enters the beach house in flip-flops, her hair still wet from a dip in the Caribbean. "I really like it here," she says. "The food is great, the beach is awesome. I made some fantastic friends."
A typical child's reaction to a beach holiday, perhaps - only this is no ordinary seaside break. Olga is a Ukrainian "Chernobyl child", in Cuba not for a holiday but to undergo intensive medical treatment with some of the country's best doctors.
She goes to school along with 180 other Ukrainian children. "I miss some bits of my home town," she muses. "But I don't ever want to leave."
Olga is one of more than 18,000 Ukrainian children to have been treated over the years at the Tarara facility near the Cuban capital, Havana. The programme was set up in 1990 to treat the victims of the world's most devastating nuclear accident four years earlier.
Twenty-three years after Chernobyl, the Cuban programme is still going strong. Remarkably, children born years after the disaster still suffer physical consequences of the meltdown that irradiated large parts of Ukraine and Belarus; equally remarkably, despite isolation and economic miasma, Cuba still manages to tend to them.
Olga's freckled face is marbled with pink and brown patches due to depigmentation. Her arms and legs are also affected. She suffers from vitiligo, a skin disease that some believe is caused by a combination of genetic and environmental factors. Both those causes can be attributed to her case: she was born in a small village in the northern Rivne province in Ukraine, near Chernobyl.
The cost of Chernobyl will be met over decades and over generations. There will never be an exact figure of the victims of the catastrophe. For many, the impact is not in their past, but in their future. The damage is not only physical, according to Dr Maria Teresa Oliva, a paediatrician and deputy director of the programme.
Ukrainian authorities have expressed their gratitude to Cuba on several occasions.


Courtesy: www.dawn.com