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July 2016
Why the Yemen peace talks collapsed?
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: Riyadh-based Yemen government in exile Thursday (July 28) pulled out of the peace talks underway in Kuwait after Houthi militants and their allies formed a 10-member "supreme council" to run the war-torn nation. "The negotiations have completely ended," said Abdallah al-Olaimi, a member of the exile government team to the talks. UN special envoy Ismail Ahmad Ould Cheikh Ahmed, who has been brokering the talks aimed at a peaceful settlement, condemned the move without formally announcing the collapse of negotiations. The Houthi militants and the General People's Congress of former president Ali Abdallah Saleh earlier Thursday announced the formation of "a supreme political council of 10 members". They did not name the council's members. Read More
Turkey: Two weeks after the abortive coup
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: Erdoganism is a new terminology introduced by the opinion writers against President Tayyib Erdogan who has launched a cleansing operation in the civil and military bureaucracy in the aftermath of July 15 abortive coup blamed on the US-based pro-Israel cleric, Fatehullah Gulen who is described by Pape Escobar as a CIA asset. Read More
The good news and the bad news about Turkey’s attempted coup
By Stephen Zunes: The survival of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Welfare Party of an attempted coup last week is a mixed blessing. The good news is that the coup’s failure may be a sign that, for the first time in history, Turkey’s elected government has successfully imposed civilian rule over the military. Having experienced military rule a number of times in recent history, the Turkish public recognized a military regime would probably be even worse. They also saw what happened in Egypt, where liberal democrats initially cheered the military coup against Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood only to find themselves under a brutal military dictatorship. Read More
The post-abortive-coup Turkey
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: On Wednesday, July 20, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan declared a three-month state of emergency in Turkey in order to hunt down all those deemed to be behind an attempted coup. The state of emergency was needed "in order to remove swiftly all the elements of the terrorist organization involved in the coup attempt," he told a press conference. Turkey has accused the group of US-based cleric Fethullah Gulen of being behind the coup and acting as a terror group. "The decision has been made to declare the state of emergency for a period of three months," Erdogan said adding that the state of emergency is a measure "against the terror threat facing our country". Read More
Radical Islam and Wahhabism
By Arthur Scott: Today in America there is a heated debate over how best to describe Muslim radicals without either demonizing the entire religion, or giving ISIS added notoriety that it can use in recruitment. Finding the correct metaphor that captures best this Islamic expression is very challenging. What makes the debate even more complicated is that even within conservative Islam, mostly Sunna Saudis, there is an “ultra-conservative strain’ known as Wahhabi. Read More
American Muslims shocked at Gangrich’s call to test and deport Muslims
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: The seven million strong American Muslim community was shocked at the impractical, inhuman and unconstitutional suggestion of former House Speaker Newt Gingrich calling for Inquisition-style religious “testing” and possible deportation of “every person here who is of a Muslim background.” Read More
Kashmir: Trouble in Paradise
Dr. Ghulam Nabi Fai: So much for Ban Ki-moon’s heart and possibly even more so his soul. One can only recall the quote in Matthew and the betrayal of Jesus, “When Pilate saw that he was accomplishing nothing, but rather that a riot was starting, he took water and washed his hands in front of the crowd, saying, "I am innocent of this Man's blood; see to that yourselves." The United Nations has walked away from the slaughter in Kashmir and washed its hands of it, and the world body has told India, “it’s your problem. See to that yourselves.” Even the U.S. State Department spokesman John Kirby has deferred all inquiries about the “killing fields” of Kashmir to the Indian government, the very source of all the bloodshed. That’s like referring the problem of foxes in the henhouse to Chief Minister Fox. Read More
Keeping alive the ghost of Osama Bin Laden
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: A dubious website, the SITE Intelligence Group, has quoted Hamza bin Laden, a son of Osama Bin Laden, as threatening revenge against the U.S. for assassinating his father.The SITE Intelligence Group referred to an audio message of Hamza posted online where he said: “We will continue striking you and targeting you in your country and abroad in response to your oppression of the people of Palestine, Afghanistan, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Somalia and the rest of the Muslim lands that did not survive your oppression.” Read More
U.S. should have its own Chilcot Report
By Habib Siddiqui: I have argued many times that the Iraq invasion was a crime of the highest proportion. Bush’s poodle, a.k.a. former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, allowed his country to be pulled into a conflict that claimed hundreds of British lives, thousands of American lives, and probably a million Iraqi lives (but who is counting!), while plunging the entire region into a maelstrom of terroristic chaos, including the birth of extremist groups like the Daesh. Read More
Blanket surveillance of Muslims in Japan
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: Japan's Supreme Court has rejected a second appeal by the country's Muslim community against nationwide surveillance of Muslim groups, mosques and even halal restaurants. seventeen Japanese Muslim plaintiffs had complained that the government's security measures constituted "an unconstitutional invasion of their privacy and freedom of religion." The Supreme Court dismissed the appeal as unconstitutional. The justices concurred with a lower court that the surveillance was "necessary and inevitable" to guard against international terrorism. Read More
The American Revolution as affected by the Muslim World
Reviewed by Prof. Abdul Jabbar: One will have to read at least a dozen books to gather the amount of information that Syed Mahmood has packed in his admirably thorough chronicle of an often-overlooked part of American history. The book shows that before the U.S. became a country, Muslims were here in America and have continued to play an important part through the centuries to the present day. Read More
Elie Wiesel – the Nazi camp survivor – was a very controversial man
By Habib Siddiqui: Elie Wiesel, the Nobel Peace Prize winner, has died. I was never a fan of him in spite of his many successes in life, mostly selling for the Holocaust industry as a survivor from the Nazi camp. I found him fake and considered him a disingenuous person: a hypocrite of our time. Elie lied a lot. He was in the habit of making things up, in a way that his many subsequent detractors could identify as not untypical of his modus operandi: grasping with deft assurance what people important to his future would want to hear and, by the same token, would not want to hear. Read More
The legacy of Pakistan's 'Father Teresa' Abdul Sattar Edhi
By Abdus Sattar Ghazali: Abdul Sattar Edhi, a celebrated famed philanthropist who achieved a saintly status in Pakistan has passed away at the age of 88 on July 8 in Karachi. He had been undergoing treatment for renal failure. Motivated by a spiritual quest for justice, over the years Edhi and his team created maternity wards, morgues, orphanages, shelters and homes for the elderly – all aimed at helping those who cannot help themselves. He once said “my religion is humanitarianism, which is the basis of every religion in the world. No religion is higher than humanity. Beware of those who attribute petty instructions to God.” Read More
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