Muslims must not apologise for terror - they are no more responsible than the rest of us

It is too early to know exactly what happened in Woolwich this afternoon, but it seems very likely it was a terrorist killing of a British soldier by Islamic extremists.

Shortly after it emerged it could be a terrorist attack, a hashtag appeared online: #notinmyname. The Muslims who expressed this sentiment had honourable motives, but it is a mistake. They do not need to condemn what has happened. This killing has no more to do with them than it does with the rest of us.

Doing so suggests Muslims are somehow more responsible for the attack than other Brits. It vindicates the central message of Islamic extremists: that we are not, ultimately, British. We are Christians, Muslims and Sikhs, endlessly divided by race and faith and culture.

This is false. It has always been false. We are Brits first.

When World War Two began, many intellectuals openly wondered how long it would take for British society to collapse into civil chaos. People assumed a society so strained by inequality and competing political groups could never withstand such pressure. To a very important extent, France failed to do so. In Britain, the essential solidarity of the people prevailed.

It prevailed during the Blitz. It prevailed during the IRA strikes. And it prevailed after 7/7. This is as diverse a society as any in the history of mankind. But it is British, and united, regardless of race or religion or even income. There is no reason to mention such things in day-to-day life. But on days like today, we should proclaim them proudly.

Muslims have nothing to apologise for and nothing to justify. They are no more culpable for what happened this afternoon than I am for the insane rants of Nick Griffin.

ITV today showed footage of a black man dressed in western clothes, his hands covered in blood, talking to the camera. "In our land our women have to see the same. You people will never be safe," he says.

And yet he speaks in a London accent. This is his land.

Now we will have to undertake the solemn, confusing, despairing process of understanding how people who live in our society could do this to other people in it. That is the debate which should take place. How can Britain still be so beset with alienation that these events could take place?

But that is a question for Brits to answer: not for British Muslims alone. In so far as anyone outside the killers is culpable, we are all culpable.

And when we answer this question, we should remember the following piece of information: After they dragged his body into the road, a group of women crowded around the body and protected it from the assailants. That's why he mentioned the women in the first place. Because they were brave enough to stand between thugs and their victim.

Those women represented Britain too. Source

Bloggers Battle: the battered little girl Lama

The fate of five-year-old Lama is a hot topic in Saudi Arabia and beyond. Lama’s father, Fayhan Ghamdi, allegedly molested and abused her, resulting in Lama’s death after months of hospitalization.

Now her case has fired up debate on social media. Who is responsible for this terrible turn of events? The justice system, child protection agencies, or the culture at large? Or is it just a case of Saudi bashing, as some claim? RNW asked two prominent bloggers for their opinion: journalist Turki Al-Dakheel and Eman Nafjan, who has been following Lama’s case closely on her blog ‘Saudi Woman’.

Several media have reported that Lama’s father was released from custody after paying the mother blood money. Do you think there’s any truth to this?

Eman: No, those reports are all false. He’s still in jail, but the judge did tell the mother that she is only entitled to blood money.

Turki: The case is still in court.

If he did kill his daughter, what punishment does the father deserve?

E: He deserves a harsh punishment—ask the mother.

Lama’s mother, in conversation with RNW: “He deserves being put through the same experience his daughter went through—both him and his second wife.”

T: There are people who argue that a father should not be punished for harming a child. I am not sure what the sharia states on this issue, but I believe all murder is sin. The perpetrator should be punished. The fact that he is the father does not give him the right to abuse his son or daughter.

But a hadith (the sayings and traditions of the prophet Mohammed, one of the sources on which sharia is based) states, “A father shall not be killed for killing his son.”

E: Yes, they have applied this hadith in this case, and in many others. With the exception of one case, no father has ever received a heavy punishment for the abuse of his child. That same hadith is applied to cases that involve husband and wives; even in a case in which a man slit his wife’s throat, he only received a five-year sentence.

T: Ask a judge.

Judge and Shoura Council member dr. Aissa Al-Ghaith, in conversation with RNW: “According to sharia, a father or mother cannot receive a death sentence (qasaas) for killing his or her child. But the state is allowed to deliver such a sentence (ta3zir). A precedent exists of such a case, in which a husband and wife abused the child of the man’s first wife, resulting in the death of the child.

How unambiguous is the law on such matters?

E: No codification of laws exists, and precedents are of no concern. The judge can decide however he sees fit. In reality, the interests of the man always take precedence. The court’s decision can differ from one abaya to the other, and from one judge to the other. Or it depends on my last name, or whether I am Saudi or Pakistani.

Dr. Aissa Al-Ghaith: “What Eman claims, is not true. There is no hadith forbidding a father or mother from being punished for abusing their children, nor does the situation she describes exist. These are very rare cases which are perfectly solved in a judicial procedure in the national courts. The Saudi law applies the Islamic Sharia, which is a law that has existed for centuries and finds its sources in the Holy Quran and prophet Mohammed’s  sayings and traditions. It applies to all Muslims, not to a specific state or people.”

Is this case indicative of a larger problem?

E: We have no system for child protection. In theory a protocol does exist, but it is never applied. If a fifteen-year old girl would report her father to the local police office for hitting her, the response would largely be: “How dare you complain about your father.” By the way—this is not an issue of “men against women” per se; there are plenty of women who would choose the father’s or brother’s side. That’s the general mentality.

T: A year ago, a special hotline was set up that people can call to report child abuse. Part of the problem is that existing laws are not enacted. But there is so much more that we can do, as I wrote in reference to this case in the Al-Riadh newspaper: “But even the laws and systems that are already written need to be developed and supported by more rigorous means, such as taking the guardianship from the father and appointing a more suitable guardian for the child or girl, this is a very important step so that children are not a toy in the hands of their parents.”

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Death by brown skin

Sunando Sen, a 46-year-old Indian immigrant, recently opened a small copying and printing business in New York City’s Upper West Side with his hard-earned savings. Described by friends as “very educated” and “so quiet, so gentle, so nice,” Sen’s American dream ended in tragedy last Thursday when Erika Menendez fatally pushed him in front of an oncoming subway train.

Menendez admitted the hate crime, explaining she “pushed a Muslim off the train tracks because I hate Hindus and Muslims ever since 2001 when they put down the twin towers I’ve been beating them up.”

Never mind that Sen was raised Hindu and the 9-11 terrorist attacks were coordinated by 19 foreign hijackers primarily from Saudi Arabia.

An unbalanced, paranoid mind marinated in our oversaturated Islamophobic environment is numb to such cultural specifics and susceptible to conflate anyone appearing “Muslimy” as the “enemy.”

Although Islamophobes did not cause the NYC murder, they contaminate civil society with their toxic ideological fuel and remain a beacon for bigots, hate-mongers, and the mentally unhinged, all of whom emerge from the same diseased infrastructure.

Citizens of this dangerous, fringe minority include Norwegian mass murderer Anders Breivik, who killed 77 individuals last summer to punish Europe’s alleged leniency towards Muslims and multiculturalism. Upon reviewing Breivik’s 1,500 page anti-Muslim manifesto, which frequently cites notable American Islamophobes, counter-terrorism expert Marc Sagemen concluded thisIslamophobic  rhetoric is “not cost free.”

The cost of such hate is mostly borne by members of the AMEMSA (Arab Middle Eastern Muslim South Asian) communities, however the tainted profit is collected by bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, co-founders of the “hate group” Stop Islamization of America (SIOA), part of the lucrative  “Islamophobia network” subsidized by inciting fear-mongering and misinformation against Muslims.

SIOA claims that it is a “human rights organization dedicated to freedom of speech, religious liberty, and individual rights; no special rights for special classes.” However, the Anti Defamation League reviewed SIOA’s activities and concluded SIOA “promotes a conspiratorial anti-Muslim agenda under the guise of fighting radical Islam. The group seeks to rouse public fears by consistently vilifying the Islamic faith and asserting the existence of an Islamic conspiracy to destroy ‘American’ values.”

In the fall, SIOA purchased inflammatory anti-Muslim ads that continue to appear in New York City and Washington D.C. metro stations and buses.  One ad reads: “In any war between the civilized man and the savage, support the civilized man. Support Israel, Defeat jihad,” suggesting all Muslims are savages. Another ad features a picture of the World Trade Center towers burning next to two Quran quotes.

In light of SIOA’s recent propaganda in NYC subway stations, it is not far-fetched to wonder if Menendez’s hate toward Sen was in some way influenced by these ads.

After news broke of Sen’s murder, Robert Spencer tweeted what sounded like a justification for senseless, anti-Muslim hate crimes: “If Muslims would stop doing evil in name of Islam and jihad, no one would respond with evil to them.”

This is typical rhetoric from Spencer, a hack whose writings are so toxic they reverberate globally and damage both national security and our relationship with Muslim communities abroad. Before her death, Pakistan’s former Prime Minister Benazhir Bhutto name-checkedSpencer in her biography as an individual who “uses the Internet to spread misinformation and hatred of Islam…he presents a skewed, one-sided, and inflammatory story that only helps sow the seeds of civilizational conflict.”

Spencer’s blog “Jihad Watch” was cited more than 162 times in mass murderer Breivik’s manifesto.  Spencer has published the writings of Serge Trifovic, one of the leaders of the Bosnian Serbs during the ethnic cleansing of Bosnian Muslims. Spencer believes the neo-Nazi group English Defense League “deserves the support of all free people.”

Spencer’s colleague in hate, Pam Geller, who never met an anti-Muslim conspiracy theory she didn’t immediately publish as fact, believes “devout Muslims should be prohibited from military service. Would Patton have recruited Nazis into his army?” She also thinks President Obama is a Muslim, illegitimate son of Malcolm X who once went to Pakistan for drugs and jihad, and that the Arabic language is a spearhead for anti-Americanism. She believes stealth jihadists have infiltrated Disneyland because employees wear headscarves to work. Like Spencer, Pamela Geller once strongly endorsed the English Defense League writing, “I share the EDL’s goals… We need to encourage rational, reasonable groups that oppose the Islamisation of the West.”

In a perfect world, these rantings would be amusing fodder for an amateur comic.  However, when over 60% of Americans say they do not know a Muslim and Islam has its lowest favorability rating ever, extremists like Geller and Spencer disproportionately inform and influence the nation’s conversation and perceptions about Islam and Muslims.

According to a new quantitive analysis published by the American Sociological Review, sociologist Christopher Bail mentions Stop Islamization of America as one of the “angry and fearful fringe organizations” that “not only exerted powerful influence on media discourse about Muslims in the aftermath of the September 11th attacks, but ultimately became some of the most influential mainstream groups in the field. By 2008, these fringe organizations not only permeated the mainstream but also forged vast social networks that consolidated their capacity to create cultural change.”

These Islamophobic memes do not exist in a victimless vacuum. There is a cost to such dissemination of hate.

In 2012, The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) reported a 300 percent increase in anti-Muslim hate groups. In 2010, the FBI reported unprecedented 50 percent rise in anti-Muslim hate crimes, with 160 reported cases. In 2011, the number dipped slightly to 157.

SPLC mentions the 2010 Ground Zero Mosque debate as the key driver for the recent surge in anti-Muslim sentiment. The controversy and subsequent protests against the Park 51 community center, which is neither a mosque nor at Ground Zero, was directly manufactured and orchestrated by Pamela Geller and SIOA. Now, there are over 50 ongoing nationwide movements against allowing Muslims to build their constitutionally protected houses of worship.

Recently, a man convicted of setting fire to an Ohio mosque said Fox News convinced him all Muslims are “terrorists.”

Last August, recently defeated Rep. Joe Walsh (R-Ill.) told a town hall in Chicago that Muslims in America are “trying to kill Americans every week.” A few days later, air rifle shots were fired at a mosque in north suburban Morton Grove, Illinois. Soon after, someone hurled a 7-Up bottle filled with acid and other unspecified materials at an Islamic school in Chicago during nighttime Ramadan prayers.

Nearly 31 states have introduced an anti-sharia bill, which is about as necessary as a bill banning big-foot or unicorns.  Yet, 6 states have passed it (Louisiana, Arizona, Tennessee, Kansas, South Dakota, Oklahoma.)  The author of the bill is attorney David Yerushalmi, who serves as counsel to none other than Pamela Geller.

Islamophobia is not just a “Muslim” issue. It never was. Sadly, it is a cancer affecting all our communities.

Sen’s horrific death was yet another episode in which an innocent individual’s brown skin tragically caused him to be mistaken as an anti-American threat. Last August, White supremacist Wade Michael Page murdered six Sikh Americans at their Wisconsin temple. The first post 9-11 hate crime murder was of Arizona gas station owner Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh American specifically chosen by the murderer because he was “dark-skinned, bearded and wore a turban.”

A senseless tragedy like this affords an opportunity, requires necessity and demands urgency for diverse American communities, especially Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus, to unite in solidarity against hate and intolerance. In America, there exists space for legitimate criticism, debate, and discussion about  religion, race, and ethnicity. But we must finally confront ourselves and ask how do we, as a society, benefit from hysteria, fear and scapegoating? What do these Islamophobes inspire except division and lucrative, personal paychecks?

Yes, we give the KKK a freedom to speak their nonsense, but we as citizens and as a nation have disempowered them, denied them a mainstream platform and silenced their megaphone.

The question now at hand is how many Sens and Sodhis will it take to expose these fringe Islamophobic voices, marginalize them, and move onward, together, as they slither in shame and eventually drown in their own irrelevance. 

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Al Jazeera Investigates - The Hidden Genocide

Domestic violence in West Bank on the rise

High fences surround a two story building with a vast yard, a court planted by lemon and mint sits at the centre of a couple of dozen rooms. Here, at Al Mehwar, some of the least fortunate Palestinian women share their stories of abuse. 

Women staying in this Bethlehem safe house are given shelter, food, clothing, counselling and what they need most - hope and a chance to start over.

Raneem, which is not her real name, has been living in the safe house for nearly two years. The 38-year-old describes most of her life as though it was a journey through hell.

Raised in a broken family, she had to accept the first man who came to ask her hand in marriage, she said. At only 22 years of age, she was married, abused, beaten, had her husband take away her one-week-old baby and divorced. Shortly after her divorce, Raneem made another wrong turn. She married a much older man - her second husband, who was almost 40 years her elder.

Not only did he beat her constantly, broke most of her teeth and severely damaged her eye, he also brought his friends and acquaintances to rape her and watched, she said.

"I can't begin to describe how it felt," she said. "There was a tsunami in me that wanted to destroy everything."

She endured living in this harsh cycle for seven years. But even after she escaped the "monster", as she called her second husband, she didn't find peace.

Safe house

Her family shunned her; she was locked in a remote farmhouse for four years, until she finally managed to escape to the police who redirected her to the safe house.

In Al Mehwar, Raneem talked of her past life as if it was another's. She was confident, unlike the women who first stepped into the doors of this place, she said.

"I've just recently started dressing like a lady," she said with a smile on her face. Now, she wants to continue her education, start a small business and meet her child.

Although Raneem's bitter experience may not be the norm, she is one of 37 per cent of Palestinian ever married women who have been exposed to one form or another of domestic violence - except in Raneem's case: she was affected by all forms.

According to a 2011 report by the Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics, two out of three women exposed to violence prefer silence and only 0.7 per cent head to women centres asking for help.

In the occupied Palestinian Territories, like many other places, many view domestic disputes as simply that - domestic.

Lots of incidents are swept under the mat between the West Bank and Gaza.

Obviously, only those who speak up or end up killed are those whose stories are heard ... Since the beginning of this year, 12 women have been killed by family members.

Shame

The matrix of social norms and cultural traditions that consider the woman's sexual freedom - or the mere doubt of a sexual relationship - a reason to bring "shame" to the family, is one of the most common justifications for the killing of women by family members.

That, and the complicated political and economic situation, along with the absence of a deterrent law are reasons behind the increase of women killing, according to many activists.

In the West Bank, the Jordanian penal code of 1960, which was amended many times in Jordan, still applies.

Although President Mahmoud Abbas issued a presidential decree in May, 2011 to annul the article that protects male assailant who commits so-called "honour killing" and allows for a lesser sentence, the law remains full of other articles that can be interpreted in favour of the assailants.

The abnormal legislative situation in the occupied Palestinian Territories, which left the Palestinian Legislative Council paralysed, allowed the president to pass more than 50 decree laws since 2007.

Human rights activists however argue that while draft laws concerning investment and taxes were endorsed, the law that helps protect women - who compensate half the Palestinian society and raise the other half - was not.

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French woman in custody fight with Saudi Prince dies in fall

Suspicions have been raised about the apparently accidental death of a French mother who was gaining ground in a lengthy child custody battle with a Saudi prince.

French authorities insisted yesterday that the death of Candice Cohen-Ahnine, 35, in a fall from her fourth floor apartment in Paris, bore all the signs of an accident. However, friends and her lawyer say she had spoken of a feeling of being under threat in recent days. Despite a previous suicide attempt, they are convinced that she would not have killed herself just weeks before she was due to travel to Saudi Arabia to visit her 10 year old daughter for the first time in four years.

"She was in a state of exaltation, very determined, delighted," said her lawyer, Laurence Tarquiny-Charpentier. "There was a great deal of progress in her case in recent times."

Ms Cohen-Ahnine published a book last year on her struggle to recover her daughter, Haya, who has been held – allegedly in captivity – by her father, Prince Sattam al-Saud of the Saudi royal family, since September 2008.

She fell from the window of her fourth-floor apartment in the eighth arrondissement of Paris, apparently while trying to clamber into the flat next door. Although there was no obvious sign that she had been attacked, friends have suggested to the French media that she might have been trying to flee an assailant. The results of a post-mortem examination released yesterday failed to clear up the mystery. Officials said the autopsy showed that she died as a result of injuries from the fall. "The accident theory appears to have firmed up," one official said.

A French court ruled in January that Haya be restored to her mother's full custody and ordered Prince Sattam to pay child support of €10,000 (£7,800) a month. The prince rejected the ruling but agreed recently that Ms Cohen-Ahnine, who was of French-Jewish origin, could travel to Saudi Arabia to see her daughter next month.

The couple met in London in 1997. After an on-off love affair, Haya was born in November 2001. The prince allegedly refused to marry Ms Cohen-Ahnine because she was Jewish but asked her to remain as his mistress after he married his cousin.

In her book Rendez-moi ma fille ("Give me back my daughter"), she claimed that she was held captive in a palace in Riyadh after taking Haya to visit her father in 2008. She refused to leave without the little girl but, according to her account, the prince's family threatened to bring charges that she was a Muslim who had converted to Judaism – an offence punishable by death under Saudi law. She took fright and, with the help of the French embassy, escaped and returned to France.

Her lawyer said: "This was no suicide. The pain of her separation from her daughter had left its traces but she was also a great fighter, convinced that she would see her daughter again."

The journalist and author Jean-Claude Elfassi, who co-wrote Ms Cohen-Ahnine's book, criticised the French authorities for not fighting her case more strenuously. "Fate was against her," he said. "She promised her daughter the day that she left her: 'I will never abandon you'. And to her last breath, she fought for Haya."

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Pakistani wife in disputed marriage gunned down in court by her brother

 A new low for Pakistan:(

So-called honour killings by families who believe their daughters have disgraced them are increasingly common in Pakistan. But the gunning down last week of a woman by her brother, a lawyer, in front of dozens of witnesses in a packed courtroom in the bustling city of Hyderabad marks an alarming new low.

The family of 22 year-old Raheela Sehto had already made their fury at her marriage to Zulfiqar Sehto – a love match struck without their permission – abundantly clear. They reacted by filing a claim with local police that their daughter had been kidnapped by her 30-year-old husband, a life-long neighbour who had wooed Raheela over the years, although largely through clandestine mobile phone conversations.

Her uncle had tried to throttle her with a scarf at an earlier appearance at the high court in Hyderabad in July. The couple had petitioned the court for its protection and to try and have the kidnapping charges thrown out.

But Sehto, a university graduate working for the local electricity company, said they felt they had no reason to fear for their lives in court, even when in the earlier part of the morning he was sitting almost directly in front of his wife's eventual killer, Javed Iqbal Shaikh, her brother.

Shortly after the two judges had returned to their seats after a break, Shaikh, dressed in the black suit and tie of his profession, produced a gun he had smuggled into court, lunged at Raheela and shot her point-blank in the left side of the head.

"Before she fell to the ground, my wife was looking straight at me," said Sehto. The gunman, Shaikh, then tried to shoot Sehto, but was overpowered by police.

Although furious families have succeeded in killing their daughters in police custody before, it is the first time such an incident has occurred in open court.

The killer managed to evade security checks, including two sets of metal detectors and body searches, because he was one of the country's obstreperous lawyers – an entitled group that has been known to assault policemen violently.

"The lawyers, they don't like to be searched," said Amjad Shaikh, a police superintendent in Hyderabad, the main city in Pakistan's southern province of Sindh. "Security is a little bit of a problem there."

Apparently unrepentant, Shaikh gave interviews to journalists later, while in custody, saying he had "lost my mind".

"I did that in rage because she had dishonoured the family," he said to a Pakistani newspaper. Four other family members who accompanied him in court have also been charged over the killing.

"Everyone is very shocked by this because it happened in an educated family," said the police officer. "Normally, honour killings happen in the rural areas where people are not educated."

In the countryside such crimes can even be given the imprimatur of local "jirgas", informal and illegal justice systems run by communities that enforce tribal law.

The superintendent added that the involvement of the Shaikhs was also unusual, saying they are known for being "peaceful".

The Shaikhs of Sindh, originally migrants from neighbouring Punjab, tend to enjoy high levels of education, are traditionally involved in trade and are little connected with tribal custom.

According to the latest survey of violence against women by the Aurat Foundation, a rights group, there were 2,341 honour killings in 2011 in Pakistan – a 27% jump on the year before. The report also said there were more than 8,000 abductions and 3,461 rapes and gang rapes.

But the figures were just "the tip of the iceberg", it warned, saying researchers relied on those cases that were reported in the media only.

Amar Sindhu, a professor of philosophy at Sindh University and a women's rights activist, said the phenomenon was less to do with "cultural and social practices" and more to do with "the complete absence of the rule of law".

"Even in the 19th-century, the colonial authorities were able to reduce these crimes by enforcing laws when social, cultural and religious practices were just as male dominated and anti-woman as they are today," she said.

Sehto struggled to speak as he described the loss of his young wife, whom he had known for almost his entire life, growing up in the small town of Behlani.

"She was my neighbour and we went to each other's home since we were children," he said. "We began to fall in love more than 18 months ago, but they kept refusing my family's request to marry her."

Raheela agreed to elope with Sehto only after her father attempted to marry her off to a Shaikh from Punjab whom she did not know, he said.

His family has now left Behlani, and he said he will never return.

"All I want is justice, I want the court to convict Javed and his accomplices with the death penalty," he said.

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