USA’s freedom of expression doesn’t apply to muslims. A courageous man who was imprisoned for speaking the truth.
Tarek Mehanna: punished for speaking truth to power
If Mehanna is a terrorist conspirator for advocating resistance to US military occupation, then so am I, a Marine veteran
The real criminals in the Tarek Mehanna case
Read the eloquent statement of American Born Tarek Mehanna at his sentencing.
For the pathetic decisions by Lowe’s Home Improvement and for the hate mongers and bigots like Christian Florida Family Association, there are others who reject their message of bigotry. People like U.S. Congressman Keith Ellison, actress Mia Farrow, California state Senator Ted Lieu, mogul Russell Simmons and many others step up and lead through their words and actions.
US conservatives force firm to pull pro-Muslim ad
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Keith Ellison, one of only two Muslim congressmen, also signed the petition.“The success of All-American Muslim shows how ready the country is to learn about Muslims as Americans,” he said in a statement.
“This probably makes hate-mongers uncomfortable — as they should be,” Mr Ellison, a Democrat who site in the House of Representatives for a Minnesota district.
The petition had a positive impact and Tuesday Russell Simmons, a hip-hop Mogul and a practicing Buddhist, said he had bought spots for the next week’s show. He said he wanted to buy time for this week’s show as well but it was sold out.
“Just purchased remaining spots for #allamericanmuslim for next week The show is now sold out! keep your money Lowe’s and we will keep ours,” Mr Simmons tweeted.
Famous American actress, singer, humanitarian, and fashion model, Mia Farrow asked her followers to join her in a boycott of the home improvement chain, tweeting: “Big effort on Twitter to hit Lowe’s where it hurts, Let’s all boycott Lowe’s.”
California state Senator Ted Lieu called the Lowe’s ad pull, “stunning bigotry.”
“I call on Lowe’s to rescind its action and apologise to Americans who are Muslim. If Lowe’s continues its religious bigotry, I will encourage boycotts of Lowe’s and look into legislative remedies,” he wrote.
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Indian bomb probes wrongly target Muslims: judge
A recently retired judge from the Indian Supreme Court has launched a blistering attack on the country’s police, accusing them of falsely implicating local Muslims in bomb attacks.
Markandey Katju, who retired from the top court last month, said Indian police were poorly trained in forensic investigations which meant they were unable to crack terror attack cases.
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Training and equipment to conduct scientific investigations “is absent in India so it is done by suspicion. Some bomb blast takes place, they catch hold of the local Muslims and young people and implicate them,” he added.
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In the most recent miscarriage of justice highlighted in the Indian media, Imran Kirmani, a Kashmiri Muslim, was released after four and half years in jail after being falsely accused of plotting a major terror strike in 2006.
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Glenn Greenwald lays bare the double standards of American media. See transcipt/video @
Glenn Greenwald: Norway Attacks Expose U.S. Media’s Double Standard on “Terrorism”
Some quotes,
And it just struck me that when we think that Muslims are responsible for violence aimed at Western nations, it receives a huge amount of attention in the American media, and yet when the United States brings violence on that level to Muslim countries, kills an equal number of civilians, dozens of people killed by drone attacks and the like, and tons of people killed that way over Afghanistan over the past decade, it barely registers. I mean, an attack like this, this level of death in Iraq, for example, or Afghanistan, would barely register on the media scale.
Bush official + Fox News,
Well, unsurprisingly, if you combine a Bush terrorism official with Fox News, you’re going to get what you got there, which is too many factually false statements to even count. But I’ll just highlight a couple of them.
On the propaganda against Muslims
But the idea that Islamic terrorism is some sort of unique threat is completely belied by the E.U.’s own statistic. This idea of equating Muslims with terrorism is an incredibly propagandistic and deceitful term. The idea is to suggest that, as several of your guests were saying, that Islam is some sort of existential threat to Western civilization, to Europe and the like, and it’s propagated with this myth that terrorism is an Islamic problem. And that’s why the idea that the establishment media in the United States and in political circles equates terrorism, as a matter of definition, with violence by Muslims is so problematic, because it promotes this lie that terrorism is a function of Islamic ideology.
The lack of scrutiny of the inspiration for these murderers
That you would think that—you would think that in response to this attack, we would end up doing things like, for example, profiling Nordic males or tall, blond Americans, tall, blond, Nordic-looking people at airports, or would start to, for example, engage in surveillance on the communications of people who belong to right-wing groups in Europe, or you look at the people who inspire these attacks, people like Robert Spencer or Pamela Geller, people who engage in this sort of strident anti-Muslim commentary who inspired this individual.
Peter King Hearings & Islamophobia under the garb of terrorism hearings
And you would expect that Peter King’s hearings, if he were really interested in the threat of violence or terrorism, would be expanded to include what we now know is a very real threat, and yet it isn’t, which simply underscores that those hearings, like so many of these measures done in the name of terrorism, is really just a vehicle for demonizing Muslims, restricting their rights, subjecting them to increased scrutiny. It’s about Islamophobia and not about terrorism.
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And yet, the minute that it turned out that the perpetrator wasn’t Muslim, but instead was this right-wing figure, the exact opposite view arose, which is, “Oh, his views and associations aren’t relevant. It’s not fair to attribute or to blame people who share his views or who inspired him with these acts.” And it got depicted as being this sort of individual crazy person with no broader political meaning, and media interest disappeared. It’s exactly the opposite of how it’s treated when violence is undertaken by someone who’s Muslim.
Sahih Muslim
Book 041, Number 6904:
Thauban reported that Allah’s Messenger (may peace be upon him) said: Allah drew the ends of the world near one another for my sake. And I have seen its eastern and western ends. And the dominion of my Ummah would reach those ends which have been drawn near me and I have been granted the red and the white treasure and I begged my Lord for my Ummah that it should not be destroyed because of famine, nor be dominated by an enemy who is not amongst them to take their lives and destroy them root and branch, and my Lord said: Muhammad, whenever I make a decision, there is none to change it. Well, I grant you for your Ummah that it would not be destroyed by famine and it would not be dominated by an enemy who would not be amongst it and would take their lives and destroy them root and branch even if all the people from the different parts of the world join hands together (for this purpose), but it would be from amongst them, viz. your Ummah, that some people would kill the others or imprison the others.
(English Translation: Abdul Hamid Siddiqui)
Bobbysocks Obama and Clinton have managed an even weirder somersault. Having originally supported the “stable” dictatorships of the Middle East – when they should have stood by the forces of democracy – they decided to support civilian calls for democracy in the Arab world at a time when the Arabs were so utterly disenchanted with the West’s hypocrisy that they didn’t want America on their side. “The Americans interfered in our country for 30 years under Mubarak, supporting his regime, arming his soldiers,” an Egyptian student told me in Tahrir Square last week. “Now we would be grateful if they stopped interfering on our side.” At the end of the week, I heard identical voices in Bahrain. “We are getting shot by American weapons fired by American-trained Bahraini soldiers with American-made tanks,” a medical orderly told me on Friday. “And now Obama wants to be on our side?”
Source: Robert Fisk: These are secular popular revolts – yet everyone is blaming religion
A nice read I came across on OnIslam.net
Read full article @ Living a Single Life
By Fatimah Asmaal
Snippet
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Therefore, we also have to remember that just as marriage is an integral part of faith, so is exercising trust in and patience with the decree of Allah, All-Wise. We have to realize that — ultimately — if we are still unmarried, it is simply because Almighty Allah has willed that we be single at this point in time. We have to opt for one of two choices: to lose sleep over it, beat ourselves up everyday, and feel really sorry for ourselves, or to realize that the time we have in our hands is a gift from our Lord and a trust from Him that should not to be wasted in counterproductive thoughts and futile tears and fears.Having come to grasp the value of time, we have to start spending it in the most beneficial way.
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“It is important that the Americans know and admit the true reasons for the hatred against them. It is important because until they do they will not be able to come up with any solution to the present costly war.”
Previoulsy I had shared some thoughts on the question “Why do they hate US?” in this post. Dr. Mahatir Mohamad (the former Prime Minister of Malaysia) shares his thoughts on the same issue. Read about it in this post on his blog “I DON’T KNOW WHY THEY HATE US”.
