Tag Archives: Muslims

Muslim Saves Jews In Paris Kosher Store

Lassana Bathily, Muslim employee of Paris kosher deli. Photo by Screengrab from Buzzfeed
One of the unsung heroes after Friday’s hostage crisis at a kosher supermarket in eastern Paris was a Muslim employee, who hid shoppers in a basement walk-in freezer while terrorists seized hostages just upstairs.

The shop was busy on a Friday as Jewish customers bought specialties for the Sabbath, which began at sunset that night. But its clientele was as diverse as the neighborhood where it sat: Twenty-five-year-old French Muslim Malik Zadi told The Washington Post that “It’s a kosher store, but not only Jews go there. I go there… In this neighborhood, there are Muslims, Jews, Christians.”

Four people were killed Friday when the terrorist Amedy Coulibaly took several hostages inside a Kosher market in Paris, but that number may well have been higher were it not for a quick-thinking employee of the market named Lassana Bathily.

Bathily, a 24-year-old Muslim from Mali, was working in the store in the Porte de Vincennes neighborhood when the Islamist gunman burst in.

As panic ensued, up to 15 customers in the store hurried down to the store basement, when Bathily had an idea.

“When they ran down, I opened the door [to the freezer],” he told France’s BFMTV.

He quickly shut off the freezer and switched off its light. As he closed the door to shelter the customers inside, he told them,“Stay calm here. I’m going out.”

Eventually police raided the market, killing Coulibaly. As the hostages were freed from the freezer, they had a few words of thanks for Bathily. “They congratulated me,” he told BFMTV.

ON SOCIAL MEDIA, BATHILY WAS BEING PRAISED AS A HERO FOR HIS ACTIONS.

France’s Jewish Defense League thanked Lassana Bathilyby name on Twitter, saying he “saved many Jewish lives by hiding them in the cold room,” and using the hashtag“ #JewsAndArabsRefuseToBeEnemies.”

I Am Not Charlie. I Am Ahmed!

Lest we forget, there are also Muslims who wear “white hats.” The majority are good, productive and loyal citizens.

#JeSuisAhmed Reveals The Hero Of The Paris Shooting Everyone Needs To Know

In the hours following the deadly attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, much of the public support has been directed toward the victims that worked for the magazine, like editor-in-chief Stéphane Charbonnier, 76-year-old cartoonist Jean Cabut and economist Bernard Maris.
… but it’s equally important to remember that the lives of the victims extended beyond the confines of the magazine.
Two of those killed, 42-year-old Ahmed Merabet and 49-year-old Franck Brinsolaro, were police officers — the very people tasked with protecting Charlie Hebdo‘s staff. Merabet’s death was captured on film during a French television broadcast and shared quickly across social media. Two masked gunmen can be seen approaching him, ignoring his pleas to spare his life.
Who Was He? As information about the victims began to filter out, the world learned that Merabet worked at a police station in Paris’ 11th Arrondissement, near the location of Charlie Hebdo‘s offices. Reports also emerged that Merabet was himself Muslim.

He gave his life to protect Charlie Hebdo‘s right to ridicule his religion, a powerful fact that has now become a trending hashtag on Twitter

Merabet’s Sacrifice Matters: Each of the 12 victims deserves equal remembrance and respect. But given the Islamophobic backlash that has already ripped through France — several mosques were vandalized overnight, and many fear that the Charlie Hebdo attack is to blame — the country is in a dangerous place when it comes to anti-Muslim sentiment.

Instead of assuming that everyone who practices Islam is tied to the extremists who carried out Wednesday’s violence, we would do well to remember that that vast majority are, in fact, much closer to Ahmed Merabet.

Asking Muslims To Condemn Terrorism Must Stop

There’s a certain ritual that each and every one of the world’s billion-plus Muslims, especially those living in Western countries, is expected to go through immediately following any incident of violence involving a Muslim perpetrator. It’s a ritual that is continuing now with the Sydney hostage crisis, in which a deranged self-styled sheikh named Man Haron Monis took several people hostage in a downtown café.
Here is what Muslims and Muslim organizations are expected to say: “As a Muslim, I condemn this attack and terrorism in any form.”
This expectation we place on Muslims, to be absolutely clear, is Islamophobic and bigoted. The denunciation is a form of apology: an apology for Islam and for Muslims.

The implication is that every Muslim is under suspicion of being sympathetic to terrorism unless he or she explicitly says otherwise. The implication is also that any crime committed by a Muslim is the responsibility of all Muslims simply by virtue of their shared religion.

This sort of thinking — blaming an entire group for the actions of a few individuals, assuming the worst about a person just because of their identity — is the very definition of bigotry.

It is time for that ritual to end: non-Muslims in all countries, and today especially those in Australia, should finally take on the correct assumption that Muslims hate terrorism just as much as they do, and cease expecting Muslims to prove their innocence just because of their faith.

Bigoted assumptions are the only plausible reason for this ritual to exist, which means that maintaining the ritual is maintaining bigotry. Otherwise, we wouldn’t expect Muslims to condemn Haron Monis — who is clearly a crazy person who has no affiliations with formal religious groups — any more than we would expect Christians to condemn Timothy McVeigh. Similarly, if someone blames all Jews for the act of, say, extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank, we immediately and correctly reject that position as prejudiced. We understand that such an accusation is hateful and wrong — but not when it is applied to Muslims.

This is, quite literally, a different set of standards that we apply only to Muslims. Hend Amry, who is Libyan-American, brilliantly satirized this expectation with this tweet, highlighting the arbitrary expectations about what Muslims are and are not expected to condemn:

Hend @LibyaLibertyAs a Muslim, I condemn acts of sexual assault following time spent as a self-proclaimed spiritual healer specializing in black magic.10:50 AM – 15 Dec 2014

This ritual began shortly after September 2001. American Muslims, as well as Muslims in other Western countries, feared that they could be victims to a public backlash against people of their religion. While the short-term need to guard against a backlash was real, that moment has passed, and the ritual’s persistence is perpetuating Islamophobia rather than reducing it, by constantly reminding us of our assumption that Muslims are guilty until proven innocent.
The media has played a significant role in maintaining this ritual and thus the prejudiced ideas behind it. Yes, that includes openly Islamophobic cable news hosts like those in the US. But it also includes even well-intentioned media outlets and reporters who broadcast Muslims’ and Muslim organizations’ condemnation of acts of extremist violence, like the hostage crisis in Sydney.
There is no question that this coverage is explicitly and earnestly designed to combat Islamophobia and promote equal treatment of Muslims. No question. All the same, this coverage ends up cementing the ritual condemnation as a necessary act, and thus cementing as well the racist implications of that ritual.

By treating it as news every time, the media is reminding its readers and viewers that Muslims are held to a different standard; it is implicitly if unintentionally reiterating the idea that they are guilty until proven innocent, that maybe there is something to the idea of collective Muslim responsibility for lone criminals who happen to share their religion.

Instead, we should treat the assumptions that compel this ritual — that Muslims bear collective responsibility, that they are presumed terrorist-sympathizers until proven otherwise — as flatly bigoted ideas with no place in our society. There is no legitimate reason for Muslim groups to need to condemn Haron Monis, nor is there any legitimate reason to treat those condemnations as news. So we should stop.
We should treat people like Haron Monis as what he is: a deranged lunatic. And we should treat Muslims as what they are: normal people who of course reject terrorism, rather than as a lesser form of humanity that is expected to reject violence every time it happens.

Myanmar Plans To Eradicate Rohingya Identity

Authorities sealed off villages in Myanmar’s only Muslim-majority region and in some cases beat and arrested people who refused to register with immigration officials, in what may be the most aggressive effort yet to force Rohingya to indicate they are illegal migrants from neighboring Bangladesh.

Immigration officials, border guards and members of the illegal-alien task force in the northern tip of Rakhine state — home to 90 percent of the country’s 1.3 million Rohingya — this year, in addition to questions about marriages, deaths and births, people were classified by ethnicity.

Residents said those who refused to take part suffered the consequences.

“We are trapped,” Khin Maung Win said last week. He said authorities started setting up police checkpoints outside his village, Kyee Kan Pyin, in mid-September, preventing people from leaving even to shop for food in local markets, work in surrounding paddies or take children to school.

“If we don’t have letters and paperwork showing we took part — that we are Bengali — we can’t leave,” he said.
Chris Lewa of the Arakan Project, which has been advocating on behalf of the Rohingya for more than a decade, said residents reported incidents of violence and abuse in at least 30 village tracts from June to late September.
Most worrying to many, the government has largely stood by as Buddhist extremists have targeted Rohingya, sometimes with machetes and bamboo clubs, saying they pose a threat to the country’s culture and traditions.
Denied citizenship by national law, members of the religious minority are effectively stateless. They feel they are being systematically erased.
Almost all Rohingya were excluded from a U.N.-funded nationwide census earlier this year, the first in three decades, because they did not want to register as Bengalis. And Thein Sein is considering a“Rakhine Action Plan” that would make people who identify themselves as Rohingya not only ineligible for citizenship but candidates for detainment and possible deportation.
Most Rohingya have lived under apartheid-like conditions in northern Rakhine for decades, with limited access to adequate health care, education and jobs, as well as restrictions on travel and the right to practice their faith.
In 2012, Buddhist extremists killed up to 280 people and displaced tens of thousands of others. About 140,000 people of those forced from their homes continue to languish in crowded displacement camps further south, outside Sittwe, the Rakhine state capital.
Many villages were placed under lockdown, with police checkpoints set up to make sure only those who have cooperated could leave, more than a dozen residents confirmed in telephone interviews with The Associated Press.

In other villages, the names of influential residents were posted on community boards with verbal warnings that they face up to two years in jail if they fail to convince others to take part in the registration process, Lewa said. Other Rohingya say officials forced them to sign the papers at gunpoint, or threatened that they would end up in camps like those outside Sittwe if they didn’t comply, she said. In some cases residents say authorities have shown up after midnight and broken down doors to catch residents by surprise and pressure them to hand over family lists.

Villagers also have been kicked and beaten with clubs and arrested for refusing to take part, according to Lewa and residents interviewed by the AP.

Rohingya said they didn’t want to register family members because they worry the information might be used to deny them citizenship.

As international pressure mounts to end abuses against Rohingya, the government has agreed to provide citizenship to anyone who qualifies. But many Rohingya say they cannot meet the requirements, which include submitting documents proving that their families have been in Myanmar for at least three generations. And under the plan Thein Sein is considering, even that would not be enough for people who insist on calling themselves Rohingya rather than Bengali.

The Islamic Army Of Frederick II

Archeologists and historians are shedding new light on how medieval Holy Roman emperor Frederick II created an Islamic army to attack the pope. The German Historical Institute in Rome – together with universities of Foggia (Italy), Trier and Kiel (both in Germany) are investigating the southern Italian city of Lucera which, in the 13th century, was a major centre of Islamic culture and learning– and the cause of considerable papal anger.
The story started in 1222 when emperor Frederick II, faced with a Muslim rebellion in Sicily, started deporting Sicilian Muslims to the Lucera area of south-east Italy. By 1244, he had transferred up to 20,000 people – virtually entire Muslim population of Sicily. However, in order to keep the deportees loyal, he treated them well in their new homes and allowed mosques and an Islamic university to be built, and gave them land.
The pope – just 130 miles to the north-west – was furious and declared Frederick a heretic.  Soon war was raging between emperor and pope – and Frederick used his muslim Sicilian deportees as a purpose – made army to secure initial victory. Indeed it is probable that creating a Muslim army against the pope had been the ulterior motive behind the deportation in the first place.
The investigations so far suggest that Frederick settled his Sicilian Muslims in and around the city of Lucera – not inside town’s vast castle as had been thought until now. Settling them around the city would almost certainly have necessitated the forced removal of some of the pre-existing Christian communities, including the local bishop – a process which angered the pope still further.

Mexican Drug Cartels Are Worse Than ISIL

Western Obsession With The Islamic State Is Fueled More By Bigotry Than Any Genuine Assessment Of Risk Or Atrocities

The horrific rampage of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) has captured the world’s attention. Many Western commentators have characterized ISIL’s crimes as unique, no longer practiced anywhere else in the civilized world. They argue that the group’s barbarism is intrinsically Islamic, a product of the aggressive and archaic worldview that dominates the Muslim world. The ignorance of these claims is stunning.
While there are other organized groups whose depravity and threat to the United States far surpasses that of ISIL, none has engendered the same kind of collective indignation and hysteria. This raises a question: Are Americans primarily concerned with ISIL’s atrocities or with the fact that Muslims are committing these crimes?
For example, even as the U.S. media and policymakers radically inflate ISIL’s threat to the Middle East and United States, most Americans appear to be unaware of the scale of the atrocities committed by Mexican drug cartels and the threat they pose to the United States.

CARTELS VERSUS ISIL

A recent United Nations report estimated nearly 9,000 civilians have been killed and 17,386 wounded in Iraq in 2014, more than half since ISIL fighters seized large parts on northern Iraq in June. It is likely that the group is responsible another several thousand deaths in Syria. To be sure, these numbers are staggering.

But in 2013 drug cartels murdered more than 16,000 people in Mexico alone, and another 60,000 from 2006 to 2012 — a rate of more than one killing every half hour for the last seven years. What is worse, these are estimates from the Mexican government, which is known to deflate the actual death toll by about 50 percent.

Statistics alone do not convey the depravity and threat of the cartels.

They carry out hundreds of beheadings every year. In addition to decapitations, the cartels are known to dismember and otherwise mutilate the corpses of their victims — displaying piles of bodies prominently in towns to terrorize the public into compliance. They routinely target women and children to further intimidate communities. Like ISIL, the cartels use social media to post graphic images of their atrocious crimes.

The narcos also recruit child soldiers, molding boys as young as 11 into assassins or sending them on suicide missions during armed confrontations with Mexico’s army. They kidnap tens of thousands of children every year to use as drug mules or prostitutes or to simply kill and harvest their organs for sale on the black market. Those who dare to call for reforms often end up dead.

In September, with the apparent assistance of local police, cartels kidnapped and massacred 43 students at a teaching college near the Mexican town ofIguala in response to student protests. A search in the area for the students has uncovered a number of mass graves containing mutilated bodies burned almost beyond recognition, but none of the remains have been confirmed to be of the students.

While the Islamic militants have killed a handful of journalists, the cartels murdered as many as 57 since 2006 for reporting on cartel crimes or exposing government complicity with the criminals. Many of Mexico’s media have been effectively silenced by intimidation or bribes.
These censorship activities extend beyond professional media, with narcos tracking down and murdering ordinary citizens who criticize them on the Internet, leaving their naked and disemboweled corpses hanging in public squares.
Yet American intellectuals such as Sam Harris appear to be more outraged when Muslims protest or issue threats in response to blasphemous or anti-Muslim hate speech than when cartels murder dozens of journalists and systematically co-opt an entire country’s media.
Similarly, Westerners across various political spectrums were outraged when ISIL seized 1,500 Yazidi women, committing sexual violence against the captives and using them as slaves. Here again, the cartels’ capture and trafficking of women dwarfs ISIL’s crimes. Narcos hold tens of thousands of Mexican citizens as slaves for their various enterprises and systematically use rape as a weapon of war.
U.S. media have especially hyped ISIL’s violence against Americans. This summer ISIL beheaded two Americans and has warned about executing a third; additionally, one U.S. Marine has died in efforts to combat the group. By contrast, the cartels killed 293 Americans in Mexico from 2007 to 2010 and have repeatedly attacked U.S. consulates in Mexico. While ISIL’s beheadings are no doubt outrageous, the cartels tortured, dismembered and then cooked one of the Americans they captured — possibly eating him or feeding him to dogs.
The US government cannot formulate an effective response to the narcos’ severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the US military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad.
The cartels’ atrocities are not restricted to the Mexican side of the border. From 2006 to 2010 as many as 5,700 Americans were killed in the U.S. by cartel-fueled drug violence. By contrast, 2,937 people were killed in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Over the last decade, some 2,349 Americans were killed in Afghanistan, and 4,487 Americans died in Iraq. In four years the cartels have managed to cause the deaths of more Americans than during 9/11 or either of those wars.
Barack Obama’s administration claims ISIL poses a severe threat to U.S. interests and national security. However, the militants were primarily concerned with seizing and holding territory in Iraq and Syria until the U.S. began targeting them. Even now, while they have called for lone wolves to carry out attacks on targets in the United States, so far those arrested in connection to ISIL have been trying to go and fight abroad rather than plotting domestic attacks. To the extent ISIL wants to kill Americans, its primary tactic has been to try to lure U.S. troops to its turf by publicly executing citizens they already hold hostage.

In fact, several U.S. intelligence officials have asserted that ISIL poses no credible threat to the United States homeland.

However, the same cannot be said of the cartels.

Narcos have infiltrated at least 3,000 U.S. cities and are recruiting many Americans, including U.S. troops and law enforcement officers, to their organizations. They have an increasingly sophisticated and robust foundation in the U.S., with Mexican cartels now controlling more than 80 percent of the illicit drug trade in the United States and their top agents deployed to virtually every major metropolitan area. There are no realistic assessments indicating that ISIL could achieve a similar level of penetration in the United States.

EXPLAINING THE DISSONANCE

It is clear that the anti-ISIL campaign is not driven by the group’s relative threat to the United States or the scale or inhumane nature of their atrocities. If these were the primary considerations, the public would be far more terrified of and outraged by the narcos. Perhaps the U.S. would be mobilizing 50 nations to purge Mexico’s Sinaloa cartel rather than shielding it from prosecution, helping it polish off its rivals or even move drugs into the United States.

Some may argue that despite the asymmetries, the cartels are less of a threat than ISIL because ISIL is unified around an ideology, which is antithetical to the prevailing international order, while the cartels are concerned primarily with money. This is not true.

A good deal of the cartels’ violence is perpetrated ritualistically as part of their religion, which is centered, quite literally, on the worship of death. The narcosbuild and support churches all across Mexico to perpetuate their eschatology. One of the cartels, the Knights Templar (whose name evokes religious warfare), even boasts about its leader’s death and resurrection. When cartel members are killed, they are buried in lavish mausoleums, regarded as martyrs and commemorated in popular songs glorifying their exploits in all their brutality. Many of their members view the “martyrs” as heroes who diedresisting an international order that exploits Latin America and fighting the feckless governments that enable it. The cartels see their role as compensating for state failures in governance. The narco gospel, which derives fromCatholicism, is swiftly making inroads in the United States and Central America. In short, the cartels’ ideological disposition is no less pronounced than ISIL’s, if not worse.

Unfortunately, the U.S. government cannot formulate an effective response to these much more severe threats because the American public is far too busy disparaging Islam while the U.S. military kills Arabs and Muslims abroad. One thing is certain: America’s obsession with ISIL is fueled by Islamophobia rather than any empirical realities.
Musa al-Gharbi is an instructor in the Department of Government and Public Service at the University of Arizona, and an affiliate of the Southwest Initiative for the Study of Middle East Conflicts (SISMEC). #CrimesAgainstHumanity   #DAESH

Muslim Hate In Australia

This Social Experiment is proof that hate against Muslims is not welcome in Australia. Almost every person interfered to stop the hate filled attacks. Truly inspirational.

There is no doubt Islamophobia occurs in Australia (as we’ve already seen countless times), whether promoted by the media, politicians or the rare bigoted inidividual – however after shooting this experiment we are certain that the Australian public do not welcome hate against Muslims and it must be stopped.

Video made by Macquarie University Muslim students Association for Islamic Awareness Week 2014 “iSlamPhobia”.

The Muslims Of The Central African Republic

This man is from Central Africa. Whenever his mosque gets attacked, he would gather all the Quran pages to save them.

He was killed by a mob armed with knives earlier this year, simply for being Muslim. May Allah give him Jannah.

Please pray for the Muslims in the Central African Republic.

For those of you who are interested in keeping abreast of the crimes against humanity that is being perpetrated against our Muslim brothers and sisters in the Central African Republic (CAR) >>>

This is their FaceBook page: Cries Of CAR

This is their twitter account: Cries Of CAR

لأولئك الذين يرغبون في مواكبة الجرائم ضد الإنسانية التي ترتكب ضد إخواننا وأخواتنا المسلمين في جمهورية أفريقيا الوسطى (CAR)

هذه هي صفحة الفيسبوك الخاصة بهم
Cries Of CAR

هذا هو حساب على تويتر 
Cries Of CAR