Pakistan Day; Adityanath as UP CM; London Terror; FBI Trump Probe

What is the significance of March 23 for Pakistanis? How did Pakistan celebrate its National Day? What does the participation of friendly nations China, Saudi Arabia and Turkey in the parade mean?

World's Tallest Building Burj Khalifa Lit Up in Pakistani Colors
What message does Indian PM Modi's choice of Hindu militant priest Yogi Adityanath as Chief Minister of Uttar Pradesh, India's most populous state, send to Indian Muslims and the world? Does this election further reinforce the reasons for the partition of India as demanded by Muslims on March 23, 1940?

Who is Khalid Masood, the man alleged to have terrorized London and considered responsible for causing tragic deaths and injuries to many near the British Parliament? How is the Islamophobia industry using this incident to fan the flames of hate? Does Masood have any connection to Pakistan as alleged by some? Is he representative of Muslims and Islam?

Is the FBI investigating "coordination" between the Trump campaign and the Russians to influence US presidential elections in 2016? What does "coordination" mean? Is it active "collusion" to leak damaging Clinton emails and other info? Or simply encouraging such leaks to benefit Trump? 



Viewpoint From Overseas host Faraz Darvesh discusses these questions with Riaz Haq (www.riazhaq.com)

https://youtu.be/sKxPdYMuA-o




Related Links:

Haq's Musings

Looking Back at Lahore Resolution of  March 23, 1940

UP Elections 2017

Husain Haqqani's Shifting Loyalties

Hinduization of India

Islamophobia in the West

Trump's Appointments

Talk4Pak Youtube Channel

Talk4Pak Vimeo Channel


Views: 510

Comment by Mehmood Malik on March 25, 2017 at 6:05am
Not surprised at all at the appointment of Adityanath as CM of utter Purdesh, one extremist appointing another.
Modi has been a lifelong member of RSS, that tells me everything about this hateful man, the same man who compared the murder of thousands of Muslims in Gujarat to a dog being run over.
Comment by Riaz Haq on March 26, 2017 at 11:10am

@Mehmood: Good observation. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 26, 2017 at 1:14pm

The 712-page Google doc that proves #Muslims do condemn #terrorism | World news | The Guardian #Islamophobia
https://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2017/mar/26/muslims-condemn-terrorism-stats

It happened in history class. Heraa Hashmi, a 19-year-old American Muslim student at the University of Colorado, was supposed to be discussing the Crusades with the man sitting next to her. Within a few minutes, however, he was crusading against Islam.

“Not all Muslims are terrorists, but all terrorists are Muslims,” Hashmi’s classmate told her. What’s more, he complained, not enough Muslims were making a stand against terrorism.

Hashmi was perplexed by this analysis. Muslims are constantly denouncing atrocities that have been committed in the name of Islam. Yet many people seem to think Muslims don’t condemn terrorism enough. So Hashmi decided to put the notion to the test. Using Google spreadsheets, she made a “712-page list of Muslims condemning things with sources”, which she tweeted. The list includes everything from acts of domestic violence to 9/11.

“I wanted to show people how weak the argument [that Muslims don’t care about terrorism] is,” she explained.

Her stats struck a chord. Within 24 hours, Hashmi’s tweet had been retweeted 15,000 times. A couple of her followers volunteered to help her turn her spreadsheet into an interactive website and, within a week of the tweet, muslimscondemn.com was born. This was last November, but the website has grown considerably since then and, sadly, flickers into prominence whenever a new attack takes place.

Hashmi’s project isn’t just designed to prove that Muslims are constantly condemning terrorism; she made it to demonstrate how ridiculous it is that Muslims are constantly expected to offer apologies for terrorist acts. Muslims, notes Hashmi, are “held to a different standard than other minorities: 1.6 billion people are expected to apologise and condemn [terrorism] on behalf of a couple of dozen lunatics. It makes no sense.” After all, Hashmi, says, “I don’t view the KKK or the Westboro Baptist church or the Lord’s Resistance Army as accurate representations of Christianity. I know that they’re on the fringe. So it gets very frustrating having to defend myself and having to apologise on behalf of some crazy people.”

You can see that double standard at play in the aftermath of the London attacks. Khalid Masood, the London attacker, was born Adrian Elms in Dartford, Kent and is believed to have converted to Islam in prison. Have we heard Kent natives – hello Nigel Farage! – condemn the actions of the people born in their county? (“I hope my Kentish brothers and sisters will reach out to fellow Britons in solidarity to demonstrate that such hatred will not defeat the inherent bonhomie of the home counties?”) No, we haven’t, because that would be ridiculous. And yet Muslims have often been expected to apologise for the actions of someone on the very fringes of their community, and have done so.

Thanks to Hashmi, all these condemnations are now carefully recorded at muslimscondemn.com. So for anyone asking why more Muslims don’t denounce terrorism, you know where to go. 

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 26, 2017 at 1:55pm

Indian history scholar Audrey Truschke says the Hindu-right largely ignore the colonial history and see their history through an Indo-Islamic lens only.
“So, to contradict that narrative or make it more nuanced and complex is a problem, since their current position in the Indian cultural and political landscape rests on their reading of the past,” says Truschke. “But Aurangzeb was a complex king who had a profound impact on the political landscape of 17th- and 18th-century India. As historians, we need to avoid this presentist stance and look at the evidence before us.”

A leading scholar of South Asian cultural and intellectual history, Truschke has just published a book on one of the most hated figures in Indian history, the last of six great kings of the powerful Mughal dynasty, whose empire stretched across the Indian subcontinent during the heyday of Muslim rule in the region from the 16th to 18th centuries.

Since this year’s publication of Aurangzeb: The Man and the Myth, Truschke has been targeted by Hindu-nationalists supporting the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and by other groups, whose current anti-Muslim sentiment traces back to medieval times, when Muslims started expanding into the region.

“My Twitter account is a nightmare right now,” Truschke says. “It hasn’t been fun.”

The popular view in today’s India is that, like other Mughal kings who were hostile to Indian languages, religions and culture, Aurangzeb was a Hindu-despising Islamist fanatic who destroyed Hindu and Jain temples and imposed a military tax on most non-Muslims.

But Truschke, one of the few living scholars who reads pre-modern Persian, Sanskrit and Hindi, had in a prior book argued that the Mughal courts were deeply interested in Indian thinkers and ideas, with elites and intellectuals engaging across cultures. In researching that monograph, Culture of Encounters: Sanskrit at the Mughal Court (2016), she was the first scholar to study texts in Sanskrit and Persian in exploring the courtly life of the Mughals.

In her latest work, she paints a much more nuanced picture of Aurangzeb, showing how he also protected most Hindu and Jain temples and increased the Hindu share in the Mughal nobility. Rather than hatred of Hindus driving his decisions, Truschke says, more likely Aurangzeb was guided by political reprisals and other practical considerations of rule, along with morality concerns, and a thirst for power and expansion.

That interpretation hasn’t sat well with some factions in India, but Truschke argues that as an academic historian, her project wasn’t to play political football with Aurangzeb to satisfy current agendas. It was to recapture the world of the sixth Mughal king, which operated according to quite different norms and ideas.

“My book looks at Aurangzeb as part of an Indian dynasty in all its complexities and nuances. I don’t ask if he was good or bad; that’s not an interesting historical question,” says Truschke. “I look at him with a purely empirical view, and that has been widely read by Hindu-nationalists as an apology for his Muslim atrocities.”

Truschke says that the current ethno-religious tensions in India were stoked during the British colonial period, when Britain benefitted by pitting Hindus and Muslims against each another while portraying themselves as neutral saviors who could keep ancient religious conflicts at bay.

Modern Hindu-nationalists, meanwhile, saw the political value in perpetuating the conflict and have done so with great success.

https://www.newark.rutgers.edu/news/historian-finds-herself-center-... 

Comment by Riaz Haq on March 27, 2017 at 8:14am

Noam Chomsky: Is It Fair to Worry About #Trump Staging a False Flag #Terrorist Attack? @alternet

http://www.alternet.org/noam-chomsky-it-fair-worry-about-trump-stag...

Chomsky warns of scapegoating vulnerable people: "That can turn out to be very ugly."

In order to maintain his popularity, the Trump administration will have to try to find some means of rallying the support and changing the discourse from the policies that they are carrying out, which are basically a wrecking ball to something else. Maybe scapegoating, saying, "Well, I'm sorry, I can't bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it." And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, terrorists, Muslims and elitists, whoever it may be. And that can turn out to be very ugly. 

I think that we shouldn't put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly.

Comment by Mehmood Malik on March 28, 2017 at 12:00pm
People in the media regularly ask is Islam a peaceful religion, what they should be asking is , is Christianity a religion of peace bearing in mind our Christian brothers have been, by far, the greatest killers of humanity.From the time of the first Christian religious crusades to the present time, they have committed genicides in every corner of the world against the indigenous populations of Australia, North America, South America, Africa, Asia.
They like nothing better then going to war, they have constantly been at war throughput the whole of their history , if they are not committing genicides in far flung places then they always find a reason to fight amongst themselves. The biggest muderers over the last hundred years have been democratically elected Western European or North American Christian leaders...Hitler, Mosaliny, Johnson, Bush Blair to name a few.
Comment by Mehmood Malik on March 28, 2017 at 12:08pm
They have gifted the world nuclear holacousts in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, they have propped up apartheid regimes in South Africa and Israel and yet, according to the mainstream media its the Muslims who are the terrorists.
Comment by Riaz Haq on March 31, 2017 at 10:51am

#India state to give life sentences for #cow slaughter @AJENews. #GaurakshaACT #Modi #BJP #Gujarat

http://www.aljazeera.com/news/2017/03/india-state-give-life-sentenc...

Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's home state of Gujarat on Friday increased the punishment for cow slaughter from seven years to life imprisonment as Hindu hardliners push for tougher protections for the holy animal. 

Under the stiffened penalties passed by Gujarat's state assembly, anyone caught transporting cows for slaughter could also face up to 10 years in jail. 

Cows are considered sacred in Hindu-majority India, and their slaughter is illegal in most states. 

"A cow is not an animal. It is symbol of universal life," Gujarat Law Minister Pradipsinh Jadeja told the state's assembly. 

"Anybody who does not spare the cow, the government will not spare him." 


The amendment still needs the approval of the state governor - a formality all but assured - before becoming law. 

Millions from India's huge minority populations - including Muslims, Christians and lower-caste Hindus - eat beef, although it is not widely available. 

But Modi's ruling right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party, which recently won India's largest state Uttar Pradesh in a landslide, has long campaigned for the protection of cows. 

The BJP's new chief minister in Uttar Pradesh, Yogi Adityanath, has launched a crackdown on abattoirs since taking office in March that has ground the state's meat industry to a halt. 

Hindu activists have long accused the Muslim-dominated meat industry of covering up the slaughter of cows and passing off the meat as buffalo, which are not revered as holy. 

Cow slaughter is a hot-button issue in India, where even rumours of cows being transported can spark murderous reprisals and religious riots. 

Squads of "cow protection" vigilantes are known to roam highways inspecting livestock trucks for any trace of the animal. 

In 2015, a 50-year-old Muslim man accused of eating beef was dragged from his home and beaten to death by a mob. Police later said it was mutton.

Comment by Mehmood Malik on April 1, 2017 at 2:09pm
India is becoming more intolerant day by day since this terrorist Modi became prime minister of the country, as Riaz Saab has mentioned a Muslim man was beaten to death by a mob of hindutva fanatics on the mare rumour of eating beef, and yet India is the largest exporter of beef and Hindu members of parliament belonging to the BJP are at the heart of this trade and earning huge amounts of money from it.
Comment by Riaz Haq on April 2, 2017 at 8:18am

Fears in #India over spread of '#Taliban-like' moral policing amid crackdown on meat and romance http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/04/02/fears-india-spread-talib... … via @telegraphnews

Controversial “anti-Romeo” squads to police and control young couples in public are spreading across India after they were introduced by the firebrand Hindu leader of the country’s largest state, Uttar Pradesh.

The squads of plain-clothed and uniformed police officers have been accused of “Taliban-like" moral policing by patrolling public spaces to prevent men from loitering near women. The authorities claim they are only trying to protect women from sexual harassment.

The patrols were launched just over a week ago on the orders of Yogi Adityanath, 44, a right-wing Hindu monk repeatedly accused of fanning religious tensions and who was jailed for 15 days in 2007 on charges of inciting riots, but who now rules a state of over 200 million people.

The idea has since spread to Jharkhand, north-east India, where reports emerged that the squads had “rounded up some young men and slapped them” for being found too close to women-only colleges.

In cities across Uttar Pradesh local parks, where many young couples traditionally find privacy, are said to have emptied. 

“Between 300 and 400 couples visit the park every day, but since 21 March, only 5 or 10 have showed up,” Atul Kumar, a ticket seller at a park in Ghaziabad, told the Hindustan Times, claiming to have seen nine young men rounded up for no reason.

On Monday, 50 couples were apprehended for “immoral activities” after police raided two hotels in Ghaziabad.

“India is going through a very conservative and orthodox, almost Stone Age, where we can’t accept young boys and girls, above the age of 18, may freely choose who they want to be with,” said Shehzad Poonawalla, a lawyer and official with the opposition Congress party.

“How is this any different from Taliban culture?”

Poonawalla is one of many Indians who fear the squads form part of a wider right-wing Hindu political agenda by the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party who appointed Adityanath despite his controversial past.

The move coincides with a widespread crackdown on Uttar Pradesh slaughterhouses to protect cows, considered sacred animals by India’s Hindu majority.

Most butchers are Muslims and many suspect that they are being unfairly targeted as they face the loss of their livelihoods.

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