Jihate on Women in Kashmir

Kashmir has the highest percentage 11.6 of sexual violence in comparison to other conflict areas across the globe, a sample survey by an international humanitarian organisation, Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF), has revealed in its latest report.

 

The report titled “Kashmir: Violence and Mental Health” said that its respondents in two medical blocks — Kralpora in north-western Kashmir district of Kupwara and Beerwah in central Kashmir district of Budgam — reported “suffering direct violations of their modesty and/or witnessing such acts since 1989.”

 

The survey said: “A rather high percentage of respondents (11.6 per cent) in comparison to other conflict areas said they know of terror-related rape incidents since 1989. Of them, more than one in 10 were raped in the past three months.” The 30-page survey compiled in November and released on December 21 noted: “It is possible that the actual prevalence is higher as many people regard it a taboo to talk about sex-related issues.” The survey was, however, silent on which of the two “warring parties” (militants and Indian army) are more responsible for committing this kind of violence.

 

J&K Health and Medical Education Secretary, KB Jandial, when asked to comment, said: “Though I have not seen the report, the fact is that it is a normal practice that whenever security forces are allegedly involved in any wrongdoing, the matters are reported and the people protest. Since these rape cases were not reported, they appear to have been committed by militants. The people are afraid to speak against militants,” Jandial said.

 

The MSF that had started its psycho-social programme in August 2000 drew comparisons with other conflict-hit areas. “The study found that much higher number of people experienced sexual violence in J&K compared to findings in other areas: Sierra Leone (2 per cent), Sri Lanka (2 per cent), Chechnya (0 per cent) and Ingushetia (0.1 per cent).”

http://www.hindustantimes.com/news/181_1877848,000900010002.htm?headline=Study~finds~alarming~sexual~violence~in~J&K

Pope in Turkey: A Reluctant State Guest

On Friday Pope Benedict XVI arrived back in Rome following a four-day visit to Turkey. His trip marked his first papal visit to a Muslim nation, and was marked by controversy that followed remarks he made in September on the link between violence and Muhammad, the prophet of Islam. Before leaving Turkey the pope celebrated Mass for the small Roman Catholic community in Istanbul and repeated his call to heal divisions among the world’s Christians. On Wednesday pope met Patriarch Bartholomew I, widely respected as “the first among equals” among Orthodox bishops. Earlier in the week, immediately upon his arrival in Turkey, the pontiff surprised the world by telling the Turkish Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, that the Holy See supports his country’s entry to the European Union. He also called for increased dialogue, peace and reconciliation between Christians and Muslims, and—according to Mr. Erdogan—“the most important message the Pope gave was toward Islam, he reiterated his view of Islam as peaceful and affectionate.”

More:http://www.chroniclesmagazine.org/cgi-bin/newsviews.cgi/Islam/Pope_in_Turkey_A_Re.printer

A Civilization in Crisis

The Arab and Muslim worlds now confront a civilizational challenge unlike any they have faced since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. The terrorists attacks on New York and Washington cost thousands of innocent lives. Millions of other lives will be wasted or lost if Muslims and Arabs respond to September 11th by wallowing even more in their sense of victimhood.
“Anti-Americanism” in the hands of an Osama bin Laden is but the latest and most virulent form of an idea nurtured originally by secular, so-called progressive, nationalist Arab intellectuals under a variety of labels: anti-imperialism, anti-zionism, Arab socialism, pan-Arabism. These took as their point of departure genuine grievances, some more legitimate than others. Among the legitimate grievances, priority must be given to the injustice caused by the dispossession of millions of Palestinians that accompanied the birth of Israel in 1948.
In the hands of Arab nationalists and leftist “anti-imperialists” of my generation, however (of whom I was once one), this sense of grievance failed to get channeled into building civil societies based on any hard-won expansions of civil liberties wrested from tyrannical regimes (such as occurred in Latin America in the 1980s). Our failure to even pursue such goals left a vacuum that was soon filled by a conspiratorial view of history , reinforced by those tyrannies, which ascribed all the world’s ills to either the great Satan, America, or the little Satan, Israel.
The dangerous, unstated corollary of this view was the notion that “we Arabs” had no, or hardly any, power to change the unjust ways in which the world works. Arabs in particular, and Muslims more generally, began to see themselves as the “eternal” victims of the 20th century, consigned to a Sisyphean “struggle” against Satanic injustice. Lost was a sense of ourselves as authentic political agents aiming toward concrete and gradual political gains.
It is important to note that Arabs are not the only people who wrap themselves in victimhood; the modern Israeli sense of identity was, after all, forged on the foundations of the Holocaust just as surely as Palestinian national identity was forged by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Such symmetries (there are many) created a powerful complex of victimhood, applicable to one degree or another to all peoples of the Middle East (Palestinians, Israelis, Kurds, Armenians, Turkomans, Shi’is, and Sunnis).
In the Arab world, especially after Israel’s victory in the six day war of 1967, this complex turned into the driving force of politics and culture; it became the foundation upon which such murderous regimes as Saddam Husain’s Iraq and Hafez Assad’s Syria were built. From the hands of secular Arab nationalists, the murderous anti-American brew was passed on to (previously marginal) religious zealots. In 1979 it fused with anti-Shah sentiments to become one of the animating forces of the Iranian revolution. In the wake of that seminal event, it overwhelmed major sections of the Islamic movement from Algeria to Pakistan.
The Arab and Muslim worlds today comprise a basket case of collapsing economies and mass unemployment overseen by ever more repressive regimes. But in many ways the greatest failure in the Islamic world is intellectual, specifically a failure of the intelligentsia – writers, professors, artists, journalists, and so forth – who, with few exceptions, fail to challenge the region’s wildest and most paranoid fantasies. If anything they buttress them by refusing to break out of nationalist paradigms (for instance by not extending the hand of solidarity to counterparts in Israel).
Instead they act as “rejectionist” critics, excoriating their rulers for being insufficiently anti-zionist or anti-imperialist. Lost in all of this is the hard work of creating a modern, rights-based political order, one that could form the basis for general prosperity. Absent that alternative focus, in the thick of endlessly self-pitying victimizing rhetoric, is it any wonder that despairing middle class individuals gravitate toward radical and terrorist activities aimed at smiting the demonized other? Their horrific/suicidal actions call forth ever more summary and violent responses, which in turn reinforce that pervasive sense of victimhood, yielding other delusional martyrs. Here is the abyss facing the world’s Arab and Muslim communities today.
To pull back from the precipice, Muslims and Arabs, not Americans, must be on the frontlines of a new kind of war, one worth waging for our own salvation and our own souls . That, as out-of-fashion Muslim scholars will tell you, is the true meaning of “ jihad ,” a meaning hijacked by terrorists and suicide bombers and those who applaud or excuse them. To exorcise what they have done in our name is the civilizational challenge that Arabs and Muslims, within and without the Arab and Muslim worlds (Osama bin Laden has erased the significance of such distinctions) face at the dawn of the 21st century.

Kanan Makiya was born in Baghdad, Iraq and now teaches at Brandeis University. His books include “Republic of Fear: The Politics of Modern Iraq” (University of California Press, 1989 and 1995), “Cruelty and Silence: War, Tyranny, Uprising and the Arab World” (Penguin, 1993) and “The Rock: A Seventh Century Tale of Jerusalem” (Pantheon Books, 2001).

http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/makiya1

Jihate in Turkey

October 31 (Compass Direct News) – A Turkish prosecutor slapped criminal charges against two converts to Christianity earlier this month, accusing them of “insulting Turkishness,” inciting hatred against Islam and secretly compiling data on private citizens for a local Bible correspondence course.Hakan Tastan, 37, and Turan Topal, 46, joined the ranks of 97 other Turkish citizens hauled into court in the last 16 months over alleged violations of the country’s controversial Article 301 restricting freedom of speech.

More:

http://www.compassdirect.org/en/display.php?page=news&lang=en&length=long&idelement=4602&backpage=summaries

58 percent of French oppose Turkish EU entry.

PARIS, Oct 20, 2006 (AFP) – Nearly six out of 10 French people oppose Turkey joining the European Union, according to an opinion poll published Friday.

The LH2 survey for RMC radio recorded 58 percent of the public against Turkish membership and 28 percent in favour.

http://www.expatica.com/actual/article.asp?subchannel_id=25&story_id=33855

Turkey shows anti-Semitic books at Frankfurt fair

A Jewish human rights group said Thursday it had discovered anti-Semitic books in Turkey’s display at the recent Frankfurt Book Fair, and urged Ankara to investigate.

Shimon Samuels, a representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center, said he had made the complaint to delegates at a Warsaw meeting of the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe.

“This is no longer a case of freedom of expression,” Samuels said in a statement. “Indeed, it could dangerously be construed as government endorsement.”

A Turkish Culture Ministry official who recently visited the fair told The Associated Press that he did not see any anti-Semitic publications at the pavilion when he was there. The official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists, said the ministry was aware of the complaint and was looking into it.

Jerusalem Post

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1159193428084&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

For what ????Islam World Will Be Relieved If Pope Makes Full Apology, Erdogan

WASHINGTON D.C. – The Islam world will be relieved if the Pope makes a full apology,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said.In an interview on the Fox TV, Erdogan said that religious leaders should refrain from using the words of Islam and terrorism together.

“Such remarks hurt all the Muslims. We should refrain from remarks which may overshadow alliance of civilizations,” he stressed.

-FUNDAMENTALISM-

On fundamentalism, Erdogan said, “fundamentalism is a problem in every religion. But, there is no fundamentalist threat in Turkey today. Secularism is a system that protects the country and nation against extreme movements. As the government, we are taking measures against extreme movements. Secularism is an insurance for different life styles.”

-TERRORIST ORGANIZATION-

Commenting on the terrorist organization PKK, Erdogan said that the terrorist organization is infiltrating Turkey from northern Iraq and staging terrorist attacks.

Erdogan stated that Turkey expects “more concrete steps” from the USA in fight against terrorism, and qualified appointment of retired general Joseph Ralston as the U.S. special representative for countering terrorism as positive.

Emphasizing that the terrorist organization should lay down arms, Erdogan said that a military operation of the Turkish army in northern Iraq is out of question at the moment, but noted that developments will be monitored.

Erdogan underlined importance of a trilateral cooperation among Turkish, U.S. and Iraqi governments against the terrorist organization PKK.

PM Erdogan was interviewed also by The Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.

Erdogan will meet U.S. President George Bush today, and depart from Washington D.C. for Britain.

Turkey stumbles on WWI genocide

by Simon Ostrovsky and Mariam Haroutunian in Yerevan

October 01, 2006 06:10am

Article from: Agence France-Presse

Font size: + –

Send this article: Print Email

FRENCH President Jacques Chirac has urged Turkey overnight to recognise World War I-era massacres of Armenians as genocide if it wants to join the European Union.

Mr Chirac was speaking during a visit to the Armenian capital Yerevan, and his comments were likely to irritate Turkey and put a further strain on its relations with France.

He told a news conference Turkey needed to face up to its Ottoman past in response to a question on the nation’s EU ambitions.

Asked if he thought Turkey should recognize the 1915-1917 massacres as genocide before it joins the EU, the French president replied: “Honestly, I believe so.”

“All countries grow up acknowledging their dramas and their errors,” said Mr Chirac, who is on a two-day visit to Armenia, where he paid homage to Yerevan’s “genocide” memorial and attended the inauguration of a “France Square” in central Yerevan.

Until now, France had refused to make a direct link between the genocide issue and Turkey’s EU membership bid. The bloc has not made it a condition of entry.

But a response to the same question by Chirac’s Armenian counterpart Robert Kocharian was markedly softer, reflecting Armenia’s desire to mend ties with its neighbour.

“We don’t see any danger in this process,” Mr Kocharian said of Turkey’s EU aspirations, “but we would like that our interests be discussed in the process too,” he added.

Mr Kocharian said it would be in Armenia’s interests to have a neighbour “with a value system that allows for free movement and open borders.”

France, with 400,000 citizens of Armenian descent, officially recognised the events as genocide in 2001, putting a strain on relations with Turkey.

A proposal by France’s Socialists to make genocide denial a crime punishable by a year in prison and a €45,000 fine has elicited further ire in Turkey, but Mr Chirac said he did not support the proposal.

Armenia has campaigned for Turkey to acknowledge the World War I killings, in which it says 1.5 million Armenians died, as genocide.

But Turkey argues that 300,000 Armenians and at least as many Turks died in an internal conflict sparked by attempts by Armenians to win independence in eastern Anatolia.

Today’s Armenia is in a critical geopolitical position.

Flanked to the southwest by historical foe Turkey, its eastern borders press up against Azerbaijan, with which Yerevan is still technically at war over the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave.

As a result, its only access to the outside world is through Iran and Georgia.

But as relations between Russia and Georgia sour transporting Russian goods to Moscow’s ally Armenia has become more difficult.

“Armenia is very interested in the normalisation of Georgian-Russian relations because it directly effects our economy,” Mr Kocharian said.

Mr Chirac later attended a mass concert on a square in Yerevan at which veteran French singer and movie star Charles Aznavour, who is of Armenian origin, launched a series of events called A Year of Armenia in France.

Other performers included Greek-born singer Nana Mouskouri and French veteran composer and conductor Michel Legrand – who is also of Armenian origin.

http://www.news.com.au/story/0,23599,20506318-1702,00.html

FRIEDMAN AND PETTY, VINDICTIVE ERDOGAN

Whenever Tom Friedman sets aside his partisanship, he pens out a column that demonstrates how well he gets it. He did so today and so I am pasting it bellow. He is right to call for an inter-Muslim dialogue and right in identifying the growing Western wish (expressed not only by the masses) to erect an anti-Muslim wall.At a recent FPRI lecture on Arab media an audience member suggested that the West agree to pull out of all Muslim lands and in return evict all the Muslims leaving in the West. On the train home, I mentioned the surprising comment to my husband. “That’s right,” said the passenger in front of us. “That is precisely what we should do.”

For the papal demand for reciprocity is beginning to echo throughout the land. Friedman writes:

It will be terrible if Turkey is blocked from entering the European Union, but that’s where we’re heading, and the only thing that will halt it is honest dialogue.

Unfortunately, I am not sure Turkey is not blocking itself. For instead of providing ammunition to their EU supporters, Turkey provides it to their opponents by using its courts again and again to stifle speech.

We got used to repeated Turkish attempts to prosecute Turks acknowledging the Armenian holocaust. The charges against two well known writers, Safak and Pamuk, were dropped but the higher court upheld the conviction and a six-month suspended sentence for the less well known Hrant Dink, editor of Agos, a Turkish-Armenian newspaper in Istanbul.

But now we have to ponder the frame of mind of the members of Diyanet-Sen, an imans’ union with the Religious Affairs Directorate, which demands that the authorities launch legal proceeding against the Pope and arrest him when he visits Turkey in November.

And why not, after all, Prime Minister Erdogan has just won a court case against Fethi Dorduncu? Who is Fehti Dorduncu? A man in his eighties who dared write and unflattering comment in the visitors book in Ataturk’s boyhood home in Saloniki, Greece. How did Erdogan respond? He ripped the page out of the book and sued the man in Turkish court. What did the court do? It found him guilty and gave him a large fine, 10,000 lira or $6700. When is all this taking place? In the middle of an election campaign.

Do not worry. Erdogan is not about to lose the elections. Turks do not seem any more offended by this show of their Prime Minister’s vindictive pettiness than Muslims as a whole seem offended by Muslim suicide bombers blowing up Mosques and markets on Ramadan. Something very fundamental must change before we are going to see the kind of inter-Muslim dialogue needed to prevent the world from careening towards a full fledged clash of civilization.

September 29, 2006
Op-Ed Columnist
Islam and the Pope
By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
We need to stop insulting Islam. It’s enough already.

No, that doesn’t mean the pope should apologize. The pope was actually treating Islam with dignity. He was treating the faith and its community as adults who could be challenged and engaged. That is a sign of respect.

What is insulting is the politically correct, kid-gloves view of how to deal with Muslims that is taking root in the West today. It goes like this: “Hushhh! Don’t say anything about Islam! Don’t you understand? If you say anything critical or questioning about Muslims, they’ll burn down your house. Hushhh! Just let them be. Don’t rile them. They are not capable of a civil, rational dialogue about problems in their faith community.”

Now that is insulting. It’s an attitude full of contempt and self-censorship, but that is the attitude of Western elites today, and it’s helping to foster the slow-motion clash of civilizations that Sam Huntington predicted. Because Western masses don’t buy it. They see violence exploding from Muslim communities and they find it frightening, and they don’t think their leaders are talking honestly about it. So many now just want to build a wall against Islam. It will be terrible if Turkey is blocked from entering the European Union, but that’s where we’re heading, and the only thing that will halt it is honest dialogue.

But it is not the dialogue the pope mentioned — one between Islam and Christianity. That’s necessary, but it’s not sufficient. What is needed first is an honest dialogue between Muslims and Muslims.

As someone who has lived in the Muslim world, enjoyed the friendship of many Muslims there and seen the compassionate side of Islam in action, I have to admit I am confused as to what Islam stands for today.

Why? On the first day of Ramadan last year a Sunni Muslim suicide bomber blew up a Shiite mosque in Hilla, Iraq, in the middle of a memorial service, killing 25 worshipers. This year on the first day of Ramadan, a Sunni suicide bomber in Baghdad killed 35 people who were lining up in a Shiite neighborhood to buy fuel. The same day, the severed heads of nine murdered Iraqi police officers and soldiers were found north of Baghdad.

I don’t get it. How can Muslims blow up other Muslims on their most holy day of the year — in mosques! — and there is barely a peep of protest in the Muslim world, let alone a million Muslim march? Yet Danish cartoons or a papal speech lead to violent protests. If Muslims butchering Muslims — in Sudan, Iraq, Egypt, Pakistan and Jordan — produces little communal reaction, while cartoons and papal remarks produce mass protests, what does Islam stand for today? It is not an insult to ask that question.

Muslims might say: “Well, what about Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo or Palestine? Let’s talk about all your violent behavior.” To which I would say: “Let’s talk about it! But you’ll have to get in line behind us, because we’re constantly talking about where we’ve gone wrong.” We can’t have a meaningful dialogue if we, too, are not self-critical, but neither can Muslims.

Part of the problem in getting answers is that Islam has no hierarchy. There is no Muslim pope defining the faith. There are centers of Muslim learning, in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but their credibility with the masses is uneven because they’re often seen as tools of regimes. So those Muslim preachers with authenticity tend to be the street preachers — firebrands, who gain legitimacy by spewing hatred at both their own regimes and the Western powers that support them.

As a result, there is a huge body of disenfranchised Sunni Muslims, who are neither violent fundamentalists nor wannabe secularists. They are people who’d like to see a marriage between Islam and modernity. But right now there is little free space in the Sunni Muslim world — between the firebrand preachers and the “official” ones — for that synthesis to be discussed and defined.

I had hoped Iraq would be that space. Whenever people asked me how I’d know if we’d won in Iraq, I said: when Salman Rushdie could give a lecture in Baghdad. I’m all for a respectful dialogue between Islam and the West, but first there needs to be a respectful, free dialogue between Muslims and Muslims. What matters is not what Muslims tell us they stand for. What matters is what they tell themselves, in their own languages, and how they treat their own.

Without a real war of ideas within Islam to sort that out — a war that progressives win — I fear we are drifting at best toward a wall between civilizations and at worst toward a real clash.

http://hnn.us/blogs/3.html

Mussulmen “Thinkers” do not want to discuss JIHATE, TANZIM, JAZIA, Apostasy and death, Conversion by the sword, Taqqiya…because it is not their kind of dialoque and a second class dhimmi – ein untermensch – like the pope must not utter anything…anything about islam……………or else……

Istanbul, September 22: Following a wave of protests against Pope Benedict’s remarks on Islam, Muslim intellectuals in Turkey are asking what he really thinks about their faith and what long-term consequences his views will have.

Muslim thinkers in Turkey, where the German-born Pontiff is due on a sensitive visit in late November, suspect Benedict suffers from ‘Orientalist’ delusions about Islam and wants to move the Roman Catholic Church away from dialogue with it.

His argument that Christianity is rational could be an indirect way of saying Islam is unreasonable and has no place in Christian-rooted Europe, they say.

At the same time, they set clear limits on the dialogue they want, boxing it into a series of polite exchanges where the tough issues Benedict wants to discuss risk remaining taboo.

He should explain a lot of things. His apology was not enough for the feelings of the Muslim world,” said Bekir Karliaga, philosophy professor at Istanbul’s Marmara University.

The Pope has invited ambassadors of Muslim countries at the Vatican, and Muslim religious leaders, to a meeting on Monday at his summer palace, a senior Vatican official said on Friday.

The meeting is part of diplomatic efforts to explain that his speech in Germany has been misunderstood, the Vatican said.

Benedict has said his much-criticised speech in Regensburg, in which he quoted a 14th century Byzantine emperor as saying Islam was evil and violent, did not reflect his own thinking.

But quoting an emperor under siege from Muslim armies suggests Benedict thinks Islam has not changed from the days when it was a military threat to Europe, Kerim Balci said.

“This suggests that nations don’t change,” said Balci, editor of the Aksiyon news weekly published by an influential movement led by Islamic preacher Fethullah Gulen.

“That would mean Christian nations don’t change either and so the Crusader soul is still alive. That would give power to those who are against conducting a dialogue,” he said.

FAITH AND REASON

Much of Benedict’s speech was devoted to the argument that Christianity is rational because it is based on faith in God bolstered by the insights of ancient Greek philosophy.

Balci said this was a Western argument that made little sense in Islam because it would discount many Muslim practices that aim to gain favour with God in the afterlife.

Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss-born Muslim intellectual now at Oxford University in Britain, recalled Benedict has spoken out in the past against Turkey’s bid to join the European Union.

“The Pope attempted to set out a European identity that would be Christian by faith and Greek by philosophical reason,” he wrote in a syndicated column this week.

“Islam, which has apparently had no such relationship with reason, would thus be foreign to the European identity that has been built atop this heritage.”

Balci also criticised the Pope for saying the Prophet Mohammad opposed forced conversions when he was politically weak but changed his views when he took power in Mecca. “That is an Orientalist view of Islam,” he said.

Cemal Usak, another Gulen movement activist long involved in inter-religious dialogue, was concerned about recent changes he saw in the Vatican’s approach to other religions.

He noted Benedict folded the Vatican department for inter-religious dialogue into its culture ministry in February.

“From this I understand that the Vatican doesn’t see other faiths as religions, but as just another culture,” he said.

“When Pope John Paul was pope, there was no problem for Muslims,” he said, referring to Benedict’s predecessor and his enthusiasm for a dialogue with Islam. “Pope Benedict may not like Islam but he has to respect Muslims.”

TALK, BUT ON WHOSE TERMS?

Gunduz Aktan, a columnist for the daily Radikal, accused the Pope of wanting a dialogue ‘based on the argument that Islam is open to violence but closed to reason and democracy’.

Karliaga and Usak did not want dialogue between Islam and the West to deal with issues such as they saw Benedict making between Muslim theology and violence.

“You can’t discuss on a theological level. You must base the dialogue on the non-theological part. Religion and violence are two different things,” Karliaga insisted.

Usak rejected proposals for Muslims to read the Koran in a less literal way to bring their understanding of it more in line with the modern world.

“It’s impossible and against reality to ask a Muslim to reinterpret the Koran,” Usak declared.