Habib Siddiqui

I was asked about my views about debating with a known racist. Here below are my views on this subject: A debate in a hall or media outlet is all about counterpoints raised by each participant about his/her position on a given subject with the sole aim of winning it. The question is does such an agenda - a debate with a Rakhine racist -- help the Rohingya cause vis-a-vis their accusers, who are racists and bigots? Aye Chan is a half-educated Rakhine with a PhD degree from a third-rate university who now teaches in a 4th rate university in Japan. He uses his laughable credential to masquerade as a Rakhine intellectual. But if one studies his work, there is nothing intellectually enlightening in his work other than his 'discoveries' about how the names Arakan and Akyab had originated, how the Rohingya people are a legacy of the British Occupation period, and how the current Rohingyas are infiltrators from Chittagong who are trying to take over Arakan and introduce the Taliban-bra...

Aye Chan is a Rakhine racist and bigot who has made a profession out of distorting history of Muslims of Arakan. His latest article "Burma’s Western Border as Reported by the Diplomatic Correspondence (1947 – 1975)" is another such evil attempt to justify aggression and oppression against the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan (and Burma). In his twisted logic he shows his selective amnesia about the crimes of his own racist group while being all agog about the so-called secession movement of the Rohingyas in the dying days of the British rule in South Asia. Aye Chan's latest disingenuous attempt to revise history should not surprise anyone that is well acquainted with the history of partition of British India and emergence of Burma as a free nation. During that period, many activists of the freedom movement felt that it was not what they had bargained for with the leaders of the dying British Colonial administration. Even the Arakanese people wanted a state of their own away fro...

As I maintained in many of my posts the U.S. War against Afghanistan surely could have been avoided if the Bush Administration was serious. Instead, from the very outset, flanked by war-criminals-to-be, it wanted to embark on a different course. Just as pundits today would agree that even if 9/11 did not happen, Bush and his warmongers - Cheney and Rumsfeld - were well prepared to strike Iraq to complete the unfinished task of Bush Sr., the same is the case with Afghanistan. The Bush administration had no interest in peacefully resolving the OBL factor. In an exclusive interview, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban's last foreign minister, tells Al-Jazeera that the Taliban government, which then controlled Afghanistan, made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader for trial for his involvement in plots targeting U.S. facilities during the 1990s. "Even before the (9/11) attacks, our Islamic emirate had tried -- through various proposals -- to resolve th...

This Sunday is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which, by any account, was a momentous event in American history. In the post-World War II period, never before has the USA suffered such a massive loss in human lives and properties. The total cost to the USA has been estimated by the New York Times at a whopping $3.3 trillion, including $55 billion from the loss of lives and materials. While not all of the costs have been borne by the government — and some are still to come — this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt. Here is the breakdown of the estimates. In 2002, the New York City comptroller's office estimated the cost of replacing destroyed and damaged property at $26 billion. And another $29 billion was estimated for the value of life and injury. The estimates of the economic impact of the attacks ranged from about $40 billion to $122 billion in a group of studies led by the CREATE Homeland Security Center at the prestigious University of Southern California. John...