Habib Siddiqui

American soldiers have done it again! It was not too long ago that they were found urinating on the dead bodies of Afghans. This time they have burned the Qur’an, the Muslim Scripture. At least two dozen Afghans have died protesting the sacrilegious act. When will these invading forces learn not to commit bastardly acts that are inexcusable and considered profane by other cultures? Will they ever? It is simply absurd to think that those American military personnel serving in Afghanistan did not know any better. A decade has passed since the Americans had invaded this highly conservative and religious country. It is inconceivable that they did not have sensitivity training to acquaint them with the do’s and the don’ts in Afghanistan. They ought to have known that Muslims consider destruction of the holy book blasphemous. Yet American soldiers last week started to incinerate a truckload of Islamic religious items, including copies of the Qur’an, taken from detainees at Bagram Air Base. A...

Winter is very dry in Bangladesh, and as such, can be quite dusty in the towns and cities with all the construction works going on round the clock. Although for an expatriate like me who has spent more time in North America than in Bangladesh, December weather in Chittagong should feel more like that of an early autumn in the north-east corner of the USA. However, what I heard from various sectors of the population is that Bangladesh is getting colder during the winter, as it is getting hotter during the summer months. So, there must be some truth to the global climatic changes taking place! Soon after my arrival in Chittagong, I picked up a bad cold, which persisted until late January – almost a month after my return to Philadelphia. It was, I guess, the combination of dust in the air and the cold, which made me suffer. Like many concerned families, my siblings and parents bought hundreds of blanket for distribution amongst the poor and the needy people. ORCA, an alumni organization t...

Last month the French Senate approved a controversial bill with a 127-86 vote that makes it a criminal offence to deny that genocide was committed by Ottoman Turks against Armenians during World War I. The measure has been sent to President Sarkozy for final approval. France already labels the so-called killings as an act of genocide, but the new bill, which passed both houses of parliament would hit anyone found denying the ‘genocide’ with a jail term and a fine of 45,000 euros (£29,000; $58,000). France has half a million citizens of Armenian descent, and many political analysts see a direct link with the passage of the bill with this year’s presidential elections. French politicians, from both the Senate and the lower house of parliament, who opposed the law, have referred it to France’s Constitutional court. An interested reader may recall that in 2010 a U.S. congressional panel similarly approved a resolution declaring, what it called the Ottoman-era killing of Armenians genocide....

Aye Kyaw died on January 19, 2012 in New York. The feeling I personally have hearing about Aye Kyaw's death is - the world has one less bigot and racist SOB today than it was merely a few days ago when he was alive. As we have repeatedly maintained our world is becoming a world of multi-culture or pluralism where different groups of people perform best when they are integrated and not forced to assimilate into, and worse yet alienated or exiled from the society. Aye Kyaw and his bunch of hate-mongering provocateurs like Aye Chan simply did not evolve into a thinking two-legged animal, but wanted to stay in their hateful pre-modern comfort zone of delusion and mendacity, poisoning the world with their unfathomable poisons of hatred and xenophobia. And the irony of the whole thing is that Aye Kyaw and his ilk chose to live as minorities in their newly adopted countries demanding social and economic justice for them. So, why this level of hypocrisy, this level of promotion of hatred a...