Habib Siddiqui

The U.S. Congress has recently conducted a hearing on Burma. You can view this by clicking here .

Most news reports coming from Myanmar are bad, often atrocious and painful to read or watch in video. But once in a while some good news reports are also showing up in the media these days. Thanks to the world-wide condemnation of one-sided, anti-Muslim justice in this Buddhist country that has seen unfathomed savagery and crime by the Buddhist mobs, often aided and led by Buddhist monks, security forces and political leaders, in recent days, the Myanmar government has put some criminal elements within its Buddhist community behind the bar. They have been found guilty for crimes that have resulted in internal displacement of some 140,000 Rohingya Muslims inside the Arakan (Rakhine) state, and tens of thousands of other Muslims in other parts of Myanmar, let alone wholesale destruction of Muslim-owned properties, including mosques, schools, orphanages, and hostels. Nothing was spared by the racist savages within the Buddhist community. And yet, as one may recall not a single Buddhist p...

In an Internet search I came across a posting which cites a few examples of Muslim-Jewish cooperation during hard times saving lives of each other. Here below, I share four examples of Muslims saving Jewish lives during the World War II. These facts are important not only for the sake of history but also for creating a world in which people of different faiths can live together peacefully without intolerance and hatred, which, sadly, have become norms in certain parts of our world to tarnish our common humanity and/or heritage. In 1930 Albania, a small Balkan country, had a mere 803,000 citizens of which two hundred were Jewish. In 1943 the Nazis occupied Albania and in an unprecedented act of defiance the Albanian people refused to hand-over its Jewish residents. Instead various government agencies gave Jewish families fake documentation and Jewish refugees from Europe were given sanctuary (even while under Italian rule).   At a time ...

Last week America celebrated the 50 th anniversary of March to Washington D.C. It was the largest demonstration ever seen in the nation's capital, and one of the first to have extensive television coverage, where nearly a quarter million marchers demanded civil and economic rights for Black Americans. On August 28, 1963 Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his famous speech, ‘I have a dream’ in front of the Lincoln Memorial with many in the crowd holding banners that read “March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom”. There, he established his reputation as one of the greatest orators in American history. Although African Americans had been legally freed from slavery, elevated to the status of citizens and the men given full voting rights at the end of the American Civil War, many continued to face economic and political repression. A system of legal discrimination, known as Jim Crow, was pervasive in the American South, ensuring that Black Americans remained second-class citizens. T...

Hardly a week goes without seeing Buddhist violence against unarmed Muslims and other religious minorities in Myanmar. Here is the latest news from the Myanmar News. Hundreds of Muslims were made homeless after about 1000 anti-Muslim rioters rampaged through villages in Sagaing Region’s Kanbalu township on the evening of August 24, setting fire to Muslim-owned properties and attacking rescue vehicles with catapults.