Habib Siddiqui

On August 5 of this year, Major General Harold J. Greene was killed in Afghanistan by a lone gunman. Greene was the highest-ranking U.S. military officer to be killed in a war zone in four decades. Before him, according to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial database, Maj. Gen. John Albert B. Dillard Jr. was killed on May 12, 1970 when his helicopter was shot down. Later Rear Adm. Rembrandt Cecil Robinson, who was the Navy’s equivalent of a major general, was killed on May 8, 1972 when his helicopter crashed. Five other American officers of comparable rank were killed in the Vietnam War, all in air crashes, whether accidental or caused by hostile action. Lt. Gen. Timothy L. Maude, who was the Army’s deputy chief of staff for personnel, was killed at the Pentagon site on September 11, 2001.   What is noteworthy here is that Maj. Gen. Harold J. Greene died not at the hand of a sworn enemy like the Taliban but from a burst of gunfire by a soldier in an allied army who had been largely pa...

Derek Tonkin's anti-Rohingya article has drawn much criticism from many experts. Here below is a response from Carlos Sardiña Galache   which has appeared in the DVB, which I share in to to (BTW: DVB has failed to post some of my responses): According to Mr. Tonkin, the Rohingya identity might be "imposed from above". Of course, he doesn't provide any evidence to support that, but this insinuation is particularly insulting in view of the more than credible reports of the authorities trying to impose the "Bengali" identification, often using violence against those that refuse it. He claims that the name Rohingya is offensive to Rakhines and Burmese alike. That's irrelevant. Any individual/group has the right to self-identify, not the right to decide others' self-identification. Rakhines have all the right to correct me if I call them Bamar (or even Burmese if they like), in the same way that a Basque have the right to self-identify as such and...

Feminism has become a buzz word these days, esp. within the women communities around the globe. How does various religions see the issue? Do Judaism, Christianity, and Islam have the same conception of women? Are they different in their conceptions? Do Judaism and Christianity really offer women better treatment than those offered in Islam? What is the truth? Here is an article that is quite illuminating.

This is in response to Derek Tonkin’s article: The R-word, and its ramifications, which was posted in the JAS:   As I first noted in one of my articles, Derek Tonkin,  former British Ambassador to Thailand and Advisor to Bagan Capital Limited , is in the business of promoting the agenda of the Burmese government, as this is part of his job making some money out of that friendship that he enjoys. He has been intellectually dishonest on the issue of the Rohingya cause knowing that his Burmese patrons in the administration of Thein Sein and his British patrons for whom doing business in Myanmar is more important than human rights of the persecuted minority. So, time and again, he comes out of his turtle nest to repeat flawed theory. In this endeavor, he does not miss to quote another intellectually dishonest researcher Jacques Leider, well known for anti-Muslim, missionary bias.   Mr. Tonkin may like to read the British report of 1826 in which ...

In times of war and troubles, truth is one of the first casualties. As we have seen many times before  with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran and other troubling places in the world, so is the case with ISIL or ISIS, or so it seems. From published reports, I have not found anything to show that there is anything good about this extremist group. My opinion about their evil prowess has not changed. If published reports are true they are monsters who have no respect for Islam and are abusing the name to create hatred towards the faith of a billion and six hundred million Muslims. The group first emerged amongst the Sunnis as a resistance movement against American occupation forces in Iraq. Later the local Sunnis had enough of their brand of extremism and were able to throw them out. Unfortunately, with Nuri al-Maliki's sectarian rule in Iraq which marginalized the Sunnis, the group resurrected from the ashes of Anbar under a new battle-hardened leadership in Syria. They have been able to grav...

This past week, Hollywood actor Robin Williams, one of the funniest guys in the planet, took his own life by committing suicide. He was suffering from depression, anxiety and the early stages of Parkinson’s disease. It is so difficult to believe that Robin who amused so many through his acting and spontaneous jokes was himself in such a dire condition that he probably needed more amusement to hang onto life than others that he had entertained all these decades! Fifty years ago, America's living rooms were interrupted with images of peaceful protesters in Selma or Washington or Chicago being bitten by police dogs, sprayed with fire hoses and pummeled by batons. At that time, the mainstream media, comprising mostly white journalists, failed miserably to tell the truth about the protest marches. Like the embedded journalists that we saw during Bush Jr.’s genocidal campaign in Iraq in 2003, the White media relayed the viewpoint of the police. They simply could not relate to the ...

Thanks to Nahum Barnea, a prominent journalist at Israeli newspaper Yedioth Ahronoth, i t is now learnt that prominent settler and former Israeli army chief rabbi Avichai Rontzki delivered a “messianic, fiery speech” to Israeli forces prior to the devastating massacre of the Gaza City neighborhood of Shujaiya  during Israel's latest genocidal campaign in Gaza. He reported from a soldier who related that before their invasion of Shujaiya, troops were gathered to “listen to the words” of Rontzki, who “praised the miracle of God’s army.” Israel’s ground assault on the Gaza Strip began late on Thursday 17 July, with tanks receiving orders “ to open fire at anything that moved .”  Over the next few days, the Shujaiya district of Gaza City was subjected to intense and indiscriminate bombardment, including 600 shells fired by an artillery battalion and 100 one-ton bombs dropped from the air. Rontzki’s speech to Israeli soldiers recalls his time as Israeli army chief rabbi...

On January 31, 1970, the great philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote a message on the conflict in the Middle East, which was read on February 3, the day after his death, to an International Conference of Parliamentarians meeting in Cairo. He wrote, “ The development of the crisis in the Middle East is both dangerous and instructive. For over 20 years Israel has expanded by force of arms. After every stage in this expansion Israel has appealed to “reason” and has suggested “negotiations”. This is the traditional role of the imperial power, because it wishes to consolidate with the least difficulty what it has already taken by violence. Every new conquest becomes the new basis of the proposed negotiation from strength, which ignores the injustice of the previous aggression. The aggression committed by Israel must be condemned, not only because no state has the right to annex foreign territory, but because every expansion is an experiment to discover how much more aggression the world w...

Peter Cohen is a retired sociologist from the University of Amsterdam and a Jewish-Dutch World War II survivor. He is critical of Israel and considers it a colonist enterprise. In his latest article posted in the Huffington Post, Cohen says: "The 1917 Balfour Declaration is regarded as one of these justifications [for establishment of Israel]. However, no one maintains that the then government of Great Britain had any authority to assign the land of Palestine to anyone other than the people who were living there. Similarly, although the United Nations assigned a portion of Palestine to the immigrants in the so-called Partition of Palestine in 1947, its own Charter stated that it had no right to do so without obtaining the consent of the mandate territory's population. 3 Given their poor economic and political development, the local inhabitants of the British mandate territory were unable to prevent the Zionist immigration, although the British could see that this immigratio...

John Dugard is emeritus professor of international law at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands and former U.N. special rapporteur on human rights in the occupied Palestinian territory. He exposes the lie that has been repeated by Israel and many Western leaders. Israel's claim that it is acting in self defense is entirely baseless and fraudulent. Click Here  to find out why Israel's argument is baseless.  

I have never been fond of Fox News, or anything  with its brand of trashy, yellow journalism.  The people who work for Rupert Murdoch's empire appear to me as rejects, low-lives who have no qualms about morality. Personally, many of them live a life of hypocrisy. What they say, they don't often practice. Many of them sound too right-wing, too extreme, too conservative, too anti-progress, too anti-plurality, anti anything that are important in the 21st century. I avoid those misfits who are trying to make our world a poisonous world. As such, I had no knowledge of who Sabrina Rodriguez was, well, until today. I found out that she was a Fox40 reporter in S acramento  who recently  was arrested for something she's reported about before ... shoplifting.    She  turned herself in Thursday after a warrant was issued for her arrest for grand theft, burglary and conspiracy in a shoplifting incident that took place in 2013 -- which means she's facing felony c...

Here is the latest toll numbers (courtesy of the PBS News) from Israel's murderous campaign in Gaza: More than 1900 Palestinians - almost all civilians - were killed by Israel. Sixty-four Israeli soldiers (IDF) and 3 civilians (including a Thai worker) got killed from attacks by Hamas militants. You do the math: who has targeted civilians? Answer: Israel.

I have long maintained and rightly so that Prime Minister Netanyahu of Israel is an evil monster who has no human conscience for non-Jews. He is an utterly evil person. Like many of his predecessors lying and deception come too easily for him. When facing difficult questions in front of international media, Netanyahu often wants to portray his mission of mass murder in Gaza as a humane one, and of not targeting civilians. The facts are just the opposite:  some 1,700 Palestinians have already died and nearly a quarter of Gaza's population - more than two hundred thousands have been rendered homeless because their homes have been destroyed in massive attacks from the IDF. His mass murdering soldiers and pilots did not discriminate between UN Schools, hospitals, mosques, businesses, apartments, anything. To them, under his evil leadership, everything owned or lived by Palestinians was a fair target. Here in the USA, we are bombarded with false propaganda from Israel...

As we know too well, it is not the US government alone which has been providing arms to Israel, which ended up killing hundreds of unarmed Palestinian civilians and wounding many more. Now we know for sure that the British government has also been guilty of similar crimes. You can read the full story by clicking here . In what follows below, I provide some excerpts from the Independent, UK: Documents shown to The Independent reveal that arms export licences worth £42m have been granted to 130 British defence manufacturers since 2010 to sell military equipment to Israel. These range from weapons control and targeting systems to ammunition, drones and armoured vehicles. Among the manufacturers given permission to make sales were two UK companies supplying components for the Hermes drone, described by the Israeli air force as the “backbone” of its targeting and reconnaissance missions. One of the two companies also supplies components for Israel’s main battle tank. The Hermes...

Many Jews are very opposed to Israel's murderous policies and practices against the Palestinian people. And yet, there are many more who remain loyal to the state of Israel. Included amongst them are many Jewish Americans whose loyalty to Israel is seemingly more than that to the USA.  Peter Schwartz is a Jewish immigrant and child of Holocaust survivors, who has posted a response to Eno's letter in the Independent, UK. While I have some disagreement with some of his views, I agree with some other points he made. I quote from his writing - "And I believe that creating the Jewish state of Israel was a historic mistake that is likely to destroy the religion behind it. The actions nation states take to assure their survival are usually in contradiction to any moral values that a religion might espouse. And that contradiction is now very evident in Israel’s behaviour. Israel will destroy Judaism. First, the history has two important intersecting threads, Zionism and th...

Brian Peter George St. John le Baptiste de la Salle Eno, professionally known as Brian Eno or simply as Eno, is an English musician, composer, record producer, singer, and visual artist. When the musician Brian Eno saw a picture of a Palestinian man carrying the remains of his dead son in a plastic bag, he was moved to write a cri de coeur to his American friends, asking them to explain their country’s unconditional support for Israel. I provide below his entire letter, which was posted in the Independent, UK, on August 1, from the link here . He wrote: "Dear All of You, I sense I’m breaking an unspoken rule with this letter, but I can’t keep quiet any more.Today I saw a picture of a weeping Palestinian man holding a plastic carrier bag of meat. It was his son. He’d been shredded (the hospital’s word) by an Israeli missile attack – apparently using their fab new weapon, fléchette bombs. You probably know what those are – hundreds of small steel darts packed around explo...