Habib Siddiqui

Last month on December 22 I received a call around 10:30 p.m. from my niece Tanita that my mom had been hospitalized. It was dreaded news for which none within our family was prepared. I remember talking with her a few hours before she went to sleep that night. She sounded cheerful in the presence of my younger brother Shameem who was visiting her. I quickly called his wife Sabina in Houston to find out the details. Shameem and our sister Jessy had been in Chittagong Metropolitan Hospital since the dawn of December 23 and could not say much saying that the doctors were trying to determine whether it was a stroke, or massive heart attack or diabetes related sugar-spike that had caused the problem. We could only pray and hope that she would survive. But that did not happen. Ultimately the inevitable news came in the late afternoon of December 25, the Christmas day, here in the USA: my mother - Khadija Siddiqui – has died. It was December 26 at around 3 a.m. local Bangladesh time (i...

Myanmar's terrorist - Buddhist monk Wirathu is untouchable inside the country. In 2003 he was sentenced to 25 years in prison but was released in 2010 along with other political prisoners. Most keen observers knew the reason as to why this anti-Muslim zealot was freed by the regime. He was to serve as its pit bull and inciter for committing hate crimes and ethnic cleansing drives against the minority Muslims, esp. the Rohingya people that live in the Arakan (Rakhine) state of Myanmar, bordering Bangladesh. And Wirathu continues to deliver for the regime. He has effectively become the face of Burmese Buddhism . His '969' fascist movement has led to widespread hate crimes and genocidal campaigns against the minority Muslims all across the Buddhist-dominated country, and has brutally rendered more than a million Muslims homeless. Many Burmese Muslims are risking their lives to get out of this den of hatred and intolerance, once called Burma. ...

Soon after publication of my article in the Ovi Magazine on hypocrisy of the French government and its French-fried citizens on matters concerning Islam and Muslims, a commentator complained that I did not see the matter from the other angle, as if my view was a biased one. Another confused individual suggested that such insulting cartoons or expressions are uncompromising western values, and are not blasphemous, i.e., Muslims should learn to swallow them. Such dissenting voices to my article show their deplorable ignorance. They are unaware of the clear cases of hypocrisy in western systems of applying laws. When it suits them they ride the van of freedom of expression to insult and abuse others, but when it does not suit them, they cry foul and incriminate people for expressing their views. France has ample of examples highlighting this chronic disease. Not too long ago, the Sydney Morning Herald of Australia had to apologize for a cartoon on bombing of Gaza while Is...

The Buddhist monk Wirathu of Burma plays the role as an executor and provocateur against the Rohingya Muslims of Burma similar to what Himmler has been for the Jews of Germany under Hitler. His anti-Muslim provocations have led to depopulation of some one million Rohingya and other Muslims inside Burma - the den of intolerance, xenophobia and hatred. He is hostile about any organization and individual that tries to talk about the rights of the Rohingya people. In recent days he has called the  United Nations Special Rapporteur on the situation of Human Rights in Myanmar, Ms. Yanghee Lee - a prostitute. Ms. Lee has recently visited Myanmar for 10 days and left on January 16, 2015.   You can read the news by following the link :  http://www.rohingyablogger.com/2015/01/wirathu-face-of-buddhist-terror-calls.html#sthash.mhQVp1BT.dpuf

A French Moroccan Muslim has been murdered by a French Islamophobic criminal. The 28-year-old attacker forced the front door of his neighbors' house in the picturesque village of Beaucet near Avignon just after midnight on Wednesday shouting "I am your god, I am your Islam" before repeatedly stabbing Mohamed El Makouli. An autopsy showed El Makouli had been stabbed 17 times. More than 50 anti-Muslim incidents including attacks on mosques have been recorded by the Central Council of Muslims in France since the Paris shootings which left 17 dead, including 12 at the offices of the Charlie Hebdo weekly. You can find out more about this latest attack by clicking here . As expected here in the west such acts of violence against Muslims won't make headlines. Surely, you did not know about it before I posted this news.

The groundbreaking memoir of a current Guantánamo inmate that lays bare the harrowing details of the US rendition and torture programme from the perspective of one of its victims is to be published next week after a six-year battle for the manuscript to be declassified. Guantánamo Diary , the first book written by a still imprisoned detainee, is being published in 20 countries and has been serialised by the Guardian amid renewed calls by civil liberty campaigners for its author’s release. Mohamedou Ould Slahi describes a world tour of torture and humiliation that began in his native Mauritania more than 13 years ago and progressed through Jordan and Afghanistan before he was consigned to US detention in Guantánamo, Cuba, in August 2002 as prisoner number 760. US military officials told the Guardian this week that despite never being prosecuted and being cleared for release by a judge in 2010, he is unlikely to be released in the next year. The journal, which Slahi handwrote in E...

Here is an interesting, very thought-provoking article by Dean Obeidallah, which analyzes claims by Islamophobes that all terrorists are Muslims. The truth is rather that Muslim terrorists are responsible for a very small fraction of terrorism. For example, in 2013, there were 152 terror attacks in Europe. Only two of them were “religiously motivated,” while 84 were predicated upon ethno-nationalist or separatist beliefs. Just imagine! Have you heard of all those non-Muslim terrorist acts? Surely not. However, whenever Muslims commit such acts of terror they make the headlines in the western press. When Christian terrorist Anders Breivik slaughtered 77 people in Norway to further his anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant, and pro-“Christian Europe” agenda as he stated in his manifesto, how much press did we see in the United States? Very little. How about Jewish terrorism? Per the 2013 State Department’s report on terrorism, there were 399 acts of terror committed by Israeli settlers in...

Soon after the execution style assassination of low-life caricaturists of the French weekly Charlie Ebdo, the FBI claimed that it has foiled a terrorist plan in the USA. From the off-again and on-again released reports, since 9/11, the FBI and the Homeland Security Administration seem to have gone to great lengths to 'save the country' from such potential threats of terrorists 'bent on harming' the country. Very little debate has occurred about the policy of the agency as to how it does such foiling activities. However, thanks to truth-seeking journalists and human rights activists, what we are learning is something sinister and chilling. In many such cases of foiled plots, the agency is planting such plans in the mind of very vulnerable loners, who may have some sympathy for the drone-victims in the Muslim world, and/or grudge and anger against the criminal activities of the USA government which terrorize millions of people in vast territories of the Muslim world. ...

The New York based Human Rights Watch called on the Burmese government to amend citizenship law, claiming it “fuels repression” and denies basic human rights to the country’s ethnic Rohingya minority. Brad Adams, HRW’s Asia director, said the law entrenched discrimination and must be changed. “Burma’s discriminatory citizenship law not only deprives Rohingya of citizenship, but for decades has encouraged systematic rights violations,” Mr. Adams said, “Amending the law to bring it in line with international standards is the first step for resolving this long-standing human rights abomination.” Muslim Rohingya face persecution in Burma and are denied basic rights in law granted to full citizens. Violence between Arakanese Buddhists and Rohingya in 2012 led to killings and the destruction of homes, shops and mosques. The UN has estimated that more than 140,000 Rohingya remain internally displaced by the violence and as result are forced to live in squalid camps lacking in basic infras...

The details about the  killings in Paris can be read in the link here .

Paris has recently witnessed the targeted assassination of eight Parisian journalists. Many see their execution as terrorism. Some see it as a justifiable act of avenge or retaliation for insulting Islam and its revered Prophet (S). And then there are many others who are not sure how to categorize the violence – while they are disgusted by the shootings in Paris they may nonetheless have reasons for not embracing the slogan "I am Charlie". The French government has epitomized hypocrisy and taken it to a level that is rarely seen in our time. It claims to respect religious rights, but such rights are routinely denied to more than six million French Muslims. A third generation French Muslim of North African heritage is still treated as an outsider in France. Mosques get routinely attacked by Islamophobic French hoodlums, but such information, thanks to the French-fried, biased and hostile media, never makes the news. The French authorities owe the public answers to the...

Human trafficking has become a serious problem with refugees trying to flee killing fields. And no community is suffering more than the Rohingyas of Myanmar (Burma). In southern Thailand, a Rohingya woman was crushed to death while being transported in a crammed pickup truck from Phangnga to Songkhla on Sunday. She was among 98 Rohingya migrants believed to have been smuggled into the country by a human-trafficking ring. They were arrested at a checkpoint in Hua Sai district of Nakhon Si Thammarat province early yesterday. Thai Pol Capt Somporn Thongcheen, deputy inspector in charge of crime suppression at Hua Sai police station, said the 98 migrants were found crammed into five vehicles. There were three four-door pickups, one pickup modified as a van and a Toyota Fortuner. The drivers of three vehicles fled the scene and the other two were arrested. They were identified as Sawat Phadungchart, 29, of Ranong’s Suksamran district, and Suthipong Chuaypat, 49, of Surat Thani’s Chaiy...

My mother - Khadija Siddiqui - died on December 26 at around 3 a.m. (Dec. 25, 4 p.m. Philadelphia time) in Chittagong Metropolitan Hospital. Inna lillahi wa inna elayhe wa rajioun . The news was a shocking and devastating one, which I could not believe. I was hoping that she would survive her latest bout with death and that I would meet her when she recovered. But that did not happen. A couple days earlier my wife Eva had left for Bangladesh with our two sons. My brother Shameem had gone earlier, before the Christmas, with his daughter Sadaf, to be with our parents. And he was the fortunate one, along with my sister Jessy, to be able to spend some precious time with her when she was well, before her hospitalization. My two other sisters left from the USA on the day of her hospitalization. All of them were able to see her before she died on the late night (or early AM hours) of December 26 but could not communicate with her. I reached Bangladesh on the 28th instan...