Habib Siddiqui

The UN condemns treatment of Muslim minorities in Myanmar. Here is a link to the news.

Will the war criminals be ever tried for their horrendous crimes against humanity? It seems an untenable wish for many of our peace and human rights activists. But it does not harm to at least dream that our humanity will do what is right and things will one day become better for all of us so that we could all share this planet without hatred and violence and that the criminals would be locked up and serve the time in confined prison cells for their crimes. The Spanish national court has reopened a 2010 case against seven current and former top Israeli leaders for a naval incident that resulted in the death of 10 Turkish activists. A Spanish judge has issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and other former and current government officials for a deadly fight at sea in 2010. As long as the warrant is in effect, if Netanyahu and those officials set foot in the western European country, they could be detained and questioned. You can read the full text o...

While the world attention is now diverted to Paris and Brussels, the criminal settler regime in Israel is doing its illegal activities in the occupied territories. You can read the news by clicking here . A hugely controversial set of settlement expansion plans, mostly in the Ramat Shlomo settlement in occupied East Jerusalem, was announced today by the Israeli government, reviving a plan which was frozen back in 2012 under heavy international pressure. The Ramat Shlomo plan was for 436 settlement housing units as part of a 660 unit plan back in 2010. This segment was frozen in 2012 amid harsh criticism from US and EU officials. Today’s announcement unfreezes these, and adds 18 m,ore units in Ramot . Though the prime minister’s office didn’t offer any details on the reasoning, it is widely believed today’s move is “retaliation” for the European Union’s decision to label Israeli products differently if they come out of settlements in the occupied territories. The settlements are ...

Muhammad Selim was loaded into a sampan with other migrants “like chickens” as he sought better employment in Malaysia. Instead, he worked for six months at a Malaysian construction site before being rounded up by police, abused in prison and sent back home. Stories like this are not uncommon for many of the unfortunate Rohingyas fleeing genocide in Myanmar. Their situation seems hopeless. Here is an article on this subject from the Globe and the Mail.

In the aftermath of the terrorism in Paris, Syrian refugees are denied entry by many of the US states. Many of these states are governed by racists and bigots. Many of them found the Paris tragedy as a sufficient justification to object to the entry of these unfortunate refugees from war torn countries to whom the incidents like Paris had been a regular feature. The Jews of Europe faced similar problems in the 1930s and 1940s. Here is a link to an article on fleeing Jews from Europe in the 1930 s.

Here is an article from veteran journalist Robert Fisk on the Paris attacks.

Here is an article from Ben Norton of Salon, which should be read by all. He writes, "History takes no prisoners. It shows, with absolute lucidity, that the Islamic extremism ravaging the world today was borne out of the Western foreign policy of yesteryear. Gore Vidal famously referred to the USA as the United States of Amnesia . The late Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai put it a little more delicately, quipping, “One of the delightful things about Americans is that they have absolutely no historical memory.” In order to understand the rise of militant Salafi groups like ISIS and al-Qaida... we must rekindle this historical memory.... A much-circulated photo of an article published in British newspaper the Independent in 1993 exemplifies the West’s twisted hypocrisy. Titled “ Anti-Soviet warrior puts his army on the road to peace ,” it features a large photo of Osama bin Laden, who, at the time, was a close Western ally... The newspaper noted that bin Laden organized a militia...

The terrorist attacks like the one that took place last Friday in Paris always invigorate criminal regimes to unleash their brand of state terrorism on targeted groups that are considered rebellious. We have seen how the events in 9/11 allowed criminal regimes all across the globe from China to Myanmar to Russia to wipe out resistance from the groups they considered hostile to their regimes. In Myanmar, 9/11 allowed the criminal military regimes to persecute the Rohingya Muslim minorities with a much harsher state sponsored program that was not seen for quite sometime since Ne Win's time. The same was the case with Chinese communist regime against the Uighur Muslims whose lands it grabbed making them a second class citizens in their ancestral home. And the same was true for Russia against the Chechens under Putin. So, I am not surprised that Chinese government is again trying to take advantage of the Paris attacks to justify its war in East Turkistan, which it call...

Over a year after ISIS captured the city of Sinjar, home to a significant chunk of Iraq’s Yazidi minority, the city was “liberated” by Kurdish forces. Just days later, Yazidis are rampaging through the streets, burning mosques and the homes of Muslims , who they accuse of being in league with ISIS. As before, however, such news are not shown in the western media. You can read the news by clicking here  and here .

Laura Gottesdiener is a freelance journalist and a news producer with Democracy Now! The author of A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and the Fight for a Place to Call Home , her writing has appeared in Mother Jones , Al Jazeera , Guernica , Playboy , Rolling Stone , and frequently at TomDispatch . Last month, a hospital run by the MSF was deliberately bombed by the US forces killing many. Laura writes, " MSF’s hospital had been a fixture in Kunduz since August 2011, the only medical facility in the region. A photo snapped a few months after its opening showed a large sign affixed to the front gate of the compound: “The MSF Trauma Centre will prioritize treatment for war-wounded and other seriously injured persons, without regard to their ethnicity or political affiliations, and determined solely by their medical needs. No fee charged.” Above the text was an image of an automatic rifle surrounded by a red circle with two thick lines through it, indicating t...

After his lawyer was killed for working to expose corruption in Putin's Russia, financier Bill Browder became a human rights activist. Ali Velshi interviewed him for Al Jazeera in September but was reshown this morning when I viewed it. It can be seen by clicking here . In his words, "I go from my $2,000 to $20,000. I ended up raising $25 million for an investment fund called the Hermitage Fund. I move to Moscow. I’m the only Wall Street–educated investor on the ground in Moscow at the time... I was the most successful hedge fund. I had more than $1 billion, which was a huge amount of money in any circumstance but certainly back then and in Russia... In 1998 the market crashes. They default. They devalue. It’s all a complete disaster. At this point I’m in a very rough place because I need to make my money back for my investors. And so I decide to try and stick it out and try to fight my way out of this hole for my clients. But what I discover is that the oligarchs, all ...

Here is the link to a good article in the Al Jazeera.

How many Yemenis have died in the Saudi-led war in Yemen against the Houthis? At least 5.4 thousand in the last few months. But who is counting when the victims are Yemenis! Usually, the western media don't report such news, and even if they do, it is usually a small news, never to be shown in the TV. For such news, you need Al Jazeera. Here is a news report on the topic of Yemen's civil war.

Is there a double standard with matters relating to terrorism? Absolutely. That is how Ben Norton of Salon.com sees it. In a must-read article in salon.com, Norton writes, "Any time there is an attack on civilians in the post-9/11 West, demagogues immediately blame it on Muslims. They frequently lack evidence, but depend on the blunt force of anti-Muslim bigotry to bolster their accusations. Actual evidence, on the other hand, shows that less than two percent of terrorist attacks from 2009 to 2013 in the E.U. were religiously motivated. In 2013, just one percent of the 152 terrorist attacks were religious in nature; in 2012, less than three percent of the 219 terrorist attacks were inspired by religion. The vast majority of terrorist attacks in these years were motivated by ethno-nationalism or separatism. In 2013, 55 percent of terrorist attacks were ethno-nationalist or separatist in nature; in 2012, more than three-quarters (76 percent) of terrorist attacks were inspir...

Paris on Friday (Nov. 13) night suffered a series of simultaneous assaults, which left at least 129 people dead and around 350 wounded. They included a mass shooting at a concert hall, several shootings at bars and restaurants, and several bomb detonations, including more than one near France’s national stadium, where a soccer match between the French and German national teams was in progress. It was a brutal attack intended to sow mayhem and terror.   According to the Paris prosecutor, François Molins, the attackers were all armed with heavy weaponry and suicide vests. Their assault began at 9:20 p.m. Friday, when one of the attackers detonated a suicide bomb outside the gates of the soccer stadium on the northern outskirts of Paris. It ended at 12:20 a.m. Saturday when the authorities stormed a concert hall, the Bataclan. One attacker there was killed; two others detonated suicide vests.   According to officials in France and Belgium , 3 of the seven suicid...

Toby Cadman is an international lawyer who has been advising the government of the Republic of Maldives on legal and constitutional reform. His article on double standards in international politics appeared in Al Jazeera some 3 months ago. He bemoans the fact that David Cameron's government has not been consistent in applying the same international standard for all mass murderers. It is a good piece and can be viewed by clicking here .

Narendra Modi has done it again. He was able to rally thousands of supporters in his latest trip outside India. This time it was in the UK. Modi is the third in a string of controversial state leaders hosted by Britain in the past two months, following Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit last month and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's stay in September.  Modi is the first Indian prime minister to visit the UK since 2006, and his visit has polarized opinion among British politicians and the Indian diaspora. In 2002, an alleged  arson attack on a train in Gujarat province, where Modi was chief minister, killed some Hindu pilgrims and sparked anti-Muslim pogroms. Estimates vary, but over the following few months, nearly 2,000 Muslims were killed by Hindus. Women were raped, mosques destroyed and bodies dumped into mass graves.  Modi was accused of not only turning a blind eye to the killings but also of being implicitly involved ...

Francis Wade has done a good job analyzing the real problems in Burma. However, he should have known that the May-June 2012 pogroms against Burmese and Rohingya Muslims were based on a false rumor that some Rohingya Muslims had raped a Rakhine woman. As subsequently found out by investigative reporters, however, there was no truth to that allegation. It was a planted story to exterminate the minority Muslims of Burma in what can be described as part of a very sinister genocidal plan. All the other pogroms that followed in the last three years and the half were part of that national project to not only kill and forcibly cause their exodus from Burma but also to disenfranchise them en masse. The recently concluded November election where they were barred from voting was the last of such criminal ploys to add to their plight. For Burma to avoid being a failed state, it must embrace federalism, human rights and integrate its born Muslims and other ethnic minorities as ...

Global warming is no longer treated as a myth but as a hard fact. Based on the records of temperature around the globe it is said that we may breach the average 1 deg C rise in temperature this year, which is sure to make this worse for tens of millions of people, esp. some 62 million people living in South Asia (formerly known as Indian Sub-continent). Many of the low lying territories like the Maldives would have its coastal territories vulnerable to the rising sea water level. It is a bad news for our planet unless we all make a big difference in lowering the use of greenhouse gases like CO2 and CH4 (carbon dioxide and methane). Can the developing countries like India and China that are using the fossil fuels to move up in technology and meet the energy needs of the growing population that are now more dependent on such than anytime before make the desired change? Or it will all be the same as usual with finger pointing for the root cause of the problem that threatens us ...

Here is the latest info from the BBC on Myanmar election: Myanmar's opposition National League for Democracy says it is confident of victory in the first openly contested national election in 25 years. An NLD spokesman said it expected to win about 70% of seats. Party leader Aung San Suu Kyi said: "I think you all have the idea of the results." Official results have been released for just 12 seats, all won by the NLD. The military-backed Union Solidarity Development Party (USDP) has been in power since 2011. "We are on track to win more than 70% of seats around the country, but the election commission has not officially confirmed yet," NLD spokesman Win Htein told AFP news agency. The 12 seats announced so far are all in Yangon. The acting chairman of the USDP has told BBC Burmese that he has lost his own seat in the constituency of Hinthada to the NLD - seen as a key indicator of election results. In spite of such victories for the NLD and loss for ...

Prime Minister Narendra Modi of India recently visited Indian Occupied Kashmir in which he tried to sell his development mantra with very few takers taking him seriously. Shortly after his visit, violence broke out and a demonstrator was killed in clashes with government troops. Police opened fire and used tear gas to disperse the crowds, but the news of the death brought more protesters onto the streets of the city of Srinagar. You can read the news by clicking here and  here .

Here is a good article from the CBC on Burma's recently held election. With tremendous excitement and hope, millions of citizens voted Sunday in Burma's historic general election that will test whether the military's long-standing grip on power can be loosened, with opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi's party expected to secure an easy victory. Even if the NLD wins, the military is guaranteed key ministerial posts — defence, interior and border security. It is not under the government's control and could continue attacks against ethnic groups. But critics are most concerned about the military's constitutional right to retake direct control of government, as well as its direct and indirect control over the country's economy. Richard Horsey, a Myanmar analyst, said that given the powers it has, the military will not be too perturbed about allowing a transfer of power to the NLD if it wins. "It's very difficult to imagine that anyone will be runnin...

The Miami Herald has recently posted a good article on the condition of Muslims of Myanmar who were disenfranchised in the election held today. You can view this by clicking here . Here is another good article on the subject of disenfranchisement  by the Globe.

Last week on Nov. 2,  two Rohingyas from Mrauk-U and Minbya Township in Arakan State of Myanmar were attacked by Rakhine extremists. One Rohingya was murdered by the Buddhist extremists and one was killed while the other victim was able to escape. When the matter was reported to the police instead of going after the Rakhine criminals, the police has imprisoned the other victim. Only in Mogher Mulluk (land of the lawless Moghs) can one find such a mockery of justice!  According to Mr. Arakani, "There were two Rohingya young men who work at farms as daily wages workers, one named Sadek S/o Shofi Alam (Aged 20) from Si Thay village Mrauk-U Township who worke at the farm of Hason in the same village, while another young man is named Shomshu Alam S/o Dil Mohammed (Aged 18) from Nagara village, Minbya Township, working at the farm of Mohammed Shah in Si Thay village, Mrauk-U Township.  On November 2nd at 5pm both of them went to paddy field to c...

The Independent of UK has published a good article from Peter Popham on election on Burma. It is about two days old but very helpful to understand the depth of bigotry within the Buddhists of Burma. Lies are propagated by Buddhist monks of the terrorist organization Ma Ba Tha to foment genocidal hatred against the Rohingya and other Muslims. By the way, the Rakhine state which saw most of the genocidal pogroms against the Rohingya is not alone in this genocidal crime. Even Rangoon, the former capital with a big Muslim population, is witnessing such unfathomed hatred and animosity. “A long time ago there were no divisions,” said San Tin Kyaw, a Muslim running for election in central Rangoon. “Buddhists and Muslims lived together and struggled for independence under one flag.” But the paranoid nationalism of successive Burmese rulers, starting with General Ne Win, has slowly eroded their position: children today learn only about Buddhism, not other religions, and increasingly Muslims ...

Today Myanmar (previously Burma) is holding its first contested vote since 1990. Since achieving independence from Britain in 1948, the country had a very difficult start. Military has ruled the country for more than half a century since 1962. Although an election was held in 1990 in which the National League for Democracy ( NLD), the opposition party of Suu Kyi, daughter of Aung San, considered the father of the nation (who was murdered by his rivals six months before independence) came out as the winner, the military refused to cede power. Suu Kyi spent most of the next 23 years under house arrest, becoming an iconic figure at home and abroad. To put pressure on the hated military regime, she was even granted a Nobel Prize for peace. Over the last four years, Myanmar’s military has loosened its grip, allowing a ‘reformist’ quasi-civil-military government to come to power under a former general, Thein Sein. Sein has received accolades for liberating political prisoners a...