Habib Siddiqui

Joint statement Date:  31 st  October 2020    We, the undersigned Rohingya organisations, are increasingly worried about the propaganda war being stepped up by the Myanmar Army, the Tatmadaw, in Rakhine State and online. The Tatmadaw is trying to instigate more conflicts between Rohingya and Rakhine people, and destroying peaceful co-existence. During the last week, disturbing developments such as instigation to sow new discord between Rohingya and Rakhine people have taken place both in Rakhine State and online. In Rakhine State, the Tatmadaw is trying to destabilize relationship between two communities. This information has come from multiple, reliable sources, and it puts the life of the 600,000 remaining Rohingya in Rakhine State in grave danger, as well as all the Rakhine living there. Tun Khin, President of BROUK, has also come under attack through fake Facebook accounts during the last few days. Several accounts with Tun Khin’s name and photo have been publish...

The General Secretariat of the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) continues to follow up the repercussions of the abusive cartoons of Prophet Muhammad, salla allahu alayhi wa-sallam (SAWS) (peace be upon him) and strongly condemns such an unjustified provocation of Muslim feelings under the pretext of freedom of expression. The OIC's General Secretariat reiterates its assertion that defamation of the Messengers (peace be upon them) is unacceptable under any pretext, noting in this context the ruling of the European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) in October 2018. This ruling, which stipulated that disparagement of Prophet Muhammad (SAWS) is not freedom of expression, upheld another domestic judgment issued by an Austrian court against an Austrian woman convicted for insulting Prophet Muhammad (SAWS). On its part, the General Secretariat renews its rejection of any attempt to render Islam the objective correlative of terrorism. It condemns every terrorist act, regardless of its ...

Ivanka and Jared Kushner were waiting for Marissa Velez Kraxberger inside Trump Tower . It was the summer of 2015 and Ms Kraxberger, chief marketing and creative officer for Ms Trump’s clothing and accessories brand, was not happy. ood and watched, at her boss’s request, as Donald Trump descended the escalator in the gaudy lobby of Trump Tower on 16 June, deriding Mexicans as “rapists” and declaring the US “a dumping ground for everybody else’s problems”. His candidacy for the presidency surprised them all: Ms Trump quickly summoned Ms Kraxberger to record a video which she posted on social media, proclaiming her joy at her father’s announcement. “After his speech, we went back upstairs,” Ms Kraxberger told The Independent . “She asked what I thought. I said to her: ‘you spoke very eloquently, but I disagree with everything your father said.’ “I didn’t believe at all in what her father stood for. And I didn’t want to get involved.” To read the entire article, click here: https://...

Malaysia’s former prime minister Mahathir Mohamad has said social media platforms Twitter and Facebook “misrepresented” what he was saying, after they deleted part of a blog post in which he wrote Muslims had “a right to be angry and kill millions of French people for the massacres of the past” after the comments triggered an outcry. In a new blog post, Mahathir said he was “disgusted with attempts to misrepresent and take out of context” what he had written, saying that that section of the post needed to be read with the subsequent paragraph in which he wrote: “But by and large, the Muslims have not applied the ‘eye for an eye’ law. Muslims don’t. The French shouldn’t.” The two sections appeared as separate tweets on Twitter, where they were posted as a thread. Their publication coincided with Thursday’s knife attack at a Nice church in which three people were killed. Separately, the Malaysian government said it “strongly condemned” the Nice attack. In a statement on Friday it said...

In a second preelection statement released today, The Carter Center noted that while COVID-19 related restrictions continue to impact the activities of the election administration, political parties, candidates, and observers, the election process remains broadly on course for voting to take place on Nov. 8. The update of the voter roll is complete, and out-of-country voting has concluded, advance voting is underway, and the Union Election Commission is carrying out voter education and training for poll workers despite the major operational challenges posed by the pandemic. However, the postponement and cancellation of elections in many constituencies on security grounds has not been a transparent process. This has caused a number of political parties to question the motivation for some of the decisions taken. Estimates are that some 1.4 million voters will be disenfranchised, including a majority of voters in Rakhine State. The number of candidates has decreased significantly, partly ...

Macron epitomizes bigotry. He closed down at least 70 masjid in France while he talks about openness. He is a hypocrite of worst kind. When Muslims are attacked and killed by hateful French people and their anti-Muslim government, you won't hear the news unless someone mentions such in social media. But when a Muslim immigrant reacts to daily abuse and bigotry he/she sees around, his/her act becomes headline news. Consider the story below which did not make headlines in the western world until several days later. ---------- Two women accused of stabbing two other women wearing Muslim headscarves near the Eiffel Tower in Paris and trying to rip off their veils have been charged with assault and racist slurs, legal sources told AFP news agency on Thursday. The case comes amid heightened racial tensions following the killing last week of a French teacher who had shown his pupils caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed. The women accused over the assault were drunk when they came across ...