Habib Siddiqui

India, under Modi, is hostile to Islam, Muslims and their holy sites. Critics of the ruling party have long claimed that Hindtuvadi partisans that are sympathetic to the Hindutva causes of the ruling BJP and the Sangh Parivar are appointed throughout India's judicial system to get favorable verdict. They sanctify land-grab of Muslim holy sites.  The latest landgrab is another naked demonstration of such a hideous agenda.- HS  ============= LUCKNOW, India, Jan 31 (Reuters) - An Indian court on Wednesday ruled that Hindus can offer prayers in a 17th century mosque in the holy city of Varanasi, a lawyer for the Hindu petitioners said... The fight over claims to holy sites has divided India, which has a Hindu majority but also the world's third-largest Muslim population, since independence from British rule in 1947. The court in Varanasi, which is Prime Minister Narendra Modi's parliamentary constituency in northern Uttar Pradesh state, said Hindus can offer prayers in the Gyan...

  Image by Craig Manners. The New York Times  reported  January 27 on three negotiating tracks that are being pursued simultaneously to end the Israel-Hamas war. None of them seems likely to succeed at the moment, and Israel is not directly involved in two of them. Changes on the battlefield or in Israeli public opinion might alter the situation for the better, but changes in the region threaten to do the opposite. Track 1 is a Hamas hostage release in exchange for a time-limited cease-fire and Israel’s release of Palestinian prisoners. Hamas is demanding a permanent cease-fire, not simply a pause. A deal that includes the release of some hostages and some prisoners seems most likely. Pres. Biden has sent the CIA director, William Burns, to the Middle East to move the negotiations along. Track 2 is an overhaul of the Palestinian Authority (PA) so as to make it a more efficient and less corrupt entity to rule in Gaza. Mahmoud Abbas, the 88-year-old...

  The relief on the Louvre stele. Photograph Source: Mbzt –  CC BY 3.0 In the heady days of the antiwar movement during the Vietnam War, and larger wars in Southeast Asia, including Cambodia and Laos, millions of people took part in the great push against war on the streets around the entire globe. Here in the US, hundreds of thousands of men and women resisted war in groups and as individuals. We were on the streets and and in the jails, sitting in, teaching in, and in many other significant places. Hundreds of thousands of men and women directly pushed back against the military draft and the military in one of the largest examples of resistance in history. By 1973, when direct military operations ended for the US, followed by the reunification of Vietnam and the end of the war in 1975, it became almost impossible for the government here to stop the hemorrhaging of troops because of their refusal to obey orders in the field seen as useless. Acts of violence were committed aga...

  Speaking at the International Court of Justice the South African lawyer and writer Thembeka Ngcukaitobi pointed to the statement by Israeli defence minister Yoav Gallant that Israel was “fighting human animals”. The denial of the full and equal humanity of Palestinians by Israel and its Western backers is part of a long history of European and then Western monopolization of the claim to be fully human. This was famously expressed by Aimé Césaire, the great Martinican poet, in 1950 when he wrote that the West has never been able to “live a true humanism—a humanism made to the measure of the world.” In 1973 Steve Biko, the charismatic young leader of the Black Consciousness movement in South Africa, who understood his struggle as a “quest for a true humanity”, wrote that “the great gift still has to come from Africa – giving the world a more human face”. Oppressive regimes are never able to tolerate the intersection of principle and courage and in 1977 Biko met his death, as he had...

  Incidents of discrimination, bias and hate targeting Muslims and Palestinians in the United States increased by 178 percent in the three months following the 7 October Hamas-led attacks on Israel, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (Cair) said on Monday.  The Muslim advocacy group said it received 3,578 complaints during the last three months of 2023 since the Israel-Palestine war began.  In the period from October to December, the majority of the reported complaints fell into three main categories: 19 percent were employment discrimination cases; 13 percent were hate crimes and hate incidents; and 13 percent of the instances were discrimination in educational environments. “In the face of relentless hate and bogus smears, American Muslims, Arabs and a broad coalition of Jewish, Christian, African American, Asian Americans, and others continue calling for justice for Palestine,” Cair research and advocacy director Corey Saylor said. “This coalition knows the way ...