1. Introduction: The Rohingya Identity and Hatemongering by Rakhine Racists
Khin Maung Saw’s article “Islamization of Burma through Chittagonian Bengalis as Rohingya Refugees” is a revisionist attempt by a deranged chauvinist Magh to rewrite the history of the Muslims of Arakan. Racism and bigotry are written all over the article. In this post-9/11 era of hatemongering and Islamophobia, it is not difficult to understand his evil mindset that steered him to concoct such an absurd idea that the Rohingya Muslims are working towards Islamization of Myanmar (Burma). Forget about the fact that Burma is a military-ruled country with no democracy, how could a mere 2 to 3 million people impose the dictates of their faith on a nation of 50 million, especially when they are denied all basic rights – of movement, assembly, marriage, education, jobs, etc.? One has to be either mentally unstable or very high in mind-altering drugs to hallucinate such a ludicrous idea!
As already recognized by scores of international organizations and human rights groups, including the US government and the UN, the legitimate rights of the Rohingyas of Arakan state of Burma towards equal rights and citizenship in their ancestral home cannot be throttled by hateful propaganda of anyone, and surely not by the paid agents of the rogue regime that have not given up on their divide-and-conquer policy to weaken genuine democratic aspirations of the people of Burma. And what better tactic than to stoke the fear of Islamization of the country by a persecuted minority that has already been brutalized and marginalized! Denied every right, enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, these unfortunate Rohingya people, pushed to settle for an uncertain life of either statelessness or refugees, inside or outside Burma, must now defend their honor and dignity against hateful and bigotry-ridden campaigns by their fellow countrymen – the racist Rakhine/Maghs of Arakan!
Racism and bigotry cannot come any worse than what thus far has been showcased by these evil children of Arakanese (and by default, Burmese) racism! It is sad to see that Saw who has been living in Germany has not learned anything from its past history of xenophobia. He had the choice to either reject or espouse the failed model of Nazi fascism that has had wrecked so much havoc and brought so much pain, shame and unbearable misery to its people. Instead of siding with the persecuted Rohingyas, he chose the hated monsters of the Nazi era as his model. One can only feel repulsed by such an evil choice.
Thus, it is not surprising to discover the unmistakable similarities of his fascist onslaught against the persecuted Rohingyas with those of the Jews of Nazi-era Germany. Like his other pseudo-historian peers - Aye Kyaw and Aye Chan (two unabashed fascists, by any account), his pattern of onslaught against the Rohingya people is borrowed from the hateful works of convicted war criminals like Julius Streicher of the Nazi era. One only has to change the terms ‘Jew’ to Chittagonian Bengali/Muslim or Rohingya, ‘Judenstaat’ to Islamization, and ‘Germany’ to Burma (Myanmar) to see the obvious similarity of their hate campaign.
These demented and paranoid Theravada Buddhists of Arakan, often masquerading as intellectual voices of their community, are no democrats and surely not liberals. They are, in fact, closet fascists. If allowed to come to power or sway policy decisions, they will, in all likelihood, borrow the pages from the hated (German) SS manual and repeat the heinous crimes of their fellow coreligionists in Cambodia. It is no accident that Saw’s mentor Aye Kyaw wrote the infamous 1982 Burma Citizenship Law that provided the blueprint for denying citizenship rights of the Rohingya people – the other dominant ethnic group of Arakan. It was done with a calculated precision to not only rob the properties of the Rohingya but also to uproot them en masse from the soil of Arakan, their ancestral home. It’s an utterly devious and devilish conspiracy.
Surely, these Buddhists of Arakan give a bad name to their religion and the non-violent founder of their faith. Their malicious words and acts of unfathomable bigotry, racism, aggression against and oppression of the Rohingya people show that they are misfits to the civilized world, especially in the 21st century when people have learned to live amicably burying their age-old prejudice. Indubitably, multi-culture, integration and pluralism -- a reality in most parts of our world today -- are alien concepts to them, and as such, are an anathema to everything that they stand for or crave for their fractured country along the ethnic line.
Forgotten there is the time-honored realization that Burma is a country that has many races, ethnicities and religions. It is a country of many nations. It is not a country either of or for any particular group – be they are the majority Bamar (Burman), the minority Shan, Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Rohingya, Rakhine, Mon, Karen, Chinese, Indians, or whatever. Racism runs deep and acts like the Krazy glue holding members of each of these discernible groups together in their own domain, while it acts like a double-edged knife cutting through the fabric of the Burmese society, justifying hostility against disparate groups that have nothing in common either in language or in religion.
The only way this country of many nations can survive and evolve into a civilized state is not through the brutal and savage arms of injustice, denial, xenophobia, abuse and oppression of the minorities but a federal democratic framework that genuinely protects all ensuring their human rights and equality without any discrimination. This means, the Rohingyas of Arakan should have the same rights as enjoyed by a Rakhine; the Karens have the same rights as enjoyed by a Bamar, and so on and so forth for all the races, tribes, ethnicities, and groups.
As much as the spiteful non-Muslim promoters of ‘Islamization of Europe’ and ‘Islamization of America’ have failed to bring about mass-scale onslaught against minority Muslims living in the West, and, instead, have unearthed their own unfathomable bigotry and racism, and the often-ignored but dirty little secret about the criminality of the homegrown terrorists and white hate-groups, the fascists of Arakan and Burma are doomed to failure with their fear-tactic of using boogeyman of ‘Islamization of Burma.’ Their disinformation campaign has also unearthed their true hideous selves.
2. Analysis: The Land and the Indigenous People of Arakan:
To incite violence and bigotry against Rohingya Muslims of Arakan, Khin Maung Saw does not waste any time. He starts with a picture of a Muslim congregational prayer on the front page, followed by a photo of some soldiers (or possibly guerillas) sitting on the ground. The connotation is quite obvious. However, such fear-mongering tactics will not succeed and would only lay bare the hideous character of their accusers, as it did in Norway. After all, of all the various communities that call Arakan their home, it is the Rakhine Maghs of Burma that have continued to practice violence; they want a ‘free’ Arakan away from the no less monstrous military brutes of Burma, while still purporting to retain its racist, non-democratic and fascist character that does not allow integration and multi-culture.
In his prologue Saw mentions the story of an ‘ungrateful’ camel that had dislodged its master from the tent. He does not duck the connotation by stating that the Rohingyas of Burma are like that camel in the story that are trying to dislodge the ‘owner’ of the tent. By ‘owner’, he obviously means his own race - the Rakhine Magh.
Fact is, however, opposed to this make-belief fictional story put forth by the chauvinist Rakhine: the Rohingyas are neither the guests of Arakan nor are they trying to dislodge anyone. Far from the false Rakhine propaganda of being the outsiders who had settled in Arakan during the British rule of Arakan -- a persistent theme in the propaganda materials of Aye Kyaw, Aye Chan, Khin Maung Saw and other ultra-chauvinist racists of Arakan -- the existence of the Rohingya in the soil of Arakan predates the Magh influx to the territory from Tibet and other parts of Burma.
As credible research work by unbiased historians and researchers have amply shown, these Rohingyas, derogatorily called the Kalas (by the racist Maghs of Arakan), are the descendants of the indigenous people of Arakan – the true Bhumiputras (adibashis) -- of the land.
Separated to the north by the high hills and deep forests of the Chin State and to the east by the almost insurmountable Arakan Yoma mountain range which divides the Arakan coastal area from the rest of Burma, the region came to be known as the land of the ‘Kala Mukh’ (Land of the ‘Black Faces’), inhabited by these dark brown-colored Indians who had much in common with the people (today’s Bangladeshis, or more particularly Chittagonians) living on the north-western side of the Naaf River, along the adjoining coastal areas of the Bay of Bengal. The resemblance was not limited to physical features like skin color, shape of head and nose alone, but also in shared culture and beliefs. They thrived on rice cultivation on the fertile planes and the abundant supply of fish in the nearby rivers, streams and the Bay of Bengal. The one-mile wide Naaf River was no barrier to sustain family and cultural ties between these sea-faring people living on either side of the river. Arakan’s northern part Mayu, as noted by Dr. Moshe Yegar, can be seen as ‘an almost direct continuation of eastern Bengal’ [Bangladesh].
The Arakan Mountain range also served as a barrier inhibiting Burmese invasions, and allowing Arakan to develop as a separate political entity. As also concurred by all historians the influx of the Sino-Tibetans (with Mongoloid features) in Arakan, resembling today’s Rakhine stock, did not happen until after the collapse of the Vaisali kingdom in the 10th century CE.
What happened to the region in the centuries before and after this invasion? As evidenced by numerous archeological finds, it is obvious that the Hindu colonists, fuelled by their need for trade and commerce, gold and silver, first colonized the region in the early 1st century CE. According to Dr. Emil Forchhammer, a Swiss Professor of Pali at Rangoon College, and Superintendent of the newly founded Archaeological Survey (1881): “The earliest dawn of the history of Arakan reveals the base of the hills, which divide the lowest courses of the Kaladan and Lemro rivers, inhabited by sojourners from India… Their subjects are divided into the four castes of the older Hindu communities…”
By the 3rd century (CE), the coastal region of Kala Mukh (Arakan) had been settled with the colonists dominating and coexisting warily with the indigenous people. In the sites of major habitation Sanskrit became the written language of the ruling class, and the religious beliefs were those prevalent at that time in south-Asia (or Indian sub-continent). The Hindu kings that ruled the coastal territories of Chittagong also ruled the crescent of Arakan. Presumably, the indigenous people of Arakan, much like their brothers and sisters living to the north-west of the Naaf River in (today’s) Chittagong, practiced some loose form of Hinduism.
The second phase of Indianization of Arakan occurred between the 4th and the 6th century CE, by which time the colonists had established their kingdom, and named their capital Vaishali. As a port city, Vaishali was in contact with Samatat (the planes of lower Bangladesh) and other parts of India and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). Historically, these early rulers came to be known as the Chandras and controlled the territories as far north as Chittagong.
The Anand Chandra Inscription, which contains 65 verses (71 and a half lines) and now sited at the Shitthaung pagoda, provides some information about these early rulers. Interestingly, neither the name of the kingdom or the two premier cities – Dhanyavati and Vaishali – is mentioned. This 11-foot high monolith, unique in entire Burma, has three of its four faces inscribed in a Nagari script, which is closely allied to those of Bengali and north-eastern India. As noted rightly by Noel Singer had it not been for Professor E.H. Johnston of Balliol College, Oxford, who translated the Sanskrit script and the Indian epigraphists before him, the contents of the Inscription which remained inaccessible for well over a thousand years would never have been known.
The script on the panel on the east face is believed by Johnston to be the oldest. According to Pamela Gutman it was similar to the type of script used in Bengal (Bangladesh) during the early 6th century CE. As to the panel on the north face, Johnston mentioned that several smaller inscriptions in Bengali characters had been added in the 10th century. Gutman however felt that the principal text in this section is of the mid-11th century CE. The panel on the west face, which is reasonably preserved, is believed by Gutman to be of the earlier part of the 8th century. This priceless document not only lists the personalities of each monarch but also some of the major events of every reign.
So who is this Ananda Chandra? In verse 64, it clearly says that he was a descendant of the Saiva-Andhra monarchs [presumably of Banga or Bangladesh] whose kingdom was located between the Godavari and Krishna Rivers of Bengal, and close to the Bay of Bengal. The founder of this new dynasty was Vajra Sakti who reigned circa 649-665 CE. His successor was Sri Dharma Vijaya, who reigned from circa 665-701. As noted by Singer, and much in contrast to Rakhine claims, Dharma Vijaya was not a Theravada Buddhist, but probably a Mahayanist. The next in line was Narendra Vijaya who reigned from circa 701 to 704 CE. The next to rule was Sri Dharma Chandra, who reigned from 704 to 720 CE. He was the father of Ananda Chandra who was a munificent patron of Mahayana Buddhism and Hindu institutions.
As can be clearly seen from the above brief review, the rulers that ruled Arakan, in centuries before the Sino-Tibetan invasion, were of Indian descent, as were the people (the so-called Kalas) who lived there. They had much in common with Banga, or today’s Bangladesh.
So what happened to those indigenous people after the invasion of Arakan in 957 CE by the Sino-Tibetan race? We have absolutely no historic evidence to suggest that they were exterminated. It is not difficult to understand that while the kingdom had changed hands, a majority of those indigenous people (the ‘Kalas’) continued on with their lives as usual, paying taxes (e.g., in grains) to their new rulers, as they had done before to the previous rulers. Some perhaps changed their faith to Buddhism, while many retained their ancestral religion. Theravada Buddhism, imported mostly from Sri Lanka, took centuries to take its root in Arakan, gradually replacing the Mahayanist Buddhism of the latter Vaisali rulers.
It is also important to note that many of the Sinhalese Buddhists, who later came as monks and settlers to Arakan, were the descendants of Bengali Buddhists who had fled the country as a result of internecine wars that took place between the forces of Hinduism and Buddhism in nearby Bengal in the centuries before Islam came to the region. As Buddhism was almost wiped out in Bengal by the Hindu rulers and the Brahmin clergy, it found a safe haven in Sri Lanka where it flourished. And who would have thought that centuries later those Singhalese Buddhists (with a remarkable facial similarity with the people of Bengal), the progenies of fleeing Buddhists from Bengal, would one day become the harbinger of the new faith - Theravada Buddhism -- in Arakan and rest of Burma?
While the previous Vaishali rulers looked westward, the newer Sino-Tibetan rulers looked eastward, thus allowing mixing of its race with Burman people of today’s Myanmar proper. Over the centuries, two communities emerged – one the indigenous with Indian (Bengali/Arakanese) features (the forefathers of today’s Rohingya Hindus and Muslims) and the other, the new-comer with Mongoloid features (the forefathers of today’s Rakhine Buddhists). It is not difficult to also conclude that in those days of porous borders across land and sea there were migration of other races and religions to this region. Buddhist monks, e.g., came from Sri Lanka bringing in their Theravada Buddhism, as did others, slowly changing the culture of the people living there.
It is simply regrettable to notice how today’s ultra-chauvinist Rakhine and Burman intelligentsia with tunnel-vision refuses to widen their knowledge of the ‘other’ people, Hindus and Muslims, who share the same territory. Anything Indian/Bengali/Chittagonian is usually looked down and frowned upon. It is pure racism at its worst.
==== to be continued ======
Saturday, October 1, 2011
The 66th UN General Assembly Session and Obama’s Deplorable Tactics
Last month the Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, and the U.S. President Obama all spoke at the U.N. While for the first time in years, Abbas behaved and spoke like a leader, taking proactive measures instead of waiting for someone else to call the shots, it is hard to decide whose speech was worse: Netanyahu’s or Obama’s. Obama’s read like an appeal to Jewish voters to finance and reelect him in the next election and Netanyahu’s read like a pep rally to the Likud Central Committee.
In the post-Arafat era, President Abbas has more often than not behaved like a yes-man for the U.S., as if too unsure or too uncomfortable about speaking out against the mindless zero-sum activities that seem to be the only things that either the U.S. or the Israeli government cared about. But on Friday, September 23, he found his lost voice and assumed the title the Palestinian people have long waited for. He transformed himself to becoming their leader, their hero, in relaying their voice. It was long overdue.
In the 66th session of the General Assembly, President Abbas said, “It is a moment of truth; and my people are waiting to hear the answer of the world. Will it allow Israel to continue its occupation, the only occupation in the world? Will it allow Israel to remain a State above the law and accountability?” “There are either those that believe that we are not wanted in the Middle East or (those that believe) that there is a missing State that needs to be established immediately.”
He thanked the states that had supported the Palestinian struggle and had recognized the State of Palestine, and those that had upgraded Palestine’s representation in their capitals. He also thanked the U.N. Secretary-General for stating that the Palestinian State should have been created years ago; such support made the Palestinians feel that they were being listened to and that their tragedy was not being ignored. It also reinforced their hope for justice.
President Abbas then informed the Assembly that he had submitted to the Secretary-General an application for admission of Palestine, on the basis of the 4 June 1967 borders, with Al-Quds Al-Sharif (Jerusalem) as its capital, as a full United Nations member. “I call upon Mr. Secretary-General to expedite transmittal of our request to the Security Council, and I call upon the distinguished members of the Security Council to vote in favor of our full membership. I also appeal to the states that have not yet recognized the State of Palestine to do so,” he said. The world’s support for that was a “victory for truth, freedom, justice, law and international legitimacy” and was the greatest contribution to peacemaking in the Holy Land. In closing, he said: “I have come here today with a message from a courageous and proud people: Palestine is being reborn.” He implored everyone to stand with it.
In his speech, President Obama said that “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable.” He also made it crystal clear that Washington will veto any Palestinian application to the U.N. Security Council for statehood. Not once did he refer to illegal Jewish “settlements” on Palestinian lands, nor did he even use the word “occupied” — or any derivative of that word in his long speech. Nor was there a word about the plight of the still besieged population of Gaza, or about the “1967 borders” as being the basis for any eventual two-state solution. Obama is truly becoming a joke of our time!
Honestly speaking, Obama does not surprise me any more. Since becoming the President of the USA, he has largely forgotten what got him elected and put him into the White House. It was to usher in a ‘change’ for the better from the dark days of GW Bush. To those who voted for Obama, Bush was a villain, an utterly evil man with a crusading zeal, who had deliberately lied and took the country into two unnecessary wars, thereby bankrupting it. Obama was supposed to be the ‘good’ guy restoring America’s honor and dignity. But Bush, whether one either loathes or loves him, was no hypocrite; at least people knew what to expect of him. But the same cannot be said of Obama. The latter has become the greatest disappointment of our time.
As I write, the Obama administration has assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan -- two of its own citizens, thus behaving like any of the hated authoritarian regimes of our time. By acting as the accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and (finally now the) executioner – all at the same time – his administration has violated the Fifth Amendment, which forbids the U.S. federal government from depriving any person -- not just American citizens -- of life without due process of law. Commenting on the assassination, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, said, "Al-Awlaki was born here, he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad." Paul noted the different treatment afforded the Oklahoma bomber. "What would people have said about Timothy McVeigh? We didn't assassinate him, and they were pretty certain he had done it. They went and put him through the courts, and then they executed him. To start assassinating American citizens without charges, we should think very seriously about this."
As is clear from his murderous activities overseas, Obama is not a man of peace! The Nobel Committee should do us all a favor by admitting its mistake and recall its Peace prize which they bestowed to this undeserving person.
In his Cairo speech two years ago, President Obama displayed some awareness of the Palestinian distress; but that was before he was enslaved by the U.S. pro-Israel lobby. Commenting on Obama’s speech at the UN, Hanan Ashrawi, a veteran Palestinian stateswoman, told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, “Listening to him, you would think it was the Palestinians who occupy Israel,” noting what even The New York Times suggested seemed to be the “hypocritical” nature of Obama’s enthusiasm for Arab democracy movements. “He presented a double standard when he disassociated the Arabs’ fight for their freedom in the region from the Palestinian freedom fighters, who deal with the occupation for 63 years,” she said. “What we heard is precisely why we are going to the U.N.,” she added.
By siding so brazenly with Netanyahu and against the Palestinian bid for statehood, Obama has put the final nail in the coffin of America’s status as a superpower, thus, forfeiting Washington’s 20-year exclusivity as broker of the clearly broken “peace process” between the two parties.
As Uri Avnery has recently observed, “Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength — Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis. But of the two, it is the Israelis — only they — who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad. No occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened.”
This in spite of the fact that 6,430 Palestinians including 1,463 Palestinian children were killed by the Israelis since September 29, 2000! In the same period, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been injured, 5,554 Palestinians imprisoned and 24,813 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by the Israelis. The tolls on the Israeli side are zero home destroyed and one prisoner held (by Hamas). In the same period, Israel has built 236 Jewish-only settlements and outposts illegally on confiscated land. Obviously, none of these facts mattered to Obama.
The Arab Spring may have been America’s last chance to recover its tarnished standing in the Middle East. Obama stayed with Mubarak until it was too late; ‘crying Iranian wolves’, he sided with the murderous regime in Bahrain; he came to the aid of the rebels in Libya against Gaddafi but chose to ignore the plight of the Syrian people against their murderous tyrant Bashar al-Asad. Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. As Uri Avnery has put it, “No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the U.S. has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff.”
And what a difference a year can make! Last year, Obama in his speech to the United Nations was full of promise and determination to advance Palestinian statehood through negotiations with Israel. He said in the UN General Assembly: “Those of us who are friends of Israel must understand that true security for the Jewish state requires an independent Palestine – one that allows the Palestinian people to live with dignity and opportunity... And we can come back here, next year, as we have for the last sixty, and make long speeches about it. We can read familiar lists of grievances….Or, we can say that this time will be different – that this time we will not let terror, or turbulence, or posturing, or petty politics stand in the way. This time, we will think not of ourselves, but of the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams, or the young boy in Sderot who wants to sleep without the nightmare of rocket fire. This time, we should draw upon the teachings of tolerance that lie at the heart of three great religions that see Jerusalem’s soil as sacred. This time we should reach for what’s best within ourselves. If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”
Ironically, in his speech last year, Obama reminded us about one of the first actions of the UN General Assembly, which was to adopt a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. “That Declaration begins by stating that, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world,” Obama said.
By promising to deny that very right to the Palestinian people, what message is Obama conveying to the world now? Can one conceive of freedom, justice and peace for the world without beginning with freedom, justice, and peace in the lives of individual human beings? By standing up against universal values, Obama has unmasked the immoral character of his administration. He foolishly thinks that such immoral stands -- and there are plenty to cite -- would get him reelected in 2012. Why would the pro-Israelis vote for him when they would have the likes of Rick Perry and other Christian fundamentalist nuts within the opposition to vote for? What Obama needed was a moral leadership to salvage his pathetic record, and not the deplorable hypocrisy or the pro-Israeli appeasements with which he has come to be associated with. His flip-flop actions have erased the support within the non-partisan center that he needs to get reelected.
Whether or not President Obama wields the butcher’s knife with his own hand, no one is under any delusion that his speech at the UN has killed the peace process. With such a support from Washington, it was no surprise that last Tuesday Israel announced 1,100 new housing units in east Jerusalem outside Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.
Israel is a pariah state, a fact once again demonstrated through the thunderous ovation that Abbas enjoyed (compared to Netanyahu) during his historic speech at the UN General Assembly. Its goal has been to expand its borders by swallowing up the West Bank and to make life so miserable for the Palestinian people that they will have no option but to leave. Lack of mobility restricts Palestinian livelihood. And the diversion of water into the Israeli settlements robs them of a basic necessity of their life. These are crimes against humanity. But in this age of information, she has been using endless zero-sum ‘peace talks’ as covers to complete her illegal annexation policy.
President Obama should reflect upon the fact that if the U.S. government vetoes Palestine’s bid for recognition by the U.N., it would be against America’s own declaration of independence which says that if people are denied equal rights and representative government, they have the right to resist their oppressors. It is a terrible hypocrisy of the Obama administration when it denies the rights to the Palestinian people that it cherishes at home and preaches abroad.
One can only pity Obama who lost the moral compass of what is right and what is wrong!
In the post-Arafat era, President Abbas has more often than not behaved like a yes-man for the U.S., as if too unsure or too uncomfortable about speaking out against the mindless zero-sum activities that seem to be the only things that either the U.S. or the Israeli government cared about. But on Friday, September 23, he found his lost voice and assumed the title the Palestinian people have long waited for. He transformed himself to becoming their leader, their hero, in relaying their voice. It was long overdue.
In the 66th session of the General Assembly, President Abbas said, “It is a moment of truth; and my people are waiting to hear the answer of the world. Will it allow Israel to continue its occupation, the only occupation in the world? Will it allow Israel to remain a State above the law and accountability?” “There are either those that believe that we are not wanted in the Middle East or (those that believe) that there is a missing State that needs to be established immediately.”
He thanked the states that had supported the Palestinian struggle and had recognized the State of Palestine, and those that had upgraded Palestine’s representation in their capitals. He also thanked the U.N. Secretary-General for stating that the Palestinian State should have been created years ago; such support made the Palestinians feel that they were being listened to and that their tragedy was not being ignored. It also reinforced their hope for justice.
President Abbas then informed the Assembly that he had submitted to the Secretary-General an application for admission of Palestine, on the basis of the 4 June 1967 borders, with Al-Quds Al-Sharif (Jerusalem) as its capital, as a full United Nations member. “I call upon Mr. Secretary-General to expedite transmittal of our request to the Security Council, and I call upon the distinguished members of the Security Council to vote in favor of our full membership. I also appeal to the states that have not yet recognized the State of Palestine to do so,” he said. The world’s support for that was a “victory for truth, freedom, justice, law and international legitimacy” and was the greatest contribution to peacemaking in the Holy Land. In closing, he said: “I have come here today with a message from a courageous and proud people: Palestine is being reborn.” He implored everyone to stand with it.
In his speech, President Obama said that “America’s commitment to Israel’s security is unshakeable.” He also made it crystal clear that Washington will veto any Palestinian application to the U.N. Security Council for statehood. Not once did he refer to illegal Jewish “settlements” on Palestinian lands, nor did he even use the word “occupied” — or any derivative of that word in his long speech. Nor was there a word about the plight of the still besieged population of Gaza, or about the “1967 borders” as being the basis for any eventual two-state solution. Obama is truly becoming a joke of our time!
Honestly speaking, Obama does not surprise me any more. Since becoming the President of the USA, he has largely forgotten what got him elected and put him into the White House. It was to usher in a ‘change’ for the better from the dark days of GW Bush. To those who voted for Obama, Bush was a villain, an utterly evil man with a crusading zeal, who had deliberately lied and took the country into two unnecessary wars, thereby bankrupting it. Obama was supposed to be the ‘good’ guy restoring America’s honor and dignity. But Bush, whether one either loathes or loves him, was no hypocrite; at least people knew what to expect of him. But the same cannot be said of Obama. The latter has become the greatest disappointment of our time.
As I write, the Obama administration has assassinated Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan -- two of its own citizens, thus behaving like any of the hated authoritarian regimes of our time. By acting as the accuser, prosecutor, judge, jury and (finally now the) executioner – all at the same time – his administration has violated the Fifth Amendment, which forbids the U.S. federal government from depriving any person -- not just American citizens -- of life without due process of law. Commenting on the assassination, Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas), who is running for the GOP presidential nomination, said, "Al-Awlaki was born here, he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it's sad." Paul noted the different treatment afforded the Oklahoma bomber. "What would people have said about Timothy McVeigh? We didn't assassinate him, and they were pretty certain he had done it. They went and put him through the courts, and then they executed him. To start assassinating American citizens without charges, we should think very seriously about this."
As is clear from his murderous activities overseas, Obama is not a man of peace! The Nobel Committee should do us all a favor by admitting its mistake and recall its Peace prize which they bestowed to this undeserving person.
In his Cairo speech two years ago, President Obama displayed some awareness of the Palestinian distress; but that was before he was enslaved by the U.S. pro-Israel lobby. Commenting on Obama’s speech at the UN, Hanan Ashrawi, a veteran Palestinian stateswoman, told Israel’s Haaretz newspaper, “Listening to him, you would think it was the Palestinians who occupy Israel,” noting what even The New York Times suggested seemed to be the “hypocritical” nature of Obama’s enthusiasm for Arab democracy movements. “He presented a double standard when he disassociated the Arabs’ fight for their freedom in the region from the Palestinian freedom fighters, who deal with the occupation for 63 years,” she said. “What we heard is precisely why we are going to the U.N.,” she added.
By siding so brazenly with Netanyahu and against the Palestinian bid for statehood, Obama has put the final nail in the coffin of America’s status as a superpower, thus, forfeiting Washington’s 20-year exclusivity as broker of the clearly broken “peace process” between the two parties.
As Uri Avnery has recently observed, “Obama treated the two sides as if they were equal in strength — Israelis and Palestinians, Palestinians and Israelis. But of the two, it is the Israelis — only they — who suffer and have suffered. Persecution. Exile. Holocaust. An Israeli child threatened by rockets. Surrounded by the hatred of Arab children. So sad. No occupation. No settlements. No June 1967 borders. No Naqba. No Palestinian children killed or frightened.”
This in spite of the fact that 6,430 Palestinians including 1,463 Palestinian children were killed by the Israelis since September 29, 2000! In the same period, more than 45,000 Palestinians have been injured, 5,554 Palestinians imprisoned and 24,813 Palestinian homes have been destroyed by the Israelis. The tolls on the Israeli side are zero home destroyed and one prisoner held (by Hamas). In the same period, Israel has built 236 Jewish-only settlements and outposts illegally on confiscated land. Obviously, none of these facts mattered to Obama.
The Arab Spring may have been America’s last chance to recover its tarnished standing in the Middle East. Obama stayed with Mubarak until it was too late; ‘crying Iranian wolves’, he sided with the murderous regime in Bahrain; he came to the aid of the rebels in Libya against Gaddafi but chose to ignore the plight of the Syrian people against their murderous tyrant Bashar al-Asad. Now he has blown it, perhaps forever. As Uri Avnery has put it, “No self-respecting Arab will forgive him for plunging his knife into the back of the helpless Palestinians. All the credit the U.S. has tried to gain in the last months in the Arab and the wider Muslim world has been blown away with one puff.”
And what a difference a year can make! Last year, Obama in his speech to the United Nations was full of promise and determination to advance Palestinian statehood through negotiations with Israel. He said in the UN General Assembly: “Those of us who are friends of Israel must understand that true security for the Jewish state requires an independent Palestine – one that allows the Palestinian people to live with dignity and opportunity... And we can come back here, next year, as we have for the last sixty, and make long speeches about it. We can read familiar lists of grievances….Or, we can say that this time will be different – that this time we will not let terror, or turbulence, or posturing, or petty politics stand in the way. This time, we will think not of ourselves, but of the young girl in Gaza who wants to have no ceiling on her dreams, or the young boy in Sderot who wants to sleep without the nightmare of rocket fire. This time, we should draw upon the teachings of tolerance that lie at the heart of three great religions that see Jerusalem’s soil as sacred. This time we should reach for what’s best within ourselves. If we do, when we come back here next year, we can have an agreement that will lead to a new member of the United Nations – an independent, sovereign state of Palestine, living in peace with Israel.”
Ironically, in his speech last year, Obama reminded us about one of the first actions of the UN General Assembly, which was to adopt a Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948. “That Declaration begins by stating that, “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice, and peace in the world,” Obama said.
By promising to deny that very right to the Palestinian people, what message is Obama conveying to the world now? Can one conceive of freedom, justice and peace for the world without beginning with freedom, justice, and peace in the lives of individual human beings? By standing up against universal values, Obama has unmasked the immoral character of his administration. He foolishly thinks that such immoral stands -- and there are plenty to cite -- would get him reelected in 2012. Why would the pro-Israelis vote for him when they would have the likes of Rick Perry and other Christian fundamentalist nuts within the opposition to vote for? What Obama needed was a moral leadership to salvage his pathetic record, and not the deplorable hypocrisy or the pro-Israeli appeasements with which he has come to be associated with. His flip-flop actions have erased the support within the non-partisan center that he needs to get reelected.
Whether or not President Obama wields the butcher’s knife with his own hand, no one is under any delusion that his speech at the UN has killed the peace process. With such a support from Washington, it was no surprise that last Tuesday Israel announced 1,100 new housing units in east Jerusalem outside Israel’s pre-1967 boundaries.
Israel is a pariah state, a fact once again demonstrated through the thunderous ovation that Abbas enjoyed (compared to Netanyahu) during his historic speech at the UN General Assembly. Its goal has been to expand its borders by swallowing up the West Bank and to make life so miserable for the Palestinian people that they will have no option but to leave. Lack of mobility restricts Palestinian livelihood. And the diversion of water into the Israeli settlements robs them of a basic necessity of their life. These are crimes against humanity. But in this age of information, she has been using endless zero-sum ‘peace talks’ as covers to complete her illegal annexation policy.
President Obama should reflect upon the fact that if the U.S. government vetoes Palestine’s bid for recognition by the U.N., it would be against America’s own declaration of independence which says that if people are denied equal rights and representative government, they have the right to resist their oppressors. It is a terrible hypocrisy of the Obama administration when it denies the rights to the Palestinian people that it cherishes at home and preaches abroad.
One can only pity Obama who lost the moral compass of what is right and what is wrong!
Thursday, September 15, 2011
Debate with a known Rakhine Racist?
I was asked about my views about debating with a known racist. Here below are my views on this subject:
A debate in a hall or media outlet is all about counterpoints raised by each participant about his/her position on a given subject with the sole aim of winning it. The question is does such an agenda - a debate with a Rakhine racist -- help the Rohingya cause vis-a-vis their accusers, who are racists and bigots? Aye Chan is a half-educated Rakhine with a PhD degree from a third-rate university who now teaches in a 4th rate university in Japan. He uses his laughable credential to masquerade as a Rakhine intellectual. But if one studies his work, there is nothing intellectually enlightening in his work other than his 'discoveries' about how the names Arakan and Akyab had originated, how the Rohingya people are a legacy of the British Occupation period, and how the current Rohingyas are infiltrators from Chittagong who are trying to take over Arakan and introduce the Taliban-brand of Islam on everyone. These are all false propaganda made with the single objective of uprooting the Rohingya people from their ancestral home in Arakan. One has to pity such ludicrous claims from a person who likes to claim himself as an intellectual. He is a pin-head charlatan, but dangerous enough to seed hatred to divide our world.
Before the mongoloid featured Tibeto-Burman savages moved into the crescent of Arakan, the indigenous people were brown-colored people, derogatorily termed 'Kalas' by the invaders. These indigenous people had everything in common with the people living on the other side of the Naaf river, and nothing to do and common with the wild people that lived on the forests to the north-east and the savages east of the Arakan Yoma mountain range.
If we recall Yoma is the Sanskrit word for what in Bengali is called Jom (devil, death or bad spirit). That is how it was named by the indigenous people because of the savages that lived there and the regions beyond to the north and east. Fearful of those savages, these indigenous people lived along the coastal areas, and thrived on rice cultivation grown in the plane land and the abundant supply of fish found in the sea, rivers, streams and ponds that they dug. These indigenous 'Kalas' mixing with the latter Muslim settlers/travelers/Sufis (including Arab/Persian merchants, traders, soldiers who came to restore Narameikhla to the Arakan throne, and others) created the genesis of today's Rohingya. The conversion of the 'Kalas' to Islam is no different than what has happened throughout history in the last 14 centuries along the coastal regions from Mozambique to Malacca. To call these indigenous people unwanted guests is like calling the Native Indians of America as refugees who had settled after the Europeans. So much for Aye Chan's pseudo-scholarship!
An intellectual is endowed with intellect having the power of understanding; having capacity for the higher forms of knowledge or thought; characterized by intelligence or mental capacity. Does Aye Chan possess any of these traits? I have failed to find any in his. He is a provocateur to tense relationship between two major groups in Arakan. Who benefits from such trash racism? It is the forces of divide and rule. Is he an agent for the hated Myanmar government? I won't be surprised to discover the under-table deals he has made with the regime.
A true intellectual concerned about his homeland should understand what is wrong with his native country and its people so as to find ways that would provide direction for upliftment, and getting out of the current sad state. Do you see anything remotely connected with this line of actions from Aye Chan or his peers? I have not. As I have repeatedly said he is like a cancer that spreads racism and bigotry in the fabric of Arakan eventually killing/weakening the nation. It is not the future any conscientious Arakanese Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist would like to see. But the Rakhine side has no wise intellectual and only the reincarnations of convicted Nazi criminals like Julius Streicher in the likes of Aye Chan, Aye Kyaw and Khin Maung Saw, and their ilk, who sell the tablet of hatred packaged as the boogeyman of 'Islamization of Arakan by the Rohingya'. They are essentially fascists.
Sharing a dais with a fascist is not something that is either noble or wise. It would give credibility to hatred. The best one can get is: call it a draw; and nothing better. It would be a shouting match and unruly. In his so-called invitation to debate the Rohingya issue, Aye Chan is craving for publicity, and wants to get a free audience at a high cost to the Rohingya, who must organize and pay for the meeting, with no burden unto him or his group for free publicity of hatred. Such debates require a strong neutral moderator to conduct it in a civic way, none of which one can guarantee to find. If Aye Chan is serious about a debate, let him organize such an event with invitation made to the Rohingya people to debate him or his ilk in a civic forum that is moderated neutrally by a university professor of repute. I would have no problem endorsing such a move.
As I shared in an earlier note, what is needed is propagating the Rohingya view widely by all the avenues that are out there, including popularizing and sharing the correct analyses and views on the Rohingya that many of us have written, or available sources from unbiased scholars. There are quite a few good works on this subject that should be made available to policy makers in each country.
Finally again, I won't support wasting money or resources to give a voice to racism and bigotry, so typical of the likes of Aye Chan. He is a fascist intellectual for his chauvinist people, and is not an honorable person possessing integrity, analytical thinking, and wisdom that we should give publicity to. What we need is: refutation of every false propaganda that he makes so that truth prevails, and people have the ability to discern truth from his false campaigns.
A debate in a hall or media outlet is all about counterpoints raised by each participant about his/her position on a given subject with the sole aim of winning it. The question is does such an agenda - a debate with a Rakhine racist -- help the Rohingya cause vis-a-vis their accusers, who are racists and bigots? Aye Chan is a half-educated Rakhine with a PhD degree from a third-rate university who now teaches in a 4th rate university in Japan. He uses his laughable credential to masquerade as a Rakhine intellectual. But if one studies his work, there is nothing intellectually enlightening in his work other than his 'discoveries' about how the names Arakan and Akyab had originated, how the Rohingya people are a legacy of the British Occupation period, and how the current Rohingyas are infiltrators from Chittagong who are trying to take over Arakan and introduce the Taliban-brand of Islam on everyone. These are all false propaganda made with the single objective of uprooting the Rohingya people from their ancestral home in Arakan. One has to pity such ludicrous claims from a person who likes to claim himself as an intellectual. He is a pin-head charlatan, but dangerous enough to seed hatred to divide our world.
Before the mongoloid featured Tibeto-Burman savages moved into the crescent of Arakan, the indigenous people were brown-colored people, derogatorily termed 'Kalas' by the invaders. These indigenous people had everything in common with the people living on the other side of the Naaf river, and nothing to do and common with the wild people that lived on the forests to the north-east and the savages east of the Arakan Yoma mountain range.
If we recall Yoma is the Sanskrit word for what in Bengali is called Jom (devil, death or bad spirit). That is how it was named by the indigenous people because of the savages that lived there and the regions beyond to the north and east. Fearful of those savages, these indigenous people lived along the coastal areas, and thrived on rice cultivation grown in the plane land and the abundant supply of fish found in the sea, rivers, streams and ponds that they dug. These indigenous 'Kalas' mixing with the latter Muslim settlers/travelers/Sufis (including Arab/Persian merchants, traders, soldiers who came to restore Narameikhla to the Arakan throne, and others) created the genesis of today's Rohingya. The conversion of the 'Kalas' to Islam is no different than what has happened throughout history in the last 14 centuries along the coastal regions from Mozambique to Malacca. To call these indigenous people unwanted guests is like calling the Native Indians of America as refugees who had settled after the Europeans. So much for Aye Chan's pseudo-scholarship!
An intellectual is endowed with intellect having the power of understanding; having capacity for the higher forms of knowledge or thought; characterized by intelligence or mental capacity. Does Aye Chan possess any of these traits? I have failed to find any in his. He is a provocateur to tense relationship between two major groups in Arakan. Who benefits from such trash racism? It is the forces of divide and rule. Is he an agent for the hated Myanmar government? I won't be surprised to discover the under-table deals he has made with the regime.
A true intellectual concerned about his homeland should understand what is wrong with his native country and its people so as to find ways that would provide direction for upliftment, and getting out of the current sad state. Do you see anything remotely connected with this line of actions from Aye Chan or his peers? I have not. As I have repeatedly said he is like a cancer that spreads racism and bigotry in the fabric of Arakan eventually killing/weakening the nation. It is not the future any conscientious Arakanese Muslim, Hindu and Buddhist would like to see. But the Rakhine side has no wise intellectual and only the reincarnations of convicted Nazi criminals like Julius Streicher in the likes of Aye Chan, Aye Kyaw and Khin Maung Saw, and their ilk, who sell the tablet of hatred packaged as the boogeyman of 'Islamization of Arakan by the Rohingya'. They are essentially fascists.
Sharing a dais with a fascist is not something that is either noble or wise. It would give credibility to hatred. The best one can get is: call it a draw; and nothing better. It would be a shouting match and unruly. In his so-called invitation to debate the Rohingya issue, Aye Chan is craving for publicity, and wants to get a free audience at a high cost to the Rohingya, who must organize and pay for the meeting, with no burden unto him or his group for free publicity of hatred. Such debates require a strong neutral moderator to conduct it in a civic way, none of which one can guarantee to find. If Aye Chan is serious about a debate, let him organize such an event with invitation made to the Rohingya people to debate him or his ilk in a civic forum that is moderated neutrally by a university professor of repute. I would have no problem endorsing such a move.
As I shared in an earlier note, what is needed is propagating the Rohingya view widely by all the avenues that are out there, including popularizing and sharing the correct analyses and views on the Rohingya that many of us have written, or available sources from unbiased scholars. There are quite a few good works on this subject that should be made available to policy makers in each country.
Finally again, I won't support wasting money or resources to give a voice to racism and bigotry, so typical of the likes of Aye Chan. He is a fascist intellectual for his chauvinist people, and is not an honorable person possessing integrity, analytical thinking, and wisdom that we should give publicity to. What we need is: refutation of every false propaganda that he makes so that truth prevails, and people have the ability to discern truth from his false campaigns.
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
Aye Chan's Selective Amnesia – a brief analysis
Aye Chan is a Rakhine racist and bigot who has made a profession out of distorting history of Muslims of Arakan. His latest article "Burma’s Western Border as Reported by the Diplomatic Correspondence (1947 – 1975)" is another such evil attempt to justify aggression and oppression against the Rohingya Muslims of Arakan (and Burma). In his twisted logic he shows his selective amnesia about the crimes of his own racist group while being all agog about the so-called secession movement of the Rohingyas in the dying days of the British rule in South Asia.
Aye Chan's latest disingenuous attempt to revise history should not surprise anyone that is well acquainted with the history of partition of British India and emergence of Burma as a free nation. During that period, many activists of the freedom movement felt that it was not what they had bargained for with the leaders of the dying British Colonial administration. Even the Arakanese people wanted a state of their own away from the control of the Burmans. Muslims of Kashmir wanted to be part of Pakistan, a matter that was left unresolved because while the territory had some 80-90% Muslims, its ruler was a Hindu. So was the case with princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by Muslim nobility over Hindu majority.
In the then East Pakistan no one knew for a short period after 14-15 August 1947, whether Sylhet and Karimganj, two places with huge Muslim population would become part of Pakistan or became part of India. The same goes for other territories all along the boundaries that we see today. Boundary demarcation was not clear. Some border towns had one day the Indian flag raised, only to be replaced by the Pakistani flag next day, or week, and vice versa. So, if the Rohingya Muslim people of Northern Arakan, where it is overwhelmingly Muslim, had desired during the independence of Pakistan and Burma to be connected with fellow Muslims in East Pakistan, because of their cultural ties, was it totally out of line? I doubt that.
Even the Rakhines did not want to be part of Burma. There were insurgencies, communist and nationalist alike, raging everywhere inside Burma. From the 1950s, there was a growing movement for secession and restoration of independence of Arakan. In part to appease this sentiment, in 1974, the socialist government under General Ne Win constituted Rakhine State from Arakan Division giving at least nominal acknowledgment of the regional majority of the Rakhine people. This was an unfortunate and ill-conceived decision, planting the seeds of racism in a divided country along ethnic lines that would complicate the relationship between the two major ethnic groups, Rakhines and Rohingyas. Islamic separatists calling themselves the Mujahid also carried out a rebellion to create an Islamic state in the regions bordering Chittagong/Cox's Bazar (of the then East Pakistan). Now to blame the Rohingyas for their piece of struggle, while hiding crimes of the Rakhine insurgency, is insincere and racist to the core. It is not analysis but paralysis of independent and unbiased thinking! As the dust settled, which by the way did take some years with all those killings of founding leaders of Burma, the disparate people of Burma have learned to live with the new reality of military autocracy. But Burma still remains a fractured country of nations where racism runs deep and wisdom a rarity, even amongst its intellectuals.
Today's Rohingya people have no desire for a separate homeland of their own, if their basic human rights can be protected. But if they continue to be treated as outsiders, infiltrators, and all the false xenophobic, or rather racist, epithets thrown at them by their hateful accusers, then it is high time for the conscience minded people of our planet to demand a change with such an attitude that forces these indigenous people of Arakan to live a life of statelessness inside Burma, or of unwanted refugees outside.
Historically, the people of Arakan and Chittagong were the same people living along the coastal shorelines of the Bay of Bengal. The River Naaf which now separates Burma from Bangladesh was not a physical barrier to these indigenous people. People of this joint landmass lived for centuries together before they became part of either the Muslim Sultanate or Buddhist Rule.
The indigenous people, the true Bhumiputras (adibashis), were these brown-colored (Indian featured) people whose descendants now live in northern Arakan (whom we know as the Rohingyas) and Chittagong/Cox's Bazar districts of today's Bangladesh (known as the Chittagonians). Their racial similarity was mostly because of that connected shoreline, away from the Arakan Yoma mountain range that had separated this crescent on the Bay of Bengal from the thrust of savages coming from the north and the east. Their dialect was also same (originating from Sanskrit, which later evolved into Bangla) until much later in history, when the Muslim ruled Chittagong absorbed lots of Farsi and Arabic terms in their vocabulary, as a result of Sultanate and Mughal rule of Bengal.
It took the late 10th century for this landmass of Arakan, then ruled by Hindu kings, to come under the possession of the Tibeto-Burman Buddhist invaders from the north. While the northern territories of Chittagong survived from the takeover, it took a few centuries, until the Mrauk-U dynasty to cement this relationship between the two sides of the Naaf River. Nurtured by the new rulers who were indebted to the Bengal Sultan who had restored Narameikhla back to power in 1430, Mrohaung (sounding Rohang or Roshang - in Bengali), the capital city, became the literary center of Bengali literature. From then on, the cultural link between the two sides was only punctuated during the Burman invasion of Arakan in 1784, when tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims and Hindus, and Rakhine Buddhists were killed and enslaved. Many fled to Chittagong and settled there. During the British occupation, dating back to 1824, some of the children and grandchildren of these exiles returned to cultivate the land that had become desolate. Many however, chose to remain in Chittagong, as is well recorded and documented to this date.
The obnoxious claim that the Rohingyas are a product of British occupation period, or of even later time, or geopolitics of the region, is absolutely false. It is ludicrous and aimed at denying basic rights of citizenship to these people. Not only is this 1982 Citizenship Law in Burma (interestingly written by Rakhine racists like Aye Kyaw, himself a naturalized American, living in NY city) at variance with all laws of our civilized world, it is downright criminal, and must be altered, thus allowing restoring rights of this unfortunate people, and many other races and ethnicities (including the Karen).
Even on another level, when we consider that it took less than a decade for many of these Rakhine exiles, now comfortably living as naturalized citizens in their adopted countries - USA, Germany, Canada, Japan and other parts of Europe, it is really bizarre to see them advocating for denial of citizenship rights to the Rohingya people. How long should they wait? Even if one were to accept the Rakhine version of false propaganda that the Rohingyas had infiltrated the territory in the mid-19th century, is not these 100 plus years sufficient?
Funny that these hostile racists and bigots of the Rakhine community claim that they are democratic minded and would love to see a federal state where democracy runs supreme! Their provocative statements, and the lies that they propagate, and the hatred that they spew, inciting violence against minority, only go on to show that they are fascists, and nothing else.
Aye Chan, who works for the Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, gives a bad name to scholarship and critical analytical thinking. His racist and bigotry-ridden writings that provoke his ethnic Rakhine group and the hated Myanmar military regime to justify their inhuman crimes against the Rohingyas of Burma show that he is also a disgrace to the Kanda University and the civilized world who has learned to move on burying their age old hatred and build a better society for our human race. Shame on Aye Chan and his peers and patrons!
Aye Chan's latest disingenuous attempt to revise history should not surprise anyone that is well acquainted with the history of partition of British India and emergence of Burma as a free nation. During that period, many activists of the freedom movement felt that it was not what they had bargained for with the leaders of the dying British Colonial administration. Even the Arakanese people wanted a state of their own away from the control of the Burmans. Muslims of Kashmir wanted to be part of Pakistan, a matter that was left unresolved because while the territory had some 80-90% Muslims, its ruler was a Hindu. So was the case with princely state of Hyderabad, ruled by Muslim nobility over Hindu majority.
In the then East Pakistan no one knew for a short period after 14-15 August 1947, whether Sylhet and Karimganj, two places with huge Muslim population would become part of Pakistan or became part of India. The same goes for other territories all along the boundaries that we see today. Boundary demarcation was not clear. Some border towns had one day the Indian flag raised, only to be replaced by the Pakistani flag next day, or week, and vice versa. So, if the Rohingya Muslim people of Northern Arakan, where it is overwhelmingly Muslim, had desired during the independence of Pakistan and Burma to be connected with fellow Muslims in East Pakistan, because of their cultural ties, was it totally out of line? I doubt that.
Even the Rakhines did not want to be part of Burma. There were insurgencies, communist and nationalist alike, raging everywhere inside Burma. From the 1950s, there was a growing movement for secession and restoration of independence of Arakan. In part to appease this sentiment, in 1974, the socialist government under General Ne Win constituted Rakhine State from Arakan Division giving at least nominal acknowledgment of the regional majority of the Rakhine people. This was an unfortunate and ill-conceived decision, planting the seeds of racism in a divided country along ethnic lines that would complicate the relationship between the two major ethnic groups, Rakhines and Rohingyas. Islamic separatists calling themselves the Mujahid also carried out a rebellion to create an Islamic state in the regions bordering Chittagong/Cox's Bazar (of the then East Pakistan). Now to blame the Rohingyas for their piece of struggle, while hiding crimes of the Rakhine insurgency, is insincere and racist to the core. It is not analysis but paralysis of independent and unbiased thinking! As the dust settled, which by the way did take some years with all those killings of founding leaders of Burma, the disparate people of Burma have learned to live with the new reality of military autocracy. But Burma still remains a fractured country of nations where racism runs deep and wisdom a rarity, even amongst its intellectuals.
Today's Rohingya people have no desire for a separate homeland of their own, if their basic human rights can be protected. But if they continue to be treated as outsiders, infiltrators, and all the false xenophobic, or rather racist, epithets thrown at them by their hateful accusers, then it is high time for the conscience minded people of our planet to demand a change with such an attitude that forces these indigenous people of Arakan to live a life of statelessness inside Burma, or of unwanted refugees outside.
Historically, the people of Arakan and Chittagong were the same people living along the coastal shorelines of the Bay of Bengal. The River Naaf which now separates Burma from Bangladesh was not a physical barrier to these indigenous people. People of this joint landmass lived for centuries together before they became part of either the Muslim Sultanate or Buddhist Rule.
The indigenous people, the true Bhumiputras (adibashis), were these brown-colored (Indian featured) people whose descendants now live in northern Arakan (whom we know as the Rohingyas) and Chittagong/Cox's Bazar districts of today's Bangladesh (known as the Chittagonians). Their racial similarity was mostly because of that connected shoreline, away from the Arakan Yoma mountain range that had separated this crescent on the Bay of Bengal from the thrust of savages coming from the north and the east. Their dialect was also same (originating from Sanskrit, which later evolved into Bangla) until much later in history, when the Muslim ruled Chittagong absorbed lots of Farsi and Arabic terms in their vocabulary, as a result of Sultanate and Mughal rule of Bengal.
It took the late 10th century for this landmass of Arakan, then ruled by Hindu kings, to come under the possession of the Tibeto-Burman Buddhist invaders from the north. While the northern territories of Chittagong survived from the takeover, it took a few centuries, until the Mrauk-U dynasty to cement this relationship between the two sides of the Naaf River. Nurtured by the new rulers who were indebted to the Bengal Sultan who had restored Narameikhla back to power in 1430, Mrohaung (sounding Rohang or Roshang - in Bengali), the capital city, became the literary center of Bengali literature. From then on, the cultural link between the two sides was only punctuated during the Burman invasion of Arakan in 1784, when tens of thousands of Rohingya Muslims and Hindus, and Rakhine Buddhists were killed and enslaved. Many fled to Chittagong and settled there. During the British occupation, dating back to 1824, some of the children and grandchildren of these exiles returned to cultivate the land that had become desolate. Many however, chose to remain in Chittagong, as is well recorded and documented to this date.
The obnoxious claim that the Rohingyas are a product of British occupation period, or of even later time, or geopolitics of the region, is absolutely false. It is ludicrous and aimed at denying basic rights of citizenship to these people. Not only is this 1982 Citizenship Law in Burma (interestingly written by Rakhine racists like Aye Kyaw, himself a naturalized American, living in NY city) at variance with all laws of our civilized world, it is downright criminal, and must be altered, thus allowing restoring rights of this unfortunate people, and many other races and ethnicities (including the Karen).
Even on another level, when we consider that it took less than a decade for many of these Rakhine exiles, now comfortably living as naturalized citizens in their adopted countries - USA, Germany, Canada, Japan and other parts of Europe, it is really bizarre to see them advocating for denial of citizenship rights to the Rohingya people. How long should they wait? Even if one were to accept the Rakhine version of false propaganda that the Rohingyas had infiltrated the territory in the mid-19th century, is not these 100 plus years sufficient?
Funny that these hostile racists and bigots of the Rakhine community claim that they are democratic minded and would love to see a federal state where democracy runs supreme! Their provocative statements, and the lies that they propagate, and the hatred that they spew, inciting violence against minority, only go on to show that they are fascists, and nothing else.
Aye Chan, who works for the Kanda University of International Studies in Japan, gives a bad name to scholarship and critical analytical thinking. His racist and bigotry-ridden writings that provoke his ethnic Rakhine group and the hated Myanmar military regime to justify their inhuman crimes against the Rohingyas of Burma show that he is also a disgrace to the Kanda University and the civilized world who has learned to move on burying their age old hatred and build a better society for our human race. Shame on Aye Chan and his peers and patrons!
Sunday, September 11, 2011
Bush's Invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 - Was it Avoidable?
As I maintained in many of my posts the U.S. War against Afghanistan surely could have been avoided if the Bush Administration was serious. Instead, from the very outset, flanked by war-criminals-to-be, it wanted to embark on a different course. Just as pundits today would agree that even if 9/11 did not happen, Bush and his warmongers - Cheney and Rumsfeld - were well prepared to strike Iraq to complete the unfinished task of Bush Sr., the same is the case with Afghanistan. The Bush administration had no interest in peacefully resolving the OBL factor.
In an exclusive interview, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban's last foreign minister, tells Al-Jazeera that the Taliban government, which then controlled Afghanistan, made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader for trial for his involvement in plots targeting U.S. facilities during the 1990s.
"Even before the (9/11) attacks, our Islamic emirate had tried -- through various proposals -- to resolve the Osama issue. One such proposal was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)," Muttawakil says.
"But the U.S. showed no interest in it. They kept demanding we hand him over, but we had not relations with the U.S., no agreement of any sort. They did not recognize our government."
Al-Jazeera says Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time of 9/11, confirms that such proposals were made to U.S. officials. It quotes Grenier as saying Washington considered the offers a "ploy." "Another idea was that [bin Laden] would be brought to trial before a group of Ulema [religious scholars] in Afghanistan," Grenier is quoted as saying. "No one in the U.S. government took these [offers] seriously because they did not trust the Taliban and their ability to conduct a proper trial."
For a reading of the interview with the then Taliban Foreign Minister read here.
Now look what has happened. America is in debts to the tune of some 18 trillion dollars, where those uncalled for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, factor large. Bush and his criminal partners in crime saw war as a means to prosperity for their friends in oil and defense industry, while still hoping that some would even trickle down to ordinary Americans. None of those Satanic wishes has turned into reality. Two wars were launched, which surely could have been avoided, if Bush was serious.
Is it that difficult to picture how our world would have been minus those wars?
In an exclusive interview, Wakil Ahmad Muttawakil, Taliban's last foreign minister, tells Al-Jazeera that the Taliban government, which then controlled Afghanistan, made several proposals to the United States to present the al-Qaeda leader for trial for his involvement in plots targeting U.S. facilities during the 1990s.
"Even before the (9/11) attacks, our Islamic emirate had tried -- through various proposals -- to resolve the Osama issue. One such proposal was to set up a three-nation court, or something under the supervision of the Organization of the Islamic Conference (OIC)," Muttawakil says.
"But the U.S. showed no interest in it. They kept demanding we hand him over, but we had not relations with the U.S., no agreement of any sort. They did not recognize our government."
Al-Jazeera says Robert Grenier, the CIA station chief in Pakistan at the time of 9/11, confirms that such proposals were made to U.S. officials. It quotes Grenier as saying Washington considered the offers a "ploy." "Another idea was that [bin Laden] would be brought to trial before a group of Ulema [religious scholars] in Afghanistan," Grenier is quoted as saying. "No one in the U.S. government took these [offers] seriously because they did not trust the Taliban and their ability to conduct a proper trial."
For a reading of the interview with the then Taliban Foreign Minister read here.
Now look what has happened. America is in debts to the tune of some 18 trillion dollars, where those uncalled for wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, factor large. Bush and his criminal partners in crime saw war as a means to prosperity for their friends in oil and defense industry, while still hoping that some would even trickle down to ordinary Americans. None of those Satanic wishes has turned into reality. Two wars were launched, which surely could have been avoided, if Bush was serious.
Is it that difficult to picture how our world would have been minus those wars?
Saturday, September 10, 2011
The 10th Anniversary of 9/11 – America’s Pyrrhic Experience
This Sunday is the 10th anniversary of 9/11, which, by any account, was a momentous event in American history. In the post-World War II period, never before has the USA suffered such a massive loss in human lives and properties. The total cost to the USA has been estimated by the New York Times at a whopping $3.3 trillion, including $55 billion from the loss of lives and materials. While not all of the costs have been borne by the government — and some are still to come — this total equals one-fifth of the current national debt.
Here is the breakdown of the estimates. In 2002, the New York City comptroller's office estimated the cost of replacing destroyed and damaged property at $26 billion. And another $29 billion was estimated for the value of life and injury. The estimates of the economic impact of the attacks ranged from about $40 billion to $122 billion in a group of studies led by the CREATE Homeland Security Center at the prestigious University of Southern California. John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, and Mark G. Stewart, an Australian engineer, have estimated the increase in spending of $589 billion for homeland security and non-war-related national intelligence since 2001. The estimate of total war funding by the Congressional Research Service including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as medical care for veterans, is $1649 billion. The estimate of war funding from 2012 to 2016 and the cost of caring for veterans over the next 40 years is $867 billion (of which $55 and $223 billion are expected to be spent for Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively).
We are also told that the total cost on the al-Qaeda side to bring this massive loss to the USA was less than half a million dollars. That is, the USA has spent about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks on 9/11. Knowing that only a tiny fraction of the $3.3 trillion cost figure to America owes it to the loss of lives and properties suffered as a result of the attack, it is high time to ask was George W. Bush’s decision to launch the two pyrrhic wars justifiable?
The wars are still raging. As a mater of fact August 2011 has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the conflict began nearly 10 years ago with 66 US troops dead this month. This includes the deadliest attack on US forces since the beginning of the conflict, when 30 US service members, including 17 Navy SEALS, were killed when Taliban forces shot down their helicopter.
What is worse: there are unconfirmed reports that al-Qaeda is again seeking to harm Americans and in particular, target New York and Washington to avenge for the death of their martyred leader! Acutely aware of these factors, law enforcement around the country had already increased security measures at airports, nuclear plants, train stations and other important places. The latest threat has also prompted the U.S. embassies and consulates abroad to boost their vigilance in preparation for the anniversary.
In the nearly 10 years since 9/11 a lot of money has been spent in America on reducing the risk of another major terrorist attack. It is clearly time to compare the cost of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. A security measure, as rightly noted in their study by Mueller and Stewart, is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing it. The benefit of a security measure = (probability of a successful attack) x (losses sustained in the successful attack) x (reduction in risk). The "probability of a successful attack" is the likelihood a successful terrorist attack will take place if no new security measures are put in place, and "reduction in risk" is the effectiveness of the new measures to foil, deter, disrupt, or protect against a terrorist attack. The same equation can be used to calculate how many attacks will have to take place to justify the expenditure.
Mueller and Stewart assumed that the total reduction in risk was 95%, and also applied the 2010 foiled attack in New York City to cost effectiveness equation. In 2010, a vigilant Muslim street vendor working in New York City largely averted a terrorism attack by a vehicle bomber in Times Square. Had the bomber been successful he might have caused a dozen fatalities with loss of life and property damage worth $100 million. The result was that for the counter terrorism spending since 9/11 to be fully justified, homeland security would have had to deter, prevent, foil or protect against 1667 Times Square style attacks a year, or more than four a day.
Mueller and Stewart, similarly, evaluated the 2005 attacks on underground trains and a bus in London that killed 52 people and injured many hundreds of commuters and passers by. The losses from such attacks would not exceed $5 billion. In their estimate, for enhanced security measures to be cost-effective for attacks of that magnitude, their rate of occurrence without those enhanced measures would have had to exceed 30 a year. If one posits that such an attack is thwarted once a year -- a conservative threat-likelihood by any measure -- the ratio of benefit to cost is a meager 0.03 meaning that spending $1 buys only 3¢ of benefits. For a terrorist of the magnitude of 9/11 costing $200 billion, the enhanced expenditures would be cost-effective only if that sort of attack would have occurred more than once a year.
Bottom line: the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks are so low that the benefits of enhanced counter terrorism expenditures of a trillion dollars since 9/11 are not justifiable by any rational and accepted standard of cost-benefit analysis. As the authors of the study noted, instead of saving lives, extravagant homeland security spending is, in a sense, costing lives. In the past month over 320 people were killed by tornadoes in the US, and yet there are studies that show $200 million spent subsidizing the purchase of tornado shelters for mobile home owners could have saved 30 lives during the life of the shelters. These are guaranteed lives saved for a modest government investment. There are other examples ranging from air bags to smoke alarms to pharmaceuticals known to save many lives. The authors opine that diverting even a small proportion of homeland security spending to such measures could save many lives at a fraction of the cost.
These findings are not much different from the conclusions reached by other studies conducted earlier. Virginia Tech public policy professor Patrick Roberts wrote in the Review of Policy Research in 2005, the creation of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was "an example of the triumph of symbolic and distributive policies over more straightforward attempts to address the real problems of homeland security."
When the DHS was formed, it absorbed 22 disparate agencies, cramming them into a single, 230,000-person mega-bureaucracy. Without a clear overall strategy, the grant money DHS was responsible for allocating went out to states regardless of their needs. Huge defense contractors took advantage of the easy funding to pitch untested products. "It opened a floodgate of money for private industry to sell scanners and other devices," said Charles Perrow, a Yale sociology professor who has called the creation of DHS "The Disaster After 9/11."
In 2006, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee identified 32 DHS contracts "collectively worth $34.3 billion that have been plagued by waste, abuse, or mismanagement" during the first five years after 9/11. In 2008, the House Committee on Homeland Security listed $15 billion in failed contracts since the department's founding.
The USA is on a high alert now. This yearly ‘al-Qaeda fear factor’ is costing the USA today billions of dollars, pushing it more and more into a debtor country. Unless corrective actions are taken, the USA cannot avoid the fate embraced by King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 279-280 BCE: ‘one more such victory would utterly undo him.’
Is the US government ready to learn from history and amend its ways to avoid a repeat of 9/11?
Here is the breakdown of the estimates. In 2002, the New York City comptroller's office estimated the cost of replacing destroyed and damaged property at $26 billion. And another $29 billion was estimated for the value of life and injury. The estimates of the economic impact of the attacks ranged from about $40 billion to $122 billion in a group of studies led by the CREATE Homeland Security Center at the prestigious University of Southern California. John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University, and Mark G. Stewart, an Australian engineer, have estimated the increase in spending of $589 billion for homeland security and non-war-related national intelligence since 2001. The estimate of total war funding by the Congressional Research Service including wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, as well as medical care for veterans, is $1649 billion. The estimate of war funding from 2012 to 2016 and the cost of caring for veterans over the next 40 years is $867 billion (of which $55 and $223 billion are expected to be spent for Iraq and Afghanistan, respectively).
We are also told that the total cost on the al-Qaeda side to bring this massive loss to the USA was less than half a million dollars. That is, the USA has spent about $7 million for every dollar Al Qaeda spent planning and executing the attacks on 9/11. Knowing that only a tiny fraction of the $3.3 trillion cost figure to America owes it to the loss of lives and properties suffered as a result of the attack, it is high time to ask was George W. Bush’s decision to launch the two pyrrhic wars justifiable?
The wars are still raging. As a mater of fact August 2011 has been the deadliest month for U.S. forces in Afghanistan since the conflict began nearly 10 years ago with 66 US troops dead this month. This includes the deadliest attack on US forces since the beginning of the conflict, when 30 US service members, including 17 Navy SEALS, were killed when Taliban forces shot down their helicopter.
What is worse: there are unconfirmed reports that al-Qaeda is again seeking to harm Americans and in particular, target New York and Washington to avenge for the death of their martyred leader! Acutely aware of these factors, law enforcement around the country had already increased security measures at airports, nuclear plants, train stations and other important places. The latest threat has also prompted the U.S. embassies and consulates abroad to boost their vigilance in preparation for the anniversary.
In the nearly 10 years since 9/11 a lot of money has been spent in America on reducing the risk of another major terrorist attack. It is clearly time to compare the cost of security measures with the benefits as tallied in lives saved and damages averted. A security measure, as rightly noted in their study by Mueller and Stewart, is cost-effective when the benefit of the measure outweighs the costs of providing it. The benefit of a security measure = (probability of a successful attack) x (losses sustained in the successful attack) x (reduction in risk). The "probability of a successful attack" is the likelihood a successful terrorist attack will take place if no new security measures are put in place, and "reduction in risk" is the effectiveness of the new measures to foil, deter, disrupt, or protect against a terrorist attack. The same equation can be used to calculate how many attacks will have to take place to justify the expenditure.
Mueller and Stewart assumed that the total reduction in risk was 95%, and also applied the 2010 foiled attack in New York City to cost effectiveness equation. In 2010, a vigilant Muslim street vendor working in New York City largely averted a terrorism attack by a vehicle bomber in Times Square. Had the bomber been successful he might have caused a dozen fatalities with loss of life and property damage worth $100 million. The result was that for the counter terrorism spending since 9/11 to be fully justified, homeland security would have had to deter, prevent, foil or protect against 1667 Times Square style attacks a year, or more than four a day.
Mueller and Stewart, similarly, evaluated the 2005 attacks on underground trains and a bus in London that killed 52 people and injured many hundreds of commuters and passers by. The losses from such attacks would not exceed $5 billion. In their estimate, for enhanced security measures to be cost-effective for attacks of that magnitude, their rate of occurrence without those enhanced measures would have had to exceed 30 a year. If one posits that such an attack is thwarted once a year -- a conservative threat-likelihood by any measure -- the ratio of benefit to cost is a meager 0.03 meaning that spending $1 buys only 3¢ of benefits. For a terrorist of the magnitude of 9/11 costing $200 billion, the enhanced expenditures would be cost-effective only if that sort of attack would have occurred more than once a year.
Bottom line: the frequency and severity of terrorist attacks are so low that the benefits of enhanced counter terrorism expenditures of a trillion dollars since 9/11 are not justifiable by any rational and accepted standard of cost-benefit analysis. As the authors of the study noted, instead of saving lives, extravagant homeland security spending is, in a sense, costing lives. In the past month over 320 people were killed by tornadoes in the US, and yet there are studies that show $200 million spent subsidizing the purchase of tornado shelters for mobile home owners could have saved 30 lives during the life of the shelters. These are guaranteed lives saved for a modest government investment. There are other examples ranging from air bags to smoke alarms to pharmaceuticals known to save many lives. The authors opine that diverting even a small proportion of homeland security spending to such measures could save many lives at a fraction of the cost.
These findings are not much different from the conclusions reached by other studies conducted earlier. Virginia Tech public policy professor Patrick Roberts wrote in the Review of Policy Research in 2005, the creation of Department of Homeland Security (DHS) was "an example of the triumph of symbolic and distributive policies over more straightforward attempts to address the real problems of homeland security."
When the DHS was formed, it absorbed 22 disparate agencies, cramming them into a single, 230,000-person mega-bureaucracy. Without a clear overall strategy, the grant money DHS was responsible for allocating went out to states regardless of their needs. Huge defense contractors took advantage of the easy funding to pitch untested products. "It opened a floodgate of money for private industry to sell scanners and other devices," said Charles Perrow, a Yale sociology professor who has called the creation of DHS "The Disaster After 9/11."
In 2006, the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee identified 32 DHS contracts "collectively worth $34.3 billion that have been plagued by waste, abuse, or mismanagement" during the first five years after 9/11. In 2008, the House Committee on Homeland Security listed $15 billion in failed contracts since the department's founding.
The USA is on a high alert now. This yearly ‘al-Qaeda fear factor’ is costing the USA today billions of dollars, pushing it more and more into a debtor country. Unless corrective actions are taken, the USA cannot avoid the fate embraced by King Pyrrhus of Epirus in 279-280 BCE: ‘one more such victory would utterly undo him.’
Is the US government ready to learn from history and amend its ways to avoid a repeat of 9/11?
Sunday, August 28, 2011
The blessed Night of Power
The blessed month of Ramadan is coming to an end. The first one-third of the month was for seeking mercy, the middle one-third for forgiveness and the last one-third for salvation from the Fire of Hell. In the last part of this month lies hidden the Night of Power or Decree (Laylatul Qadr) about which Allah says in the Qur’an:
The Night of Power is better than a thousand months. (97:3)
As to the reason behind revelation of this powerful verse of the Qur’an, Imam as-Suyuti (rahmatullahi alayh) mentions in his book "Lubaabun Nuqool" that once Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, meaning - may Allah's blessings and peace be upon him) [herein after abbreviated as (S)], mentioned about the story of a person from among the Children of Israel who had strived (jihad fi-sabilillah) in the path of Allah for 1000 months. Upon hearing this, the Sahabah (companions) were astonished and at the same time they became very despondent on the basis that how will they ever be able to accomplish such a feat (after all, very few live that long to be able to engage oneself in jihad for 83 years and 4 months). So Allah revealed this noble verse as a solace to the believers. The followers of Muhammad (S) don’t have to match what that pious Israelite had done; only a fully engaged worship of one night in the Night of Power (Laylatul Qadr) – would be equivalent in merit.
A similar story is mentioned in another Hadith: there was a pious man from the Children of Israel who used to be engaged in the worship of Allah from the evening till the following morning, and then be engaged in the jihad fi-sabilillah from the morning till the evening. He did this continuously for a thousand months. So Allah revealed this verse stating that the worship in this night alone is better than the thousand months which the person had spent in worship and jihad.
So, the question arises when is this Night of Power? The answer is provided by Prophet Muhammad (S) who said: “Seek it in the last ten; and if one of you is too weak or unable then let him not allow that to make him miss the final seven.” [Bukhari and Muslim]
Although to encourage worship amongst believers, this Night has not been pinpointed, a more common understanding amongst Muslims is that it falls on an odd night (23rd, 25th, 27th or 29th), and possibly the 27th of Ramadan.
Because of its merit, the Prophet (S) used to exert himself greatly during Laylatul-Qadr. He would spend the nights in worship. The Prophet (S) said: “Whoever stands (in prayer) in Laylatul Qadr out of Iman (faith) and seeking reward then his previous sins are forgiven.” [Bukhari and Muslim]
Given the fact that the people of the Book (e.g., Children of Israel and Christians) don’t have anything remotely close to this blessing, Muslims feel highly blessed by God because of unfathomable merits of this blessed night which comes every year during the month of Ramadan – the Muslim month of fasting. It is, thus, not surprising to witness that many pious Muslims spend the entire night of the last 7 to 10 days of Ramadan awake -- praying, reciting the Qur'an and giving away charity (specially in disbursing their zakat and sadqah) hoping to earn the merit of good deeds of 1000 months.
On a comparable matter, it is worth noting that the Jewish Jubilee (Hebrew Yov-el) year - preeminently a time of joy, the year of remission or universal pardon - is the year at the end of seven cycles of Sabbatical years (Hebrew Shmita). And according to the Bible it came once every fifty years: “You shall sanctify the 50th year and proclaim freedom throughout the land for all its inhabitants; it shall be the Jubilee year for you, you shall return each person to his ancestral heritage and you shall return each to his family. It shall be a Jubilee Year for you - the 50th year - you shall not sow, you shall not harvest its after-growth and you shall not pick what was set aside of it for yourself. For it is a Jubilee Year, it shall be holy to you; from the field you eat its crop." (Leviticus 25:10-13)
Basically, these verses indicate that the Jubilee required all debts between ALL people (Jews and gentiles alike) to be annulled (although the practice was limited amongst the Jews only). Also, any Jew that sold his or herself into slavery is to be released, whether they worked the amount of time they promised, or not.
Rashi, an eleventh century (CE) Jewish scholar, pointed out that the world Jubilee was related to the Hebrew word for "ram," alluding to the fact that the Jubilee year was proclaimed by the blast of a ram's horn. Nachmanides, another great Jewish scholar, added that the word Jubilee was also related to the Hebrew word which means "to move around." Thus, all Jews who had sold themselves into slavery, or were shackled (so to speak) by debt, were to be released from their bonds on the Jubilee year and were to be given the freedom to move around freely.
According to the rabbinical sources, the origination of the counting of the Jubilee Year did not quite start with the time when the Children of Israel had entered the Holy Land (under Joshua), but rather after they finished conquering the Holy Land and after apportioning it to each family, which was 1288 BCE (Ref: Maimonides - Laws of Shmita and Jubilee 10:2). The first Jubilee was forty-nine years later.
Although the Sanhedrin was in charge of counting the years and ensuring its accuracy, and ensuring that the Jewish nation was notified of the Jubilee year's arrival by the blast of the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur (Leviticus 25:8 and Numbers 35:4), there is absolutely no credible historical evidence suggesting that it was observed religiously every fifty years in the centuries shortly before the advent of Jesus. The latter evidences even suggest that it might have been observed every hundred years during the time of Jesus, son of Mary.
For example, the apocryphal book – Gospel of Barnabas – puts these words in the mouth of Jesus, saying: “I am indeed sent to the house of Israel as a prophet of salvation; but after me shall come the Messiah, sent of God to all the world; for whom God hath made the world. And then through all the world will God be worshipped, and mercy received, insomuch that the year of jubilee, which now cometh every hundred years, shall by the Messiah be reduced to every year in every place.” (Chapter 82)
As to the identity of this Messiah, the Jesus of the Gospel of Barnabas, is quite explicit, when asked by a priest, answering: "The name of the Messiah is admirable [Ar. Muhammad], for God himself gave him the name when he had created his soul, and placed it in a celestial splendour. God said: "Wait Muhammad; for your sake I will to create paradise, the world, and a great multitude of creatures, whereof I make you a present, insomuch that whoever shall bless you shall be blessed, and whoever shall curse you shall be accursed. When I shall send you into the world I shall send you as my Messenger of salvation, and your word shall be true, insomuch that heaven and earth shall fail, but your faith shall never fail." Muhammad is his blessed name." Then the crowd lifted up their voices, saying: "O God send us your Messenger: O Muhammad, come quickly for the salvation of the world!" (Chapter 97)
In chapter 84, the Jesus of Gospel of Barnabas after completing one of the midnight prayers reportedly said, "Let us give thanks to God because he has given to us this night great mercy; for that he has made to come back the time that needs must pass in the night, in that we have made prayer in union with the Messenger of God. And I have heard his voice." The disciples rejoiced greatly at hearing this…”
Is it possible that the aforementioned night is the Laylatul Qadr – the Night of Power, mentioned in the Qur’an? And God knows the best!
====-====
Whatever may be the controversy surrounding the authenticity of each of the gospels – canonical and apocryphal – now attributed to the disciples – real or self-styled – of Jesus, son of Mary, the Qur’an – the Last Testament of God to mankind - is rather unambiguous about the merit of Laylatul Qadr. This night, thus, remains the most sought-after night amongst the faithful Muslims.
As the end of the blessed month of Ramadan approaches, let us remind ourselves with the wise advice of Abul Abbas al-Sabti (may Allah have mercy on him): "The secret of Fasting is that you are hungry. When you are hungry you remember the one who is always hungry and know the strength of the fire of hunger that afflicts him, so that you become charitable towards him. Thus, if you deny yourself food but have no compassion for the hungry and your Fasting does not cause this idea to occur to you, you have not [truly] Fasted and have not understood the intended meaning of the Fast." [Al-Tashawwuf ila rijal al-tasawwuf wa akhbar Abil Abbas al-Sabti: Yusuf ibn al-Zayyat al-Tadili]
According to ‘Ubadah ibn al-Samit (may Allah be pleased with him), a Companion, the Prophet Muhammad (S) used to say upon entering this month of Ramadan: "O Allah, greet and save me for Ramadan; greet and save Ramadan; greet and save Ramadan on my behalf, and grant me its acceptance (Allahumma sallimnee li ramadana wa sallim ramadana wa sallimhu minnee mutaqabbilan)."
May Allah accept our fasting and save us for this and the next Ramadan. Amin.
I wish you all a happy Eid.
The Night of Power is better than a thousand months. (97:3)
As to the reason behind revelation of this powerful verse of the Qur’an, Imam as-Suyuti (rahmatullahi alayh) mentions in his book "Lubaabun Nuqool" that once Prophet Muhammad (sallallahu alayhi wa sallam, meaning - may Allah's blessings and peace be upon him) [herein after abbreviated as (S)], mentioned about the story of a person from among the Children of Israel who had strived (jihad fi-sabilillah) in the path of Allah for 1000 months. Upon hearing this, the Sahabah (companions) were astonished and at the same time they became very despondent on the basis that how will they ever be able to accomplish such a feat (after all, very few live that long to be able to engage oneself in jihad for 83 years and 4 months). So Allah revealed this noble verse as a solace to the believers. The followers of Muhammad (S) don’t have to match what that pious Israelite had done; only a fully engaged worship of one night in the Night of Power (Laylatul Qadr) – would be equivalent in merit.
A similar story is mentioned in another Hadith: there was a pious man from the Children of Israel who used to be engaged in the worship of Allah from the evening till the following morning, and then be engaged in the jihad fi-sabilillah from the morning till the evening. He did this continuously for a thousand months. So Allah revealed this verse stating that the worship in this night alone is better than the thousand months which the person had spent in worship and jihad.
So, the question arises when is this Night of Power? The answer is provided by Prophet Muhammad (S) who said: “Seek it in the last ten; and if one of you is too weak or unable then let him not allow that to make him miss the final seven.” [Bukhari and Muslim]
Although to encourage worship amongst believers, this Night has not been pinpointed, a more common understanding amongst Muslims is that it falls on an odd night (23rd, 25th, 27th or 29th), and possibly the 27th of Ramadan.
Because of its merit, the Prophet (S) used to exert himself greatly during Laylatul-Qadr. He would spend the nights in worship. The Prophet (S) said: “Whoever stands (in prayer) in Laylatul Qadr out of Iman (faith) and seeking reward then his previous sins are forgiven.” [Bukhari and Muslim]
Given the fact that the people of the Book (e.g., Children of Israel and Christians) don’t have anything remotely close to this blessing, Muslims feel highly blessed by God because of unfathomable merits of this blessed night which comes every year during the month of Ramadan – the Muslim month of fasting. It is, thus, not surprising to witness that many pious Muslims spend the entire night of the last 7 to 10 days of Ramadan awake -- praying, reciting the Qur'an and giving away charity (specially in disbursing their zakat and sadqah) hoping to earn the merit of good deeds of 1000 months.
On a comparable matter, it is worth noting that the Jewish Jubilee (Hebrew Yov-el) year - preeminently a time of joy, the year of remission or universal pardon - is the year at the end of seven cycles of Sabbatical years (Hebrew Shmita). And according to the Bible it came once every fifty years: “You shall sanctify the 50th year and proclaim freedom throughout the land for all its inhabitants; it shall be the Jubilee year for you, you shall return each person to his ancestral heritage and you shall return each to his family. It shall be a Jubilee Year for you - the 50th year - you shall not sow, you shall not harvest its after-growth and you shall not pick what was set aside of it for yourself. For it is a Jubilee Year, it shall be holy to you; from the field you eat its crop." (Leviticus 25:10-13)
Basically, these verses indicate that the Jubilee required all debts between ALL people (Jews and gentiles alike) to be annulled (although the practice was limited amongst the Jews only). Also, any Jew that sold his or herself into slavery is to be released, whether they worked the amount of time they promised, or not.
Rashi, an eleventh century (CE) Jewish scholar, pointed out that the world Jubilee was related to the Hebrew word for "ram," alluding to the fact that the Jubilee year was proclaimed by the blast of a ram's horn. Nachmanides, another great Jewish scholar, added that the word Jubilee was also related to the Hebrew word which means "to move around." Thus, all Jews who had sold themselves into slavery, or were shackled (so to speak) by debt, were to be released from their bonds on the Jubilee year and were to be given the freedom to move around freely.
According to the rabbinical sources, the origination of the counting of the Jubilee Year did not quite start with the time when the Children of Israel had entered the Holy Land (under Joshua), but rather after they finished conquering the Holy Land and after apportioning it to each family, which was 1288 BCE (Ref: Maimonides - Laws of Shmita and Jubilee 10:2). The first Jubilee was forty-nine years later.
Although the Sanhedrin was in charge of counting the years and ensuring its accuracy, and ensuring that the Jewish nation was notified of the Jubilee year's arrival by the blast of the shofar at the end of Yom Kippur (Leviticus 25:8 and Numbers 35:4), there is absolutely no credible historical evidence suggesting that it was observed religiously every fifty years in the centuries shortly before the advent of Jesus. The latter evidences even suggest that it might have been observed every hundred years during the time of Jesus, son of Mary.
For example, the apocryphal book – Gospel of Barnabas – puts these words in the mouth of Jesus, saying: “I am indeed sent to the house of Israel as a prophet of salvation; but after me shall come the Messiah, sent of God to all the world; for whom God hath made the world. And then through all the world will God be worshipped, and mercy received, insomuch that the year of jubilee, which now cometh every hundred years, shall by the Messiah be reduced to every year in every place.” (Chapter 82)
As to the identity of this Messiah, the Jesus of the Gospel of Barnabas, is quite explicit, when asked by a priest, answering: "The name of the Messiah is admirable [Ar. Muhammad], for God himself gave him the name when he had created his soul, and placed it in a celestial splendour. God said: "Wait Muhammad; for your sake I will to create paradise, the world, and a great multitude of creatures, whereof I make you a present, insomuch that whoever shall bless you shall be blessed, and whoever shall curse you shall be accursed. When I shall send you into the world I shall send you as my Messenger of salvation, and your word shall be true, insomuch that heaven and earth shall fail, but your faith shall never fail." Muhammad is his blessed name." Then the crowd lifted up their voices, saying: "O God send us your Messenger: O Muhammad, come quickly for the salvation of the world!" (Chapter 97)
In chapter 84, the Jesus of Gospel of Barnabas after completing one of the midnight prayers reportedly said, "Let us give thanks to God because he has given to us this night great mercy; for that he has made to come back the time that needs must pass in the night, in that we have made prayer in union with the Messenger of God. And I have heard his voice." The disciples rejoiced greatly at hearing this…”
Is it possible that the aforementioned night is the Laylatul Qadr – the Night of Power, mentioned in the Qur’an? And God knows the best!
====-====
Whatever may be the controversy surrounding the authenticity of each of the gospels – canonical and apocryphal – now attributed to the disciples – real or self-styled – of Jesus, son of Mary, the Qur’an – the Last Testament of God to mankind - is rather unambiguous about the merit of Laylatul Qadr. This night, thus, remains the most sought-after night amongst the faithful Muslims.
As the end of the blessed month of Ramadan approaches, let us remind ourselves with the wise advice of Abul Abbas al-Sabti (may Allah have mercy on him): "The secret of Fasting is that you are hungry. When you are hungry you remember the one who is always hungry and know the strength of the fire of hunger that afflicts him, so that you become charitable towards him. Thus, if you deny yourself food but have no compassion for the hungry and your Fasting does not cause this idea to occur to you, you have not [truly] Fasted and have not understood the intended meaning of the Fast." [Al-Tashawwuf ila rijal al-tasawwuf wa akhbar Abil Abbas al-Sabti: Yusuf ibn al-Zayyat al-Tadili]
According to ‘Ubadah ibn al-Samit (may Allah be pleased with him), a Companion, the Prophet Muhammad (S) used to say upon entering this month of Ramadan: "O Allah, greet and save me for Ramadan; greet and save Ramadan; greet and save Ramadan on my behalf, and grant me its acceptance (Allahumma sallimnee li ramadana wa sallim ramadana wa sallimhu minnee mutaqabbilan)."
May Allah accept our fasting and save us for this and the next Ramadan. Amin.
I wish you all a happy Eid.
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