Dr Kaukab Siddique | Editor-in-Chief ---------------------------------------------------------
Ramadan 4, 1426/October 8, 2005 #76
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A sage explains to New Trend's Editor why the Earthquake Came to Pakistan. Please scroll way down. This is worth reading.
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Jamaat al-Muslimeen News
Peaceful but Uncompromising
P.O. Box 10881
Baltimore, MD 21234

October 8, 2005: Killer Earthquake Hits Pakistan, Kashmir, parts of India and Afghanistan:

The epicenter of the quake was 60 milies north east of Islamabad. The death toll rose steadily throughout the day. At least 3,000 people are dead. The most horrifying tragedy was near Mansehra where 400 students, many of them girls, died in the collapse of their school.

More than 200 Pakistani troops following General Musharraf's orders to stop the entry of mujahideen into occupied Kashmir were crushed to death in their bunkers by the tremblor.

Another 1500 people were killed in various towns in Frontier Province.

In Indian occupied Kashmir, 500 people and 36 Indian troops were killed.

Major population centers like Lahore and Rawalpindi swayed but were spared major destruction. Daily Nawa-e-waqt reports that in many towns, as the ground trembled, thousands of terrified people poured into the streets reciting the kalima, fearful that the end of the world was at hand.

In New Delhi, India, there was general panic. India suffered more than 200 dead but no serious damage.

[News from small Pakistani and Pakistani -Kashmir towns is slowly coming in. Entire villages have been wiped out. The death toll is likely to rise.]
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APPEAL for HELP:

Jamaat al-Muslimeen urges readers to donate for the poorer segments of the Pakistani people hit by the earthquake. Donations are also needed in Guatemala, central America where mud slides have killed 800. Also, in Bangladesh, massive floods are wreaking havoc.

Please send checks and money orders to:
Jamaat al-Muslimeen
P.O. Box 10881
Baltimore, MD 21234.
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media monitor

Glimpses of Iraqi Realities in U.S. TV: The Camera Doesn't Lie [5 Iraqi towns have been destroyed]

Tal Afar: Terrified Muslim Children and their mothers coming out of their Homes with their hands up facing heavily armed U.S. troops. They were wounded in the U.S. attack. CNN crew rush to bind their wounds.
[Seen on CNN Headline News October 7, 2005]

Karabilah: U.S. troops break into a Muslim home: A woman in Chador sits clasping her young adult, terrified, daughter in the courtyard of their home as the troops trash their home. [Seen on MSNBC, October 2, 2005]

[Remember the photo of the Jewish child with his hands up facing armed German troops in the Warsaw ghetto? The Jews made it world famous. Where are our artists, writers, poets? Who will cry for our children, our sisters? In the words of the Hadith of the Prophet, pbuh, "O Hussan (ibn Thabit) Do their Hujw" {Answer the oppressors in poetry.} It is a religious duty.]
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Meet Medea Benjamin

Code Pink Protest at Walter Reed Military Hospital

By Nadrat Siddique

On September 23, I attended the Code Pink vigil outside Walter Reed Military Hospital in Northwest Washington. Code Pink's demands are:
1) an end to the Iraq occupation and withdrawal of U.S. troops;
2) proper medical care for injured troops (predominantly poor people) when they return home.

The vigil participants numbered perhaps 40-50, many of them wearing pink. Too late, I remembered I should have worn my pink shalwar kameez. Attendance was higher than usual, for the weekly vigil, with many activists in town early for the national anti-war protest the next day.

Directly across the street from the vigil was a group of counter-demonstrators, whose numbers very nearly matched those of Code Pink. These numbers were an odd contradiction of the polls, which show an overwhelming majority of Americans now oppose the war.

Code Pink's members are primarily Caucasian women. Many of them dress in very feminine fashion, decked out in beautiful, old-fashioned pink hats, frilly pink dresses and pink shawls. But they are very tough, for it was some of their members who lay down in the streets and refused to move, protesting the inhumanity of the war very early on.

"We wear pink," one of them told me during a previous vigil, "because it is a peaceful and soothing color, and also to draw attention to the farce of the Code Red, Code Orange, and other alerts issued by the Bush administration post 9-11."

I'd just walked up to the vigil when a petite, fashionably dressed brunette, with shoulder length hair, came up to me and introduced herself, "Hi, I'm Medea."

So, this was Code Pink's gutsy co-founder, Medea Benjamin. Earlier this year, Medea had disrupted Condoleezza Rice's San Francisco speech. Dressed in a black hood and cloak similar to that worn by Iraqi prisoners, she'd stood up screaming, "Stop the torture. Stop the killing. U.S. out of Iraq," until she was removed from the hall by the authorities. She had all my respect.

I shook her hand and thanked her for her efforts against the war. At the time, I was not aware that Medea planned to be arrested in the mass civil disobedience two days later. She exuded a tranquility that comes, perhaps, from working for justice.

The Code Pink women are very organized. Someone offered me a candle with a nice holder; someone else handed me a flier. The flier instructed me not to interact with the counter-demonstrators. Don't talk to press members, unless they present ID, the flier said.

Don't talk to press? That's a little extreme, I thought.

Later, after some searching on the web, I found articles from Cybercast News Service (CNS) and other right-wing sources attacking Medea Benjamin, quoting the right wing demonstrators at length, and offering only brief quotes of questionable authenticity from Code Pink protestors. Yes, this is the same CNS which attacked Dr. Siddique at the behest of the Zionists.
Now you know why not to talk to the (Zionist) media, stupid!

A few weeks ago, a young soldier had joined the Code Pink vigil. He'd returned from Iraq thoroughly disillusioned by the war. Still angry and emotional at what he'd experienced, he was provoked into a physical confrontation by the taunts of the counter-demonstrators. Police quickly broken up the incident, but the Code Pink women were determined there should be no repeat of this.

I found that young soldier and talked with him for a few minutes.

He said "Those guys across the street, look at their hair. It's too long. They can't have been over there. That is why they support the war. They have no idea what the U.S. is doing over there."

A Vietnam veteran who stood with us agreed. The current administration, he said, are all cowards and draft dodgers, hiding behind their power and wealth. Most of them don't have any military service under their belt. That is why they take war so lightly."

I squinted to read the counter demonstrators' signs, in an effort to understand their argument. There was none. They carried bizarre signs, such as "Code Pink Funds Terrorists," and "America's Armed Forces: Bringing democracy to the world, toppling one dictator at a time." Some of them wore tee-shirts saying "Club G'itmo." Their main point seemed to be that Code Pink--not an illegal war--is the problem.

It was the classic propaganda tactic: when you can't answer your opponent's argument with facts, create as much confusion as you possibly can, with wild accusations.

A young Italian-American woman wearing camouflage pants handed me one end of a Code Pink banner. "I made this banner," she announced proudly. It read "Money for the Wounded, Not for the War."

A $3 billion shortfall is expected for Veterans Administration (VA) funding; many veterans hospitals (including Walter Reed) are under threat of closure. The Code Pink banner was on point, elucidating the hypocrisy of the Bush regime, in its dealings with its own fighting men and women.

While I held the banner, a conservatively dressed Code Pink woman, who appeared to be in her sixties or seventies, with entirely grey hair, darted out into traffic. As I watched in amazement, she energetically handed out fliers announcing the anti-war march the next day to the cars stopped at the Georgia Avenue traffic light.

I chatted with two elderly woman in a bright pink Stetsons. They had come from Texas for the national march the next day. One of them told me she had been in Camp Casey for several weeks, and then joined a contingent to deliver a protest letter to Laura Bush, in response to her racist comments following Hurricane Katrina.

Just as I was about to ask her if they'd been successful in delivering the letter, the Code Pink women broke out in song to the accompaniment of a banjo: "I ain't going to study war no more," a very creative anti-war version of "When the Saints Come Marching In", and other well known peace songs.

(The vigil continues to be held every Friday night at 7:00 pm - 9:00 pm outside the main entrance of Walter Reed Medical Center, in Northwest DC).

(Next: Behind the Scenes at the September 24 Protest)
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Is this a Warning of worse to come?
Why the Earthquake in Pakistan?

Oedipus the King was the Cause of the Sickness in Thebes: A CIA Agent Rules Islamabad, mocking Islam

by Kaukab Siddique, Ph.D

I was numbed by the news pouring in from Pakistan. My usual way to understand such tragedies is to take refuge in my 21st century rational/empirical self. These things happen owing to the rules of physics and the contours of geography, I told myself, and all we can do is to write checks, help the survivors, and work for improved health and transportation facilities.

Somehow, I could not rest content with the explanation offered by my cynical, americanized self. So, I asked a sage. The answer I got was lengthy but I will summarize his main points here: ---------------------------------------------------------------------------

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2005-10-10 Mon 20:19ct
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