Dr Kaukab Siddique | Editor-in-Chief Jamada al-Thani 24, 1425/ August 11, 2004 #80
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LOCAL NEWS
Jamaat al-Muslimeen's National Shoora will meet in Atlanta on August 21, inshallah

Former Black Panther calls for march for reparations [to compensate for 400 years of slavery] on August 28. [See message below.]
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WAR NEWS

SIX DAYS OF RESISTANCE in NAJAF, Iraq: MOQTEDA Al-SADR Defiant: DECISIVE DAYS for FUTURE of SHI'ISM

from our Iraq observer

For six days, U.S. forces backed by renegade Shias supporting U.S. -installed "Prime Minister" Allavi, have been fighting the emerging leader of Shi'ism, the youthful Sayyid Moqteda al-Sadr. His lightly armed militia are trying to fight the U.S. in face to face fighting and suffering heavy losses, both in Najaf and in Sadr City, Baghdad.

[British forces in BASRA have also been facing resistance and lost one killed, five wounded.]

The U.S. is using tanks, helicopter gunships and air strikes in Najaf, the holiest city of Shi'ism. U.S. air bombardment of a Shi'ite graveyard in Najaf is also reported. The U.S. is awaiting a signal from Allawi to attack the mosque of Imam Ali.

END OF IRAN'S CREDIBILITY AMONG SHI'AS?

With Najaf under attack, and turmoil in Karbala, Basra and Sadr City, the silence of Iran is intriguing for observers. It appears that Iranian nationalism has outweighed Islamic considerations in the post-Khomeini Iran. The Iranian strategies coincide so accurately with U.S. strategies that Iran continues to play the waiting game.

Earlier in the war, under British occupation of Basra, a Qur'an written by Imam Ali himself was set on fire, with deafening silence from Iran.

Iran is already discredited in most of the Muslim world owing to its support for Russia over Chechnia, its extreme hostility to the Taliban, it's neutrality over the Jihad in Kashmir, its support of the sanctions on Iraq for 12 years, and it's constant propaganda about Palestine without any weapons for the Palestinians.
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AFGHANISTAN

In a Taliban attack in the Ghazni area, six U.S. troops and their interpreter were killed, according to Pakistani newspapers. The U.S. media say two U.S. troops and the interpreter were killed.
Pakistani reports says the Taliban now control four districts of Oruzgan province even during the day. Vast areas of southern and southeastern Afghanistan are under Taliban control at night, [not during the day owing to control of the air by the U.S.]
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SUDAN:

On his arrival at the Arab Foreign Minister's conference in Cairo, the Sudanese foreign minister told reporters that ISRAEL is involved in the rebellion in Darfur. The rebels are using heavy weapons against poorly armed Sudanese troops.
As New Trend noticed, as if at a signal, the Zionist propaganda machine AROUND THE WORLD went into high gear to claim that "genocide" had taken place in Darfur! The Washington Post was the most shameless of all, claiming in a front page story that 'mass rape' had taken place in Darfur, ABSOLUTELY without evidence.

[BY CONTRAST, the Zionist media ignore atrocities against Muslims on a daily basis in Palestine and Kashmir.]
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Anniversary of Abu Bakr Siddiq, r.a., Greatest Muslim Male after Prophet Muhammad (pbuh), Father of 'Ayesha Siddiqa, r.a., greatest Muslim Woman.
First Rightly Guided Caliph, Referred to in the Qur’an as "Second of Two"

by Kaukab Siddique

"If ye help not (the Prophet), (It is no matter): For Allah did indeed help him, when the unbelievers drove him out:
being the second of two. They two were in the cave, and he said to his companion, "Have no fear, for ALLAH is WITH US": Then Allah sent down His peace upon him, and strengthened him with forces which ye saw not, and humbled to the depths the word of the unbelievers. And the Word of Allah is exalted to the heights: For Allah is Exalted in might, Wise." [The Qur’an 9:40]

Abu Bakr, r.a., died on Jamada al-Thani 22, in the year 13 of the Islamic calendar. He was the First Rightly guided Caliph and ruled over the original Islamic community, the pure model of Islam, for two years, six months and 10 days.

The verse of the Qur’an quoted above [9:40], refers to one of the most poignant moments in Islamic history when Muhammad (p) and Abu Bakr (r.a.) were hiding in a cave, during their escape from Makka, on the way to Madinah. The oppressors pursued them and were about to discover them in the cave. Muhammad’s (p) words, Allah is with ‘us,’ sealed this holy companionship for ever.

There are numerous Hadith about Abu Bakr, r.a., because he was with Muhammad (pbuh) in the Prophet’s ENTIRE struggle to create the original Islamic community. Here are a few narrations from TAQBAT al-KUBRA, a high quality book of Hadith which is composed of biographical texts, and a few summaries from other books of Hadith:

"Abi Arvi al-Dausi (and numerous others) narrate that the FIRST PERSON TO EMBRACE ISLAM from the Prophet, p, was Abu Bakr Siddiq, r.a."

"Ibrahim narrates that the first to establish salat [formal prayer] with the Prophet, p, was Abu Bakr Siddiq, r.a."

When Abu Bakr embraced Islam, he had 40,000 dirhams, When he migrated to Madinah with the Prophet, p, he had 5000 dirhams. When he died as Caliph, he had NONE. He had given ALL he had to the Way of Allah. [Allama Iqbal, the Poet of the East has written a beautiful couplet about the "giving all" quality of Abu Bakr, r.a.]

[There are narrations about how Abu Bakr, r.a., used his wealth to free slaves, the most famous of whom was BILAL (r.a.) and who in turn became one of the greatest Muslims.]

When the Prophet, pbuh, was dying, he commanded Abu Bakr, r.a., to lead the Islamic community in prayer, thus pointing out his successor.

The Prophet, pbuh, prayed BEHIND Abu Bakr, r.a., in his final illness. Hence the community was sure that Abu Bakr, r.a., would be their leader after the Prophet, pbuh.

In his life style, he left examples of honesty, simplicity, humility and equal treatment of people which are impossible to find anywhere else in human history, other than in the examples of Muhammad, p, ‘Umar ibn al-Khattab, r.a., and Ayesha Siddiqa, r.a.

Abu Bakr, r.a., was with the Prophet, pbuh, in Jihad, and when the Prophet, p, passed away, the first concern of Abu Bakr, r.a., was to send out the Islamic army led by a very young man named Osama, r.a.

Ali, r.a., was asked about Abu Bakr, r.a., and ‘Umar, r.a., and this is what he said: "Both were Imams of right guidance: They found the Way, they were pioneers forward, they were ones who always set things right, and they were successful. They left the world in a condition that their stomachs were never full."

Abu Bakr's, r.a., daughter from his first marriage, Asma, r.a., also a great Muslim woman, is famous for bringing food for the Prophet, p, and her father, when they were fleeing from Makka. Owing to the emergency situation, they had left with nothing. There was no utensil in which to store the food. So Asma, r.a. tore up her dress to tie the food in. [Later in life, she is famous for urging her son Abdullah ibn Zubair, r.a., to resist the Ummayad tyranny.].

There was a dynamic daughter-father relationship between ‘Ayesha, r.a., and Abu Bakr, r.a. When he was dying, she expressed her sorrow in poetry and he answered her in poetry.

His body was washed and prepared for burial by his wife ‘Asma, r.a., the daughter of ‘Umais. [This too was a great mujahid woman about whom a separate book could be written.].
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MARCH FOR REPARATIONS: RICHMOND, VIRGINIA, Aug.28

[From famous former Black Panther leader, Jihad Abdul-Mumit.]

As-salaamu 'alaykum!

Dear Sisters and Brothers,
Insha Allah, there will be a March for Reparations in Richmond, Va. on Saturday, 8/28/04 from 12 Noon to 3:00pm. Please do all you can to attend and participate. We are in need of speakers to do 5 minute relevant presentations at the rally to take place at the State Capital. If you are willing and able to address this topic, please contact me (Jihad Abdulmumit) at 804-270-4478.

Also, [please forward this Email to everyone you can and distribute amongst the people this invitation. We need numbers to legitimize our point here in Richmond. Insha Allah, if the March is successful, then after the city elections we will use the March as a precedent and request that the City adopt and pass a Resolution in support of Reparations. This Resolution will in turn be used to support the Nation effort for Reparations.

There will be Marches throughout the South during the Month of August.

Thank you for your support!!!!!!!

Sincerely,
Jihad Abdulmumit
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TERRORIST OR VICTIM? The Case of British Muslim Babar Ahmad
Famous British journalist Yvonne Ridley looks at a case which has been uncritically publicized in the U.S. media.

Earlier this month in London Babar Ahmad was arrested by Anti-Terrorist police acting upon an extradition request from the US.

According to a 250-page document, American intelligence says he planned attacks and laundered money for terrorist activities.

However, there are many who believe that Babar is being persecuted and has been singled out because of his voluntary work setting up a pressure group called Stop Police Terror.

The highly successful pressure group urges all British people to resist being bullied by George W Bush and Tony Blair and fight injustice on behalf of Muslims in the UK.

The high-profile case of the brother, formerly referred to as Suspect A, who was arrested as part of December raids in London, will continue to inspire the pressure group.

Therefore it comes as no surprise that the British establishment are seeking to remove this thorn in their side. His arrest comes at a time while investigations as part of the official complaint he lodged are still pending in this case which had attracted much media attention and aroused deep anger in the community.

It is rather convenient that the British establishment are now seeking to eliminate the very individual who has exposed and widely publicised the extent of police brutality and the arbitrariness of their arrests.

Br. Ahmad is a law-abiding, upright British citizen, born and educated in South London, Described as an 'intelligent, articulate graduate with a lovely family', he is a well-known, highly beneficial member of the community, who has contributed particularly to the preservation of the Muslim youth and ensuring they are occupied with Islamic activities.

Is he really a dangerous terrorist, a key Al-Qaida planner of operations as they would have us believe, or simply a political pawn? Where is the much-lauded British justice? Why must we bend at Bush's every beck and call?

Was it not sufficient that the Anti-Terrorist officers burst into his home and brutally beat Babar Ahmad, inflicting more than 50 potentially life-threatening injuries in December 2003?

Shocking pictures of his injuries were shown to Muslims in Florida earlier this year who attended a special video presentation given by UK sister Yvonne Ridley on the War on Terror.

If there had been a shred of incriminating evidence it would have been found in the forensic searches of his property, in the intricate scans of his computers or in the raid of his workplace, she told New Trend this week.

And if that were not enough, then exhaustively sending samples of his DNA and fingerprints around the globe should have been more than adequate in securing some charge, but unsurprisingly - yet again - they were able to find nothing. So from where arises the need to extradite this British citizen to a country infamous for its human rights abuses?

Members of the Stop Police Terror group have asked the following questions.

Can we really have faith in an administration which has arrested more than a staggering 5,000 Muslims on its own soil since 2001, whose soldiers continue to torture and humiliate innocent civilians from Afghanistan to Iraq to Guantanamo?

Can we rely upon an administration which extracts confessions under torture and duress - or who renders individuals to foreign governments to torture on their behalf - and makes such confessions the basis for arrests and charges levelled against individuals across the globe?

Can we trust an administration which deprives its detainees of legal counsel, of access to witnesses, to independent enquiry for years, who evade the rulings of their own Supreme Court?

Can we trust such an administration to treat Mr Ahmad with fairness and justice, when its interests lie in raising and lowering the terror alert at whim, to secure their seat in the upcoming elections, who revel in creating an atmosphere of fear and paranoia amongst the British and American people?

SPT adds: 'Let us not forget recent examples of the December and the Manchester raids, where all detainees were released without charge, or the arrests of Algerians in Scotland, whose lives were destroyed in spite of their innocence now being established. Let us not forget the 594 arrests with only 6 charged.'

Unfortunately, Woodhill Prison where Mr Ahmad is being held has misinformed members of his family and have issued the wrong prison number for Mr Ahmad.

The erroneous number has since been publicised widely via the internet and to several hundred people present at the Stop Police Conference on Sunday in London as part of the address to write to Babar Ahmad.

Moreover this is in spite of the fact that the family and others have sent letters and money (without which he cannot purchase small items or make phone calls) which will now be received by another prisoner.

The correct prisoner no. is MX5383

So please send letters and messages of support to brother Babar and let him know that members of his family around the world are thinking of him, even if you don't give reply details.
B Ahmad MX5383
HMP Woodhill
Tattenhoe Street
Milton Keynes
Bucks
MK4 4DA
Please disseminate the new address as widely as possible. For more information please check out the website: www.stoppoliceterror.com
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Heavily Publicized Story of Jordanian Woman's Murder for Dating a Christian Was a Hoax: Exposed Below

A hoax and honor lost for Norma Khouri
By Ali Abunimah

The Daily Star
10 August 2004

http://dailystar.com.lb/article.asp?edition_id=10&categ_id=5&article_id=7113

A sensational book that purported to tell the "true" story of the murder of a young Jordanian woman by her father because she dared to date a Christian man has been exposed as a fraud. The scandal was a setback for advocates of women's rights in Jordan and provided a disturbing case study of how lies and distortions can masquerade as "fact" in Western discussions of the Arab world and Islam.

When Norma Khouri's book "Forbidden Love" (" Honor Lost " in the US) came out last year, it was a hit, selling more than 250,000 copies globally. In Australia, where the author has been granted asylum, it was voted one of the country's 100 favorite books of all time. Khouri's book told the story of how she and her friend "Dalia," a Muslim woman, opened a unisex hair salon in Amman in the early 1990s. Dalia fell in love with a Christian man, "Michael," who frequented the salon, and despite the innocence of the affair, she was brutally stabbed to death by her father in 1996. Khouri claimed she fled Jordan after this atrocity, fearing for her own life, eventually making her way to Australia.

However, investigations by a Jordanian journalist, women's rights activists and Australia's Sydney Morning Herald have revealed the book to be a hoax. There is no evidence the events described took place. If Khouri's ragged tale could fool major publishers like Random House (in Australia) and Simon and Schuster (in the US), her story fell apart immediately when Rana Husseini, an investigative journalist at the Jordan Times, got hold of it. Since 1994, Husseini has written countless articles on honor crimes in Jordan and can be credited with a major role in galvanizing public opinion against the practice.

This has been a hard road, as Husseini explained by telephone from Amman: "I have always been accused of tarnishing Jordan's image, of washing dirty laundry in public. But I have always been very careful to explain that honor killing is not part of the Muslim religion, and that although serious, there are only 15-25 cases per year, not thousands, like Khouri claimed falsely in her book." Husseini pointed out that the practice also occurs among Christian families.

Husseini first heard about Khouri's book through a flow of e-mails from Australia, since Khouri had published Husseini's e-mail address without her permission. Some were from Arab-Australians who felt slandered, but many more were from readers who believed that Arabs and Muslims were monsters. "I felt I had to do something," says Husseini. She contacted the Jordanian National Committee for Women (JNCW), and with the organization's president, Amal al-Sabbagh, she did a thorough page-by-page analysis of the book and documented dozens of serious errors and anachronisms, covering geography, history, Islam, Arabic language and law.

On page two of her book, for example, Khouri wrote that the Jordan River is "no longer strong enough to flow down to Amman." Yet, the Jordan River has never flowed anywhere near Amman, not least because it would have meant flowing uphill for an altitude of 1 kilometer.

There were also errors about Jordan's legal system: Khouri claimed that Dalia's killer was released on bail, even though Jordan never releases suspects on bail in capital offences. Khouri also described the lives of a majority of Jordanian women as being akin to that of prisoners, slavishly serving men in silence and eating their leftovers, She also described a society of fear that was unrecognizable to anyone familiar with Jordan. Husseini's investigation determined that no salon as described by Khouri had ever existed (unisex salons are in any case illegal), nor had anyone in Khouri's alleged Amman neighborhood ever heard of her family, or of the brutal murder. Husseini was astonished that Khouri's book contained not a single reference for any of the thousands of "facts" it reported.

JNCW's Sabbagh sent a letter detailing these findings to Random House in Australia, but so far the publisher has stood by Khouri. However, the American publisher has withdrawn the book from sale pending an investigation. While the facts of the Khouri hoax are astonishing, it is, sadly, not surprising that so many were ready to believe her. Husseini observes: "The timing of the book was very suspicious, between Sept. 11, 2001, and the war on Iraq. The alleged crime happened in 1996, so why did the book come out after so long?"

In the post- Sept. 11 era, Khouri's book met a certain demand in the US and other Western societies, where the shortcomings and "backwardness" of Arab and Muslim societies have become a focus of intense interest to which precious little genuine expertise is brought to bear. Indeed the desire to "rescue" Muslim women has become a prominent theme in liberal justifications for US intervention in the region. This was most common at the beginning of the Afghanistan war.

There is also a Western tendency to assume that violence is a pathology when it occurs among Arabs and Muslims, and to apply spurious religious or cultural explanations to explain it. Murder rates in general, and specifically for the murder of women by male family members and intimates, are far higher in the United States than in Jordan, though few analyses attribute this to American culture generally, or to Americans' devout Christianity.

Husseini points to the well-worn stereotypes that infect Western media discourse about the issues to which she has devoted her career. She notes the exotic artwork on the cover of Khouri's book, which shows a women clad in black head-covering with only her long-lashed eyes peering out - dress that certainly exists, but is not typical in Jordan, where women outnumber and outperform men in secondary and higher education, and are increasingly present in all sectors of the economy.

"We have this problem (of honor crimes) in Jordan and elsewhere," says Husseini; "(T)here are people here working on it, the government is working on it and the royal family. The country acknowledged the problem before anyone outside was talking about honor crimes."

There is resistance to change from conservatives. For example from the opposition Islamic Action Front or some tribal leaders, who often justify their positions by claiming that the campaign against honor crimes is a hostile foreign plot. However, Husseini points out, noted Muslim figures, among them Jordan's Chief Islamic Justice Sheikh Izzedin al-Tamimi, have come out firmly against the practice, and in recent years there have been 10 major legislative reforms advancing women's rights in several areas.

The stereotype of helpless women in need of escape, which Khouri's book has fed, renders these debates and struggles invisible, and disempowers the very women who are campaigning successfully for change from within.

Ali Abunimah, a Chicago-based Palestinian-Jordanian analyst and media critic, is co-founder of Electronic Intifada. He wrote this commentary for THE DAILY STAR
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2004-08-11 Wed 19:40ct