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  • thabet 10:18 am on January 23, 2011 Permalink
    Tags: , ethnic violence, , , , , , , , ,   

    Kyrgyz mosques under scrutiny for links to ‘extremism’:

    In Kyrgyzstan, where 85 percent of the population is Muslim, many looked to mosques as a place for reconciliation after the summer violence left a bloody divide between the country’s ethnic Kyrgyz and Uzbeks. Special prayer sessions were held in a number of mosques to bring together members of both communities and call for respect and mutual tolerance.

    But mosques have also been viewed with suspicion, with some suggesting they’re a breeding ground for extremist groups who may have played a role in the June events and are intent upon further destabilizing the country.

    Officials in Bishkek have blamed religious extremists for a recent spate of explosions and other attacks, including a massive bombing that disrupted court proceedings in November and a January 4 firefight that left four law enforcement officers and two alleged militants dead. Interior Minister Zarylbek Rysaliev said in a statement that “a war has been declared on all of us” and that “evil is wearing the mask of a believer.”

    Marat Imankulov, the deputy chairman of the State Committee for National Security, says that the single greatest security threat facing Kyrgyzstan today is religious extremism promoted by organizations like Hizb ut-Tahrir, whose call for a global Islamic caliphate has deeply unnerved governments in Central Asia despite the group’s formal renunciation of violence.

     

  • abunoor 9:14 am on June 11, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: ethnic violence, , , Muslims in former soviet union   

    Ethnic violence in Kyrgyzstan (both Uzbek and Kygryz ethnic groups are predominantly Muslim)

    Mobs of armed men torched Uzbek neighborhoods in southern Kyrgyzstan on Friday in ethnic clashes that officials said left at least 37 people dead and over 500 wounded. A state of emergency was declared in the Central Asian nation that hosts U.S. and Russian military bases.
    The rioting in Osh, the country’s second-largest city, is the heaviest violence since former President Kurmanbek Bakiyev was toppled in a bloody uprising in April and fled the country.
    The intensity of the conflict, which pits ethnic Kyrgyz against minority Uzbeks, appears to have taken authorities by surprise and has thrown the fragile interim government’s prospects for survival into doubt.
    Quelling the violence will prove a decisive test of the government’s ability to control the country, hold a June 27 vote on a new constitution and go ahead with new parliamentary elections scheduled for October.

     

    • Dan 12:13 pm on June 11, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      So much for pan-Turkic “unity”.

    • Issay 3:22 pm on June 11, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      They are muslim by name. when they were real muslims in past centuries all ethnic central asian muslims and non muslims lived peacefully together.

      • thabet 9:22 pm on June 11, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Nice bit of takfiring there.

        • Abu Noor Al-Irlandee 7:02 pm on June 14, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

          Thabet, I’m not sure where Issay is coming but I think it is wrong to label statements like these as takfir. When Muslims act in ways that are wrong or fail to fundamentally live up to the title Muslim, surely it must be permissible to say they are not acting as “real Muslims” or even that they are not acting as “Muslims.” There are numerous ahadith I am sure you are aware of where the Prophet (saw) did just this.

          • thabet 1:36 am on June 15, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            OK, I concede I was harsh and wrong to say so, but only in response to an equally harsh and wrong-headed view imho.

            It is likely this has little to do with them being “Muslim by name”, so talking about their ‘Muslimness’ is the wrong focus.

            • Abu Noor 8:47 am on June 15, 2010 Permalink

              I agree Issay’s comment could have been phrased better. But isn’t Issay basically saying what you are saying, doesn’t Muslim “by name” mean that their Islam is not related to the actions they are taking? (Although the way Issay phrased it implies that they should instead be acting as ‘real Muslims” while leaving the matter out entirely would lack that implication.

              I don’t mean to belabor this point. I actually used your off hand comment more as an opening to pick at this issue of takfir, which is indeed a very serious issue, but I think is used in very strange ways in Muslim discourse today.

            • thabet 3:27 pm on June 15, 2010 Permalink

              Fair points in the 2nd para, Abu Noor.

              Sure critique them from an Islamic moral stance if you want, but I guess I have just grown weary of “real” or “fake” Muslim gibes.

          • aziz 4:23 pm on June 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

            i couldnt disagree more strongly. This “takfir-lite” is no less insidious than full-on takfir, and we should develop a culture of intolerance towards such statements.

            You may not perceive them as a threat, Abu Noor, because you are probably rarely at the receiving end of it.

            the key is of course, who gets to define “muslim-ness”. In Pakistan, thats a literal question of life and death. For my part, I tend to take assertions of being muslim at face value; Ive never even takfired Osama bin Laden.

            Bieng muslim is as simple as saying the shahada – and thats all it takes to be muslim (and be held accountable by Allah to that standard).

            • Abu Noor 6:35 pm on June 17, 2010 Permalink

              Aziz, I think you are missing the point. And bringing up completely extraneous issues about which we may agree or disagree does not help clarify this issue.

            • Abu Noor 6:52 pm on June 17, 2010 Permalink

              By the way, Aziz, your notion that I would not have been on the receiving end of this “takfir-lite” again shows that you are talking about something totally different. I don’t get a lot of people singling out me personally and telling me I’m not a real Muslim, of course the comment we are discussing by Issay also did not single out any individual at all. And there are many groups with which I may identify or with which others may identify me that are routinely described in ways that would surely qualify as “takfir-lite.”

              I can see both Thabet’s point that talking/arguing about who are the “Real Muslims” can be tiresome and your point that such talk can be dangerous.

              But such talk is also, if you really think about it, quite ubiquitous although it can be done with a variety of different tones. In certain contexts a more “academic” perspective in which no one is more Muslim than another and everyone’s beliefs and actions are just their own understanding of Islam is appropriate.

              But in other contexts for people who are actually believers who feel passionately about these subjects, there has to be room for idenitfying what is the authentic belief and what are the righteous actions. And such discourse will sometimes not shy away from pointing out beliefs and behaviors which are other than that.

              As I said to Thabet, there are numerous examples of the Prophet (saw) making statements which were not meant to make legalistic takfir of people but which used language which sounds like takfir to express how serious certain issues are and the high standards of being a Muslim.

    • Nadia 6:51 pm on June 14, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Still not as bad as the Arab vs Israel conflict, which is all about anti-Jewish bigotry by Arab racism & radical Islamists’ intolerance – that lethal combination of FASCISM.

    • David Mullens 7:56 am on June 17, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Here is the response to midwinterspring, in the form of a letter to Helen Thomas

      AN OPEN LETTER TO HELEN THOMAS

      Dear Ms. Thomas,

      I was deeply grieved and shocked when you said that Israeli Jews “should go back (home) to Germany and Poland .” I have news for you. They are home. And as an indigenous Egyptian Jew forced out of my home by Gamal Abdul Nasser’s regime in 1952, I found your comments woefully ignorant and hateful. Even more so since, like me, most Israeli Jews can trace their ancestry not to Europe , but to the Middle East and North Africa .

      It is true that the world’s sympathy for Europe ’s murdered Jews, systematically exterminated by Germany in occupied Poland where all the death camps were located, led to support for the creation of the State of Israel. What most people don’t know, including you, is that nearly one million Jews from Egypt , Syria , Iraq , Libya , Morocco , Tunisia , Yemen , Algeria , and Lebanon – your ancestral homeland – were forced out of their homes and are mostly now living in Israel .

      Maybe what struck me most was your utter ignorance of Middle Eastern Jewish history, that we were once a thriving community in nine Arab states, and our presence in these countries was ended by a chauvinistic pan-Arab nationalism. It seems your bigoted opinions are not new, but have been part of your agenda all your life.

      Even scarier is your words echo that of Hamas, Hezballah and their sponsor the Holocaust-denying President Ahmedinejad of Iran .

      The historical facts are unchallenged: Jews have populated this region – today’s Israel and surrounding lands – since time immemorial. Jews and Judaism are indigenous to the Middle East , not a foreign implant. Indeed, Jews were living in what are now “Arab” and “Muslim” lands a thousand years before Islam’s prophet Muhammad was born in the seventh century. Under the banner of Islam, Arabian Jews were mostly killed and Arabian armies invaded and colonized the rest of the region, subjecting Jews, Assyrians, Berbers, Chaldeans, Greeks and other peoples to their “occupation.” Jews and Christians were forced to become “dhimmis,” a “protected” group of non-citizens living under canonized discriminatory conditions until the 19th and 20th centuries.

      I was 11 years old in 1947, living in Cairo , an indigenous Egyptian Jew with deep roots in the soil of the Nile . The situation in the Middle East was precarious with fighting between Jews and Arabs in British Mandated Palestine reaching critical levels. As a remedy, the United Nations voted to partition the region into Arab Palestine and Jewish Palestine. The Palestinian Arabs refused to accept the partition. The Arab League’s General Secretary declared, “This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre that will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacre and Crusades.” The Arab war against Israel – costly to both sides – was a failure with the Arabs losing.

      This was humiliating for the Arab states. In their rage, they took their revenge on their indigenous Jewish citizens. Anti-Jewish riots erupted in Cairo , Baghdad , Damascus , Tripoli and other Arab capitals killing and wounding hundreds of Jews. It was hell in Dante’s Inferno.

      Gradually, the 850,000 Jews living in nine Arab countries were expelled or otherwise forced out. Our properties were confiscated by the Arab governments. No Trial, No Jury, No Justice. Most of us went to Israel strengthening and enriching that country. Some of us, myself included, went to America and elsewhere. For the last 62 years the Arab world has refused to recognize the rights of the Jewish refugees from Arab countries to restitution, and this is a crime.

      I can’t help but feel that if the Palestinian Arabs had accepted the Partition of 1947 they would have been independent and prosperous, living side by side with Israel. Tragically, Ms. Thomas, people like you with your misinformation, hate and bigotry continue to make the prospects for peace all but impossible.

      Joseph Abdel Wahed is a founder of JIMENA (Jews Indigenous to the Middle East and North Africa . He is the former Chief Economist and SVP for Wells Fargo Bank.

  • johnpi 9:28 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , , , , ethnic violence, ethnicty,   

    Cracking open the secular ‘sacred’ truths with examples from reality.

    Since the end of the Cold War, the dominant paradigm of the Caucasus region has been “ethnic unmixing,” however, on the ground away from nation-state actions, there are actually examples all over the place of Armenians and Azerbaijanis living in peaceful, mixed communities.

    As a conclusion, I would like to return to one of the stereotypes that are most common both on grassroots level and in the official discourse of Armenia and Azerbaijan, according to which states Armenian and Azerbaijani peoples cannot live side by side. I hope that many of those who are subject to the hypnotic influence of such myths will learn about the existence of villages like Tsopi, which is by far not the only existing remnant from the times when the lives of the two peoples were closely intertwined. [...] from a more general point of view representatives of different national communities, including Armenians and Azerbaijanis, are destined to co-existence as neighbors, as in the case of the villagers of Tsopi. It is necessary to pay attention to these spaces of coexistence and then probably there will be much more chances to make the perspective of peace closer to this region.

    (via)

     

  • johnpi 11:34 am on January 6, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , ethnic violence, , , ,   

    The partially burnt corpse of another murdered Indian national has been discovered on a rural Australian road, prompting the government of India to issue a travel advisory to its citizens about visiting Australia.

    In the advisory, India’s government said: “The ministry of external affairs cautions Indian students who are planning to study in Australia that there have been several incidents of robbery and assault on Indians in Australia, particularly in Melbourne, which has seen an increase in violence on its streets in recent years, with the offenders suspected to be mainly young people in their teens and early 20s.”

    Australia’s response: Hey, everybody’s doing it.

    Australia’s acting foreign minister, Simon Crean, said he hoped “wiser heads” would prevail, insisting Australia, and in particular Melbourne, was a safe place for foreign students as the city had one of the lowest homicide rates in the world.

    “[Melbourne] is not the only place that deaths happen,” he said. “They happen in India. They happen in Mumbai. They happen in Delhi.”

    Here’s another Youtube video of an assault in Australia, this one in September on a Sri Lankan man waiting for a train.

     

    • pi.info 8:36 pm on January 6, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Indian student visa applications dropped 46 percent to Australia over a three month period in the late summer/fall.

      Visa applications by Indians to study in Australia fell at twice the pace of students from other countries amid attacks on Indian nationals and the financial collapse of some private colleges.

      Applications by Indians from abroad fell 46 percent to 11,183 between July and October 2009 compared with a year earlier, according to data from the Department of Immigration and Citizenship. Applications from all countries dropped 23 percent to 58,103 during the period, it said.

    • Anthony 9:05 pm on January 6, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Indians should be in India and not Australia. These people are quick to cry about colonization, but want the right to colonize other lands. I doubt it is Aussies doing this, most of the crime in Australia is done by Lebanese Muslim gangs.

      • cbarwa 11:15 pm on January 6, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Indians should be in India and not Australia

        By that logic, all white Australians should return to the Motherland in Europe.

      • Dan 12:30 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Have you even been in Australia, Anthony? Obviously not. I’ve spent time in the country, and while some crime is committed by Lebanese gangs, the claim that they are all Muslim is not entirely correct. There are Vietnamese gangs are pretty notorious in Cabramatta, whereas Assyrian CHRISTIAN gangs in Fairfield have had their fair share of gang activity, and Perth has its share of Aboriginals engaging in fights with everyone else. And as for Aussies not doing this, I guess you forgot what happened in Cronulla more than 4 years ago. Have you even spent time in Kings Cross? A lot of stabbings occur there, and guess who they are committed by? Yeah, white anglo Aussies.

        And as for the “Indians should be in India” claim, you are an idiot.

    • Anthony 12:20 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      cbarwa 11:15 pm on January 6, 2010 Permalink | Reply

      Indians should be in India and not Australia

      By that logic, all white Australians should return to the Motherland in Europe.

      You sound like a racist. Australia was created by Europeans, not kids from Calcutta or Karachi.

      • Dan 12:32 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        Incorrect, Australia was conceived by Anglo-Saxon immigrants. Anyone who is from southern/southeastern Europe, which includes Italians, Greeks, Turks, Macedonians, Maltese, or anyone else from the Balkans, for that matter, knew what Hell it was like when they first stepped off from the boat in Australia back in the 1950′s and 1960′s.

        Australia benefits greatly from immigrants, you racist twat.

      • cbarwa 5:35 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        not kids from Calcutta or Karachi.

        Karachi is in Pakistan, not India by the way. At least bother to learn the geography of the countries you are insulting, it makes you look that tiny bit less stupid :D

    • Anthony 12:41 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      You’re wrong Dan, Irish aren’t Anglo Saxon. Australia doesn’t need Indians, only a Jew would think that. The Indians should stay in India. You Jews shouldn’t decide what non Jews want.

      • Dan 12:47 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        hahahahaha Australia doesn’t need Indians? Get off your high horse you clown. Australia benefits immensely from immigration. Indians have done a lot of work to make Australia better, as have every other immigrant group. How about you STFU and go back to Stormfront or Jihadwatch instead?

      • cbarwa 5:34 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

        You Jews shouldn’t decide what non Jews want.

        LOL, are you for real, coming on a predominantly Muslim site and slagging off ‘Jews’. Hilarious.

    • Anthony 2:20 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Go back to Israel or Yemen Jew. Australia just did fine for centuries without Indians. Indians in Australia are invaders!

    • null 7:17 am on January 7, 2010 Permalink | Log in to Reply

      Is this guy Anthony for real ?
      Most of these Indians have gone thier to study .

  • johnpi 11:48 pm on January 5, 2010 Permalink
    Tags: , , , , , ethnic violence, , , , , , ,   

    Relations between India and Australia have hit a new low after the murder of a young Indian man named Nitin Garg on his way to work in Melbourne last weekend. The murder caps a long series of violent attacks targeting Indians in Australia.

    Police are reluctant to draw a racial link to the murder, even though Mr Garg was not robbed and his belongings were left scattered the park where he was murdered.

    A representative of the Federation of Indian Students said there are ‘on average 5 attacks a day’ on Indians in Melbourne. The Indian Foreign Minister says it will “be forced to take action” if there are more attacks.

    Attackers have been reported as being white, Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, aboriginal and Pacific islander. One assault was even captured on subway video. Police have speculated that Indian students often work late at night, live in low-income areas, and are perceived to be “easy” targets of violence.

    Police have no witnesses and no suspects in the Garg murder.

    There were so many attacks on Indians in 2009 that the topic has its own Wikipedia page.

     

  • johnpi 6:34 am on October 16, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , ethnic violence, , , , ,   

    There is a sense in which the Pakistani army’s struggle against the Taliban is increasingly an ethnic war between radical Muslim Pashtuns and more traditionalist or secular Punjabis, says Juan Cole.

    Punjabis are 55% of the population and dominate the army; Pashtuns are more like 12% of the population and disproportionately rural and poor.

     

  • thabet 4:20 pm on July 12, 2009 Permalink
    Tags: , ethnic violence   

    The Boston Globe’s latest Big Picture series is on the ethnic violence in China.

     

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