Dish Out That Cash!
ah back to school, it seems no matter what age, going back to school means $$$ Elementary school’s send out lists of such absurd things to buy for the young students, middle school is an angry time where kids have to buy even more absurd things for the 5-7 different teachers they have to deal with and hm I think high school was the cheapest time for me because uhm well I stopped buying school supplies…. maybe that wasn’t such a good idea? And that’s not counting the trips and this habit of having to buy new outfits and food (maybe that’s only something I calculate) and on and on… subhanAllah we spend excessively on everything and anything! So the most expensive is college, duh. The tuition is enough to scare some people away from the school that they really want to go to, and then dorming is a whole other issue and then paying for the food and then that brings us to ah the books! I honestly feel like I’m being robbed every time I walk into my bookstore! I am now a second semester junior in college and every since freshman year I’ve been telling myself, ‘hey, if I have some left over money, I’ll buy myself a school hoodie.’ I have this obsession with hoodies, I’m an odd person, I juss really want one of my school hoodies, anyway… So here I am three years later, still no school hoodie, and instead I walk into the book store doing eenie meenie miney moe between the books I need for my classes and having to not buy some of them.
So the economy is dead, yes I said it. It’s not terrible, it’s not going through some things, it juss stinks a lot and it’s dead to me. Ok maybe that’s a little harsh, lets say it’s in a coma. I go to SUNY Old Westbury, a SUNY school, if you live in NY and you don’t have a lot of dough, go to a SUNY or a CUNY school cuz they’re good mashaAllah and cheap, well they were. Tuition has increased since last year, adjunct professors are being cut, certain departments are losing their budget, classrooms are getting more filled, parking is getting absurd, AND we’re paying for all these inconveniences? Yes I know, we should be thankful, hamdulillah I am thankful for everything, but thing’s need to change, and I think by reducing the quality of our education is a couple of leaps backwards. I’m part of the Student Government Association on my campus and we had our second semester training on Friday. We were discussing how to use our budget, or our lack of budget. How we have pretty much no money and it’s going to be so hard to plan events or get anything accomplished. We then discussed how Governor Paterson is asking from every SUNY school to give back around $800,000, what is he going to do with all that money? Allahu Alam, what is that loss of money going to mean for the students? Well, you can only imagine…
Las week, President Barak Obama had his state of the union address, if you didn’t watch/hear it/read it, you should google it and look into it. He stated, “because in the United States of America, no one should go broke because they chose to go to College.” Dear President Obama, I think you’re cool and all, I actually went out and voted for you, but I am working three jobs and I’m a full time student and I am ba-rokeee!!! I would sincerely appreciate it if you get some cooler deals for struggling students. Another problem that is faced for American Muslims is student loans eerrr loans in general. We need to find a loan system that doesn’t charge interest because in Islam, interest is not allowed, so we have kind of no options. I went to an event where Ustadh Usama Canon was speaking at Stony Brook last semester, and this question came up and he didn’t have an answer. If anyone knows any other solutions please* let me know. Being a junior all I can do is make du’a to get into the grad school of my dreams, and then sigh and get sad because I have no idea how I am going to pay for it 
InshaAllah something will come out soon that will help out American Muslim Students.
I truly believe that education is the key to everything, but at the same time as I look around, I get sad as I see how education is selective and increases the gap between us all. I pray that inshaAllah this gap decreases, that ignorance decreases, and that students everywhere can be what they dream of. After all, those that work hard deserve to have their dreams come true, don’t you think?
I guess as big of a pessimist I may be, I’m also a bigger optimist 
Khayr inshaAllah, make this semester a good one! And please keep me in your du’as, as usual I take up a lot more than I can handle, but I really would like my semester to be successful and for the sake of Allah inshaAllah so du’as please!
Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.
-radf
Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.
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1 comment February 1, 2010
UP!
So this isn’t what I normally blog about, well actually if you read my blog there really isn’t any ‘normal,’ I’m kinda juss all over the place, story of my life, hamdulillah 
Any whooo, so for some break is over, hahahha, I’m sorry that was inappropriate, ehm, but for others this is the last week. I go back to school on the 25th :::sigh::: so for those of you who still have a little bit of break left, or even if you started class, I suggest a nice way to end it or start the semester is to get a nice group of friends, or even better, your parents and siblings together and watch the movie UP! I love cartoons and Pixar, and totally approve of this one, it’s such a great movie and I’m not even joking when I say it will teach you a thing or two about life or how to at least appreciate it more. Once you see it, within the first 10 minutes you will go through an emotional roller coaster. So if you have the time, watch it, we all need some relaxing time and this movie is the perfect way to do so. Check out the trailer and a really funny part of the movie below:
Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.
-radf
Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.
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3 comments January 20, 2010
Help the Hungry by Juss a Click!
On some lighter news, check out www.freerice.com!!! It’s so cool! All you have to do is answer the questions and they’ll donate rice for each answer you get right! And it’s on different subjects too like vocabulary, math, english, geography, chemistry, art and you can even try to learn new languages! This site is awesome, it teaches you and each question you get right they donate 10 grains of rice! It goes so fast and it’s better than wasting your day and playing some other silly little game. Hey for me, this vocabulary section is a good quick refresher for the GRE’s, although those words may be a little harder, hm….. khayr inshaAllah. So check out freerice.com!
Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.
-radf
Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.
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Add comment January 18, 2010
“…I tasted death…”
Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.
-radf
Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.
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Add comment January 15, 2010
Devastation Hits Haiti
I’m sure by now you all have heard about the earth quake that has hit Haiti, if you haven’t you should probably look into it. It was a powerful quake that scaled around 7.3 and had a couple of powerful after shocks as well. It’s estimated that thousands are dead and many are still missing. All we can do at this time is make du’a for those who have been affected by this in any way possible. May Allah grant these people shifah and sabr, and especially the families that are awaiting to hear from their loved ones. Allah says in the Qu’ran:
“And indeed this, your nation, is one nation (in having a unified collective way of life and course of conduct), and I am your Lord, so fear Me.”
Quran 23:52
Take care inshaAllah and keep everyone in your du’as.
-radf
Allahumma sali ala sayyidina muhammadin an-Nabbiyil ummiyi Wa ala alihi wa sahbihi wa salim.
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Add comment January 14, 2010
Surprising Re-Union
This article is pretty amazing, read about it below and make watch a short clip about it by clicking here.
Guantanamo Guard Reunited With Ex-Inmates
By Gavin Lee
BBC NewsWhy would a former Guantanamo Bay prison guard track down two of his former captives – two British men – and agree to fly to London to meet them?
“You look different without a cap.”
“You look different without the jump suits.”
With those words, an extraordinary reunion gets under way.
The last time Ruhal Ahmed met Brandon Neely, he was “behind bars, behind a cage and [Brandon] was on the other side”.
The location had been Camp X-Ray – the high-security detention camp run by the US in Guantanamo Bay. Mr Ahmed, originally from Tipton in the West Midlands, was among several hundred foreign terror suspects held at the centre.
Mr Neely was one of his guards.
The scene of this current exchange of pleasantries couldn’t be more different from where they last met – a television studio in London. Also here is Shafiq Rasul, a fellow ex-Guantanamo prisoner, without whose Facebook page the reunion would never have happened.
The journey of reconciliation began almost a year ago in Huntsville, Texas. Mr Neely, 29, had left the US military in 2005 to become a police officer and was still struggling to come to terms with his time as a guard at Guantanamo.
He felt anger at a number of incidents of abuse he says he witnessed, and guilt over one in particular.
Highly controversial since it opened in 2002, Guantanamo prison was set up by President George Bush in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks to house suspected “terrorists”. But it has been heavily divisive and President Barack Obama has said it has “damaged [America's] national security interests and become a tremendous recruiting tool for al Qaeda”.
Mr Neely recalls only the good publicity in the US media.
“The news would always try to make Guantanamo into this great place,” he says, “like ‘they [prisoners] were treated so great’. No it wasn’t. You know here I was basically just putting innocent people in cages.”
Hip-hop tastes
The prisoners arriving on planes, in goggles and jump suits, from Afghanistan were termed by then US defence secretary Donald Rumsfeld as the “worst of the worst”. But after getting to know some of the English-speaking detainees, Mr Neely started to have doubts all of them were fanatical terrorists.
He recalls how when he and Mr Ahmed chatted through the bars at Guantanamo, they had a surprising amount in common.
“It was no different from me sitting at the bar with a friend of mine talking about women or music,” says Mr Neely. “He would say, ‘you ever listen to Eminem or Dr Dre’ and he threw off a little rap and it was just funny. I thought how could it be somebody is here who’s doing the same stuff that I do when I’m back home.”
Mr Neely was 22 when he worked at the camp and left after six months to serve in Iraq. But after quitting the military his doubts about Guantanamo began to crystallise. This led to a spontaneous decision last year to reach out to his former prisoners.
“I was pretty new to Facebook and decided to type in their names to see if their profiles popped up and I came across Shafiq’s Facebook page. I decided to send him a little e-mail,” says Mr Neely.
Released in 2004, after being held for two years, Mr Rasul and Mr Ahmed and another friend from Tipton had been captured in Afghanistan on suspicion of links to the Taliban. The three said they were beaten by US troops although this was disputed by the US government at the time.
After all that, the Facebook communique was a shock to Mr Rasul.
Last-minute nerves
“At first I couldn’t believe it. Getting a message from an ex-guard saying that what happened to us in Guantanamo was wrong was surprising more than anything.”
To Mr Neely’s astonishment he received a reply and the pair began an exchange of e-mails. It was at this point that the BBC asked if both sides would be prepared to meet in person.
They agreed.
Several months later the ex-inmates were sitting in the TV studio waiting to be reunited with their former jailer. But Mr Rasul was having doubts. He was feeling conflicted.
“There’s a few people in my family who have said what do you want to meet someone like that for, the way he treated you, you stay away from him,” says Mr Rasul. “They say because if it was me, I’d want to beat him up.”
Mr Neely had also been feeling uneasy.
He arrived at Heathrow airport ashen-faced, pensive and reluctant to speak much before the meeting.
Mr Rasul and his normally gregarious friend were notably quiet as they sat in front of TV cameras waiting for Mr Neely to enter. No-one knew what to expect, and the atmosphere was tense.
After an initially awkward exchange about caps and jump suits, the conversation turns to the reason for the visit. Mr Neely says he’d thought about the moment a million times. He’d wanted to say how he’d felt complicit in their detention, and acknowledge the wrong they were subjected to.
Smoking dope
But what were the pair doing in Afghanistan in 2001?
They explain that, being in their late teens and early twenties at the time, they had made a naive, spontaneous decision to travel for free with an aid convoy weeks before a friend’s wedding, due to take place in Pakistan.
Mr Ahmed admits they had a secret agenda for entering Afghanistan, but it wasn’t to join al-Qaeda.
“Aid work was like probably 5% of it. Our main reason was just to go and sightsee really and smoke some dope”.
Does their former prison guard believe them? Yes, says Mr Neely, who says he thinks it was a case of “wrong place, wrong time”.
Both sides are beginning to bond, yet towards the end, Mr Neely has a confession of his own. It threatens to destroy the mood of reconciliation.
He is deeply ashamed of an incident in which he “slammed” an elderly prisoner’s head against the floor.
Mr Neely recalls that he thought he had been under attack because the man kept trying to rise to his feet. But weeks later he discovered the prisoner thought he was being placed on his knees to be executed and believed he was fighting for his life.
Mr Ahmed is speechless, then evidently conflicted as he wrestles in his mind with whether or not he can forgive. Eventually, he says he can.
But should Mr Neely be prosecuted for his actions? Mr Ahmed pauses again.
“He’s realised what he did was wrong and he’s living with it and suffering with it and as long as that he knows what he did was wrong. That’s the main thing.”
Afterwards, each say they had genuinely found some sort of closure from meeting. The sense of relief in all their faces speaks volumes, and they leave the meeting closer to one another.
Source: BBC News Magazine
Add comment January 13, 2010
One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists
One Day We’ll All Be Terrorists
Posted on Dec 28, 2009
By Chris Hedges
Syed Fahad Hashmi can tell you about the dark heart of America. He knows that our First Amendment rights have become a joke, that habeas corpus no longer exists and that we torture, not only in black sites such as those at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan or at Guantánamo Bay, but also at the federal Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Lower Manhattan. Hashmi is a U.S. citizen of Muslim descent imprisoned on two counts of providing and conspiring to provide material support and two counts of making and conspiring to make a contribution of goods or services to al-Qaida. As his case prepares for trial, his plight illustrates that the gravest threat we face is not from Islamic extremists, but the codification of draconian procedures that deny Americans basic civil liberties and due process. Hashmi would be a better person to tell you this, but he is not allowed to speak.
This corruption of our legal system, if history is any guide, will not be reserved by the state for suspected terrorists, or even Muslim Americans. In the coming turmoil and economic collapse, it will be used to silence all who are branded as disruptive or subversive. Hashmi endures what many others, who are not Muslim, will endure later. Radical activists in the environmental, globalization, anti-nuclear, sustainable agriculture and anarchist movements—who are already being placed by the state in special detention facilities with Muslims charged with terrorism—have discovered that his fate is their fate. Courageous groups have organized protests, including vigils outside the Manhattan detention facility. They can be found at www.educatorsforcivilliberties.org or www.freefahad.com. On Martin Luther King Day, this Jan. 18 at 6 p.m. EST, protesters will hold a large vigil in front of the MCC on 150 Park Row in Lower Manhattan to call for a return of our constitutional rights. Join them if you can.
The case against Hashmi, like most of the terrorist cases launched by the Bush administration, is appallingly weak and built on flimsy circumstantial evidence. This may be the reason the state has set up parallel legal and penal codes to railroad those it charges with links to terrorism. If it were a matter of evidence, activists like Hashmi, who is accused of facilitating the delivery of socks to al-Qaida, would probably never be brought to trial.
Hashmi, who if convicted could face up to 70 years in prison, has been held in solitary confinement for more than 2½ years. Special administrative measures, known as SAMs, have been imposed by the attorney general to prevent or severely restrict communication with other prisoners, attorneys, family, the media and people outside the jail. He also is denied access to the news and other reading material. Hashmi is not allowed to attend group prayer. He is subject to 24-hour electronic monitoring and 23-hour lockdown. He must shower and go to the bathroom on camera. He can write one letter a week to a single member of his family, but he cannot use more than three pieces of paper. He has no access to fresh air and must take his one hour of daily recreation in a cage. His “proclivity for violence” is cited as the reason for these measures although he has never been charged or convicted with committing an act of violence.
“My brother was an activist,” Hashmi’s brother, Faisal, told me by phone from his home in Queens. “He spoke out on Muslim issues, especially those dealing with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. His arrest and torture have nothing to do with providing ponchos and socks to al-Qaida, as has been charged, but the manipulation of the law to suppress activists and scare the Muslim American community. My brother is an example. His treatment is meant to show Muslims what will happen to them if they speak about the plight of Muslims. We have lost every single motion to preserve my brother’s humanity and remove the special administrative measures. These measures are designed solely to break the psyche of prisoners and terrorize the Muslim community. These measures exemplify the malice towards Muslims at home and the malice towards the millions of Muslims who are considered as non-humans in Iraq and Afghanistan.”
The extreme sensory deprivation used on Hashmi is a form of psychological torture, far more effective in breaking and disorienting detainees. It is torture as science. In Germany, the Gestapo broke bones while its successor, the communist East German Stasi, broke souls. We are like the Stasi. We have refined the art of psychological disintegration and drag bewildered suspects into secretive courts when they no longer have the mental and psychological capability to defend themselves.
“Hashmi’s right to a fair trial has been abridged,” said Michael Ratner, the president of the Center for Constitutional Rights. “Much of the evidence in the case has been classified under CIPA, and thus Hashmi has not been allowed to review it. The prosecution only recently turned over a significant portion of evidence to the defense. Hashmi may not communicate with the news media, either directly or through his attorneys. The conditions of his detention have impacted his mental state and ability to participate in his own defense.
“The prosecution’s case against Hashmi, an outspoken activist within the Muslim community, abridges his First Amendment rights and threatens the First Amendment rights of others,” Ratner added. “While Hashmi’s political and religious beliefs, speech and associations are constitutionally protected, the government has been given wide latitude by the court to use them as evidence of his frame of mind and, by extension, intent. The material support charges against him depend on criminalization of association. This could have a chilling effect on the First Amendment rights of others, particularly in activist and Muslim communities.”
Constitutionally protected statements, beliefs and associations can now become a crime. Dissidents, even those who break no laws, can be stripped of their rights and imprisoned without due process. It is the legal equivalent of preemptive war. The state can detain and prosecute people not for what they have done, or even for what they are planning to do, but for holding religious or political beliefs that the state deems seditious. The first of those targeted have been observant Muslims, but they will not be the last.
“Most of the evidence is classified,” Jeanne Theoharis, an associate professor of political science at Brooklyn College who taught Hashmi, told me, “but Hashmi is not allowed to see it. He is an American citizen. But in America you can now go to trial and all the evidence collected against you cannot be reviewed. You can spend 2½ years in solitary confinement before you are convicted of anything. There has been attention paid to extraordinary rendition, Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib with this false idea that if people are tried in the United States things will be fair. But what allowed Guantánamo to happen was the devolution of the rule of law here at home, and this is not only happening to Hashmi.”
Hashmi was, like so many of those arrested during the Bush years, briefly a poster child in the “war on terror.” He was apprehended in Britain on June 6, 2006, on a U.S. warrant. His arrest was the top story on the CBS and NBC nightly news programs, which used graphics that read “Terror Trail” and “Web of Terror.” He was held for 11 months at Belmarsh Prison in London and then became the first U.S. citizen to be extradited by Britain. The year before his arrest, Hashmi, a graduate of Brooklyn College, had completed his master’s degree in international relations at London Metropolitan University. His case has no more substance than the one against the seven men arrested on suspicion of plotting to blow up the Sears Tower, a case where, even though there were five convictions after two mistrials, an FBI deputy director acknowledged that the plan was more “aspirational rather than operational.” And it mirrors the older case of the Palestinian activist Sami Al-Arian, now under house arrest in Virginia, who has been hounded by the Justice Department although he should legally have been freed. Judge Leonie Brinkema, currently handling the Al-Arian case, in early March, questioned the U.S. attorney’s actions in Al-Arian’s plea agreement saying curtly: “I think there’s something more important here, and that’s the integrity of the Justice Department.”
The case against Hashmi revolves around the testimony of Junaid Babar, also an American citizen. Babar, in early 2004, stayed with Hashmi at his London apartment for two weeks. In his luggage, the government alleges, Babar had raincoats, ponchos and waterproof socks, which Babar later delivered to a member of al-Qaida in south Waziristan, Pakistan. It was alleged that Hashmi allowed Babar to use his cell phone to call conspirators in other terror plots.
“Hashmi grew up here, was well known here, was very outspoken, very charismatic and very political,” said Theoharis. “This is really a message being sent to American Muslims about the cost of being politically active. It is not about delivering alleged socks and ponchos and rain gear. Do you think al-Qaida can’t get socks and ponchos in Pakistan? The government is planning to introduce tapes of Hashmi’s political talks while he was at Brooklyn College at the trial. Why are we willing to let this happen? Is it because they are Muslims, and we think it will not affect us? People who care about First Amendment rights should be terrified. This is one of the crucial civil rights issues of our time. We ignore this at our own peril.”
Babar, who was arrested in 2004 and has pleaded guilty to five counts of material support for al-Qaida, also faces up to 70 years in prison. But he has agreed to serve as a government witness and has already testified for the government in terror trials in Britain and Canada. Babar will receive a reduced sentence for his services, and many speculate he will be set free after the Hashmi trial. Since there is very little evidence to link Hashmi to terrorist activity, the government will rely on Babar to prove intent. This intent will revolve around alleged conversations and statements Hashmi made in Babar’s presence. Hashmi, who was a member of the New York political group Al Muhajiroun as a student at Brooklyn College, has made provocative statements, including calling America “the biggest terrorist in the world,” but Al Muhajiroun is not defined by the government as a terrorist organization. Membership in the group is not illegal. And our complicity in acts of state terror is a historical fact.
There will be more Hashmis, and the Justice Department, planning for future detentions, set up in 2006 a segregated facility, the Communication Management Unit, at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind. Nearly all the inmates transferred to Terre Haute are Muslims. A second facility has been set up at Marion, Ill., where the inmates again are mostly Muslim but also include a sprinkling of animal rights and environmental activists, among them Daniel McGowan, who was charged with two arsons at logging operations in Oregon. His sentence was given “terrorism enhancements” under the Patriot Act. Amnesty International has called the Marion prison facility “inhumane.” All calls and mail—although communication customarily is off-limits to prison officials—are monitored in these two Communication Management Units. Communication among prisoners is required to be only in English. The highest-level terrorists are housed at the Penitentiary Administrative Maximum Facility, known as Supermax, in Florence, Colo., where prisoners have almost no human interaction, physical exercise or mental stimulation, replicating the conditions for most of those held at Guantánamo. If detainees are transferred from Guantánamo to the prison in Thomson, Ill., they will find little change. They will endure Guantánamo-like conditions in colder weather.
Our descent is the familiar disease of decaying empires. The tyranny we impose on others we finally impose on ourselves. The influx of non-Muslim American activists into these facilities is another ominous development. It presages the continued dismantling of the rule of law, the widening of a system where prisoners are psychologically broken by sensory deprivation, extreme isolation and secretive kangaroo courts where suspects are sentenced on rumors and innuendo and denied the right to view the evidence against them. Dissent is no longer the duty of the engaged citizen but is becoming an act of terrorism.
Chris Hedges, whose column is published on Truthdig every Monday, spent two decades as a foreign reporter covering wars in Latin America, Africa, Europe and the Middle East. He has written nine books, including “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009) and “War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning” (2003).
Source: Truth Dig
Add comment December 31, 2009
Switzerland: Minaret Ban Violates Rights
Switzerland: Minaret Ban Violates Rights
DECEMBER 4, 2009(Geneva) – The recent vote in Switzerland to ban minaret construction violates the rights of observant Muslims to manifest their religion in public and reflects mounting anti-Muslim sentiment in Western Europe, Human Rights Watch said today.
On November 29, 57 percent of those voting in a national referendum endorsed a constitutional amendment to ban the future construction of minarets in Switzerland. The campaign for the yes vote, led by the Swiss People’s Party, was marked by rhetoric against Islam and Muslims. A campaign poster showed minarets appearing to launch, like missiles, off the Swiss flag behind a woman wearing the niqab (a full-face veil leaving only the eyes visible). The Swiss government, which opposed the referendum, is required by Swiss law to draft legislation to amend the Constitution in line with the popular vote.
A ban on minarets denies Muslims the right to manifest their religion and is discriminatory. The right to manifest one’s religion in public, through worship, teaching, practice, and observance, is an integral part of the right to religious freedom, guaranteed by international human rights treaties, such as the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR) and the European Convention on Human Rights, both of which Switzerland has ratified. Both treaties also prohibit discrimination on the grounds of religion.
States are permitted to limit the right to practice or display religious belief only if they can demonstrate a need to do so to protect public safety, public order, health, or morals, or the fundamental rights or freedoms of others. None of these justifications apply to the Swiss ban on minarets, Human Rights Watch said. By targeting one religion, without any legitimate justification, the ban is clearly discriminatory.
The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights and the UN expert on religious freedom have condemned the vote as discriminatory and a violation of the fundamental right to manifest one’s religion. The UN Human Rights Committee, which monitors compliance with the ICCPR, warned Switzerland in October that a minaret ban would violate the treaty. The ban is likely to face legal challenges in Switzerland and could eventually be examined by the European Court of Human Rights.
The vote is a deeply worrisome expression of growing intolerance toward Muslims across Europe, Human Rights Watch said. The vote has already galvanized far-right parties across Europe. The Danish People’s Party, Vlaams Belang in Belgium, Italian Northern League, and the Dutch Party for Freedom immediately praised the vote and pledged to pursue similar initiatives in their own countries.
Conflicts over mosques also do a deep disservice to the important goals of combating discrimination and encouraging integration of Europe’s newer communities, Human Rights Watch said. While in some cases there may be legitimate local dynamics and regulations to consider concerning the construction of religious buildings, the most vocal opponents often cast the issue in terms of defending Europe’s Christian heritage or preventing Islamic radicalism. By presenting Islam as a dangerous interloper, these arguments stigmatize Muslims and feed into routine discrimination against Muslims.
A major survey commissioned by the European Union’s Fundamental Rights Agency in 14 European countries found that one in three Muslims had experienced some kind of discrimination over the past 12 months. One in 10 said they had suffered a racially motivated assault, threat, or serious harassment at least once during that time. The vast majority never reported the incidents, lacking confidence that they would get help.
All European countries, including Switzerland, should uphold their values of human rights and tolerance, Human Rights Watch said, and in particular their commitment to freedom of religion and to ending all forms of discrimination on the grounds of religion.
Source: Human Rights Watch
2 comments December 6, 2009
Better Late Than Never
I’m so sorry, but as they say better late than never, inshaAllah someone will forgive me
Eid Mubarak to you all!
I pray that you all enjoyed your day and it was full of nothing but happiness!
Take care inshaAllah!
-radf
Add comment November 30, 2009
