Author Archives: Editors

Muslim Woman Denied Job Over Head Scarf Wins in Supreme Court

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Muslim Woman Denied Job Over Head Scarf Wins in Supreme Court

By ADAM LIPTAK

June 1, 2015

WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Monday revived an employment discrimination lawsuit against Abercrombie & Fitch, which had refused to hire a Muslim woman because she wore a head scarf. The company said the scarf clashed with its dress code, which called for a “classic East Coast collegiate style.”

“This is really easy,” Justice Antonin Scalia said in announcing the decision from the bench.

The company, he said, at least suspected that the applicant, Samantha Elauf, wore the head scarf for religious reasons. The company’s decision not to hire her, Justice Scalia said, was motivated by a desire to avoid accommodating her religious practice. That was enough, he concluded, to allow her to sue under a federal employment discrimination law.

The vote was 8 to 1, with Justice Clarence Thomas dissenting.

To read the full article, please click the hyper-link below:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2015/06/02/us/supreme-court-rules-in-samantha-elauf-abercrombie-fitch-case.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=0&referrer=

Shared by Dr. Nasik Elahi

‘White lies And Death Of Osama Bin Laden’ By VJ Prashad

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Mr. Prashad further analyses the death of Osama , article by Semour Hersh and asks following questions;  How did the U.S. learn that bin Laden was in Abbottabad? What did the Pakistani military know? Why did Obama betray the Pakistanis? ( f. sheikh)

In early May, THE veteran investigati-ve journalist Seymour Hersh wrote a 10,000-word report in London Review of Books entitled “The Killing of Osama bin Laden”. The essay alleges that the narrative produced by the United States government on the events of May 2, 2011, is flawed. The fact of bin Laden’s death is not in contention. At least that is taken for granted. What is in doubt, Hersh argues in the report, is the manner in which the U.S. government found out about bin Laden’s presence in the Pakistani town of Abbottabad, the role of the Pakistani government in the U.S. operation, the way in which the U.S. Navy Seals killed bin Laden, and the manner in which his body was disposed of. The allegations are not all new. Many of them had circulated widely in Pakistan right after the operation. What gives them weight is that they come from a well-respected U.S. journalist and produced a denial from the White House.

What was the U.S. government’s story? The film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) closely reflects the official tale. Under torture, the film suggests, an associate of bin Laden led the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the Al Qaeda courier network that kept bin Laden in operational control. The CIA followed the couriers until they found bin Laden in Abbottabad. A fake polio immunisation drive allowed the CIA to get the DNA (deoxyribonucleic acid) sample of bin Laden to confirm his identity. At this point, the White House authorised the Navy Seals to fly into Pakistan—without permission from the Pakistani military—and seize bin Laden. The raid went as planned although one of the two helicopters crashed in the compound. Bin Laden was killed in a firefight. His body was returned to Afghanistan, from where it was taken to USS Carl Vinson to be buried at sea. A trove of intelligence was found in bin Laden’s compound, which was turned over to the CIA.

Hersh disputes much of this story. He brings a tremendous amount of credibility to his assessment. Hersh as a reporter won a Pulitzer Prize for breaking the story about the My Lai (Vietnam) massacre by U.S. troops in 1969. Unlike many of his peers, he did not set down his notebook and take up the columnist’s pen; he continued doggedly to pursue the story in the trenches of the U.S. security state. Thirty-five years after My Lai, Hersh brought to light the torture by U.S. prison guards in Abu Ghraib (Iraq). In recent years, as Hersh has shone his torch at the operation of the U.S. security state, establishment media outlets in the U.S. have pilloried him as a “conspiracy theorist”. Rather than carefully go through the evidence that he is able to provide, the press has been overly hostile to his reports—whether on allegations that Turkey is in collusion with Islamist radicals and that these radicals might have used chemical weapons in Syria (“The Red Line and the Rat Line”, London Review of Books, April 17, 2014), or on the death of bin Laden.

One of the most frequent criticisms against Hersh is that he uses anonymous sources. This is certainly the case. Why do journalists like Hersh rely on anonymous sources? One of the reasons is that the U.S. government is ruthless in its treatment of whistle-blowers. The Barack Obama administration, more than any previous one, has used the Espionage Act against any government official who leaks information that is inconvenient to it. Most recently, Jeffrey Sterling, an undercover CIA officer, was sentenced to three and a half years in prison for letting The New York Times reporter James Risen know about Operation Merlin—a covert campaign by the U.S. government to sell Iran flawed material for its nuclear programme. That Hersh uses anonymous sources is nothing new. Most articles on national security rely on “senior government officials” or a “senior White House official who is not authorised to speak publicly”. Such formal criticism of Hersh’s reporting is misplaced, or even malicious. What is most striking about the lack of interest in Hersh’s account is that it comes just months after the U.S. Congressional Report on the CIA’s use of torture (“America’s Shame”, Frontline, January 9). That report shows that the CIA tried to hide its operations even when its personnel knew that laws had been violated. Trust in government should have been rattled by the revelations in that report, if nothing else. Hersh’s report takes apart several important pieces of the White House narrative on the death of bin Laden. There are pieces of the story, such as the bits about bin Laden’s body and the intelligence gained from bin Laden’s compound, that are fascinating but perhaps not as explosive as the three questions: How did the U.S. learn that bin Laden was in Abbottabad? What did the Pakistani military know? Why did Obama betray the Pakistanis? Click on the link below to read the full article; 

http://www.frontline.in/world-affairs/white-lies/article7239187.ece

 

 

LIFE ALWAYS SUSTAINS ITSELF

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LIFE ALWAYS SUSTAINS ITSELF

 

My name is Bennie and i am a 30 year young man living in a very beautiful African country called Zambia.  English is not my first language so kindly bear with my writing.

One day when i was 17 years old, I committed suicide.  It was immediately after i had an argument with my father which i used as an excuse for my reaction while deep inside i knew that the main reason was because i saw the world as the most unfair and unreasonable place. i hated the fact that i was young and saw any grownup as having too much power over me. I saw grownups oppressing other grownups. I saw a world where everyone was just so un-happy and everyone was complaining over something. Then when someone died, there was always a phrase, MAY THEY REST IN PEACE.  I saw death as the only way for man to be happy on earth.

Being in a coma for hours felt like seconds. i saw nothing during my coma but just darkness. 3hours was just a blink of an eye and i was alive again. i was so annoyed. Why did i live? was the question that kept coming back to me. I saw my suicide failure as just another level of unfairness that this life possess. How can me who is ready to die be alive and there is someone out there wishing to live who has died.

There was always this pain and anger that i felt, because deep inside was a voice telling me that death was not ready for me.

After months of whys and cries, i came to a final conclusion, to wait on life and see why i survived, i wanted to see if there was any major thing that life wanted to show me that will make me, someday fear death and be so much in love with life such that i would love to live forever. This decision for me meant that i have to live life to the fullest hoping one day i will find myself  in a life style that would fill my heart with total joy and happiness. The kind of life that makes man want to live forever.

The first path was religion, growing up in a Christian home and Christian dominated country. Christianity was on my door step. I listened to every preacher i could find. They all promised total happiness if you just repeated a short prayer after them about receiving and believing that Jesus was the son of God and savior of my soul.

I think i might have said a million of those prayers but was still feeling like ending my life the next second. Watching people giving testimonies about how their lives changed upon saying that same prayer made me think that maybe there was something wrong i was doing. I stopped listening to any other music but Christian music, started going to church and changed all my friends.

I had a smile but it was fake. The more i got into church staff the more alone i felt. I started realizing that most people where at church by default. For some it was just trendy, others because their parents expected them to be there, while some just followed their spouses and for the majority it was either they were looking for marriages or just some assurance that when they died, at least there will be some people at their funeral.

Since i didn’t find happiness there, i tried drugs, women, alcohol even tried finding happiness in college, same situation. Tried finding a good job, love, marriage even kids. I always wanted to have 2 kids. First a boy and second, a girl and it came to pass, But still no lasting happiness except for a few minutes after holding my son and daughter in my hands for the first time.

28 years old, Head of ICT systems in a big government organization, own house, 2 cars, 2 Kids, beautiful wife, personal business picking up and still haven’t found the true happiness of life. At this point i started thinking that there was no such a thing as internal happiness. I started thinking that maybe life was all about external happiness. It is all about what you have and not what you feel.

Then one day i heard a small voice inside me saying that i should start fasting and prayer, and i will find true happiness. What I have to lose, i thought.  Since i had tried religion before, i won’t put so much trust in this little voice.  I would always break my fast with a beer. After a couple of weeks, I heard a little voice again, and this time it told me that i can ask for anything during my break prayer.  I thought, i had always wanted to fly out of Zambia, and visit another country like South Africa. This is kind of funny i thought to myself, this is like having your own gene. I gave it a try and started waiting. Some weeks passed and nothing came up. I kept on fasting and praying at least once per week.  I started noticing some changes in me. I slowly started controlling my temper, and as weeks passed, people around me started telling me how cheerful i was and comforting it was to be around me.

I had being fasting and praying one day per week for about 6 months and no one knew about it. The little voice inside kept getting louder. One day while fasting, the little voice told me to ask for Knowledge and wisdom and give thanks for my previous request because it was answered and i did. 2 weeks letter, i was informed by my boss that my name came up for those the company wanted to send for training in South Africa. I was so excited, i couldn’t believe it come true. A month letter, i was in South Africa. I looked around and all i saw was the same ground, same trees and same people. I came to realize that the entire earth was the same. If you have seen water, it is the same everywhere, Trees are the same everywhere, the only thing that differs from place to place is but man made staff (taller buildings, wider roads).

I came to realize that nothing inside you even recognizes that you are in another country or continent, you just have to force achievement happiness by reminding yourself every morning that you are in South Africa. This was the first time i ever thought like this. Visiting new places always exited me, but now that i have visited the one place i wanted the most, i felt no excitement at all.

One more time the little voice came back and said, “Now you have all you want and ever wanted. Whatever you need is already with you even before you ask. All you need to do from now on is just to say thank you as your fasting prayer.”

………………………………………..

Now 30 years old and my heart over flows with happiness and joy. My mind has expanded to levels i never knew existed and still expanding. It has being a year now since i discovered the reason why i survived. And the reason is simple, LIFE ALWAYS SUSTAINS ITSELF.  I survived so that life can be sustained by the knowledge that is in me.

Since this is a thinker’s blog, i thought best to share my story first here and hopefully excite more thinking on these plains

1) Every human being who has ever lived on earth is but a human being. If he was born then he was human. Yes that includes Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha and any other person that man has God-fyd. I have studied the 3 major world religions and never being any instance where the people whose lives these religions are based on claimed to be better than anyone else on earth. Jesus said, “i am the son of God just like you are the son of God and more things than these you can do if you just believe in my massage (not just him). The massage was that you are all children of God so, stop fighting and love each other.

Buddha, also talked about love for each other and not for material things. He said himself that i sat and discovered the things that makes man suffer.

Muhammad’s massage was close to Jesus’ but he still had attachments to the temporal  earthly things, so people turned his personal conquest to Godly commands.

What i am saying is that, it is coded in all of us to do greater things than the previous generations.  Any message that has ever survived through history is there to encourage us to do better or do more and not to limit us. We should all see ourselves as Jesus, Moses, Buddha or any messenger of the Gods and sit down to check inside of us the message which we brought to deliver to the masses. Jesus was willing to die for his personal message and not fight for it. What is your personal message that you can stand and die for without a fight?

2) Everyone lives for someone, either knowingly or unknowingly. We all know about role models. Everyone living now is shaping their lives in line with someone they admire, either dead or alive. For some, its parents, some its teachers, others it’s a neighbor and for some its some guy they saw on TV. Look at your current life and think deeply, you will find that you saw someone in that same life and chose to make it your own. Even someone begging in the street is inspiring someone to live like them. Someone who saw a beggar in the street at one time, if they encounter any difficulties in  life, they may choose begging not because it’s the only way but because they have seen someone doing it. Look at your life and see yourself as a role model for the entire next generation because what you are doing now, you are showing someone knowingly or unknowingly as the right way to live on earth and they will come and live their lives exactly the way you lived yours.

A third quarter of people on earth live their lives by default and not as a personal tested way of life. Most Christians are Christians because they were born in a Christian home, same with Muslims and other religions. Most people are ready to defend and fight for their religious following not because they are personally convinced and believer of the doctrine but just because their parents told them that it was a true religion.   A Muslim will tell his child that Islam is the only true religion and the Quran is the only true holy book anything else is false and from the evil one. A Christian parent will also say the same thing about Christianity and the Bible. Then 5 generations down the line, you have 2 thousand people from these 2 religions groups fighting to death calling each the evil one, without ever trying to understand what the other one believes in. In the actual fact these are the most closely related religions.

3) Man showed man a way of life and he turned it into religion. Anyone who has studied any religious book open minded, will realize that the base message in any religion is of a personal nature. Something any person can choose to live or not. But as time passes, original messages are turned into traditions. Any tradition to survive, it has to have an organized structure with some people on top. This discriminatory system in organized religion hides under the fake cover of Order. So the more members that any tradition has, the more powerful the top people in that tradition become. In order to keep the increasing number of believers in check, some additions needs to be done to the original message. If people can believe that the original message came from God, then they can also believe any extra message for as long as both messages are put in the same book, no matter how contradicting the messages maybe. RELIGION IS MODERN DAY SLAVERY THAT RIDES ON THE MESSAGE OF FREEDOM.

4) Anyone who claims the world is unfair then he just wants what belongs to a friend. This world is fair for as long as you are happy with what you have.  I always give this example on this matter, imagine you are in a queue at the hospital for hours, then this guy comes up and since he is a friend of the nurse, he jumps queues and gets treated. You get annoyed and complain all you can. Finally you get to be attended hours letter. After living the clinic, you rush to the bank hoping to find it open. You reach the bank and there is a long queue with people waiting for hours. You hear someone calling you and it’s the cashier, your old friend wanting to assist you jump queue. Can you refuse the offer because it will be unfair on others or can you take it? The fact of life is that life always balances up favors.

Some people are complaining why there parents died early (because the friend’s parents are alive) and others why their parents are not dying already. Some want to lose their lives, others what to regain their lives. Whatever is on your friend that you are wishing was yours, there is something on you that your friend wants to have.

5) Whatever happens then it was supposed to happen. If it was not meant to happen then how can it happen?

6) What is yours is yours and what is not yours is not yours but everything under the sun is yours if you want it

7) Time does not exist only targets.

More i wish to share and more i shall share…

 

Bennie Chibwe

 

BLURRED LINES: WOMEN, “CELEBRITY” SHAYKHS, AND SPIRITUAL ABUSE

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Shared by Tahir Mahmood

People are often curious about my role as a female teacher and speaker in the male-dominated field of “traditional Islam.” [3] “What does a woman scholar-in-residence do?” I am often asked. To the non-Muslim questioner, my role is seen as a bit of a curiosity, especially given the stock, standard media image of the oppressed Muslim woman. To the Muslim questioner, the question goes deeper. For some women, I am a potential role model for their daughters and a mentor to them. For some men, I represent the rare woman in the circles associated with traditional Islam who is willing to speak in public. I am simultaneously called upon to speak for the women in the audience, while defending the Shar’i (Islamic legal) basis for my presence on stage. Event organizers, typically quite gracious, believe that I contribute to the diverse perspectives they hope to offer to audience members. Often the only woman in a lineup that is otherwise exclusively male, I represent, supposedly, a continuation of the tradition of the scholarly Muslim woman.

For more of this article use the following link

http://muslimmatters.org/2015/05/27/blurred-lines-women-celebrity-shaykhs-spiritual-abuse/

Editor: The comments after the article are very interesting.