Within hours of the attacks in Paris, the familiar ritual began: the calls for Muslims to denounce ISIS rolled in, as they inevitably do after a terrorist attack by a group claiming to act in the name of Islam.

This is a common occurrence, and Muslims — myself included — are tired of it. We’re tired of being held responsible for the atrocities committed by individuals whose actions and beliefs are abhorrent to us and completely at odds with our values and our understanding of our religion. We’re also tired of people acting as if we haven’t already condemned ISIS, al-Qaeda, and terrorism over and over and over, loudly, publicly,“unreservedly,” and in great detail.

It just starts to get old after a while.

Which is why when people on social media began echoing politicians in the UK who demanded that Muslims denounce ISIS, one British Muslim teenager decided he’d had just about enough of that nonsense, and posted this on his Facebook page:

His post went viral. J.K. Rowling and Stephen King even retweeted his post once itmade its way to Twitter. So did a member of the European parliament:

I got in touch with Kash over Facebook to ask what motived him to write that post. Kash — who consistently addressed me as “Miss Williams” — told me:

It wasnt the views or opinions of politicians that made me respond but the views of the general public

when fridays terror attacks happened which were extremely unfortunate there were only 2 opinions on my twitter time line

the first was of people demanding an apology for what happened which was met by either muslims apologising for the acts that occured or the other view, which was my view of muslims asking why we should apologise as ISIS has nothing to do with Islam?

This isn’t the first time Muslims have used social media to express irritation at being told to “do more” to counter extremist ideology and to apologize for the actions of strangers who have perverted our beliefs and who actually kill way more Muslims than they do any other group. The Twitter hashtag #MuslimApologies went viral a while back (with some unanticipated consequences for yours truly), with Muslims using the hashtag to point out the absurdity of being asked to apologize for things well beyond our control. Some were serious, emphasizing the various contributions Islam has made to the world:

Click link below for full article;

http://www.vox.com/2015/11/21/9770948/muslims-condemn-isis-reaction

posted by f. sheikh

What to do about terrorism, now that Paris has suffered several coordinated attacks and over a hundred dead, with another hundred critically injured?

Redouble our efforts to fight ISIS?

No. How about the exact opposite?

Why not stop fighting ISIS? Why not let America and the West — the former colonial powers — get the hell out of the Middle East, and let those troglodytes fight their own battles among themselves?

Let me state the plain truth: if we got the hell out of the Middle East, the terrorists would get the hell out of our lives.

So, please, sil vous plait: let them have at one another in their horrorshow dance of damnable death without us helping anyone kill anyone else.

Let ISIS have their damn Caliphate.

Let Syria fight itself empty of people, where they cannot feed themselves because of a drought brought on by climate change anyway, with millions fleeing the country (from 22 million people, they’re now down to 16.6 million, with millions in neighboring refugee camps, or on their way to Europe, or already there).

Let Saudi-Arabia clobber Yemen, and keep treating its women like shit, and keep publicly beheading people for blasphemy and witchcraft, and stone women to death for adultery, and continue being the worst state on planet Earth (naturally, we are their best friends, which probably makes us the second worst state on planet Earth).

Let the Taliban battle the corrupt leaders of Afghanistan.

Let the Iraqi Shiites continue giving their Sunnis hell, so ISIS keeps growing.

Let Israel do battle with Hezbollah and the Palestinians on their own till the day there are more Arabs than Jews in Israel, when the Israelis will finally have to give up and make a deal.

And let Iran become the major power in the Middle East, which should be the case, since they’re not Arabs anyway, but a more progressive race, Persians (they once ruled the world) — whose Persian youths are very different from their ruling mullahs who’ll be dead in another twenty years, and then Iran will look like a Western country, since their youth watch The Daily Show already, and they also make damn good movies there, better than Hollywood.

Let the crazy fundamentalist zealots in the Middle East sort it out among themselves, in their pre-Enlightenment morass. There is not a clash of civilizations between the East and West: there is a miscommunication of the ages: one is in the 21st century, and the other is in the 14th century, and the twain should remain twained, since they have nothing in common. The Middle East has the same problem with their religious fundamentalists that we have with ours, with the exception that their fundamentalists are in the majority, while our right-wing fundamentalist Taliban-type evangelists are thankfully in a minority, and the only mischief they can do us, is to keep a dying GOP alive (and make idiots like Ben Carson and Rick Santorum and Mike Huckabee significant political figures).

We’d still be getting a lot of our oil from the Middle East if we left them alone, so what are we doing there, except creating terrorism? And if we do something about climate change and switch to renewables like sunshine and wind, we wouldn’t need their oil anyway, and we’d have no reason to be there whatsoever.

Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Rice greatly increased terrorism in the Middle East when they invaded Iraq.

In fact, they created ISIS when Paul Bremer stupidly disbanded the Baathist Iraqi Army, whose generals have now reconstituted themselves as ISIS.

Without that invasion, Al Qaeda would be a tiny, dwindling group of terrorists today, and ISIS would never have existed.

“Obama and Hillary and Hollande and Angela are being as stupidly dumb-ass as Bush-Cheney ever were. Get this, you moron leaders: if we stop fighting them over there, we wouldn’t have to fight them here.

We should do what Ronald Reagan did. When 299 American and French soldiers were killed in Beirut in 1983 by terrorists driving truck bombs into their barracks, Reagan got the hell out. He cut and ran. He did the sensible, cowardly thing.

It’s time for the West to do the cowardly, sensible thing, and flee the Middle East with our tails between our legs.

That is the only way to stop terrorism.

Stop terrorizing the Middle East, and they will stop terrorizing us.

It’s that simple.” Click link for full article.

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2015/11/if-america-and-the-west-got-the-hell-out-of-the-middle-east-thered-be-no-terrorism-its-that-simple.html#more

posted by f.sheikh

NEW DELHI — Earlier this month in the state of Bihar, India’s ruling coalition, led by the Bharatiya Janata Party, was routed by a provincial “grand alliance” that won nearly three-fourths of the seats in the state legislative assembly. Given that most published exit polls had predicted a close race, this was a massive defeat for the party.

More pointedly, it was a humiliating personal defeat for Prime MinisterNarendra Modi and Amit Shah, Mr. Modi’s consigliere from his home state of Gujarat. Since Mr. Modi became prime minister in May 2014, Mr. Shah, the president of the BJP, has run the party’s state election campaigns as though they were presidential contests between the prime minister on the one hand and Antagonist X on the other. After some initial successes, this strategy has failed spectacularly — first in the Delhi elections earlier this year (in which the BJP won just three seats out of 70) and now in Bihar, one of the most important states in the country’s Gangetic heartland.

Several economic reasons contributed to the BJP’s defeat: the high price of pulses, for example, and the government’s failure to fulfill a promise to fund newly opened bank accounts for the poor. But since the party ran in Bihar the most explicitly communal election campaign in India’s recent history, the most obvious lesson to draw from its defeat is that the state’s electorate rejected the BJP’s majoritarian bigotry.

This conclusion should have lifted the liberal gloom that set in after the BJP’s victory in the 2014 general election. Yet it hasn’t. Why aren’t those who have fretted that Hindu nationalism would swamp the pluralist common sense of the Republic now reading the grand alliance’s victory in Bihar as a sign that the Republic has struck back? Indian liberals, keenly aware of their privileged lives in a poor country, seem haunted by the anxiety that they are too quick to read their ideals into the workings of pragmatic grass-roots politics.

Nitish Kumar, the chief minister of Bihar, leader of the grand alliance and heir to an indigenous socialist tradition, joined forces with Lalu Prasad Yadav, a notoriously corrupt populist, because Mr. Yadav commands the allegiance of one of the state’s largest caste communities. The influential political scientist Yogendra Yadav (no relation) said a month before the election that it offered only a “tragic choice” between “naked majoritarianism” and “a completely defocused caste coalition” that “includes one of the most corrupt political forces this country has ever seen.” The historian Ramachandra Guha, citing the lawlessness that defines Lalu Prasad Yadav’s politics, echoed Yogendra Yadav’s pessimism: “Whoever wins, the people of Bihar have already lost.”

Both academics were questioning the alliance’s credentials: Is invoking caste loyalties progressive or backward-looking? In the context of the Bihar election, the answer should be clear. Any political coalition that brings together peasants, marginal farmers, landless laborers and artisans in a mainly rural state to oppose a Hindu majoritarian party dominated by urban upper castes must be a virtuous coalition.

Majoritarian politicians have managed to put some Indian liberals on the defensive by claiming that the so-called secularism of the Bihar grand alliance amounted to buying Muslims’ vote by playing on their insecurities. In fact, when confronted by a party that systematically trolled Muslims during its campaign, voting en masse for the other side was an act of political rationality, not the reflex of a hive mind.

After the election, Yogendra Yadav again sounded a note of caution, arguing that in a truly secular state beleaguered minorities would not have needed to rally behind parties that promised them security. This is true, but it is beside the point. There is no question that Muslims in India are at a disadvantage by any socioeconomic measure — they are frequently discriminated against in matters of housing, for instance, and make up a disproportionately large part of India’s prison population. The BJP’s defeat in the Bihar election isn’t going to improve the condition of Muslims, but to the extent that it prevents a majoritarian party from running the state, it will keep matters from getting worse.

Consider Mr. Modi’s stump speeches. He accused his opponents of scheming to shift opportunities reserved for dalits and other plebeian castes to members of “a particular community.” The BJP’s most important provincial leader in Bihar, Sushil Modi (who is not related to the prime minister), made the same allegation on Twitter, specifying that the beneficiaries of this stolen largesse were Muslims and Christians.

This wasn’t the first time Mr. Modi dog-whistled while campaigning. He did it during the general election last year, referring to the beef trade controlled by Muslims and the infiltration of Muslim migrants into eastern India. But now he is the prime minister of India. And he is a prime minister who, by insinuating that the poor Hindus of Bihar are being robbed for the benefit of poor Muslims, is playing zero-sum games with the poorest communities in a very poor state.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/16/opinion/indian-liberal-and-anxious.html?ribbon-ad-idx=12&rref=opinion&module=Ribbon&version=context®ion=Header&action=click&contentCollection=Opinion&pgtype=article

posted by f.sheikh

Within the span of few days we have seen the horrible tragedies of bombing of Russian airplane, Beirut bombing and now Paris suicidal attacks.  How to eradicate the menace of this extremism? It seems, we are at a loss and at a dead-end to find some credible solution. The natural instinct to use ruthless force to destroy the existing menace, also sows the seeds for the emergence of next monster even more ruthless and merciless. Invasion of Iraq lead to the creation of ISIS.

With current carnage in Paris, there may be now overwhelming military response by the West and goal of destruction of ISIS may be achieved, but it will not be possible without even a larger scale death, destruction and human dislocation. But then what is next? Who will fill the vacuum?  Both Syria and Iraq are in civil war and thousands of refugees fleeing to Europe. The Kurds will expand somewhat their own territory for Independent Kurdistan but they do not have the capacity to go much beyond their own borders. Any Kurdish expansion will also invite furious response from Turkey. The currently held territory by ISIS cannot be managed by weakened Syria or Iraq embroiled in civil war. Naturally it will get occupied by other extremists groups who will try to outdo each other.

Apart from use of force, withering attacks on radical Islamist ideology in particular and Islam in general,  has not done much either to combat extremism, rather on the contrary it is  creating an atmosphere of Islamophobia in the West which is helping create further alienated Muslim youths who are being discriminated against for just external appearance and Muslim names. It is not now uncommon, especially in Europe, for being fired or refused to be hired because of external appearance and a Muslim name. It no longer matters whether someone is a mainstream moderate Muslim or even Muslim atheist, external appearance and Muslim name is enough to deny your civil rights. These alienated young Muslim youths are the natural target of recruiting efforts by the extremist groups like ISIS.

Muslims themselves are also the target of these extremist groups and bombing of the mosques and other soft targets is a daily occurrence in many Muslim lands. The West has not been able to get the support of these targeted moderate Muslims either because of the mistrust of the West in the face of withering attacks on Islam in general and Islamophobia in Western lands.

Islam is in the middle of a civil war both Shia vs Sunni and extreme vs moderate Islamic ideology. This ideological civil war is further complicated by the masses’ desire to get rid of dictators and monarchs. The West is injecting itself in this civil war to protect its economic and politico geographic interests. It has prompted the Russia to enter the race also. By injecting itself in this civil war, both West and Russia has changed the civil war into extremists vs West and Russia. The ISIS has fired back at both.

There are no good options but outside involvement has never done any good in these Muslim lands and it may make it worse. Let Muslim lands fight it out themselves and West and Russia should get out of the way. If countries like Turkey, Iran, Jordan, Egypt and Gulf states are not willing to fight for their own survival and take the lead, then why West should get in the middle and become the target from all the sides.