Category Archives: Politics

We, the People, the Humanity and Our Entangled Future in Global COVID-19 Pandemic

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Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja Ph.D

We, the People, the Humanity and Our Entangled Future in Global COVID-19 Pandemic

“He who does not bellow the truth when he knows the truth makes himself the accomplice of liars and forgers.”  CHARLES PEGUY – French Author (1873-1914).

Looking Beyond the Erroneous Logic of Contemporary Professional Intellect and Political Leaderships

Are we living in an era of false truth, feigned piety and alternate transient facts of human affairs?  To answer a rational question, we need to look for critical thinking of our own lives being managed by distorted narratives coming from those who cannot even think for themselves in political governance. Those occupying positions of influence generate ideas and narratives which are often drawn from people who are ideologue of self-interest, contradictions and misrepresentations across global landscape. The COVID-19 pandemic surge has depleted our inner thoughts, souls and outlook for change and adaptability to the making of the future. At the outset, political leaders appear to be leading the movement for human survival, often abridged by medical scientists and experts in determining which vaccinations – be it European, Russian, Chinese or American should be used to treat people of ethnic, social, moral and intellectual and political diversities. Do they pretend that vaccines or the pandemic knows nationalities or political ideologies separating the human intellect? Ostensibly, human faculties of thinking and choices are being used for divisions and political indoctrinations not for specialized human unity to cope with the emerging crises of COVID-pandemic and its aftermath impacting the masses across the world.

Truth is ONE, it cannot be divided into numbers of votaries, that is, We are One People, We are One humanity under the dreadful impacts and consequences of an invisible enemy set to dehumanize all the mankind on this planet. We should be looking for an informed conscience not default of an enlightened conscience to restore trust and societal confidence that COVID-19 pandemic is medically and spiritually treatable and could be diagnosed by century’s evolved medical science complemented by human genius and technological know-how of the 21st century information age. If our leaders are bent on following self-geared national interests and not the interest of one global humanity, consequently our fate, our future are at great risk of dissolution and annihilation by sheer perpetuated ignorance. We are facing many adversaries both in our own minds (the self) and subdued minds which control our thoughts and propagated minds setting in a given societal culture. This trend has evolved a new tyranny of political and medical obsessions to make us powerless and indifferent while we continued to be the victims of this seamless pandemic raging across our lives. We must be looking for truth to necessitate rethinking in our minds and souls for change and universal sense of humanity as being One and unshakeable by geography, politics and ethnicity and sentiments of political nationalities and persecution. We can do it, we are One People and One Humanity impacted by unknown motives of the few lacking knowledge and wisdom to unite the mankind in situations of crises often engineered by ignorance missing divine knowledge of truth and human origin.  We cannot be divided into segments of geography and history as numbers. We the People, We the Humanity are connected to all other things within the God-given Universe to serve the mankind. This gives soundness and power to reason and forbidden truth in the current global affairs.

Global Mankind Looks for Peace, Unity of the People and a Sustainable Future

Jerry Alatalo THE ONENESS of HUMANITY For Global Truth, Justice,Peace(11/03/2015) describes “Empire, Spiritual Evolution, World  Peace” in the following context:

“The first peace, which is most important, is that which is found within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells the Great Spirit, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us.” (BLACK ELK).

Our common sense of One Humanity must inspire new thinking and complements the essence and spirit of the 18th century German philosopher Immanuel Kant’s vision of “Perpetual Peace” as ‘cities of peace’ do not wage war against mankind. We must connect people to people across the globe to be active participants in delivering a new and more viable common future of unity, happiness and future-making. They used to export weapons to wage wars, now exporting wars and media propaganda and are profiteering from the emerging crises in the Middle East. Replacing human consciousness of peace and security by repulsive ideas of despotism, the warlords are corrupting the human values, new-age visions and concepts of healthy standards of peaceful co-existence as they see it a threat to their plans. In the 21st century of changing global culture of new and critical thinking of globalization, we must pioneer new vision of participatory global humanity and critical insights of the stagnated international affairs. The global mankind never consented to any superpowers, the UNO or the Nation State to represent its interests and priorities.

Agreeably, in the 21st century knowledge-based political affairs require true and effective leadership having a comprehensive sense of human rights, dignity, kindness towards fellow human beings and versatile understanding of navigational change when facts of political life warrant a change. Most contemporary leaders of the world appear to rejoice self-centered evil-mongering, not wisdom and truth of people-oriented political systems of governance. Ideas and ideals that defy reasoning and truth are gushingly operative in aerial bombing of the innocents in Syria and inhuman displacement of civilians, killings of people in Iraq, forced confinement and torture of masses in Kashmir by Indian occupied forces, Palestinians under Israeli occupation, Saudi Arabian-UAE led war against the people of Yemen, not to mention of the large scale Syrian civilian displacements of refugees sheltered in Western European nations, and almost a million forcibly evicted Rohinga Muslims from Mynamar (Burma). The UNO is just a symbolic title, not a force to transform conflicts into peacemaking optimism. We, the People of the globe ask all nations on Earth to recognize our strengths and weaknesses for unity of minds for change and adaptability to the making of a people-oriented future in peace and living together as people of reasoned conscience.

We must reason for an instinctive recognition of social, economic and political injustice across the globe and logically try to transform the world of political wickedness, disharmony, socio-economic and political deprivation and exploitation into a world of moral, intellectual and  spiritual reasoning and be passionate  and hopeful for constructive changes in thoughts and behaviors – be it the policing or the masses march on streets and halls of fame, our aim and wisdom must be focused on purpose – a different and a better world of tomorrow and continuous change to be monitored and assessed by the people of knowledge and reason to ensure that we do not cross-over the limits of the Laws of Nature  deserving punishment from God –  the Creator and Sustainer of all the lives, the Earth and the Universe that matter to us all as human beings. The aggressive violations of human rights, dignity and equal participation should not lead to a Third World War against us by us. Its consequences will be unthinkable and catastrophic for the human civilizations claiming to be intelligent and just as it happened during the 2nd WW. The warmongers and their cruelty were not punished in its entirety against the fellow human beings.

(Dr. Mahboob A. Khawaja specializes in international affairs – global security, peace and conflict resolution with keen interests in Islamic-Western comparative cultures and civilizations, and author of several publications including the latest: One Humanity and the Remaking of Global Peace, Security and Conflict Resolution. Lambert Academic Publishing, Germany, 12/2019).

Where were the protesters when the Rohingya were being murdered? By Kenan Malik

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Myanmar’s coup has brought thousands on to the streets, but in 2017 they were empty.

For almost three weeks there have been mass protests on the streets of Myanmar. On 1 February, the Tatmadaw, or military, moved against the government of Aung San Suu Kyi, claiming fraud in last November’s elections, which her party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), comprehensively won.

Since then, civil servants and teachers, bus drivers and garment workers have taken to the streets. Myanmar’s main city, Yangon, was brought to a standstill by a “broken-down” rally, where drivers left their cars parked across the roads, with bonnets open. There are even stories of police having joined in.

The nationwide defiance of the military coup has been courageous and impressive, and echoes similar protests in Russia, Belarus and elsewhere. But, as welcome and important as these demonstrations are, they also lead to a difficult and uncomfortable question. Where was all the marching and shouting and defiance over the past four years as the Tatmadaw organised a brutal campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Rohingya people, razing their villages, killing thousands and forcing hundreds of thousands to flee to neighbouring Bangladesh?

The Rohingya, Muslims who live mostly in the north-west state of Rakhine, bordering Bangladesh, are the most persecuted of Myanmar’s many ethnic groups. Though Rohingya have lived in Rakhine for generations, they are treated, officially and unofficially, as foreigners. The authorities refer to them as “Bengalis”, and the 2014 census refused to include Rohingya as an ethnic category.

The military junta that came to power in Myanmar in 1962 (or Burma as it was then) fomented hatred against the Rohingya as a means of cementing support. The latest and most vicious drive began in 2017. Under the pretext of a campaign against “terrorists”, the army implemented a programme of ethnic cleansing, which many deem as possessing “genocidal intent”, a clampdown as brutal as China’s suppression of the Uighurs.

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How Hatred Of Islam Corrupting American Soul.

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Shared by DR. S A Ehtisham

Khaled Abou El Fadl ABC Religion and Ethics Updated 19 Jan 2017 (First posted 18 Jan 2017)

What happens when your enemy is demonized and dehumanized past the point of no return? If Allah, the Qur’an, Muhammad and Islamic history are so vile, what options are left to Muslims? Credit: JEWEL SAMAD / AFP / GettyImages

Khaled Abou El Fadl is the Omar and Azmeralda Alfi Distinguished Professor of Law at the UCLA School of Law. He is the author of Reasoning with God: Reclaiming Shari’ah in the Modern Age.

A bill requiring the U.S. State Department to declare the Muslim Brotherhood a “foreign terrorist organization” is very likely to become law in the coming days.

Senator Ted Cruz, one of the sponsors of the law, stated in a press release that the Brotherhood “espouses a violent Islamist ideology with a mission of destroying the West.”

In the same press release, Cruz cited to what is known as the “civilization jihad” memorandum – a document in which he accuses American Muslim organizations such as the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA) and the North American Islamic Trust (NAIT) of being affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Frank Gaffney, a notorious Islamophobe who is now one of Donald Trump’s key advisers, and the main author of the “civilization jihad” memorandum, had previously pioneered most of the anti-Shari’ah laws passed by many states in the United States.

Gaffney is not shy about proclaiming the United States to be a Christian nation and the Western civilization as rooted in Judaeo-Christian values that are currently under siege by global jihad and Shari’ah. A day after the U.S. election, Gaffney pronounced in a radio interview that Trump’s victory was “a blessing from God” and that declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a terrorist organization would become a key part of Trump’s strategy of “victory over jihad.”

Leo Hohmann, a member of Frank Gaffney’s Center for Security Policy and a contributor to the extremist Frontline Magazine, recently published a curious book entitled Stealth Invasion: Muslim Conquest Through Immigration and Resettlement Jihad. Hohmann outlines a strategy for responding to what he considers to be a purposeful and deliberate conspiracy orchestrated by the Muslim Brotherhood to defeat the West and America through stealth jihad. In his book, Hohmann states: “The Brotherhood is an extreme Islamist organization whose overarching goal is to create a global caliphate governed by Sharia.” He then calls for passing a law declaring the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign terrorist organization and explains that this issue must be “fought not only on the political level but also spiritually.”

In the Muslim world, the bogeyman of the Muslim Brotherhood has been exploited by authoritarian governments to repress their citizens for more than half a century. It is but a pathetic and pitiful irony that now the very same bogeyman will be used to persecute a broad array of Muslim organizations and individuals in the United States.

Current anti-terrorism laws in the United States give virtually limitless powers to the state to monitor, arrest, detain and convict any group or individual who joins, aids, assists, or even supports a foreign terrorist organization. Thus, by designating the Muslim Brotherhood as a foreign terrorist organization, the Trump administration will have unfettered powers to go after any group or person that it suspects or accuses of having so much as pro-Brotherhood sympathies.

Am I overstating the case? Not a bit. The government would have to prove technical legal concepts such as “knowing” assistance as opposed to “unknowing” support of the Brotherhood, and “material support” as opposed to non-material support in order to obtain a felony conviction in a court of law. But if the conduct of the Bush administration is to be taken as any indication, the government does not have to prove a thing to anyone before it can spy on, search, temporarily seize or freeze the assets of, detain for very protracted periods of time and interrogate any one it suspects of anything.

Put simply, as long as a link or nexus is duly alleged, a foreign terrorist designation empowers the government to destroy the life of any family or organization suspected of a limitless set of behaviour and conduct before we even get to what lawyers call “a hearing on the merits.”

Do most Americans know that this is what is about to happen? Most resolutely, no. In the years that I have taught American national security law, I am always intrigued and touched by the naive surprise of my law students when they realize that in the United States, the executive branch can and does hold this level of coercive power. Do most Americans care? I guess the response to this is another question: How can one care about what one does not know or understand?

And most Americans do not know or understand a thing about Islam except what has been steadily fed to them by the obscenely well-financed Islamophobic industry that is behind the very same law at issue. One thing of which I am absolutely certain is that every American who is currently oblivious towards the entire issue of the designation of the Muslim Brotherhood will soon have a very compelling reason to care – and care a great deal – because what is at issue is not the Muslim Brotherhood, Muslims, or even Islam, but the very moral identity and character of the United States and the world in which we live.

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America And Turbulent Democracy Look For A Change

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The Unthinkable Insurrection on America Powerhouse

Written by: Mahboob A Khawaja

America and its politics find itself at the tyranny of reason of which it appears to be unconscious either by design or by choice.  The living thought of American political harmony does not seem to exhibit an ideal scenario of democracy as acclaimed by its political proponents. The perplexities and despotic character are rooted in the making of modern democracy. American constitutional sense of liberty, freedom and justice appear tainted and dislodged by individualistic Trump’s cult and the planned mob violence against the epicenter of political governance in Washington. D.C. on January 6 -Wednesday.  It exposed an ugly and forbidden truth about the American political thought, values and plastic configuration of piety of democratic values. The gangsters upsurge denied the normal functional of the working seat of political governance to verify the results of the 2020 presidential election won by Democrat Joe Biden. The seditious crowd chanted “Hang Pence”  against the Vice President, “take hostage” the enemy of Trump victory, the election was “fraudulent”  and “ Trump won” the election, the encompassing chaos echoes the worst upcoming epoch in contemporary American history. In all rational observations, it was an authoritarian sponsored coup against We, the People who had systematically elected Joe Biden- President Elect in November 2020. There were silenced pleas and indifference by Republican top leadership who shared the Trump belligerent stance on the outcomes of the presidential election. Is it a wake-up call for rethinking of the American emotional outburst or an opportunity to reflect intelligently as to what went wrong on that historic day?  Rowan Wolf (https://www.uncommonthought.com/mtblog/archives/2021/01/06/if-you-think-that-trump-will-not-continue-to-push-a-coup-then-think-again.php: 1/06/21) highlights the following facts:  

It is critical that we take seriously the impact of the lies, propaganda, and actual coup attempt that is occurring. Trump and the GOP have colluded in creating a narrative that has left a large portion of our population believing that 1) there has been significant fraud in the vote; 2) that the Biden win is illegitimate; 3) that the actions taken by Trump and the GOP are legal, legitimate, and “saving” our democracy. The truth is the obverse of this. In fact, we have a larger portion of the people and virtually the whole of the GOP throwing democracy and the Constitution into the ditch in order to establish an oligarchy, a dictatorship. They are attempting to throw out the votes of tens of millions of people in a coup.

The mob violence and killing of five American signaled deficient security arrangements to safeguard the sanctity of the Capitol complex, members of Congress and Senate who were discharging their legal duties to address the agenda of verification of the election results. It represented lack of planning and distorted image of American official planning on security and protection of human lives.  If there were responsible and rational officials, the security plan should have met the challenge of the day but there was nothing to stabilize a trivial emerging security catastrophic emergency.  Strangely enough, few weeks, The Black Lives Matter protest was met with police brutality, rubber bullets and cordon off the Capitol premise. President Trump incited the mob for an appalling way forward to undo the congressional verification of the President Elect, Joe Biden.  Would President Trump be held accountable for his insurrection and violation of the tenets of the US Constitution?  Or would he go unpunished for the next ten days?

Responding to this formidable challenge, Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House is calling for “impeachment” of President Trump and demands invocation of the 25th Amendment of the US Constitution to dismiss Trump from his office. The time and opportunity for a reasoned dialogue was lost by Trump and the Republican Party leadership. The followers of Trump’s cult performed the stage the drama to appease the emperor and his complicit supporters. Cynicism about American politicians is endemic across the board.  Could the present American leadership restore a sense of political normalcy in a highly turbulent crisis that engulfed the nation to greater risk of insecurity and survival for a sustainable political future?  This author noted the following observations in “American Presidential Election and Democracy Look for Change, Moral and Intellectual Leadership.” (UncommonThought: 11/19/2020.):  To glance ahead, America and its claim to a working democracy will haunt future generations with suspicion and extended discard. Trump and his coercive puppies could not think of America as part of the global community except as conforming to their own fantasies, phobias, prejudices, policies, practices and preferences, favoring Israel and Netanyahu and nothing else for the pandemic entrenched people of America. History will tell of this time when Trump plagued the body politic with the deliberate misinterpretation of the election and outrageous futuristic hypotheses leading nowhere in a civilized society. The sudden and inexplicable democratic plunge into self-geared wickedness must be catastrophic for future generations

Did America’s War Abroad Generate the Evolution of Domestic Terrorism?

Is there a connection to America’s global warmongering and the domestic “terrorism” advanced by the Trump cult?  In every political culture there is peculiar psychology to see its own pros and nothing else. If America and its democracy will ignore the imperatives of living Time, its articulation of futuristic Time will be totally unlike its own – a contradiction covered by adroit instinct. Could America and its political leadership see the mirror and do some soul-searching? “There are the times that try men’s soul”, noted Thomas Paine in his famous “Common Sense”, the lifeline to American independence.

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