Submitted By Mirza Ashraf

ABSTRACT: History does not account top-down oppression as terrorism while retaliation to such oppression from bottom-up is described as violence and terrorism. Though religion-inspired terrorism has appeared on the fringes of all major and minor religions, today it is more frequent than other religions among Islamic groups from West Africa to Central Asia and Philippines. Is this mere accident or could a pattern be detected? In this article I have attempted to break the stranglehold from within illustrating that in Islam, though there is no such term as terrorism but the terrorist attacks of 9/11 were perpetrated by some non-state Muslim actors. … Terrorism seems to be in the interest of the Western powers helping them to turn the Islamic ideology against itself. It derives its impetus from the flaws of previous century’s nation-state system in the Middle East. The fate of its course depends upon the response of Western Powers. The West is viewed by the Arabs responsible for dividing the Arab world into small nation states, and appointing or supporting corrupt rulers as its agents. Therefore, for some zealous Muslims, targeting and charging mortal threats to the Western world and their agent rulers, is a freedom seeking tactic of the followers of Islam. Whereas they believe Islam is a faith of peace, a bottom-up struggle, even by raising arms for freedom and justice, is a rational crux in pursuit of their just objectives. . . . For the revolutionists, terrorism prompts justice for those who are oppressed and is an emanation of virtue. Since the concept of prompt and ready justice is at the core of Islamic Shari’ah, such justifications further embolden the religiously zealous jihadists. They are further inspired by the argument of Sergius Stepniak, a Russian-born fighter for democracy that “the terrorist … is noble, terrible, irresistibly fascinating, for he combines in himself the two sublimities of human grandeur: the martyr and the hero.” Within this context as the revolutionary Europeans justified or authenticated the use of terrorism as a struggle for the restoration of human liberties, it also provided a justification to the Muslims parallel to just war theory. Muslims under colonial rules adopted it as a form of new technique of revolutionary struggle wherever a dysfunctional relation showed up between the state and society. Just as the political sensibility of the French Revolution justified violence and terrorism as an important avenue leading towards a political progression, Muslims maintain that violence today, whether conducted with a religious commitment or an ideological determination, is “a politics by other means.” . . . Terrorist tactics, thus, have been learned by the Muslims from the Europeans, not from the Qur’an, which does not contain any injunction promoting terrorism. In Islam the term “terrorist” or an act defined as “terrorism,” has never been adopted by an individual or a group. It has always been applied to them by others, either by the governments of the states they target or by the societies practicing oppression. . . . The problem can be overcome, only if the Muslims think rationally and instead of presenting terrorism as a misinterpretation of Islam they need to view it as a mortal danger to Islamic civilization. It is time that Muslims need to accept the truth that we all live in a common and increasingly mixed global community where we share a common global history. Today, modern technology has connected us with each other irrespective of our faiths and beliefs. Because of scientific-enlightenment, day by day nonviolent forms of social and political changes are overtaking violent forms and actions.

For complete article please click at: https://independent.academia.edu/MirzaAshraf

The recent surge in negative sentiments towards Islam and Muslims has resulted in many attempts to depict the religion as inherently violent. This has also resulted in absurd accusations against the Qur’an. What are the five most frequently misquoted passages in the Qur’an? Do accusations of violence stand up to academic scrutiny, or are the verses being distorted to suggest the opposite of what they actually say?

http://muslimmatters.org/2014/11/13/top-five-misquotations-of-the-quran/

We usually don’t post articles related to current headline news; this is an exception because of its importance. You decide if it is “hogwash” or not.

“The Other Version of Killing of
Osama Bin Laden” By Seymour Hersch
Seymour Hirsch is a Pulitzer Prize
winner investigative journalist.
(Shared By Sohail Rizvi)
It’s been four years since a group of US Navy Seals
assassinated Osama bin Laden in a night raid on a high-walled compound in
Abbottabad, Pakistan. The killing was the high point of Obama’s first term, and
a major factor in his re-election. The White House still maintains that the
mission was an all-American affair, and that the senior generals of Pakistan’s
army and Inter-Services Intelligence agency (ISI) were not told of the raid in
advance. This is false, as are many other elements of the Obama
administration’s account. The White House’s story might have been written by
Lewis Carroll: would bin Laden, target of a massive international manhunt,
really decide that a resort town forty miles from Islamabad would be the safest
place to live and command al-Qaida’s operations? He was hiding in the open. So
America said.

The most
blatant lie was that Pakistan’s two most senior military leaders – General
Ashfaq Parvez Kayani, chief of the army staff, and General Ahmed Shuja Pasha,
director general of the ISI – were never informed of the US mission. This
remains the White House position despite an array of reports that have raised
questions, including one by Carlotta Gall in the New York Times Magazine of 19 March 2014. Gall, who spent 12 years as
the Times correspondent
in Afghanistan, wrote that she’d been told by a ‘Pakistani official’ that Pasha
had known before the raid that bin Laden was in Abbottabad. The story was
denied by US and Pakistani officials, and went no further. In his book Pakistan: Before and after Osama (2012), Imtiaz Gul, executive director of the
Centre for Research and Security Studies, a think tank in Islamabad, wrote that
he’d spoken to four undercover intelligence officers who – reflecting a widely
held local view – asserted that the Pakistani military must have had knowledge
of the operation. The issue was raised again in February, when a retired
general, Asad Durrani, who was head of the ISI in the early 1990s, told an
al-Jazeera interviewer that it was ‘quite possible’ that the senior officers of
the ISI did not know where bin Laden had been hiding, ‘but it was more probable
that they did [know]. And the idea was that, at the right time, his location
would be revealed. And the right time would have been when you can get the
necessary quid pro quo – if you have someone like Osama bin Laden, you are not
going to simply hand him over to the United States.’

This spring I contacted Durrani and told him in detail what I had learned about the
bin Laden assault from American sources: that bin Laden had been a prisoner of
the ISI at the Abbottabad compound since 2006; that Kayani and Pasha knew of
the raid in advance and had made sure that the two helicopters delivering the
Seals to Abbottabad could cross Pakistani airspace without triggering any
alarms; that the CIA did not learn of bin Laden’s whereabouts by tracking his couriers,
as the White House has claimed since May 2011, but from a former senior
Pakistani intelligence officer who betrayed the secret in return for much of
the $25 million reward offered by the US, and that, while Obama did order the
raid and the Seal team did carry it out, many other aspects of the
administration’s account were false.

‘When your version comes out – if you do it – people in Pakistan will be tremendously
grateful,’ Durrani told me. ‘For a long time people have stopped trusting what
comes out about bin Laden from the official mouths. There will be some negative
political comment and some anger, but people like to be told the truth, and
what you’ve told me is essentially what I have heard from former colleagues who
have been on a fact-finding mission since this episode.’ As a former ISI head,
he said, he had been told shortly after the raid by ‘people in the “strategic
community” who would know’ that there had been an informant who had alerted the
US to bin Laden’s presence in Abbottabad, and that after his killing the US’s
betrayed promises left Kayani and Pasha exposed.

The major US source for the account that follows is a retired senior intelligence
official who was knowledgeable about the initial intelligence about bin Laden’s
presence in Abbottabad. He also was privy to many aspects of the Seals’
training for the raid, and to the various after-action reports. Two other US
sources, who had access to corroborating information, have been longtime
consultants to the Special Operations Command. I also received information from
inside Pakistan about widespread dismay among the senior ISI and military
leadership – echoed later by Durrani – over Obama’s decision to go public
immediately with news of bin Laden’s death. The White House did not respond to
requests for comment.

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v37/n10/seymour-m-hersh/the-killing-of-osama-bin-laden

This is yet another aspect of the end of life issues we have been discussing. Necessity and quality of care are challenges we all confront.  It would beinteresting to hear from the physicians in our group what they think.

Nasik Elahi

It was lunchtime before my afternoon surgery clinic, which meant that I was at my desk, eating a ham-and-cheese sandwich and clicking through medical articles. Among those which caught my eye: a British case report on the first 3-D-printed hip implanted in a human being, a Canadian analysis of the rising volume of emergency-room visits by children who have ingested magnets, and a Colorado study finding that the percentage of fatal motor-vehicle accidents involving marijuana had doubled since its commercial distribution became legal. The one that got me thinking, however, was a study of more than a million Medicare patients. It suggested that a huge proportion had received care that was simply a waste.

For the rest of the article please click on the link.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/05/11/overkill-atul-gawande?mbid=nl_050515_Daily&CNDID=17878219&mbid=nl_050515_Daily&CNDID=17878219&spMailingID=7717036&spUserID=MjQ4NTYwMzU4NDkS1&spJobID=680489128&spReportId=NjgwNDg5MTI4S0