Trump seeks to ban Muslim entry to US (Credit: yalibnan.com)
AFTER the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, a real estate mogul and television host with nature-defying hair used the moment to publicly muse about registration databases and even special identification cards for American Muslims. For the sake of efficiency, I created a card myself, listing my skin tone as “Caramel Mocha,” my ethnicity as “Bollywood” and my religion as “Sunny-Side Sunni.”
On Monday afternoon, Donald J. Trump, that mogul turned leading Republican presidential candidate, said that this country should bar all Muslims from entry until we can “understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses.” He used the horrific attack in San Bernardino, Calif., which claimed the lives of 14 and wounded 21, to cast suspicion on roughly 1.6 billion people worldwide.
The proposal was so outlandish that at first I tweeted to ask if he actually said bar Muslims or muslin? As an American Muslim, I don’t support either idea, but I can live without the latter. (Although I would miss the softness.)
We live in absurd times with these absurd realities, but sadly, there is no laugh track.
That’s the “Trump Drill”: Begin with an ominous warning such as, “Something really dangerous is going on,” before launching into an insidious exercise of manipulating fear against minorities to cynically mobilize support. It’s most effective after tragic events like the San Bernardino shootings, reportedly carried out by a radicalized couple, Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik, who were sympathetic to the Islamic State.
When I first heard the news of the attack, I also began a drill. The Muslim Drill. It’s familiar to many minority communities. First, I pray for the victims and their families. Then, I start a different sort of prayer: “Oh, Allah, please don’t let it be a Muslim. Just let it be some white dude.”
My prayer reflects no ill will or animosity against white people, but rather a realization that when a white male, say, kills three people at a Planned Parenthood clinic in Colorado, the entire civilization, behavior and population of whatever constitutes “whiteness” are not indicted and asked to engage in post-tragedy condemnathons.
White Christians generally don’t have to denounce violence in the name of their religion or hope their patriotic “American-ness” isn’t questioned by a nameless, skeptical jury.
But that is exactly what American Muslims are expected to do after violent extremists they’ve never met commit violent acts in cities they’ve never visited.
Even before the shooting was declared an act of terror, an American Muslim civil rights organization held a news conference to condemn the shooting on behalf of the “American Muslim community.” Memo to Muslims and haters alike: There’s no such thing as a monolithic Muslim community. American Muslims are among the most diverse religious communities in this country, who can’t even decide on what day to celebrate Eid.
Who can blame anyone, though, for pre-emptive condemnations when anti-Muslim bigotry is now mainstreamed? The F.B.I. reports that anti-Muslim hate crimes are about five times more common now than they were before 2001. However, that hasn’t stopped some American Muslims from pledging more than $100,000, as of Tuesday evening, for the families of the San Bernardino victims.
When Syed Farook was named as one of the San Bernardino shooters, a Muslim friend texted: “Donald Trump loves this. If it is ISIS, it’s like they want him elected so he can put us in camps,” resigning himself to his inevitable internment. We joked that we could make money by making bean pies and hummus in the camps and selling them on the black market.
It is dark and can seem callous, I know. But many American Muslims have learned to adopt a gallows humor since the attacks of Sept. 11. This doesn’t minimize the tragedies — we, like all Americans, mourn for the victims and fear for our country — but rather allows a collective catharsis amid the anxiety.
For example, after law enforcement officials confirmed that Mr. Farook’s wife, the other shooting suspect, was a Pakistani citizen, I noticed that #Pakistani was trending on social media. I mused about creating a new “Pakistani Drill.” I’ll start telling people that I’m a pre-partition Indian who is “spiritual but not religious” and loves “Slumdog Millionaire.”
Of course, general suspicion, manifested in calls for exclusion, is no laughing matter. An exasperated Arab-American friend asked on social media: “Can someone please come up with a strategy we can get behind to put the brakes on this slide to the very ugly future on the horizon?”
An unlikely but welcome brake came from the former vice president Dick Cheney. In a radio interview, he said, “This whole notion that somehow we can just say no more Muslims, just ban a whole religion, goes against everything we stand for and believe in.”
I actually agree with Mr. Cheney’s statement. Truly, we must be witnessing the apocalypse.
Many Americans know there is a problem of violent extremism and mass shootings in our country. “The Trump Drill” will not help us. We don’t need a repeat of a shameful past that rationalized internment and bigotry in the name of security. We need a way to feel secure that celebrates our values: pluralism, liberties, diverse partnerships and the inevitable marriage of halal meat with corn tortillas. Maybe we can call this the “American Drill.”
Tashfeen & Rizwan enter US in 2014 (Credit: wsj.com)
MULTAN, Dec 7— Tashfeen Malik, who went on a deadly shooting spree in California with her husband last week, studied after college at a conservative Islamic religious school here that attracts relatively well-educated and affluent women.
Officials at the Al-Huda International school said Ms. Malik took classes on the Quran for about a year until May 2014—two months before she moved to the U.S. and married a Pakistani-American man, Syed Rizwan Farook.
Earlier reports suggested she had left Pakistan after completing a university degree here in 2012. Some of her college friends said she hadn’t told them she attended classes at Al-Huda.
Al-Huda was founded in 1994 in Islamabad by a Pakistani woman, Farhat Hashmi, and now has branches around the world, including in the U.S. and Canada, according to the school.
Spokeswoman Farrukh Choudhry described Ms. Malik—who was born in a Pakistani family but grew up in Saudi Arabia—as “very loving and very obedient” while at the school. “No one would have thought that she could do something like this,” she said.
Classmates and university professors described her as traditional, but not extreme.
In a statement Monday, the school said “we cannot be held responsible for personal acts of any of our students.” It said Al-Huda promotes a “peaceful message of Islam and denounces extremism, violence and acts of terrorism.”
U.S. authorities say the 29-year-old Ms. Malik posted a message on her Facebook FB 0.99 % page Wednesday declaring her allegiance to the leader of the Islamic State extremist group, the same day she and her husband killed 14 people and injured 21 others. The couple was later killed in a shootout with police.
U.S. officials say they suspect that Ms. Malik radicalized Mr. Farook, who was born in the U.S. and worked for a county health department in San Bernardino, Calif.
Al-Huda officials in Multan, a city in central Pakistan, say Ms. Malik enrolled in their school April 2013 after completing a pharmacy degree at Bahauddin Zakariya University in the same city. She completed her last class at Al-Huda on May 3, 2014. Eight days later, she sent an email saying she was getting married and moving to the U.S., they said.
She requested information about correspondence courses and it was sent, but the school received no response, Ms. Choudhry said.
However, a woman who said she was a college friend of Ms. Malik said they went together to Al-Huda classes before Ms. Malik graduated from the university. The discrepancy couldn’t immediately be explained.
Ms. Malik appeared religious even when she started at the university in 2007, wearing a niqab—the all-covering veil that leaves only the eyes exposed—throughout her time there, according to her professors.
Unlike traditional madrassas, or religious schools, Al-Huda was founded to provide a modern Islamic education for women. In recent years, it also has begun to offer instruction to men. A poster in a shop window in Multan on Monday offered Al-Huda courses for teenage boys.
Ms. Choudhry said the group teaches students to understand the Quran. “We have no politics, no sect. We don’t touch controversial issues,” she said.
The school’s website says it aims to help students “find inner peace, develop good character, demonstrate effective interpersonal relations and become beneficial members of society working to better serve humanity.”
Critics of the group say it promotes a rigid, puritanical mind-set.
Sadaf Ahmad, author of a book on Al-Huda, said its followers have a “sense of righteousness” and their beliefs “have the potential to become de-humanizing, dangerous and harmful for others.”
Khaled Ahmed, a Lahore-based expert on religious extremism, called Al-Huda’s teachings “retrogressive.” He said because the founder, Ms. Hashmi, “is educated, speaks out against the ‘religious right’ and is a woman, other women find her teachings more acceptable and legitimate.”
He said the group is “increasing in popularity among educated, urban, upper-middle-class and upper-class women.”
Ms. Hashmi has a master’s degree in Arabic from Pakistan’s Punjab University and a Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Glasgow in Scotland, according to her website.
Her lectures in Pakistan and abroad often attract thousands of women. Her website says most of her funding comes from students, and she claims there that she has no affiliation with any religious group.
Ms. Malik’s family, originally from Pakistan, has been based in Saudi Arabia for about 30 years. One of her brothers, reached by phone in Riyadh, said the family only learned of her role in the California assault on television.
“We are in shock,” he said. “We don’t know what happened to our life.” He described his sister as studious and quiet, and said she showed no evidence of drifting toward extremism.
“She was very normal here,” said the brother, who didn’t want his name used for fear he would lose his job. “She was living in Saudi Arabia. There is no social life here. There is no life outside, no friends.”
He said he last saw her sister around a year and a half ago. They would speak every couple of months under pressure from their mother. “My mother would say: ‘She is your sister, why are you not talking to her?’”
—Margherita Stancati in Riyadh contributed to this article.
Tashfeen Malik, the 29-year-old female shooter in the deadly San Bernardino rampage, was a onetime “modern girl” who became religious during college and then began posting extremist messages on Facebook after arriving in the U.S., a family member in Pakistan told the Los Angeles Times.
The family member, in Malik’s hometown of Karor Lal Esan who asked to not be identified, said Malik’s postings on Facebook were a source of concern for her family.
“After a couple of years in college, she started becoming religious. She started taking part in religious activities and also started asking women in the family and the locality to become good Muslims. She started taking part in religious activities of women in the area,” the family member told The Times.
“She used to talk to somebody in Arabic at night on the Internet. None of our family members in Pakistan know Arabic, so we do not know what she used to discuss,” the family member said. The family speaks Urdu and a dialect of Punjabi known as Saraiki.
Malik’s paternal aunt, Hafza Batool, told a local correspondent of the BBC that the family was in a state of shock. “She was so modern. I do not know what had happened to her. She brought a bad name to our family,” Batool said.
Malik pledged allegiance on Facebook to a leader of Islamic State just as Wednesday’s attack was getting underway.
The family member who spoke with The Times anonymously said Malik, who was born in Pakistan, moved with her family to Saudi Arabia when she was a child.
Malik traveled frequently to the Punjab region of Pakistan to visit family and then returned to study pharmacology at Bahauddin Zakariya University in the city of Multan in southern Punjab to study from 2007 to 2012, the family member said.
After attending the university in Pakistan, she returned to Saudi Arabia.
Malik met her future husband, Syed Rizwan Farook, online. The couple attacked a holiday gathering of Farook’s co-workers, killing 14 people and injuring 21 others in San Bernardino on Wednesday.
Farook, 28, was born in Chicago, and was the son of Pakistani immigrants — a truck driver and a clerk at Kaiser Permanente. He grew up in Riverside and attended La Sierra High School and studied at Cal State San Bernardino, earning a degree in environmental health. He then got a job as an inspector at the San Bernardino County Department of Public Health.
The two married last year in Islam’s holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia, according to Farook’s co-workers. Malik was granted a conditional green card last summer after a background check by the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security, and the couple held a walima, a celebration after the wedding, at the Islamic Center of Riverside for people who couldn’t attend the Saudi ceremony; a few hundred people attended, said Nizaam Ali, who worshiped with Farook at a San Bernardino mosque.
Ali said that he had met Malik on a few occasions, but that she wore a head scarf that obscured most of her face.
“If you asked me how she looked, I couldn’t tell you,” Ali said.
Malik and Farook had a baby girl in May.
Malik’s father owns a house in the Babar Colony neighborhood of Multan, where she attended the university, and she lived there during her studies.
The family was “not too social,” a neighbor told Pakistan’s Channel 24.
“The family would visit the house every three or four months, but they hardly have established links with the people in the area,” the neighbor said.
Dr. Nisar Hussain, one of Malik’s professors in the pharmacology department during her five years at the university, told The Times she was veiled when attending the college.
“She was religious, but a very normal person as well. She was a very hardworking and submissive student. She never created any problem in the class. She was an obedient girl. I cannot even imagine she could murder people,” he said in an interview.
Malik was a good student, and at one point, was first in her class, he said. “I don’t think she had any kind of mental illness. She was among the best students, always hardworking, never created problems.
“Yes, she was religious, but not an extremist. She never tried to influence the class in the name of religion, never,” he said.
women didn’t commingle.
“Tashfeen was an individual who kept to herself most of the time,” said Mohammad Abuershaid, an attorney representing the couple’s family. She was a soft-spoken housewife who stayed at home with the baby, the lawyer said, and the couple’s life was that of a “traditional” Muslim household.
Malik belonged to an educated, politically influential family from Karor Lal Esan in the Layyah district of Pakistan. Malik Ahmad Ali Aulakh, a cousin of Malik’s father, was once a provincial minister. Residents said the Aulakh family is known to have connections to militant Islam.
“The family has some extremist credentials,” said Zahid Gishkori, 32, a resident of the Layyah district in the area who knows the family well.
FBI director James B. Comey said Friday there is no indication that “these killers were part of an organized larger group or formed part of a cell. … There is no indication they were part of a network.”
Instead, the young couple fit a profile now distressingly familiar when looking at other recent acts of terrorism in the United States.
Malik and Farook were devout Muslims but not outwardly radical. They were members of a close-knit family with ties to the community. They built and stored crude pipe bombs in their home. And their attack apparently was inspired by, but not directed by, extremists abroad.
The couple thus had more in common with the Army psychiatrist who shot up a military facility at Ft. Hood, Texas, in 2009, and the North Caucasus brothers who set off homemade bombs at the Boston Marathon in 2013, than with the Belgian and French gunmen who killed 130 people last month in Paris.
In contrast with the Paris attacks, no evidence yet indicates that Farook and Malik were part of a larger conspiracy organized by Islamic State or another militant group, or were part of a bigger terrorist cell in California.
That helped them avoid detection before Wednesday’s massacre. Indeed, the absence of warning signs has become a hallmark of recent domestic plots, analysts said.
Investigators have learned that Farook had made contact — in some cases by phone and in others via social media — with people who came up tangentially in previous federal terrorism investigations. But he had not drawn any scrutiny.
Officials said that Malik had posted a comment swearing allegiance to Islamic State on a Facebook page — but only just before the couple stormed into a holiday party at the Inland Regional Center, guns blazing.
There was “nothing of such a significance” that it drew FBI attention before the attack, Comey said.
“The challenge the U.S. faces is that there are radical individuals who are being a lot more careful, and it makes them virtually impossible to detect,” said Seth Jones, a terrorism analyst with the Rand Corp., a Santa Monica-based think tank.
That is a change from the threat Americans faced after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, when Al Qaeda and its supporters repeatedly sought to bomb airliners or other U.S. targets, using operatives who were trained and directed by militants abroad.
With Al Qaeda now overshadowed by Islamic State, the threat inside the United States increasingly comes from self-radicalized individuals.
Their plots are less organized and possibly less deadly, but paradoxically are harder to stop, analysts say.
“There are no direct communications or orders that you can intercept to realize that there’s a plot going on,” said Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at Georgetown University. “There’s an absence of red flags.”
Investigators may find that Farook and Malik left digital or other tracks that have not yet emerged.
After Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan killed 13 people and injured more than 30 at a military processing center at Ft. Hood on Nov. 5, 2009, for example, investigators found that a Joint Terrorism Task Force knew he had been in direct contact with Anwar Awlaki, an Al Qaeda leader in Yemen who was later killed in a U.S. drone strike.
And after Dzhokhar and Tamerlan Tsarnaev killed three people and wounded more than 260 at the Boston Marathon on April 15, 2013, the Russian government said it had warned the FBI two years earlier that Tamerlan and his mother were “adherents of radical Islam” and that he was preparing to join unspecified “bandit underground groups” in Dagestan and Chechnya.
The FBI failed to follow up on the warnings, a subsequent investigation showed.
Still, the pattern of Islamic extremists operating in the U.S. without outside direction is a clear change from the period after Sept. 11, 2001, when Al Qaeda and its supporters repeatedly sought to bomb airliners or other U.S. targets with operatives who were trained and directed by militants abroad.
Those included the incident in late 2001 when a British citizen tried to detonate explosives in his shoe on a flight to Miami; a foiled 2009 plot to bomb New York City subways by an Afghan American who had trained at Al Qaeda camps; and the 2010 attempted car bombing in New York’s Times Square by a Connecticut resident who had traveled to Pakistan for training.
Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, the network’s affiliate in Yemen, hatched two other failed plots — the 2009 attempt to down a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit by a Nigerian man with a bomb in his underwear, and a 2010 attempt to explode bombs hidden in printer cartridges aboard two U.S.-bound cargo jets.
Even before Wednesday’s attack, the FBI had about 900 active investigations of suspected Islamic State sympathizers or supporters and other homegrown extremists. Authorities have arrested 71 people on charges related to the group since March 2014, including 56 this year.
The group’s social media, propaganda videos and direct appeals have exhorted followers to launch attacks in their own countries. In recent weeks, militants have bombed a Russian aircraft over Egypt, conducted bombings in Lebanon and Libya, and shot up restaurants and other sites in Paris.
Last fall, Islamic State released a video by a spokesman, Abu Muhammad Adnani, that called for revenge against countries that sent forces to Iraq and Syria to fight them, including Australia, France, Canada and the United States.
Michael C. Leiter, a former senior counterterrorism official in the George W. Bush and Obama administrations, said that signaled a greater danger in some ways because Islamic State wasn’t trying to send operatives into the United States.
“People ask, ‘Is it directed or is it inspired?’ I think that’s entirely the wrong rubric because their direction is to inspire,” Leiter said. “They are not looking to direct attacks at all.”
Special correspondent Sahi reported from Islamabad, and Times staff writers Cloud and Bennett from Washington.
Contributing to this report were Times staff writers Soumya Karlamangla, Paloma Esquivel, Laura J. Nelson, Harriet Ryan, Dexter Thomas, Matt Hamilton, W.J. Hennigan, Peter Jamison, Jack Dolan, Richard Winton, Richard A. Serrano, Joel Rubin, Joseph Serna, Veronica Rocha, Thomas Curwen, Corina Knoll, Marisa Gerber, Ruben Vives, Hailey Branson-Potts, Sarah Parvini, Kate Mather, Taylor Goldenstein, Anh Do, Lauren Raab, Christine Mai-Duc, Stephen Ceasar, Cindy Chang, Garrett Therolf, Paresh Dave, Phil Willon and Rong-Gong Lin II.
The discovery that several of the Paris attackers were European nationals has fueled concern about Muslim immigrants becoming radicalized in the West.
Some politicians have expressed views that the best way to avoid homegrown terrorists is to shut the door.
The refugee migration debate turned even more contentious after authorities found a Syrian passport at the scene of the attack. Poland is now turning back refugees, more than half of American governors have vowed to refuse Middle Easterners seeking a new beginning, and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan has asked for a “pause” on the federal Syrian refugee program.
Fearful reactions to terrorist violence are nothing new. Incidents of extremist activity are often followed by anti-Islam protests or hate crimes. Reports of the Islamic State luring Western Muslims abroad are followed by a tightening of homeland security policy. Just after the attacks in Paris, presidential hopeful Donald Trump said that he would be willing to close mosques in America.
Such displays of intolerance can make Muslims feel like they don’t belong in Europe or the United States.
Our research, forthcoming in Behavioral Science and Policy, and in partnership with the World Organization for Resource Development and Education, shows that making Muslims feel this way can fuel support for radical movements. In other words, many Western policies that aim to prevent terrorism may actually be causing it.
Preventing radicalization
In our research, we asked hundreds of Muslims in Germany and the United States to tell us about their experiences as religious and cultural minorities, including their feelings of being excluded or discriminated against on the basis of their religion. We also asked how they balance their heritage identities with their American or German identities. We wanted to know if these kinds of experiences were related to their feelings toward radical groups and causes.
There are a lot of practical and ethical barriers to studying what makes someone become a terrorist.
We normally don’t know who terrorists are until after they’ve committed an attack. By then, we can only rely on after-the-fact explanations as to what motivated them. We can’t perform a controlled laboratory study to see who would participate in an act of terrorism. In surveys, we can’t ask someone straightforwardly how much they would like to join a radical movement, because most people who are becoming radicalized would not answer honestly.
Instead, we measured a couple of indicators of support for radicalism. We asked people how willing they would be to sacrifice themselves for an important cause. We also measured the extent to which participants held a radical interpretation of Islam. For example, we asked whether it’s acceptable to engage in violent jihad. Finally, we asked people to read a description of a hypothetical radical group and tell us how much they liked the group and how much they would want to support it. This hypothetical group consisted of Muslims in the United States (or Germany, in the German study) who were upset about how Muslims were treated by society and would stop at nothing to protect Islam.
Overall, support for these indicators of extremism was very low, which is a reminder that the vast majority of Muslims do not hold radical views.
But the responses of some people showed they felt marginalized and identified with neither the culture of their heritage nor the culture of their adopted country.
We described people as “culturally homeless” when they didn’t practice the same customs or share the same values as others in their adopted culture but also felt different from other people of their heritage.
We found that people who said they were torn between cultures also reported feeling ashamed, meaningless and hopeless. They expressed an overall lack of significance in their lives or a feeling that they don’t really matter. The more people’s sense of self worth was threatened, the more they expressed support for radicalism.
Our findings are consistent with a theory in psychology that terrorists are looking for a way to find meaning in their lives. When people experience a loss to their sense of personal significance — for example, through being humiliated or disrespected — they seek out other outlets for creating meaning.
Extremists know and exploit these vulnerabilities, targeting Muslims whose sense of significance is low or threatened. Radical religious groups give these culturally homeless Muslims a sense of certainty, purpose and structure.
For people who already feel culturally homeless, discrimination by the adopted society can make matters worse. In our data, people who said they had been excluded or discriminated against on the basis of their religion experienced a threat to their self-esteem. The negative effects of discrimination were the most damaging for people who already felt culturally homeless.
Our results suggest that cultivating anti-immigrant or anti-Islamic sentiment is deeply counterproductive. Anti-immigrant discourse is likely to fuel support for extremism, rather than squelch it.
Integration the goal
To decrease the risk of homegrown radicalization, we should work to improve integration of Muslim immigrants, not further isolate them. This means welcoming Syrian refugees, not excluding them. It means redefining what it means to be American or German in a way that is inclusive and doesn’t represent only the majority culture. It means showing interest in and appreciation for other cultural and religious traditions, not fearing them.
According to our data, most Muslims in the United States and in Germany want to blend their two cultures. But it is difficult to do this if either side pressures them to choose.
We should not confuse integration with assimilation.
Integration means encouraging immigrants to call themselves American, German or French and to take pride in their own cultural and religious heritage.
Our data suggest that policies that pressure immigrants to conform to their adopted culture, like France’s ban on religious symbols in public institutions or the “burqa ban,” are likely to backfire, because such policies are disrespectful of their heritage.
In the United States, the pressure to conform comes in the implicit meaning of the “melting pot” metaphor that underlies our cultural ethos. This idea encourages newcomers to shed their cultural uniqueness in the interest of forging a homogeneous national identity. In comparison, the “mixed salad” or “cultural mosaic” metaphors often used in Canada communicate appreciation for cultural differences.
In Germany, immigrants without sufficient German language skills are required to complete an integration course, which is essentially a tutorial on how to be German. Interestingly, we found that the more German Muslim participants perceived that Germans wanted them to assimilate, the less desire they had to do so. We also see these identity struggles in Muslim communities in France, where “being French” and “being Muslim” are thought to be mutually exclusive.
Our findings point to a strategy for reducing homegrown radicalization: encouraging immigrants to participate in both of their cultures plus curbing discrimination against Muslims. This strategy is better for both immigrants’ well-being and adopted cultures’ political stability.
For an example of how this can be done successfully, look to a jihadist rehabilitation program in Aarhus, Denmark, where the police work with the Muslim community to help reintegrate foreign fighters and find ways for them to participate in Danish society without compromising their religious values.
Communities can make it harder for terrorists to recruit by helping the culturally homeless feel more at home.
PESHAWAR, Oct 27 — The powerful earthquake that killed hundreds of people across Afghanistan and Pakistan was a “warning” from God, according to a religious education group.
Wafaq-ul-Madaris-e-Arabia, Pakistan’s largest federation of seminaries in the Deobandi school of Islam, also said it was pleased at an uptick in mosque attendance following the quake because “collective repentance is the need of the hour,” Pakistan’s Express Tribune newspaper reported.
The magnitude-7.5 quake struck a remote, mountainous region of northeast Afghanistan on Tuesday, but most of the deaths and injuries were in neighboring Pakistan. It triggered landslides, damaged thousands of homes, and rocked cities up to 400 miles away.
Although the earthquake was powerful, it struck deep beneath the Hindu Kush mountains, meaning the damage was significantly less than a similar quake in 2005 that killed some 86,000 people.
“Allah Almighty has protected Pakistan of major harm and disaster. The people should offer special prayers giving thanks,” said the statement. It was issued by the Hanif Jalandhary, the general secretary of Wafaq-ul-Madaris-e-Arabia, was well as several other religious scholars, according to The Express Tribune.
Meanwhile, the Taliban urged aid agencies on Tuesday not to hold back delivering supplies to areas of Afghanistan affected by the tremor.
The Islamist militants hold de facto control over some areas rescuers have been struggling to reach. The Taliban said in a statement it had instructed its militants to lend their “complete help” to the recovery effort.
“The [Taliban] calls on our good-willed countrymen and charitable organizations to not hold back in providing shelter, food and medical supplies to the victims of this earthquake,” the statement said. “And it similarly orders its mujahideen in the affected areas to lend their complete help to the victims and facilitate those giving charity to the needy.”
The earthquake also prompted no halt in the perilous security situation on the Afghan-Pakistan border.
Seven Pakistani soldiers were killed in the country’s Paktika province after a group of militants opened fire from the Afghan side of the border on Tuesday, a senior Pakistani military official told NBC News.
Qadri in prison van (Credit: geotv)Islamabad, Oct 7 – A former police bodyguard revered as a hero by Pakistani conservatives for killing a politician who criticised the country’s blasphemy laws has had his death sentence upheld.
In ordinary circumstances there would never be any doubt about which way the supreme court decision would go: Mumtaz Qadri is unrepentent at having shot dead Salmaan Taseer, then governor of Punjar, as he left a restaurant in a busy Islamabad market in January 2011. But moderates have claimed the ruling is a sign of a change in official attitudes towards religious extremism.
Salmaan Taseer murder case harks back to 1929 killing of Hindu publisher
Many Pakistanis argue Mumtaz Qadri should be regarded as a national hero like Ilm-Deen, who knifed the publisher of a commentary on the prophet Muhammad’s life
Read more
In the months before his murder, Taseer had sparked anger among religious conservatives by taking up the cause of Asia Bibi, a poor Christian woman who had been sentenced to death for allegedly insulting the prophet Muhammad.
Saroop Ijaz, a lawyer and head of Human Rights Watch in Pakistan, hailed the upholding of Qadri’s conviction for murder as a “brave decision” and “the first step in introducing some rational discourse on blasphemy”.
The only thing now standing between Qadri and execution is an appeal for a presidential pardon, which few expect to be granted.
Qadri’s execution will likely be seen as a key moment in the dramatic hardening of the state’s attitude towards extremists following the Taliban massacre of more than 130 schoolboys in Peshawar last year, which prompted the government to scrap an informal moratorium on the death penalty.
Public support for Qadri was so great that the army chief at the time of the murder, Gen Ashfaq Kayani, reportedly told western ambassadors he could not publicly condemn Qadri because too many of his soldiers sympathised with the killer.
Such was the controversy around Taseer that his family struggled to find a mullah to officiate at his funeral. Qadri on the other hand was greeted by lawyers at his first court hearing with a shower of rose petals.
As with other cases involving Pakistan’s notorious blasphemy laws, Bibi was convicted on the basis of allegations made by women in her village with whom she had been involved in a dispute.
Taseer, a liberal-minded business tycoon from Lahore, visited her in prison, campaigned for a presidential pardon and called the country’s hardline blasphemy legislation – which dates from the 1980s Islamist military dictatorship of Muhammad Zia-ul-Haq – a “black law”..
Qadri enjoys special prison perks and has recorded best-selling albums of devotional songs. Last year he was found to have incited a prison guard into attempting to kill an elderly British citizen held in the same building for alleged blasphemy.
His appeal hearings at the Islamabad high court attracted large crowds of banner-waving supporters from the country’s majority Barelvis, a community that prior to Taseer’s killing was seen by many western analysts as a bulwark against religious extremism.
Qadri also attracted some of the country’s most senior lawyers to his defence team, including two former judges. But three chief justices this week rejected arguments that Qadri had the right to take the law into his own hands, or that merely criticising blasphemy laws constitutes an insult against Islam.
Legal analysts said it was significant that the supreme court rejected the lower court’s decision to overturn Qadri’s conviction under the country’s terrorism legislation, which would have reduced the matter to regular statute law.
That would have relieved the state of the final decision on whether to execute Qadri and led to Taseer’s family being pressured to forgive Qadri under controversial “blood money” provisions.
Taseer’s daughter Sanam said she was against the death penalty in principle but that she would welcome the death of Qadri because of the cult-like power he enjoys from his prison cell. “He is treated like a king in prison,” she said. “Women bring him their children for him to teach.”
She said the verdict was “wonderful for the country because it shows there is rule of law”.
Zahid ur Rashidi, a religious scholar and supporter of Qadri, said the government should immediately release “our national hero” and introduce strict religious law.
“Because the legal system is un-Islamic, young people become desperate and take the law into their own hands,” he said.
In a country where Islamic extremists once operated with near impunity, in recent months the state’s attitude towards them has hardened dramatically.
In July Malik Ishaq, former leader of one of Pakistan’s most lethal anti-Shia terror groups, was killed in an apparently stage-managed police shootout. Several notorious clerics have also been arrested.
Mosharraf Zaidi, an analyst who has written angst-laden newspaper columns arguing that the Qadri-Taseer case showed the country was failing to confront its demons, said “Pakistan in 2015 now feels dramatically different”.
“We are not out of the woods yet, but the supreme court decision is a very strong sign the state is trying to recover the space it ceded to violent extremists,” he said.
Pope Francis & President Obama (Credit: thedailybeast.com)Pope Francis on Thursday warned members of Congress and the American public not to be consumed by their opposition to religious extremism.
“Our world is increasingly a place of violent conflict, hatred and brutal atrocities, committed even in the name of God and of religion,” Francis said before a rapt joint meeting of Congress.
A delicate balance is required to combat violence perpetrated in the name of a religion, an ideology or an economic system, while also safeguarding religious freedom, intellectual freedom and individual freedoms,” he said. “But there is another temptation which we must especially guard against: the simplistic reductionism which sees only good or evil; or, if you will, the righteous and sinners.”
“We know that in the attempt to be freed of the enemy without, we can be tempted to feed the enemy within,” Francis said. “To imitate the hatred and violence of tyrants and murderers is the best way to take their place.”
Though Francis never mentioned Islam during his historic address — the first ever by a pontiff before a joint meeting of Congress — the comments appear to refer to ongoing global struggles against extremist groups such as the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Some critics have worried that efforts to crack down on radicalism around the world end up limiting people’s rights and subjecting them to constant surveillance.
Francis’s speech on Thursday captured the attention of all of Washington.
In addition to the comments on extremism, the address largely focused on immigration, climate change and efforts to protect the poor.
BEIRUT, Lebanon — In streaming ribbons of white, great masses of Muslim pilgrims made their way between cities of air-conditioned tents toward the next stop on their holy tour of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
Then something went disastrously wrong, trapping the crowds in narrow streets and touching off a mass panic and crushing stampede that left the asphalt covered with lost sandals, crumpled wheelchairs and piles of white-robed bodies.
It was the deadliest accident during the Hajj pilgrimage in a quarter-century, with at least 717 pilgrims from around the world killed and more than 850 wounded. And it posed yet another challenge for the country’s new leader, King Salman, who is already coping with low oil prices, a war in Yemen and an increasingly fierce rivalry with Iran.
The stampede was the latest in a series of crises that have plagued the pilgrimage this season: Just two weeks ago, a crane collapse killed more than 100 visitors, and hotel fires have injured others. The missteps have embarrassed the insular Saudi monarchy, which considers itself the global guardian of orthodox Islam and takes great pride in protecting the holy sites and their millions of annual visitors.
King Salman — who bears the title of “the custodian of the two holy mosques,” giving him personal responsibility for Mecca and Medina — expressed his condolences for the dead in an address aired on Saudi state television and ordered a review of the management of the pilgrimage. A commission was formed to investigate.
Other officials appeared to blame the dead. The Saudi health minister, Khalid al-Falih, said in a statement that the stampede may have been caused by “some pilgrims who didn’t follow the guidelines and instructions issued by the responsible authorities.”
But some present in the area at the time said security forces had temporarily closed exits from an area packed with pilgrims, causing the crowding that led to the stampede.
Khalid Saleh, a Saudi government employee who rushed to the site when he heard screams and sirens, said he had found “huge numbers of people on the ground either dying or injured.” Pilgrims there told him that some of the area’s exits had been closed so that V.I.P. cars could pass, he said.
The Saudis’ main regional rival, Iran, blamed the tragedy on Saudi mismanagement. The head of Iran’s Hajj organization, Said Ohadi, said two paths near the site of the accident had been closed for “unknown reasons.”
“This caused the tragic incident,” he told Iranian state television. “Saudi officials should be held accountable.”
At least 131 Iranians were among the dead, according to Iranian news agencies.
Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the supreme leader of Iran, blamed “misconduct and improper acts” by Saudi officials and declared three days of public mourning.
The Saudi government has spent billions of dollars on construction in Mecca in recent years aimed at enlarging the grand mosque, adding accommodations and facilitating movement between the sites. Those investments followed a number of high-casualty accidents, including the 2006 deaths of 360 people on a bridge that had long been identified as a dangerous choke point.
Nevertheless, Thursday’s stampede is likely to renew criticism that Saudi Arabia lacks the management skills to protect one of the world’s largest regular human migrations.
Irfan al-Alawi, the executive director of the Islamic Heritage Research Foundation and a critic of how the Saudi government has developed Mecca and another holy city, Medina, said by telephone from Mecca that the stampede had been a result of “poor management” by the government, given the number of past disasters.
The stampede occurred early Thursday, the first day of the Muslim Eid al-Adha holiday, near a T-shaped intersection of narrow streets in Mina, about six miles east of Mecca, where many pilgrims stay in air conditioned tents.
The area is close to Jamarat, where pilgrims gather to throw pebbles at walls in a ritual that represents the stoning of the devil.
Maj. Gen. Mansour Turki, a spokesman for the Saudi Interior Ministry, told reporters that large groups of pilgrims had run into each other and started shoving, causing the stampede, which was exacerbated by extreme heat and fatigue.
General Turki and other officials said they would not comment on how the streets had become so crowded before the official investigation was complete.
And Saudi officials confined reporters given official access to the pilgrimage for hours after the accident, preventing them from reaching the site and investigating its cause.
Survivors described a nightmare situation of getting trapped in a crush of bodies and feeling other people walk over their backs in an effort to escape.
“I saw someone trip over someone in a wheelchair and several people tripping over him,” said Abdullah Lotfy, a pilgrim from Egypt, according to The Associated Press. “People were climbing over each other just to breathe.”
Cellphones and cameras are prohibited from the main sanctuaries, but can be used in the surrounding areas, and videos of the aftermath shared on social media showed scores of lifeless bodies in the street, many covered with the simple white garments pilgrims wear during the hajj.
One video showed a heap of men lying atop one another, while rescue workers in fluorescent yellow vests worked to free struggling survivors trapped between lifeless bodies.
The stampede was the deadliest incident during the hajj — and in the entire kingdom — since 1990, when 1,426 pilgrims perished in a stampede in a tunnel linking Mecca and Mina.
It occurred less than two weeks after a large construction crane toppled over and crashed through the roof of the Grand Mosque in Mecca, killing at least 111 people and injuring 394 others. The Saudi authorities have faulted the Saudi Binladin Group, a construction conglomerate working on the mosque expansion, denying it future contracts and banning some of its executives from leaving the country.
The accidents have occurred as the Saudi government spends billion of dollars on the construction of new buildings — including the world’s largest hotel — that critics say have destroyed the sites’ natural setting and cater only to the wealthiest pilgrims.
But accidents that kill large numbers of visitors have become less common than they were during earlier eras. The last was the stampede in 2006, along with a building housing pilgrims collapsed, killing at least 73 people.
Sami Angawi, a Mecca-born architect who has spent decades studying the pilgrimage, said the Saudi government faces a huge logistical dilemma in welcoming so many people and cycling them through a series of specific sites in a limited amount of time. Some two million pilgrims from 180 countries are performing the hajj this year.
He said the pilgrims’ diversity and lack of a common language added to the challenge. “With a huge number like this and all the diversity that is in it, it is hard to communicate and do orientation,” he said.
But he criticized the Saudi government for seeking to build its way out of the problem instead of improving crowd control.
“There is a lot of money spent, but the solution is not in making more roads or bridges,” he said. “It is in how to organize the management of people to have a flow from one area to another.”
Madawi al-Rasheed, a Saudi anthropologist at the London School of Economics, accused members of the royal family of profiting handsomely from the construction boom.
“The renovation and expansion are done under the pretext of creating more space for Muslim pilgrims, but it masks land grabs and vast amounts of money being made by the princes and by other Saudis,” she said. “There is no accountability.”
Dr. Rasheed said that officials in the kingdom had avoided responsibility in part by citing the belief that anyone who dies during the pilgrimage — one of the five pillars of Islam, and a duty for all able-bodied Muslims with the means to make the trip — goes to heaven.
Saudi state television reported the deaths in text banners on its screen during normal pilgrimage programming, only briefly showing footage of rescue workers putting injured pilgrims into ambulances.
“That is among the things that happen at any large gathering,” one presenter said.
He closed his program by reminding viewers that it is a “virtue” to die while performing the pilgrimage and that the tragedy was only “temporary.”
Reporting was contributed by Mona Boshnaq from London, Kareem Fahim from Cairo, Thomas Erdbrink from Tehran, Christine Hauser from New York, and Sheikha al-Dosary from Alexandria, Va.
This time Donald Trump is in hot water for what he didn’t say.
The Republican presidential front-runner decided to shake things up at a New Hampshire rally Thursday by abandoning his stump speech — wall, China, proven business leader — and taking questions from the crowd.
And the first one was a doozy.
“We’ve got a problem in this country,” said the first questioner. “It’s called Muslims. You know our current President is one. You know he’s not even an American.”
“We need this question?” Trump said, laughing.
“But anyway,” the man continued, “We have training camps growing, where they want to kill us. That’s my question: When can we get rid of them?”
Instead of correcting the man on President Obama’s religion — he’s Christian — or denouncing the blanket statement about all Muslims, the birther movement banner holder just let it hang in the air.
“We’re going to be looking at a lot of different things,” Trump said. “And you know, a lot of people are saying that and a lot of people are saying that bad things are happening out there. We’re going to be looking at that and plenty of other things.”
Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton blasted the billionaire real estate mogul for not correcting the questioner.
“Donald Trump not denouncing false statements about POTUS & hateful rhetoric about Muslims is disturbing, & just plain wrong. Cut it out. -H,” she tweeted.
“GOP frontrunner Donald Trump’s racism knows no bounds. This is certainly horrendous but unfortunately unsurprising given what we have seen already,” said Democratic National Committee Chair Debbie Wasserman Schulz.
In 2008, Sen. John McCain drew boos at a town hall when he corrected a woman who called then-Sen. Obama “an Arab.”
“I have to tell you, Sen. Obama is a decent person and a person you don’t have to be scared of as President of the United States,” McCain said.
Trump’s camp responded to the mounting backlash by accusing Obama of waging a religious war.
“The media wants to make this issue about Obama. The bigger issue is that Obama is waging a war against Christians in this country,” the Trump campaign said in a statement. “Christians need support in this country. Their religious liberty is at stake.”
One of the Queen’s personal representatives has resigned after leaked emails showed him saying British Pakistanis must be taught “basic common courtesy and civility”.
Paul Sabapathy, CBE, Her Majesty’s lord lieutenant of the West Midlands, made the remarks in an email after attending an event at the Pakistan consulate in Birmingham on 14 August to commemorate Pakistan Independence Day.
Apparently unhappy about the lack of respect he and colleagues were shown as the Queen’s representatives, he said: “Pakistanis are lovely people individually but there is a lot of work to do to teach them basic common courtesy and civility.”
He went on: “They talk to themselves and do not engage with the wider community. They are living in the UK not Pakistan. Whilst being rightly proud of their Pakistani culture and heritage they need to explain better and engage more with their non-Pakistani brothers and sisters if they want their children to succeed as British Pakistani citizens.”
Sabapathy, who was born in Chennai in India and moved to the UK in 1964, was the first non-white lord lieutenant.
Her Majesty’s lord lieutenants are the representatives of the crown for each county in the United Kingdom. Men or women of all backgrounds, they are appointed by the Queen on the advice of the prime minister.
Lord lieutenants were originally appointed in Henry VIII’s reign to take over the military duties of the sheriff and control the military forces of the crown. Nowadays they perform a largely ceremonial function but are nonetheless expected to uphold the same standards as the reigning monarch.
Sabapathy’s remarks were seemingly prompted by a group of 20-25 Pakistani men talking as he tried to address the Independence Day event.
When the Guardian contacted Sabapathy on Friday morning to ask for clarification on his remarks, he asked for time to comment. In the meantime a growing number of MPs spoke out about his remarks, with one Pakistani-origin MP saying the lord lieutenant had been offensive and must apologise.
At 5.30pm on Friday he issued a statement saying he had decided to stand down and wanted to offer an unreserved apology.
He said: “I wish to apologise unreservedly and wholeheartedly for the offence I have caused to the Pakistani community and others, by the contents of my private email. I have today written to all those who received my original email to express my sincere sorrow and regret. I have asked for their forgiveness in the hope that my comments do not damage relationships between the many communities of the West Midlands.”
A palace spokesperson said in a statement: “We understand that Paul Sabapathy has informed the Cabinet Office of his decision to step down from his role as lord lieutenant in the West Midlands. The Royal household would like to acknowledge the tremendous work done by Mr Sabapathy since his appointment in 2007 to support the work of the royal family and to bring together and work with the communities in the West Midlands.”
Before Sabapathy tendered his resignation, Shabana Mahmood, MP for Birmingham Ladywood, whose family are from Mirpur in Kashmir, Pakistan, said: “Clearly he should apologise, his comments are very offensive. If he had issues with the way the event was organised then the appropriate thing to have done would have been to take it up with the event organisers directly.”
Valerie Vaz, Labour MP for Walsall South, said: “I am disappointed with these generalised remarks about the Pakistani community which indicates to me he is out of touch. In my experience the community are hospitable, generously support charitable causes both in the UK and aboard, support multi-faith activities and actively oppose those who seek to divide our diverse tolerant community in Walsall. I think he should apologise.”
Another West Midlands MP, Roger Godsiff, who represents Birmingham Sparkbrook and Small Heath, was at the Independence Day event: “Based on my own visit to the Pakistani consulate in Birmingham on 14 August, it is surprising that Paul Sabapathy could make such sweeping generalisations. Perhaps the other attendees thought he was being a bit snooty and ignored him,” he said.
He added: “It seems that it would be helpful for community relations if he did apologise.”
Jess Phillips, MP for Birmingham Yardley, said: “Without understanding the context of what happened at the event it is difficult for me to comment. But I would say if Paul Sabapathy thinks the British Pakistanis don’t engage with the wider community he wants to come and live on my street. He wouldn’t be there for five minutes without being invited in for a chat with my British Pakistani neighbours.”
The remarks were leaked the day before Sabaphaty was set to appear as guest of honour at the British Organisation for People of Asian Origin (Bopa) in Birmingham. On Saturday he is due at the Belgrade Theatre for Bopa’s conference on the “Asian contribution to World War One”.
But Davinder Prasad, Bopa’s chief secretary, said Vaz and others were “making a meal out of it.”
He said: “Why should the lord lieutenant apologise? He was right in what he was saying. The Asian community, whether Sikh or Pakistani or Indian must learn. What he is doing is educating Asian people that they are in British society. They can’t behave as if they are still in Pakistan, India, Bangladesh or Sri Lanka. They must not just expect to get food on a plate. They must accept what British society has on offer, for example, tolerance and respect. We need to show respect to the British monarchy. Why must people try to make a meal out of what he said?”
He added: “I’m appalled if someone is asking him to apologise. We are very fond of the lord lieutenant and see him as a source of inspiration. We have nothing but respect for him. If somebody is being discourteous or impolite, the lord lieutenant is right to draw it to their attention. Anyone criticising him should look himself in the mirror.”
Andrew Mitchell, the Conservative MP for Sutton Coldfield and secretary of state for international development, praised Sabapathy for his “superb work across the area” and good relations with the Pakistani community, and said something must have gone “awry” on Independence Day.
In his resignation statement, Sabapathy wrote: “As an immigrant myself, coming to the UK 51 years ago not knowing anyone and the first non-white lord lieutenant ever, I have been conscious of my duty to engage with and support all communities in their endeavour and to ensure they are represented fairly and without discrimination.
“Those who know me will, I am sure, confirm I am a great advocate of the Muslim and Pakistani communities – in the same way that I support all of those in the region, no matter their colour, creed or beliefs. Collaboration and engagement are at the heart of all my work. There is not one iota of prejudice on my part and I am deeply sorry for the upset I have caused and I offer my sincere and heartfelt apologies.
“It has been a privilege to be the representative of Her Majesty the Queen and to serve the communities of the West Midlands for the last eight years. Having given the matter deep consideration and in the light of my wife’s ill health I have decided to stand down as lord lieutenant of West Midlands to spend more time with my wife.”
