Ramanisblog

Tag: minorities

  • Why ‘Minority Muslim Sentiment is Not hurt’ By This?

    The Minority community expresses anger, hurt over a Film like Viswaroopam which in no way insults Islam or Muslims.

     

    Please read my post ‘Yes Viswaroopam Hurts, Review’

     

    Three has been no protest over the beheading of Indian Soldiers by Pakistani Soldiers.

     

    But there is protest over the hanging of a man who has attacked the Parliament of India and killed people!

     

    There is no ‘hurt’ over 6000 Indians jailed in maximum security jails in Saudi Arabia.

     

    ‘Over 6,000 Indians are currently languishing in foreign jails with the maximum of 1,691 being lodged in Saudi Arabia.   External affairs minister Salman Khurshid, replying to a question in Rajya Sabha, said a total of 6,293 Indians are imprisoned in various

    countries.

     

    He said 1,012 Indians are lodged in jails in United Arab Emirates followed by 441 in the US, 426 people in United Kingdom, 377 in neighbouring Nepal, 279 in Qatar and 225 in Kuwait.

    The number of Indians lodged in Pakistani prisons is 224 while 114 people are languishing in jails in Australia, 167 in Bangladesh, 187 in Malaysia, 52 in Iran and 27 in Afghan prisons”

    http://www.hindustantimes.com/India-news/NewDelhi/Over-6000-Indians-jailed-abroad-maximum-in-Saudi/Article1-962828.aspx

    Muslims and World
    Muslims and World

     

    There is no anger at the discriminatory and insulting treatment meted out to Indian Muslims the Middle East,Indonesia and Pakistan to name a few Countries.

     

    Why?

     

    Look at these Statistics.

    Alcohol use in predominantly Muslim regions of the world increased by 25 percent between 2005 and 2010.

    Statistics provided by research group Euromonitor International reported a constant increase in the use of alcohol in several countries where the Muslim religion, which prohibits the use of any product capable of affecting behaviour (drugs included), is dominant. Quoting the survey, Le Monde reported that between 2005 and 2010 the average consumption by the French dropped from 104.2 litres of alcohol per year to 96.7, while in the same period in the Middle East and Africa area it increased by 25%, from 11.7 billion litres to 15.2 billion.[2]

    February, 2011
    “The Gulf is an important market for us to continue growing,” said Jane Ewing, Diageo’s general manager for the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region. The London-based maker of Johnnie Walker whisky and Smirnoff vodka posted a 16 per cent rise in regional net sales last year [2010] and expects sales to double in the next five years in the MENA region. The Gulf Arab region alone accounted for 44 per cent of Diageo’s total sales in MENA, with the United Arab Emirates and Lebanon being its two largest markets.[3]

    March, 2011
    According to the study [cited by the Alriyadyh Arabic language daily], Arab countries spend more than $10 billion on Viagra and other anti-impotence medicines every year and that Saudi Arabia [ranked sixth largest consumer of sex drugs] alone spends over $1.5 billion [10 times more than Russia although the population in Russia is more than 10 times the Saudis]. It is followed by Egypt and the UAE, which spend about $one billion and $500 million respectively.[4]
    While alcohol consumption is supposedly forbidden, the Muslim world has seen nearly double the increase in alcohol consumption in the past decade, according to a new study.Across the Islamic world, The Economist magazine said, consumption is on the rise, with an increase of some 72 percent between 2001 and 2011.

    “I believe it 100 percent,” said Egyptian lawyer Ahmed, who regularly joins his friends at a bar after work for a beer.

    “We just like to enjoy ourselves and this whole religion thing has not been something that hinders us,” he told Bikyamasr.com.

    Surprisingly, the Islamic world’s increase in boozing has been as the rest of the world has only grown in its alcohol consumption by some 30 percent.

    The magazine, in its report on the new figures, said that the “rise [in alcohol-sales in the Middle East] is unlikely to be accounted for by non-Muslims and foreigners alone.”

    Muslims are just as likely to partake in drinking as their non-Muslim counterparts. Granted, there are some Muslims who maintain abstinence to drinking, but the magazine and others believe Muslims have had a direct role in the rise of alcohol.

    Although a taboo in many Muslim countries, more so in places like Iran, Saudi Arabia, Libya and Pakistan where it is legally banned, drinking is still commonplace.

    In other places, such as Lebanon, Turkey, Indonesia, Malaysia and Egypt it is legal to consume alcohol and bars are often crowded.
    . . .

    While there are some countries where drinking is lower, overall drinking is becoming a common part of many lives in the Islamic world, from Morocco to Indonesia.

    Children

    • 4 out of 5 Middle-Eastern women are sexually abused between the ages of 3 and 6 by family members.
    • More than half of all Yemeni girls are married before reaching puberty.
    • About 1 in 10 pregnancies in the Arab world ends in abortion. In Pakistan every 6th pregnancy is terminated.
    • 94% of Yemeni children (2-14 yrs) subjected to violence from a parent or guardian. (read more)

    Crime & Prejudice

    • 2011 Pew study finds Muslims are more “phobic” of non-Muslims than the non-Muslims are “Islamophobic” of Muslims.
    • According to FBI 2008 statistics, anti-Muslim incidents in the US are dropping and only account for 1.3% of all hate crimes.
    • Jewish victims of hate crimes in the US outnumber Muslim victims by a 10-1 ratio.
    • Anti-Christian hate crime incidents outnumber anti-Muslim incidents in the US. (read more)

    Free Speech

    • Turkey has more journalists in prison than any other country in the world, almost double that of China and Iran.
    • 40% of Indonesian Muslims say they would use violence against those blaspheming Islam.
    • 78% of British Muslims support punishing people who publish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad.
    • Since 1990, 52 people accused of blasphemy in Pakistan have been extra-judicially killed by lynch mobs. (read more)

    Homosexuals

    • As of 1999 in Iran, more than 4000 lesbians and gays had been executed since the 1979 Islamic revolution.
    • Two thirds of all reported incidents of anti-gay violence in Amsterdam are by Muslim youths.
    • A 2009 Gallup survey could not find a single UK Muslim who approved of homosexuality. (read more)

    • Pornography

      • Google survey finds mostly Muslim states seek access to sex-related websites (they rank 1, 2, 4, 5, 7 & 8 in the top 10).
      • Iranians made the highest number of visits to “immoral sites” on Ashura Day.
      • Approximately 2 million online users watch pornographic films each minute in Turkey.
      • Pakistan ranked No. 1 in searches for “child sex,” “animal sex,” “rape sex,” “camel sex,” “dog sex,” “rape video.” (read more)

      • Scripture

        • There are 164 Jihad verses in the Qur’an & nearly 500 verses (roughly 1 out of every 12) that speak of Hell.
        • Practicing Muslims recite anti-Semitic & anti-Christian rhetoric at least 17 times a day, and over 5,000 times a year.
        • Compared to Mein Kampf, the non-abrograted Medinan verses of the Qur’an contain more than 2x the amount of anti-Jewish text.
        • 122 peaceful Qur’anic verses have been abrogated by the Sword verse (9:5) and Fighting verse (9:29). (read more)

        Slavery

        • Africans taken (or died in the process of being taken) as slaves by Muslims is estimated to be higher than 140 million.
        • 1.25 million white European Christians were captured and sold into the Muslim slave trade between the 16th and 19th century.
        • The Islamic slave trade still flourishes in Muslim countries. There are over half a million slaves in Mauritania alone.
        • Christian Solidarity International (CSI) has liberated over 80,000 Sudanese slaves taken captive by Arab Muslims. (read more)

        Women

        • In terms of cultural/tribal/religious danger to women, 4 of the 5 most dangerous countries are Muslim majorities.
        • Egyptian women are sexually harassed 7 times every 200 meters and well over two-thirds are harassed on a daily basis.
        • The Maldives, an Islamic country with a 100% Muslim population, has the highest divorce rate in the world.
        • Egyptian study contradict widely held belief that unveiled women are more likely to suffer harassment than veiled ones. (read more)
    • http://wikiislam.net/wiki/Muslim_Statistics

  • Bigotry In The Indian Premier League And The Bigger Picture

    The writer very cleverly abuses India in the guise of trying to bemoan Pakistan’s current status.Yes, IPL incident is a deliberate snub
    The reason has been obliquely hinted, that nobody wants to have a Pakistani in the team , taking into consideration the situation prevailing over there.No cricketing reason whatsoever.
    No doubt Pakistani players are exciting to watch.Then you can nor be sure whether they will take part in the competition as and when demanded by the franchisees for their country is in such a shape that their President does not know who is running the country or what will happen to Pakistan or himself.Under the circumstances, it is prudent on the part of the franchisees not to have bought any of them, for we are talking of investments and returns , not charity.
    Added to this is the PCB’s propensity of recalling players, players in match fixing scandals, dope scandal.
    Even if it were to be because of souring relations between the two countries,what is wrong in India treating these players as persona non grata?Let Pakistan understand their chaotic , region and world destroying policies have a price.
    many over there will no doubt feign ignorance over Pakistan’s malicious acts against India.
    If you close your eyes, world shall not cease to exist.
    You do so, as has been proved, at your own peril.
    Further, Pakistan declares that Pakistan parliamentary panel will not be coming to India as a retort.
    You are Welcome to take such an action.
    Keep on doing things like this with all countries,say for example with Sri Lanka whose cricketers were attacked in Pakistan;US, because it is ‘Satan’;Bangladesh ,for it seceded from you;UK,EU and Japan for they are cordial with India.
    Please be content with China and North Korea: from the former you can get Nuclear Technology and later give Pakistan away in a platter;with North Korea to whom you can sell nuclear secrets.
    Remember, sins of rulers visit their subjects.

    Story:
    What I am about to write may hurt my Indian friends and I am sorry. There are crooks, cranks and madmen in every country including India and there is no exaggeration in what I write. I am merely writing from the heart as I always do.

    Much has been said about the Indian Premier League’s decision to leave out Pakistani cricketers in the year that Pakistan is the defending World Twenty20 Cricket Champion. Indians have come up with the stupidest excuses – excuses that cannot and should not make sense to any reasonable person. But then we are not dealing with reasonable people.

    Forgive me for being harsh, but the truth is that Indians today are drunk with power and acting like the world’s newly rich. All of a sudden a hitherto mal-nourished and largely backward people through no fault of their own, mired in religious superstition and other such meandering parochialisms, find themselves sitting on a lot of wealth (or so they think) primarily – though not completely- because they have perfected the fine art and exact science of geometric population multiplication. In the process they have learnt to use terms that they have not arrived at organically – secularism, democracy, economy- etc but as events repeatedly show are clever ploys to claim a stake in the world. A few hours after the world trade center bombing, I ran into a few Indians in New Jersey and shared my feelings of profound sorrow with them. They responded with one line “America is finished now- India is the next world super power”- Again and Again I ran into Indians who repeated the same line to me . To me this response sums up the Indian uber-nationalist psyche for better or for worse. Ofcourse this is not to suggest that there aren’t any fine Indians- many manyIndians are genuine humanists and liberal secularists. They are not driving Indian policy however.

    When Mumbai happened (and Pakistan mind you has had its fairshare of Mumbais too- many of which can be traced to India as well according to Pakistan’s government), India’s intelligentsia on a power-trip began to strategise how to hurt Pakistan and destroy it. These are not random Zaid Hamid like offbase characters or Kashifiat type Jamaat-e-Islami crazies who are laughable at best. Take a look at this brilliant professor at the IIM who wrote this ridiculous piece . India’s crook, cranks and madmen are ordinary respectable members of society. It is this thinking that is behind IPL franchises opting out of choosing Pakistani players. (One must take heart from the fact that Indian captain said in 2009 WT20 that India would win the tournament because all its cricketers play in the IPL. Pakistan ended up winning the tournament without even a single player playing in the IPL that year).

    The irony is that many Pakistanis don’t understand just how far we have squandered our natural advantage over India. If there was ever a country in the subcontinent that had the potential of being a first world country, it was Pakistan. Pakistan is a naturally resource-rich country which is also at the crossroads of world’s energy and commercial transport hubs. Despite our many failures, we have a growing middle class, a free media and a growing consciousness which will transform Pakistan into a modern democracy. We do however need to throw out this unnatural obsession with religion. We should also sue for peace with India but as the IPL has proved abundantly, we need to look in all directions.

    If we can put our house in order , Pakistan has the potential and ability to outdo India in every field and stand. Everyone other than Pakistanis themselves knows it. Indians know it and this is why you find so many Indian trolls baiting and abusing Pakistanis on Pakistani websites. In the information age – catching up will never be the problem but first we have to make up our minds. Do we want to live respectably with our heads held high? That would mean hard choices – one of which is to do away with our own crooks, cranks and madmen who have kept us mired in pipedreams and shadows.

    The question is who is going to bell the cat? No instead we shall continue to persecute our minorities, let the mullahs lead us astray and watch ridiculous Indian fillums like 3 Idiots as a national past-time.
    http://pakteahouse.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/bigotry-in-the-indian-premier-league-and-the-bigger-picture/#comment-25549

  • My compatriots’ vote to ban minarets is fuelled by fear

    Fact is Muslims never integrate into the society in which they live, excepting in Muslim countries.It is too much of a simplification of the issue that Europe has been waiting for an issue.No.It is due to terrorism unleashed in the Name of Islam and also the transnational loyalty of Muslims..People who follow Islam,,can stop both acts if they take concrete steps by openly ostracizing terror groups,instead of being ambivalent.
    Remember, as you sow, so you reap.
    Story:

    The Swiss have voted not against towers, but Muslims. Across Europe, we must stand up to the flame-fanning populists

    By Tariq Ramadan guardian.co.uk, Sunday 29 November 2009

    It wasn’t meant to go this way. For months we had been told that the efforts to ban the construction of minarets in Switzerland were doomed. The last surveys suggested around 34% of the Swiss population would vote for this shocking initiative. Last Friday, in a meeting organised in Lausanne, more than 800 students, professors and citizens were in no doubt that the referendum would see the motion rejected, and instead were focused on how to turn this silly initiative into a more positive future.

    Today that confidence was shattered, as 57% of the Swiss population did as the Union Démocratique du Centre (UDC) had urged them to – a worrying sign that this populist party may be closest to the people’s fears and expectations. For the first time since 1893 an initiative that singles out one community, with a clear discriminatory essence, has been approved in Switzerland. One can hope that the ban will be rejected at the European level, but that makes the result no less alarming. What is happening in Switzerland, the land of my birth?

    There are only four minarets in Switzerland, so why is it that it is there that this initiative has been launched? My country, like many in Europe, is facing a national reaction to the new visibility of European Muslims. The minarets are but a pretext – the UDC wanted first to launch a campaign against the traditional Islamic methods of slaughtering animals but were afraid of testing the sensitivity of Swiss Jews, and instead turned their sights on the minaret as a suitable symbol.

    Every European country has its specific symbols or topics through which European Muslims are targeted. In France it is the headscarf or burka; in Germany, mosques; in Britain, violence; cartoons in Denmark; homosexuality in the Netherlands – and so on. It is important to look beyond these symbols and understand what is really happening in Europe in general and in Switzerland in particular: while European countries and citizens are going through a real and deep identity crisis, the new visibility of Muslims is problematic – and it is scary.

    At the very moment Europeans find themselves asking, in a globalising, migratory world, “What are our roots?”, “Who are we?”, “What will our future look like?”, they see around them new citizens, new skin colours, new symbols to which they are unaccustomed.

    Over the last two decades Islam has become connected to so many controversial debates – violence, extremism, freedom of speech, gender discrimination, forced marriage, to name a few – it is difficult for ordinary citizens to embrace this new Muslim presence as a positive factor. There is a great deal of fear and a palpable mistrust. Who are they? What do they want? And the questions are charged with further suspicion as the idea of Islam being an expansionist religion is intoned. Do these people want to Islamise our country?

    The campaign against the minarets was fuelled by just these anxieties and allegations. Voters were drawn to the cause by a manipulative appeal to popular fears and emotions. Posters featured a woman wearing a burka with the minarets drawn as weapons on a colonised Swiss flag. The claim was made that Islam is fundamentally incompatible with Swiss values. (The UDC has in the past demanded my citizenship be revoked because I was defending Islamic values too openly.) Its media strategy was simple but effective. Provoke controversy wherever it can be inflamed. Spread a sense of victimhood among the Swiss people: we are under siege, the Muslims are silently colonising us and we are losing our very roots and culture. This strategy worked. The Swiss majority are sending a clear message to their Muslim fellow citizens: we do not trust you and the best Muslim for us is the Muslim we cannot see.

    Who is to be blamed? I have been repeating for years to Muslim people that they have to be positively visible, active and proactive within their respective western societies. In Switzerland, over the past few months, Muslims have striven to remain hidden in order to avoid a clash. It would have been more useful to create new alliances with all these Swiss organisations and political parties that were clearly against the initiative. Swiss Muslims have their share of responsibility but one must add that the political parties, in Europe as in Switzerland have become cowed, and shy from any courageous policies towards religious and cultural pluralism. It is as if the populists set the tone and the rest follow. They fail to assert that Islam is by now a Swiss and a European religion and that Muslim citizens are largely “integrated”. That we face common challenges, such as unemployment, poverty and violence – challenges we must face together. We cannot blame the populists alone – it is a wider failure, a lack of courage, a terrible and narrow-minded lack of trust in their new Muslim citizens.

    Tariq Ramadan, a Swiss citizen, is professor of contemporary Islamic studies at Oxford University. His most recent book is What I Believe.
    http://pakteahouse.wordpress.com/2009/12/02/my-compatriots-vote-to-ban-minarets-is-fuelled-by-fear/#comment-22282