Author: mara.ahmed

A town in upstate New York is trying to force a local Muslim religious community to dig up a small cemetery on its property and never bury anyone there again because it says it’s illegal.

“What we would not want is an unauthorized cemetery,” says Bob McCarthy, town supervisor of the Delaware County town of Sidney, population 5,993. “We’re taking care of a bunch of cemeteries, and they just came in and buried the bodies, and didn’t go through…there’s no funding there, it’s not a standard kind of deal, and it’s going to become a liability to the town.”

So what steps have the Muslims skipped? “I don’t know what the exact law is,” he says. Full article.

there we go again. a military coup in the offing? the pakistani army is owned by america. i guess obama is not satisfied with just bombing people at random with drones. maybe he needs something more spectacular – something that’ll keep the focus off of a morally and financially rudderless empire.

The military, preoccupied by a war against militants and reluctant to assume direct responsibility for the economic crisis, has made clear it is not eager to take over the government, as it has many times before, military officials and politicians said.

But the government’s performance since the floods, which have left 20 million people homeless and the nation dependent on handouts from skeptical foreign donors, has laid bare the deep underlying tensions between military and civilian leaders.

American officials, too, say it has left them increasingly disillusioned with Mr. Zardari, a deeply unpopular president who was elected two and a half years ago on a wave of sympathy after the assassination of his wife, former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Full article.

Israeli commandos have boarded and seized a Gaza-bound aid ship of Jewish activists just miles off the Gaza coast. The activists were attempting to deliver a symbolic load of medicine, a water-purifying kit and other humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip. The Jewish Boat to Gaza was the latest attempt to break the blockade since Israel’s deadly attack on an aid flotilla in May. In the West Bank, Jewish settlers resumed building settlements on Monday one day after Israel refused to extend its partial freeze on settlement expansion. More here.

The president of the European Union of Football Associations (UAFA), Michel Platini, has threatened to annul Israel’s membership to the union because of the restrictions it imposes on Palestinian football players. He added; “We accepted them in Europe and furnished them the conditions for membership and they must respect the letter of the laws and international regulations otherwise there is no justification for them to remain in Europe. He continued; “Israel must choose between allowing Palestinian sport to continue and prosper or be forced to face the consequences for their behaviour.” Full article.

speak-out against government harassment of activists, rochester, ny, september 27, 2010 – photograph by al brundage.

I heard Aisha’s story from her a few weeks before the image of her face was displayed all over the world. She told me that her father-in-law caught up with her after she ran away, and took a knife to her on his own; village elders later approved, but the Taliban didn’t figure at all in this account. The Time story, however, attributes Aisha’s mutilation to a husband under orders of a Talib commander, thereby transforming a personal story, similar to those of countless women in Afghanistan today, into a portent of things to come for all women if the Taliban return to power. (Ann Jones – The Nation) Full article.

As head of state, president Dilma Rousseff would outrank Angela Merkel, Germany’s Chancellor, and Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State: her enormous country of 200 million people is revelling in its new oil wealth. Brazil’s growth rate, rivalling China’s, is one that Europe and Washington can only envy. Her widely predicted victory in next Sunday’s presidential poll will be greeted with delight by millions. It marks the final demolition of the “national security state”, an arrangement that conservative governments in the US and Europe once regarded as their best artifice for limiting democracy and reform. It maintained a rotten status quo that kept a vast majority in poverty in Latin America while favouring their rich friends. […] Ms Rousseff, the daughter of a Bulgarian immigrant to Brazil and his schoolteacher wife, has benefited from being, in effect, the prime minister of the immensely popular President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, the former union leader. But, with a record of determination and success (which includes appearing to have conquered lymphatic cancer), this wife, mother and grandmother will be her own woman. The polls say she has built up an unassailable lead – of more than 50 per cent compared with less than 30 per cent – over her nearest rival, an uninspiring man of the centre called Jose Serra. Few doubt that she will be installed in the Alvorada presidential palace in Brasilia in January. Full article.

for all my friends who have asked me about kashmir.

Maintaining bookmarks is a wonderful practice. But when one has to make a selection of 20 from hundreds of bookmarked items, not many of which you would remember anyway, it doesn’t seem to be a very wonderful task at hand. It is tedious. One has to go through every second item to remember what on earth it was about.

Of all the things that I do, I had been maintaining a bookmark folder dedicated to articles on Kashmir. I, initially, thought of compiling a list of 10 articles that all non-Kashmiris must read. But as I spent more time on it, I realised 10 would be too few — so 20 it is. Almost all have been written by Indians.

To me, the Internet is also about sharing. So here’s my Select 20 about Kashmir. Full article.

As part of a sting against anti-war activists suspected of connections to terrorism, on September 24 the FBI raided six homes in Minneapolis-St. Paul and elsewhere in the country. At the Hard Times Cafe in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood, we interviewed peace activist Mick Kelly while the FBI searched his apartment above the cafe.

ann wright spoke about “afghanistan: the need to dissent” yesterday here in rochester. she started her lecture with the FBI raids on the homes of american peace activists (they were looking for links to foreign terrorist organizations) and aafia siddiqui’s 86 yr sentence. “these r dark times” she said.

disgusting, disgusting, disgusting. americans have totally lost the moral high ground, nay the mere ability, to talk about justice anywhere in the world!

Dr Aafia Siddiqui has been sentenced to 86 years of imprisonment by the federal court in Manhattan on Thursday, for allegedly firing at US troops in Afghanistan. A jury found Aafia Siddiqui guilty in February of trying to kill U.S. agents and military officers, after Afghan police detained her in 2008. During Siddiqui’s three-week trial, FBI agents and U.S. soldiers testified that when they went to interrogate Siddiqui, she snatched an unattended assault rifle. They claimed that the neuroscientist allegedly shot at them after abusing America. Full article.