RSS for Dalit head priests in temples
This is a fantastic initiative from the RSS. This will go a long way in achieving Hindu unity and erasing Casteist boundaries that the enemies of Hinduism have used for the last 1000 years.
Times of India reports:
RSS for Dalit head priests in temples
[ 30 Oct, 2006 1835hrs ISTINDIATIMES NEWS NETWORK ]
NEW DELHI: In what could raise eyebrows in several circles, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh mouthpiece Panchjanya has suggested that Dalits and other backward classes be trained and appointed as head priests at major temples in the country.
An editorial in the latest issue of the weekly exhorts Hindus to come together by erasing caste lines. The article, “Muslim vote politics on the banks of the Ganga”, says Hindus are responsible for the sad plight of their major places of worship. The overt implication -- that a lack of unity among the Hindu community has led to its customs and traditions being run to the ground.
The Panchjanya criticises a reported Iftar held by Uttar Pradesh chief minister Mulayam Singh Yadav at the Har ki Pauri ghat in Hardwar, a place held sacred by the majority community, earlier this month. That elections are round the corner in UP is pertinent, it points out. In this context, it also refers to “secular parties celebrating the arrest of Shankaracharya on Diwali night”.
“The time has come to strengthen Hindu unity and ensure that along with those priests who are born Brahmins, Dalits and other backward classes are trained and made priests. For this, the entire Hindu community must come together,” the editorial exhorts, promising the participation of swayamsevaks in such an exercise.
Apart from taking pot shots at “secular parties”, the article talks at length about religious tolerance that exists among most communities and blames vote politics for incidents that provoke extreme reaction by hurting the sentiments of one or the other community.
Allah For Sale; Mullahs making money
Muslim religious and political leaders have been keeping Indian Muslims uneducated and backward.
As long as they remain illiterate and spend all their time in the mosques and madrassas, praying five times a day instead of spending time on acquiring true education in science technology and the arts, and remain easily excitable brainless morons who can be sent into battle to riot on the streets at the slightest excuse (like the publication of cartoons in far-away Denmark, or some statement by the Pope in the Vatican), they are an useful tool used by the Muslim religious leaders and their politician partners (the so-called "secular" politicians of Congress, Janata Dal, Samajwadi Party, Rashtriya Janata Dal, Communist parties, etc) to acieve their own political goals.
Now, some of these Imams and Mullahs have been caught selling fatwas. Will Indian Muslims wake up and stop blindly trusting these criminals who claim to speak for them ?
Hindustan Times reports:
Sting operation shows clerics issuing fatwas for money
Press Trust of India
New Delhi, September 17, 2006
A TV channel on Sunday aired purported footage of Muslim clerics in the national capital and Uttar Pradesh issuing fatwas for a payment, triggering condemnation from community leaders and protests in Meerut.
The clerics allegedly issued fatwas on a variety of subjects, including the use of credit cards and camera phones by Muslims, acting in films, and watching television, said the report on Star News that carried out a sting operation along with Cobrapost in Delhi and Meerut.
One of the clerics, Ahmed Nadir Al Qasmi, an official of Delhi-based Islamic Fiqh Academy, was shown allegedly accepting Rs 5,000 for issuing a fatwa.
The footage also purportedly showed Maulana Imran, a cleric from Meerut, allegedly demanding Rs 50,000 for issuing five fatwas against the wearing of jeans by girls in Muslim-run institutes and the teaching of English in madrassas.
In Meerut, students of a madrassa staged a protest against the clerics, saying the incident had "hurt" the community. Muslim leaders convened a meeting of clerics to decide whether action should be taken against those named in the sting operation.
In a statement, Islamic Fiqh Academy general secretary Maulana Khalid Saifullah Rehmani expressed regret at the incident. He said the body had launched a probe and would take action against anyone found guilty. Ahmed Nadir Al Qasmi had been restrained from issuing any more fatwas, he said.
Rehmani said the academy was not responsible for Qasmi's actions. He said the academy did not charge anything for fatwas, which were issued only after they had been vetted by at least two clerics.
Ex-Prime Minister H. D. Deve Gowda's hooligan grandson
India is a land of a large number of civilized and peace-loving people ruled by a small minority of thieves, murderers, and hooligans. What a shame.
Times of India reports:
'I am the CM's son, I will get this hotel blown up'
BANGALORE: Politicians’ sons can’t seem to stay out of trouble. Karnataka CM H D Kumaraswamy’s son Nikhil Gowda joined Rahul Mahajan and Manu Sharma as a member of the influential brat-pack when he and his friends chucked beer bottles and smashed up a Bangalore hotel at 3.30 am on Thursday after they were denied a meal at that hour.
Nikhil, a college dropout, Hummer-driving 19-year-old fastlane grandson of humble farmer ex-PM H D Deve Gowda, and his two friends — all reportedly under the influence of alcohol — allegedly attacked staffers of Hotel Empire International on Church Street after they refused to serve them. They sustained injuries when the staffers retaliated and had to be taken to hospital for treatment.
"I am the CM's son and I'll get this hotel blown up and closed," Nikhil was quoted as saying by one of the hotel employees who spoke on condition of anonymity. The employees did not budge. This led to an altercation between Nikhil and friends, and the hotel staff.
Police Commissioner N Achuta Rao told TOI: "A complaint has been registered at the Cubbon Park police station by Nikhil, son of the CM, against the hotel staffers. The hotelier also registered a complaint that unknown persons ransacked his premises and assaulted his staffers."
According to Cubbon Park police station records, at around 3.30 am, an inebriated Nikhil and his friends, Sayed and Manjunath, went to the hotel which remains open beyond midnight. With beer bottles in hand, they entered the restaurant which was already closed for customers. The staffers were cleaning the premises.
Lallu and Rabri insult the National Anthem
Lallu Prasad Yadav and his wife Rabri Devi placidly sat at an official Republic Day ceremony in Bihar on Jan 26, 2005 while the National Anthem of India was being played and everybody else was standing at respectful attention.
The legal process has failed to bring them to Justice for this crime of insulting the Nation.
And the people of India seem to hve conveniently forgotten the entire affair. About 18 months have passed since. Soon 2 years will be up.
Well, people with no memory don't get Justice.
The mainstream media has not mentioned this affair in the last year or so. Why ? Because they think nobody is interested.
Will we let them continue thinking so ?
An insult to India is an insult to your mother, to my mother. If someone insults your mother will you sit quietly and then just forget ? Not if you were the only son, or the only daughter.
With India having a billion sons and daughters, everybody thinks somebody else will take care of problems, so nobody does anything.
What an irony. A mother with a billion sons and daughters has nobody to stand up for her honour.
What a shame.
A close look at the worldwide Islamo-Fascist terror network III
In two earlier posts I commented on an article from Time Magazine on the Pakistani link to the world-wide Islamo-Fascist terror network and an article from the New York Times on British Muslim terrorist of Pakistani descent Rashid Rauf, who was the kingpin of a plot to blow up 10 airplanes from UK en route to USA in August 2006.
You can find the previous articles here and here. In what follows is another in-depth report from Time Magazine the terrorist-training infrastructure in Pakistani-occupied-Kashmir.
The West now sees what India has faced for over 17 years now: Radical Islamic terrorism directed at Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sufis, Parsis, and moderate Muslims (those who do not believe in the extreme violence preached in the Koran).
Time Magazine reports:
Where Some British Extremists Go On Holiday
On the pretext of visiting relatives, promising recruits are sent to Pakistan-administered Kashmir for training and advice
A Pakistani man walks in front of the abandoned ancestral home of Rashid Rauf, alleged key planner behind an airline bombings plot, in the village of Haveli Begal in the Mirpur District of Pakistani Administered Kashmir.
Posted Monday, Aug. 21, 2006
Qazi Liaqat Zamir, a relative of airline-terror suspect Rashid Rauf, stands next to a brand-new Jeep 4x4 outside a 6-bedroom house in Haveli Beghal village. The house, a technicolor confection of terraced concrete, is surrounded by several acres of empty land, and two Toyota Corollas are parked outside. Completing the picture of prosperity, Zamir pets a thoroughbred greyhound standing by his feet. Zamir smiles looking out over his property, and with a sweeping gesture of his hand says, "All this is because of England." England, of course, is where his relative Rauf, now in custody in Pakistan, is suspected of plotting a massive terror attack along with 11 other suspects charged Monday in Britain. The plot has thrown a sharp spotlight on the relationship between this particular part of Pakistan-administered Kashmir and its British-based diaspora.
Zamir, 55, has only been to England twice, but his son lives in Birmingham and sends back monthly remittances from the general store he runs. Those remittances have built Zamir a life he could never have dreamed of as a kid, allowing him to indulge in hobbies few Pakistanis can afford — like dog racing. On his last visit to see his son, he purchased a prize greyhound, whose registered name — Beer Rebel Heaven — Zamir struggles to pronounce. "I just call him Jaggu," he says, meaning powerful. Many Pakistanis have dogs, but few treat them as pets, as Islam considers dogs to be unclean. Things are a little different here in the Mirpur district of Kashmir. "Here people are used to pets, just like in England," he says.
Zamir estimates that 99% of the people in his village of 1,600 have been to England. The rest of the district of Mirpur is no different. Often called Little Britain, Mirpur has been exporting its residents to the factories of England for more than 100 years. But ties to the ancestral villages remain strong, and every year Mirpur is inundated by a reverse flow of visiting family members. The large influx of second- and third-generation Pakistani immigrants coming from Britain every summer to visit relatives would certainly provide a cover story for any radical elements looking to huddle with terror chiefs in Pakistan.
But Lahore-based analyst Hasan Askari Rizvi believes that radicalization could not occur during a one-month visit with family. "These people aren't coming to Pakistan and getting radicalized, they were radicalized before they came. You don't just show up at a madrassah, spend a few weeks there and become a jihadi. It doesn't work that way," he says. "Here in Pakistan their commitment to radicalism will be reinforced, but the germs are already in place." It is back in the U.K. that such visitors are provided with contacts and introductions to terrorist cells or extremist groups in Pakistan, who can increase their own level of militancy and training. "Even if I knew where to find them, it's not like I could just show up at the door of one of these terrorist cells and ask for a course in making a bomb. I would need references and contacts to do that," says Rizvi.
British extremist groups will often send a particularly promising recruit to Pakistan, on the pretext of visiting relatives, to link up with contacts there. "So they are visiting their relatives, and they say they are leaving for a few weeks to visit friends in Karachi. Instead they go meet up with one of the groups that they were given references to," Rizvi says. The purpose of such visits, he adds, is more likely to be ideological reinforcement than military training. "Yes, you could conceivably learn to make a bomb here more easily than in the U.K., but what are you really going to get in a two-week visit? These visits are about reinforcing beliefs, getting advice, maybe a blessing from an extremist leader," says Rizvi.
Muhammad Amir Rana, author of A to Z of Jihadi Organizations in Pakistan, takes a different view, claiming that explosives training is exactly what visiting foreigners are getting from Pakistan-based cells. "We have seen that the foreigners aren't interested in battlefield training, they are only interested in making explosives," he says, referring to the research he does with the Pakistan Institute for Peace Studies in Lahore. "You can download bomb-making instructions from the Internet, but when you don't have practice, it's still very difficult to do. So you come to Pakistan for the experience side to learn how to do a perfect job." Unlike England, he says, Pakistan has many desolate areas where a trainee could test bomb or three without attracting attention.
Not much attracts attention in Mirpur, a place of cultural confusion. Multi-tiered mansions of pink marble and stucco line dirt paths; expensive cars wind through potholed streets and park in front of the British Airways office in Mirpur town center. Residents speak with thick British regional accents. "There are more mansions in Mirpur than there are in Islamabad," boasts Ashfaq Hamid, a friend of the Birmingham-based Rauf family who has come back to Haveli Beghal to build his own mansion. The 47-year-old taxi driver plans to retire here, in the town where he was born. Before that though, he would like to bring his three sons, aged 16, 18 and 20, for a visit. "I want them to learn more about their culture, about their religion," he says. Hamid moved to Birmingham with his parents when he was 12.
He speaks of the family of the detained terror-suspect Rashid Rauf as "very likable, straight, genuine people." The last time he saw Rauf was at the funeral of his uncle, stabbed to death in what was said to be a family dispute — an incident that reportedly prompted Rauf to flee Britain. "I knew him as a very good kid, from a good family. I never heard anything bad about him. When I heard the news I was shocked." He doesn't believe that the Rauf family had anything to do with the bomb plot.
When asked whether he feared that his own children might become radicalized in England, he says he's more worried about them falling prey to Western bad habits. "My wife watches them 24/7. She worries that if she lets them go out they may mix with bad society. That makes problems for us."
... Read more !
US Afghanistan expert speaks out on Pak-sponsored terror
For close to three decades, ever since Pakistan lost the 1971 War, Pakistan has carried out a vicious campaign of Islamic terror against innocent Indian men women and children.
This has continued in a 1000-year-old tradition of Radical Islamic violence against Hindus and Buddhists that has led to the complete destruction of Buddhist and Hindu civilizations in Gandhara (Afghanistan), Central Asia, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Kashmir.
Inside Pakistan itself, a 50-year campaign of Government-tolerated torture, kidnappings, murders, extra-judicial killings, forced evictions, intimidation, and forced conversions have reduced minority Hindus from 18% of Pakistan's population in 1950 to a vanishingly-small 0.1% today.
Pakistan has managed to skillfully lie about its Crimes Against Humanity inside its territory and in India (and more recently, in Afghanistan) for several decades, but at last the truth is coming out.
American expert on Afghanistan Sarah Chayes exposes the truth about Pakistan-sponsored worldwide Islamic terror in an interview to Rediff:
The Rediff Interview/Sarah Chayes
'Osama is not in Pakistan'
October 06, 2006
When Sarah Chayes entered Afghanistan in October 2001, she was a reporter for the respected US radio station, National Public Radio, on assignment to cover the last stand of the Taliban from their stronghold of Kandahar.
But as her understanding of Afghanistan and its people and the US military occupation grew, she was drawn more deeply into the unfolding drama to rebuild the devastated nation.
So overwhelming was her commitment that when her NPR stint ended in 2002, she laid down her microphone for good and accepted a position in a nonprofit agency called Afghans for Civil Society, founded by Afghan President Hamid Karzai's brother. Being based in Kandahar, she had tremendous access to key players in the postwar government and forged not only unparalleled relationships with the Karzai family, but also with tribal leaders in the erstwhile Taliban heartland, the US military and diplomatic brass, and with leading figures in local government.
The Punishment of Virtue: Inside Afghanistan After the Taliban is her gripping and dramatic account of history in the making with all of the perverse turn of events of the US government and armed forces aiding and abetting the return to power of corrupt militia commanders and warlords, and the resurgence of the Taliban supported once again by Pakistan.
In an exclusive interview on the 5th anniversary of the invasion of Afghanistan, Sarah Chayes told Rediff India Abroad Managing Editor Aziz Haniffa that Pakistan's support for the Taliban never stopped, and describes Washington as pretty naive to have assumed that it would. The first of a five-part interview:
In your book, you strongly criticise the United States for not coming down hard on Pakistan, which you say continues to actively support the Taliban. Are you convinced that Pakistan has gone back to arming and sponsoring the Taliban?
It never stopped. And, it was pretty naive of the American government to assume that it would stop. This has been their national policy for the last 30 years to exploit an extreme religion to advance a regional, tactical agenda.
I don't believe Pakistan is behind 9/11, but I do think that for 30 years they have been using religious extremism in one form or another in their kind of power game in the region, and I don't think they ever stopped.
Even though there seems to be an appreciation in the Bush administration and the US Congress that Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf seems to be running with the hares and hunting with the hounds, officials seem to imply that they can only go so far in trying to come down hard on him because Musharraf is the only game in town. I believe he is playing a very clever game in that regard and that's exactly how he wants them to feel.
I live in Afghanistan and I am not the Pakistan person in the US State Department. But if I were in the American government, I would work very hard on developing an alternative. It's not that I would remove Musharraf or bomb Pakistan. That's not what I mean. I don't believe in violent regime change every time you get into an argument with somebody.
But I would really seriously staff up -- it's the American expression and it means, you put your staff to work for coming up with a new policy. I would deeply research how if we decided to be tough on Pakistan rather than roll over basically, what it would look like? What would the likely response be? How would we counter that likely response? Who else inside Pakistan has something interesting to say about the direction their country might move forward in? I would like to see the American government do that and I haven't seen it.
This is the answer I have always received, that, well, who else is there? So that means they are not working on alternative types of policy. It doesn't mean that you support somebody else instead of Musharraf, but what would it look like if we started tying benefits that we are offering to Pakistan to really concrete results, not just on the Al Qaeda front, but on the Taliban front. Because that is how they (Pakistan) are buying the United States off. It is by turning over Al Qaeda operatives.
While he visited Washington, (Pakistan President) Pervez Musharraf explained his agreement with tribal leaders in North Waziristan and said that President Bush is on board with it. What do you make of this agreement that has left a lot of people concerned that he seems to have cut a deal with people who might be sheltering Osama bin Laden, other Al Qaeda leaders and also the leadership of the Taliban?
We say, from a distance, tribal leaders, but what does that mean? Which ones? Who? In Kandahar, I would understand what an agreement like that would mean, but for Waziristan, I don't. The real problem in Afghanistan is not in Waziristan. Nobody who is doing anything bad to Afghanistan is sitting around in Waziristan. It has never been real. There have never been any major Taliban figures in North Waziristan.
I don't think Osama bin Laden is up there either. I believe what is happening in North Waziristan has everything to do with Pakistan. His little genie has gotten out of the bottle there and so there actually are extremist or jihadis up there who are a menace to Pakistan.
I don't think Osama bin Laden is in Pakistan. I think all of that is a smokescreen -- but that's my own opinion -- and the people who are troublesome to Afghanistan are in Quetta. They are not in caves. They are sitting around in apartments and driving cars that are often licensed with ISI plates in Quetta. So Waziristan is like a red herring.
Is there any chance that perhaps Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri and others could be in Quetta?
Not Osama. I think Pakistan has been using Al Qaeda figures as a way of buying off America. If you think about it regionally, they have no reason to like Al Qaeda because the Taliban allowed them to run Afghanistan to get this strategic weight vis-a-vis India. They (Pakistan) basically ran Afghanistan though the Taliban. Not perfectly, but more or less. So that gave them the backyard that they wanted.
Osama bin Laden comes in 1996, and the Pakistani government was probably delighted to get some more money and some more seasoned fighters in Afghanistan. But then Osama bin Laden does 9/11, and the US comes and kicks the Taliban out of Afghanistan. In a way, it was Al Qaeda that ruined Pakistan's nice chess game. So why would they have any positive feelings about Al Qaeda? That is why he (Musharraf) has been turning Al Qaeda people once every two or three months.
What benefit would there be for them to keep Osama? That is the one thing that would make the United States really angry at them and end whatever benefit they are getting out of this alliance. So in my personal view -- I don't have any hard evidence about this -- I don't think Osama is in Pakistan. I believe he went the other way. On the other hand, all the top Taliban people are in Quetta. I know they are.
When you mean Osama went the other way, where do you think he went?
I believe he went out through Iran and is probably in Saudi Arabia or Sudan or somewhere like that. He left moving westwards, not eastwards.
The argument you are making is that if Osama were in Pakistan, it would certainly be to Musharraf's advantage to apprehend him and offer him on a platter to the US because that would really cement the US-Pakistan alliance and make Bush eternally grateful to him?
Exactly. But, the converse is also true. If the United States ever found out that he has been sitting around in Pakistan that would be the one thing that would probably likely have the US really do something punitive to Pakistan.
President Musharraf, who met with President Bush recently, has asserted that both the mujahideen and the Taliban -- at least initially -- came about because of a joint US-Pakistan effort to counter the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and to bring stability to the country.
That's true (that initially the US also supported the Taliban), but first of all, it is false to say that the Taliban were concocted to counter the Soviets. That is historically inaccurate. The person that Pakistan wanted to take over Afghanistan after the Soviet withdrawal was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and he definitely got the lion's share of the financial support during the Soviet occupation.
So what Pakistan wanted was for him to take over Afghanistan, but guess what, Afghanistan didn't want an extremist, ideological, Islamic regime and he was not able to take over. So it wasn't until 1994 that they invented the Taliban and the Soviets were gone by then.
It is really disingenuous and ahistorical to say that and the fact that that he (Musharraf) is saying it means he has something to hide. It is accurate to say that both Pakistan and the United States were seduced by extremist ideology as a counter-force to the Soviet community ideology. But after the Soviet Union didn't exist anymore, that's when Pakistan invented the Taliban. I mean, I am being schematic but that's when they got involved in creating that force.
This is the same kind of religious extremism in Kashmir they were exploiting during the Kargil crisis. If you misinterpret history that way, then it's difficult to trust the substance of what you are saying.
So it is not just to keep its finger on Afghanistan through the Taliban, but as you say in your book in quite an explosive charge, it is for some kind of strategic advantage vis-a-vis a growing India and to undermine New Delhi, which is fast becoming an influential regional power and forging this strategic partnership with Washington?
I spent some time in Pakistan, but not enough to be able to answer that in a very educated way. But why would they be interested in Afghanistan if it didn't have to do with India? I mean, fundamentally, iit seems to me from what I've read -- and you guys know more than I do --like India has always been their fundamental concern and they are only interested in Afghanistan insofar as it can give them more strategic weight vis-a-vis India.
Is Afghan President Hamid Karzai's angry assertion that Musharraf is fomenting cross-border terrorism and meddling in the affairs of Afghanistan totally justifiable? Or is it a case, as Musharraf alleges, of his own inadequacies? Is Pakistan indeed fomenting all these resurgent problems that seem to have arisen in recent months with a vengeance within Afghanistan?
Absolutely. There is no doubt about it. I wouldn't be speaking to you the way I am if I weren't sure of this. Oh, my God! In Kandahar, it is so visible. I went to the border a year or so ago, and I just sat on the border to watch who is coming through the main border crossing. And there were at least half-a-dozen Taliban who came through in less than 10 minutes.
I have so many examples of people who cross into Pakistan and there are Talib. You can have a discussion with them in the taxicabs. It's not just that they have the turban on. They absolutely are the Talib, and even when they don't have the proper papers the frontier guards wave them through.
It is not like they are coming across mountain trails or anything like that. I mean, it is really, really clear. Not to mention a certain degree of other sorts of agitation, like some of the demonstrations that were definitely sparked in an organised fashion. Particularly the one about the Quran being flushed down the toilet in 2005, which was obviously sparked by Pakistanis in Afghan universities.
So Musharraf's argument that he can't help it despite all of his efforts to completely halt all infiltration across the border because its so porous,etc lacks credibility?
Absolutely. There is no credibility, not if you actually go down there and look at what is happening on the border. But let me back up on this question of Karzai accusing Pakistan of involvement and fomenting the resurgence of the Taliban and all that. The only problem I have with that is that President Karzai also has people that he knows have close contacts with the Pakistan ISI (Inter Services Intelligence agency) in his government.
So, although I completely approve of the statements that he's making, and they certainly have their basis in fact, I would love to see him be a little more vigorous in terms of cleaning Pakistani people out of his own government, in particular in certain provinces.
There are things he can do without Pakistan doing anything to reduce their level of influence on what happens inside Afghanistan, and he's been very squeamish about doing that, and I don't know why.
I don't know if he's afraid or what. But that's the only thing that makes me a little bit sceptical about these statements that he's making. He's making great statements, but he himself is not doing what he himself could do to improve the situation.
You have charged that the main reason behind this is fundamentally to acquire strategic depth vis-a-vis India. In this whole simmering and troubling scenario, does India have to play it very cautiously and tread very carefully?
You bet, very cautiously. You know what, the best thing for India to do is to just shut up. It's sort of like the United States and Iran. The United States should shut up about Iran and let the Iranian people get rid of the mullahs and then you can tackle the nuclear situation in a different context.
But if India says the least thing, that gives Pakistan an excuse to say, 'Well, India is meddling too.' That's what I got from a Pakistani taxi driver in Washington, when we got into some of this stuff. He said, 'Well, the Indian consul in Kandahar is arming the Baloch insurgents.' Well, I haven't seen any evidence of that at all.
I've seen evidence of the Pakistanis arming the Taliban, but I haven't seen any evidence of Indians assisting the Balochs. But it's very difficult to argue a negative. How can I prove to this guy that the Indian consul is not? But I would be extremely low-key. I would not even put very much money into Afghanistan, as much as I am grateful to the Indian government for what they have put into Afghanistan, for the buses, for the cold storage in Kandahar.
You know, I actually believe it's not all that appropriate that there be an Indian consul on the border with Pakistan. There's not a huge Indian community in Kandahar. So it's a little bit provocative, and so I would really stay the heck out of it if I were India.
So you are suggesting that New Delhi should have a presence in Kabul and that should be it?
Yes, exactly. For example, you can't fly directly from Kandahar to India. Anyone who wants to go to India has to go through Kabul anyway. I love the Indian consul in Kandahar. I've been friends with two in a row now, and it is certainly a great source of comradeship and good food. I am not sure I would close the consulate now, but if I had been the Indian government, I wouldn't have opened one in Kandahar. I think that's pretty provocative.
In your book you also criticise the US for playing ball with a lot of these warlords in Afghanistan, which in a sense inadvertently or otherwise undermines President Karzai. What's the basis of this charge?
Again, I saw it. I saw a situation, where Karzai, way back in 2001, had control of Kandahar, the Taliban was gone, Al Qaeda was gone, and so it's like we won. And then US soldiers egged on a warlord to take over Kandahar from Karzai's hands. I saw it happen, and I tried in every way I knew how to reduce the insidious power of these warlord governors, and I had no traction with the Americans. I believe it was mostly just a mistake. It was sort of default.
I don't think it was conscious policy, but it certainly was unbudgable once it started and the problem with that is that now people in Southern Afghanistan are saying, 'You know what, the government and the Taliban, they are both preying upon us. They are both extracting money from us. The Taliban at night are asking for food and the government in the daytime is shaking us down.'
So unfortunately, this policy or default of supporting warlords is what has ended up making room for the insurgency. In other words, Pakistan is creating it, but it's the Afghans who are also unhappy with their government. If their government were honest and not corrupt and not stealing money from them every time it could, they would defend their government. But this doesn't seem defensible.
Is it a given that the Karzai government really doesnt govern beyond Kabul?
Oh! Totally. It doesn't even govern Kabul. They hardly govern the palace.
Is it, because as you allege, there are these Pakistani agents within the government?
Exactly. Both of the warlord variety and there is a Pakistani variety.
So whats going on here? The US is backing Karzai to the hilt but you say he hardly has any control over Kabul, let along any clout and influence outside of the capital?
We (the US) are really stupid. The American government, is in a way, over its head and it doesn't understand that you need to have a really textured, rich, intimate, long-standing local knowledge of places like this before you start running around creating governments. And, the idea that you can have that kind of knowledge of a place like Afghanistan and a place like Iraq at the same time is ridiculous, with nobody who speaks the language, with foreign service officers rotating in and out every few months, and the same with the military.
It's a style of arrogance that to me goes even beyond colonial arrogance. At least during the colonial period, people came out and learnt the language, stayed a long time, they lived with the local population even if in a very hierarchical fashion. It was actually a lot less arrogant than what we are doing now.
You have also not pulled any punches over the lack of sufficient troops for fighting the so-called war on terror, that has now resulted in the resurgence of the Taliban, and pouring in more resources and diverting troops from Afghanistan into Iraq. How much of a major blunder was this, and was the timing completely off?
It was a major blunder to start Iraq when Afghanistan was so fresh. It is a blunder because we -- the United States -- just don't have the human resources. It's kind of an extension of what I just said.
We don't have the human resources to properly effect a transition from a government that is very detrimental to the population of a country as well as to the rest of the world, to a strong, healthy, democratic -- although democratic has almost become a bad word now -- government that takes into account the needs and the desires of its people, with a healthy economy. You can't do that in two different, difficult countries at the same time. We just don't have the resources. So in that sense it was a huge mistake.
Let me ask you something I should have asked you at the outset. What was the rationale behind your book? What were you really trying to achieve?
That's a very interesting question because when I pitched this book, I went to New York and went to publishing companies back in 2002, and I actually didn't know how the story was going to come out. It's not like the story happened and then I wrote the book. I actually suggested the book in the spring of 2002 and what I thought was going to happen was that everyone was going to immediately see that the US policy of backing warlords was wrong, including the US.
I thought it was going to be a really temporary thing that only lasted a couple of months, and then everyone was going to remove the warlords from power, and that's the story I suggested when I said I want to write a book. That everyone is going to gang up on the warlords and I am going to tell the story on how you end warlord government, and I wasn't going to be in it. I said, I am going to choose five to six people and I am going to follow their story through this removal of the warlords. So that's the book that I offered that was accepted.
And, then when I really got serious about writing it in 2004, the story was very different and I had also been in part of the story, and so I had to put myself in it. So, in a way, my objective was different from the book that ended up being written because the story was different.
It is about Afghanistan and it is very deeply about Kandahar, but it is also a metaphor, which is in this sort of international intervention, which the United States is inevitably going to get into again.
It is about this level of knowledge that you have to be willing to acquire in order to do a good job, and, its about continuity. I very deliberately included as much history as I did, which was hard. I had to browbeat my editors because to me that's part of the message. You have to expose yourself to where a country is coming from if you are going to take this kind of action.
Was the title yours?
The title is a joke on the old Taliban religious beliefs, you know, the Ministry for the Promotion of Virtue and the Punishment of Vice. So I said this government is the government for the Promotion of Vice. At first, I was going to call it the Promotion of Vice, not the Punishment of Virtue. Had I completed the book before my friend Muhammad Akrem Khakrezwal was killed, I would have called it the Promotion of Vice, about the warlords being promoted.
But then he got killed and I had to significantly change the book. I had to add the first chapter, about five at the end, and rearrange some of the middle. Then it was too frivolous to call it the Promotion of Vice, and so it became the Punishment of Virtue.
Are you still running Afghans for Civil Society?
No. I left that in January of 2004. I am running a small agro-business, a cooperative called Arghand, and what we do is actually similar to what India has become very good at: produce high-end products for exports. India does it beautifully with fabrics and also I believe with some soap, which is what we are doing. We are making high-end soap which is sold in the United States and Canada out of a lot of the agricultural products. We extract almond oil, apricot kernel oil, and rose oil, those essential oils and seed oil and from these things we make soap.
Earlier, when you ran Afghans for Civil Society, I believe you founded it with Hamid Karzai's brother?
Correct, with his older brother Qayum.
But now, have you had a falling out with the Karzai family or do you still get along with them?
I still get along with them and I am still deeply grateful to them on a personal level. I've been a member of the family really. But I certainly am critical of a number of the ways that, in particular the president, has run his country. I think he's a decent human being, but I have real policy differences with him and I think it's accurate to say that I have taken some distance from the whole family because I don't want to associate myself with a lot of the ways that they operate.
So it's a very emotionally difficult situation for me, because I love them as humans, and, as I said, I've had the privilege to kind of be a member of their family, and Ahmed Wali, who is the younger brother, has been a bulwark to me when I am there in Kandahar. If I need anything, I've always been able to call on him. But I really do feel on the level of political ethics actually, I've had to create a little bit of distance.
Horrific torture of wife by polygamist Muslim
It is high time to start being a civilized country, With the Radical-Islam-appeasing "secular" (anti-Hindu) politicians ruling the country, India is getting more and more barbaric every day.
What happens to women in Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan under Taliban, what used to happen in India under the barbaric rule of Islamic tyrants like Aurangzeb in the medieval Middle Ages, is happening in India again.
The first step towards civilization would be repeal of the Muslim Personal Law. The "Muslim Personal Law" is simply a civilized-sounding name invented by (pseudo-)"secular" leader Rajiv Gandhi and his "secular" Congress Party for the uncivilized, barbaric (and truly un-secular) Islamic Shariah Law. The law demeans women and encourages this kind of mistreatment of women. If polygamy had been illegal, this kind of thing would never have happened.
Muslim men would not treat their wives as animals (like this guy does in the news article below) if they had only one wife.
The Muslim Personal Law is anti-women and uncivilized. Support its repeal and replacement with the Uniform Civil Code. There is no place for Islamic Shariah Law (that is what the Muslim Personal Law actually is) in secular India.
Telegraph India reports:
Chained wife forced to drink urine
G.S. RADHAKRISHNA
Hyderabad, Aug. 31: A man who locked up his wife in a room for three years and made her drink her own urine for opposing his bigamy has been arrested.
Thirty-five-year-old Asha Begum, wife of construction foreman Mohammed Shadulla, said she was chained and held captive in the window-less room for opposing her husband’s extra-marital relations with Noorie Begum, a relative’s daughter who had come to live with them.
“Shadulla convinced his neighbours that his wife Asha Begum became mentally imbalanced after the death of their second daughter and had been sent away to a dargah in Nellore to be cured,” Begumpet police inspector Subbarami Reddy said today.
But Asha was chained and kept in an isolated room within the same house and was not even allowed to speak to her children.
“He kept me chained, (and) gave food through a hole in the door. He did not allow me to come out even to use the toilet and made me drink urine,” said an undernourished and thin Asha at the police station yesterday evening.
“When I fell sick, tablets were thrown into the room. I had to make do with only three saris and two other clothes for three years,” she added.
Asha said she managed to escape when the door of her room was kept ajar for cleaning up while Shad-ulla was away. “I fought with the other woman who tried to stop me.”
The other woman, Noorie Begum, a 26-year-old schoolteacher and second wife of Shadulla, is absconding.
The police said Shadulla, who hails from Latur in Maharashtra, had been liv- ing in the Bhai Patel Nagar locality with his family of three daughters and a son since 1995.
He developed intimacy with the schoolteacher who came to live with them from Latur for a few days after she was transferred to a local school about three years ago.
“He had kept me in captivity to hush up the affair,” Asha said.
She also claimed that her husband had killed their eight-year-old second daughter Reshma for telling her about Shadulla’s illicit relationship with the woman.
The police said Shadulla had confessed to chaining and holding his wife captive but not killing his daughter.
Islam destroying Rule of Law in India
Islam has already destroyed secularism and religious equality in India. That happened through minority appeasement and religious vote bank politics. The destruction of Secularism in India became clear with the Shah Bano Case: when a 65 year old mother of 5 children was kicked out of her 40 year old marriage with
"teen talaq" and (pseudo-)"secular" leader Rajiv Gandhi passed the Islamic Shariah Law in the Parliament of India (disguised with the more civilized-sounding name "Muslim Personal Law") to deny her the protection of modern civilized secular law in the Supreme Court of India.
Civilized Muslims protested along with non-Muslims. But since the vote bank of uneducated backward Muslims is too large to give up, the Shariah Law could not be revoked. Most Hindus did not care too much, because only Muslim women would suffere under this Shariah Law.
Now, Islamic Radicalism has become powerful enough to launch a full-fledged attack on the Rule of Law in India. A terrorist and murderer, Muhammad Afzal, convicted and sentenced to death for launching a galling attack on the Parliament of India itself, no less, is being asked to be released under threats of more Islamic violence if the sentence against him is carried out.
It is high time now to take the bull by its horns. Radical Islam must be fought at all costs.
If we keep appeasing it and retreating on the face of its outrageous demands, its demands will get more and more outrageous.
First they demand that Muslims should live under Shariah Law. We agree. Then they demand that Muslim terrorists must not be punished for terrorist acts carried out in the name of Islam.
If we agree again, it won't be long till we find ourselves faced with the demand that Muslim terrorists be awarded medals for terrorist attacks carried out in the name of Islam.
That is what happens in places that were part of Hindu-majority India not too long ago. Pakistan. Afghanistan. The Islamic terrorists (like Jaish-e-Muhammad, Lashkar-e-Tayiba, Taliban, etc) roam free with heads held high, proud to be serving Allah by kidnapping raping and torturing Hindu girls and killing innocent defenceless Hindu men in continuation of a 1000 year Islamic tradition that has finally reduced the population of Hindus -- who used to be the majority there less than 1000 years ago -- to a shocking 0.1% of the population.
This is exactly the transformation that happened in Afghanistan (Gandhara), Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria, Central Asia, Iran etc: liberal Hindu Buddhist and Christian civilizations were slowly transformed into vicious Islamic ones. The same transformation is happening in Bangladesh now. India is only slighly behind.
In initial stages of the transformation Radical Islamists use threats and small-scale street riots and violent street protests (the same type they are doing in India, like in Allahabad and Malegaon to name a few, and many parts of Europe as well). In later stages they use large-scale violence in areas where they are in a majority or a substantially large minority. Just like Jinnah did in 1946-1947.
Just like the ongoing genocide of Hindu minorities in Bangladesh right now.
Just like the wipeout of Hindu minorities in Pakistan since 1950 (they were reduced from 18% of population to 0.1% today through killings of men, kidnappings and forced conversions of Hindu girls and women, forced evictions, intimidation, etc).
The world is a very harsh place; people and cultures that do not show the ability to defend themselves get wiped out.
Tolerance is all nice and good at the right place and the right time, but too much of anything is a bad thing.
When somebody is trying to kill you, wipe you out, and have already done the same to your own brothers and sisters before (in Pakistan, Bangladesh, Gandhara, etc) you are not supposed to show tolerance. You are supposed to defend yourself.
The first step towards defending India is to hang Muhammad Afzal. To uphold the Rule of Law and to show the Radical Islamists that we Indians are not cowed down by threats.
The second step would be to identify the people who are making or carrying out threats of violence on behalf of Muhammad Afzal today and bring them to Justice. They deserve to go to jail for attempting to subvert the Rule of Law in India by terrorizing the population of India with threats of violence and terrorist attacks.
Making threats of terrorist attacks to make people afraid is also an act of terrorism. Just as much as it is terrorism to carry them out.
If we do not take this grave threat from Radical Islam seriously today, soon we will not have a place to stand in India. Just like we no longer have the right to live as civilized human beings in Pakistan Bangladesh or Gandhara.
If we do nothing, it will happen sooner than you think. Because population grows exponentially and therefore later events get speeded up. A few million Radical Islamists (Allauddin Khiljee, Ghiyasuddin Balban, Nadir Shah, Muhammad Ghori, Mahmood of Ghazni, Aurangzeb, Tipu Siultan, etc and their followers) took a thousand years to destroy Hindu and Buddhist cultures in 25% of India (Pakistan and Bangladesh). Today there are about 450 million Muslims in India Pakistan and Bangladesh alone, not to mention their closely-networked associates in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syria, Libya, Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, etc.
It will not take more than 50 to 100 years for Radical Islamists to destroy the last traces of Hinduism, Jainism, Sikhism, Buddhism, and Christianity from what remains of India, if we keep "tolerating" all these injustices as we have done before.
Are we going to fight back ? It depends on whether enoug of us are able to wake up people around us.
The first step is simple: make sure no political party dares to stop Afzal's (or any other Muslim terrorist's) execution. They must be sure that they will lose all elections forever if they are soft on Islamic terrorists. This muist be done by building public opinion in favour of the execution of criminals like Afzal.
Public opinion in favour of maintaining the Rule of Law in India. Let us do so together.
Times of India reports:
'India will burn if Afzal is hanged'
NEW DELHI: India will 'go up in flames' if it hangs a Muslim militant convicted for his role in an attack on Parliament in 2001, former J&K chief minister Farooq Abdullah was quoted as saying.
Last month a New Delhi court set October 20 as the date for the hanging of Kashmiri Mohammed Afzal, triggering violent protests in Indian Kashmir.
"You want to hang him? Go ahead and hang him ... this nation will go up in flames because the terrorists will do things which will destroy the relationship of the Hindus and Muslims here," Abdullah told CNN-IBN news channel.
"Kashmir will anyway go up in flames ... there will (also) be turmoil which India will have to face. I am telling you."
Abdullah, a senior Kashmiri politician whose pro-India National Conference party has often ruled the state, was speaking in an interview to be telecast on Sunday, excerpts of which were released by the channel on Saturday.
Afzal was sentenced to death for his role in the attack when five gunmen stormed the parliament complex.
The gunmen were all shot dead. Kashmiri leaders have said hanging Afzal would fuel a Muslim separatist revolt in Indian Kashmir that has killed more than 45,000 people since 1989.
"You will be making him a hero for centuries to come ...you are giving a massive weapon to the separatists in Jammu and Kashmir," Abdullah told CNN-IBN .
Afzal's wife has asked President A P J Abdul Kalam for clemency for her husband.
It is not clear if the hanging will be carried out on the set date as the President considers the clemency plea.
A close look at the worldwide Islamo-Fascist terror network II
In an earlier post I commented on an article from Time Magazine on the Pakistani link to the world-wide Islamo-Fascist terror network.
You can find the earlier article here. Here is another in-depth report from New York Times on British Muslim terrorist of Pakistani descent Rashid Rauf, who was the kingpin of a plot to blow up 10 airplanes from UK en route to USA in August 2006.
The West now sees what India has faced for over 17 years now: Radical Islamic terrorism directed at Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, Jains, Christians, Sufis, Parsis, and moderate Muslims (those who do not believe in the extreme violence preached in the Koran).
New York Times reports:
In British Inquiry, a Family Caught in Two Worlds
In 2002, Rashid Rauf, a suspect in the alleged plot to blow up airplanes, moved from Britain to Bahawalpur, Pakistan, where he has a home, left. His family, which immigrated from Pakistan, owns a bakery, right, in Birmingham, England. His brother and father are also under scrutiny.
By IAN FISHER and SERGE F. KOVALESKI
Published: August 20, 2006
LONDON, Aug. 19 — The father, Abdul, seems a classic immigrant to Britain: a Pakistani who settled in Birmingham, he opened a bakery and worked long hours. But he also kept exceptionally strong ties to the old country, starting a charity that raised money meant to help Pakistanis in need.
An older son, Rashid, like many second-generation Muslim immigrants here, had a more complicated life, caught between cultures, with Islam the one consistent thread. He, too, felt the strong lure of Pakistan, where he fled in 2002 after an uncle was mysteriously stabbed in Birmingham, and where he apparently joined an extreme Islamic group.
A younger son, Tayib, visited Pakistan and seemed to be following in his father’s footsteps as a hard-working baker in Britain. In the early hours of Aug. 10, he collected a check of roughly $3,000 from a customer, then sat with him until 2 a.m., talking and eating potato chips.
“A person who is on the verge of blowing himself up isn’t going to sit down and be calm or go around and collect money,” said the customer, Mohammad Nazam, a former Birmingham City Council member who owns three supermarkets and has known the family more than 40 years.
But just a few hours later, Tayib was one of 24 Muslim men arrested in the plot to blow up airplanes over the Atlantic, only a day after his brother, Rashid, was arrested in Pakistan amid allegations that he was one of the chief plotters.
Little is known about the strength of the British government’s evidence against the suspects. But at this early, sketchy stage, the three men of the Rauf family and the charity the father helped found are at the heart of the investigation into a plot that has shaken Britain.
A central question is whether there was any connection between the mostly young and British-born people who have been detained and the world of sophisticated terrorism based thousands of miles away in the murky recesses of Pakistan and Afghanistan. With much unknown a week after the plot was revealed, the Rauf family represents the strongest possibility of such a link.
A British police official, who has been briefed on the inquiry, said, “The Raufs were targeted precisely because of the family’s links to extremist groups in Pakistan that have, over the years, come to work hand in glove with Al Qaeda.” The official, who requested anonymity because he is not authorized to speak about the investigation, said that the family had “been flagged red for months” and that the authorities had come to see Tayib as the leader of the plot in Britain and Rashid as the connection to Pakistan. But he warned that “what is unclear yet is how far this inquiry has been able to trace their links back to some so-called mastermind in Pakistan.”
For years before the airline bombing plot, the Rauf family seemed to have attracted an unusual amount of suspicion, and not only for their ties to Pakistan. Their house in Birmingham was searched, the police say, after two slayings, including the killing of the sons’ uncle. Banking regulators put the elder Rauf’s charity account under review in March this year. In the summer of 2005, after the subway and bus bombings here that killed 52 people and 4 bombers, a neighbor of the charity’s office in East London became so suspicious that she called Britain’s antiterrorism hot line.
The operator, she said, dismissed her worries. Odd comings and goings at night at the store, a sudden switch from importing cookies to providing charity, all soon after the bombings, did not add up to terrorism. “I understood what they meant,” said the neighbor, Linda Brown, 48, a former secretary at the business next door to the charity, Crescent Relief, which operates in an industrial park in the Dagenham section. “But maybe if they had investigated, if they had snooped around, who knows what they might have found?”
In fact there is evidence that at least one of the men in detention was involved in the Rauf charity. Last October, The Bucks Free Press, in High Wycombe, listed one suspect, Khuram Ali, as a local contact for donations to Crescent Relief to help victims of the October 2005 Kashmir earthquake. The paper, which said 1,000 tents had been flown to Kashmir, also listed a phone number for Mr. Ali that is no longer in service.
In High Wycombe, where Mr. Ali lived, a neighbor of his, Ashley Tighe, said in an interview on Saturday that Mr. Ali had told him that he was involved in a charitable effort to send tents to the areas hit by the quake.
“He said that he was doing work for a charity and that they had sent over tents because of the earthquake, but that some of them had gone missing at the airport,” Mr. Tighe recalled. He said he understood that the charity was also sending food and clothing to the area.
The whereabouts of Abdul Rauf, 52, are unknown. Relatives and neighbors have said that he was visiting Pakistan at the time of the arrests. ABC News has reported that he, too, has been placed in custody in Pakistan, but the government there has not confirmed that. British authorities have not suggested that Abdul Rauf was involved in the plot, nor have his assets been frozen by the Bank of England, which did act against most of the other suspects.
The portrait of Mr. Rauf that emerges from interviews with friends, neighbors and business associates seems defined by an intensity of religious devotion and a determination not to let go of Pakistan and its traditions amid modern, secular British life.
In all, Mr. Rauf seemed the archetype of the successful immigrant, who like most of Britain’s Pakistanis, came from the Mirpur district in Pakistani-controlled Kashmir. He ran a bakery making flat bread and sold cakes and cookies imported from Pakistan, neighbors and a business associate said. He was also deeply involved in charity work, forming Crescent Relief in 2000, and more recently giving money for victims of the earthquake in Kashmir and the 2004 tsunami in Asia.
“They were a working-class family who had very little social time,” said Nassar Mahmood, a trustee of the Central Mosque in Birmingham. “They haven’t really reaped the full fruits of their business.”
But, he added, they had no animosity toward Britain. “I can tell when someone feels alienated or angry about the country’s policies,” he said. “But that was not these people. They enjoyed their lives in Britain.”
At the same time, like many Pakistani immigrants here, Mr. Rauf regularly visited his home village, Haveli Beghal, where he kept a house and reportedly financed the construction of a mosque. He was there attending a wedding, friends say, when his sons were arrested.
And he was so steadfast in his beliefs that he built a little study center for Muslim children in a shed on the back patio of his house on St. Margaret’s Road in Birmingham.
A next-door neighbor, June Lethbridge, said that anywhere from a dozen to 20 youngsters would attend classes there three to four times a week. Mr. Rauf’s wife, who never left the house without her head and face covered, gave Koran lessons to girls.
“The best I can remember was that this all started four or five years ago,” Mrs. Lethbridge said. “It was amazing that they could all fit in there.”
Some tension between cultures in this case — possibly between traditional law and that of their adopted nation — seemed to explode for the Rauf family in April 2002.
Mohammad Saeed, a delivery driver and a brother-in-law of the elder Mr. Rauf, was stabbed to death in April 2002 at his house in Birmingham, in front of his wife and two children. He was 54. No one was ever arrested, though the Rauf house was searched. Rashid Rauf, believed to be 29, fled to Pakistan soon after.
The police never formally identified a suspect, but news reports pointed to Rashid and what was said to be a family dispute that possibly led to an “honor killing,” not uncommon in Pakistan, and often involving possible sexual misbehavior. The West Midlands police refused to comment, other than to confirm that the Rauf’s house had been searched in connection with the killing.
Three years later, the family came under suspicion when riots between black and Asian youths broke out in Birmingham, leaving among the dead a young black man, Isaiah Youngsam. The police confirm that the Rauf family home was again searched over that killing, though other suspects were later arrested.
In the last week, the authorities in Pakistan have described Rashid Rauf as a central figure in the plot and as the prime connection between Britain and Pakistan with links, they say, to Al Qaeda and other militant groups.
There is no evidence that he ever returned to Britain after 2002. About a year after arriving in Pakistan, Rashid Rauf married and later settled in southern Punjab, in the town of Bahawalpur, which is also the home of Jaish-e-Muhammad, one of the most extreme Islamist groups in Pakistan, with strong ties to Al Qaeda.
His sister-in-law is married to the brother of the group’s founder, Maulana Masood Azhar, and members have said Rashid Rauf was himself a member through its various incarnations. But this week in Bahawalpur, where donkey carts jostle for space with bicycles and farm vehicles, fearful neighbors and local officials were not willing to provide many details about his life there.
“They were very exceptionally rich,” said one neighbor, in the deeply poor village. “They had a lot of money and everyone was wondering how they had the money.”
Various news accounts here in Britain, citing anonymous law enforcement officials, suggested that money from the family’s charity might have been diverted to the plot. Last week the Charity Commission of England and Wales said it was looking into that possibility.
The last official filing with the commission showed Crescent Relief had a gross income of £89,202, about $168,000, in the fiscal year that ended in October 2004.
In March, the account came under scrutiny from its bank, Barclays, over a £50,000 ($94,000) transfer in 2005 to an account at Saudi Pak Bank, said one person briefed on the investigation into the account, who was not authorized to speak publicly.
The person said neither the amount nor the destination of the transfer itself made after the earthquake in Kashmir last year raised concerns. Instead, the account was put under review because the person making the transfer failed to provide proper identification.
The charity’s office in Dagenham also attracted the attention of neighbors last year. Ms. Brown, the secretary of a nearby office, said that after several years of operating as a warehouse for imported Pakistani cookies and cakes, it changed soon after the London bombings into a charity to help Kashmir.
People at the new charity, she said, began distributing pamphlets on the plight of people in Kashmir, a region that is the subject of a dispute between Pakistan and India. Ms. Brown and a co-worker said trucks arrived at all hours, especially at night, and backed entirely into the office bay before unloading, as if trying to hide the contents.
“They were so secretive about what was going in and out,” said the co-worker, Kay Charles, 60.
In the heightened concern after last year’s attacks, Ms. Brown said she called the antiterrorism hot line. She said she was still uncertain that anything wrong was going on. It was, she said, “just a gut feeling.”
One of the charity’s trustees, Mohammad Farooq, who had also served as a director but left the charity several months ago, said it was completely legitimate. “It’s totally normal,” Mr. Farooq said in an interview at his house in East London.
With Abdul Rauf in Pakistan this month, one friend said the younger son, Tayib, 22, was left to run the business. “He knows what products are best to buy for his purposes and what prices to get,” said the friend, Abid Hussain, a manager of a supermarket in Birmingham.
His other interest, several people said, was the local mosque that adheres to Wahhabism, the strict sect followed by many militants.
One friend, who said he had known Tayib for nine years and attended school with him but declined to give his name, said the family was culturally divided between Pakistan and Britain. The friend remembered that when Tayib recently discussed marriage with his father, the father said it did not need to be an arranged one.
“If Tayib thought the girl was right for him, he could marry her,” the friend said. “The parents were not that strict.”
Reporting for this article was contributed by Heather Timmons and Stephen Grey from London, Souad Mekhennet from Birmingham, Carlotta Gall from Bahawalpur, Pakistan, and Margot Williams from New York.
... Read more !
Europeans waking up to threat from Radical Islam; India still sleeping
India has suffered from a bloody campaign of genocide, torture, economic and political persecution (eg. through the "zizya" religious tax), kidnappings and forced conversions, evictions, arson, intimidation, and rioting carried out by Radical Islamists over the last 1000 years.
Europeans are waking up to the grave threat posed by Radical Islam soon after 9/11, 7/7, and 3/11 attacks. Indians are still blindly following anti-Hindu (Communist, Socialist, Muslim fundamentalist and Christian fundamentalist) (pseudo)-"secular" leaders who are blissfully sabotaging the critical war against Islamic terror and pandering to Radical Islamic vote banks to win elections.
From Rajiv Gandhi's betrayal of secularism and women's rights in the Shah Bano case, all the way to the current pro-Radical-Islam leaders like Mulla Mulayam, Salman Khursheed, Imam Bukhari, Ghulam Nabi Azad and Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, the tradition of appeasement of Radical Islam and sacrifice of liberal and progessive values in the name of "secularism" (how more ironic can things be ?) is alive and well in India.
How long will this continue ? Till the remaining civilized parts of India reach the state Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Afghanistan are in today ?
You can decide. I can decide. Together. Shall we ?
New York Times reports:
Across Europe, Worries on Islam Spread to Center
By DAN BILEFSKY and IAN FISHER
Published: October 11, 2006
BRUSSELS, Oct. 10 — Europe appears to be crossing an invisible line regarding its Muslim minorities: more people in the political mainstream are arguing that Islam cannot be reconciled with European values.
“You saw what happened with the pope,” said Patrick Gonman, 43, the owner of Raga, a funky wine bar in downtown Antwerp, 25 miles from here. “He said Islam is an aggressive religion. And the next day they kill a nun somewhere and make his point.
“Rationality is gone.”
Mr. Gonman is hardly an extremist. In fact, he organized a protest last week in which 20 bars and restaurants closed on the night when a far-right party with an anti-Muslim message held a rally nearby.
His worry is shared by centrists across Europe angry at terror attacks in the name of religion on a continent that has largely abandoned it, and disturbed that any criticism of Islam or Muslim immigration provokes threats of violence.
For years those who raised their voices were mostly on the far right. Now those normally seen as moderates — ordinary people as well as politicians — are asking whether once unquestioned values of tolerance and multiculturalism should have limits.
Former Foreign Secretary Jack Straw of Britain, a prominent Labor politician, seemed to sum up the moment when he wrote last week that he felt uncomfortable addressing women whose faces were covered with a veil. The veil, he wrote, is a “visible statement of separation and difference.”
When Pope Benedict XVI made the speech last month that included a quotation calling aspects of Islam “evil and inhuman,” it seemed to unleash such feelings. Muslims berated him for stigmatizing their culture, while non-Muslims applauded him for bravely speaking a hard truth.
The line between open criticism of another group or religion and bigotry can be a thin one, and many Muslims worry that it is being crossed more and more.
Whatever the motivations, “the reality is that views on both sides are becoming more extreme,” said Imam Wahid Pedersen, a prominent Dane who is a convert to Islam. “It has become politically correct to attack Islam, and this is making it hard for moderates on both sides to remain reasonable.” Mr. Pedersen fears that onetime moderates are baiting Muslims, the very people they say should integrate into Europe.
The worries about extremism are real. The Belgian far-right party, Vlaams Belang, took 20.5 percent of the vote in city elections last Sunday, five percentage points higher than in 2000. In Antwerp, its base, though, its performance improved barely, suggesting to some experts that its power might be peaking.
In Austria this month, right-wing parties also polled well, on a campaign promise that had rarely been made openly: that Austria should start to deport its immigrants. Vlaams Belang, too, has suggested “repatriation” for immigrants who do not made greater efforts to integrate.
The idea is unthinkable to mainstream leaders, but many Muslims still fear that the day — or at least a debate on the topic — may be a terror attack away.
“I think the time will come,” said Amir Shafe, 34, a Pakistani who earns a good living selling clothes at a market in Antwerp. He deplores terrorism and said he himself did not sense hostility in Belgium. But he said, “We are now thinking of going back to our country, before that time comes.”
Many experts note that there is a deep and troubled history between Islam and Europe, with the Crusaders and the Ottoman Empire jostling each other for centuries and bloodily defining the boundaries of Christianity and Islam. A sense of guilt over Europe’s colonial past and then World War II, when intolerance exploded into mass murder, allowed a large migration to occur without any uncomfortable debates over the real differences between migrant and host.
Then the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, jolted Europe into new awareness and worry.
The subsequent bombings in Madrid and London, and the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh by a Dutch-born Moroccan stand as examples of the extreme. But many Europeans — even those who generally support immigration — have begun talking more bluntly about cultural differences, specifically about Muslims’ deep religious beliefs and social values, which are far more conservative than those of most Europeans on issues like women’s rights and homosexuality.
“A lot of people, progressive ones — we are not talking about nationalists or the extreme right — are saying, ‘Now we have this religion, it plays a role and it challenges our assumptions about what we learned in the 60’s and 70’s,’ ” said Joost Lagendik, a Dutch member of the European Parliament for the Green Left Party, who is active on Muslim issues.
“So there is this fear,” he said, “that we are being transported back in a time machine where we have to explain to our immigrants that there is equality between men and women, and gays should be treated properly. Now there is the idea we have to do it again.”
Now Europeans are discussing the limits of tolerance, the right with increasing stridency and the left with trepidation.
Austrians in their recent election complained about public schools in Vienna being nearly full with Muslim students and blamed the successive governments that allowed it to happen.
Some Dutch Muslims have expressed support for insurgents in Iraq over Dutch peacekeepers there, on the theory that their prime loyalty is to a Muslim country under invasion.
So strong is the fear that Dutch values of tolerance are under siege that the government last winter introduced a primer on those values for prospective newcomers to Dutch life: a DVD briefly showing topless women and two men kissing. The film does not explicitly mention Muslims, but its target audience is as clear as its message: embrace our culture or leave.
Perhaps most wrenching has been the issue of free speech and expression, and the growing fear that any criticism of Islam could provoke violence.
In France last month, a high school teacher went into hiding after receiving death threats for writing an article calling the Prophet Muhammad “a merciless warlord, a looter, a mass murderer of Jews and a polygamist.” In Germany a Mozart opera with a scene of Muhammad’s severed head was canceled because of security fears.
With each incident, mainstream leaders are speaking more plainly. “Self-censorship does not help us against people who want to practice violence in the name of Islam,” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany said in criticizing the opera’s cancellation. “It makes no sense to retreat.”
The backlash is revealing itself in other ways. Last month the British home secretary, John Reid, called on Muslim parents to keep a close watch on their children. “There’s no nice way of saying this,” he told a Muslim group in East London. “These fanatics are looking to groom and brainwash children, including your children, for suicide bombing, grooming them to kill themselves to murder others.”
Many Muslims say this new mood is suddenly imposing expectations that never existed before that Muslims be exactly like their European hosts.
Dyab Abou Jahjah, a Lebanese-born activist here in Belgium, said that for years Europeans had emphasized “citizenship and human rights,” the notion that Muslim immigrants had the responsibility to obey the law but could otherwise live with their traditions.
Then someone comes and says it’s different than that,” said Mr. Jahjah, who opposes assimilation. “You have to dump your culture and religion. It’s a different deal now.”
Lianne Duinberke, 34, who works at a market in the racially mixed northern section of Antwerp, said: “Before I was very eager to tell people I was married to a Muslim. Now I hesitate.” She has been with her husband, a Tunisian, for 12 years, and they have three children.
Many Europeans, she said, have not been accepting of Muslims, especially since 9/11. On the other hand, she said, Muslims truly are different culturally: No amount of explanation about free speech could convince her husband that the publication of cartoons lampooning Muhammad in a Danish newspaper was in any way justified.
When asked if she was optimistic or pessimistic about the future of Muslim immigration in Europe , she found it hard to answer. She finally gave a defeated smile. “I am trying to be optimistic,” she said. “But if you see the global problems before the people, then you really can’t be.”
Dan Bilefsky reported from Brussels, and Ian Fisher from Rome. Contributing were Sarah Lyall and Alan Cowell from London, Mark Landler from Frankfurt, Peter Kiefer from Rome, Renwick McLean from Madrid and Maia de la Baume from Paris.
US-based Christian fanatics converting Hindus in India to Christianity using money and intimidation
US evangelical Christian missionaries have been targetting India, China, Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, etc as sources of "souls" for quite some time.
Having lost influence in the increasingly educated populations of the Western nations of USA and Europe for their narrow-minded and unscientific ideology, these evangelicals have been targetting innocent broad-minded and tolerant Hindus and Buddhists with money, deception, lies, and treachery. People with sick children are promised that God will bless their children and make them better if they convert. People with no food to feed their cildren are promised money or jobs if they convert to Christianity. People who use such tactics to preach about something as high and as noble as God, count among the most base vile and low imaginable.
India's narrow-minded Christian fundamentalist leaders like Sonia Nehru are also betraying the trust given in them by the tolerant Hindus by encouraging this conversion.
Thanks to an anonymous contributor for the following video showing how ancient Indian culture is being wiped out by dogmatic narow-minded Christian evangelical religious fanatics. India's secularism is being taken advantage of to destroy the Hindu/Jain/Buddhist tolerant rational and scientific-minded cultural heritage that has allowed such secularism and religious tolerance to exist for thousands of years, and replace it with intolerant dogmatic narrow-minded fanatic Christianity -- the same unscientific and fairy-tale-based religion that educated people in Europe and USA are rejecting and turning away from.
Hindustan Times reports:
'CIA funds religious conversions in India'
United News of India
Madurai, August 23, 2006
Launching a blistering attack on the US for imposing its culture and value system on other nations, RSS Chief KS Sudharshan has charged the CIA with funding large-scale conversions in the country.
American Baptists were engaged in a grand project of religious conversion, christened as Joshua I, with the patronage of the Bush administration, he alleged, addressing a symposium on Empowerment of Hindu Intelligentsia organised as part of the Golwalkar centenary celebrations at Madurai on Tuesday night.
According to him, the project envisaged a church initially in each locality having a post office and then between a cycling distance.
Turning his ire on Muslims, he warned of the 'serious consequences' of Bangladeshi immigrants, affecting the demographic profile of Assam, West Bengal and Bihar. In Assam alone 10 out of 18 districts have witnessed an alarming rise in the proportion of Muslims, he claimed.
Expressing hope that a Hindu renaissance would blossom by the year 2011, he called upon the intelligentsia to spread 'Hindu Dharma'.
Former Union Minister Arun Shourie, speaking on Media and Hindu Intelligentsia, said intellectual work should be an instrument for acquiring political power. As such, all efforts should be doubled and directed at achieving this and the current situation remained the most opportune and favourable one to realise that, he felt.
Stating that more than 50 years of secular discourse had done great harm to the nation, he said Hindu tradition had been denied its due space in mainstream media, which was insensitive to the national cause.
Rediff reports:
Is US behind conversions in India?
Right wing Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh chief K S Suddharshan on Tuesday alleged that the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States, with the help of non-governmental organisations, was indulging in religious conversions in India.
Delivering the special address at a symposium on "Empowerment of Hindu Intelligentsia" organised in connection with Sri Guruji (RSS founder M S Golwakar) Centenary Celebrations in Madurai, he claimed that as soon as George W Bush took over as president, he had allocated $20 billion for the NGOs to work and convert people to Christianity.
"The CIA planned to establish one church in every post office area. The churches would be established within walking distance of each other," he said.
The 'surreptitious' way of organising conversions under the garb of doing service was more dangerous, he said, adding that the NGOs planned to setup schools, hospitals etc to veer the rural people away from their Hindu moorings.
He alleged that the missionaries were also misleading the tribals, with whom they worked, by saying that Aryans had invaded their land.
He said Maoists also posed a threat to the country, "resorting to terrorism" and "just as they did in Nepal, they would attack government offices, including, police stations, etc to demoralise government officials, and bring the area under their control.
He said Muslims were trying to spread their religion by migrating to new areas, infiltration and Jehad. They had become the majority population in some of the districts, he added.
Eminent thinker and journalist Arun Shourie said the domestic media was not writing about the full preparedness of China along India's borders, or about Pakistan trying build mosques madrassas along the borders, and was giving importance to Pakistan's view or terrorists' views.
The RSS should counter the "anti-hindu anti-Indian culture press" only through alternative way of communicating directly to the people, he said. He also stressed the need for political power to control anti-national forces.
... Read more !
Sharad Pawar's NCP fights for Islamic terrorist
India's (pseudo-) "secular" leader Sharad Pawar's "secular" Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) has joined the "secular" bandwagon that is fighting to save the Islamic terrorist Mohammad Afzal from the just punishment for his participation in Terrorist Attacks and associated Crimes Against Humanity.
Sharad Pawar and other "secular" leaders like him are protected by our own brothers and sisters serving in the Indian Army, the paramilitary forces, the Special Protection Group, and the National Security Guard. They know they are safe; no terrorist can get to them.
So they keep sabotaging India's 1000-year-long fight against Islamic terrorism for petty personal gains (appeasing Radical Islamists to win elections using the Muslim vote bank).
If and when India finally loses the 1000-year-old war against Radical Islam and gets overrun by forces of Radical Islam (like the Hindu Buddhist Parsi and Christian civilizations of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Central Asia, Lebanon, Iran got overrun and wiped out by Radical Islam) because of these corrupt incompetent and immoral leaders (as opposed to honest and capable ones we had earlier like Rana Pratap, Chatrapati Shivaji, Guru Teg Bahadur, Guru Govind Singh, Peshwa Balaji Baji Rao, Prithviraj Chauhan, etc) our "secular" leaders will simply escape and seek political asylum in civilized countries that will still remain. They have enough money saved in secret Swiss Bank acounts that their next 50 generations can live comfortably in Switzerland.
We, the common people of India, will have nowhere to go.
We escaped from Afghanistan to India. From Pakistan to India. From Bangladesh to India.
When what remains of India gets overrun where will we go ? Into some cave in the ravines of Madhya Pradesh ? And then disappear ?
The overrunning of India by forces of Radical Islam is possible in less that 100 years. Population grows exponentially, so events get speeded up. A few million Muslims took 1000 years to overrun Persia, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Central Asia, Lebanon etc. Now a billion Muslims can outbreed overwhelm and overrun India in less than 100 years, perhaps only 50.
They are already doing so taking advantage of Democracy itself.
When Hindus get capital punishment, nobody protests. When a Muslim terrorist should get caputal punishment for terrorist attacks against the Parliament, the seat of Democracy and the Government of India, and waging war against the Nation, the law itself is being changed (subverting Democracy itself, in the form of vote bank politics) to rule out capital punishment entirely, invoking the names of Buddha and Gandhi, no less.
What an irony.
Will all of us silently watch this charade ? Or will we build public opinion against Sharad Pawar and all other "secular" (anti-Hindu) leaders of his kind; make sure they never get a single Hindu vote in the next 50 years ?
You can decide. I can decide. Not alone, but together. Shall we ?
Times of India reports:
Afzal should get life imprisonment: NCP
KATIHAR: Advocating the need for a national debate on ending the provision of hanging in India, Nationalist Congress Party (NCP) general secretary Tariq Anwar on Sunday appealed President A P J Abdul Kalam to commute the death sentence of Mohammad Afzal, facing execution in the 2001 Parliament attack case, to life imprisonment.
"While many countries have ended capital punishment, India continues with it even in the 21st century. Besides, this is a land of Buddha, Mahavira and Mahatama Gandhi, who were symbols of peace ...India should do away with capital punishment," Anwar said.
The general secretary of NCP, a constituent of UPA at the Centre, advocated a national debate on ending execution in the country.
Anwar claimed that besides Jammu and Kashmir chief minister and Congress leader Gulam Nabi Azad, former chief minister Farooq Abdullah, two left parties like CPI and CPM also favoured life imprisonment for Afzal.
"Except for the BJP, majority of political parties and leaders want commuting Afzal's punishment to life imprisonment", the senior NCP leader said.
"Providing clemency to Afzal would give him an opportunity to repent for his act," Anwar added.
A close look at the worldwide Islamo-Fascist terror network I
YANNIS KONTOS / POLARIS
Two members of Jaish-e-Mohammed Since 1989, India has been the victim of Pakistani-trained Islamic terrorists -- the same terrorists who had been fighting against the Soviets in Afghanistan till 1989, when the USSR finally withdrew from Afghanistan.
The rest of the world has casually watched these Crimes against Humanity committed by Pakistan's Islamic terrorists for 17 years since 1989 while India repeatedly accused Pakistan of sending trained criminals across the Line of Control into Jammu and Kashmir to kill innocent Indian men, women, and children.
The terrorists killed Hindu families, raped Hindu women, and caused almost the entire Kashmiri Hindu community to live in exile. At the same time, the Radical Sunni Salafist Islamists killed moderate and secular Kashmiri Muslims loyal to India. Supporters of Indian political parties were murdered. Kashmiris were threatened not to participate in elections held by India to elect State and Parliamentary representatives of the people. Candidates in elections were killed. People voting were identified and many of them later gunned down.
Kashmiri women were ordered to stay indoors, and wear a burqa and be accompanied by a male from the family when travelling outdoors. The same medieval laws the Taliban had enforced in Afghanistan were forced upon the secular and moderate Muslims of Kashmir. Women found not wearing burqas in public had acid bulbs thrown at their faces, permanently disfiguring them.
Kashmir's Sufi shrines were destroyed by the Sunni Salafist Islamic terrorists. In their view, Sufism is un-Islamic because of its association of music and dance with God. Sufis are mystics who think they can reach God through music and dance. Pakistani and Saudi hardliners cannot tolerate the ideology.
Sufis of Kashmir preserve a single hair of the Prophet Hazrat Muhammad in the "Hazratbal" mosque in Kashmir. (Hazratbal means "hair of the Hazrat"; bal means "hair" in Hindi). The Sufis hold this hair in high esteem. The Saudi Salafist and Pakistani hardliners consider this "idolatry" or "idol-worship", which in their view is un-Islamic, and punishable with death.
A large number of major Sufi shrines have been attacked by Pakistani terrorists in the last 17 years of terrorism -- including the Hazratbal mosque and the 700 year old shrine of Sufi saint Shaikh Noor-ud-din Chisti at Chrar-e-Sharief. Many of these shrines, including the Chrar-e-Sharief, are wooden structures. The terrorists set fire to them with grenades and other explosives and burnt them to the ground.
Since 1947 the Islamo-Fascists running Pakistan have wiped out the Hindu minority there. The process is currently being executed in Bangladesh. Hindu minorities are being exterminated through killings of men, kidnappings, rape, torture and forcible conversions of women, forced eviction and occupation of property of Hindu families, arrests, torture, extraction of confessions, and execution of Hindus on false charges, and similar means. The police and judiciary of Pakistan and Bangladesh turn a blind eye and often actively collaborate in these actions.
The Hindus of Pakistan have been reduced from 18% of Pakistan's population in 1950 to 0.1% today. The Hindus of Bangladesh are following the same path to extermination. The number of Hindus already missing in Bangladesh since 1971 is estimated at 11 million.
These exterminations constitute the biggest genocides in known human history. But the West does not care. Hindu lives don't matter to anybody. Not to the Christian West; not even to Hindu-majority India, which ignores the plight of Hindus and only focuses on preserving the interests of Muslims, Christians and other minorities following a warped anti-Hindu version of "secularism".
However, injustice usually meets punishment. The West is beginning to realise that it will have to pay a heavy price for its callous disregard for the millions of Hindu lives that have been destroyed by Islamo-Fascists. The same Radical Islamists now have the West in their cross-hairs.
If the West had done the right thing and followed international law when Hindu genocides had been going on in these Islamic countries, then Radical Islam would probably have been defeated a lot sooner and the events of 9/11, 7/7, and 3/11 would probably never have happened.
Now, it is not clear that Radical Islam can be defeated at all. Al Qaeda is only a few steps away from acquiring nuclear devices. Every few months new terrifying terrorist plots are being luckily uncovered. New attacks of unprecedented dimensions are being planned with increasing frequency and it is conceivable that sooner or later one or more of them will succeed.
There is still time. But there is very little time to waste. The West must get rid of its hypocrisy and its callous disregard for Hindu lives. The real enemy of the Civilized World is Pakistan, not Iraq. Pakistan created Al Qaeda. Pakistan created Taliban. Pakistan created LAshkar-e-Tayiba. Pakistan created Jaish-e-Muhammad. All the terrorists of all the major terror plots carried out or caught in recent times (including the 7/7 attacks in London and the recently uncovered plot to blow up 10 planes in mid-air en-route to USA from UK) have been trained in Pakistan.
And Pakistan has the nuclear bomb.
Pakistan has already been caught selling nuclear technology to Iran and North Korea.
Osama bin Laden is widely thought to be hiding in Pakistan.
And the West continues to call Pakistan a "front-line ally" in the war on terror. And they continue to ask India to hold peace talks with Pakistan, not even 24 hours after Pakistani terrorists killed over 200 innocent Indians and maimed over 700 Indians in the terror attacks in Mumbai on July 11 2006.
What is this, if not hypocrisy of the highest level ?
The West must be honest, or it will not survive. There is still time.
Time Magazine reports:
World
Exclusive: A Kashmiri Tie to the Terror Plot
A key suspect in the foiled airline bombing plan who was arrested in Pakistan has links to one of India's most wanted terrorists
By JESSICA CARSEN/LONDON
Aug. 16, 2006
One of the British suspects detained in Pakistan as part of the investigation into the alleged plot to blow up planes flying from Great Britain to the U.S. is connected to the militant Islamic leader Maulana Masood Azhar, one of India's most wanted terrorists. Azhar family members told TIME that the sister-in law of Rashid Rauf, 25, who Pakistani intelligence officers fingered early on as a "key suspect," is married to Azhar's brother.
In a further link, the father of Rauf's wife and her sister runs Darul Uloom Madina, one of Pakistan's biggest and most hardline seminaries, with some 2,000 students, in Bahawalpur, Azhar's hometown. Rauf's arrest in Bahawalpur was one of the events that prompted British police to swoop in on the suspected London conspirators last Thursday, for fear they would become suspicious if they lost contact with such a central figure in their plans.
Although Azhar, in his late 30s, is now in hiding, he continues to lead the militant group Jaish-e-Muhammad, which is opposed to Indian rule of the disputed region of Kashmir and is said to have been behind the 2004 assassination attempt of President Pervez Musharraf and several other terror attacks. Azhar founded the group after he was released from an Indian prison in December 1999 in exchange for 155 passengers from a hijacked Indian airliner. Another prisoner released at the same time was Ahmad Omar Saeed Sheikh, a militant close to Jaish-e-Muhammad who was subsequently convicted of abducting U.S. journalist Daniel Pearl and sentencing him to death. At a rally in Karachi in January 2000 Azhar exhorted the crowd that "Muslims should not rest in peace until we have destroyed America and India."
While senior Pakistani officials do not believe Azhar is directly linked to recent terrorist activity in Pakistan or to al-Qaeda, it is believed rebel members of his group are now forging links with Osama Bin Laden's Afghanistan-based network.
Rauf, who is believed to have two daughters, aged two and eight months, is known to have shuttled between his base in Pakistan and Kandahar and Paktia in Afghanistan. Until 2002, he lived in Birmingham, England, but left after the murder of his uncle, which was never solved. His younger brother Tayib was one of two suspects arrested in Birmingham last week in the wave of British raids that has netted 23 people in total. U.K. intelligence officers are now expected to fly to Pakistan to interrogate Rauf and hope to bring him back to the U.K.; however there are no formal extradition treaties with Pakistan.
A charity called Crescent Relief founded by the Rauf's father, Abdul, which collected money for last year's Pakistani earthquake relief, effort is also under the microscope. A London-based independent security analyst said money was transferred from Crescent Relief late last year into three accounts in three separate banks in the Mirpur region of Kashmir. The accounts belonged to suspects arrested in the U.K. and Pakistan in the past week, the source said.Officials at Crescent Relief were unavailable for comment, and Pakistan's Foreign Ministry has dismissed reports that a tie to earthquake relief funds is being investigated. "Rashid Rauf had nothing to do with any charity involved in the earthquake relief work or with any relief work as such," said Tasneem Aslam, a Foreign Ministry spokesperson.
In a separate development, Tuesday evening a senior Pakistani intelligence official, speaking on condition of anonymity, told reporters in Islamabad that an al-Qaeda leader based in Afghanistan masterminded the British plot. While he did not identify the leader, the official suggested he was close to the rank of Abu Faraj al-Libbi, a Libyan said to have been a high-ranking operative arrested in Pakistan in May last year and later turned over to the U.S. But the direct involvement of Osama Bin Laden or Ayman al-Zawahri on this particular plot was ruled out by the official.
At the same time, investigators are examining links between the British detainees and known Islamic extremists in Germany. Counter-terrorism officers there are trying to ascertain the connection between at least one of the London suspects and the wife of a Hamburg al-Qaeda cell fugitive linked to the Sept. 11 attacks in New York.
The international dimension of the investigation has mobilized European politicians eager to present a united front against terrorism. Wednesday morning, British Home Office minister John Reid, who earlier this week warned that another 24 plots had been detected in the U.K., briefed his E.U. counterparts on the London investigation and urged them to ensure security measures were consistent across the Continent. "We face a common threat and must respond in common fashion," Reid told them, warning that threat was evolving all the time.
He didn't have to do much to convince them. Near the end of the meeting Franco Frattini, vice president of the European Commission on Liberty, Justice and Security mapped out the enhanced practical measures that E.U. leaders will announce in a formal plan over the next few days. They include extending existing research on explosives (particularly liquid explosives), a tougher crackdown on inflammatory websites or those that detail bomb-making expertise, and encouraging security officials to share biometric data of suspected persons more often and more rapidly.
Nicolas Sarkozy, French Interior Minister, also suggested the establishment, at an E.U. level, of counter-terror expert teams ready to help member states when needed. These would be similar to the "rapid reaction teams"at the disposal of the E.U. under its solidarity agreement, which aid member states in preventing illegal immigration.
Meanwhile, police in London Wednesday were granted by the courts more time to question the suspects in their custody, who include at least one woman. New powers granted under the 2006 Terrorism Act allow the police a maximum of 28 days to detain the suspects without charge, subject to request. Some 46 properties and 20 vehicles have already been searched and vast swaths of woodland near High Wycombe, scene of six of the first wave of arrests, are currently being combed for evidence of stashed explosives.
- with reporting by Ghulam Hasnain/Bahawalpur, Aryn Baker and Syed Talat Hussain/Islamabad and Adam Smith/London.
... Read more !
YANNIS KONTOS / POLARIS
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