UstaadKhan Blogs

The Canadian Red Cross is asking for funding to help flood victims in Pakistan.

It is estimated that six million people are in need of immediate assistance, including food, medicine, nutrition and clean drinking water, with a high epidemic risk.

Pregnant women, children and the elderly are most vulnerable.

Jan Brunschot, the Chatham branch’s community service co-ordinator for disaster management, said that some local donations have been coming in.

“We’re having trouble really pinpointing the extent of the damage, because we can’t get to some of the people,” she said on Friday.

On Monday, the Red Cross deployed a new field clinic. These clinics provide immediate curative, preventive and community health care.

Those wishing to donate may give online, call 1-800- 418-1111, or contact the local Canadian Red Cross office at 519-352-2510.

Cheques should be made payable to the Canadian Red Cross, earmarked “Pakistan Floods 2010″ and mailed to the Canadian Red Cross National Office, 170 Metcalfe Street, Suite 300, Ottawa, Ontario, K2P 2P2.

Donate $5 by texting REDCROSS to 30333. A onetime donation of $5 will be added to your mobile phone bill. All charges are billed by and payable to your mobile service provider.

Pakistan must stop helping the Taliban if Afghanistan is to ever see peace, said a former Canadian and United Nations diplomat.

Christopher Alexander who spent six years working in Afghanistan — first as Canada’s ambassador, and then as a UN envoy — says the Taliban would have folded up shop by now were it not for the support given to the insurgency group by Pakistan’s military establishment, especially the Directorate for Inter-Service Intelligence.

Alexander made the explosive comments Monday before the Senate Standing Committee on National Security and Defence.

The former diplomat and now declared candidate for the Conservative Party said the world needs to be open and frank about Pakistan’s role in Afghanistan’s ongoing struggle.

Pakistan has several seats on local military councils that plan the insurgency throughout Afghanistan, said Alexander.

“These networks, whose leadership, fundraising, training, bomb-making, supply and planning centres are based overwhelming on the territory of Pakistan, constitute the primary threat to peace and security in Afghanistan today.”

As for the Taliban’s role in recent peace talks with the Karzai government, Alexander said: “The Taliban doesn’t want peace. They don’t want a piece of the pie; they want to blow up the pie.”

FBI special agent Richard J. Kolko confirmed the arrests of the New Jersey suspects.

The arrests of two more Americans as would-be jihadists recently, as they were trying to board flights from New York City to Somalia, is a warning that the face of terror may be changing. Threats not only come from abroad; they can be homegrown.

Domestic terrorism is not new … as this area, home to the late Timothy McVeigh, is all too aware. And the two New Jersey men unmasked by an undercover New York City police officer and arrested as they headed toward hoped-for terror training were just the latest episode in domestic arrests that started with the Lackawanna Six shortly after 9/11.

So far, there have been 49 cases of radicalization and recruitment to jihadist terrorism within the United States, and 133 arrests. And so far, the would-be terrorists have proven, thankfully, inept.

But it only takes one. And America must not let down its guard.

“There is no long mile between the terrorist wannabe and the lethal zealot,” Rand Corp. analyst Brian Jenkins testified May 26 before the House Homeland Security Committee.

America’s Muslim-American community plays a huge role in maintaining our guard. It has indeed been helpful … the local chapter of the Muslim American Public Affairs Committee has been recognized for its work with the FBI … but there must be no let-up in community condemnation of terrorism and the organizations that support it. (more…)

AN ISLAMIC group broke with tradition yesterday when a woman led afternoon prayers.

Author Raheel Raza, above, from Canada, became one of the first Muslim-born women to deliver a sermon in the UK — a move opposed by many Muslim clerics. She spoke at the Muslim Educational Centre of Oxford’s prayers in Summertown Hall, Banbury Road.

Ms Raza appealed to Muslims to discuss “difficult” issues like homosexuality and immigration or “risk losing their children.”

Meco chairman Dr Taj Hargey said: “I think it went brilliantly.

“She is a very erudite and important person and I think this was a very historic event.”

Ms Raza has received death threats for trying to progress the role of women in Islam. She said: “If people open their minds, women leading prayers could become an achievable goal throughout the world.”

TUESDAY was “Quit Facebook” day around the world but especially in Canada. The attempt to scuttle the famous — or infamous — social networking site was, after all, the initiative of two Canadians. Why they became so determined to do in Facebook is not entirely clear, at least to anyone who doesn’t actually use it or any of the other social networking sites — people like myself.

The phrase social networking, in fact, seems to be a bit of an oxymoron. The more addicted to sites like Facebook people become, often the less social they actually are. They may have a thousand Facebook friends but no one to talk to outside of the web. As one faithful Facebook aficionado lamented recently, she had been trying to find someone to talk to for 45 minutes without any luck. This must mean, she concluded, that she had no friends, and she may well have been right. Talking through the ether seems to me to be not much more friendly than passing gas in a crowded elevator.

But none of that seems to be the reason for Quit Facebook day. Its users don’t seem to mind that, for the most part, it is not much more than one huge, collective intellectual fart where people tell total strangers what they had for dinner and what colour underwear they were wearing while they ate.

There are serious issues surrounding Facebook and similar social networks. In Pakistan, Facebook was banned recently because a user urged others to post cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, which to Muslims is blasphemy. A Pakistani court this week overturned that ban, saying the government could not limit freedom of speech and then went on to say that freedom did not include contradicting Islam. Facebook has had trouble in other countries as well — its only merit, as nearly as this low-tech Luddite can figure out — is that it is a conduit for free speech, no matter how fatuous most of that speech might be.

Rather, the reason that quitting Facebook was the talk of Twitter this week appears to be the company’s questionable collection of personal and private information from its users that it then sells to anyone who pays. Even that knowledge wasn’t enough to make Facebook users quit on Tuesday — the company won’t say how many did, but the estimate is about 40,000 pledges out 400 million users — and, with the threat of American legislation hanging over its head, Facebook has announced that it is tightening its privacy controls. That’s a step in the right direction, both for Facebook and for keeping government regulators out of the Internet, but it remains a jungle. Go ahead, talk your face off on the Internet if you want, but before you tell the world what you really did last night, give your life a reality check. No one has 1,000 friends.

A simmering clash between free speech and religious sensibilities in Pakistan burst from the streets onto the Internet on Thursday, as the government blocked the video-sharing site YouTube and other pages it deemed “sacrilegious” to the nation’s Muslim majority.

Islamabad, May 21 (IANS) Rallies and demonstrations were held across Pakistan Friday to protest publishing of blasphemous caricatures of Prophet Mohammad on social network site Facebook and Youtube.
Protesters urged the government to take strict action against the countries involved in publishing of the caricatures.

A protest rally was taken out from the Faisal Masjid here after Friday prayers by students of the International Islamic University of Islamabad. The protesters chanted slogans against the elements involved in publishing of caricatures on Facebook website and urged the Muslim world to take a united stance against the “conspiracy”.

In Rawalpindi, various religious and student organisations took out rallies in different parts of the garrison city and supported the blocking of Youtube and Facebook websites, adding the Muslim community should raise the issue at the United Nations and the Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC).

Lahore High Court Bar associations in the Punjab capital also took out a protest rally, contending that the caricatures had hurt the religious sentiments of Muslims across the world and all the Muslim countries should move the International Court of Justice.

Protests rallies and demonstrations were also reported from Karachi, Faisalabad, Gujranwala, and Peshawar, among other cities.

The New York Daily News reports that the financial district committee of the Community Board 1 in Manhattan has unanimously endorsed the erection of a 13-story mosque and Islamic cultural center.

The Cordoba House is a $100 million project that is being proposed for the former Burlington Coat Factory building at Park Place and Broadway, a location that is two blocks away from where the twin towers of the World Trade Center once stood. Committee Chairman Ro Sheffe shares: “I think it will be a wonderful asset to the community.”

The Cordoba Initiative was founded after the 9/11 attacks, and according to Imam Feisel Abdul Rauf, one of those who helped found the initiative, the Cordoba House aims to foster better relations between Muslims and the West. The project consists of a glass and steel building that will house a 500-seat performing arts venue, a swimming pool and a basketball court. Rauf gushed that there will be “nothing like it” and that it will be open to all New Yorkers.

Islam, however, is a religion that is unsurprisingly associated with the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, and despite the knowledge and the realization that it is incorrect to give a sweeping generalization of all Muslims, those who lost loved ones during the attacks are not too keen about seeing a mosque in the area.

Retired FDNY Deputy Chief Jim Riches, who lost his son Jim, a firefighter, during the attacks, said: “I realize it’s not all of them, but I don’t want to have to go down to a memorial where my son died on 9/11 and look at a mosque.”

The Cordoba Initiative hopes to break ground on the project by 9/11/2011, the 10th anniversary of the attacks. An estimated 1,000 to 2,000 Muslims are expected to pray in the Mosque on Fridays.