[Bangla Daily Star] Panicked by the government move to hold trial of war criminals, top Jamaat-e-Islami leaders with alleged links to 1971 war crimes are desperately searching ways to evade prosecution and protect their political future.
Once convicted of war crimes, an individual will permanently lose the right to contest election to parliament or local government bodies, according to the electoral laws enacted before and after the ninth parliamentary election.
A number of top Jamaat leaders might be detained on charge of war crimes after the investigation agency, likely to be formed today, starts working, a senior Jamaat leader told The Daily Star yesterday.
While talking to The Daily Star at his residence in the capital, he received a number of phone calls from other Jamaat leaders voicing concern about the start of the trial process and possible detention.
Jamaat leaders were still assessing the full implication of events to come.
The government has already imposed a restriction on their leaving the country and is keeping them under constant watch. Jamaat leaders Mohammad Kamaruzzaman and Abdur Razzaque had been barred from going abroad.
Jamaat high command has already directed party leaders to prepare for demonstration against detention, without waiting for any response from the BNP or other components of the four-party alliance, party insiders said.
Some Jamaat leaders met BNP Chief Khaleda Zia at her Gulshan office last month and proposed waging a united movement against the government on various issues including "harassment of political leaders in the name of the trial."
But they received a lukewarm response from the BNP chief. She told them that movement against the government can be launched from their respective sides, said a Jamaat source.
"We will decide on our next course of action after observing the government's actions. If the government attempts to victimise Jamaat-e-Islami in the name of trial, we will see what to do," Jamaat Secretary General Ali Ahsan Mohammad Mojaheed told The Daily Star yesterday.
He however claimed that there is no war criminal in Jamaat-e-Islami.
Jamaat is also making preparation to face the trial legally.
Jamaat's legal wing comprised of a number of lawyers is working to defend party leaders who might be charged with war crimes, party sources said.
Separate files are being prepared on the party's top leaders with possible allegations against them and legal arguments to get them cleared of the allegations, a party leader said.
Jamaat also plans to challenge the International Crimes (Tribunal) Act 1973 under which the trail will be held, he said.
"But we can't challenge the law at the Supreme Court before it is used against any of us," the Jamaat leader said.
The severity of the Act also worries them because if charged under the act, an individual will lose his or her fundamental rights ensured by the constitution.
The party has also launched a massive campaign at home and abroad raising questions about the legality of the prosecution.
A number of Jamaat leaders have been in contact with foreign diplomats in Dhaka.
Some party men abroad are also keeping contact with some international organisations.
The party prepared and published a number of documents, and sent those to the foreign missions labelling the government move as "politically motivated", a Jamaat leader said.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/25/2010 00:00 ||
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#1
Someone who lives on his nerves is called a neurovore.
Posted by: Frank G ||
03/25/2010 18:06 Comments ||
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CO2e (carbon dioxide equivalents)
Therein lies another huge scandal relating to the Montreal Protocol which led directly to the Kyoto Protocol.
The Montreal Protocol which supposedly saved us from ozone depletion mandated the use of gases with CO2 equivalents hundreds of times greater than CO2 itself.
Notwithstanding the fact CO2 equivalents are basically guesswork with almost no empirical basis.
#2
If a university official's letter accusing a speaker of having a proclivity to commit speech crimes before she's given the speech -- which then leads to Facebook postings demanding that Ann Coulter be hurt, a massive riot and a police-ordered cancellation of the speech -- is not hate speech, then there is no such thing as hate speech.
Either Francois goes to jail or the Human Rights Commission is a hoax and a fraud.
My money's on 'fraud'.
Posted by: Bobby ||
03/25/2010 12:44 Comments ||
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What is this "unwritten code of 'positive-space'"?
"Health insurance is haraam like other types of commercial insurance..."
So, Obamacare is a new source of grievance?
Posted by: Whiskey Mike ||
03/25/2010 9:21 Comments ||
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#2
OK, how does Obama square this?
Health insurance is haraam like other types of commercial insurance, because it is based on ambiguity, gambling and riba (usury). This is what is stated in fatwas by the senior scholars.
In Fataawa al-Lajnah al-Daaimah (15/277) there is a quotation of a statement of the Council of Senior Scholars concerning the prohibition on insurance and why it is haraam.
1. In the saheeh hadeeth it says that the Prophet (peace and blessings of Allaah be upon him) forbade ambiguous transactions.
2. When the ambiguity becomes prevalent, it becomes like gambling, whereupon it comes under the general prohibition on gambling
#3
Looks like Muhammed did not like insurance agents. Can't really say I blame him.
The fact that the state makes insurance compulsory does not make it permissible; rather the burden of sin is waived from the person or company who is obliged to do that. As for the broker company which is doing this work by choice, it is guilty of sin.
Solomon B. Watson IV was the top legal officer of the New York Times back in 2005 and 2006 when, notoriously, it published two stories compromising top-secret counterterrorism programs. I wrote about what the Times had done at the time in "Exposure," as Gabriel Schoenfeld did in "Has the New York Times violated the Espionage Act?" Indeed, Schoenfeld's forthcoming book Necessary Secrets was inspired by the recurring issues raised by the Times's -- oh, let's say it --- violations of the Espionage Act.
The Obama administration has now nominated Watson to be general counsel of the Army. This has raised some questions in the minds of Senators John McCain and Jeff Sessions about how Mr. Watson might deal with issues of leaking and secrecy in his sensitive new post. In fact, in his confirmation hearings they gave him a hot grilling. There is no one more qualified than Schnoenfeld to review Watson's responses to Senators McCain and Sessions. He analyzes them in "A secret keeper (and breaker)."
JOHN adds: Is this some kind of sick joke? How does a career spent at the New York Times qualify Solomon to be the Army's chief legal officer? It's one thing to make bad appointments, but, given the Times's history, it is hard to see this one as anything other than an intentional slap in the Army's face.
If this is general counsel, no Soldier need re-enlist.
Mission overseas is over. I need you back home before this ass clown collapses our country and you are left overseas with no viable currency.
The war is officially at home at this point and I assure you it will become a hardship tour.
No danger pay, but lots of optempo none the less.
I Am calling it all in folks. This has gone too far for sustainment. It is becoming survival.
Sorry men. I know we win the wars, yet now, this is becoming imperative that our Soldiers are back home.
Besides, how do you re-deploy when the dollar is worthless?
Five years after being barred from the U.S. for making charitable contributions to a group that sent those contributions to the jihad terror group Hamas, internationally renowned Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan, often dubbed the Muslim Martin Luther,' will make his first public appearance in America this April after being permitted to enter the country.
The turnabout comes not because Ramadan has been cleared of these charges, but because Secretary of State Clinton has, in the words of State spokesman Darby Holladay, chosen to exercise her exemption authority for the benefit of Tariq Ramadan.'
Holladay disingenuously suggested that the Bush Administration had barred Ramadan from the country because of his opposition to the Iraq War, but no exemption authority' would have been needed to overturn a ban that had been put in place for that reason. Clinton was exempting Ramadan from prohibitions on supporters of terror groups entering the country.
And ironically, days after the Obama State Department announced the exemption for Ramadan, a Detroit-area Muslim named Mohamad Mustapha Ali Masfaka was arrested at the border while attempting to cross from Canada back into the United States. His crime? Lying to the FBI and immigration officials about his work with the Holy Land Foundation, formerly the largest Islamic charity in the United States, which has now been shut down for funneling charitable contributions to Hamas.
So what is the difference between Tariq Ramadan and Mohamad Mustapha Ali Masfaka? They have both allegedly been disingenuous about their ties to a Hamas charity, and yet Ramadan is free to enter the United States and Masfaka is under arrest. So what unique and compelling benefit does Tariq Ramadan bring to the U.S. that would move Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton to bend their own anti-terror rules and make this exemption for him?
The answer, of course, is that Tariq Ramadan is internationally famous as a voice of Islamic moderation and a vocal critic of the Bush Administration's Middle East policies, which the Obama Administration very much wants to subject to public criticism. Mohamad Mustapha Ali Masfaka, in contrast, toils in relative obscurity and offers the Obama Administration no such political fringe benefits. Ramadan represents the kind of Muslim who should respond most favorably to Obama's recurring pleas for a new relationship based on mutual respect: urbane, sophisticated, Westernized, closely identified with Islamic moderation and reform. In fact, Holladay explained the exemption for Ramadan in terms that specifically recalled Obama's repeated appeals: Both the president and the secretary of state have made it clear that the US government is pursuing a new relationship with Muslim communities based on mutual interest and mutual respect.'
However, there are cracks in Ramadan's façade that should have raised eyebrows even in Obama's State Department. Ramadan is the grandson of Hasan Al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood an international Islamic supremacist organization that is dedicated, in its own words (according to an internal Brotherhood document captured in a raid of the Holy Land Foundation), to eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house.' French journalist Caroline Fourest, who has published a book-length study of Ramadan's sly duplicity, Brother Tariq, concludes that this much-lionized putative Muslim Martin Luther is actually anything but a reformer: in reality, Ramadan is remaining scrupulously faithful to the strategy mapped out by his grandfather, a strategy of advance stage by stage' toward the imposition of Islamic law in the West.
Ramadan, she explains, in his public lectures and writings invests words like law' and democracy' with subtle and carefully crafted new definitions, permitting him to engage in an apparently inoffensive discourse while remaining faithful to an eminently Islamist message and without having to lie overtly at least not in his eyes.' Ramadan, she said, may have an influence on young Islamists and constitute a factor of incitement that could lead them to join the partisans of violence.'
In light of Ramadan's smooth duplicity, his new welcome into the U.S. is a fitting symbol for the entire catastrophe of the Obama Administration's policy toward the Middle East and Islamic terror. Obama reaches out to the Islamic world, assuming that his overtures will be welcomed by voices of reason and restraint. But in making this appeal, Obama drastically underestimates the jihad threat and mistakes all too many enemies for friends. And so now he also underestimates and misevaluates Tariq Ramadan, with consequences that no one can foretell at this point, but which are not likely to be positive.
Obama announced the appointment of Rashad Hussain as ambassador to the Organization of the Islamic Conference. By video, Obama told attendees at something called the U.S.-Islamic World Forum in Doha, Qatar, that Hussain, 31, was not just an accomplished lawyer and trusted member of my White House staff,' but also a hafiz' - a Muslim who has memorized the entire Koran.
Posted by: ed ||
03/25/2010 15:36 ||
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Hamas leader Mahmoud al Zahar has received his share of [smear] campaigns and accusations of treason just like anybody else who speaks logically and rationally about the mistakes being committed in Gaza. This article does not aim to defend al Zahar inasmuch as it is an attempt to keep shedding light on a matter that some people are trying conceal through deception and news laundering.
A few days ago, al Zahar openly attacked the rockets fired from Gaza to Israel on the Iranian Al Alam television station and described them as "suspicious [action]." Al Zahar said, "some elements are firing rockets (towards Israel) that do not have warheads in order to take advantage of this in the media," adding that the Gazan government is following up on this matter on the security level in order to reveal the truth behind it. He further stated that Hamas knows the real motives [behind the firing of rockets].
Immediately after that statement, al Zahar was subjected to criticism from Islamist factions and others, as he was advised to take back his comments and to explain his statement in an attempt to reduce the anger [surrounding it]. However, anybody who looks carefully at al Zahar's explanation would see that he did not back down [from his position] but rather that he further stressed his viewpoint at length as he said that "the enemy wants to remove this moment of calm, and justify its attacks in order to escape the crisis that it is going through with regards to Jerusalem and its insult to the US. The enemy might resort to escalation and we respect and appreciate the resistance project regardless of the parties that adopt it or their visions; Palestine is for everyone and we are with them but beware of the conspiracies of some agents to help the enemy out of its real crisis." He added that "there must be a reconsideration of every experience; this is not condemnation, as reconsideration means assessment."
Some might say here that we should ask who taught the fox to be wise. However it seems that we are not facing another round of Hamas deception; rather there are only two possibilities with regards to al Zahar's position. The first possibility is that al Zahar is actually talking rationally and does not want to alleviate the pressure and embarrassment Netanyahu is experiencing by giving him a pretext to move on quickly thus avoiding the dilemma he is in with Obama and [helping] Netanyahu maintain unity within his government and this is what we spoke about when we asked the Palestinians, the Palestinian Authority and Hamas to keep silent and not try to escalate matters.
The second possibility with regards to al Zahar's comments -- and there is evidence to support this -- is that Hamas is facing real rebellion in Gaza from some armed factions, as some of them do not want to adhere to the truce that Hamas reached with Israel after the Gaza war whether for different political reasons or because of a real ideological battle with Hamas. The best example of this was the armed conflict that took place in Ibn Taymiyyah mosque with Jund Ansar Allah.
Therefore, what was said about al Zahar retracting his comments about "suspicious [action]" was not accurate, as his explanation did not seem to be a retraction inasmuch as it was confirmation of his position against the firing of anti-tank rockets, which he said was for propaganda [reasons]. Regardless of al Zahar's motives, what is important is that the Israelis are not given a pretext and above all that the people of Gaza are not subjected to even more suffering.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/25/2010 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
