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SearchToday in Islamophobia: Police cracks down on protesters in India, as the new coronavirus outbreak threatens Uighurs in internment camps in Xinjiang. In the U.S, Trump’s Muslim Ban faces new legal challenges as it enters its third year. Our recommended read today is by Raksha Kumar on the role of religion in the India protests. This, and more, below:
India
India’s Muslims Are Fighting for Their Religion. Should They Display It, Too? | Recommended Read
The nationwide protests have thrown up important questions of identity, religion, and belonging, some of which have driven a wedge within the progressive circles opposing the designs of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) for Hindu supremacy. What is the identity of the Muslims who started and joined these protests in large numbers? Should Muslim demonstrators protest as Muslims or as Indians who happen to be Muslim? Is their primary identity their religion or their nationality? read the complete article
'Our Democracy Is In Danger': Muslims In India Say Police Target Them With Violence
On Dec. 15, Renna and hundreds of her classmates were marching and waving protest banners on the campus of Jamia Millia Islamia, a historically Muslim university, when they came under attack by police. They had avoided a barricade and taken another route "because we wanted to make it a peaceful kind of thing," she recalls. "But what we saw next was complete brutality. Police started chasing the protesters and beating them up." read the complete article
Who Is an Indian?
India’s diversity is unique—it has long had the world’s second-largest Muslim population—but the question it is dealing with, of what makes a citizen, poses a challenge for democracies around the world. With battles over immigration and citizenship, membership and belonging, acquiring intensity not only in India but also in the United States and Europe, it is worth asking whether, as India’s founders felt, the ultimate solution will be found not in some ideal pact among communities but rather in a system where one is treated as an individual. That is, an arrangement in which Indians would not be seen as simply members of a particular community, be it a religion or caste. This is hard to achieve, and requires constant political work. The equality promised would demand the intense suppression of one’s instincts and impulses, but holds the possibility of creating a self-sustaining politics. read the complete article
Efforts being made to normalise Islamophobia: Arundhati Roy
Delivering a keynote address at an event on Thursday, Arundhati Roy said "efforts were being made to normalise Islamophobia". Arundhati Roy also contended that the Citizenship Amendment Act (CAA) would hit hard the economically deprived and marginalized Muslims, Dalits and women at large. "The rhetoric of political address is at its worst now... as graphic as it is about spreading communal hatred. It is also deceiving in the sense that it hides the true purpose of NRC or CAA from common understanding," the Man Booker Prize awardee said. The present-day India "where legacy papers act as current day document" is a slightly upturned version of Nazi Germany, she claimed. read the complete article
United States
Muslim Ban Turns Three
Underlying the Muslim ban are issues of Islamophobia, racism, xenophobia, and white nationalism, all of which have been mainstreamed by the Trump administration. President Trump justified the ban in national security terms, saying it was needed to keep Americans safe from terrorism, despite evidence showing that none of the individuals accused of terrorist attacks came from the countries listed on the ban. Moreover, a report in 2017 by the Investigative Fund at the Nation Institute and news outlet Reveal from the Center for Investigative Reporting found that “right-wing extremists were behind nearly twice as many incidents” as terror acts associated with those identified as ‘Islamist domestic terrorism.’” read the complete article
Trump's Travel Ban Faces New Challenge in Federal Appeals Court
The 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals will hear arguments Tuesday in three lawsuits filed by U.S. citizens and permanent residents whose relatives have been unable to enter the U.S. because of the travel ban, which was first imposed shortly after Trump took office in January 2017. The court is being asked to decide whether a federal judge in Maryland made a mistake when he refused to dismiss constitutional claims made in a lawsuit filed by the International Refugee Assistance Project despite a 2018 U.S. Supreme Court ruling in a Hawaii case that found the travel ban “a legitimate grounding in national security concerns.” read the complete article
Delta ordered to pay $50,000 fine over allegations it discriminated against Muslim passengers
The US Department of Transportation ordered Delta Air Lines on Friday to pay a $50,000 fine to settle allegations it violated federal law by discriminating against Muslim passengers. The department released a consent order that alleges Delta "engaged in discriminatory conduct" against three Muslim passengers on two separate incidents in 2016, including one flight from Paris to Ohio and another flight from Amsterdam to New York City. In both instances, the passengers were removed from their seats after flight attendants and fellow passengers became nervous, citing their behavior, according to the order. read the complete article
Argument Erupts in Guantánamo Court Over Use of the Term ‘Torture’
The judge, Col. W. Shane Cohen of the Air Force, said it would be his role to decide before the trial whether what happened to the defendants in the C.I.A. prison network was “torture” or “cruel, inhuman and degrading punishment.” Jury selection is scheduled to start on Jan. 11, 2021. “The opinion of the Department of Justice, the Attorney General or even the President of the United States is not binding on me,” Colonel Cohen said, referring to legal memos from the Bush administration that authorized brutal interrogation techniques like waterboarding that are now outlawed as torture. With such a finding, a military commission judge could decide to exclude certain evidence from the trial, dismiss the case or prevent the prosecution from seeking the death penalty. read the complete article
CW: Torture | The Torturers Wanted to Stop, but the CIA Kept Going
James Mitchell, one of the architects and practitioners of waterboarding, still defends the interrogation method, which involves strapping human beings to a gurney, covering their nose and mouth with a rag, and forcing water into their nasal cavity and lungs as they squirm. The technique is intended to break people by subjecting them to the primal terror of drowning. Prisoner Abu Zubaydah was terrorized that way 83 times at a black site in Thailand. According to the Senate torture report, he was “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” That report also noted that “non-stop use of the CIA’s enhanced interrogation techniques was disturbing to CIA personnel at Detention Site Green,” and that they objected, but were “instructed by CIA headquarters to continue using the techniques.” It added that the techniques continued for “more than two weeks” after CIA personnel on-site questioned the legality of what they were doing. read the complete article
Myanmar
Myanmar Is on Trial for Its Rohingya Campaign. Here’s Why
Since 2017, some 740,000 Rohingya Muslims have fled Myanmar for neighboring Bangladesh. The mass exodus was provoked, in the words of United Nations investigators, by security forces practicing “ethnic cleansing” and “crimes against humanity” with “genocidal intent.” Now two international tribunals are investigating Myanmar for atrocities committed against the Rohingya, who have lived uneasily among Myanmar’s Buddhist majority since the country’s independence from British rule seven decades ago. read the complete article
International
At Davos, Billionaire George Soros' Big Attack On PM Modi
On nationalism: "Nationalism, far from being reversed, made further headway." The biggest and "most frightening setback," he said came in India "where a democratically elected Narendra Modi is creating a Hindu nationalist state, imposing punitive measures on Kashmir, a semi-autonomous Muslim region, and threatening to deprive millions of Muslims of their citizenship." read the complete article
Canada
Quebec mosque shooting: Victims are healing — each at their own pace
A barber by trade, Mohamed Khabar still can’t stand up more than an hour before the burning sensation in his right foot becomes unbearable. When the pain is too much to bear, he sleeps alone not to bother his wife as he tosses and turns through the night. But when he finds himself on his own in the dark, the nightmares start. It feels like there’s an earthquake and the room is closing in on him. read the complete article
China
The Wuhan coronavirus has hit Xinjiang, where China has imprisoned at least 1 million Uighur Muslims. Its filthy detention camps will make inmates sitting ducks.
The Wuhan coronavirus has reached Xinjiang in western China, prompting fears that the million Uighur Muslims detained in prison camps across the region are helpless to infection. Authorities reported two cases in the autonomous southwestern region on Thursday, Radio Free Asia (RFA) and The Wall Street Journal reported, citing local health authorities. Conditions at the prison camps are dire, with poor sanitation, hygiene, and cramped living conditions, according to former inmates. There are at least 465 scattered across the region. Dolkun Isa, president of the World Uyghur Congress exile group, told RFA "the lives of millions of people will be at stake." read the complete article