MUSLIM HATE OF JOURNALISTS!
By Shaikh Azizur Rahman
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
October 22, 2005
DHAKA, Bangladesh -- A chill ran down the
spine of journalist Mizanur Rahman when a neatly folded white cloth symbolizing
an Islamic burial shroud tumbled out of a package he received by mail last
month.
An accompanying letter addressed to Mr. Rahman, a reporter for the Dhaka
daily Janakantha (People's Voice), said that because of his "anti-Islamic"
reporting, his days were numbered and he would soon be in a white burial shroud.
White shrouds and death threats also reached eight other journalists the
same day in Satkhira, a district in southwestern Bangladesh.
The letters were signed by leaders of the outlawed militant group Jagrata
Muslim Janata Bangladesh (Awakened Muslim Citizens of Bangladesh, often referred
to by its initials, JMJB), the orthodox Islamist movement Ahl-e-Hadith
(followers of the Sayings of the Prophet) and Jamat-e-Islami Bangladesh, an
Islamist political party in the ruling coalition in Bangladesh. The letters
threatened that the journalists would be "slaughtered" because their writings
attacked clerics who want to transform the country into a pure Islamic state.
"We are determined to bring total Islamic rule in Bangladesh through an
armed revolution," the letters said. "You are some of the obstacles on our way
to achieve these goals. You are the country's enemies, so you face removal from
this Earth."
Of the nine reporters who received these death threats, five are Hindus, and
the letters warned them that as non-Muslims, they had no right to report on
Islamic matters.
Kalyan Banerjee, a Hindu reporter for the popular Dhaka daily Pratham Alo
(First Light), said: "In the letter accompanying the kafan (burial shroud) they
said to me, Hindu religious functions would not be allowed in Pak Bangla (Holy
Bangladesh) and no Hindu will be allowed to vote in the next parliamentary
elections in Bangladesh. They will be slaughtered if they try to vote."
Mr. Banerjee, who reported on growing Islamist extremist activities in the
area in a recent series of reports, said that he is also getting threatening
calls from unknown people on his cell phone.
JMJB and Ahl-e-Hadith, among other Islamist groups, were accused of
masterminding the Aug. 17 violence in which more than 400 bombs exploded
simultaneously across Bangladesh, killing two persons and injuring more than
200.
This month, the authorities announced a reward of $15,200 for information
leading to the arrest of underground JMJB chief Siddiqur Islam, alias Bangla
Bhai.
Also this month, JMJB claimed responsibility for a series of Oct. 3
courtroom bombings in three towns that killed two persons and injured more than
50. The radical group has been campaigning to establish strict Islamic rule in
Bangladesh, a Muslim-majority country governed by secular laws.
Statistics suggest that journalism is a dangerous profession in Bangladesh.
In the past10 years, at least 19 journalists have been murdered and more than
800 have been injured in attacks by Islamist fundamentalists, political parties,
criminals and various government agencies including the police.
Dipankar Chakrabarty, editor of a regional daily Durjoy Bangla (Invincible
Bangla) was hacked to death with a machete in the central town of Sherpur last
October.
Before his death, he told Reporters Without Borders that anonymous callers
were threatening him by phone with death if he did not stop reporting on the
ties between some powerful politicians and a criminal organization in the area.
In January 2004, a bomb in the southwestern district of Khulna killed Manik
Saha, a reporter for the Dhaka daily New Age and stringer for the British
Broadcasting Corp.
Some of his colleagues think Mr. Saha was killed because of his book
investigating shrimp mafias who were converting paddy fields into shrimp farms,
damaging the environment. The veteran journalist received many death threats by
phone before he was slain.
A banned extremist Maoist group called Purba Bangla Communist Party (PBCP)
claimed responsibility for the Saha murder. A week after the killing, PBCP
threatened nine other reporters with death if they did not stop writing about
the dead reporter.
In another bomb attack at Khulna in February, the PBCP injured three
journalists and killed Belal Ahmed, a reporter with the national daily Dainik
Sangram (Daily Struggle). The Maoist group -- which claimed to have killed four
journalists, all "enemies of the poor" -- says it has 30 other journalists on
its hit list.
Golam Mortoza, executive editor of Weekly 2000, an investigative weekly,
recently received a death threat from unknown groups. He said in Dhaka that many
politically frustrated ex-Maoist cadres had formed criminal gangs who are
targeting journalists reporting on extortion and racketeering.
Sumi Khan, a Weekly 2000 crime reporter who was stabbed by unidentified
assailants last year, agrees. "I was targeted because I reported how religious
extremists, criminal mafias and illegal gunrunners were thriving in my area,"
she said. "Such attacks on the media throughout the country try to block the
free flow of information."
Mrs. Khan, who narrowly escaped death, was awarded the Guardian newspaper's
Hugo Young Award for courageous journalism in London this year.
Although most of the journalists threatened in Bangladesh exposed
corruption, crime and growing religious extremism, some have been targeted for
revealing the covert activities of politicians.
"At election time, the major political parties accept help from shady
political elements to win votes," said Naim Islam Khan, president of the
Bangladesh Center for Development, Journalism and Communication.
"Some take donations from criminal gangs, providing protection in exchange,"
so reporters exposing such politician-criminal connections face threats to their
lives.
Although police have registered more than a thousand cases of violence
against journalists in the past10 years, nearly all cases remain unsolved.
Journalists in Bangladesh have even been targeted by the government.
Nurul Kabir, executive editor of the Dhaka daily New Age, thinks reporters
in Bangladesh are targeted by parts of the government because they expose
activities or plans that many citizens oppose.
"Journalists who are critical about corruption and malfeasance in ruling
circles are being targeted -- especially outside the capital -- by activists
supporting the ruling coalition. They are also attacked by supporters of the
main opposition Awami League when they reveal its indifference toward people's
suffering," Mr. Kabir said.
In 2002, Saleem Samad, a stringer for Time magazine, was detained by the
army for helping a British Channel 4 team film a documentary on Islamist
extremism and persecution of minority Hindus in Bangladesh.
Mr. Samad was released after 55 days of detention, following protests from
human- and media-rights groups outside the country.
"[The army] told me to sign a statement admitting that I engaged in
activities detrimental to the national interest. When I refused to sign the
false statement, they started torturing me in a dark, tiny cell. They did not
give me enough food and water. I was released only after the High Court ruled
that my detention was illegal," said Mr. Samad.
Last year, when Mr. Samad was in Canada to attend an international seminar,
the army, apparently at the behest of the government, raided his home in Dhaka
looking for him. Friends and relatives advised him not to return to Bangladesh,
and the 52-year-old journalist has applied for political asylum in Canada.
"Although I don't like to live in a foreign land, I cannot return to my
country. I know this time they would kill me. They are angry because of my last
Time write-up which described Bangladesh as a country in utter 'dysfunction,' "
said Mr. Samad, who is now living in Ottawa as a refugee as the Canadian
government considers his application for asylum.
"Death threats are becoming a pervasive and insidious part of daily life for
journalists in Bangladesh," said Christopher Warren, president of the
International Federation of Journalists. "The intimidation [of journalists] is a
direct violation of civil rights and liberties, which are the basic tools for a
successful democracy."
The bitter rivalry between Begum Khaleda Zia, the prime minister of
Bangladesh, and opposition leader Sheikh Hasina Wajed has polarized the whole
country. Even journalists are now politicized to a point where individual
editors, reporters and newspapers are better known for their political leanings
than for the contents of their work.
A senior editor at a popular daily in Dhaka said: "Until a few years ago,
you would find most of us with independent views, but now we are either Khaleda
Zia supporters or belong to Sheikh Hasina's camp. Unless the two groups are
reunited, journalists will continue to be attacked in Bangladesh. But this will
never happen unless the two top political leaders come to good terms."
Newspapers gagged over cartoon slur
February 04, 2006
The council of Muslim
theologians has obtained a court interdict barring newspapers under the Johncom
and Independent groups from publishing the controversial cartoons of the prophet
Mohammed. The order means that the Sunday Times, Sunday Tribune,
and the The Independent will not publish the cartoons.
Mondli Makhanya, the Sunday Times editor, says the paper had opposed the
council's application on the principle that it should not be dictated to by any
outside influences.
Ferial Hafajee, the Mail and Guardian editor, says she regrets any harm
caused by the weekly's publishing of one of the controversial cartoons depicting
the prophet Mohammed. The paper yesterday published the cartoon.
The picture is one of 12 originally published in a Danish newspaper in September
last year. They have subsequently appeared on several European newspapers,
sparking outrage in the Muslim world. Hafajee says the intention was to show
readers what the outcry is about.
Editor to be tried over Mohammed cartoon
From correspondents in Jakarta
July 21, 2006
AN Indonesian editor detained for posting cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed on his newspaper website earlier this year has been released from prison but will face trial for offending Islam.
Teguh Santosa, 35, was freed from a Jakarta prison last night after being held there for 24 hours by the prosecutor's office, police detective Aries Syarif Hidayat said.
Mr Santosa, who is the chief editor of the Rakyat Merdeka Online newspaper, will still have to face trial for publishing the cartoons in February, Hidayat said.
He faces a maximum five years' imprisonment if convicted.
Prosecutors have charged Mr Santosa with two counts of "inciting animosity and hatred" towards Islam.
The Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten first printed 12 caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed last September and a slew of other, mostly European, newspapers have followed suit, sparking outrage in the Muslim world.
Islam considers images of the prophet to be blasphemous.
Mr Santosa, quoted by the Koran Tempo newspaper today, said he was only trying to give readers a complete story on the controversial cartoons.
"It was in accordance with my job as a journalist," he reportedly said.
Denmark in February temporarily closed its mission in Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim nation, and warned its nationals to leave the country after weeks of protests.
Ayatollah issues fatwa calling for two journalists in Azerbaijan to be killed
December 3, 2006
Reporters without borders
Reporters Without Borders voiced deep concern today about a fatwa (religious decree) issued by an Iranian ayatollah calling for two journalists in neighbouring Azerbaijan to be killed for an allegedly blasphemous article. The fatwa’s targets are Rafiq Nazar Oughlo Taghizadh of the Azerbaijani fortnightly Sanat (“Industry”) and his editor Samir Sadaght Oughlo.
“We urge the Iranian authorities to calm people down as there has been a great deal of tension since the publication of Mohammed cartoons in a Danish newspaper last February,” the press freedom organisation said. “We also ask the Azerbaijani authorities to do everything necessary to protect these two journalists.”
Reporters Without Borders added: “It is deeply shocking and completely unacceptable that religious fundamentalists should call for the murder of two people who just expressed their opinions.”
The offending article was written by Taghizadh, 56, for the newspaper’s 6 November issue. Entitled “Europe and us,” its claim that European values were superior to those of Muslim countries sparked outrage in both Azerbaijan (a Muslim country) and Iran.
Fazel Lankarani (photo), one of the Islamic Republic of Iran’s leading ayatollah’s, issued the fatwa in response to appeals for advice from Azerbaijani Muslims. Posted on his website (www.lankarani.org) on 25 November, it calls for both the “apostate” journalist who wrote the article and the editor who published it to be killed.
Muslim Mau-Mauing
One Dallas journo’s experience
Two years after standing on the Brooklyn Bridge and watching the second tower fall, I joined the Dallas Morning News. My wife, a native Dallasite, praises our new city as “a September 10 kind of place.” She means that the anxieties attending our post-9/11 New York life simply don’t exist here. The downside is that people lull themselves into a false sense of security about the Muslim community. From where I sit, it looks to me as though the entire mainstream media also live in a September 10 kind of place. We—and I say “we” because I’m part of the dreaded MSM—really don’t want to know what’s happening among Muslims in Dallas, Brooklyn, or anywhere else.
Dallas is home to a large and relatively prosperous Muslim community. The Dallas Central Mosque is Texas’s largest. The area’s Muslims, though, have had a contentious relationship in recent years with the Dallas Morning News, mostly because of the paper’s groundbreaking 2001 reporting on the Holy Land Foundation, whose leadership is now under federal terrorism indictment. Since then, local Muslim leaders have engaged in a running dialogue with the News, with the declared aim of improving relations.
It was in that spirit that Sayyid Syeed, then head of the Islamic Society of North America, came in, together with a local delegation, to see the editorial board a few months after I arrived from New York in 2003. Syeed made a laborious presentation about how journalists needed to join with the organization in promoting peace, tolerance, and reconciliation. I knew something about ISNA and asked Syeed why—if his group truly supported peace and suchlike—its board included members directly linked to Islamic extremism and anti-Semitism, including the notorious Wahhabi-trained Brooklyn imam Siraj Wahhaj. The professorial Syeed dropped his polite mask, shook his fist at me, told me that I would one day “repent,” and compared my question with a Nazi inquisition.
Hysterical indignation, I soon learned, is the standard operating procedure for Islamic groups in dealing with the media in this town. Shortly after the Syeed meeting, I published a column in the News decrying the media’s evasion of legitimate questions about Islamic figures and organizations, hoping to shame journalists into posing them. That’s how I became, in the designation of one (now-defunct) Muslim website dedicated to criticizing the News, “the new face of hate.”
I then joined that Islamic site’s e-mail list—which contained several prominent Dallas Muslims—under my own name. Before the site operators discovered my presence and booted me off, I printed out e-mails in which participants discussed a plan to approach business and religious leaders in town and persuade them to lean on the News’s publisher to fire me as a danger to Muslims. “Dreher needs to be ruined,” one e-mailer wrote. “When people here [sic] the name ‘Rod Dreher’ the image of David Duke should appear in their mind’s eye. So, a campaign must be planned and carefully executed to expose this hate-monger and render him a joke.” Naturally, I publicized the plans and made sure that copies of the e-mails got into the hands of the newspaper’s lawyers. That apparently ended that.
I kept making a pest of myself, though, pointing out in columns and editorial-board blog postings inconvenient truths about Dallas’s Muslim community—that, for instance, the leading local imam, who positions himself as an avuncular ecumenicist, had praised on his website the radical Islamists Hasan al-Turabi and Yusuf Qaradawi as the kind of scholars American Muslims should consult. I also helped get into the News’s editorial pages disturbing facts: that the Dallas Central Mosque had participated in a contest that assigned the best-known work of the fanatical Islamic revolutionary Sayyid Qutb to teenage readers, for example, and that some local Muslim leaders had attended a “Tribute to the Great Islamic Visionary”—that would be the Ayatollah Khomeini—at a suburban mosque.
This December, another delegation of local Muslim leaders trooped into the News to meet with the editorial board, mostly to complain about, well, me, and to clear up misunderstandings that my supposedly biased rantings might have caused among my colleagues. It was a classic performance. The group obfuscated and bullied, seeking to skirt some tough questions—such as whether they wanted sharia imposed as the law of the land—and trying to make the journalists on hand feel guilty for even asking. What the Muslims were counting on: 1) a lack of specific knowledge about Islam and Islamic figures on the audience’s part; and 2) the audience’s ideological sympathy for them as members of a mistrusted minority.
Luckily, we had in the room a News reporter recently reassigned from our London bureau. He speaks Arabic and had covered the London subway bombings. When the Muslim group tried to claim that Sayyid Qutb was a fringe figure, my newsroom colleague said no, he’s not, and one can easily find his work in Islamic bookshops in England, where it has contributed to the radicalization of British Muslim youth. So it wasn’t just that right-wing Dreher guy from New York—traumatized by 9/11, alas for him—asking these questions. It’s amazing how undone these Muslim leaders become when informed journalists, refusing to be intimidated into embarrassed silence, confront them with the facts.
Later, after I blogged about the meeting, the group’s leader fired off an e-mail to me and my supervisors accusing me of single-handedly burning every bridge built between the Dallas Muslim community and the newspaper. I’d hate for that to be true. But far worse for those bridges to remain standing if built on the dangerous notion that the news media should always publish happy-clappy news about local Muslims and shun any healthy suspicion about things such as Khomeini tributes, anti-Jewish and anti-Christian hate literature showing up in mosque libraries (as happened here), and the like.
Monday, August 6, 2007
Oakland police will seek formal charges as early as today against several people associated with Your Black Muslim Bakery, including the alleged killer of a newspaper editor who had been working on a story about the controversial group that operates the bakery, the city's assistant police chief said Sunday.
Howard Jordan said Devaughndre Broussard, a 19-year-old handyman at the bakery, had confessed to fatally shooting Oakland Post Editor Chauncey Bailey, 57, near his offices Thursday morning. Broussard was one of seven people arrested in raids the following day.
Jordan said Broussard and others, under investigation for their part in an alleged string of crimes earlier this year, are part of a splinter group within the organization founded by the late Yusuf Bey more than 30 years ago.
The splinter group, Jordan said, "promotes violence in the name of the Muslim faith and contradicts the teachings of (former Nation of Islam leader) Elijah Muhammad."
Police will also seek charges of kidnapping for ransom in connection with a May 19 incident in which two people were abducted, Jordan said. Alameda County prosecutors must review evidence in the case - including documents, recordings and witness statements - and decide on charges by Tuesday.
Jordan said police will not seek charges at this point in two North Oakland slayings that have been linked to members of the group: the July slayings of Michael John Wills Jr., 36, and Odell Roberson Jr., 31. Sources have said the men's deaths may have been linked to the bakery group's effort to "cleanse" the area near the bakery on San Pablo Avenue.
"There's still a lot left to do in terms of developing leads," Jordan said.
Referring to Broussard's arrest in Bailey's killing, he said, "We don't know if he was the only one involved."
The leader of the organization, 21-year-old Yusuf Bey IV, was also arrested last week in the raids on a $375,000 felony assault warrant issued in San Francisco. The young man took over the organization after his father, who was awaiting trial on charges of raping a minor, died in 2003.
San Francisco police said the younger Bey, already charged with vandalizing a West Oakland liquor store in an effort to curb its alcohol sales, used his BMW to run over a bouncer after being thrown out of a strip club in April 2006. Since then, Jordan said, he has missed court dates, prompting the warrant.
Efforts to reach Bey's family members were unsuccessful on Sunday. In the afternoon, two men stood in the doorway of the bakery on San Pablo Avenue; one said "No" and closed the door when approached by a reporter.
The business, which last year filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, was boarded up after the raids. The Alameda County Department of Environmental Health shut it, saying in a report that problems included a "strong odor of rotting flesh" and "fish thawing in still water." Grease piled up in open buckets, and someone disposed of grease in a toilet and in storm drains, the report said.
"I almost threw up," said Jordan, who was at the raid.
The organization - which has also operated a security firm and a school, among other businesses - has in the past been praised for its focus on reforming troubled youth and building self-reliance. But it has been increasingly criticized for some its members' propensity for violence.
Three parents whose children were arrested in the raids said Sunday they had been impressed by the bakery's ability to keep kids out of trouble.
The mother of J-Shawn Belser, who is being held at the Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, said Sunday that she had seen only positive things after he started working there.
The 18-year-old had become depressed in July 2006 after the fatal shooting in Oakland of Charles Fort Jr., his 17-year-old best friend and cousin, said Kathy Belser.
"He just lost his way," she said. "One day, he said, 'I'm going to try and join the Muslims.' He started reading the Quran. He changed his life, going to school and working at the bakery."
Her son, she said, was happy and studying to get a GED after dropping out of high school. With most of his time occupied with work and school, Belser thought her son was safe.
"I was happy that he was learning to respect himself and respect others and learn how to be a man - take care of family and take care of business," Belser said. "He's just a good kid. I know for a fact that he's not involved in any of this."
Belser, though, said she wished she had heard about the bakery's troubled history.
"Had I known all these things were being said about the bakery, I wouldn't have allowed my son to be there at all," she said.
A more ominous note was sounded by a parent who said his child, who had been detained Thursday by police and later released, had already been threatened.
"These guys, the way they operate, they don't care about anyone," said the father. "They'll do whatever they want to whomever they want."
CURSED ARE THE PICTURE MAKERS!
Volume 3, Book 34, Number 299:
Narrated 'Aun bin Abu Juhaifa:
My father bought a slave who practiced the profession of cupping. (My father broke the slave's instruments of cupping). I asked my father why he had done so. He replied, "The Prophet forbade the acceptance of the price of a dog or blood, and also forbade the profession of tattooing, getting tattooed and receiving or giving Riba, (usury), and cursed the picture-makers."