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Intolerance Breeds hatred

Every society consists of various groups following different faiths, ideologies, sectarian beliefs and social and political adherences. In some cases, there is a majority which dominates the society and makes attempts, either by force or by persuasion, to integrate these different groups into its fold. In such a scenario the majority believes that only by uniting all groups can society grow strong and defend itself from internal and external dangers. This creates conflict and instead of uniting, the society further fragments and breaks into pieces. This is what is called tyranny of the majority and its intolerance toward differences and diverse opinions. Keep reading >>>>


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Sahelistan: the beginning of a new war


Inside Story - Berbers in North Africa by aljazeeraenglish
ARE the Western powers blindly plunging head on into a new war against forces more determined, better organised and higher equipped than those they faced in Iraq and Afghanistan? The talk of the town here these days is a newly published book, `Sahelistan` by a writer who, according to his own admission, is essentially an `adviser` to investors in the most inaccessible regions of the world. 
Samuel Laurent says his visits between early 2012 and early this year into the very heart of Sahelistan was supposed to be top secret. But the things he witnessed and the people he met there convinced him that Western leaders are making fatal blunders at the risk of paying enormous prices sooner or later; so it became incumbent upon him to talk about the matter publicly. But, before we proceed any further, let`s make sure we agree on what we mean by Sahelistan; we`re talking here of a 7,500 kilo-metre-wide ocean of sand and bare rocks in the central Sahara, with Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Libya in the north, and Mali, Niger, Chad and Sudan in the south. 

This is a desolate no man`s land where drugs and weapons traffickers and armed bandits have ruled for centuries. 
The southern Libyan side of the Sahara plays a major role in the shaping of Sahelistan as a refuge as well as training ground for extremist forces. In his final days in 2011, when the French air force planes were heavily bombarding Libya, the late Col Muammar Qadhafi had spokenrather prophetically: `Once I am gone, Libya will turn into the headquarters of a new war against Europe and America.

Today, affirms the book, the truth about the Libyan version of the `Arab Spring` amounts tragically to vengeful killings, arbitrary arrests, tortures, rapes and genocide as the order of the day. Nobody rules the country and thousands of armed men, including nomad Tuareg rebels, are rapidly settling down in different parts of Sahelistan and posing resistance to Western influence.

Even after the Egyptian, Tunisian and Libyan revolutions, says the book, the fast spreading power of AlQaeda was never fully grasped by the West and the media merely started taking a somewhat half-hearted interest in the subject following the assassination of US ambassador Christopher Stevens in Benghazi on the wellchosen, symbolic date of Sept 11 last year.Adamantlyrefusing to learn a lesson from the Libyan disaster, the French forces carried out vast military operations in northern Mali early this year. Although President François Hollande resisted the temptation of declaring `mission accomplished` à  la George Bush, the French media celebrated the killing of Mokhtar Belmokhtar, an Al Qaeda-linked military leader who had lost an eye during the Afghan war.

Barely a month ago, on May 23, an army base and a uranium treatment plant run by the French Areva enterprise in Niger were hit by forces close to Al Qaeda, causing the death of at least 12 soldiers. The supposedly `eliminated` Mokhtar Belmokhtar reappeared and claimed responsibility, promising to hit again at a time and place of his choice along the length and breadth of Sahelistan.

This hardly is an empty threat; the militants, rapidly forging alliances with local insurgentsand extremist groups like Ansar al Deen and Al Qaeda in Islamic Maghreb (AQIM), are today much deeply entrenched than ever.

Their ample resources come from arms and drugs trafficking ofcourse, but also considerably from cash ransoms paid by Europeans and Americans themselves for the release of their secret agents kidnapped while gathering intelligence in the guise of human rights workers.

In a region where young men are desperate to make a living, the masters of Sahelistan are using their easily earned money to offer relatively comfortable salaries to recruits, together with military training and Kalashnikov rifles.

The most surprising feature of Samuel Laurent`s book are the interviews of the jihadists themselves. Contrary to the widely accepted cliché of their being stubborn, blind fanatics, one is surprised by the lucid reasoning of their arguments. `Libya is neither Iraq nor Afghanistan,` says Mohammad el Gharabi, head of a clandestine military training camp not far from Benghazi, `and no Western powers are going to appoint a Noori alMaliki or a Hamid Karzai here.

As one digs deeper, one discovers a patient, wide-ranging plan projected far into the future for gaining power north and east of Sahelistan through political and military means (this already seems to be a reality in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt); then cross the Mediterranean to conquer Europe.

Does this sound crazy? Count André de la Roche, a retired diplomat who has spent a number of years in the Middle East, takes Samuel Laurent`s book seriously. He says the mighty Roman empire was brought to its knees by Christians coming from south of the Mediterranean and, should one need another proof, the Arabs conquered Spain in 711 to rule there for the next eight centuries.

The writer is a journalist base i in Paris. ZafMasud@gmail.com 




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Scrapping equipment key to Afghan drawdown



KANDAHAR AIRFIELD, Afghanistan — Facing a tight withdrawal deadline and tough terrain, the U.S. military has destroyed more than 170 million pounds worth of vehicles and other military equipment as it rushes to wind down its role in the Afghanistan war by the end of 2014.
The massive disposal effort, which U.S. military officials call unprecedented, has unfolded largely out of sight amid an ongoing debate inside the Pentagon about what to do with the heaps of equipment that won’t be returning home. Military planners have determined that they will not ship back more than $7 billion worth of equipment — about 20 percent of what the U.S. military has in Afghanistan — because it is no longer needed or would be too costly to ship back home.


That has left the Pentagon in a quandary about what to do with the items. Bequeathing a large share to the Afghan government would be challenging because of complicated rules governing equipment donations to other countries, and there is concern that Afghanistan’s fledgling forces would be unable to maintain it. Some gear may be sold or donated to allied nations, but few are likely to be able to retrieve it from the war zone.
Therefore, much of it will continue to be shredded, cut and crushed to be sold for pennies per pound on the Afghan scrap market — a process that reflects a presumptive end to an era of protracted ground wars. The destruction of tons of equipment is all but certain to raise sharp questions in Afghanistan and the United States about whether the Pentagon’s approach is fiscally responsible and whether it should find ways to leave a greater share to the Afghans.
“We’re making history doing what we’re doing here,” said Maj. Gen. Kurt J. Stein, head of the 1st Sustainment Command, who is overseeing the drawdown in Afghanistan. “This is the largest retrograde mission in history.”
The most contentious and closely watched part of the effort involves the disposal of Mine-Resistant Ambush Protected vehicles, the hulking beige personnel carriers that the Pentagonraced to build starting in 2007 to counter the threat of roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan. The massive trucks, known as MRAPs, came to symbolize the bloody evolution of wars that were meant to be short conflicts but turned into quagmires.
The Pentagon has determined that it will no longer have use for about 12,300 of its 25,500 MRAPs scattered at bases worldwide, officials said. In Afghanistan, the military has labeled about 2,000 of its roughly 11,000 MRAPs “excess.” About 9,000 will be shipped to the United States and U.S. military bases in Kuwait and elsewhere, but the majority of the unwanted vehicles — which cost about $1 million each — will probably be shredded, officials said, because they are unlikely to find clients willing to come pick them up.
“MRAPs have served us well in the current war, but we will not need all that we bought for Iraq and Afghanistan in the future,” Alan Estevez, the assistant secretary of defense for logistics and materiel readiness, said in a statement. “It is cost prohibitive to retrograde and reset MRAPs that we do not need for the future.”


‘Gold dust’
Those MRAPs that the Pentagon has deemed unnecessary have been arriving by the dozen at scrap yards at four U.S. military bases in Afghanistan in recent months. Toiling under the searing sun last week at this vast base in southern Kandahar province, contract workers from Nepal and other countries in the region wore fireproof suits and masks as they used special blowtorches to dismantle vehicles built to withstand deadly blasts. It takes about 12 hours to tear apart each MRAP.

In another section of the scrap yard, a massive grinder gobbled slabs of steel, turning them into small scraps. The debris is packed into U.S.-owned shipping containers that also have been deemed unfit to return home.
Last month, the Kandahar yard produced 11 million pounds of scrap that was sold to Afghan contractors for a few cents per pound, said Morgan Gunn, a Defense Logistics Agency employee who runs the site. Afghans use the scrap mainly for construction and as makeshift spare parts.
“Gold dust is what they call it,” Gunn said.
Military officials have drawn little attention to the scrapping operations, mindful that the endeavor might appear wasteful in an era of contracting defense budgets and misguided at a time when Afghan troops are being killed at a record rate. But officials argue that the effort is part of a withdrawal operation that is being carried out in a fiscally responsible, carefully planned manner.
“One might ask: Why not give it to the Afghans?” Stein said as he toured the Kandahar yard. “It’s such a fast-paced operation, and most of it is trash. We don’t want to leave this in the battlefield.”
As they have debated how much excess equipment to shred or sell, officials have considered whether the defense industry would suffer if the Pentagon unloaded tons of used equipment on the market at vastly reduced prices. Additionally, Pentagon policy requires that allied nations seeking to take ownership of excess U.S. equipment travel to Afghanistan to pick it up — an onerous task that few nations are likely to take on.
When the U.S. military withdrew from Iraq, it donated much of its equipment to the Iraqis, who had access to cheap fuel, a robust defense budget and more sophisticated mechanics. The Pentagon also shipped a significant share to Afghanistan, where a troop surge was underway. But donating MRAPs to the Afghans would be more complicated and potentially counterproductive, military officials said.
“Frankly, in a lot of ways, the Afghan economy and military can’t absorb some of the things the Iraqis did,” said Lt. Gen. Raymond V. Mason, the Army deputy chief of staff for logistics. “We don’t want to give [the Afghans] a lot of equipment that they can’t handle and could compound their challenges.”
Military officials said they have spent billions of dollars equipping and building up Afghanistan’s security forces over the past decade, outfitting them with lighter tactical vehicles that are a better fit for the country’s rudimentary road networks.
A situation unlike in Iraq
The U.S. Army owns the lion’s share of the military equipment currently in Afghanistan. As of May, Mason said, $25 billion worth of equipment was deployed with Army personnel. After an analysis of needs and costs, it has decided to ship back no more than 76 percent. Transporting that much will cost $2 billion to $3 billion, the Army estimates. And repairing the gear that comes back will cost $8 billion to $9 billion.
“Kuwait was a lifesaver,” Stein said, noting that there are no neighboring U.S. bases where equipment leaving Afghanistan could be easily stored. “It’s very hard to get our stuff out of Afghanistan. In Iraq, we could drive it out to Kuwait, and it sat there for a year or two until the Army decided its disposition.”
As the U.S. military reduces its footprint in Afghanistan from 150 bases to 50 by February, Stein’s teams are ramping up their efforts, finding more efficient ways of sorting through equipment to be shipped and drawing from lessons learned in Iraq.
Until a few months ago, the military flew out the vast majority of the equipment it was sending back to the United States.
In recent months, after Pakistan, a neighbor of landlocked Afghanistan, agreed to let the U.S. military use its roads to ship materiel out through its ports, most containers that don’t include sensitive materials or weapons are being trucked out by land. Shipping through Pakistan is by no means trouble-free — and officials recognize that the route could get shut down in the event of a new spat between Islamabad and Washington.
“We continue to get delays. There’s still corruption, taxes, tariffs,” Stein said. “But our equipment is getting through.”
By Ernesto Londoño:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/scrapping-equipment-key-to-afghan-drawdown/2013/06/19/9d435258-d83f-11e2-b418-9dfa095e125d_story.html
$7 billion in gear U.S. sent to war will not return
$7 billion in gear U.S. sent to war will not return
About 20 percent of the equipment sent to Afghanistan will be disposed of because it is not needed or too costly to ship back, and it’s too complicated to donate or sell.

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The Greeks who worship the ancient gods





The summer solstice, 21 June, is one of the most important dates in the calendar for many followers of ancient religions, and it's a special time for people in Greece who worship the country's pre-Christian gods.

"I love the energy this place has," says Exsekias Trivoulides who has pitched his tent on what he considers to be the holy site of Mount Olympus.
Trivoulides is a sculptor who studied art history and classics, and these days, he is living his passion.
Along with a few thousand others he is taking part in the Prometheia festival, which celebrates the ancient Greek hero Prometheus, who helped humans by stealing fire from the gods.
It's the most important annual festival for followers of The Return of the Hellenes - a movement trying to bring back the religion, values, philosophy and way of life of ancient Greece, more than 16 centuries after it was replaced by Christianity.
These people consider Greece to be a country under Christian occupation.
Tryphon Olympios leads many of the ceremonies
"People want to identify with something in the past - where they came from - so as to know where they are going," says Trivoulides. "If you don't know your past, you don't have a future.
"It's going back to the roots. It makes me feel the continuation through the millennia."
The festival begins with six runners - in full Greek battle gear - racing the six miles (10 km) up Mount Olympus, home of the gods, their shields and long spears clanking as they go.
But as they set out from the small village of Dion at the base of the mountain, passersby hardly seem to notice - they are used to them.
It's a telling sign of how far they have come already, in a nation where 98% of the public are said to identify themselves as Orthodox Christian.
In 2007, an official of the Orthodox Church described them as, "a handful of miserable resuscitators of a degenerate dead religion".
These days, relations have improved, according to Tryphon Olympios, the philosophy professor who founded the Return of the Hellenes movement in 1996.
"They have understood that we are not dangerous and we are not pagans and Satanists," he says.
"We are peaceful people and come with ideas that are useful for society."
The economic crisis in Greece should be a time of reflection about the values that should govern a society, he says.
The Return of the Hellenes focus on the 12 main gods of ancient Greece - the dodecatheon.
They don't actually pray to Zeus, Hera and the others. They see them as representations of values such as beauty, health or wisdom.
The followers are an odd mix. There are New Age types who revere ancient traditions, leftists who resent the power of the Orthodox Church, and Greek nationalists who see Christianity as having destroyed everything that was truly Greek.
As the modern-day ancients relax in their camp at the base of the mountain, a few sell philosophy books, CDs, food and jewellery. Some wear modern clothes, others tunics, and a few sport a wreath.
Over the course of the three-day event, there are public prayers, two marriages, and a naming ceremony, where followers choose an ancient name - like Calisto, Hermis or Orpheus - and "cleanse" themselves of their modern Christian ones.
None of these rituals is officially recognised by the Greek state. The biggest bone of contention for those involved is that they are prevented from praying at ancient temples, and struggle to get permission to build their own temples, which in Greece requires the approval of the local Orthodox bishop.
In an attempt to formalise their status, the umbrella group the Supreme Council of Ethnikoi Hellenes is campaigning to get their form of ancient worship classed as an "ethnic religion" of Greece.
But it's an idea few Greeks would support, says Victor Roudometof, a professor of sociology at the University of Cyprus, and an expert on religion in Greece.
Although many Greeks only actually attend church a few times a year, the Orthodox religion is a "cornerstone" of Greek identity, he says.
Those who worship the ancient Greek gods are widely regarded as no more than "interesting curiosities", he adds.
Experts in the study of the ancient world also tend to be dismissive.
"I don't think you can roll the clock back," says Robert Parker, a professor of ancient history at the University of Oxford.
"You can't import an ancient religion into a completely different environment and social system."
He has two words to describe those who attempt to do so - the first is "kooky", the second, "ridiculous".
Parker points to historical inconsistencies. Prometheus, for example, was only a relatively minor figure in ancient Greek religion, he says, and never had a major festival dedicated to him.
Other historians say these groups are idealising an ancient religion that had little to do with ethics or morality.
"The whole point of it is that you keep the gods sweet - you scratch their back, they will scratch yours," says Peter Jones, co-founder of Friends of Classics.
"You establish a quid pro quo relationship... It is simply an acknowledgement of the gods, in the hope that the gods will help you," he says. "Values and virtues are entirely meaningless in ancient terms."
Animal sacrifice was by far the most important part of any ancient Greek religious ritual, with the throat of a live bull slit with a knife at the altar outside the temple.
But most of the revivalists make simple offerings of flowers, fruit, milk and honey.
The ancient Greeks were also famed for drama and tragedy, and a night-time torch-lit theatrical production Prometheia is the main event at the Mount Olympus festival.
The performance combines classic drama with lessons about what the ancients have to teach us, all these centuries later.
Followers are all too aware they are seen as outsiders by some in society, but insist that attitudes in Greece are changing.
"In the beginning, they were making jokes, then they were ignoring us, now they are interested," says tax manager Persis Argyros, who has been involved since the start of the movement. "We became too big to ignore."
No-one has accurate figures for the number of followers, but numbers have swelled since their first gathering on the mountain 17 years ago, and the movement claims to have hundreds of thousands of supporters.
It's clear they are in their element here on Olympus. After the show closes, the Hellenes dance and frolic under the moonlight.

The 12 Olympians

A statue of Artemis
In Greek mythology there were 12 deities who lived on Mount Olympus
Gods - Apollo, Ares, Dionysus, Hermes, Hephaestus, Poseidon, and Zeus
Goddesses - Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis (above), Demeter, and Hera
Matthew Brunwasser was reporting for The World, which is a co-production of the BBC World Service, PRI and WGBH . Additional reporting Cordelia Hebblethwaite: http://www.bbc.co.uk
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Anti-virus for the mind

“A spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down” is a concept familiar to many parents - and manufacturers of medicine. In contrast, some medicines with potential to be harmful have a purposely bitter taste. Nobody wants their toddler to swallow the “sweeties” unintentionally left within reach. Similarly, a portion of nutritious food, say a pellet of wheat meal, may very effectively carry a small but fatal payload of poison for killing a rodent pest.
The mental hop from comparing the effect of poisons and antidotes on the health of the body, to health of the human mind, requires a conceptual ‘model’. There are risks of over-simplifying or over-complicating any model. One convenience of a model is that, if it appears inadequate, you can apply your intellect to revise the model. So useful is the analogy of a model, that in the majority of mind’s association with reality, models are essential to understanding. Nobody has seen an atom. We use a frequently-revised model of what an atom could be. Some models are very accurate in behaving like the real thing that they demonstrate. Others are not so close to perfection.
A respected spokesman for evolution, Richard Dawkins, authored a publication titled “Viruses of the Mind”. In that article, Dawkins models the faith and activities of religion as if religion was a viral infection of the human mind. Dawkins’ model environment is presented as the mind of a beautiful, six year old girl that he knows. This innocent mind accepts the existence of Thomas the Tank Engine and Father Christmas - and has ambitions to be a Tooth Fairy one day.
The narrative reveals that this vulnerable mind is being subjected, without the consent of her father, to Roman Catholic religious instruction. While the locomotive and jolly fat man pose no threat, all is not so well when it comes to absorbing the notion that all bad children will roast in hell, as Dawkins explains. A brief description then follows, of how DNA can be corrupted and passed on.
Next, a lengthier description, with examples, explains how computer viruses propagate. Dawkins underlines that an important characteristic of a virus is to remain undetected. It also requires two qualities in its host; a readiness to replicate information and a readiness to obey instructions.
To develop his conceptual model, Dawkins proceeds to describe how a meme, (his concept of a unit of human behavioural, conceptual or cultural traits) is replicated among human minds. He expounds how negative the religious memes are, giving examples. He notes that some of the examples are trivial or extreme and some readers may notice that some examples are not fully informed. Criticism of these deficiencies is unnecessary here.
Ultimately these religious memes are replicated virally to the detriment of numbers of human hosts - and one would infer, also to the detriment of uninfected humans who are collaterally disadvantaged.
“Viruses of the Mind” is sometimes invoked by other atheists to affirm criticisms of religious memes. Malicious or not, a mind-virus is merely an agent of intent, not the source. The article itself manifests several viral memes. Expansion on those themes is for another time.
Now, Dawkins’ viral model is also useful in the hands of the Christian believer. It can be applied intelligently to the fall of man. Adam and Eve were created with flawless DNA. Yet they chose to believe the outright lie of Satan (“You will certainly not die but be as gods”), vehemently contradicting the statement made by God (“Enjoy everything else I have given you but do not eat of the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, or you will die”). As a result, the whole of creation was cursed and the perfectly made human couple came under a death sentence.
The curse can easily be conceptualised as a viral infection of all DNA/RNA (as applicable) on earth. Aging, death, mutations into thorns and weeds, pests, animal predation - and all the other ills of living organisms appeared as a result of the now-degenerating, coded-for-life, double helix. Ever since then the defects have slowly multiplied. DNA started devolving, having lost the capability to auto-correct flawlessly with every replication.
Having three billion DNA base-pairs in the haploid genome and six billion in the diploid genome meant it would take a significant time before some defective genes became a concern. For example, ageing was very slow to begin with. Similarly, reproduction between relatives would be successful, with near-perfect genes. As these genes continued to devolve, a few at a time, it became undesirable for closely-related couples to reproduce and incest became intolerable. Aging accelerated very gradually. Remember that this is only a model and I am not a geneticist, so don’t get too caught up.
Along with the physical deterioration that came with this viral infection, came a deterioration of the mind. Where is the mind? “Fallen” man will say that the mind is in the brain but it is not the brain per se. We cannot be entirely specific but we know that memory, emotion and reasoning can be affected by trauma or disease in various areas of the brain. So the mind, at a conceptually higher level than the physical brain, having functions of intelligence, is in there somewhere.
A reasoning mind would conclude that the lower level (the physical body) should be subservient to the higher level (the mind). A viral infection can reverse this hierarchy and the mind becomes subservient to an ill body, particularly if the ill part is brain tissue.
Christians postulate that there is a third and higher level to being human; the soul (or spirit).
Christians can postulate the soul being undesirably dominated by the virally-influenced mind. It is not a physical problem, unless the mind is being dominated by the body. But it is a mental problem if the soul is being dominated by the mind. The infected mind is not able to detect a mind virus, in the concept of our model. So an infected mind would be unable to detect that it is infected. It could compare itself to other minds and decide that similar minds were uninfected - and that dissimilar minds were infected and thus, defective. It may even attempt to treat those ‘defects’, for self-preservation. Failed treatment may call for elimination of what it thinks is the ‘defective’ mind.
In the meme model of a mind virus, an anti-virus was introduced via a momentous action on the part of the creator of the mind. Flawless DNA was sacrificed to make this anti-virus. It was injected into a small population, over two thousand years ago. The anti-virus continues to replicate as responsive minds begin restoration. A recovering mind gradually submits to the soul’s authority. It takes time – but eventually the soul is asserted and takes on its purpose. We beings, thinking previously that we were a mind, discover that we are more than that. We are spirits, companions of God, with an eternal existence. We are purposed for a perfect makeover in a new creation. Even the elements then will be different - and current models will no longer be relevant.
One of the attributes of the anti-virus is that it is designed to replicate. Scant surprise then; that an inoculated mind is driven to spread it, long before it understands why.
http://www.news24.com/MyNews24/Anti-virus-for-the-mind-20130618
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Banned’ Ramadan for Uighur Muslims in China Violation of Human rights: 禁止在中国维吾尔族穆斯林斋月违反人权

禁止在中国维吾尔族穆斯林斋月违反人权
如果你不想极端主义,然后允许快速穆斯林斋月期间在和平





It’s not exactly breaking news that China has serious issues with freedom of religion and as an officially Atheist state is often very repressive against those observing religious rites.

China has once again leveled restrictions on the persecuted Uighurs when it comes to practicing Ramadan.

BEIJING – Unlike millions of Muslims around the world, Uighur students returning for summer vacations in northwestern China are banned from fasting during the holy month of Ramadan.

“They are extracting guarantees from parents, promising that their children won’t fast on Ramadan,” Dilxat Raxit, Sweden-based spokesman for the exile World Uighur Congress (WUC), told Radio Free Asia on Thursday, June 13.

Chinese authorities have reportedly imposed restrictions on Uighur Muslim students returning for summer vacations in the northwestern region of Xinjiang ahead of Ramadan.

Under the restrictions, Uighur students under 18 are banned from fasting during Ramadan or taking part in religious activities.

Students defying the restrictions are being reported to authorities for punishment.

“They have also made groups of 10 households responsible for spying on each other, so that if a single child from one family fasts for Ramadan, or takes part in religious activities, then all 10 families will be fined,” Raxit said.

“It’s called a 10-household guarantee system.”

Religious officials have confirmed that Ramadan fasting is banned for Uighur Muslim students.

“[Fasting] is not allowed,” an official at a religious affairs bureau in Hotan’s Yutian County told Radio Free Asia.

“The students and the teachers have to report to their schools every Friday, even during the vacation.

“It’s like regular lessons,” he said, adding that the students would also be eating there.

Activists have also complained that Uighur students are being stripped off their mobile phones ahead of Ramadan.

“After the students get back to their hometowns, those with cell phones and computers must hand them in to the police for searching,” said Raxit.

“If they don’t hand them over and are reported or caught by the authorities, then they will have to bear the consequences.”

The pre-Ramadan restrictions come ahead of the fourth anniversary of deadly riots in Xinjiang, which left nearly 200 people dead.

Chinese authorities have convicted about 200 people, mostly Uighurs, over the riots and sentenced 26 of them to death.
If you do not want extremism, then allow Muslims to fast during Ramadan at peace
如果你不想极端主义,然后允许快速穆斯林斋月期间在和平
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Throughout the history of Islam in China, Chinese Muslims have influenced the course of Chinese history. Chinese Muslims have been in China for the last 1,400 years of continuous interaction with Chinese society. Muslims ...
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As we came from the Holy Land

“As a writer based in Jerusalem, I have an intense relationship with history. I feel that now, in a time of occupation and checkpoints, what I write is necessary in order to encapsulate and diffuse the present, but also how this period will be understood in the future.” [Aamer Hussein is a fiction writer, critic and professor of literature.]

At the border with Jordan, they took away five passports. I was the first to get mine back. The others — an American Palestinian, a British Palestinian, a London-born Turk, another Londoner who was half-Egyptian, and a young man from Manchester — were kept waiting until it was time to close the checkpoint. One or two had been called into a room and questioned; I’d only been asked to spell my grandfather’s name over and over again though I said he had nothing to do with this country.

We were a group from England — writers, a cameraman, a blogger, travelling for the sixth annual Palestine Festival of Literature. From the border we took the bus into what seemed to be no man’s terrain: rocks, deserts, a few villages, some Arab, some Israeli. And then we were in Area A, designated Palestinian Territories, signposted with a warning that no Israeli citizen should enter. (And yet they do. They pockmark the landscapes with their buildings, their antennae, their flags.)

We reached Ramallah, a haven on a hill. That evening, novelist Gillian Slovo read from her novels in a garden. She was accompanied by a singer and two musicians. When she left the stage, the haunting music went on; the garden was full of people, both local Europeans and Palestinian, moving around and sipping fresh fruit juice and coffee from paper cups. The breeze was bracing, cool. With just a stroke or two of the brush this picture could be changed into one of many literary gatherings I’ve attended.

The next morning, at Birzeit University, I met a group of students to talk about the short story. I soon realised they knew most of what I had to tell them and tried to go deeper. I read a passage from one of my stories and they all recognised the Surah Maryam from the Quran. The exchanges soon moved from the normal stuff of workshops to the subject of history and myth, experience and memory. One young woman in a headscarf said she’d had a very normal life — no relatives murdered, no one in prison or in exile, and yet she couldn’t escape history. A young man said he wrote Sufi parables to escape the absurdity of existence. He must have been about 19. As they left, he handed me a sheaf of stories.

Then, a few hours later, Qalandiya: one of the infamous checkpoints. Nothing I had heard or read had prepared me for the experience. Adolescent Israeli soldiers barking over mikes from their glass booths. Narrow corridors in which you waited until a green light came on and then you had to walk single file, dragging your luggage towards revolving gates so oddly angled and narrow that you were sometimes stuck in them with your suitcase as you tried to get through. At the other end, a boy behind a window told me three times to take my spectacles off while he checked my passport.

We reached East Jerusalem, and were driven to the neighbourhood called Shaikh Jarrah. Two women at a local community centre told us how people who’d been living here for decades had been chased out of their family homes on the pretext that they were settled there illegally, to make room for more and more settlers. They took us to meet Hajja Fatima, who had come back to Jerusalem after ’48 with her husband to live with her ailing parents. After their death she had been constantly beleaguered by the authorities who told her she had no right to live there. (Try to repair, rebuild, renovate and the Israeli authorities crack down and make you pay to undo what you’ve done.) As we walked away, I put my arm around Sara’s shoulder, the Palestinian-American I’d known for a day, who like many of us was crying.

We walked down the Via Dolorosa, lined with people selling fruit, spices and souvenirs, to the church where Jesus’s body had rested when he was taken down from the cross. A group of South Indian pilgrims bent, one by one, to kiss relics. Deeper, in the belly of the church, a choir of Armenian boys sang. At some point of their chant they began walking, still singing. When they stopped, a group of worshippers bent to touch the earth, kiss their fingers, and bring their fingers to their foreheads.

At the exit, another checkpoint. Behind me, I heard the sound of altercation: an Israeli soldier had grabbed the documents of Muna Hasan, the young activist who was with us, and pushed her back from the barrier when she took them from him. As she stepped away, a soldier with an American accent told her she had to go the long way round. I guessed that her Hebrew, though she wasn’t speaking it, was better than his.

The next morning we went to the Mount. I’d been told that we probably couldn’t visit Al-Aqsa, but as we entered the courtyard Sara and I looked at each other and decided to stand in the doorway to see if we could look in. An elderly man approached us and spoke to us in Arabic. “You want to go in?” Yes. “Go then.”

From the side, two young men called out and asked me to say a prayer as proof of my Muslim identity. I recited the Fatiha; after hearing me read the first two lines they let me pass. Epochs converged in the serene space of the mosque’s great hall where I stood for a few minutes.

We went to Bethlehem. As we got off our coach, a woman who looked as if she might have stepped out of a fashion magazine approached us and took us to the emporium where her family had been selling Christian souvenirs for decades. But Claire Anastas — that was her name — wasn’t selling us souvenirs. She was telling us about how she couldn’t enter parts of her own house because the Israelis had decreed them out of bounds. Too close to the wall. Her story had been honed and polished by multiple tellings; no one has done anything for her, to relieve her pain, and she seemed destined to endless repetition. Part of the house, I seem to remember, had once been a guest house, but now her business has slumped; hardly anyone visits that divided corner any more.

In front of her shop is the wall that cuts off a part of Bethlehem from its natives — the tomb of Rachel, the Jewish matriarch, lay beyond it. This wall was once a blank page, which residents of the town have covered now with their testimonies of exile and return. There are messages, too, from those who, like Claire and her family, refused to leave.

“What we all want is the right to live in dignity and safety, to live where we belong,” novelist Ibtisam Azem said as we looked over the rooftops of Hebron the next morning. “And the choice to leave freely, without constraint.” (I had first met Ibtisam the night before; she read from her work in Jerusalem, and spoke about the uses of documentary material for the imaginative writer. For some years she lived in Germany and then moved to New York.)

As we walked down the streets of Hebron to the mosque of Abraham, a child followed us and asked me in Arabic, “Ya Haj, where have you come from?” Ibtisam explained. When he heard I came from London, he remarked: “Why would you come here to Hebron, of all places?” His eyes were so blue they were almost violet. “It’s a ghost town,” his friend added in English.

It was indescribable. A settler woman dreamed that Sarah had once bathed from a well on a hall on the other side of the town’s main shopping street. So the settlers decided to take over the main part of the town. They blocked access to Palestinians who wanted to move from one part of the town to another. We walked through the main artery of the town, with its shops selling everything you can imagine. Above our heads were ugly additions settlers had built to old houses so that they could squat there. They liked to provoke the locals by flinging rubbish at them: broken bottles, rotting food and even excreta. As we looked above our heads we saw nets the locals had built to protect themselves from the shower of trash; they were burdened with detritus, as if some mad artist was trying to create a crazy installation to cover the entire town.

We passed through another checkpoint to get to the other side of Hebron. As we waited for the younger, darker members of our group to come through — this had become a predictable occurrence — an Israeli guard (they say there are two or three guards in the town for each settler) said: “Move away, they might throw stones.” “Who are they?” Gillian asked. “Oh, them,” the boy, who looked about 18, muttered as he moved away. And “they” were glaring down at us as we sat on the terrace of Issa Amro’s hilltop house; a man with a long orange beard and his guard (or two? I couldn’t tell because the afternoon sun was in my eyes.) Sometimes the guard would point his gun in our direction. The settlers are trying to chase the locals away from the hill. From the town.

In the ancient mosque, surrounded by the sanctuaries of Abraham and his family, I found myself praying again, every prayer I could remember, for freedom and protection and for the time the town would be safe and whole and undivided again.

Hebron, or al-Khalil as the locals call it, was a beautiful Palestinian town, with its winding lanes and its stone walls built to welcome the breeze in summer and give shelter from the wind in winter. And the people of the town are trying to rebuild it. As we walked down the streets, Walid, who was leading us through his city — or through those parts of it he could enter — remembered a young boy in his teens, deaf perhaps, who was shot down here for no reason. It was his birthday; his 17th, I think.

On the way back to Jerusalem, two Israeli soldiers jumped into our coach and wanted to see our passports. They seemed to have an instinct for spotting Palestinians, even a generation or two away from their origins. This time they targeted Ibtisam and started asking questions about her papers. She responded in what sounded like fluent, idiomatic Hebrew. After the usual delays, they let us pass.

In the evening we reached Haifa, where it was to be my turn to read from my work, but I was too drained to shower or change. I sat on the terrace and looked out at the sea, sipping a Turkish coffee. The concert hall was packed when we got there, late. The programme had been altered and I was one of the last to perform. The night before, writer Haneen Namnih, who had translated my story, ‘The Tree at the Limit,’ and poet Najwan Darwish, who had selected it for translation, had suggested I read it to the audience. Haneen, in particular, was taken by the story’s central image, of Sidrat-ul-Muntaha, the tree with the leaves on which the names of those who are to die are written. By the time I was on — between a ventriloquist and a violinist, as one of my companions later quipped — I was exhausted and wondering what relevance this imagistic fiction of another time in Pakistan, when religious scholars were accused of transgression for interpreting certain traditional stories as allegories, could have for my audience; I couldn’t tell, and I couldn’t hear the translation on the earphones. I hadn’t been writing since I got here, and though I was officially visiting the West Bank as a writer I hadn’t been thinking about writing at all. I told the audience I felt that it was an anticlimax to read a short story after everything I’d seen in the past three days.

But the next day we were back in Palestine, in the resplendent city of Nablus. In a courtyard we watched the sun set while the iconic band al-Turab played songs with inflections of jazz to an enormous audience. Many of the songs were poems set to music, some by Najwan who was supposed to make it from Jerusalem. Halfway through the concert we heard he had been held up at a checkpoint and wouldn’t be there. Basil, the lead singer, picked up his oud and sang a song that sounded like an ancient dirge, as if it had been crafted from stones and the memory of a river not far away.

The next night in Ramallah would be our last in Palestine. As I sat talking to Basil at dinner we heard Najwan had arrived. Their delayed performance took place in that garden in Ramallah.

I was thinking how, in these few days I’d been in their land, I’d heard Palestinians make music and poetry and stories, and on the way across the border Jerusalem-based journalist  Maath Musleh had told me stories of the land from Ottoman times until the present. I’d kept expecting to hear the familiar lines “but you wouldn’t understand, you haven’t lived through this,” but instead I heard the opposite: stories that included the listener, songs that drew me in, poems that made me feel I lived within them.

Late that night, I was dropped at my hotel by poet and novelist Mustafa Mustafa, who had been asking me my impressions of his country and answering my questions. When I reached my London flat less than 20 hours later I had a message from him, continuing our conversation. I had been too busy to take notes on my trip, too absorbed in what was around me to write in my journal. So I thought I’d end this piece with his words. I want you to tell my Pakistani readers something about yourself, I said to him. Here is his reply:

“As a writer based in Jerusalem, I have an intense relationship with history. I feel that now, in a time of occupation and checkpoints, what I write is necessary in order to encapsulate and diffuse the present, but also how this period will be understood in the future.”
By Aamer Hussein is a fiction writer, critic and professor of literature.
http://x.dawn.com/2013/06/16/column-as-we-came-from-the-holy-land-by-aamer-hussein/
Related:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palestine
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