Tarek Fatah's Blog, page 9
August 11, 2016
August 9, 2016
ISIS rears its head in Balochistan – Pakistan Military uses the Attack to target the victims
August 10, 2016
Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
Nearly 100 people died Monday in an attack by Islamic State (ISIS) on a hospital in Quetta, the capital of Pakistan’s Balochistan province.
Balochistan, the size of France, is a strategic territory at the mouth of the Straits of Hormuz that can effectively choke off all oil traffic to and from the Persian Gulf.
In March, 2012, I wrote the following about the war in Balochistan for the Sun papers:
“A terrible war is unfolding in a faraway land called Balochistan. Almost daily, bodies of young men, kidnapped and tortured to death by the Pakistan occupation army, end up in ditches. Others, still alive, are thrown from helicopters into the arms of the rough mountain terrain below. Yet, not a single western journalist covers this ongoing, slow-motion genocide of the Baloch people.”
An independent country before it was occupied by Pakistan in 1948, Balochistan has witnessed a 65-year insurgency by nationalist guerrillas seeking freedom for their once unoccupied state.
Baloch leaders say that to counter the largely secular independence struggle led by left-wing revolutionaries, the Pakistan army introduced Islamic right-wing jihadi death squads to carry out assassinations of the Baloch intelligentsia, the political leadership, journalists, lawyers and academics.
For example, most of the dead and wounded victims of ISIS in the latest attack were lawyers, who had come to the hospital after the head of the Balochistan Bar Association was shot dead a few hours earlier by gunmen.
Two weeks ago, Baloch human rights activist Wahed Baloch, who ran a private library of 10,000 books and was lovingly referred to as the “Baloch Bookman”, was abducted from a bus and has since disappeared along with tens of thousands of other Baloch who had the misfortune to obtain higher education.
The reported nexus between the Pakistan army and the Islamic radicals has come full circle. The tail is now wagging the dog.
One faction of the Pakistan-backed Taliban has split and joined ISIS. It calls itself Jamaat-ur-Ahrar
It was this group that claimed to carry out the horrific suicide bombing in Quetta. Its spokesman said in an email, the group “takes responsibility for this attack, and pledges to continue carrying out such attacks. We will release a video report on this soon.”
The response from the Pakistan government was callous at best, seemingly more concerned about the economic impact on its investments than the people who died.
The prime minister was overshadowed by the country’s armed forces chief of staff, whose spokesman claimed the attack was aimed at wrecking the multi-billion-dollar China-Pakistan Corridor (CPEC), being built to link a Chinese naval base on Balochistan’s coastal city of Gwadar and China’s Xinxiang region.
The Twitter post by the military’s spokesperson drew a sharp rebuke by exiled Balochistan leader Mehran Marri, who wrote:
“100 people killed in #Balochistan’s capital & the shameless #PakistanArmy is worried about the China-Pak CPEC deal.”
While the spectre of ISIS in Balochistan is a scary development, Baloch leaders claim the attack may have been staged by the Pakistan military to extract American funds.
Marri put it this way on Twitter: “Is it a coincidence, days after U.S. blocks $300M to Pakistan there’s a major terror attack? Who r the Pakistanis fooling? China or the USA?”
Meanwhile the latest victims of ISIS in Balochistan went largely unnoticed around in the world. Imagine if they had died in Gaza, or Glasgow.
———————————–
WARNING – Graphic Video:
Here is a video showing the scenes of carnage after the Islamist suicide bomber blew himself:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/sjuzfzothtczlsh/Quetta%20Blast%20Video%2018%2B%20Graphic.mp4?raw=1
August 4, 2016
July 28, 2016
Liberal Media is in denial over Islamist Terror – My Column in the Toronto Sun
Friends,
It is troubling to read Islamist-friendly articles being published as commentary in the liberal media around the world, from India to Indiana. Bias is one thing, but when op-eds are based on fabrication and total untruths, a line is crossed.
Read this column in today’s Toronto Star by one of their Muslim contributors. She bases her commentary on a complete fabrication, suggesting the Muslim Munich terrorist had nothing to do with Islam and thus building her argument on that fabrication. She writes:
Last Friday’s mass shooting in Munich was rapidly recast as a “non-terrorist” incident as soon as any suspected connection with “Islamism” was discredited. David Ali Sonboly, it seems, was motivated by right-wing and anti-immigrant extremism rather than “Muslim radicalism”; and so he quickly became a “depressed loner” rather than a “terrorist.”
Nonsense. No one ‘rapidly recast’ Ali Sonboly as a “non-terrorist”. Not a single person came to the conclusion once the dust had settled, yet the Toronto Star allowed this fabrication of the truth to fly as fact.
In fact the first witness and the only one to see the shooter in close quarters stated explicitly that he yelled ‘Allah O Akbar’ before firing his gun. The witness was an Albanian Muslim mother and had no reason to lie.
Here she is on CNN, a clip ignored not just by the Toronto Star columnist, but also CNN commentators and hosts as the evening unfolded.
It’s not just the Islamist opinion writers in the Toronto Star who are pushing the propaganda of international Islamism and trying to cover up and downplay our fears of the jihadi threat, but also the editors who go out of the way to trivialize the acts of terror. When two ISIS jihadi terrorists beheaded an 84-year old Catholic priest in France, the news got major coverage around the world, but in the liberal Toronto Star it was diminished to page 10 as a single-column report. almost as if it was a death in a traffic accident. Here is a comparison between the story as it covered in two Toronto newspapers. You can guess which one was the Toronto Star.
Presenting themselves falsely as ‘moderate’ Muslims, this is just one tactic being used by wealthy westernized Islamists using their charm and lavish hospitality at mosques and community centres to influence editors. Elsewhere it is the disease of ‘White Guilt’ that makes mainstream journalists and broadcasters to parrot the propaganda fed to them by highly well organized Islamic groups in North America and UK (less so in Europe).
Here is my column written in response to the abysmal surrender to Islamist propaganda by the liberal media and liberal commentators on CNN and BBC too.
Read and reflect.
Tarek
July 27, 2016
Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
While the rest of the world reels from the shock of recent Islamist terror attacks in Germany and France, our ruling elite and media seem to be in a state of denial, if not fear, of being labelled “Islamophobic”.
The talking heads that feed our 24/7 news appetite on networks like CNN and the BBC best illustrate this condition.
The clearest example of such unnecessary caution was displayed following the July 22 Munich terror attack in which the gunman, David Ali Sonboly, committed suicide.
Among the first eyewitnesses who saw Sonboly in close quarters before he began his rampage, was a Muslim woman who spoke to CNN:
“My son saw a man in the toilet loading a gun. It was a pistol .… I hear ‘Allah O Akbar’ ‘Allah O Akbar’. This I know because I am Muslim. I hear this and I only cry.”
Despite a clear statement identifying the shooter as a Muslim, CNN’s hosts and commentators refused to give any credence to the women’s account. There was even speculation the terrorist was a right-wing German extremist.
Tom Fuentes, former FBI Assistant Director effectively questioned the woman’s account by saying “Whether it’s Islamic terrorism or whether its right-wing terrorism designed to cause a backlash against Islamic people in Germany, and that’s a possibility as well…”
Michael Weiss, the respected author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, shrugged off the ‘Allah O Akbar’ clue, saying:
“The alleged shooter describes himself as being a German… I’ll be honest with you, I am tending a little bit more away from ISIS at this point,” he said.
Watching this exchange, I felt I was in some parallel universe, where truth, common sense and courage had committed collective harakiri.
My wife, amused at my exasperation reminded me of Matthew 15:14 in the Bible: “So ignore them. They are blind guides leading the blind, and if one blind person guides another, they will both fall into a ditch.”
As if the German right-wing theory being pushed by the talking heads were not enough, CNN’s “terrorism analyst” Paul Cruickshank comment made me shut off the TV set.
He predicted, “We don’t actually even know it’s terrorism in the sense of an attack with a political motive at this point” and later added “this may not end up being a terrorist attack at all.”
An hour later when I reluctantly came back to hear the latest from Munich, CNN’s justice correspondent Evan Perez set the seal by making the following pronouncement:
“It’s the fifth anniversary of the attack in Norway in which a right-wing attacker blew up a bomb at the parliament and then went after a youth conference…”
In the meantime the Muslim woman’s clip, who heard the “Allah O Akbar” giveaway chant, seemed to disappear from subsequent broadcasts.
Soon, Norway, Breivik and the German right-wing extremists were being touted as the villains. The inability to utter the words “Muslim” or “Islamic” was also reflected in the subsequent attacks this week.
On July 25, when an ISIS Syrian-born suicide bomber blew himself up outside a music festival in Bavaria, the BBC headline (subsequently changed) read: “Syrian migrant dies in German blast”.
The politically blind are indeed leading us. Fortunately the rest of us can see through this cowardice.
July 20, 2016
India’s Secular Congress Party wants to silence Secular authors Tarek Fatah and Taslima Nasreen. Both writers attacked in India’s Upper House of Parliament
On July 20, 2016 during a parliamentary debate on the strife in Kashmir and the press censorship imposed in that State, the leader of the India’s opposition Congress Party in the Upper House of Parliament, Mr. Ghulam Nabi Azad took an unprecedented swipe at Bangladesh-born writer Taslima Nasreen and Pakistan-born Tarek Fatah, describing them as ‘anti-Islamic’ non-Indians.
The attack came after both Taslima Nasreen and Tarek Fatah participated in TV debates to discuss the role of a Saudi-backed Islamic supremacist wahhabi preacher in India, Dr. Zakir Naik in fanning Islamic radicalism in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, specifically in the State of Kashmir.
While asking for press freedom and freedom of speech, Mr. Azad ironically argued that both Taslima and Fatah be stopped from appearing on Indian TV networks and blamed the current Indian government for not silencing any discussion on Islam.
Here is an extract of Mr. Azad’s speech:
As bizarre as his allegation was, the Muslim Congress leader seemed particularly upset that both Nasreen and Fatah were vocal critics of the Islamists and Jihadis in J&K and identified themselves with Indian heritage.
The next day the Indian TV network ZeeNews hosted a discussion on this issue with spokesmen of both the ruling BJP and the opposition Congress Party where the secular Congress’s representative insisted we no one should discuss Islam on TV networks even if the acts of terror were being carried put by jihadis in the name of Islam.
Here is the discussion in two parts:
Part One:
Part Two:
July 19, 2016
WARNING: Horrific Video, not for the Faint-Hearted. Turkmen Jihadis backed by Turkey behead a Palestinian Boy in Syria
BBC report on the Syrian jihadis ‘filmed beheading boy’ in Aleppo: Click here to read the story.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/8hwtew5r1zii2uq/VID_20160719_121125.mp4?raw=1
July 6, 2016
Why Islamists (Occasionally) Desecrate Islamic Holy Sites – Background to the Terrorist Attack on Prophet Muhammad’s Mosque in Medina, Saudi Arabia
“The moral of the story is that no matter how often Muslims refuse to acknowledge our history, it will not hide the mess we have created that we now refuse to cleanse. Let us own up to it and stop blaming others for it.”
July 6, 2016
Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
Monday’s suicide bombing outside the tomb of Prophet Muhammad in Medina, Saudi Arabia, sent shock waves throughout the Islamic world.
The fact a Muslim carried out this act of terror during the holy month of Ramadan has left many followers of the Islamic faith in disbelief.
Too many Muslims have fallen for the common refrain, trumpeted by Islamists, that no Muslim could carry out such an act and hence neither Islam nor Muslims can be held accountable for it in any way.
These arguments have been used every time Islamist terrorists engage in mass killings, from 9/11 in New York to the massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh, last week.
But the facts tell us a different story regarding the turbulent history of Islam and the roles played by Muslims within it.
Academics and scholars are reluctant to discuss these historical facts for fear of being accused of bigotry and racism.
Thus ordinary Muslims, to say nothing of non-Muslims, do not commonly know them.
The result is a Muslim community unaware of its own often bloody history, going back centuries, when both our holy cities — Mecca and Medina — were attacked, ransacked and destroyed, not by the “kufaar” (non-Muslims), but by Muslim leaders.
They fought for power, using Islam as a tool to enhance or entrench their political hold on the states they created.
Fanatical, politically motivated and radicalized Muslims have never hesitated to desecrate Islam’s holy sites.
As early as October, 683 AD, the Umayyad caliph of Damascus invaded Mecca, then under the control of a rival caliph, and bombarded the ancient shrine of Black Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam.
The Kaaba, where Muhammad preached, was destroyed in the fighting. A new one was constructed, but the worst was yet to come.
As schisms increased within the Muslim world based on who was the rightful heir to Islam, in 899 AD a new sect of Islam emerged known as the Qarmatians. It embraced elements of Ismaili Shia Islam with Persian mysticism and was based in what is today Bahrain and Saudi Arabia’s oil-rich Eastern Province.
During the Hajj season of 930 AD, the Qarmatians invaded Mecca, destroyed the Kaaba and stole the pre-historic “Hajarul Aswad,” the Black Stone that was embedded in the eastern corner of the Kaaba itself.
They further desecrated the Zamzam Well by stuffing it with corpses of the defenders. It wasn’t until 22 years later that the Black Stone was brought back and placed back into the Kaaba’s eastern corner.
Skipping over the centuries, we have the 1805 invasion of the Prophet’s city, Medina, by the first Saudi state.
Imbibed with a fierce zealotry, the Wahhabi warriors of Muhammad Ibn Saud overran Medina and started to destroy Islamic shrines. They even tried to destroy the magnificent dome structure over the tomb of Prophet Muhammad, removed all precious objects from his gravesite and looted the treasury of the mosque itself.
After occupying Medina these Muslims, who came from the neighbouring region of Nejd, systematically leveled the “Jannat al-Baqi” cemetery, the vast burial site adjacent to the Prophet’s mosque that housed the remains of many of the members of Muhammad’s family, close companions and central figures of early Islam, including his beloved daughter, Fatima.
These acts of sacrilege were re-enacted by a new generation of Wahabbi zealots led by Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saud during the second Saudi state, a century later.
On April 21, 1925 the rebuilt tombs and domes in Medina were once again bulldozed.
Had it not been for intervention and diplomacy by then Prince Faisal (later King), who was in command of the regular Saudi army, the Wahabbis would have destroyed Prophet Muhammad’s tomb as well.
As recently as November, 1979, radicalized Muslims from around the world, including the U.S., Pakistan and Egypt, led by Saudi fanatic Juhayman al-Otaybi, took over the Holy Kaaba and killed many people during a two-week siege.
The moral of the story is that no matter how often Muslims refuse to acknowledge our history, it will not hide the mess we have created that we now refuse to cleanse.
Let us own up to it and stop blaming others for it.
The History of Islamist Terrorism – Background to the Terrorist Attack on Prophet Muhammad’s Mosque in Medina
July 6, 2016
Tarek Fatah
The Toronto Sun
Monday’s suicide bombing outside the tomb of Prophet Muhammad in Medina, Saudi Arabia, sent shock waves throughout the Islamic world.
The fact a Muslim carried out this act of terror during the holy month of Ramadan has left many followers of the Islamic faith in disbelief.
Too many Muslims have fallen for the common refrain, trumpeted by Islamists, that no Muslim could carry out such an act and hence neither Islam nor Muslims can be held accountable for it in any way.
These arguments have been used every time Islamist terrorists engage in mass killings, from 9/11 in New York to the massacre in Dhaka, Bangladesh, last week.
But the facts tell us a different story regarding the turbulent history of Islam and the roles played by Muslims within it.
Academics and scholars are reluctant to discuss these historical facts for fear of being accused of bigotry and racism.
Thus ordinary Muslims, to say nothing of non-Muslims, do not commonly know them.
The result is a Muslim community unaware of its own often bloody history, going back centuries, when both our holy cities — Mecca and Medina — were attacked, ransacked and destroyed, not by the “kufaar” (non-Muslims), but by Muslim leaders.
They fought for power, using Islam as a tool to enhance or entrench their political hold on the states they created.
Fanatical, politically motivated and radicalized Muslims have never hesitated to desecrate Islam’s holy sites.
As early as October, 683 AD, the Umayyad caliph of Damascus invaded Mecca, then under the control of a rival caliph, and bombarded the ancient shrine of Black Kaaba, the holiest site in Islam.
The Kaaba, where Muhammad preached, was destroyed in the fighting. A new one was constructed.
Skipping over the centuries, we have the 1805 invasion of the Prophet’s city, Medina, by the first Saudi state.
Imbibed with a fierce zealotry, the Wahhabi warriors of Muhammad Ibn Saud overran Medina and started to destroy Islamic shrines. They even tried to destroy the magnificent dome structure over the tomb of Prophet Muhammad, removed all precious objects from his gravesite and looted the treasury of the mosque itself.
After occupying Medina these Muslims, who came from the neighbouring region of Nejd, systematically leveled the “Jannat al-Baqi” cemetery, the vast burial site adjacent to the Prophet’s mosque that housed the remains of many of the members of Muhammad’s family, close companions and central figures of early Islam, including his beloved daughter, Fatima.
These acts of sacrilege were re-enacted by a new generation of Wahabbi zealots led by Abdel-Aziz Ibn Saud during the second Saudi state, a century later.
On April 21, 1925 the rebuilt tombs and domes in Medina were once again bulldozed.
Had it not been for intervention and diplomacy by then Prince Faisal (later King), who was in command of the regular Saudi army, the Wahabbis would have destroyed Prophet Muhammad’s tomb as well.
As recently as November, 1979, radicalized Muslims from around the world, including the U.S., Pakistan and Egypt, led by Saudi fanatic Juhayman al-Otaybi, took over the Holy Kaaba and killed many people during a two-week siege.
The moral of the story is that no matter how often Muslims refuse to acknowledge our history, it will not hide the mess we have created that we now refuse to cleanse.
Let us own up to it and stop blaming others for it.
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