Written by
Paul Lunde
Photographed by Nik Wheeler
One night T'ai Tsung, the emperor of China, had a dream.
I dreamed of a turbaned man and of monsters ... The man in the turban, with his hands clasped and murmuring prayers, pursued the monsters... To look on, he [had] indeed a strange countenance, totally unlike ordinary men; his face was the color of black gold... his moustache and beard were cut... short and even; he had phoenix eyebrows, and high nose and black eyes. His clothes were white and powdered, a jeweled girdle of jade encircled his loins, on his head was... a cloth turban like a coiled dragon. His presence was awe-inspiring... When he entered he knelt towards the West, reading the book he held in his hand. When the monsters saw him they were at once changed into... proper forms, and in distressful voices pleaded for forgiveness. But the turbaned man read on for a little, till the monsters turned to blood and at last to dust, and at the sound of a voice the turbaned man disappeared.
The emperor summoned the Interpreter of Dreams, who explained that the man in the dream was a Muslim from the West - from Arabia where a great sage had been granted a revelation from God in the form of a book. As for the monsters, they were symbols of evil influences at work in the world - which only the Muslims could destroy.
At that, a prince at the court spoke up and said: "I have heard well of these Muslims. They are straightforward and true, gracious and loyal. Throw open the pass, let communications be unhindered... and by so doing encourage peace. I beseech you to issue a decree and to send an ambassador across the western frontiers to the... Muslims, asking him to send a sage to deal with the evils that threaten, that the country may be at peace!"
So runs a legend among the Hui, the largest group of Chinese Muslims. It has been known at least since the 17th century, is probably much older and, like all legends, contains a kernel of truth.
For the Hui Muslims, the legend also links their origins with China's greatest emperor: T'ai Tsung, second ruler of the T'ang Dynasty and the man who united north and south China and established governmental institutions that were to last for the next 1,000 years.
Born in the year 600, T'ai Tsung came to the throne in 626 - four years after Muhammad and his followers left Makkah (Mecca) for Medina in far-off Arabia. About the same time the Turkic tribes of nomads in Central Asia were gathering outside the Great Wall of China for a massive incursion into the "Celestial Empire." T'ai Tsung, however, drove them back beyond the Great Wall and in so doing initiated a series of westward migrations - as one Turkic tribe displaced another. These were the tribes whose descendants make up the Turkic-speaking Muslim communities of China, as opposed to the Chinese-speaking Hui of the south and center.
While T'ai Tsung was defending and unifying China, Muhammad was laying the foundations for the Islamic state that would come into being after his death in 632. T'ai Tsung in his capital of Ch'ang-an (Xian) could never have dreamed that he and the dynasty he was consolidating would be affected by events in a small commercial town half a world away. Yet it was not long before the results of the Muslim conquests made themselves felt in Ch'ang-an: about 638 Shah Yazdegerd, of the Sassanids - who then ruled much of what is today's Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan - appealed for help against the new, but rapidly spreading force: the Muslims.
T'ai Tsung refused to help the Sassanids, but 13 years later his successor, Kao Tsung, received an identical plea for help from Shah Peroz, son of Yazdegerd, and this time China, having come to realize that the Muslim threat was serious, encouraged and helped Peroz.
"To the Chinese at that time, the Sassanids and the Byzantines were the great powers to the west. Indeed, long before the rise of Islam, embassies from Byzantium and Sassanid Persia had made their way to the Chinese court via what came to be called the Silk Road, the great trade route that reached from China to Constantinople and on to Rome. When ambassadors from Byzantium arrived at Ch'ang-an just five years after those of Shah Yazdegerd they almost certainly brought news of the astounding expansion of the new Muslim state - an expansion in which the Sassanids would be eradicated.
To modern readers it may seem extraordinary that such far-flung lands could have been in communication at such an early date; we tend to think that global politics are a recent phenomenon. In fact, seventh-century political leaders in both China and the Islamic world tried just as hard as their modem counterparts to keep abreast of events that might threaten their national security or their economy. Thus the appearance of the Arabs on the borders of Central Asia was a matter of grave concern in Ch'ang-an, for during the T'ang Dynasty, Chinese satellites in Central Asia were considered part of the empire. One reason for this concern was that China had developed a taste for Western goods and was anxious lest the overland trade route - the famous Silk Road - be closed by the new and growing Islamic empire. The Chinese also feared that the collapse of Sassanid Persia would permit the Turkic tribes - recently driven beyond the Great Wall - to resume their attacks on China.
In 651, the same year Shah Peroz appealed to Kao Tsung for support against the Arabs, Kao Tsung received a mission from 'Uthman, the Muslims' third caliph (or "successor" to Muhammad). As the T'ang annals put it: "In the year 651, the king of Arabia sent for the first time an envoy with presents to the Chinese court and at the same time announced that the Arabs had already reigned 34 years and had had three kings."
Arabic sources do not record such an embassy, and it is possible that the account in the T'ang records is a later interpolation. But it is still very interesting. For one thing, the "three kings" are the first three caliphs: Abu Bakr, 'Umar and 'Uthman. For another, 651 is regarded by the Hui as the date of the introduction of Islam to China.
As the years went by, the Chinese continued to keep an eye on developments in the Islamic world. The T'ang annals, for instance, mention the first Umayyad caliph, Mu'awiya - calling him "Mo-ee" - and note his unsuccessful siege of Constantinople; the notice must, therefore, date after 679, the year the Muslim troops withdrew from the walls of the Byzantine capital.
By then, the Chinese were better informed about the Ta-shih, the Chinese term for the Arabs, as this entry in T'ang annals suggests:
Ta-shih comprises territory which formerly belonged to Persia. The men have large noses and black beards. They carry a silver knife on a silver girdle. They drink no wine and know no music. The women are white and veil the face when they leave the house. There are great temples. Every seventh day the king addresses his subjects from a lofty throne in the temple in the following words: "Those who have died by the hand of the enemy will rise again to heaven; those who have defeated the enemy will be happy." Hence it is that the Ta-shih are such valiant warriors. They pray five times a day to the Heavenly Spirit.
It is noteworthy that this account tacitly refers to a number of fundamental Muslim beliefs and practices: the prohibition of wine, the veiling of women, assembly for public prayers, the delivery of the khutba, the Friday sermon at the mosque, daily prayer, and jihad, holy war against enemies of the faith. Again, it must be borne in mind that the annals of the T'ang went through a number of later revisions, and it is possible that this description may be of later date.
Until then, however, the Chinese still had not come into direct conflict with the Muslims - and would not for almost 100 years. But then, starting in 705, the great Arab general Qutaiba ibn Muslim marched east from Khorasan into Central Asia and in the next 10 years, in a series of brilliant campaigns, conquered Tukharistan, Bukhara, Khwarizm, Samarkand, and finally, reached Fergana in today's Soviet Central Asia.
According to the famous Arab historian Tabari, Qutaiba also crossed the Celestial Mountains - that formidable barrier that protects China to the west - and reached the town of Kashgar (Kashi). During this campaign, legend says, a Chinese provincial governor, hearing that Qutaiba had swom to take possession of China, sent him a bag of Chinese soil to trample, a bag of coins as token tribute and four young men as prisoners; his idea, apparently, was to release Qutaiba from his oath by giving him symbolic "possession" of China's land, wealth and people.
In crossing the Oxus, Qutaiba may well have been attempting to wrest control of the Silk Road from a people called the Sogdians. But his initial conquests did not last, so again conflict between China and Islam was avoided and it was to be some years before the Chinese and the Arabs found themselves face to face in Central Asia.
Chinese histories record another fascinating - and possibly true - story about the Qutaiba period. In 713, when Qutaiba was besieging Fergana, another Arab embassy arrived at Ch'ang-an:
In 713 an envoy appeared from Ta-shih bringing as presents beautiful horses and a magnificent girdle. When the envoy was... presented to the Emperor Hsuan Tsung, he refused to perform the prescribed obeisance, saying: "In my country we only bow to God and never to a prince." At first they wanted to kill the envoy. One of the ministers, however, interceded for him, saying that a difference in the court etiquette of foreign countries ought not to be considered a crime.
It is very possible that Hsuan Tsung's tolerance for the omission of the customary "kowtow" - touching the forehead to the ground - was partly motivated by Qutaiba's military successes on his western frontier. This was an enemy not to antagonize.
Hsuan Tsung came to the throne of China in 712. During his long and remarkable reign, the T'ang court developed a taste for exotica from the Islamic world - shadow plays known as karagoz in Turkish (See Aramco World, August-September 1963), musicians and musical instruments from Samarkand and Bukhara, dancers from Tashkent, lute players from Kucha, singing girls from Khuttal and whirling dancing girls from Chach. All these things found a welcome at Ch'ang-an and profoundly affected Chinese taste.
In the West, meanwhile, there were momentous happenings among the Muslims. The Umayyad Dynasty had been overthrown by the Abbasids and in 750, the first Abbasid caliph had come to the throne. One year later Muslim troops confronted a Chinese army for the first time, at Talas (See Aramco World, September-October 1982) where, aided by the Qarluq Turks, they decisively defeated a Chinese army that numbered about 30,000 men according to Chinese sources, 100,000 according to Arab reports. From then on, Muslim control of Central Asia began to grow until, gradually, most of the peoples of this area were converted to Islam.
Another result of the Battle of Talas was the capture of some skilled Chinese paper-makers - who introduced the manufacture of paper, a Chinese invention, to the Islamic world. Since this occurred at the beginning of the Abbasid era, the early years of which coincided with the T'ang Dynasty in China, it helped to stimulate a flowering of culture in Baghdad comparable to that which took place in Ch'ang-an. In making books and writing accessible to the masses, paper, also helped spread literacy in Islamic lands.
Eventually, if indirectly, the Battle of Talas also brought thousands of Muslims into China and thus changed the religious character of many parts of China. This occurred when a man named An Lu-shan, a favorite of Emperor Hsuan Tsung, rebelled against the T'ang Dynasty. Of mixed Sogdian and Turkish descent, the enormously fat An Lu-shan, a skilled military commander and governor of three provinces, led an uprising in 755 after Hsuan Tsung abdicated in favor of Su Tsung. When An Lu-shan captured and occupied Ch'ang-an, Su Tsung, apparently influenced by the Muslim success at the Battle of Talas, wrote to A-p'u ch'a-fo - rather a good rendition of the Arabic name of the second Abbasid caliph Abu Ja'far al-Mansur - asking him to send troops to help him recapture Ch'ang-an. The caliph responded by sending 4,000 men - who did help Su Tsung retake the capital, but who also settled in China, took Chinese wives and, in effect, established the first Muslim community in China; their descendants are probably among today's Chinese Muslims: the Hui.
In 751, four years before his rebellion, and the year of the Battle of Talas, An Lu-shan received a great many sumptuous gifts from his royal patron, Hsuan Tsung: a brush and comb set made of rhinoceros horn, an ear-pick made of tortoise shell, a silver washbasin, a table service of jade and gilded silver, a tureen with ladle and cups, clothes, carpets and a fine Persian vase inlaid with gold flowers. Many of these presents were probably imports; others were imitations of Western wares. But together they suggest that despite the unsettled times, trade was continuing along the Silk Road, the longest artery of trade in the world -11,265 kilometers long (7,000 miles) - between the two most important cities in the world in that era: Ch'ang-an, "the City of Eternal Peace," and Baghdad called, Madinat al-Salam - the "City of Peace."
There were other similarities between the two cities as well. Baghdad, like Ch'ang-an, was a planned city. Circular in form, it was consciously laid out as a microcosm of the universe with the caliphal palace, at the center, surrounded like the core of an onion with the concentric rings of markets, each with its own specialty. There was a specific market for Chinese goods, which were highly prized at the court, as were singers, musicians and dancers from Central Asia - from the same cities that supplied the court at Ch'ang-an.
Ch'ang-an was not a circle but a square, in keeping with Chinese cosmological doctrine. It was laid out in a grid pattern, with two great markets separated by a wide avenue, and three divisions: the Palace City, where the emperor dwelt, the Imperial City, which housed his administration, and the Outer City, where the populace lived and which contained the markets. Like Baghdad, elaborate laws and regulations governed the display and sale of merchandise and the foreign population was large: Uighurs, Turks, Sogdians, Tocharians, Arabs, Persians and Hindus rubbing shoulders in the streets.
Baghdad, with a population of one and a half million, and Ch'ang-an, with a population of between one and two million, were the two largest cities in the world then, and the T'ang emperor and the Abbasid caliph the two most powerful men on earth - both of whom shared similar views and problems. Both, for example, ruled mixed populations through elaborate bureaucracies; both enlisted Turkic troops in their armies - and subsequently had difficulty in controlling them - and both shared a taste for each other's goods, and for the music and dancing of Central Asia.
They also shared a mutual interest in - and ignorance of - each other. Though the works of Muslim historians do contain notices of China, for example, they are often garbled, and Abbasid accounts of the land and sea routes to China are often difficult to follow because of the difficulty in transcribing Chinese with the Arabic alphabet. One account, for example, lists Chinese emperors in the late ninth century, but few of the names can be deciphered. It was not until after the Mongol conquests that a Muslim historian - Rashid al-Din - could give a proper list of Chinese rulers and an outline of their history.
As time went on, Arab knowledge of China increased, however, as more and more Muslim traders made their way there by land and sea. There is an interesting firsthand account by a merchant named Sulaiman, who made a number of voyages to India and China and wrote of them in 850. He speaks of the difficulties of the trade with China: the long, dangerous voyage, the frequent fires in Canton (Guangzhou) - called "Khanfu" by Arab writers - piracy, extortionate port duties, uncertain winds.
Despite the great risks, Sulaiman tells us, trade flourished. Indeed, Sulaiman says, the emperor of China had appointed a Muslim official in Canton to keep order among his co-religionists. This official also led the prayers of the faithful on Fridays and gave the khutba in the name of the Abbasid caliph.
Normally, the ships that traded with China were offloaded in Siraf on the Arabian Gulf, and the goods were then transported in other vessels to Basra and thence to Baghdad. In Canton, all the goods that arrived were warehoused until the monsoon ended and the last ship had docked. Then a 30 percent tax was levied on all the merchandise and the emperor had the right to first purchase, paying the highest prices. In Sulaiman's time, camphor was the most sought-after cargo.
Of all those who studied China, al-Mas'udi, the 10th-century Arab historian, was perhaps the most inquiring, and the most fascinated; he had traveled widely himself, sailing the Indian Ocean, and was a friend of the scholar who edited the account of the merchant Sulaiman - Abu Zaid of Siraf. And in his Meadows of Gold and Mines of Precious Gems - the title of his masterpiece - he gives much exact information about China, including a detailed description of the Huang Ch'ao troubles, in which some 120,000 foreigners perished.
In the spread of Islam, the sea route to China was of paramount importance; in fact, the Muslim traders who settled in the Chinese ports and their descendants are the progenitors of the Hui, the Muslims who speak only Chinese. And though Huang Ch'ao's rebels severely damaged relations between China and the Islamic world, in the years preceding the rebellion relations were so good that the Chinese emperor joined the famous Abbasid Caliph Harun al-Rashid - called A-lun in Chinese sources - in expelling the Tibetans from Yunnan.
Though the T'ang was the high point of Muslim-Chinese relations, subsequent dynasties also maintained close ties. Under the Sung Dynasty for instance, contacts were fewer, yet Sung annals still record some 20 embassies from the Abbasid court between 960 and 1260. And though the hordes of Genghis Khan destroyed the Abbasids in 1258 and the Sung in 1260, they also established a new dynasty, the Yuan, which lasted from 1260 to 1368; it was under the Yuan that Islam spread to the interior of China and that many Muslims rose to high position. Marco Polo records that the province of Yunnan under the Mongols was Muslim and that it had a Muslim governor.
This governor, Shams al-Din Umar, known as Sayyid al-Ajall, claimed to be a descendant of the Prophet and was appointed by Kublai Khan to govern Yunnan - which he did from 1273 till his death in 1279. With his son, Nasir al-Din, he actively propagated Islam in Yunnan, and when he died Nasir al-Din became governor and was succeeded in turn by his son Husain. This famous Muslim family still numbers descendants in China today and the tomb of Sayyid al-Ajall in Yunnan is an important monument of Islamic art in China - as is his cenotaph in Canton.
Under the Yuan rule, Muslim scientists were welcomed, particularly astronomers, who contributed to the construction of the famous observatory in Shensi (Shaanxi), and under the Ming Dynasty -1368-1644 -China and the Islamic world had even closer contacts; perhaps for the first time Chinese Muslims undertook the pilgrimage to Makkah in some numbers.
Some of these pilgrims left accounts of their difficult journeys in Chinese and increased knowledge of the Muslim and Arab worlds is reflected in such works as the great Ming geography, which contains relatively precise information about cities such as Makkah and Medina, some of which may have been gathered on the naval expeditions of Cheng Ho, a Muslim admiral in the service of the Ming.
It was also during the Ming Dynasty that many Arabic books - particularly those of a scientific nature - were translated into Chinese; that mosques were built in most cities with a Hui population - many of which still stand - and that the first indigenous Chinese Muslim literature was created. The five-volume True Explanation of the Correct Religion, by Wang Tai-yu, was written in 1642, two years before Ming fell to Ch'ing. The appearance of the work was facilitated by an edict of toleration of "foreign" religions promulgated by one of the Ming emperors.
But it was under the Manchu Dynasty, or the Ch'ing (1644 - 1911), and particularly under the learned ruler K’ang Hsi, that a true Muslim literature was created. The most notable author of the time was Liu Chih. Born in Nanking, sometime towards the middle of the 17th century, he underwent the traditional education in the Chinese classics. His intellectual curiosity unappeased by this, he then undertook a private course of study, teaching himself Arabic and reading Buddhist and Taoist works as well. His eccentric interests aroused the disapproval of his family, and he was forced to move constantly. He wrote an important work on Islamic philosophy in 1674, and in 1710 a book on Islamic law. His most important work, however, was a life of the Prophet, probably written in 1721. He based this principally on an Arabic source which he found in the library of a friend. Its composition took three years; it was finally published in 1779 in 20 small volumes.
During the 19th century, there were great upheavals in China, and the risings in Yunnan in 1855-1873 by the Muslim population were crushed with great brutality. Tension between Hui and Han was exacerbated by the interference of colonial powers. The Muslim communities of China fared badly in this century too, particularly during the Cultural Revolution. It is only in the past few years that tensions have been resolved and a return seems to have been made to the tolerant attitudes described in a 17th century poem quoted in the First Coming of the Muslims, from which is taken the dream of T'ai Tsung at the beginning of this article. The poem reads:
Islam was once found only beyond the western border.
Who could have foretold that Muslims were to dwell in China forever?
Paul Lunde is a contributing editor of Aramco World magazine.
This article appeared on pages 12-19 of the July/August 1985 print edition of Saudi Aramco World.
Reference:
http://www.saudiaramcoworld.com/issue/198504/muslims.in.china-the.history.htm
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
Reminder on Deir Yassin (9th April 1948)
Assalamualaikum,
PACE remembers Deir Yassin (9th April 1948)
Today, 9th April marked the 63rd anniversary of the massacre of Deir Yassin. The tragedy that unfolded in the wee hours of Friday, 9th April 1948 became the symbol of Zionist aggression and persecution on the Palestinian people. It became the symbol of fear that gripped the whole nation, triggering the mass fleeing of the Palestinian from their homes and their homeland – never to return.
One of the Zionist terrorist organization, Haganah, swept the village and started the killing spree by lining up 33 people against a wall who were guest at a wedding reception and spread them with bullets killing all but one child who lived to tell the terrible ordeal. He related the event in such gruesome account “Everyone dropped down dead, except us children, because we hid under the corpses. But I got hid in my side. They kept on firing. Minutes later, a bullet made the head of my four-year-old sister explode. The rest of my relatives-my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins –have all lost their lives.
Acting like beast craving for blood, they killed and maimed with such sadistic manner. Hanan Khalil, who was 16 at that time saw with his own eyes how the Zionist terrorists, both teenage boys and girls slitted their helpless victim from head to toe and let them die a painful slow death. Pregnant women, 25 of them were bayoneted in the abdomen and the fetus were taken out, while the mother was still alive, breathing their last witnessing the indescribable horror done on their babies. Fifty two children were maimed and beheaded before their mothers, an act that was clearly orchestrated to instill paralyzing fear on the Palestinian populace. It was mind-boggling for a people who claimed themselves to have gone through the greatest ordeal they call holocaust to behave in far cruel ways than what they have suffered in the hands of the Nazis.
The Irgun, another terrorist and Zionist thugs finished off what their Haganah counterparts have started. The notorious Irgun was lead by non other than Menachem Begin, who was destined to become the future Prime Minister of the illegitimate state of Israel. He still has blood in his hand when he was jointly honoured with Anwar Sadat with the prestigious nobel prize for peace following the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1978, an event that have crushed the dignity of Palestinians and Egyptians alike. Both the Palestinians especially in Gaza and the Egyptians were held hostage by the so called peace treaty until Hosni Mubarak was forced to leave office in February 2011, giving a glimmer of hope to both sides of the Rafah crossing.
Menachem Begin who with the other teenagers back then busied themselves with what they called as ‘the mopping up operation’. Red Cross doctors who came to the scene described ‘the mopping up operation was carried out with sub-machine guns, bayonets and knives with not a single person was spared alive. The victims died in the most gruesome manner, unlikely done by human beings with conscience. Those who escaped death were either concealed by piling corpses or fallen bricks. In all 250 people were killed in cold blood. British security forces were fully aware of the unfolding tragedy but they took no initiatives to stop them. It was a collusion between the Zionist and British Imperial design. Deir Yassin is needed to hasten the birth of Isreal. Menachem Begin summed up the orgy of killings at Deir Yassin in his book The Revolt
“Without what was done at Deir Yassin there would not have been a State of Israel. He
Added further: While the Haganah was carrying out successful attacks on the other fronts
… the Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin”
Deir Yassin was a culmination of scores of other atrocities committed by Jewish murderous thugs spread across Palestine. Every city; Jenin, Beersheba, Haifa, Yaffa, al-Khalil, Baisan, Nablus, Akka had all had their share of untold sufferings. The ring leaders who executed those heinuous crime later rose to become ‘statesmen’ and ‘men of peace’. Other than Menachem begin, notorious personalities like Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres were teenagers in the 1940’s who killed with impunity. This was the modus operandi of the Zionist and it remain unchanged to this day.
PACE remembers Deir Yassin as a crime against humanity that has to be urgently redressed by the world community. The only way to heal the gaping wound that still bleed to this day is to free Palestine from occupation and persecution. No matter how long this is going to take, we will press on for freedom has been destined for the Palestinian people and that day is drawing near indeed.
Dr Hafidzi Mohd Noor
Director
PACE (Palestine Centre of Excellence)
Reference:
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/m31cr9q7lfra/?v=c&th=12f3806a0fa714ed
PACE remembers Deir Yassin (9th April 1948)
Today, 9th April marked the 63rd anniversary of the massacre of Deir Yassin. The tragedy that unfolded in the wee hours of Friday, 9th April 1948 became the symbol of Zionist aggression and persecution on the Palestinian people. It became the symbol of fear that gripped the whole nation, triggering the mass fleeing of the Palestinian from their homes and their homeland – never to return.
One of the Zionist terrorist organization, Haganah, swept the village and started the killing spree by lining up 33 people against a wall who were guest at a wedding reception and spread them with bullets killing all but one child who lived to tell the terrible ordeal. He related the event in such gruesome account “Everyone dropped down dead, except us children, because we hid under the corpses. But I got hid in my side. They kept on firing. Minutes later, a bullet made the head of my four-year-old sister explode. The rest of my relatives-my parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins –have all lost their lives.
Acting like beast craving for blood, they killed and maimed with such sadistic manner. Hanan Khalil, who was 16 at that time saw with his own eyes how the Zionist terrorists, both teenage boys and girls slitted their helpless victim from head to toe and let them die a painful slow death. Pregnant women, 25 of them were bayoneted in the abdomen and the fetus were taken out, while the mother was still alive, breathing their last witnessing the indescribable horror done on their babies. Fifty two children were maimed and beheaded before their mothers, an act that was clearly orchestrated to instill paralyzing fear on the Palestinian populace. It was mind-boggling for a people who claimed themselves to have gone through the greatest ordeal they call holocaust to behave in far cruel ways than what they have suffered in the hands of the Nazis.
The Irgun, another terrorist and Zionist thugs finished off what their Haganah counterparts have started. The notorious Irgun was lead by non other than Menachem Begin, who was destined to become the future Prime Minister of the illegitimate state of Israel. He still has blood in his hand when he was jointly honoured with Anwar Sadat with the prestigious nobel prize for peace following the Camp David peace treaty between Israel and Egypt in 1978, an event that have crushed the dignity of Palestinians and Egyptians alike. Both the Palestinians especially in Gaza and the Egyptians were held hostage by the so called peace treaty until Hosni Mubarak was forced to leave office in February 2011, giving a glimmer of hope to both sides of the Rafah crossing.
Menachem Begin who with the other teenagers back then busied themselves with what they called as ‘the mopping up operation’. Red Cross doctors who came to the scene described ‘the mopping up operation was carried out with sub-machine guns, bayonets and knives with not a single person was spared alive. The victims died in the most gruesome manner, unlikely done by human beings with conscience. Those who escaped death were either concealed by piling corpses or fallen bricks. In all 250 people were killed in cold blood. British security forces were fully aware of the unfolding tragedy but they took no initiatives to stop them. It was a collusion between the Zionist and British Imperial design. Deir Yassin is needed to hasten the birth of Isreal. Menachem Begin summed up the orgy of killings at Deir Yassin in his book The Revolt
“Without what was done at Deir Yassin there would not have been a State of Israel. He
Added further: While the Haganah was carrying out successful attacks on the other fronts
… the Arabs began fleeing in panic, shouting ‘Deir Yassin”
Deir Yassin was a culmination of scores of other atrocities committed by Jewish murderous thugs spread across Palestine. Every city; Jenin, Beersheba, Haifa, Yaffa, al-Khalil, Baisan, Nablus, Akka had all had their share of untold sufferings. The ring leaders who executed those heinuous crime later rose to become ‘statesmen’ and ‘men of peace’. Other than Menachem begin, notorious personalities like Ariel Sharon and Shimon Peres were teenagers in the 1940’s who killed with impunity. This was the modus operandi of the Zionist and it remain unchanged to this day.
PACE remembers Deir Yassin as a crime against humanity that has to be urgently redressed by the world community. The only way to heal the gaping wound that still bleed to this day is to free Palestine from occupation and persecution. No matter how long this is going to take, we will press on for freedom has been destined for the Palestinian people and that day is drawing near indeed.
Dr Hafidzi Mohd Noor
Director
PACE (Palestine Centre of Excellence)
Reference:
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/m31cr9q7lfra/?v=c&th=12f3806a0fa714ed
Wednesday, March 23, 2011
Konspirasi Video Lucah Datuk T KANTOI
LEBURLAH SEBUAH FITNAH JAHAT
DETIK TERBAIK MELEBUR FITNAH 1, 2 DAN 3 !! Jam 2.48 am, malam ini walaupun aku belum tidur, jiwa aku rasa tenang. Kalau nak tidur pun bila-bila masa boleh lelap. Tapi sebab nak menulis sikit tentang rentetan peristiwa tiga hari ini, aku mengambil keputusa...n untuk tidur lewat sikit walaupun esok kerja. Menulis dengan bahasa yang santai. Aku yakin malam ini tidur aku nyenyak, begitu juga dengan rakan-rakan seperjuangan, blogger, penyokong Pakatan Rakyat dan bakal pengundi baru Pakatan Rakyat (setelah melalui detik dua hari ini semenjek video seks halal ditayangkan di hotel terkemuka negara) dan semua yang berjuang menegakkan keadilan, pasti akan tidur nyenyak. Tak tau lah pulak apa nasib Najib dan gerombolannya yang sudah terkantoi sepanjang hari ini. Sudah tidur ke belum si Najib? Sudah tidur ke belum wahai datuk-datuk 'T' stooges? Pertama, aku bersyukur kepada tuhan kerana telah menerbitkan secebis kebenaran. Benarlah bahawa doa orang-orang yang teraniaya akan diangkat tanpa hijab lalu dimakbulkan. Kesempatan ini ingin aku ceritakan detik-detik penting yang aku lalui sejak semalam yang menjadi crucial time kepada perlawanan menentang fitnah demi fitnah. Ia seolah-olah satu kemuncak kepada beberapa siri fitnah yang tiap kalinya menemui kegagalan walaupun dirancang dengan bantuan yahudi lakhnatullah. Bermula kelmarin (21 Mac 2010), pagi-pagi lagi aku dikejutkan dengan satu BBM yang mengatakan sekumpulan wartawan akan dipanggil untuk sesi tayangan video seks yang membabitkan pimpinan tertinggi Pakatan Rakyat. Aku terus check twitter, memang benar bahawa satu tayangan lucah akan berlangsung di Carcosa Sri Negara. Bayangkan sekiranya rakyat awam seperti aku telah ketahui lebih awal aktiviti jahat ini, mengapa tidak pihak polis yang punya intel mengambil tindakkan wajar? Contoh tindakkan ialah menahan Datuk T dan merampas klip video yang ditayangkan. Tetapi ia tidak berlaku! Dalam masa yang sama, aku terfikir di manakah anak muda dari AMK pagi-pagi Isnin itu? Adakah mereka bangun lewat pada hari tersebut? Sepatutnya AMK harus bertindak pantas menghimpit perjumpaan di Carcosa yang menjurus kepada penayangan video lucah kononnya membabitkan Anwar Ibrahim. Mengapa aku katakan membabitkan Anwar ialah kerana Datuk T sendiri mengatakan pemimpin PR terlibat itu harus berundur bersama isterinya! Ini bermakna isteri si tertuduh adalah merupakan seseorang yang mempunyai jawatan dalam parti, yang membolehkan satu ugutan supaya berundur telah berlaku. Polis masih tidak mengambil tindakkan, begitu juga dengan kelembapan AMK. Ketika itu aku yakin bahawa bukan Anwar Ibrahim yang terlibat. Aku tidak akan mudah terbeli dengan penyebaran berita Anwar Ibrahim melanggan pelacur di spa, begitu juga dengan kepimpinan PR yang tidak putus-putus memberi sokongan kepada Anwar Ibrahim. Sekiranya Anwar adalah orangnya, maka wajar Anwar Ibrahim berundur. Aku petik quote ini dari che'GuBard. Apa yang salahnya kenyataan ini berbanding dengan kenyataan "Tidak kira walau Anwar dalam video itu ataupun bukan, kita tetap mahukan Anwar Ibrahim sebagai pemimpin Pakatan Rakyat"? Apa yang penting adalah keyakinan kita sejak azali, kerana ini adalah fitnah ke-tiga buat Anwar Ibrahim. Apa yang jauh lebih penting ialah, peranan kita menyampaikan kebenaran kepada pelbagai lapisan masyarakat agar mereka juga yakin seperti apa yang kita yakin - Anwar tidak terlibat dalam Fitnah 1, 2 atau 3! Baca lagi kenyataan che'GuBard dan fahamkan dalam tajuk "Isu video : awat anak muda kalut ?" Masuk tarikh 22hb, keadaan tiba-tiba berubah apabila tersebarnya berita yang menyatakan pelakon dalam video seks itu berperut buncit walaupun irasnya seperti DSAI. Ketika ini, blog-blog pro-BN yang berpesta sehari sebelumnya dengan kenyataan Anwar Ibrahim lah lelaki X dalam video tersebut, telah mula bertukar rentak dengan sungguh-sungguh mengatakan video itu direkayasa oleh Anwar Ibrahim. Blogger murahan Zul Nordin sudah langsung diam seribu bahasa. Aku malas cerita pasal YB binatang nie, kalau nak baca klik di entry "Ahli Parlimen Binatang Punya Teori Bangsat Junjung Pemerintah Zalim". Zul Nordin juga sungguh-sungguh mengatakan video seks itu kerja DSAI untuk mengalih perhatian mengenai penyerahan DNA. Kemudian datanglah tanggal 23 Mac 2010, tarikh yang harus dikenang sebagai hari pembalasan kecil kepada si pendusta besar. Pagi-pagi lagi Malaysia dikejutkan dengan keputusan mahkamah yang menterbalikkan keputusan awal, apabila dengan dengan tidak semena-mena menerima semula bukti DNA lokap yang telah ditolak sebelum ini. Bayangkanlah jika hakim dah jatuh hukum, tapi menarik balik hukuman tersebut tanpa alasan munasabah. Ini sesuatu yang agak pelik seumpama ada yang tidak kena di sebalik penyebaran betapa Anwar Ibrahim tidak sebuncit si pelakon porno. Memang masa itu semua syak ada yang tak kena sebab skandal video seks dikatakan sudah gagal, tetapi belum kantoi lagi ketika itu. Rakyat kebanyakkan yang mengikuti skandal video seks ini telah lebih ramai yang meragui daripada mempercayai. Tiba-tiba seorang sahabat aku yang bernama ephol telah menjumpai satu berita dari MalaysianUnpluge yang mendedahkan siapakah Datuk 'T'. Entry tersebut di sini, dan entry ini meletup kerana belum ada pendedahan lain dalam entry pro-pakatan rakyat yang regular. Sewaktu entry tersebut dipublish, aku dapat beberapa panggilan yang bertanya akan kesahihan maklumat yang aku dapat. Belum sempat aku jawab, kira-kira sejam selepas pendedahan di blog edyesdotcom, maka hadirlah kenyataan akhbar yang merungkai segala persoalan, yang mengsahihkan sebijik-sebijik dengan maklumat awal yang dipapar sebelumnya. Maka tidak hairanlah mengapa mahkamah menterbalikkan keputusan asalnya apabila tetap menerima DNA yang diperolehi secara tidak sah. Apakah rakyat semua tidak sedar lagi? Adalah menjadi tanggungjawab pembaca blog edyesdotcom untuk sampai menyampaikan kebenaran. Pikullah amanah ini dengan yakin! Syabas dan tahniah YB Johari Abdul kerana berani dan tidak tumbang dengan umpan yang dilempar. Kenyataan YB Johari kemudiannya dipublish dalam entry "Kenyataan Akhbar Dato Johari Merungkai Segalanya !!!" . Sebuah kenyataan yang mendedahkan modus operandi UMNO memikat ahli parlimen Pakatan Rakyat bagi melunaskan nafsu mereka dengan cubaan mencukupkan bilangan majoriti dua per tiga Dewan Rakyat. Sedari tidak, perancangan jahat ini juga merupakan satu cubaan checkmate buat Anwar Ibrahim kerana dengan pelbagai tohmahan termasuk dua siri fitnah, DSAI diyakini tidak akan mampu lagi menahan beban satu lagi fitnah lebih besar dan jahat biarpun ia secalit persepsi, ia akan memusnahkan terus karier DSAI. Ini dinamakan political assasination. Namun, Allah itu maha pengasih dan penyayang, tidak membenarkan negara Malaysia terus hanyut. Justeru itu, kita harus bersyukur kerana kebenaran itu tiba tepat pada masanya. Najib sudah pening, Muhyidin sudah semak, Datuk 'T' stooges sudah tak tahu mana mau lari, cybertrooper UMNO sudah ontok seontoknya, Zul Kulim dah surrender dek dua kenyataan baghalnya yang tidak menepati sasaran dari awal hingga akhir. Binawe sungguh, aku masih petik namanya. Penyokong tegar UMNO yang tiada kepentingan mulai rasa menyesal dan rasa bersalah, bukan kepada Anwar Ibrahim, tetapi kepada apa yang mereka dukungi selama ini. Penyokong atas pagar sudah mula memilih haluan yang lebih tepat, iaitu menolak regim jahat yang mengotorkan siaran tv dengan aksi berita lucah, lucah dan lucah! Apa lagi idea yang masih belum digunapakai untuk menyelamatkan maruah UMNO apabila mereka yang terlibat adalah seorang pengerusi RISDA, seorang pembida jambatan bengkok dan seorang lagi adalah bendahari pejuang melayu tulen PERKASA. Ini dah menghampiri check-mate buat BN. Rakyat di bandar dan di kampung harus buka mata luas-luas! Lebih penting, pastikan maklumat ini sampai kepada semua. Akhir sekali, timbul satu lagi cubaan penghabisan apabila Datuk 'T' stooges tampil dalam satu sidang media. Dengan membuat pengakuan oleh datuk Eskay sendiri berada dalam video seks tersebut, tanpa menyatakan kedudukkannya sebagai pelakon yang mana. Pelakon utama ataupun tambahan. Kegemparan ini dirakam dalam sebuah lagi entry yang bertajuk "Datuk Eskay: Saya Dalam Video Itu" Kecelaruan tahap maksimum cuba ditimbulkan daripada sidang media ini. Tiba-tiba juga beberapa menteri melenting dengan mengatakan UMNO dan kerajaan BN tidak terlibat. Tetapi persoalan lebih parah yang tertimbul secara automatis; Mengapa RISDA terlibat sehingga dikatakan membuat tempahan dan membayar kos hotel Carcosa? PERKASA juga terlibat? Mengapa ketiga-tiga stooges ini masih belum ditangkap walaupun pengakuan penglibatan mereka dalam pembikinan dan penayangan video seks itu adalah sangat jelas? Muka Datuk Eskay agak seiras dengan muka DSAI, mungkin perbezaannya adalah perut siapa yang lebih buncit. Adalah sesuatu yang janggal apabila dikatakan Datuk Eskay adalah teman rapat Anwar sebulan yang lalu, benarkah begitu?? Paling penting, mereka juga telah mengugut Anwar Ibrahim dan Kak Wan pada Isnin lalu supaya berundur dari jawatan dalam parti melalui satu video seks fitnah (yang akhirnya terbongkar dibikin sendiri). Kalau Datuk 'T' stooges menyuruh Anwar dan isterinya berundur, bukankah itu yang UMNO dan Barisan Nasional mahu supaya mereka selamat di PRU ke 13? Akhir kalam, aku menyeru agar artikel peristiwa yang aku lalui sepanjang tiga hari berturut ini disampaikan kepada semua blog dan facebook. Aku yakin, rakyat hari ini telah terbuntang matanya menyaksikan kejahatan sebenar sebuah kerajaan terdesak yang ingin mempertahankan kuasa dengan slogan; Biarpun hancur tulang belulang(rakyat), Putrajaya harus dipertahankan. Hanya satu ayat yang bermain dalam kepalaku di saat ini; "Wama karu wama karullah.. Allahukhairun makireen.." yang bermaksud "Kita merancang, Allah juga merancang.. Namun perancangan Allah itu lebih baik" Takbir!! Takbir!! Di hari tumbangnya sebuah regim jahat, ketika itu jugalah sebuah REVOLUSI bermula !!
INI ADALAH eHSAN DARI:
EDYES @ edyesdotcom COURT oF PUBLIC OPINION Artikel asal untuk bacaan lebih baik, sila klik sini: http://edyesdotcom.blogspot.com/2011/03/detik-terbaik-melebur-fitnah-1-2-dan-3.html
DETIK TERBAIK MELEBUR FITNAH 1, 2 DAN 3 !! Jam 2.48 am, malam ini walaupun aku belum tidur, jiwa aku rasa tenang. Kalau nak tidur pun bila-bila masa boleh lelap. Tapi sebab nak menulis sikit tentang rentetan peristiwa tiga hari ini, aku mengambil keputusa...n untuk tidur lewat sikit walaupun esok kerja. Menulis dengan bahasa yang santai. Aku yakin malam ini tidur aku nyenyak, begitu juga dengan rakan-rakan seperjuangan, blogger, penyokong Pakatan Rakyat dan bakal pengundi baru Pakatan Rakyat (setelah melalui detik dua hari ini semenjek video seks halal ditayangkan di hotel terkemuka negara) dan semua yang berjuang menegakkan keadilan, pasti akan tidur nyenyak. Tak tau lah pulak apa nasib Najib dan gerombolannya yang sudah terkantoi sepanjang hari ini. Sudah tidur ke belum si Najib? Sudah tidur ke belum wahai datuk-datuk 'T' stooges? Pertama, aku bersyukur kepada tuhan kerana telah menerbitkan secebis kebenaran. Benarlah bahawa doa orang-orang yang teraniaya akan diangkat tanpa hijab lalu dimakbulkan. Kesempatan ini ingin aku ceritakan detik-detik penting yang aku lalui sejak semalam yang menjadi crucial time kepada perlawanan menentang fitnah demi fitnah. Ia seolah-olah satu kemuncak kepada beberapa siri fitnah yang tiap kalinya menemui kegagalan walaupun dirancang dengan bantuan yahudi lakhnatullah. Bermula kelmarin (21 Mac 2010), pagi-pagi lagi aku dikejutkan dengan satu BBM yang mengatakan sekumpulan wartawan akan dipanggil untuk sesi tayangan video seks yang membabitkan pimpinan tertinggi Pakatan Rakyat. Aku terus check twitter, memang benar bahawa satu tayangan lucah akan berlangsung di Carcosa Sri Negara. Bayangkan sekiranya rakyat awam seperti aku telah ketahui lebih awal aktiviti jahat ini, mengapa tidak pihak polis yang punya intel mengambil tindakkan wajar? Contoh tindakkan ialah menahan Datuk T dan merampas klip video yang ditayangkan. Tetapi ia tidak berlaku! Dalam masa yang sama, aku terfikir di manakah anak muda dari AMK pagi-pagi Isnin itu? Adakah mereka bangun lewat pada hari tersebut? Sepatutnya AMK harus bertindak pantas menghimpit perjumpaan di Carcosa yang menjurus kepada penayangan video lucah kononnya membabitkan Anwar Ibrahim. Mengapa aku katakan membabitkan Anwar ialah kerana Datuk T sendiri mengatakan pemimpin PR terlibat itu harus berundur bersama isterinya! Ini bermakna isteri si tertuduh adalah merupakan seseorang yang mempunyai jawatan dalam parti, yang membolehkan satu ugutan supaya berundur telah berlaku. Polis masih tidak mengambil tindakkan, begitu juga dengan kelembapan AMK. Ketika itu aku yakin bahawa bukan Anwar Ibrahim yang terlibat. Aku tidak akan mudah terbeli dengan penyebaran berita Anwar Ibrahim melanggan pelacur di spa, begitu juga dengan kepimpinan PR yang tidak putus-putus memberi sokongan kepada Anwar Ibrahim. Sekiranya Anwar adalah orangnya, maka wajar Anwar Ibrahim berundur. Aku petik quote ini dari che'GuBard. Apa yang salahnya kenyataan ini berbanding dengan kenyataan "Tidak kira walau Anwar dalam video itu ataupun bukan, kita tetap mahukan Anwar Ibrahim sebagai pemimpin Pakatan Rakyat"? Apa yang penting adalah keyakinan kita sejak azali, kerana ini adalah fitnah ke-tiga buat Anwar Ibrahim. Apa yang jauh lebih penting ialah, peranan kita menyampaikan kebenaran kepada pelbagai lapisan masyarakat agar mereka juga yakin seperti apa yang kita yakin - Anwar tidak terlibat dalam Fitnah 1, 2 atau 3! Baca lagi kenyataan che'GuBard dan fahamkan dalam tajuk "Isu video : awat anak muda kalut ?" Masuk tarikh 22hb, keadaan tiba-tiba berubah apabila tersebarnya berita yang menyatakan pelakon dalam video seks itu berperut buncit walaupun irasnya seperti DSAI. Ketika ini, blog-blog pro-BN yang berpesta sehari sebelumnya dengan kenyataan Anwar Ibrahim lah lelaki X dalam video tersebut, telah mula bertukar rentak dengan sungguh-sungguh mengatakan video itu direkayasa oleh Anwar Ibrahim. Blogger murahan Zul Nordin sudah langsung diam seribu bahasa. Aku malas cerita pasal YB binatang nie, kalau nak baca klik di entry "Ahli Parlimen Binatang Punya Teori Bangsat Junjung Pemerintah Zalim". Zul Nordin juga sungguh-sungguh mengatakan video seks itu kerja DSAI untuk mengalih perhatian mengenai penyerahan DNA. Kemudian datanglah tanggal 23 Mac 2010, tarikh yang harus dikenang sebagai hari pembalasan kecil kepada si pendusta besar. Pagi-pagi lagi Malaysia dikejutkan dengan keputusan mahkamah yang menterbalikkan keputusan awal, apabila dengan dengan tidak semena-mena menerima semula bukti DNA lokap yang telah ditolak sebelum ini. Bayangkanlah jika hakim dah jatuh hukum, tapi menarik balik hukuman tersebut tanpa alasan munasabah. Ini sesuatu yang agak pelik seumpama ada yang tidak kena di sebalik penyebaran betapa Anwar Ibrahim tidak sebuncit si pelakon porno. Memang masa itu semua syak ada yang tak kena sebab skandal video seks dikatakan sudah gagal, tetapi belum kantoi lagi ketika itu. Rakyat kebanyakkan yang mengikuti skandal video seks ini telah lebih ramai yang meragui daripada mempercayai. Tiba-tiba seorang sahabat aku yang bernama ephol telah menjumpai satu berita dari MalaysianUnpluge yang mendedahkan siapakah Datuk 'T'. Entry tersebut di sini, dan entry ini meletup kerana belum ada pendedahan lain dalam entry pro-pakatan rakyat yang regular. Sewaktu entry tersebut dipublish, aku dapat beberapa panggilan yang bertanya akan kesahihan maklumat yang aku dapat. Belum sempat aku jawab, kira-kira sejam selepas pendedahan di blog edyesdotcom, maka hadirlah kenyataan akhbar yang merungkai segala persoalan, yang mengsahihkan sebijik-sebijik dengan maklumat awal yang dipapar sebelumnya. Maka tidak hairanlah mengapa mahkamah menterbalikkan keputusan asalnya apabila tetap menerima DNA yang diperolehi secara tidak sah. Apakah rakyat semua tidak sedar lagi? Adalah menjadi tanggungjawab pembaca blog edyesdotcom untuk sampai menyampaikan kebenaran. Pikullah amanah ini dengan yakin! Syabas dan tahniah YB Johari Abdul kerana berani dan tidak tumbang dengan umpan yang dilempar. Kenyataan YB Johari kemudiannya dipublish dalam entry "Kenyataan Akhbar Dato Johari Merungkai Segalanya !!!" . Sebuah kenyataan yang mendedahkan modus operandi UMNO memikat ahli parlimen Pakatan Rakyat bagi melunaskan nafsu mereka dengan cubaan mencukupkan bilangan majoriti dua per tiga Dewan Rakyat. Sedari tidak, perancangan jahat ini juga merupakan satu cubaan checkmate buat Anwar Ibrahim kerana dengan pelbagai tohmahan termasuk dua siri fitnah, DSAI diyakini tidak akan mampu lagi menahan beban satu lagi fitnah lebih besar dan jahat biarpun ia secalit persepsi, ia akan memusnahkan terus karier DSAI. Ini dinamakan political assasination. Namun, Allah itu maha pengasih dan penyayang, tidak membenarkan negara Malaysia terus hanyut. Justeru itu, kita harus bersyukur kerana kebenaran itu tiba tepat pada masanya. Najib sudah pening, Muhyidin sudah semak, Datuk 'T' stooges sudah tak tahu mana mau lari, cybertrooper UMNO sudah ontok seontoknya, Zul Kulim dah surrender dek dua kenyataan baghalnya yang tidak menepati sasaran dari awal hingga akhir. Binawe sungguh, aku masih petik namanya. Penyokong tegar UMNO yang tiada kepentingan mulai rasa menyesal dan rasa bersalah, bukan kepada Anwar Ibrahim, tetapi kepada apa yang mereka dukungi selama ini. Penyokong atas pagar sudah mula memilih haluan yang lebih tepat, iaitu menolak regim jahat yang mengotorkan siaran tv dengan aksi berita lucah, lucah dan lucah! Apa lagi idea yang masih belum digunapakai untuk menyelamatkan maruah UMNO apabila mereka yang terlibat adalah seorang pengerusi RISDA, seorang pembida jambatan bengkok dan seorang lagi adalah bendahari pejuang melayu tulen PERKASA. Ini dah menghampiri check-mate buat BN. Rakyat di bandar dan di kampung harus buka mata luas-luas! Lebih penting, pastikan maklumat ini sampai kepada semua. Akhir sekali, timbul satu lagi cubaan penghabisan apabila Datuk 'T' stooges tampil dalam satu sidang media. Dengan membuat pengakuan oleh datuk Eskay sendiri berada dalam video seks tersebut, tanpa menyatakan kedudukkannya sebagai pelakon yang mana. Pelakon utama ataupun tambahan. Kegemparan ini dirakam dalam sebuah lagi entry yang bertajuk "Datuk Eskay: Saya Dalam Video Itu" Kecelaruan tahap maksimum cuba ditimbulkan daripada sidang media ini. Tiba-tiba juga beberapa menteri melenting dengan mengatakan UMNO dan kerajaan BN tidak terlibat. Tetapi persoalan lebih parah yang tertimbul secara automatis; Mengapa RISDA terlibat sehingga dikatakan membuat tempahan dan membayar kos hotel Carcosa? PERKASA juga terlibat? Mengapa ketiga-tiga stooges ini masih belum ditangkap walaupun pengakuan penglibatan mereka dalam pembikinan dan penayangan video seks itu adalah sangat jelas? Muka Datuk Eskay agak seiras dengan muka DSAI, mungkin perbezaannya adalah perut siapa yang lebih buncit. Adalah sesuatu yang janggal apabila dikatakan Datuk Eskay adalah teman rapat Anwar sebulan yang lalu, benarkah begitu?? Paling penting, mereka juga telah mengugut Anwar Ibrahim dan Kak Wan pada Isnin lalu supaya berundur dari jawatan dalam parti melalui satu video seks fitnah (yang akhirnya terbongkar dibikin sendiri). Kalau Datuk 'T' stooges menyuruh Anwar dan isterinya berundur, bukankah itu yang UMNO dan Barisan Nasional mahu supaya mereka selamat di PRU ke 13? Akhir kalam, aku menyeru agar artikel peristiwa yang aku lalui sepanjang tiga hari berturut ini disampaikan kepada semua blog dan facebook. Aku yakin, rakyat hari ini telah terbuntang matanya menyaksikan kejahatan sebenar sebuah kerajaan terdesak yang ingin mempertahankan kuasa dengan slogan; Biarpun hancur tulang belulang(rakyat), Putrajaya harus dipertahankan. Hanya satu ayat yang bermain dalam kepalaku di saat ini; "Wama karu wama karullah.. Allahukhairun makireen.." yang bermaksud "Kita merancang, Allah juga merancang.. Namun perancangan Allah itu lebih baik" Takbir!! Takbir!! Di hari tumbangnya sebuah regim jahat, ketika itu jugalah sebuah REVOLUSI bermula !!
INI ADALAH eHSAN DARI:
EDYES @ edyesdotcom COURT oF PUBLIC OPINION Artikel asal untuk bacaan lebih baik, sila klik sini: http://edyesdotcom.blogspot.com/2011/03/detik-terbaik-melebur-fitnah-1-2-dan-3.html
Friday, March 11, 2011
Western View had Changed upon Islam
James Carroll, Where Did All the Fatwas Go?
Posted by James Carroll at 10:05am, March 8, 2011.
A week or so ago, a friend of mine noticed a poster taped to a wall inside the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, where American demonstrators were camped out. It showeda lone demonstrator walking toward a line of helmeted Egyptian police, holding high a protest sign. Under the photo, a caption said simply: “Walk like an Egyptian.”
If you want to know something new about our American world, just think about that. No further explanation was needed. Across this country Americans undoubtedly understood just what that meant and what it represented: an unbelievably brave explosion of desire for freedom in the Arab world. If that caption had said, “Walk like a Tunisian (or Bahraini, Algerian, Iranian, Iraqi, Omani, Libyan, etc.),” few would have found that strange either. It’s already as normal here as mom and apple pie. And yet, had you predicted that this was coming as 2010 ended, you would have been laughed out of the American living room by experts, among others, who assured you that Arabs were incapable of such acts, that their religion prevented it, and that “walk like an Egyptian” was nothing more than a 1986 hit by the Bangles about the bizarre way Egyptians of old moved.
Sometimes the tectonic plates of our cultural world shift radically and we hardly know it’s happened. This seems to be such a moment and today one of my favorite columnists, James Carroll of the Boston Globe, considers just that shift. In the disastrous early years of the George W. Bush era, Carroll put the rest of the mainstream media and the punditocracy to shame. As a weekly columnist, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when President Bushreferred to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist to warn against the consequences of launching a war on Afghanistan in response to those attacks. In September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print.
He’s still ahead of the game. As he so strikingly summed up events in the Middle East in his column last week, “The revolutions in the Arab streets, whatever their individual outcomes, have already overturned the dominant assumption of global geopolitics -- that hundreds of millions of impoverished people will uncomplainingly accept their assignment to the antechamber of hell.” Tomorrow, his newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, is officially published. It is a stunning reconsideration of much of Western (even American) as well as Middle Eastern history. It offers a new way of looking at the origins and development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of the Christopher Columbus story, of the history of printing, and of so much else, including the moment in 1973 when the Middle East nearly went nuclear. There is no way to sum it up, except to indicate that the bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword has done it again. Here’s my advice: buy this book. It will change the way you see our world. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Disappearance of the Nightmare Arab
How a Revolution of Hope Is Changing the Way Americans Look at Islam
By James Carroll
Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.
For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.
The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Qaddafi’s men.
In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews” -- all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama Bin Laden -- to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance -- has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?
Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.
Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?
In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.
Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.
It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person -- as the Qu’ran says -- as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.
A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.
History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.
Because so many people have believed in themselves -- protecting one another simply by standing together -- they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).
Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake -- in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.
To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.
The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”
Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.
Scary, indeed -- but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did -- with that “we” defined as Western civilization.
Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula --- all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.
How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam -- that it was only “spread by the sword” -- was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.
Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.
“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”
No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel” -- the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.
The Revolution of Hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.
Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious -- an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.
James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 James Carroll
Reference:
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/qx38txf1q5n9/?v=c&th=12ea3bacc932e8be
Posted by James Carroll at 10:05am, March 8, 2011.
A week or so ago, a friend of mine noticed a poster taped to a wall inside the rotunda of the Wisconsin State Capitol building, where American demonstrators were camped out. It showeda lone demonstrator walking toward a line of helmeted Egyptian police, holding high a protest sign. Under the photo, a caption said simply: “Walk like an Egyptian.”
If you want to know something new about our American world, just think about that. No further explanation was needed. Across this country Americans undoubtedly understood just what that meant and what it represented: an unbelievably brave explosion of desire for freedom in the Arab world. If that caption had said, “Walk like a Tunisian (or Bahraini, Algerian, Iranian, Iraqi, Omani, Libyan, etc.),” few would have found that strange either. It’s already as normal here as mom and apple pie. And yet, had you predicted that this was coming as 2010 ended, you would have been laughed out of the American living room by experts, among others, who assured you that Arabs were incapable of such acts, that their religion prevented it, and that “walk like an Egyptian” was nothing more than a 1986 hit by the Bangles about the bizarre way Egyptians of old moved.
Sometimes the tectonic plates of our cultural world shift radically and we hardly know it’s happened. This seems to be such a moment and today one of my favorite columnists, James Carroll of the Boston Globe, considers just that shift. In the disastrous early years of the George W. Bush era, Carroll put the rest of the mainstream media and the punditocracy to shame. As a weekly columnist, he was perhaps the first media figure to notice -- and warn against -- a presidential "slip of the tongue" just after the assaults of 9/11, when President Bushreferred to his new Global War on Terror as a "crusade." He was possibly the first mainstream columnist to warn against the consequences of launching a war on Afghanistan in response to those attacks. In September 2003, he was possibly the first to pronounce the Iraq War "lost" in print.
He’s still ahead of the game. As he so strikingly summed up events in the Middle East in his column last week, “The revolutions in the Arab streets, whatever their individual outcomes, have already overturned the dominant assumption of global geopolitics -- that hundreds of millions of impoverished people will uncomplainingly accept their assignment to the antechamber of hell.” Tomorrow, his newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World, is officially published. It is a stunning reconsideration of much of Western (even American) as well as Middle Eastern history. It offers a new way of looking at the origins and development of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, of the Christopher Columbus story, of the history of printing, and of so much else, including the moment in 1973 when the Middle East nearly went nuclear. There is no way to sum it up, except to indicate that the bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword has done it again. Here’s my advice: buy this book. It will change the way you see our world. (To catch Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.) Tom
The Disappearance of the Nightmare Arab
How a Revolution of Hope Is Changing the Way Americans Look at Islam
By James Carroll
Since 2001, Americans have been living with a nightmare Arab, a Muslim monster threatening us to the core, chilling our souls with the cry, “God is great!” Yet after two months of world-historic protest and rebellion in streets and squares across the Arab world, we are finally waking up to another reality: that this was our bad dream, significantly a creation of our own fevered imaginations.
For years, vestigial colonial contempt for Arabs combined with rank prejudice against the Islamic religion, exacerbated by an obsession with oil, proved a blinding combination. Then 9/11 pulled its shroud across the sun. But like the night yielding to dawn, all of this now appears in a new light. Americans are seeing Arabs and Muslims as if for the first time, and we are, despite ourselves, impressed and moved. In this regard, too, the Arab revolution has been, well, revolutionary.
The Absence of Arab Perfidy, the Presence of God
For those same two months, jihadists who think nothing of slaughtering innocents in the name of Allah have been nowhere in sight, as millions of ordinary Arabs launched demonstration after demonstration with a non-violent discipline worthy of Mohandas Gandhi. True, rebels in Libya took up arms, but defensively, in order to throw back the murderous assaults of Muammar Qaddafi’s men.
In the meantime, across North Africa and the Middle East, none of the usual American saws about Islamic perfidy have been evident. The demonizing of Israel, anti-Semitic sloganeering, the burning of American flags, outcries against “Crusaders and Jews” -- all have been absent from nearly every instance of revolt. Osama Bin Laden -- to whom, many Americans became convinced in these last years, Muslims are supposed to have all but sworn allegiance -- has been appealed to not at all. Where are the fatwas?
Perhaps the two biggest surprises of all here: out of a culture that has notoriously disempowered women has sprung a protest movement rife with female leadership, while a religion regarded as inherently incompatible with democratic ideals has been the context from which comes an unprecedented outbreak of democratic hope. And make no mistake: the Muslim religion is essential to what has been happening across the Middle East, even without Islamic “fanatics” chanting hate-filled slogans.
Without such fanatics, who in the West knows what this religion actually looks like?
In fact, its clearest image has been there on our television screens again and again. In this period of transformation, every week has been punctuated with the poignant formality of Friday prayers, including broadcast scenes of masses of Muslims prostrate in orderly rows across vast squares in every contested Arab capital. Young and old, illiterate and tech savvy, those in flowing robes and those in tight blue jeans have been alike in such observances. From mosque pulpits have come fiery denunciations of despotism and corruption, but no blood-thirst and none of the malicious Imams who so haunt the nightmares of Europeans and Americans.
Yet sacrosanct Fridays have consistently seen decisive social action, with resistant regimes typically getting the picture on subsequent weekends. (The Tunisian prime minister, a holdover from the toppled regime of autocrat Zine Ben Ali, for example, resigned on the last Sunday in February.) These outcomes have been sparked not only by preaching, but by the mosque-inspired cohesion of a collectivity that finds no contradiction between piety and political purpose; religion, that is, has been a source of resolve.
It’s an irony, then, that Western journalists, always so quick to tie bad Muslim behavior to religion, have rushed to term this good Muslim behavior “secular.” In a word wielded by the New York Times, Islam is now considered little but an “afterthought” to the revolution. In this, the media is simply wrong. The protests, demonstrations, and uprisings that have swept across the Middle East have visibly built their foundations on the irreducible sense of self-worth that, for believers, comes from a felt closeness to God, who is as near to each person -- as the Qu’ran says -- as his or her own jugular vein. The call to prayer is a five-times-daily reminder of that infinite individual dignity.
A Rejection Not Only of Violence, But of the Old Lies
The new Arab condition is not Nirvana, nor has some political utopia been achieved. In no Arab state is the endgame in sight, much less played out. History warns that revolutions have a tendency to devour their children, just as it warns that every religion can sponsor violence and war as easily and naturally as nonviolence and peace.
History warns as well that, in times of social upheaval, Jews are the preferred and perennial scapegoat, and the State of Israel is a ready target for that hatred. Arab bigotry has not magically gone away, nor has the human temptation to drown fear with blood. But few, if any, revolutions have been launched with such wily commitment to the force of popular will, not arms. When it comes to “people power,” Arabs have given the concept several new twists.
Because so many people have believed in themselves -- protecting one another simply by standing together -- they have been able to reject not only violence, but any further belief in the lies of their despotic rulers. The stark absence of Israel as a major flashpoint of protest in these last weeks, to take a telling example, stands in marked contrast to the way in which the challenged or overthrown despots of various Middle Eastern lands habitually exploited both anti-semitism (sponsoring, for instance, the dissemination through Arab newsstands of the long-discredited Protocols of the Elders of Zion) and the plight of Palestinians (feigning sympathy for the dispossessed victims of Israeli occupation while doing nothing to help them, precisely because Arab dictators needed suffering Palestinians to distract from the suffering of their own citizens).
Not surprisingly, if always sadly, the Arab revolution has brought incidents of Jew-baiting in its wake -- in late February in Tunis, for example, by a mob outside the city’s main synagogue. That display was, however, quickly denounced and repudiated by the leadership of the Free Tunisia movement. When a group of Cairo thugs assaulted CBS correspondent Lara Logan, they reportedly hurled the word “Jew” at her as an epithet. So yes, such incidents happened, but what makes them remarkable is their rarity on such a sprawling landscape.
To be sure, Arabs broadly identify with the humiliated Palestinians, readily identify Israel as an enemy, and resent the American alliance with Israel, but something different is unfolding now. When the United States vetoed the U.N. Security Council resolution condemning Israeli settlements in the very thick of February’s revolutionary protests, to flag one signal, the issue was largely ignored by Arab protesters. In Palestinian areas of the West Bank and Gaza, the spirit of Arab revolt showed itself mainly in a youth-driven and resolutely non-violent movement to overcome the intra-Palestinian divisions between Fatah and Hamas. Again and again, that is, the Arab Muslim population has refused to behave as Americans have been conditioned to expect.
The Mainstreaming of Anti-Muslim Prejudice
Conditioned by whom? Prejudice against Arabs generally and Islam in particular is an old, old story. A few months ago, the widespread nature of the knee-jerk suspicion that all Muslims are potentially violent was confirmed by National Public Radio commentator Juan Williams, who said, “I get worried. I get nervous” around those “in Muslim garb,” those who identify themselves “first and foremost as Muslims.”
Williams was fired by NPR, but the commentariat rallied to him for simply speaking a universal truth, one which, as Williams himself acknowledged, was to be regretted: Muslims are scary. When NPR then effectively reversed itself by forcing the resignation of the executive who had fired him, anti-Muslim bigotry was resoundingly vindicated in America, no matter the intentions of the various players.
Scary, indeed -- but no surprise. Such prejudice had been woven into every fiber of American foreign and military policy across the previous decade, a period when the overheated watchword was “Islamofascism.” In 2002, scholar Bernard Lewis’s book What Went Wrong? draped a cloak of intellectual respectability around anti-Muslim contempt. It seemed not to have occurred to Lewis that, if such an insulting question in a book title deserves an answer at all, in the Arab context it should be: “we” did -- with that “we” defined as Western civilization.
Whether the historical marker is 1099 for Crusader mayhem; 1417 for the Portuguese capture of Ceuta, the first permanent European outpost in North Africa; 1492 for the expulsion from Spain of Muslims (along with Jews); 1798 for Napoleon’s arrival as a would-be conqueror in Cairo; 1869 for the opening of the Suez Canal by the French Empress Eugenie; 1917 for the British conquest of Palestine, which would start a British-spawned contest between Jews and Arabs; or the 1930s, when vast oil reserves were discovered in the Arabian peninsula --- all such Western antecedents for trouble in Arab lands are routinely ignored or downplayed in our world in favor of a preoccupation with a religion deemed to be irrational, anti-modern, and inherently hostile to democracy.
How deep-seated is such a prejudice? European Christians made expert pronouncements about the built-in violence of Islam almost from the start, although the seventh century Qur’an was not translated into Latin until the twelfth century. When a relatively objective European account of Islam’s origins and meaning finally appeared in the eighteenth century, it was quickly added to the Roman Catholic Index of forbidden books. Western culture is still at the mercy of such self-elevating ignorance. That’s readily apparent in the fact that a fourteenth century slander against Islam -- that it was only “spread by the sword” -- was reiterated in 2006 (on the fifth anniversary of 9/11) by Pope Benedict XVI. He did apologize, but by then the Muslim-haters had been encouraged.
Western contempt for Islam is related to a post-Enlightenment distrust of all religion. In modern historiography, for instance, the brutal violence that killed millions during paroxysms of conflict across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is remembered as the “religious wars,” even though religion was only part of a history that included the birth of nations and nationalism, as well as of industrial capitalism, and the opening of the “age of exploration,” also known as the age of colonial exploitation.
“Secular” sources of violence have always been played down in favor of sacred causes, whether the Reformation, Puritan fanaticism, or Catholic anti-modernism. “Enlightened” nation-states were all-too-ready to smugly denounce primitive and irrational religious violence as a way of asserting that their own expressly non-religious campaigns against rival states and aboriginal peoples were necessary and therefore just. In this tale, secular violence is as rational as religious violence is irrational. That schema holds to this day and is operative in Iraq and Afghanistan, where the United States and its NATO allies pursue dogmatically ideological and oil-driven wars that are nonetheless virtuous simply by not being “religious.”
No fatwas for us. Never mind that these wars were declared to be “against evil,” with God “not neutral,” as George W. Bush blithely put it. And never mind that U.S. forces (both the military and the private contractors) are strongly influenced by a certain kind of fervent Christian evangelicalism that defines the American enemy as the “infidel” -- the Muslim monster unleashed. In any case, ask the families of the countless dead of America’s wars if ancient rites of human sacrifice are not being re-enacted in them? The drone airplane and its Hellfire missile are weapons out of the Book of the Apocalypse.
The Revolution of Hope
The new Arab revolution, with its Muslim underpinnings, is an occasion of great hope. At the very least, “we” in the West must reckon with this overturning of the premises of our prejudice.
Yes, dangers remain, as Arab regimes resist and revolutionaries prepare to erect new political structures. Fanatics wait in the wings for the democrats to falter, while violence, even undertaken in self-defense, can open onto vistas of vengeance and cyclic retribution. Old hatreds can reignite, and the never-vanquished forces of white supremacist colonial dominance can reemerge. But that one of the world’s great religions is essential to what is unfolding across North Africa and the Middle East offers the promise that this momentous change can lead, despite the dangers, to humane new structures of justice and mercy, which remain pillars of the Islamic faith. For us, in our world, this means we, too, will have been purged of something malicious -- an ancient hatred of Muslims and Arabs that now lies exposed for what it always was.
James Carroll, bestselling author of Constantine’s Sword, is a columnist for the Boston Globe and a Distinguished Scholar-in-Residence at Suffolk University in Boston. His newest book, Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City Ignited Our Modern World (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), has just been published. To listen to Timothy MacBain’s latest TomCast audio interview in which Carroll discusses just how the Arab revolutions, the last acts of the post-colonial drama, punctured American myths, click here, or download it to your iPod here.
Copyright 2011 James Carroll
Reference:
https://mail.google.com/mail/h/qx38txf1q5n9/?v=c&th=12ea3bacc932e8be
Tuesday, March 8, 2011
Siri Fikrah Kita : Tarbiyah wa Maqaasiduhaa
Siri Fikrah Kita : Tarbiah Islamiah dan Tujuannya
by kram Terengganu on Monday, March 7, 2011 at 1:27pm.
Dengan Nama Allah Yang Maha Pemurah Lagi Maha Mengasihani
Menyebut tentang tarbiah di kalangan aktivis dakwah dan gerakan Islam seringkali dikaitkan dengan Ikhwanul Muslimun (IM) atau menyertakan bersama muassis gerakan ini iaitu Hasan al-Banna, pendiri jamaah Ikhwan. Ikhwan telah diakui menjadi sumber inspirasi arus kebangkitan Islam abad ke-20 sejak tertubuhnya pada tahun 1928 oleh sang pendiri yang berusia 22 tahun ketika itu. IM menyakini bahawa untuk mengembalikan kembali kepimpinan umat Islam sebagai peneraju dan guru dunia melalui gagasan khilafah islamiah menerusi kesyumulan islam (syumuliyatul islam) iaitu Islam sebagai satu sistem ajaran yang lengkap serta menyentuh seluruh segi kehidupan.
Islam adalah..."negara dan tanahair, pemerintahan dan umat, akhlak dan kekuatan, kasih sayang dan keadilan, peradaban dan undang-undang, ilmu dan kehakiman, sebagaimana ia adalah aqidah yang lurus dan ibadah yang benar." (Risalah al-Ta'alim, Hasan al-Banna)
Seawal sejarah IM, as-Syahid Imam Hasan al-Banna telah menyerukan secara lantang bahawa peringkat atau tahapan aktiviti dalam IM berlangsung dalam fasa ta'rif (pengenalan), takwin (pembentukan) serta tanfizh (pelaksanaan) dan setiap fasa tersebut akan hanya tegak dengan tarbiah. Ikhwan menjadikan tarbiah islamiah sebagai teras kepada kebangunan semula gagasan kebangkitan semula ummah ini.
Tarbiah islamiah menurut catatan IM ialah "cara ideal dalam berinteraksi dengan fitrah manusia, baik secara langsung melalui kata-kata mahupun secara tidak langsung dalam bentuk keteladanan, sesuai dengan sistem dan wasilah khusus yang diyakini, untuk memproses perubahan dalam diri manusia menuju keadaan yang lebih baik."
Umumnya ia bermakna proses mempersiapkan seseorang dengan persiapan yang menyentuh seluruh aspek kehidupannya meliputi rohani, jasmani dan akal fikiran. Proses menyiapkan manusia yang salih (baik pada peribadi) dan muslih (memperbaiki orang lain) dalam suatu keseimbangan potensi, tujuan, ucapan dan tindakannya secara keseluruhan.
Firman Allah SWT di dalam Surah al-Baqarah:143 sebagaimana yang disyarah oleh Allamah Maududi rh. di dalam ceramahSyahaadatul-Haq beliau :
"Dan demikianlah (pula) Kami jadikan kamu (umat Islam) umat yang yang adil dan pilihan (wasothan)."
Tujuan atau sasaran (ahdaf) tarbiah islamiah secara umumnya adalah untuk menciptakan satu keadaan atau kondisi yang kondusif bagi manusia untuk dapat hidup di dunia secara lurus dan baik, serta hidup di akhirat dengan naungan redha Allah dan pahala Allah SWT. Ianya dapat dihuraikan di dalam lima perkara iaitu :
Pertama, ibadah kepada Allah semata-mata sesuai dengan syariat-Nya (rujuk adz-Dzariat:56) - tujuan pertama dan terpenting tarbiah islamiah. Ibadah menuntut wujudnya banyak unsur daripada seorang muslim iaitu antara lain unsur iman, unsur islam, unsur ihsan, unsur keadilan, unsur amar makruf nahi mungkar dan unsur jihad di di jalan Allah untuk menjadikan kalimah Allah sebagai yang tertinggi.
Kedua, tegaknya khilafah Allah di muka bumi (rujuk al-Baqarah:30; Hud:61) - ini menuntut aktiviti pemakmuran bumi dan pemanfaatan segala sesuatu yang Allah berikan untuk umat manusia. Oleh itu, berinteraksi dengan seluruh alam yang terbentang ini - dengan menggunakan potensi ilmu dan seluruh produk penemuan ilmiah yang baik - untuk mengambil manfaat sebesar-besarnya adalah kewajipan syarak dan merupakan tujuan pokok dari berbagai tujuan tarbiah islamiah bagi manusia.
Ketiga, saling mengenal sesama manusia (rujuk al-Hujurat:13) - penciptaan manusia yang beragam jenis, warna kulit, bahasa, suku, lelaki dan wanita adalah untuk saling berkenalan (li ta'aarafu), berkasih sayang dan saling membantu di bawah naungan persaudaraan. Setelah beriman kepada Allah SWT pula, hendaklah hidup di bawah satu aqidah yang benar dengan kehidupan yang penuh kasih sayang, saling menolong dan menasihati dalam kesabaran dan memperatkan hubungan itu agar semakin sempurna.
Keempat, kepimpinan dunia (rujuk an-Nur:55) - inilah janji Allah kepada orang-orang yang beriman dan beramal salih dengan 3 janji iaitu (1) mengangkat kekhalifahan mereka di bumi ini dan menjadikan untuk mereka kekuasaan yang dapat mengambil manfaat sebesar-besarnya seluruh nikmat bagi kehidupan dan kematian mereka. (2) pengukuhan kedudukan (tamkeen li deenillah) di bumi dengan Islam dan sistemnya. (3) menggantikan keadaaan umat dari rasa takut kepada rasa aman (di bawah keadilan Islam). Selama kaum muslimin berada jauh dari penguasaan dunia bermakna mereka jauh dari hakikat iman dan amal salih. Tarbiah islamiah berupaya - dengan segenap potensi yang dimiliki - untuk mengeluarkan umat manusia dari dosa dan kemaksiatan.
Kelima, menghukum dengan syariat. (rujuk al-Jatsiah:18; al-Maidah:49) - inilah tujuan inti dari empat tujuan di atas kerana semua tujuan di atas memang untuk menghalakan kepada tegaknya syariat Allah tanpa tawar menawar, terpisah-pisah apalagi bertolak ansur kepada sistem lain buatan manusia.
Inilah tujuan tarbiah islamiah secara global dan itulah juga tujuan Islam yang sebenarnya, baik aqidah, syariah, akhlak, dakwah, lembaga, sistem, perilaku mahupun jihadnya sekaligus dalam rangka menjadikan kalimah Allah sebagai yang tertinggi (kalimatullahi hiyal-'ulya). Ini semua hanya akan wujud dengan tarbiah ruhani, akal fikiran, fizikal, akhlak dan perilaku.
Tarbiah islamiah pula memiliki bidang cakupan yang bermula dengan membangun individu muslim, rumahtangga muslim, masyarakat muslim, umat muslimah dan negara Islam dengan sistem dan undang-undang yang harus ditegakkan di dalamnya.
Tarbiah di dalam manhaj IM memiliki kepentingannya tersendiri yang tiada taranya. Bagi IM, langkah yang paling efektif untuk proses pengislahan adalah pembinaan keperibadian muslim yang sesuai dengan nilai-nilai Islam dan sistemnya untuk menghantarkannya kepada suatu tujuan iaitu masyarakat muslim, umat muslimah, kemudian negara Islam yang menegakkan syariat Allah.
Tarbiah islamiah tidak sepi daripada memahami dan mendepani tuntutan-tuntutan realiti atau konteks semasa umat yang dinamik dalam kehidupan manusia. Ini melibatkan arus pemikiran dan peradaban yang melanda umat manusia, arus sistem nilai sosial dan politik, arus politik dan ekonomi, sarana-sarana kehidupan dan pola-polanya serta tradisi-tradisi kehidupan.
(disaring daripada kitab "Wasailut Tarbiah 'inda Ikhwanil Muslimin (Dirasah Tahliliyah Tarikhiyah)" oleh Prof Dr Ali Abdul Halim Mahmud, 1990)
Fakhrul Anuar Zulkawi (FAZ)
Pen. Setiausaha IKRAM Terengganu
Reference:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/ikram-terengganu/siri-fikrah-kita-tarbiah-islamiah-dan-tujuannya/191013774272169
by kram Terengganu on Monday, March 7, 2011 at 1:27pm.
Dengan Nama Allah Yang Maha Pemurah Lagi Maha Mengasihani
Menyebut tentang tarbiah di kalangan aktivis dakwah dan gerakan Islam seringkali dikaitkan dengan Ikhwanul Muslimun (IM) atau menyertakan bersama muassis gerakan ini iaitu Hasan al-Banna, pendiri jamaah Ikhwan. Ikhwan telah diakui menjadi sumber inspirasi arus kebangkitan Islam abad ke-20 sejak tertubuhnya pada tahun 1928 oleh sang pendiri yang berusia 22 tahun ketika itu. IM menyakini bahawa untuk mengembalikan kembali kepimpinan umat Islam sebagai peneraju dan guru dunia melalui gagasan khilafah islamiah menerusi kesyumulan islam (syumuliyatul islam) iaitu Islam sebagai satu sistem ajaran yang lengkap serta menyentuh seluruh segi kehidupan.
Islam adalah..."negara dan tanahair, pemerintahan dan umat, akhlak dan kekuatan, kasih sayang dan keadilan, peradaban dan undang-undang, ilmu dan kehakiman, sebagaimana ia adalah aqidah yang lurus dan ibadah yang benar." (Risalah al-Ta'alim, Hasan al-Banna)
Seawal sejarah IM, as-Syahid Imam Hasan al-Banna telah menyerukan secara lantang bahawa peringkat atau tahapan aktiviti dalam IM berlangsung dalam fasa ta'rif (pengenalan), takwin (pembentukan) serta tanfizh (pelaksanaan) dan setiap fasa tersebut akan hanya tegak dengan tarbiah. Ikhwan menjadikan tarbiah islamiah sebagai teras kepada kebangunan semula gagasan kebangkitan semula ummah ini.
Tarbiah islamiah menurut catatan IM ialah "cara ideal dalam berinteraksi dengan fitrah manusia, baik secara langsung melalui kata-kata mahupun secara tidak langsung dalam bentuk keteladanan, sesuai dengan sistem dan wasilah khusus yang diyakini, untuk memproses perubahan dalam diri manusia menuju keadaan yang lebih baik."
Umumnya ia bermakna proses mempersiapkan seseorang dengan persiapan yang menyentuh seluruh aspek kehidupannya meliputi rohani, jasmani dan akal fikiran. Proses menyiapkan manusia yang salih (baik pada peribadi) dan muslih (memperbaiki orang lain) dalam suatu keseimbangan potensi, tujuan, ucapan dan tindakannya secara keseluruhan.
Firman Allah SWT di dalam Surah al-Baqarah:143 sebagaimana yang disyarah oleh Allamah Maududi rh. di dalam ceramahSyahaadatul-Haq beliau :
"Dan demikianlah (pula) Kami jadikan kamu (umat Islam) umat yang yang adil dan pilihan (wasothan)."
Tujuan atau sasaran (ahdaf) tarbiah islamiah secara umumnya adalah untuk menciptakan satu keadaan atau kondisi yang kondusif bagi manusia untuk dapat hidup di dunia secara lurus dan baik, serta hidup di akhirat dengan naungan redha Allah dan pahala Allah SWT. Ianya dapat dihuraikan di dalam lima perkara iaitu :
Pertama, ibadah kepada Allah semata-mata sesuai dengan syariat-Nya (rujuk adz-Dzariat:56) - tujuan pertama dan terpenting tarbiah islamiah. Ibadah menuntut wujudnya banyak unsur daripada seorang muslim iaitu antara lain unsur iman, unsur islam, unsur ihsan, unsur keadilan, unsur amar makruf nahi mungkar dan unsur jihad di di jalan Allah untuk menjadikan kalimah Allah sebagai yang tertinggi.
Kedua, tegaknya khilafah Allah di muka bumi (rujuk al-Baqarah:30; Hud:61) - ini menuntut aktiviti pemakmuran bumi dan pemanfaatan segala sesuatu yang Allah berikan untuk umat manusia. Oleh itu, berinteraksi dengan seluruh alam yang terbentang ini - dengan menggunakan potensi ilmu dan seluruh produk penemuan ilmiah yang baik - untuk mengambil manfaat sebesar-besarnya adalah kewajipan syarak dan merupakan tujuan pokok dari berbagai tujuan tarbiah islamiah bagi manusia.
Ketiga, saling mengenal sesama manusia (rujuk al-Hujurat:13) - penciptaan manusia yang beragam jenis, warna kulit, bahasa, suku, lelaki dan wanita adalah untuk saling berkenalan (li ta'aarafu), berkasih sayang dan saling membantu di bawah naungan persaudaraan. Setelah beriman kepada Allah SWT pula, hendaklah hidup di bawah satu aqidah yang benar dengan kehidupan yang penuh kasih sayang, saling menolong dan menasihati dalam kesabaran dan memperatkan hubungan itu agar semakin sempurna.
Keempat, kepimpinan dunia (rujuk an-Nur:55) - inilah janji Allah kepada orang-orang yang beriman dan beramal salih dengan 3 janji iaitu (1) mengangkat kekhalifahan mereka di bumi ini dan menjadikan untuk mereka kekuasaan yang dapat mengambil manfaat sebesar-besarnya seluruh nikmat bagi kehidupan dan kematian mereka. (2) pengukuhan kedudukan (tamkeen li deenillah) di bumi dengan Islam dan sistemnya. (3) menggantikan keadaaan umat dari rasa takut kepada rasa aman (di bawah keadilan Islam). Selama kaum muslimin berada jauh dari penguasaan dunia bermakna mereka jauh dari hakikat iman dan amal salih. Tarbiah islamiah berupaya - dengan segenap potensi yang dimiliki - untuk mengeluarkan umat manusia dari dosa dan kemaksiatan.
Kelima, menghukum dengan syariat. (rujuk al-Jatsiah:18; al-Maidah:49) - inilah tujuan inti dari empat tujuan di atas kerana semua tujuan di atas memang untuk menghalakan kepada tegaknya syariat Allah tanpa tawar menawar, terpisah-pisah apalagi bertolak ansur kepada sistem lain buatan manusia.
Inilah tujuan tarbiah islamiah secara global dan itulah juga tujuan Islam yang sebenarnya, baik aqidah, syariah, akhlak, dakwah, lembaga, sistem, perilaku mahupun jihadnya sekaligus dalam rangka menjadikan kalimah Allah sebagai yang tertinggi (kalimatullahi hiyal-'ulya). Ini semua hanya akan wujud dengan tarbiah ruhani, akal fikiran, fizikal, akhlak dan perilaku.
Tarbiah islamiah pula memiliki bidang cakupan yang bermula dengan membangun individu muslim, rumahtangga muslim, masyarakat muslim, umat muslimah dan negara Islam dengan sistem dan undang-undang yang harus ditegakkan di dalamnya.
Tarbiah di dalam manhaj IM memiliki kepentingannya tersendiri yang tiada taranya. Bagi IM, langkah yang paling efektif untuk proses pengislahan adalah pembinaan keperibadian muslim yang sesuai dengan nilai-nilai Islam dan sistemnya untuk menghantarkannya kepada suatu tujuan iaitu masyarakat muslim, umat muslimah, kemudian negara Islam yang menegakkan syariat Allah.
Tarbiah islamiah tidak sepi daripada memahami dan mendepani tuntutan-tuntutan realiti atau konteks semasa umat yang dinamik dalam kehidupan manusia. Ini melibatkan arus pemikiran dan peradaban yang melanda umat manusia, arus sistem nilai sosial dan politik, arus politik dan ekonomi, sarana-sarana kehidupan dan pola-polanya serta tradisi-tradisi kehidupan.
(disaring daripada kitab "Wasailut Tarbiah 'inda Ikhwanil Muslimin (Dirasah Tahliliyah Tarikhiyah)" oleh Prof Dr Ali Abdul Halim Mahmud, 1990)
Fakhrul Anuar Zulkawi (FAZ)
Pen. Setiausaha IKRAM Terengganu
Reference:
http://www.facebook.com/notes/ikram-terengganu/siri-fikrah-kita-tarbiah-islamiah-dan-tujuannya/191013774272169
Wednesday, March 2, 2011
Turkey Kuasa Baru Asia Barat - Dr Maszlee Malik
February 27, 2011
27 FEB — Di awal pertabalan Presiden Barack Obama sebagai Presiden Amerika Syarikat (AS), beliau menegaskan prinsip baru berhubung dasar luar negaranya. Jika Presiden George Bush sebelumnya telah menggadaikan prinsip demokrasi dan kebebasan dan menggantikannya dengan prinsip keselamatan dalam negara, Obama pula mengambil pendekatan yang agak berbeza. Penegasan beliau tentang berakhirnya hegemoni sebuah kuasa di dunia dan diganti dengan kepelbagaian sistem antarabangsa (multilateral international system) telah memberikan bayangan terhadap sikap AS dalam isu-isu antarabangsa di zaman pentadbirannya.
PM:Racip Tayep Ardogan
Kini, sewaktu berlangsungnya revolusi (dan ada yang menamakan sebagai kebangkitan) di negara-negara Arab, dasar luar Obama terserlah. Dasar luar presiden dari Parti Demokrat ini hampir menyerupai pendekatan Jimmy Carter yang telah membawa kepada kebangkitan Islam di seluruh dunia Islam di tahun 70’an. Kemuncaknya Revolusi Islam Iran pada tahun 1979. Persamaan dasar luar kedua-dua Presiden AS dari Parti Demokrat ini telah membawa kepada lanskap baru politik di Asia Barat, malah kepada dunia. Menariknya, kedua-dua presiden tersebut konsisten dengan pendirian dan juga ideologi mereka, berbanding pentadbiran presiden-presiden dari parti Republikan. Jikalaulah Bush atau mana-mana Presiden AS dari parti Republikan berkuasa pada hari ini, belum tentu Hosni Mubarak dan Ben Ali akan berada di mana beliau berada hari ini. Dasar Obama sekaligus memudahkan lagi teori domino berkaitan kebangkitan umat Arab dan kejatuhan rejim-rejim diktator di Asia Barat dan Afrika Utara untuk berlaku. Keadaan di Libya yang terang-terangan mencabuli hak asasi manusia dan nilai kemanusiaan pun tidak dapat mengundang AS untuk campur tangan seperti mana Presiden Bush bertindak ke atas Saddam Hussein di Iraq dan Taliban di Afghanistan.
Dasar luar Obama yang agak pasif berbanding pentadbiran Bush mengundang kemunculan kuasa diplomatik dan kuasa geo-politik baru di rantau berkenaan untuk muncul, iaitu Turki. Sebagai negara di tangga ke-16 dalam pencapaian ekonomi di peringkat dunia, dan juga negara ke enam kuasa ekonomi di peringkat Eropah, Turki mempunyai banyak lagi kelebihan lain untuk menjadi pengganti AS sebagai broker perdamaian dan juga kuasa pengimbang di rantau Asia Barat dan Utara Afrika. Kelebihan Turki sebagai anggota NATO, anggota aktif OIC, ahli G20, dan juga anggota negara-negara D8 menjadikan negara tersebut lebih daripada layak untuk mengisi kekosongan yang ditinggalkan oleh AS. Para penganalisis politik antarabangsa kebanyakannya melihat dasar luar Turki pada hari inilah yang menjadi antara faktor lain kepada kemunculan Turki sebagai kuasa baru. Lebih unik hubungan Turki-Amerika di dalam isu-isu di Asia Barat dan Afrika Utara boleh diungkapkan sebagai hubungan frenemy (friend-enemy) seperti yang diungkapkan di dalam buku Charles Kuplan, How Enemies Become Friends. Sungguhpun Obama menyifatkan keunikan hubungan AS-Turki dalam fasa baru ini sebagai model partnership, hakikatnya peranan yang dimainkan Turki telah menjadikan mereka rakan yang lebih dipercayai oleh negara-negara jirannya berbanding AS yang lebih dilihat sebagai ‘Big Brother’.
Kemampuan Turki untuk menjadi sebuah kuasa geo-politik di rantau tersebut boleh dilihat kepada kejayaannya di dalam bidang ekonomi serantau. Penstrukturan semula sistem politik dan ekonomi Turki semenjak parti AK berkuasa menurut formula Dana Kewangan Antarabangsa (IMF) telah berjaya meningkatkan Keluaran Negara Kasar (KNK) mereka (dari -9.5 peratus pada 2001, kepada 9.9 peratus pada 2004, dan konsisten pada tahap 7.8 peratus untuk 2010) dan berjaya mengundang FDI. Turki juga dikategorikan Bank Dunia sebagai negara maju, dan majalah The Economist menyebut sebagai ‘kuasa ekonomi yang sedang muncul’. Komitmen Turki terhadap ekonomi pasaran juga dapat dilihat daripada dasar luar yang berjaya meningkatkan hubungan dagang dengan negara-negara jiran. Begitu juga keterlibatan aktif mereka di dalam FTA yang melibatkan EU-Mediteranean, peranan utama dalam D8 dan juga aktiviti dagang serta pelaburan mereka dengan negara-negara di Asia Barat dan Afrika Utara.
Pada waktu yang sama, melalui dasar luar Turki yang baru, negara tersebut diterima oleh pihak-pihak bertelagah di rantau Asia Barat dan Mediteranean sebagai orang tengah (mediator). Mereka juga berjaya menguruskan isu dalaman yang sensitif dengan melibatkan pihak ketiga secara damai, seperti isu Armenia, Cyprus dan juga isu puak pemisah Kurdi. Turki di fasa baru juga berjaya mengikat jiran-jirannya dengan peningkatan hubungan dagang, seperti membuka sempadannya untuk Syria dan negara-negara strategik yang lain demi mengurangkan konflik yang telah lama membelenggu. Turki juga bersikap pro-aktif dengan mengadakan pertukaran dagang nuklear (uranium)-petrol dengan Iran (melalui Tehran Research Reactor) bersama dengan Brazil di waktu negara-negara lain di rantau tersebut melihat Iran sebagai ancaman utama. Turki juga berani untuk mengiktiraf aktor bukan negara dalam suasana konflik seperti Hamas dan Hezbollah, tetapi pada waktu yang sama tetap menjaga hubungan diplomasi dan dagang dengan rejim Zionis Israel. Sungguhpun demikian, Turki tetap konsisten dengan isu-isu berhubung hak asasi dan demokrasi. Ini dapat dilihat jelas dalam isu Gaza 2008, isu flotilla, dan juga yang terkini isu berhubung dengan kebangkitan rakyat Arab menentang rejim diktator. Turki menyatakan sokongan kepada rakyat yang bangkit dan mengecam pihak diktator yang menindas rakyat mereka, lebih cepat sebelum AS mengeluarkan kenyataan rasmi. Walaupun Turki mempunyai kepentingan dagang, contohnya seperti di Libya (dengan pelaburan Turki di sana yang mencapai USD 15 bilion), namun mereka tetap konsisten mengecam rejim Muammar Gadaffi yang membunuh rakyat Libya yang tidak berdosa. — Mingguan Malaysia
* Dr. Maszlee Malik ialah pensyarah jurusan Usul Fiqh, Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia (UIAM).
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
Reference:
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/breakingviews/article/turki-kuasa-baru-di-asia-barat-dr-maszlee-malik/
27 FEB — Di awal pertabalan Presiden Barack Obama sebagai Presiden Amerika Syarikat (AS), beliau menegaskan prinsip baru berhubung dasar luar negaranya. Jika Presiden George Bush sebelumnya telah menggadaikan prinsip demokrasi dan kebebasan dan menggantikannya dengan prinsip keselamatan dalam negara, Obama pula mengambil pendekatan yang agak berbeza. Penegasan beliau tentang berakhirnya hegemoni sebuah kuasa di dunia dan diganti dengan kepelbagaian sistem antarabangsa (multilateral international system) telah memberikan bayangan terhadap sikap AS dalam isu-isu antarabangsa di zaman pentadbirannya.
PM:Racip Tayep Ardogan Kini, sewaktu berlangsungnya revolusi (dan ada yang menamakan sebagai kebangkitan) di negara-negara Arab, dasar luar Obama terserlah. Dasar luar presiden dari Parti Demokrat ini hampir menyerupai pendekatan Jimmy Carter yang telah membawa kepada kebangkitan Islam di seluruh dunia Islam di tahun 70’an. Kemuncaknya Revolusi Islam Iran pada tahun 1979. Persamaan dasar luar kedua-dua Presiden AS dari Parti Demokrat ini telah membawa kepada lanskap baru politik di Asia Barat, malah kepada dunia. Menariknya, kedua-dua presiden tersebut konsisten dengan pendirian dan juga ideologi mereka, berbanding pentadbiran presiden-presiden dari parti Republikan. Jikalaulah Bush atau mana-mana Presiden AS dari parti Republikan berkuasa pada hari ini, belum tentu Hosni Mubarak dan Ben Ali akan berada di mana beliau berada hari ini. Dasar Obama sekaligus memudahkan lagi teori domino berkaitan kebangkitan umat Arab dan kejatuhan rejim-rejim diktator di Asia Barat dan Afrika Utara untuk berlaku. Keadaan di Libya yang terang-terangan mencabuli hak asasi manusia dan nilai kemanusiaan pun tidak dapat mengundang AS untuk campur tangan seperti mana Presiden Bush bertindak ke atas Saddam Hussein di Iraq dan Taliban di Afghanistan.
Dasar luar Obama yang agak pasif berbanding pentadbiran Bush mengundang kemunculan kuasa diplomatik dan kuasa geo-politik baru di rantau berkenaan untuk muncul, iaitu Turki. Sebagai negara di tangga ke-16 dalam pencapaian ekonomi di peringkat dunia, dan juga negara ke enam kuasa ekonomi di peringkat Eropah, Turki mempunyai banyak lagi kelebihan lain untuk menjadi pengganti AS sebagai broker perdamaian dan juga kuasa pengimbang di rantau Asia Barat dan Utara Afrika. Kelebihan Turki sebagai anggota NATO, anggota aktif OIC, ahli G20, dan juga anggota negara-negara D8 menjadikan negara tersebut lebih daripada layak untuk mengisi kekosongan yang ditinggalkan oleh AS. Para penganalisis politik antarabangsa kebanyakannya melihat dasar luar Turki pada hari inilah yang menjadi antara faktor lain kepada kemunculan Turki sebagai kuasa baru. Lebih unik hubungan Turki-Amerika di dalam isu-isu di Asia Barat dan Afrika Utara boleh diungkapkan sebagai hubungan frenemy (friend-enemy) seperti yang diungkapkan di dalam buku Charles Kuplan, How Enemies Become Friends. Sungguhpun Obama menyifatkan keunikan hubungan AS-Turki dalam fasa baru ini sebagai model partnership, hakikatnya peranan yang dimainkan Turki telah menjadikan mereka rakan yang lebih dipercayai oleh negara-negara jirannya berbanding AS yang lebih dilihat sebagai ‘Big Brother’.
Kemampuan Turki untuk menjadi sebuah kuasa geo-politik di rantau tersebut boleh dilihat kepada kejayaannya di dalam bidang ekonomi serantau. Penstrukturan semula sistem politik dan ekonomi Turki semenjak parti AK berkuasa menurut formula Dana Kewangan Antarabangsa (IMF) telah berjaya meningkatkan Keluaran Negara Kasar (KNK) mereka (dari -9.5 peratus pada 2001, kepada 9.9 peratus pada 2004, dan konsisten pada tahap 7.8 peratus untuk 2010) dan berjaya mengundang FDI. Turki juga dikategorikan Bank Dunia sebagai negara maju, dan majalah The Economist menyebut sebagai ‘kuasa ekonomi yang sedang muncul’. Komitmen Turki terhadap ekonomi pasaran juga dapat dilihat daripada dasar luar yang berjaya meningkatkan hubungan dagang dengan negara-negara jiran. Begitu juga keterlibatan aktif mereka di dalam FTA yang melibatkan EU-Mediteranean, peranan utama dalam D8 dan juga aktiviti dagang serta pelaburan mereka dengan negara-negara di Asia Barat dan Afrika Utara.
Pada waktu yang sama, melalui dasar luar Turki yang baru, negara tersebut diterima oleh pihak-pihak bertelagah di rantau Asia Barat dan Mediteranean sebagai orang tengah (mediator). Mereka juga berjaya menguruskan isu dalaman yang sensitif dengan melibatkan pihak ketiga secara damai, seperti isu Armenia, Cyprus dan juga isu puak pemisah Kurdi. Turki di fasa baru juga berjaya mengikat jiran-jirannya dengan peningkatan hubungan dagang, seperti membuka sempadannya untuk Syria dan negara-negara strategik yang lain demi mengurangkan konflik yang telah lama membelenggu. Turki juga bersikap pro-aktif dengan mengadakan pertukaran dagang nuklear (uranium)-petrol dengan Iran (melalui Tehran Research Reactor) bersama dengan Brazil di waktu negara-negara lain di rantau tersebut melihat Iran sebagai ancaman utama. Turki juga berani untuk mengiktiraf aktor bukan negara dalam suasana konflik seperti Hamas dan Hezbollah, tetapi pada waktu yang sama tetap menjaga hubungan diplomasi dan dagang dengan rejim Zionis Israel. Sungguhpun demikian, Turki tetap konsisten dengan isu-isu berhubung hak asasi dan demokrasi. Ini dapat dilihat jelas dalam isu Gaza 2008, isu flotilla, dan juga yang terkini isu berhubung dengan kebangkitan rakyat Arab menentang rejim diktator. Turki menyatakan sokongan kepada rakyat yang bangkit dan mengecam pihak diktator yang menindas rakyat mereka, lebih cepat sebelum AS mengeluarkan kenyataan rasmi. Walaupun Turki mempunyai kepentingan dagang, contohnya seperti di Libya (dengan pelaburan Turki di sana yang mencapai USD 15 bilion), namun mereka tetap konsisten mengecam rejim Muammar Gadaffi yang membunuh rakyat Libya yang tidak berdosa. — Mingguan Malaysia
* Dr. Maszlee Malik ialah pensyarah jurusan Usul Fiqh, Universiti Islam Antarabangsa Malaysia (UIAM).
* This is the personal opinion of the writer or publication. The Malaysian Insider does not endorse the view unless specified.
Reference:
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/breakingviews/article/turki-kuasa-baru-di-asia-barat-dr-maszlee-malik/
Tuesday, March 1, 2011
DR MUHAMMAD NUR MANUTY JAWAB NAJIB
TUDUHAN NAJIB TERHADAP QARDHAWI ADALAH KERJA JAHAT
PARTI KEADILAN RAKYAT amat terkejut dan dukacita dengan kenyatan Najib di Istanbul baru-baru ini yang membuat tuduhan melulu dan berbaur prejudis terhadap pertubuhan Ikhwanul Muslimin dan Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi. Kenyataan beliau itu jelas menunjukkan bahawa beliau amat tidak senang dengan penglibatan aktif pertubuhan itu dalam proses pendemokrasian yang sedang berlaku di beberapa buah negara Timur Tengah sekarang ini. Ia juga menyerlahkan keyakinan beliau bahawa pertubuhan itu memang sekian lama telah mengamalkan keganasan dan tidak layak melibatkan diri dalam sistem pendemokrasian selagi tidak merubah sikap „ganas‟ mereka.
Malah, tanpa segan silu beliau melafazkan kerisauan tidak tentu fasal sambil membuat menuduh melulu kepada Presiden Ulama Islam Sedunia sekarang ini iatu Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi. Bagi Najib, Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi dan dan para ulama lain seperti beliau telah mengakibatkan sebegitu banyak bumi Arab yang telah terlepas ke tangan para ektremis Islam.
Sesungguhnya, PKR amat memandang serius kenyataan Najib di atas. Ini menyerlahkan sikap sebenar beliau mengenai agama Islam dan pertubuhan-pertubuhan Islam lain yang bersifat sederhana sepertinya. Pertubuhan seperti inilah yang telah banyak melahirkan para ulama dan pendakwah yang telah banyak menabur jasa memperkukuhkan masyarakat Islam dan membantu pembangunan umat di seluruh dunia.
DS Najib sebenarnya keliru mengenai hakikat Islam, sejarah perjuangan Ikhwanul Muslimin yang tepat dan siapakah sebenarnya Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi. PKR bimbang kekeliruan ini adalah hasil dari maklumat salah yang diterima dari kumpulan penasihat antarabangsa di Pejabat Perdana Menteri sekarang ini.
PKR ingin menegaskan bahawa agama Islam yang sebenar memang menolak keganasan. Sejarah membuktikan bahawa inilah yang telah menjadi prinsip perjuangan Ikhwanul Muslimin sejak bermula ia ditubuhkan. Kesemua pemimpin utama pertubuhan ini - Hassan al Banna, Hassan Hudhaibi, Omar Tilmisani, Mustafa Mashur, Mahdi Akib, dan sekarang ini Muhammad Bada‟I – jelas menolak keganasan.
Malah, prinsip ini tetap konsisten meskipun menerima pelbagai tekanan dan penindasan dari para pemerintah diktator dan zalim di negara mereka. PKR yakin, sikap inilah yang telah menjadi faktor utama kejayaan rakyat Mesir menjatuhkan rejim pemerintah diktator Husni Mubarrak tidak menggunakan keganasan.
Sesungguhnya, salah seorang tokoh utama yang mewarnai sikap kesederhaan Ikhwnul Muslimin adalah Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi sendiri. Beliau telah menghasilkan pelbagai karya besar yang jelas menolak keganasan dan mengamalkan kesederhanaan. Antara karya utama beliau adalah “Islam: Antara Penentang dan Ekstremis‟ dan “Fiqhul Jihad” yang khusus menolak kegananasan dan menyanjung kedamaian. Lebih jauh, Yusuf Qardawi adalah salah seorang tokoh utama pendokong dialog peradaban dunia.
Seharusnya, kenyataan-kenyataan seperti di atas tidak keluar dari seorang Perdana Menteri Malaysia. Dengan ini PKR menuntut supaya Najib perlu menarik balik kenyataannya dan memohon maaf secara terbuka.
Dr Muhammad Nur Manuty
Ketua Penerangan PKR
Reference:
http://tukartiub.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B08%3A00&max-results=50
PARTI KEADILAN RAKYAT amat terkejut dan dukacita dengan kenyatan Najib di Istanbul baru-baru ini yang membuat tuduhan melulu dan berbaur prejudis terhadap pertubuhan Ikhwanul Muslimin dan Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi. Kenyataan beliau itu jelas menunjukkan bahawa beliau amat tidak senang dengan penglibatan aktif pertubuhan itu dalam proses pendemokrasian yang sedang berlaku di beberapa buah negara Timur Tengah sekarang ini. Ia juga menyerlahkan keyakinan beliau bahawa pertubuhan itu memang sekian lama telah mengamalkan keganasan dan tidak layak melibatkan diri dalam sistem pendemokrasian selagi tidak merubah sikap „ganas‟ mereka.Malah, tanpa segan silu beliau melafazkan kerisauan tidak tentu fasal sambil membuat menuduh melulu kepada Presiden Ulama Islam Sedunia sekarang ini iatu Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi. Bagi Najib, Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi dan dan para ulama lain seperti beliau telah mengakibatkan sebegitu banyak bumi Arab yang telah terlepas ke tangan para ektremis Islam.
Sesungguhnya, PKR amat memandang serius kenyataan Najib di atas. Ini menyerlahkan sikap sebenar beliau mengenai agama Islam dan pertubuhan-pertubuhan Islam lain yang bersifat sederhana sepertinya. Pertubuhan seperti inilah yang telah banyak melahirkan para ulama dan pendakwah yang telah banyak menabur jasa memperkukuhkan masyarakat Islam dan membantu pembangunan umat di seluruh dunia.
DS Najib sebenarnya keliru mengenai hakikat Islam, sejarah perjuangan Ikhwanul Muslimin yang tepat dan siapakah sebenarnya Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi. PKR bimbang kekeliruan ini adalah hasil dari maklumat salah yang diterima dari kumpulan penasihat antarabangsa di Pejabat Perdana Menteri sekarang ini.
PKR ingin menegaskan bahawa agama Islam yang sebenar memang menolak keganasan. Sejarah membuktikan bahawa inilah yang telah menjadi prinsip perjuangan Ikhwanul Muslimin sejak bermula ia ditubuhkan. Kesemua pemimpin utama pertubuhan ini - Hassan al Banna, Hassan Hudhaibi, Omar Tilmisani, Mustafa Mashur, Mahdi Akib, dan sekarang ini Muhammad Bada‟I – jelas menolak keganasan.
Malah, prinsip ini tetap konsisten meskipun menerima pelbagai tekanan dan penindasan dari para pemerintah diktator dan zalim di negara mereka. PKR yakin, sikap inilah yang telah menjadi faktor utama kejayaan rakyat Mesir menjatuhkan rejim pemerintah diktator Husni Mubarrak tidak menggunakan keganasan.
Sesungguhnya, salah seorang tokoh utama yang mewarnai sikap kesederhaan Ikhwnul Muslimin adalah Sheikh Yusuf Qardawi sendiri. Beliau telah menghasilkan pelbagai karya besar yang jelas menolak keganasan dan mengamalkan kesederhanaan. Antara karya utama beliau adalah “Islam: Antara Penentang dan Ekstremis‟ dan “Fiqhul Jihad” yang khusus menolak kegananasan dan menyanjung kedamaian. Lebih jauh, Yusuf Qardawi adalah salah seorang tokoh utama pendokong dialog peradaban dunia.
Seharusnya, kenyataan-kenyataan seperti di atas tidak keluar dari seorang Perdana Menteri Malaysia. Dengan ini PKR menuntut supaya Najib perlu menarik balik kenyataannya dan memohon maaf secara terbuka.
Dr Muhammad Nur Manuty
Ketua Penerangan PKR
Reference:
http://tukartiub.blogspot.com/search?updated-min=2011-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B08%3A00&updated-max=2012-01-01T00%3A00%3A00%2B08%3A00&max-results=50
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