India rejects Imran Khan’s allegations of discrimination against Muslims

“Instead of concentrating on fighting Covid-19, they are making baseless allegations against their neighbours,” the MEA spokesperson said while responding to media queries on Khan’s remarks

The government has slammed Pakistani leadership after Imran Khan accused India of targeting Muslims during coronavirus pandemic. External Affairs Ministry Spokesperson Anurag Srivastava said the “bizarre comments” by the Pakistani leadership was an attempt to shift focus from the “abysmal handling” of that country’s internal affairs.

In a tweet, Khan accused the Indian government of deliberately targeting the Muslim community against the backdrop of the coronavirus crisis. “The deliberate & violent targeting of Muslims in India by Modi Govt to divert the backlash over its COVID19 policy, which has left thousands stranded & hungry, is akin to what Nazis did to Jews in Gerrmany. Yet more proof of the racist Hindutva Supremacist ideology of Modi Govt,” he wrote.

“Instead of concentrating on fighting Covid-19, they are making baseless allegations against their neighbours,” the MEA spokesperson said while responding to media queries on Khan’s remarks.”On the subject of minorities, they (Pakistani leadership) would be well advised to address the concerns of their own dwindling minority communities, which have been truly discriminated…

Three killed in police firing as CAB protests flare across the Northeast

Two Bangladeshi ministers cancel visit to India; uncertainty over Guwahati hosting Shinzo Abe in India-Japan summit on December 15

Several parts of the Northeast continued to burn for a second day on Thursday, as people defied curfew in Assam to protest the passage of the Citizenship (Amendment) Bill, leaving at least three dead in police firing in Guwahati.

The police opened fire to disperse protesters at Lalungaonn area in Guwahati. There were reports of people getting injured. Police also fired in the air in several other areas of the city, including the Guwahati-Shillong Road that turned into a war zone as protesters vandalised shops and buildings, burnt tyres, and clashed with security forces, PTI reported.

The All Assam Students Union (AASU) and peasants’ organisation KMSS called for a mega gathering at Latashil playground in the city, which was attended by hundreds of people. Several prominent personalities from the film and music industry, including icon Zubeen Garg, joined the gathering along with college students. “Prime Minister Narendra Modi and CM Sarbananda Sonowal have betrayed the people of Assam by ensuring passage of the Bill,” AASU advisor Samujjal Bhattacharya said.

Airlines cancelled their flights, with hundreds of passengers stranded at the Guwahati airport, and the railways suspended plying of trains beyond Guwahati. Schools will remain shut in Assam until December 22. Internet services remained suspended in the state, and were stopped in Meghalaya for 48 hours….Click Here

India abandoning its founding principles with Citizenship Amendment Bill

The purpose is to create, through law, a permanent threat to hang over every single Muslim head in India, writes Mihir S Sharma.

For 70 years, India has struggled to remain a secular state. In spite of its people being overwhelmingly Hindu, it chose not to distinguish between its citizens–or putative citizens–on the basis of their religion. That principle was what its founding fathers fought for, and what for decades led it to proudly distinguish itself from Pakistan, born at the same time as India but explicitly as a homeland for Muslims.

The Hindu nationalist party of which India’s ruling Bharatiya Janata Party played no part in the popular struggle for independence. It has no reason to quarrel with the “two-nation theory” that holds that the Muslims and Hindus of the subcontinent are always and forever two nations–the theory that Pakistan’s founders proposed and India’s founders rejected. Indeed, as far as the BJP is concerned, India is knit together by its Hindu heritage; India’s Muslim citizens are at best to be uneasily tolerated, and at worst to be seen as interlopers who belong in Pakistan.

This week, India’s parliament enshrined this worldview in law. It passed an amendment to India’s citizenship act that allowed a swift path to citizenship for refugees and migrants from certain neighboring countries–as long as they are Hindu, Sikh, Jain, Christian, Zoroastrian or Buddhist…

Read More: Citizenship Amendment Bill

China ‘hacked’ Indian, other Asian telcos, to spy on Uighur travellers

Beijing views Uighur community as security threat, but has repeatedly denied involvement in cyber attacks.

Hackers working for the Chinese government have broken into telecoms networks to track Uighur travellers in Central and Southeast Asia, two intelligence officials and two security consultants who investigated the attacks told Reuters.

The hacks are part of a wider cyber-espionage campaign targeting “high-value individuals” such as diplomats and foreign military personnel, the sources said. But China has also prioritised tracking the movements of ethnic Uighurs, a minority mostly Muslim group considered a security threat by Beijing.

China is facing growing international criticism over its treatment of Uighurs in Xinjiang. Members of the group have been subject to mass detentions in what China calls “vocational training” centres and widespread state surveillance. Beijing’s alleged cyberspace attacks against Uighurs show how it is able to pursue those policies beyond its physical borders.

As part of the campaign, different groups of Chinese hackers have compromised telecoms operators in countries including India, Turkey, Kazakhstan, Thailand and Malaysia, the four sources said…

The history of China’s Muslims and what’s behind their persecution

For about the next 300 years – during the Ming Dynasty – Muslims continued to be influential in government.

More than 1 million Uighur Muslims are being held in confinement focuses in the far western region of Xinjiang, China. Uighur pioneers and specialists situated outside China have cautioned that the circumstance could decline, and “mass homicide” couldn’t be precluded. With upwards of 10% of the Uighurs being held without wanting to, it is being known as the most noticeably awful and the most ignored compassionate emergency of the previous 10 years.

Islam in China

I have contemplated the long history of Muslims in China. The present China is home to an enormous Muslim populace – around 1.6% of the all out populace, or around 22 million individuals. They are not newcomers. Islam was acquainted with China by agents from the Middle East who made a trip to meet Emperor Gaozong of the Tang Dynasty in the seventh century.

Soon after this visit, the main mosque was worked in the southern exchanging port of Guangzhou for Arabs and Persians who went around the Indian Ocean and the South China Seas. Amid this time, Muslim vendors built up themselves in Chinese ports and in Silk Route exchanging posts. Be that as it may, they lived isolated from the Han Chinese larger part for five centuries.

This changed in the thirteenth century under the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, when Muslims came to China in extraordinary numbers to fill in as directors for the new rulers who were relatives of Ghengis Khan, author of the Mongol domain.

The Mongols had little experience running the organization of the Chinese realm and diverted to Muslims from significant Silk Road urban areas like Bukhara and Samarkand in Central Asia for assistance. They enrolled and coercively migrated countless Central Asians and Persians to enable them to administer their growing realm to the Yuan court. Amid this time, rich authorities kept on carrying their spouses with them, while lower-positioning authorities took nearby Chinese wive

This girl became the Instagram queen of Iraq. And then was shot to death

Ms. Fares’s likeness remains repeated in this internet hall of mirrors: swathed in a hotel robe, getting her hair done on Eid al-Fitr, playing video games, flaunting her intricate tattoos

BS|On Oct. 9, the Iraqi author Sinan Antoon tweeted, “Killing those who are other/different has become a ritual/hobby, practiced by individuals for fun, after having been institutionalized by the state, political parties and militias for years.” His tweet referred to reports that an Iraqi teenager had been butchered on a Baghdad street by an assailant who thought he looked gay. But Mr. Antoon could have been referring to any of the young Iraqis who have tried to break free of the rigid social codes governing both genders only to suffer vicious reprisals.

The most famous of these victims has been Tara Fares. When she was killed in September, Ms. Fares, who had 2.8 million followers on Instagram, was the sixth most popular person on Iraqi social media. At 22, she was a self-created celebrity who mixed sexy fashion shoots with video diaries in which she fired back at her conservative critics. Ms. Fares was shot dead in Baghdad’s Camp Sarah neighborhood while riding in her Porsche.

When I read about Ms. Fares’s murder, recognition hit me like a punch. Though I am 13 years her senior, when I was her age, I also worked as a scantily clad internet model. I also reinvented myself on social media, posting endless photos of myself, trying to build a following that would somehow translate into something more. Back then, qualified only for menial jobs, I also saw my looks as a fast-closing door to freedom and used them as best I could. But I am in the United States, and she was in Iraq. The stakes for Ms. Fares were far higher. Her