Egg crisis!

Eggs have disappeared off the shelves of all major super markets in Al Ain. I don't know the situation in other cities, and I'm too lazy to research. You can check out Gulf News.com or Khaleej Times.com.
A tray of large eggs used to cost 12 dhs. A few days ago, the price had doubled to 26 dhs. And I asked my father today, it's upto 29, and eggs are still hard to find!

I hope this scarcity is temporary. The reason is cases of bird flu in India and Saudi Arabia. Local production isn't enough to meet the demands.

On an unrelated note, my mother collected the vegetable waste in the evening so that my father could give it to the neighbours to feed their hens. I didn't know hens eat vegetables.

Today however, we went to Buraimi for some errands. For all you Al Ain-ers lost without eating their eggs, the cost of the tray across the border is only 18dhs, and they are available!

Go get 'em!

Join Us - January 11 to Shut Down Guantanamo!

Friday, January 11, 2008: The 6 year anniversary of the first prisoners being brought to Guantánamo.

Last year on January 11th, after 500 people processed from the Supreme Court to the Federal court, 150 people risked arrest on behalf of the men in Guantanamo, with 88 being arrested inside the Federal Court in DC. Many of those arrested withheld their identification and took the names of men at Guantanamo. It was a very powerful day, made possible by the contributions of many in the extended Catholic Worker family.

This year, we again are working with many groups on a demonstration in Washington, D.C. The day will begin with a press conference at the White House led by Amnesty International followed by a “prisoner procession” to the Supreme Court.

Come to DC or organize a vigil, demonstration or speaker in your own community!

Additionally, and as a recruiting mechanism for Jan. 11th, we are asking people to participate in a 24 hour fast for justice on December 5th, the day the Supreme Court will hear two cases related to Guantanamo prisoners. [Download flier]

• ENDORSE the Jan 11 Day of Action
• DOWNLOAD flyers, web buttons, adaptable press release, and more.
• FIND housing, food, transportation, legal and other logistical info.
• POST your event to our calendar.
• DONATE and support the Jan 11th mobilization




International Day to Shut Down Guantánamo

“If it were up to me I would close Guantánamo not tomorrow but thisafternoon…We don't need it and it is causing us far more damage than any good we get for it.”–Colin Powell, June 10, 2007, Former Secretary of State

“The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth…It was built on a lie…And it was organized around a fiction…It is time to get rid of it.” –New York Times Editorial “Gitmo: A National Disgrace,” June 6, 2007

Guantánamo is “a stain on the character of the United States.” –Archbishop Desmond Tutu

“Immediately close the detention center for at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and either release its inmates or bring them before an impartial tribunal.”–United Nations Human Rights Commission


• Find resources for action, order T-shirts and jumpsuits, and get complete and up-to- date details about the day’s events on our website: www.witnesstorture.org
  
  Prisoners of Guantánamo march to the Supreme Court:
  A provocative street theater performance involving people wearing orange jumpsuits and black hoods. We will march in an orderly, silent procession, hauntingly evoking the moral disgrace that is Guantánamo.
  • All participants are strongly encouraged to attend a final planning meeting and training on Thursday (January 10th), 4–6pm.
  
  After dinner, there will be a public program on Guantánamo from 7–9 pm. Location: St. Stephens and the Incarnation Church,
  1525 Newton Street NW, at 16th Street.
  
  For more information or if you have any questions, please email Matt Daloisio (Daloisio@earthlink.net) or Frida Berrigan at (Frida.berrigan@gmail.com).
  
  • Organize a vigil, speaker or demonstration in your own community if you cannot come to Washington, DC.
  
  In December 2005, a group of twenty four friends, following the nonviolent tradition of Dorothy Day and the Catholic Worker walked to Guantánamo to visit the prisoners, calling themselves
  “Witness Against Torture.” When they returned, they launched the “Campaign to Shut Down Guantánamo,” which consists of public education and community outreach, networking and resource
  sharing, and acts of nonviolent civil resistance to draw attention to the plight of prisoners in Guantánamo, and victims of the war on terrorism everywhere.
  
  Friday, January 11, 2008
  
  Marks Six Years of Torture, Detention and Abuse at Guantánamo
  
  10:00am– Gather at Lafayette Park for Orientation to Prisoner March (1600 Pennsylvania Ave NW)
  
  11:00 am – Amnesty International and National Religious Campaign Against Torture demonstration in Lafayette Park
  
  Noon – Guantánamo Prisoner Procession from the White House to the Supreme Court (2 plus miles)
  
  1:30 pm – Funeral Ceremony at the Supreme Court remembering the four men who died in custody at Guantánamo and mourning the death of Habeas Corpus

From: Of course, Cageprisoners.com

Tunnel Trade on Al Jazeera

Al Jazeera is real news! I wish I had more time to watch it.
Last week on People and Power, Al Jazeera broadcasted a video on tunnel trade between the Gaza-Egypt border.
One of the tunnel traders talked about how he found medicine in the bag he was transporting through the tunnel for heart disease. He said how can he be doing something wrong, when he sells the medicine for a third of the price?
These people really have no choice. May Allah (swt) help them.

This film was made by Laila El-Haddad and Saeed Taji Farouky. Please visit their site and leave your comments.

Read the article here- Tunnel Trade.

Part I

Part II

Gulf web trends

Poor website owners getting jail sentences for no fault of theirs just because someone posted comments on their websites against some government official.
A few recent cases in UAE and Kuwait:

Rights group decries jailing of UAE Web site owner

DUBAI -- An Arab human rights group called Wednesday for the quashing of a one-year jail sentence against a Web site owner in the United Arab Emirates, who was also fined $19,000 on defamation charges.
...
hearing in the appeal against the sentence handed to Shehhi, who was ordered to pay a fine of 50,000 dirhams ($13,600) and Dh 20,000 in compensation to the official, is scheduled for August 26, the local press reported.

Kuwaiti bloggers tortured by Kuwaiti secret police

Bashar was detained because of a comment written about the Amir of Kuwait, Shaikh Sabah Al-Ahmad Al-Sabah, on his website's forum by an annonymous person, it was deleted by Bashar because of its inappropriateness but he was 15 minutes late deleting it, the police held him accountable even after it was deleted. As for Jassim he was released but beaten severely and blind folded and forced to use his fingerprint as signature to a document he couldn't read because of the blindfolds.

Spacing Wire

I've mentioned this before- I'm into Urban planning and I simply love this (Canadian) site: Spacing Wire

Extreme weather brings flood chaos round the world

People in countries across the world, from China to India and Sudan to Indonesia, are coping with severe wet weather, highlighting the position of flooding as the most deadly of all natural disasters.
While single events cannot be linked to climate change, the flooding come as research suggests that global warming will increase rainfall in some parts of the world, including the Indian monsoon, and increase the number of hurricanes – both due increased evaporation in a warmer world.
One person in 10 worldwide, including one in eight city-dwellers, lives less than 10 metres above sea-level and near the coast. This is an "at-risk zone" for flooding and stronger storms exacerbated by climate change, a recent study found.

Read more.

Al Jazeera on Ukrainian women

Yesterday at breakfast I briefly watched Al Jazeera. They were talking about the difficulty Ukrainian women have in finding long-term relationships. The Al Jazeera crew visited a popular match-making club. In a nutshell:

• Ukrainian women complained a lot about the Ukrainian men because they "drink excessively", "they only love drinking", "abusive to their wives"..
• So, they prefer "white" men (or American men) because they are kinder, sweeter and do not drink as much- and that's what most of these clubs are all about
• Most women said they were seeking long-term relationships but the men think differently
• They interviewed this one man, with a HUGE beer belly and he just said how he's looking forward to going and "picking another one"...
• One of the girls wanting to get married explained how she felt as a bunch of the girls were sitting around, and a man comes and scrutinises them, one by one- "It was horrible"
• "Thomas was talking to me, he seemed like a nice guy, but as soon as he met another one who knew more English than me, he left me for her"...
• The women said that Ukrainian men are so bad that they have to resort to internet dating and match making clubs, "but they wished this wasn't the case"
• They talked to men who had white hair (pretty disgusting) and asked them how the younger women felt about them, "if you do a good job in bed, the age doesn't matter any more", and he gave an equally disgusting smile.
• someone women were upset when they had to go home "alone", and didn't find anyone.
• They interviewed this one woman @ home. She was divorced with a 5 yr old daughter. My heart really went out to her. She said that after her divorce, she felt "alone and degraded", and these internet websites and all started making her feel good about herself. However, when she'd meet men, things would go well, until she'd tell them about her daughter, and most men would say, "I'm just not ready for that... "

The show talked about many other aspects. Last week, on the Toronto Star homepage was a video and a caption on "Canadian women are increasingly finding it difficult to find men because of sex imbalance demographics".

Of course people are going to now seek long-term relationships. That's the fitra of humans, and because left and right people have messed up their moral values and degraded society beyond disgust, that people are beginning to realise they need to find solutions. And, they're so far from morality that, the most obvious solutions, which for us Muslims have been laid out so clearly in the Qur'an, will take them a very long time to adapt. Until then, men and women alike, are going be like stray cats, feeding off peer pressure and not knowing where they belong.

U.S. Military Losses Hit 4,000 in Iraq, Afghanistan

Four thousand U.S. service members have died in U.S. President George W. Bush's ``war on terror'' in Iraq and Afghanistan 5 1/2 years after American forces ousted the Taliban in December 2001.
A total of 3,596 have died in Iraq since the March 2003 invasion that removed Saddam Hussein from power. Some 2,957 of that number were killed in action, according to the latest Department of Defense figures. More than 26,500 personnel have been wounded in that conflict, 11,959 of them so seriously they couldn't return to duty.

...

Between 66,939 and 73,253 civilians have died in Iraq since March 2003,
according to the Iraq Body Count Web site that counts casualties reported by at
least two media outlets.
Read on Bloomberg

Ignorance

Farmer buried with beloved vintage car
(IANS)

5 April 2007

KOMBAKONAM — A farmer in a Tamil Nadu village loved his car so dearly that when he died, his relatives decided to bury his old Morris Minor along with him as per his wishes.

Narayanswami, headman of Sivapuram village near Kumbakonam, in southern India died last week at the age of 64. A wealthy farmer with three sons and daughters, he bought his prized Morris Minor in 1958. According to reports, Narayanswami was spiritually inclined but lavished his affection on his vintage car. He had earlier expressed the wish that he be buried with his car when he died.

When his friends and relatives gathered to bury him on Monday, they decided that the Morris Minor should definitely go with him. The car was decorated and Narayanswami's body was placed in it. A huge grave was dug with an excavator and a large crowd gathered to see the master and his machine laid to rest together.

The Doha Debates

I'm not sure how popular the Doha Debates is in the West, but BBC does the entire coverage on it. Last night, I watched the debate on the motion: "This House believes only a new dictator can end the violence in Iraq".
I only watched it because George Galloway was one of the debaters. However, in his own words, his views ended up being misrepresented. He made a few very good points, about Hugo Chavez being the leader elected by the government of Venezuela time and again despite the US, the CIA, .. but the rest of his energy was wasted in defending his views.
At one point he even said: "you do not know me well enough if you're saying I support the US."

It made me reflect on how people like him, Noam Chompsky, Tariq Ramadan and others really have their feet in quicksand, for the views they hold publically. "
The motion was rejected, the audience vote against it was 67%.

The next debate topic is: "This House believes the veil is a barrier to integration ". I'd love to go. Admission is free!

Adnan Pachachi, former President of the Iraq Governing Council, blamed occupying forces for the sectarian violence in Iraq during the latest Doha Debate on January 31. "The vast majority of Iraqis are not involved in sectarian violence, they want to live in peace. Militias act in the name of a sect. I blame this on the occupying power, which established a system based on division," he said.
Mr. Pachachi was arguing against the motion: This House believes only a new dictator can end the violence in Iraq.
He won the Debate with co-speaker British parliamentarian George Galloway. The audience backed their call to support democracy and reject a dictator by a majority of two to one.
Arguing for the motion were Sabah Al-Mukhtar, President of the Arab Lawyers Association in the UK, and Robert Baer, a former CIA officer who served for 20 years in the Middle East.

UM Financial making headlines as usual

http://www.thestar.com/challenge

Omar Kalair has figured out how to provide financial support – what we call a
mortgage – with no interest charges attached.

"Few of Kalair's clients understand how difficult it was to devise such a seemingly simple approach. While working at Hewlett-Packard and Airmiles Loyalty Group, he put together a business plan and spent two years knocking on doors at 70 financial institutions before finding an interested potential partner at Credit Union Central of Ontario."

Putting faith in Islamic mortgages

Imam Anwar Al Awlaki

It's been in the news... but I just found out..

Urgent Appeal: Imam Anwar Al Awlaki - A Leader in Need
Reports indicate that Imam Anwar Al Awlaki, a prominent Muslim scholar highly regarded in English speaking Islamic circles, has been detained incommunicado for the past two months in Yemen and may face torture or ill treatment in custody.

What the heck? Please take action for Imam Anwar Al Awlaki

Write to the US authorities:

Demand that the state department fulfils their statutory duties and provide consular assistance and clarify where Anwar Al Awlaki is held;
Demand an end to incommunicado and secret detention; detainees should be held only in officially recognized places of detention with access to family, lawyers and courts;
Call for human rights laws and standards to be strictly adhered to in cooperation between US security forces and those of other countries, ensuring that torture and ill-treatment, incommunicado detentions and "disappearance" play no part in such cooperation;
Ensure his rights as a US national are being protected and that his detention is free from torture or ill-treatment
The Honorable Condoleezza Rice
Secretary of State
U.S. Department of State
2201 C Street, N.W.
Washington DC 20520
Tel: + 1 202 647 4000
Fax: + 1 202 261 8577
E-mail: http://contact-us.state.gov/ask_form_cat/ask_form_secretary.html

Write to the Yemeni authorities:

Appeal for the immediate release of Anwar Al Awlaki unless he is to be promptly charged with a recognizable criminal offence and given a fair trial without further delay in accordance with international fair trial standards
Call on the authorities to respect the rule of law
Remind the authorities of their obligations under both national and international human rights law and allow Anwar Al Awlaki access to legal counsel, his family and the opportunity to challenge the legality of his detention

His Excellency General ‘Ali ‘Abdullah Saleh
President
Office of The President
Sana’a
Republic of Yemen
Faxes: 009671274147

His Excellency Rashid Muhammad al-‘Alimi
Office of the Republic of Yemen Ministry of the Interior
Sana’a
Republic of Yemen
Telephone: 009671332701
Fax: 009671274147

Write to Islamic organisations:

Encourage all Islamic organisations in the US to campaign for the release of Imam Anwar al-Awlaki.
Further encourage the these societies in the US to promote the right to a fair trial and the rule of law.
Islamic Society of North America
PO Box 38
Plainfield
IN 46168
USA
Telephone: 0013178398157
Fax: 0013178391840

Council on American-Islamic Relations
453 New Jersey Avenue ,
S.E. Washington
DC 20003
Telephone: 0012024888787
Fax: 0012024880833

Veil No Bar

Bahrain's Ruqaya Al Ghasara celebrates after winning the women's 200m final on the fourth day of the athletics competition for the 15th Asian Games at Khalifa Stadium in Doha, on Monday. – AFP

See you at Guantanamo

Please visit: Fisabilillah

Christianization in the Dark Continent

Here is a partial translation of the AL-Jazeerah intervew between Maher Abdallah and Shiekh Ahmed Katani talking about the issue of 6 million muslims leaving Islam every year in Africa alone. This was a television interview that was transcribed and translated into English.

Ahmad al-Katani: This is Our Pain, We Must Struggle

Don’t bring children under five to mosques

4 December 2006

ABU DHABI — The General Authority for Islamic Affairs and Awqaf (GAIAA) in Abu Dhabi has issued a circular to mosques across the country urging worshippers not to bring with them children below five years of age to pray.
The GAIAA said the decision has been taken to maintain peace and quiet at mosques.
The authorities reportedly received a number of complaints that some people insist on bringing children to mosques and the noise they make often disturb prayers. There was mixed response to the circular. While some feel that the decision will help to ensure tranquillity in mosques, others protest against it saying there’s no religious bar on children entering mosques and they must be allowed to familiarise themselves with mosques from their early childhood.

Read in Khaleej Times

When Galloway spoke...

19/05/2005

Senator, I am not now, nor have I ever been, an oil trader and neither has anyone on my behalf. I have never seen a barrel of oil, owned one, bought one, sold one - and neither has anyone on my behalf.

Now I know that standards have slipped in the last few years in Washington, but for a lawyer you are remarkably cavalier with any idea of justice. I am here today, but last week you already found me guilty.

You traduced my name around the world without ever having asked me a single question, without ever having contacted me, without ever written to me or telephoned me, without any attempt to contact me whatsoever and you call that justice.

Now, I want to deal with the pages that relate to me in this dossier and I want to point out areas where there are - let's be charitable and say errors.

Then, I want to put this in the context where I believe it ought to be. On the very first page of your document about me, you assert that I have had "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein. This is false.

I have had two meetings with Saddam Hussein, once in 1994 and once in August 2002. By no stretch of the English language can that be described as "many meetings" with Saddam Hussein.

As a matter of fact, I have met Saddam Hussein exactly the same number of times as Donald Rumsfeld met him. The difference is that Donald Rumsfeld met him to sell him guns and to give him maps the better to target those guns.

I met him to try and bring about an end to sanctions, suffering and war and, on the second of the two occasions, I met him to try and persuade him to let Dr Hans Blix and the United Nations weapons inspectors back into the country - a rather better use of two meetings with Saddam Hussein than your own Secretary of State for Defence made of his.Read more...

Israel and 'Moral Equivalence'

The Qana massacre was the occasion for a full-court propaganda campaign by Israel’s amen corner, and one has to say they rose to the occasion like real pros. First, of course, they expressed remorse – then, naturally enough, they blamed it all on… Hezbollah.

How so? Well, you see, the Israelis bombed a building filled with children and old people because rockets fired at Israel "originated immediately next to it." Yet the Red Cross denied there were any Hezbollah in Qana. The Israelis keep up a constant refrain claiming Lebanon uses its own civilian population as "human shields," but the reality is quite different: Lebanese civilians flee when Hezbollah fires a fusillade, because they know the Israelis will soon be bombing the place to perdition. Aside from which, Nasrallah’s folks are a tightly knit group and security is taken seriously: a friend of mine who went into Hezbollah headquarters in southern Beirut was subjected to such a thorough search that by the time they were through with him he was bereft of his dignity as well as any desire to proceed further. Hezbollah doesn’t trust noncombatants, and for that reason keeps well away from them no matter what their religious, ethnic, or political affiliations.

Read the full article here.

Disunity amongst leaders

It seems as if the people who are quick to make judgements about people are the ones the media is quick to quote. Sh. Riyadh Ul Haq is a respected person all over the world by many people. What is anyone going to gain by slandering him? Before we speak our mind out, we need to weigh the odds. If all our leaders are going to do is stand up and point fingers @ each other, just to get their voices heard, then we're just entangling ourselves deeper in the web of disunity.

---

Imam's visit raises concerns