Wednesday, May 2, 2012


HADITH OF THE DAY: BLESSED WEALTH - TOP
The Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) said: "Blessed is the wealth of a Muslim from which he gives to the poor, to orphans and to needy travelers."
Sahih Al-Bukhari, Volume 2, Hadith 544
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VIDEO: CAIR WELCOMES SIKH COALITION APP TO REPORT TSA PROFILING - TOP
(WASHINGTON, D.C., 4/30/12) -- The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) today welcomed the release of the Sikh Coalition's new "FlyRights" smart phone application that allows airline passengers to report alleged instances of racial or religious profiling by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA).
DOWNLOAD: FlyRights
The Department of Homeland Security has agreed to accept reports submitted through the app as official complaints.
At today's news conference announcing the release of the app, CAIR Staff Attorney Gadeir Abbas said: "It is known that profiling is not an effective means of law enforcement. When we profile, we not only stigmatize the minority community, but we also do our concerns about safety a disservice."
CAIR is America's largest Muslim civil liberties and advocacy organization. Its mission is to enhance the understanding of Islam, encourage dialogue, protect civil liberties, empower American Muslims, and build coalitions that promote justice and mutual understanding.
CONTACT: CAIR Staff Attorney Gadeir Abbas, 202-742-6410, 720-251-0425, E-Mail:gabbas@cair.com; CAIR National Communications Director Ibrahim Hooper, 202-744-7726, E-Mail: ihooper@cair.com; CAIR Communications Coordinator Amina Rubin, 202-488-8787, 202-341-4171, Email: arubin@cair.com
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CAIR-MI: LEGISLATIVE CAUCUS 'JUDEO-CHRISTIAN' ORIENTATION 'EXCLUSIONARY'TOP
LANSING, MI -- State lawmakers are announcing the Michigan Legislative Prayer Caucus on Wednesday based on Judeo-Christian beliefs - a move that at least one law expert considers unconstitutional. ...
The caucus language doesn't sit well with Dawud Walid, executive director of the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
"I'm a firm believer that our elected officials have the right to have their values guided by their sincerely held religious convictions, however I'm somewhat troubled by the exclusionary language within this caucus because it seems contradictory," he said. "On the one hand it's being articulated that it's open to all, on the other hand there's some exclusionary language in there." (More)
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VIDEO: CAIR-MI JOINS INTERFAITH COALITION CHALLENGING ISLAMOPHOBIA -TOP
View the video here.
SEE ALSO:
CAIR-MI: 'ISLAMOPHOBIA IS A NATIONAL ILLNESS' (MSNBC) - TOP
In Dearborn Mich., a Detroit suburb known for its concentration of Muslim Americans, anti-Islam leaders from around the country are gathering to discuss how to rescue women from that faith. The "Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference on Honor Killings" on Sunday is named for a local Muslim woman murdered one year ago.
But Muslims, civil rights groups and other religious leaders say the conference is merely another event put on by well-known bigots to attack the minority religion. Their response was to schedule a town hall meeting just a few miles away on Sunday called "Rejecting Islamophobia: A Community Stand Against Hate." ...
One participant who was just on his way to the town hall was Dawud Walid, who heads the Michigan office of the Council on American Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group for Muslims.
"I think firstly we have to better expose who these anti-Muslim bigots are as well as their funders," said Walid. "We believe that the Islamophobia that permeates our country is being pushed by a well-organized, highly-funded network." (More)
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ISLAMOPHOBE ROBERT SPENCER: 'YOU ARE THE SOLDIERS...THIS IS A WAR...WE ARE THE SOLDIERS. IT'S UP TO US.' - TOP
View a tweet by a Detroit Free Press reporter.
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TERRORIST PLOTS, HELPED ALONG BY THE F.B.I. (NYT) - TOP
David K. Shipler, New York Times, 4/30/12
The United States has been narrowly saved from lethal terrorist plots in recent years -- or so it has seemed. A would-be suicide bomber was intercepted on his way to the Capitol; a scheme to bomb synagogues and shoot Stinger missiles at military aircraft was developed by men in Newburgh, N.Y.; and a fanciful idea to fly explosive-laden model planes into the Pentagon and the Capitol was hatched in Massachusetts.
But all these dramas were facilitated by the F.B.I., whose undercover agents and informers posed as terrorists offering a dummy missile, fake C-4 explosives, a disarmed suicide vest and rudimentary training. Suspects naïvely played their parts until they were arrested.
When an Oregon college student, Mohamed Osman Mohamud, thought of using a car bomb to attack a festive Christmas-tree lighting ceremony in Portland, the F.B.I. provided a van loaded with six 55-gallon drums of "inert material," harmless blasting caps, a detonator cord and a gallon of diesel fuel to make the van smell flammable. An undercover F.B.I. agent even did the driving, with Mr. Mohamud in the passenger seat. To trigger the bomb the student punched a number into a cellphone and got no boom, only a bust.
This is legal, but is it legitimate? Without the F.B.I., would the culprits commit violence on their own? Is cultivating potential terrorists the best use of the manpower designed to find the real ones? Judging by their official answers, the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are sure of themselves -- too sure, perhaps. (More)
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IN CIA PRISONS, PRISONERS ABUSED IN WAYS ONCE CONSIDERED UNCONSCIONABLE - TOP
Larry Siems, Slate.com, 4/30/12
It began with one document.
On Sept. 17, 2001, six days after the terrorist attacks in Washington, D.C., President George W. Bush sent a 12 page Memorandum of Notification to his National Security Council. That memorandum, we know now, authorized the Central Intelligence Agency to set up and run secret prisons. We still don't know exactly what it says: CIA attorneys have told a judge the document is so off-limits to the courts and the American people that even the font is classified. But we do know what it did: It literally opened a space for torture.
Thanks to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit - a lawsuit The New York Times has called "among the most successful in the history of public disclosure" - we now know much of what happened in those secret spaces the Bush administration created. Under that litigation, the American Civil Liberties Union gathered nearly 140,000 formerly classified documents from the Department of Defense, the Justice Department and the CIA that detail the abuse of prisoners in U.S. custody in the "War on Terror." My job, as the author of the website Thetorturereport.org and then of the book The Torture Report: What the Documents Say About America's Post-9/11 Torture Program, was to dig through that incredible trove of documents and figure out for myself what, exactly, my country had done.
Here is what I learned. (More)



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