I agree with Br. Shahid Saleem’s letter when he says there is no free speech in the US.
Dr. Tarek Mehanna, an American-born Muslim citizen, was handed a 17-year-prison sentence by a Boston court on April 12 for no greater “crime” than exercising his First Amendment right to free speech.
With Rick Santorum’s recent win in the Louisiana primary, Barack Obama’s elegantly simple re-election strategy seems to have succeeded. While Mitt Romney is poised to win the crown of the Republican nomination for president, Santorum stubbornly strong showing is displaying a fragmented Republican base that bodes well for the incumbent president.
Have you ever stepped back and looked at the crumbling regimes in the Arab East? If you did, have you realized they are republics and not monarchies; not that there is much of a difference between the two but the hype in the corporate media is about freedom, rights, dignity, democracy, and the rest of this political litany that is well-known.
The self-proclaimed superpower is clutching at straws about “peace talks” following the Taliban’s convincing defeat of US-NATO armies in Afghanistan. While talk about talks has gone on for years with American officials — civilian and military — making bold pronouncements about commencement of “secret talks”, only to discover that some goat herder or a petty bicycle shop owner had taken the “smart” Americans for a long ride, the latter have not given up.
After the Age of Reaganomics and the decline of participatory democracy in the United States, presidential elections have become a TV sport rather than a mass political practice. In hotly contested elections such as George W. Bush vs. Al Gore in 2000, the turnout is a mere 50% of eligible voters. As the US officially transitions to a corporatocracy, though, it appears that even an apathetic voter population is far too dangerous to entrust with the country’s political decision-making.
Can US leaders — in the executive as well as congressional branches — be considered rational? Almost daily, they threaten to bomb Iran, not to mention the imposed raft of sanctions aimed at undermining the Islamic Republic. The latest round of sanctions was slipped through the inappropriately named National Defence Authorization Act (NDAA). US President Barack Obama signed the NDAA on the last day of 2011 when most people were engrossed in New Year festivities to take much notice.
The shrill US-Israeli war rhetoric against Iran goes hand in glove with covert operations, such as the assassination of Iranian nuclear scientists, Stuxnet Virus to disrupt Iran’s uranium enrichment and also reportedly replacing street signs and bricks in buildings with ones equipped with radiation detectors. There are threats and actions to further isolate Iran by boycotting its oil to increase the economic and political pressure on the Islamic Republic.
It seems the Americans never miss an opportunity to get sadistic pleasure out of humiliating Muslims. If it is not physical abuse like torture and rape, they are busy burning copies of the Qur’an.
One of the most striking events in post-Revolutionary Iranian history unfolded in early December 2011 when Iranian state TV showed a captured RQ-170 Sentinel, the unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) used by the US for spying. It is one of the most sophisticated planes in the US arsenal and had been kept largely hidden from public eye in order to not risk its top secret spy missions.
American hubris is predicated primarily on its claim to technological superiority. This is best reflected in the radar-evading stealth technology used in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) called drones. To be sure, these are deadly weapons.
“Come, I will make the continent indissoluble… O Democracy” once sang Walt Whitman, the 19th-century US poet laureate. With the unrest in Oakland, Portland, Berkeley, New York City, spanning the indissoluble continent as it were, democracy has once more become an unknown quantity, subject to definition.
Troy Davis was executed on the night of September 21, 2011 as hundreds of people maintained vigil outside the Jackson, Georgia prison hoping the Supreme Court would grant a stay of execution. It was all very civilized; he was killed by a large dose of lethal injection administered at 7pm.
As for the US economy, despite optimistic statements by President Barack Obama that it is on the mend — what else can he say? — statistics paint a very different picture.
With America’s departure from Afghanistan now almost certain, new alignments are beginning to emerge among regional players aimed at securing the most favorable outcome for each country. Islamic Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan are in the forefront of this effort but Russia, China and the Central Asian republics are not far behind either.
Successive US regimes have claimed that al-Qaeda is their enemy number one and that no effort would be spared in costs or human lives to eliminate it. Does empirical evidence support this claim? Let us examine the facts.
Islamic movements, intellectuals and activists long tended to have a love-hate relationship with democracy. On the one hand, democracy has been associated with the aggressive, brutal, exploitative, hegemonic policies of the post-colonial Western powers, the cynicism, manipulation and dishonesty of Western politics and the increasing moral degeneracy of individualistic and hedonistic Western societies.
The Muslim East (Middle East) has been in the throes of revolutionary fervor for more than six months. Two dictators have been driven from power; others are teetering on the brink while some are also fighting back with mixed results.
Every June, ceremonies are held to commemorate the passing away of Imam Khomeini in 1989. This year, these ceremonies gain added significance in view of the uprisings underway in the Muslim East. Zafar Bangash, Director of the Institute of Contemporary Islamic Thought, compares the Imam’s leadership with the near-leaderless movements in the Muslim East.
