Welcome Home Talha Rally - 5pm Sunday 17th August 2014 - Home Office

With so much devastation unfolding in the world, we risk overlooking the significance of the few rays  of light that reach us. The freedom of Talha Ahsan is one such ray, his US judge did not fall for the lies upon lies of US-UK governments, and her judgement effectively decriminalises a genealogy of Muslim activism from the 90s which the mendacious War on Terror Industry has succeeded in pushing beyond the pale, until now.

Following early elation in the immediate aftermath of the good news of Talha's impending release (he is due back in August), we need to spread the word of the Welcome Home Talha Rally scheduled for Sunday 17th August at 5pm at the Home Office. A substantial mental and physical presence at the rally is important, even as Israel's western backed ethnic cleansing of Gaza continues to politicise and mobilise the disgust and resistance of new generations of taxpayers, voters, consumers, activists and writers.

Just as the imperialism overseas and at home are interconnected, decolonial movements need to also connect causes in the core, periphery and semi-periphery. The short-lived Equality Movement (spawned from the Student Protests of 2010 and laid to waste by riots triggered by the police killing Mark Duggan in Summer 201) made this important point.

The lawfare and geography of Talha's case, detention without trial, extradition and eventual plea bargain is this connective tissue. Everyone's rights and dignity are eroded by UK extradition laws, which among others,  have caused, and continue to cause great distress to families and waste human life.

The British government have stolen 8 years of a young, talented man's life and every department and individual in the chain should be identified, shamed and brought to book for it. The rally is as much about the moral-legal failure that continues to make such state injustices possible, as it is about the Free Talha Ahsan campaign and its widening audience of crocodile smilers.

Unless we pull the tracks and engine out of the bulldozer, it will continues to wreck havoc.

The movement to cower and depoliticise UK Muslims continues unabated,and we struggle to learn and draw strength from allied causes like the Hillsborough Justice Campaign (whose Sheila Coleman is a hearty supporter of Talha and will address the rally). With HSBC last week, we saw an entrenchment of the British establishment's political and economic persecution of charities, activists and the families of activists acting lawfully and in solidarity with the people of Palestine. The private sector follows the public sector in this respect and we remember, protest and fight the  persecution of activists and community workers like Moazzam Begg and Mahdi Hashi, who refused to play footsie with British government spooks.

Below is a Facebook banner image promoting the Welcome Home Rally for Talha at the Home Office on Sunday 17th August at 5pm. It is our duty to bear witness to and challenge the ongoing injustice of Extradition Law, the suffering of humans in Supermax and solitary confinement, and the underlying hegemonic politics it serves.

Please bring sweets and imagery to share. The speakers list looks amazing.

Information Minister Inu egged in London TV studio as diaspora disgust grows at 6th May Dhaka massacre and coverup

Bangladesh Minister for Information Hasanul Huq Inu was egged as he walked into a TV studio in London. He was in London on a Digital Bangladesh junket.

In the context of UK politics egging is pretty main stream, John Prescott attracts a lot of it, Peter Mandelson got green custard and Fathers4Justice made a purple powder stunt occur in the House of Commons.

In this BanglaVision TV analysis of the protest intervention to the right, Inu Skypes in and gives an account of the incident. The dishonourable Minister for (mis)Information was at his very best, terming it "an attack on Bangladesh's Democracy (4:45)".

Coming a close second is his performance on the Channel S talk show Obhimot, where he justified the closure of popular opposition daily Amar Desh and now 6 month detention of its editor Mahmudur Rahman through the analogy of mirror cleaning. I fear that Mahmudur Rahman will not make it out of detention, where he has been tortured, alive.

Who is Hasanul Huq Inu, why is this important?

For those who do not know, Inu is the head of the JSD (National Socialist) party and as Information Minister has played a leading role in the cover up of the Dhaka Massacre on 6th May. Questions remain unasked and unanswered as to his participation in the massacre itself.

His ministry's exchange of letters with local human rights group Odhikar who documented the massacre, and the Government's subsequent arrest of its secretary Adilur Rahman Khan made even the most fawning governmental yaysayers cringe.

Odhikar's fact finding report on the Government attacks on Hefazot's Assembly on 5th and 6th May remains the most detailed account of the terrible state crimes committed that day. Its incompletion is a function of the corrupt  media and a very real fear of government reprisal. On this matter it is very much a police state.

That defenders of the regime have reduced  the massacre and the report to a silly numbers game is par for the course. It reminds us also of the need to create new forms of protest that elude the censor and which are less predictable than huge protests, hartals and agreeable rants.

These images have been swirling around Facebook to much applause.

These young people who egged Inu probably performed the most democratic act Bangladesh has seen for a while. The deshi press, for example The Daily Star and its more OC-inspired stepdaughter The Dhaka Tribune,  have failed to rise to the (business) challenge of the government account of the Motijheel Massacre and their own roles in making it possible.

As the current government makes moves to tell itself and the world what a good job it is doing on development (over the carcasses of those it has slain), we should  make sober assessments of their records and step up the lampooning.

Transnational Localism through further Civil Disobedience

I remember those bloodied twitching bodies on the streets of Dhaka in May breathing their last, and the video of the young boy being shot in the head at point black range earlier in the spring. I believe that a whole load of deshis (and people who love desh more than an NGO ever could) have been politicised over the state brutality from the Bangladesh Awami League led government this year, in new ways that elude partisan capture.

The Prime Minister has announced her intention to attend the 68th session of the UN Assembly which takes place on 23 Sept to 4 Oct in the coming weeks. I notice a special session on "disability and inclusivity" and my heart goes out to the disabled people her regime has created..

New York will be crawling with high officials of the regime, family members and taggers on.
I practically hope that they should be met patiently and theatrically for the sake of peace, with egg, red dye, clearly expressed arguments and camera phones.

***

The red dye is significant because that is what Prime Minister and Awami League head Sheikh Hasina Wazed accused the victims of her security forces of smearing on themselves (see below). In a related not, if you want a path into the mind of the psychopaths who run Bangladesh and the lengths the Awami League leader will go to for political and financial gain, please read the Rentu Memoirs carefully.

Bangladesh Prime Minster Hasina accuses brutalised demonstators of play acting and smearing their bodies with red dye

This is the prime minister of Bangladesh Sheikh Hasina Wajed lying in Parliament about the government brutality of the 5th and 6th May. First she gets the month of the incident wrong and has to be corrected.

Lest it get lost in social media ephemera here is the most vital snippet of the speech

"..and that day's event was fully televised, you have seen how they have rubbed red dye onto their bodies and when police came and called them they got up and ran away... we saw that dead bodies made a run for it! this kind of drama has been made there." [4m 30s to 4m 46s]

For the rest of it she repeats the stories that her government has been cocreating with the press like the Dhaka Tribune and the Daily Star.

Only Bangladeshis could demonstrate in favour of judicial murders and feign some kind of Tahrir theatre.

There are groups of 'progressive' angry and youngish Bangladeshis running around London and Dhaka demanding the executions of accused war criminals.  It is a reprise of the Nirmul Committee's controversial public mock trials of 1992, a similar set of actants.  The social guilt of these individuals is framed by the Awami League's lobotomy of history, and their legal guilt has been contrived with the help of a rather pathetic show trial.

"We want execution of the Razakars." [Source]

The lobotomy of history sees the dawn of homo bangalee on 25th March 1971 with a radio announcement and a glorious Liberation struggle against an occupying Pakistani army. This army could harm only through collaborating volunteer partners The Razakars, who are responsible for the deaths of everybody, especially intellectuals, and rapes, genocide, and crimes against humanity. Thus for the lobotomised homo bangalee, any departure from the script makes you a pariah  and increasingly an enemy of the state. War crimes tribunals to this mindset are an existential issue, and the judicial executions of the targets are the secular liberals very own honour killing. 

The running Awami League government's tribunals to try selected accused, political enemies for crimes against #Liberation1971 were always problematic: from their targets and framing, to the abduction of prosecution-turned-defence witness Shokron Ranjan Bali, to the Skype conversation leaks in December 2012.  I wrote about theme here.

[http://fugstar.blogspot.co.uk/2012/12/i-am-justifiably-in-contempt-of-this.html]

Its is quite easy to politically neutralise a generation or two with false liberation warlore. This has been successful in desh to a significant degree to get worked up about. There is something here to learn for Syria, Libya, Iraq and other cases of extremely developmented national transition. 

What can be done?

On the plane of knowledge acquisition, the seculib establishment has authored most of the thought objects in the area. These are not too difficult to personally surpass if you give it some time. Never has it been easier to know better. [See:  ReclaimBangladesh]

On the plane of islah, or socio-spiritual transformation, NGOs increasingly act as an interface between us and desh, which they shouldn't. In countries like Bangladesh, NGOs are part of the problem as they sap talent, lack intellectual/financial autonomy and depoliticise problems into little manageable problems. New and old forms of political and economic solidarity must be explored as well as more dignifying, generative ways of making sense of and being the dyeshpora.

A motanarrative is a story that possesses you so much that it gives you brain damage, like jinn possession.  I for one will refuse to play along with homo bangalee's calender of misremembrance as current level of 71ster dustbin politics need to be booted of the community, just like woman-to-man dowry and The Line System.

I am justifiably in contempt of this Kangaroo Court

Tribunalgate is quite fluid these days.

Last night the Economist mumbled something about lawyers and  clearly stated that they were handed data of communications between Justice Nizamul Huq and Dr Ahmad Ziauddin (17 hours audio, 230 emails) and did not solicit them. The comments below the article are amazing, with raw relief from many at the sight of their truth finally in print, as well as secular-takfiri bloodymindedness that we have come to expect from people holding firmly onto the master narrative. Its quite a sad reflection on our internal conversation and adab (manners) that 1971 has become such an infantalising matter, enfooling and humiliating.

Legal eagle BangaliVabna finds the Economist a little limp-wristed, gives an insight into the tribunals social context and what they have already done to split, confuse and make fools out of the Bangladeshi nation.  David Bergman made an appeal to civil society to show some spine, but more conservative blogs haven't yet commented.

These tribunals don't end impunity, they reconstitute it.

In the real world, a journalist from the Bangladeshi newspaper Amar Desh (My Country)  wrote something brave,  based on what I imagine is the same data that the Economist received.  We probably won't see the western liberal media falling over themselves to protect him, but we should, as he really pushed the boat out. Mahmudur Rahman, the editor of the paper, might also come in for a spot of bother and Awami ultra violence.

The main exhibit of this post is an audio file of what appears to be a conversation between the Judge and the Academic-Activist. Whoever organised this information retrieval from deep inside the rotten core of the Bangladeshi injustice system has done well to make people who will not otherwise listen, look the lie in the face.

This post wiki wolf whistle features them complaining about ministers setting them unrealistic deadlines and discussing how to massage the judgement so that it appears like it meets the standards expected by western powers. In passing Ziauddin observes that the Bangladeshi public will not be critical about this process at all. It seems to me that they are cooking up a judgement. It seems that a key ideological campaigner is having more representation in the tribunal than the accused, whose defence witnesses are denied, kidnapped and written off.

Somehow I can't see myself wearing a t-shirts saying 'Bangladeshi Justice for Bangladeshi Citizens' at this moment in time. These situations do get you thinking about the nature of the human intellect, its moral detuning and role in power play. You can listen to some more of the alleged audio on SonarBangla and make up your own mind.

When I was on field work in Bangladesh, during the last-but-one government, a young man, who had a small mobile phone shop by the oncoming River Jamuna said to me:

Over here, the educated people try to make fools of the illiterate.

bad poem alert.

 

 The day their music died

The Awami League of Liars stared
Their version of the past declared,
An exaggerated Jatra play
A power game, a truth to flay

No party is exonerated,
Our ranks were still quite decimated,
Yet, may the future flow uphill in wonder,
With dignity and hope not blunder.

We recognise that modus operandi,
Can only beg for foreign candy,
Terrorise and halt the nation,
With political emaciation

Noble souls,
Our thoughts controlled,
Questions patrolled,
Now, may His truth unfold.

Khutbas from our Kitchens, again

Urban, immigrant life estranges us from the rest of creation.  We are becoming part of the problem. So let us alter the relations between the built, lived environment and the (mal)functionings of the urban ummah which we see being stripped away from soulfulness and plunged into consumerism.

Khutbas from the Kitchen is an idea, potentially an institution,that intervenes practically in our lives to help embody Islamic principles in our relations with creation, not least the food system, family and social relations. It is as simple as recording short educative videos from eachother’s kitchens about the ethics and values behind what we eat, warts, proverbial kitchen sink and all.

Competing with slow, unjust people over reclaiming the mimbar in the mosque is probably a useful expenditure of some people's energy. It need not distract us from the potential of networking and reimagining our existing networked ummahstuctures to overcome the cultural degradation arising from some of the activities of Islam Channel, PeaceTV, ISB, the Quilliam Foundation, Saudi Arabia/America.

Khutbas from our Kitchens rehonours the domestic, creative, hospitable space. For certain, it is not some kind of come dine with me/ready steady cook/diary of a bad man goes for chicken and chips venture. The objects around this vital room tell stories that are mostly hidden and unmarked. The packet of plain flour tells us of the history and politics of American grain surpluses. The dish rack, which bears a lot of the burden, tells us of steel, geometry and evaporation. Not to be funny or anything, but the kitchen plan itself speaks about the design and food values at the time of the building’s construction.

Kitchen media is interesting, televisions entered a lot of them in the late 80s, but now the direction of travel has reversed and one–to-many communications can be exchanged for more realistic many-to–many relationships. And perhaps the people in them have changed, less learned in some ways (humanity), more so in others (web search).

The kinds of impacts I would anticipate from this collective endeavour include a practical, shared space for learning, ensouling, deciding and creating more Creator-conscious and justice-based patterns of life and consumption.

Anti-NATO Protest video Chicago 2012

NATO is the biggest killing machine going. Something needs to be done about it. Here's what happened last week.