By Abu Ali Bafaquih 

Mar/Apr 25

Arkansas Senator Tom Cotton (R) has introduced a Senate bill mirroring the HR 7552 House bill introduced last February by New York Republicans Reps. Claudia Tenney and Anthony D’Esposito, alongside Randy Weber (R. Tex.).

The bill mandates that all official U.S. federal government documents refer to the West Bank as “Judea and Samaria,” the terminology which they claim aligns with Israel’s historical and biblical claims to the territory. 

In doing so, Cotton has regurgitated what several Congress members on both sides of the aisle have previously stated, “The Jewish people’s legal and historic rights to Judea and Samaria go back thousands of years. The U.S. should stop using the politically charged term West Bank to refer to the biblical heartland of Israel.” 

The name West Bank is a translation of the Arabic term ad-Duffah al-Gharbiyyah, given to the territory west of the Jordan River. Gaza and the West Bank are two Palestinian territories that were a small part of Mandate Palestine and were part of the swatch of territory captured by Israel during the Six-Day War in 1967. On the ground, however, Israel has rendered a two-state solution including the creation of an independent Palestinian state alongside Israel impossible with the establishment of more than 300 settlements with a population of approximately 700,00 on occupied Palestinian territory, including East Jerusalem.  

Effectively, this the U.S. congressional move aims to erase Palestinian identity, and cements U.S. complicity in Israeli expansionism. It also gives the blatant greenlight for further, illegal settlement expansion.

Cotton’s interest, however, is most interesting. According to the Jewish Virtual Library published by the American-Israeli Cooperative Enterprise, his state’s Jewish population was 4,000 in 1899 rising to 5,090 in 2024, just 0.17% of his state’s overall population. However, his deep interest in Israeli policies should be seen through the lens of his receipts from the American-Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC): Code Pink says that he has received $237,077 from AIPAC. The New York Times announced that the amount of this financial assistance was around $2 million. This is while some informed sources in the US say the AIPAC lobby has spent $4.5 million for Tom Cotton to insure his winning against “Mark Pryor” in the 2014 Senate elections.

Israel is headed by a fragile ultra right-wing coalition that holds 64 seats out of a 120-seat Knesset. The ruling western-armed Israeli junta has, since Oct. 7, 2023, and as always since the British planted this colony in 1948, striven to eliminate all non-Jews, because they claim they have a “birthright” in the territory.

On July 24, 2024, the head of this ethnocracy, Benjamin Netanyahu visited the U.S. Congress where had pledged in a scathing and combative speech to achieve “total victory” against Hamas while denouncing American opponents of the war in Gaza as “idiots”.

Speaking for nearly an hour in which, he was applauded 79 times, 58 of which were standing ovations from sycophantic members of Congress, Netanyahu said, “America and Israel must stand together. When we stand together something really simple happens: We win, they lose.” 

In essence, Netanyahu was verifying that his colonial occupation of Palestine is American made. 

To this end, it serves Netanyahu that those of us watching the release of the Israeli hostages notice the extensive damage all over Gaza, but not the Palestinian jubilation over the release of their hostages, or the surviving strength of Hamas.  

It was ordained that Hamas demonstrate clear control of these scenes while transferring previously held Israelis to the ICRC without any indication that the occupation had caved in.

Netanyahu is banking on a Palestinian revolt against Hamas so that the U.S. and Israel can install a more pliant regime, like the ineffectual Palestinian Authority (PA) in the occupied West Bank.

The Anadolu Agency’s Abdelraouf Arnaout, citing Israeli analyst Avi Issacharoff, wrote in Israel’s Yedioth Ahronoth newspaper on Jan. 20, 2025, “Even after 15 months of war, Hamas remains in place… Although the government of Benjamin Netanyahu said it will eradicate Hamas, the group not only survived militarily but also retained its rule intact.” 

True to their bias, Reuters reported, “But, in the days since the ceasefire took effect, Gaza’s Hamas-run administration has moved quickly to reimpose security, to curb looting, and to start restoring basic services to parts of the enclave, swathes of which have been reduced to wasteland by the Israeli offensive.”

The much-heralded ceasefire between Israel and Hamas (The Islamic Resistance Movement – an Arabic acronym Romanized from Arabic: Ḥarakat al-Muqāwamah al-ʾIslāmiyyah), loudly and falsely claimed by the American president as his own achievement, is merely a 42-day arrangement.

Still, Netanyahu continues his war in Gaza by refusing Israeli withdrawal from the denuded enclave. His coalition partner, Bezalel Smotrich, vows to bolt the coalition if stage two of the ceasefire is agreed upon. Consequently, Netanyahu will likely conduct a provocation, either in Gaza, the West Bank, or East Jerusalem, that could be interpreted as Hamas breaching the ceasefire thereby creating an excuse where Trump would re-assent to Israel’s renewal of the slaughter of innocent Palestinians.  

The Israelis and the American right-wing consider the question of who rules Gaza as the key to ending the war which would lead to the full Israeli withdrawal from Gaza. If Hamas remains in control of the Gaza Strip, there will likely be no reconstruction permitted. As it is, both the state of Israel and their U.S. backers have maintained a purely colonial mindset which may well lead to further ethnic cleansing in Palestine. The Trump Administration is very vocally pursuing Egypt, Jordan, and even Indonesia and Albania are being pressed to take in the intended to displace Palestinians from Gaza.  

Foreign ministers of five Arab countries, the PA, and the Arab League (Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Qatar) have issued a joint statement rejecting the forced displacement of Palestinians from their land “under any excuse.”

The statement, released on Feb. 1, 2025, presented a unified stance against Trump’s call for Egypt and Jordan to take in Palestinian refugees from Gaza.

However, Trump reiterated his illegal position on Jan. 30, 2025, saying, “We do a lot for them, and they are going to do it.” This is in apparent reference to the abundant U.S. aid, including military assistance, to Egypt and Jordan, two countries who, along with Israel, have been exempted from the American aid cutoff initiated by the autocratic Trump.

Israel and its western partners envision the Palestinian Authority taking over control of the Rafah crossing, and eventually Gaza. But will Hamas, which survives despite all the propaganda and bombs, agree to the PA taking over a major thoroughfare in their territory?

Gershon Baskin Ph.D., an Israeli blogger and self-styled negotiator, says that the Israelis are banking on creating the facade of a new temporary government in Gaza by some pliable figures such as Dr. Nasser Alkidwa, the former PLO ambassador to the UN and former PA minister of foreign affairs (he also happens to be Yasser Arafat’s nephew). 

For their parts, regional Arab governments have been compliant since the British installed them to replace the Ottoman rule after World War I. To his credit, Trump, who visited the region in October 2018, correctly stated to cheers at a rally in Mississippi on October 2, “We protect Saudi Arabia — would you say they’re rich? And I love the king, King Salman, but I said, ‘King we’re protecting you. You might not be there for two weeks without us. You have to pay for your military, you have to pay. . .”

According to opinion polls published by Gallup in 2009, the presence of the U.S. military in Saudi Arabia was strongly objected to by most of the world’s Muslim population.

This is the reality of the present-day Muslim majority countries, organized under the obviously dormant Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). Given their compromised position owing to the billions flowing in their direction from the United States, their immoral silence over the Gaza Genocide is understandable.

When will Arkansas, or any constituency of American voters, ask that their politicians focus on the U.S. like they do Israel? In the absence of that call, a joint U.S.-Zionist owned Gaza is far more sacrosanct than any human life, let alone the collection of 7 million Palestinians living on the land between the River and the Sea.

Abu Ali Bafaquih is a freelance writer.

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By S. Amjad Hussain

Mar/Apr 25

After 15 months of relentless bombing of Gaza in which much of the walled-off territory was reduced to rubble and more than 64,000 civilians were killed (as calculated by The Lancet journal in January 2025), Israel has agreed to a ceasefire. In essence, the conditions of this ceasefire render it identical to the proposal that then-U.S. President Joe Biden announced last summer.

Why did it take more than six months to implement a proposal that had already been agreed upon? It seems that Israeli domestic politics got in the way. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s right-wing government depends on the support of six extreme right parties that together make up 64 of the ruling coalition’s seats in the 120-seat Israeli Knesset.

These parties were set against the ceasefire and vowed to leave the government if Netanyahu agreed to it. Israel’s avowedly fascist Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir was true to his word in this case and resigned his position in protest, but most of the others within the coalition stayed and saved the government from collapse.

The question remains: What made the Israeli government agree to a ceasefire in the first place? Israel felt pressured by the return of Trump. 

In the final negotiation, Trump’s Middle East envoy, Steven Witkoff (who is not a diplomat, but a New York real estate investor), played a pivotal role in pressuring Netanyahu to accept the deal that he had rejected many times before over the past year. Allegedly, Netanyahu was ultimately convinced to accept the deal when the Trump team also promised to empty the Gaza Strip of Palestinians. 

The ceasefire calls for phased release of Israeli hostages in exchange for hundreds of Palestinian prisoners. But Palestinians in Israeli prisons are, in fact, hostages. When innocent men, women, and children are kidnapped from their homes in Gaza and on the West Bank and kept in administrative detention without being charged with any crime, they are hostages held by the occupying state. And when these hostages are “tried” in Israeli military courts, the outcome is a foregone conclusion. Israeli military courts have a higher than 95% conviction rate for Palestinian defendants since 1967.

The ceasefire also calls for an increase in the flow of food into the Gaza strip. During their assault on Gaza, Israel allowed in a fraction of the food that was ready to enter the Strip. In December 2024, Human Rights Watch stated that Israel was using starvation as a weapon. In the first three days after the ceasefire, though, at least 2,400 food and aid trucks entered Gaza.

However, the ceasefire is, at best, a murky arrangement as Israel continues its aggression in what is left to Palestinians in the West Bank. And considering the power held by the Israeli lobby on the American political establishment, it cannot be ruled out that Israel would find some flimsy excuse to restart their genocide against the Palestinians once all of its people have been retrieved. 

One wonders why Biden and Secretary of State Antony Blinken were not able to accomplish what Trump did even before becoming president? The simple answer is pressure.

Biden refused to use America’s enormous leverage against Israel and continued sending billions in military aid to a state committing genocide until the very end of their administration. But as the left-leaning Israeli newspaper Haaretz put it succinctly, Israel only understands force. By not using political leverage while at the same time repeating the fatuous mantra of two-state solution, Biden and Blinken were really talking from both sides of their mouths. As a result, over the course of the past four years, we have seen precious little accomplished by the Biden administration to achieve any sort of peace in the Middle East.

On Jan. 15, 2025, Blinken addressed the Atlantic Council think tank, stating: “It is time to forge a new reality in the Middle East in which all people are more secure, all can realize their national aspirations, all can live in peace. Is that hard to achieve? Yes. Peace in the region has always been. Is it impossible? No. Is it necessary? Absolutely, yes.”

The ad nauseum repetition of a two-state solution has become a joke, especially coming from the former U.S. Secretary of State. More than any other person in Biden’s circle, Blinken knew that Israel would never agree to a two-state solution.

Trump injected another element into this complex equation when he suggested the idea of having Indonesia take in one million-plus Palestinians. No sooner had he made that ridiculous suggestion than he lobbed another idiotic bombshell, asking Jordan and Egypt to take refugees from Gaza. Upon finding no response, he even brought up the possibility of bringing Albania into the deal.

Trump is parroting the views of Israeli, American, British, and European right-wing politicians. They want to build Jewish settlements in Gaza by “voluntary” repatriation of Gazans to other Arab countries. In common parlance, Trump’s proposal is nothing more than ethnic cleansing.

For Palestinians it is a double whammy. First a genocide with the tacit approval of the United States and now an attempt to ethnically cleanse Gaza for good.

It is said that Arab countries have sold their honor and traditions to the interests of the United States. Following this line of thought, the Jimmy Carter engineered Camp David Accords between Israel and Egypt was the first step in this surrender. Subsequently other Arab countries – typically ruled by despots – have also given up on solidarity with Palestine mostly in exchange for American military products and/or protection. 

And now the Abraham Accords have brought most Arab countries into the United States’ sphere of interest and in turn, into Israel’s. The only notable regional hold out so far is Saudi Arabia.

Considering Trump’s propensity to retaliate against those who refuse to buckle under his dictates, it is not beyond him to issue an ultimatum to his Arab client states to either toe the line or be ready for retaliation.

That is why it is time that all Arab countries come together and devise a common strategy for the future of the Middle East that is based on their shared history and values. Only then Palestine will have a true ally in the region. 

S. Amjad Hussain, MD, FRCSC, FACS, D.Sc. honoris causa, is Emeritus Professor of Cardiothoracic surgery at the College of Medicine and Life Sciences; and Emeritus Professor of Humanities, College of Arts and Letters University of Toledo.

An earlier version was published in The Blade of Toledo, Ohio, on January 29, 2025.

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By Md. Mahmudul Hasan 

Jan/Feb 25

Many believe that Islam and English literature are mutually exclusive. Some people may even shudder at the thought of integrating one into the other.  

English literature’s global reach is often greeted with disquiet, as it’s considered a corollary to Britain’s colonial expansion. What’s more, its study is generally believed to be unsuited to the needs of non-British or non-Western readers. In a 2019 essay, Esmaeil Zeiny of Tehran’s Kharazmi University argues that reading this literary tradition is interpreted as “celebrating the Anglo-American canonical literature.”

British-Zimbabwean writer Doris Lessing, the 2007 Nobel laureate in literature, had limited formal schooling. In “Doris Lessing: The Poetics of Change”(1994), literary scholar Gayle Greene states, “When she was seven Lessing was sent to school at the Roman Catholic Convent in Salisbury [now Harare], and at thirteen she transferred to the Girls High School, also in Salisbury, but withdrew at fourteen.”

Simply stated, Lessing was largely self-taught. In 1982, when asked if she regretted not studying at a university, she responded, “But I’m glad that I was not educated in literature and history and philosophy, which means that I did not have this Euro-centered thing driven into me, which I think is the single biggest hang-up Europe has got. It’s almost impossible for anyone in the West not to see the West as the God-given gift to the world.”

Clearly, Lessing detests the replacement of indigenous knowledge systems with Eurocentric education and correlates humanities subjects like English literature with colonial hegemony over the (formerly) colonized.

Similarly, in “Culture and Imperialism” (1993), Edward Said characterizes imperialism as “an educational movement” (p.269). In the same vein, in her 1988 essay “Currying Favor: The Politics of British Educational and Cultural Policy in India, 1813-1854”, Said’s student Gauri Viswanathan of New York’s Columbia University states, “The English literary text functioned as a surrogate Englishman in his highest and most perfect state…. The split between the material and the cultural practices of colonialism is nowhere sharper than in the progressive rarefaction of the rapacious, exploitative, and ruthless actor of history into the reflective subject of literature.”

During the British colonial period, Englishmen acted as colonial administrators and harbingers of imperial modernity in different parts of the world. Since their departure, the cultural role of spreading British values has partly been played by English literary texts. This approach makes the colonized glance away from imperial plunder and pillage and immerse themselves into various strands of literary and philosophical musings.

According to John McLeod of the University of Leeds, “The teaching of English literature in the colonies must be understood as part of the many ways in which Western colonial powers such as Britain asserted their cultural and moral superiority while at the same time devaluing indigenous cultural products” (“Beginning Postcolonialism,” 2000, p.140). 

All these arguments suggest that introducing English literature helped reinforce the notion of British cultural dominance. As a result, it reduced indigenous literature to the level of a provincial, inferior and inchoate culture.

Indigenous Canadian but Western-educated scholar Marie Battiste discusses the (ir)relevance of English literature to postcolonial societies. She “speaks with an authoritative double consciousness” and “provides important empirical perspectives aligning Western educational systems with coloniality.” 

In her 1998 essay, Battiste argues, “We cannot continue to allow Aboriginal students to be given a fragmented existence in a curriculum that does not mirror them, nor should they be denied understanding the historical context that has created the fragmentation” (“Enabling the autumn seed,” Canadian Journal of Native Education, 22.1 [1998]). 

In 1968, Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiong’o and his colleagues Taban Lo Liyong and Peter Awuor Anyumba at the University of Nairobi’s English Department wrote a note titled “On the abolition of the English Department.” They sought to make a case against the dominance of English literature in Africa and, by extension, other non-Western societies. As a result, the university’s English Department was renamed the Department of Literature.

In that memo, the three formidable Kenyan literary scholars stated, “For any group it is better to study representative works which mirror their society rather than to study a few isolated ‘classics,’ either of their own or of a foreign culture” (quoted in Killam, “African literature and Canada, The Dalhousie Review, 53 [1973-74]).

The word “mirror” in the above quote and in Battiste’s paper is important. The literary texts – Western or Eastern – taught to students should mirror their present-day, pervasive concerns as well as the life and struggles of their time’s underprivileged people.

Moreover, the literature should reflect comparable social realities in the wider world that we inhabit. The literature classes’ content should be relevant to the students’ lives and encourage their engagement and interest. For example, in terms of the context and reflection of reality, Charles Dickens’ “Oliver Twist” is relevant to our time and retains its own historical context. Its major themes – such as corruption, criminality, injustice, poverty and an unfeeling society – resonate with present-day social conditions in many parts of the world.

Thus, the novel can be characterized as a global text of enormous scope and with worldwide appeal. It compels readers to contextualize the titular protagonist’s experiences in their surroundings and acknowledge that the kind of life in which the novel was produced is not unique.

When teaching “Oliver Twist” to Muslim students, an educator can easily relate Dickens’ portrayal of oppression, exploitation and degradation of vulnerable groups in society to Islam’s strong, primordial emphasis on justice and ending all forms of injustice: “Say: My Lord enjoins justice” (7:29).

Another verse reads, “And how could you refuse to fight in the cause of God and of the utterly helpless men and women and children who are crying, ‘O our Sustainer! Lead us forth [to freedom] out of this land whose people are oppressors, and raise for us, out of Thy grace, a protector, and raise for us, out of Thy grace, one who will bring us succor!’” (4:75).

Therefore, correlating this novel’s central thesis to Islam lends the text greater legitimacy and credibility in the eyes of Muslim readers.

In March 2023, The New Yorker published Nathan Heller’s essay “The End of the English Major.” As the title indicates, the essay argues that enrolment in English departments at U.S. universities is “in free fall.”

While subjects in the humanities are losing out to the bread-and-butter fields of STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) in the West, the field of English literature in Muslim-majority countries is at risk for its underlying Eurocentrism, foreignness and irrelevance to Muslim realities.

In a time when this field is at risk of dying out or disappearing from the syllabi, seeing English literary texts through the lens of Islam will establish its relevance and context for the Muslim audience and ground them in Muslim societies.

In light of the decolonizing or indigenizing of Eurocentric education, providing Islamic perspectives on English literature will establish this literary tradition’s importance, significance and applicability to Muslims. In other words, interpreting English texts through the lens of Islam has a salvific value in terms of continuing their teaching and learning in Muslim-majority countries.

The pinnacle of the glory and global prestige of English literature is perhaps behind us. Therefore, learning its texts from Muslim perspectives may generate new insights and provide it with new trajectories of academic research. This new lens will make those works relevant to, and prolong their prevalence in, Muslim societies by way of exploring points of convergence and divergence between Islam and the literary tradition.

Any literary tradition bears the risk of becoming anachronistic if it loses relevance to its audience’s real world experiences or fails to enrich its readers’ understanding of the meaning of life. What students encounter in the text should offer an analysis of the past and present (oppressive) social conditions and have a perennial appeal to the reader globally. This will spare English literature the charges of Eurocentric bias, disconnect or anachronism.

Md. Mahmudul Hasan, PhD, is professor in the Department of English Language and Literature, International Islamic University Malaysia. He edits Asiatic: IIUM Journal of English Language and Literature. An earlier version of this essay appeared on https://www.islamicity.org/ on May 20, 2024. 

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Sep/Oct 2024

Many of our readers will be traveling to Dallas to join the thousands of North American conventioneers for ISNA’s 61st Convention: “The Muslim American:  Forging Faith and Action.”

Iqbal Unus (board chair, Islamic Horizons), a long-time convention enthusiast, reflects on how he has both experienced and benefitted from this event over the decades. He advises attendees to ponder on their goals and expectations, for “nothing can be achieved unless we make it a habit and set up a way to schedule it in our routines.” He reminds us, that “you’re not doing it alone. That’s where the convention experience comes into your plan again.”

While we are at the Convention, the Genocide continues due to the money siphoned off from our taxes — continues unabated. According to Julia Conley, “a poll found that 67% of Americans of all political affiliations want the United States to join the international call for a permanent cease-fire (www.commondreams.org, Feb. 27). Democracy at work! 

The usual hypocrisy rages as the meaningless words and phrases fill the airwaves, despite our front-row seats at the Biden administration’s seeming indifference to “the only democracy in the Middle East’s” nonstop slaughter of the innocent with American-made artillery. But only one side is “militant,” as usual.

This being an election year, American politicians fueled by lobbying funds (a misnomer for bribes) not only maintain a deathly silence, but actually seem to hope that the “chosen people” will be able to inflict the Last Days on all of Palestine.

Come November, Americans will again be asked for to vote for the “lesser evil,” after hearing again and again the thoroughly discredited assertion that “this is the most important election in American history,” as if doing so will humanize genocide, reclassify it as “a normal part of life.”

Let us Americans, irrespective of creed, be human. Let us consider humanity before we cast our votes.

Indeed, The Genocide needs a cover up. The British implantation in Occupied Palestine is de facto — a Western military base to advance their interests. In 1986, Sen. Biden (D-Del.) proclaimed, “Were there not an Israel, the United States of America would have to invent an Israel to protect her interests in the region.” 

More recently, the House of Representatives passed Rep. Jared Moskowitz’s (D-Fla.) amendment to H.R. 8771 H. Amdt.1052, which prohibits the State Department from citing statistics obtained from Gaza’s health officials. Such realities are hardly isolated. 

NATO governments’ media outlets continue their active collaboration. For example, Muhammed Bhar, a Gazan with Down syndrome, was attacked by an IDF dog and left to die; the headline (July 16) for that atrocity stated, “The lonely death of Gaza man with Down syndrome” — a great job of whitewashing!

Bhar had relied on family members to help him eat and drink. His family had to evacuate 15 times when the IDF entered Gaza City during late June. As we all know, thanks to on-the-ground social media reports, there have been constant similar deliberate tragedies. We should never forget that, according to various organizations, never have so many journalists been killed for piercing the propaganda wall raised by so many to keep the truth hidden.

Former ISNA-Canada vice presidents Syed Imtiaz Ahmed and Kathy Bullock donated their worthy time to inspire several writers in Canada to offer us a look into how that nation’s Muslims are dealing with their own challenges. Let’s learn and be inspired by each other to serve Islam, Muslims, and our neighbors.

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July/Aug 2024

The genocide in Gaza continues unabated, and American and British politicians continue to promote and benefit from it through their ever-more amazing verbal gymnastics.

The Zionist occupation junta and their AIPAC bribe-loving U.S. Congress, which some call The Knesset-on-the-Potomac, continue to do their best to divert the world’s attention elsewhere. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) has called for nuking Gaza. Netanyahu expelled Minister of Heritage Amichay Eliyahu for making the same comment. Surprisingly, or perhaps not, Graham retains his seat.

From mid-May, Zionist keyboard warriors unleashed their vitriol after Israel’s Eurovision entry didn’t win, due to “antisemitism.”  The U.K.’s Sunday Telegraph put the fifth-place Eurovision singer on its front page instead of the Swiss winner. Ironically, among its major investors is UAE vice president Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan.

After an initial show of fake concern over the Rafah invasion, by suspending the delivery of 1,800 2,000-pound bombs and 1,700 500-pound bombs, the U.S. has reverted to its regular ways. The Biden administration notified Congress on May 14 that it was moving forward with more than $1 billion in new weapons deals for Israel.

 According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI), in 2016 the U.S. and Israel signed a third 10-year agreement covering the 2018-28 period providing $33 billion in grants to buy military equipment and $5 billion for missile defense systems. Israel received 69% of its military aid from the U.S. during 2019-23.

Secretary State Blinken has noted that “in certain instances, Israel acted in ways that are not consistent with international humanitarian law” (CBS News, Face the Nation, May 12). A minor detail, perhaps?

In addition to the well-known AIPAC and ADL, many influential Zionist propaganda organizations are affecting all factors of American life. Among this is the online extremist Canary Mission (https://canarymission.org), whose raison d’être is to target and condemn any human rights advocacy for Palestine in North American academia and to meticulously document all scholarship and advocacy remotely critical of Israel or its primary paymaster, the U.S. Its website pulls no punches: It goes after “individuals and organizations that promote hatred of the USA, Israel and Jews on North American college campuses and beyond.”

Founded in 1982 as supposedly non-partisan defenders of the “truth” behind Zionism, the Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting and Analysis (CAMERA) is a media-monitoring, research and membership organization devoted to promoting Israel-centric coverage. Its tentacles include Camera on Campus that, like other anti-Palestine groups, deliberately ignores the very well-known history of Israel’s ethnic cleansing of Palestine, mass confiscation of Palestinian lands thanks to the U.S.-funded settler movement, and other illegal actions.

And then there’s the Middle East Media Research Institute, officially the Middle East Media and Research Institute (MEMRI), a U.S.-based go-to mistranslation source. Co-founded in 1997 by Israeli ex-intelligence officer Yigal Carmon and Israeli American political scientist Meyrav Wurmser, this nonprofit focuses on press monitoring and analysis organization. 

Lobbyists are no strangers to Washington’s halls of power. Just consider AIPAC, whose first “kill” occurred in 1982 when their contributions enabled Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) to de-seat Rep. Paul Findley (R-Ill), who was viewed as pro-Palestine. Durbin is now that state’s senator.

Some 46 years later, AIPAC assumed full control of the Senate, the House of Representatives and the state houses.

Isn’t it time for Muslims to begin finding ways to gain some political influence in Washington and on the street? In 2010, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission overruled an earlier decision, Austin v. Michigan State Chamber of Commerce (Austin), that sought to limit the amount of political donations by corporations. 

One result of this decision is abundantly clear: In November, Americans, especially Muslim Americans, will be faced with ideological “choices” that are, at best, disturbing. The scene is intimidating, but the time to start working is now.

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May/Jun 2024

The Genocide continues. As this issue goes to press, nearly 1.8 million Palestinians are cooped up in Rafah. So far, 32,000 and counting have been slaughtered under the guise of eliminating Hamas — the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiya (Islamic Resistance Movement). At the onset of The Genocide, it was stated that Hamas’s armed forces, under the name Al-Qassam Brigades, numbered 15,000 men.

Before The Genocide, Rafah, a 25 square-mile city in Gaza’s southernmost part, housed about 200,000 people and had a population density of 7,000 people per square mile. Today, nearly 1.5 million Palestinians are sheltering there.

Before the U.S. marked “abstain” on the UN Security Council ceasefire vote, Congress passed a bipartisan bill, which President Biden signed into law, giving Israel another $3.3 billion. Such cash handouts are in addition to the periodic weapons transfers. AIPAC triumphantly announced that the handout is “without added political conditions.” Israeli and American Jews, many of them dual citizens, blamed the UN vote on Democrats looking for votes in swing states like Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin.

The Genocide continues, irrespective of the semantic campaigns denying it as such. Before The Genocide, over 2 million Gazans lived in approximately 141 square miles. Its largest city, Gaza City, had a higher population density than any major U.S. city, including Los Angeles — 650,000+ people living within its 18 square miles.

Skeptics were asking what the rallies in the U.S. would accomplish. The reality is that this resolution – innocuous as it — comes after months of public pressure, activism and organizing by millions of Americans and the global community demanding an end to The Genocide.

The Palestinian Representative to the UN Security Council, Ambassador Riad Mansour, stated, “It has taken 6 months, over 100,000 Palestinians killed and maimed, 2 million displaced, and famine, for this council to finally demand an immediate ceasefire.”

The U.S. had vetoed three UNSC resolutions asking for a ceasefire. This heartlessness was not only intrinsic, but also shaped by lobbying. Luke Peterson notes that lobbying remains part and parcel of our government’s function, as well as an essential pillar of the American system, a legitimated form of barely regulated bribery enshrined within the right “to petition the Government for a redress of grievances” and sustained by generations of legal precedent self-sustaining policy decisions.

On Jan. 21, 2010, the Supreme Court’s ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a controversial (5:4) decision that reversed century-old campaign finance restrictions, enabled corporations and other outside groups to spend unlimited funds on elections. The gates were opened, and politicians began — and still are — brazenly taking in millions to dance to their giver’s tune.

This has been more than evident in The Genocide.

It behooves all Americans to strive to end this abhorrent situation, because it makes all talk about “democracy” meaningless. As Exodus 23:8 states so clearly, “Take no bribes, for a bribe makes you ignore something that you clearly see. A bribe makes even a righteous person twist the truth.”

This struggle is also a duty upon Muslims, for as the Quran 2:188 proclaims, “And do not consume one another’s wealth unjustly or send it [in bribery] to the rulers in order that [they might aid] you [to] consume a portion of the wealth of the people in sin, while you know [it is unlawful].” Abdullah bin ‘Amr also narrated that the Prophet (salla Allahu ‘alayhi wa sallam) warned, “The curse of God is upon the one who offers a bribe and the one who takes it” (“Musnad Ahmad” [6984] and “Sunan Ibn Majah” [2313]).

We at Islamic Horizons pray that God hears and answers the prayers of the oppressed. 

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Mar/Apr 2024

The barbarism in occupied Palestine continues unabated. While the genocide demolishes the “humanitarian” image certain countries project for themselves, thousands of humans are ironically considered ineligible to be called “human” by other humans. 

The carnage enjoys the full support of the U.S. and its closest ally, the U.K., both of which attempt to cloud the ongoing reality via verbal gymnastics. It’s self-enrichment versus humanity. For example, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has unequivocally backed the Zionist war on Gaza, while his wife’s family has been profiting from a business that operates in occupied Palestine and has appointed Israeli military intelligence veterans to senior positions.

During 2022, AIPAC and other pro-Israel PACS gave $9,633,460 to both Republican and Democratic lawmakers. Addressing the Saban Forum in 2014 (“Stormy Seas: The United States and Israel in a Tumultuous Middle East”), Biden mentioned that Netanyahu has been a “personal friend” for 30 years whom he “loves.” He also mentioned that the U.S. gives Israel $8.5 million a day.

A self-declared Zionist throughput his long political career, Biden believes that “It’s overwhelmingly in the self-interest of the United States of America to have a secure, democratic friend, a strategic partner like Israel. As I said, it’s no favor. It’s an obligation, but it’s also a strategic necessity.”

This crazed support for Palestine’s occupation has deep roots. In 1844, Christian restorationist George Bush (professor of Hebrew, New York University), distantly related to the Bush political family, published “The Valley of Vision; or, The Dry Bones of Israel Revived.” In it, he denounced “the thralldom and oppression which has so long ground them (the Jews) to the dust,” and called for “elevating [them] to a rank of honorable repute among the nations of the earth” by restoring them to the land of Israel, “where the bulk would be converted to Christianity.” 

The genocide in Gaza has also created an environment of increased Islamophobia and hate crimes against Muslims. CAIR states that they have received 2,171 complaints of Islamophobia and anti-Arab bias since October 7, an increase of 172% from 2023. 

One wonders what Muslims have done to even to dent such skewered supposition and if it isn’t it time to think and act.

Aslam Abdullah explains that weaponization of a Hindu religious myth to fan hatred against Islam and Muslims in that country and to reassert upper caste hegemony.

India’s 20+ million Muslims continue to deal with Hindutva via the ruling extremist Bharatiya Janata Party and ever-rising Islamophobia. Some are being lynched supposedly just for eating beef. On January 22, the Ram Temple was inaugurated on the site of the destroyed 600-year-old Babri Mosque, alleged to be the mythical god’s birthplace. 

In its 1,045-page 2019 verdict, India’s Supreme Court agreed that the ruins of an ancient religious structure under an existing building does not always indicate that it was demolished by unfriendly powers. But such is the BJP’s hold that the [Indian] National Herald withdrew its articles critical of the judgment and issued an apology after facing criticism on social media and from the BJP. 

Following Modi’s consecration of the temple, extremist groups weaponized ensuing celebrations and convened massive processions to attack Muslims and destroy Muslim-owned businesses, homes and mosques. BJP lawmaker Nitesh Rane threatened to “find and kill” those who had erected defensive barricades to protect a Muslim neighborhood in Mumbai. On Jan. 25, the Washington Post reported that he later ordered state bulldozers to destroy structures belonging to 55 Muslim merchants.

In the U.S., politicians such as Maryland governor Wes Moore (D) celebrated the temple. The OIC denounced these actions “aimed at obliterating the Islamic landmarks…” So once again the question arises: What have Muslims done to educate fellow Americans about the rising Hindu extremism?

Politicians do it for money, but an educated electorate may perhaps move them.

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July/August 2023

While you will be reading this issue, ISNA staff, the Convention Program Committee (CPC) and ISNA friends in Chicago are fervently putting the final touches  to welcome attendees from across North America.

The upcoming event is a landmark moment, the 60th year of ISNA’s founding as a student body. It has grown and continues to blossom forth.

In keeping with this year’s Convention theme, “Sixty Years of Service: Navigating the Way Forward,” the CPC has come up with a convention program with a dual purpose in sight.

We look forward to hosting you in Chicago this Labor Day weekend.

In May, more than 300 educators gathered in Chicago for ISNA’s 24th Educational Forum. With a theme focusing on enriching students’ lives, teachers and administrators from across the country learned about various topics in curriculum, Islamic studies, Arabic, and leadership. The highlight of the celebration banquet was the enthusiastic Keynote Speaker, Nabeela Syed, the first Muslim and youngest-ever member of the Illinois State Legislature.

In April, Islamic Horizons welcomed Kiran Ansari as assistant editor. She has a rich background in the field and will add to the magazine’s offerings.

A reality exists and, in this issue, we talk about it: single parenting. Whatever the reasons may be but more than often, in the Muslim community, single mothers and fathers feel stigmatized. While the acceptance may be improving slightly, there is still a lot of work that needs to be done. The community needs to invest time and money in creating special programs specifically for single parents. We need more support from the mimbars (pulpit) and stories about brave single parents in Islamic history.

Fawzia Mai Tung takes us on a wonderful journey to the birthplace of apples. Or should we say, the real apple! Taking an arduous journey, she examines many aspects and offers her observation that commercial apple orchards causing a natural crossing of cultivated and wild apples, threaten Eastern Kazakhstan’s centuries-old natural fruit. 

It may surprise many of us that the tentacles of Hindu caste discrimination have been spreading in the United States. Shakeel Syed shares that unable to exercise their right to protest in India, the caste-oppressed Dalits – the lowest in the caste system — in the U.S. have started speaking up against the age-old discrimination and oppression. American and Canadian cities and states are moving forward to confront this violative system. The state of California became the latest when Aisha Wahab, a refugee from Afghanistan and a first-time elected California Senator, successfully advanced her bill SB-403 out of the State Senate voting 34-1 to ban caste-based discrimination.

Lisa Kahler shares that Islamic presence south of the border is much larger than many may assume. She talks about the cross border support for the growing Latino Muslim community and how institutions based in Southern California are working in a variety of ways to support Latino Muslims.

The trials and tribulations of Muslims living in Muslim states continue. Tunisia is one such example. Monia Mazigh tells us what pain the police state is casting on its people.

Prof. Khaled A. Beydoun states that the recent wave of optimism surrounding new Saudi-Iran relations demands a critical examination that transcends the surface-level narrative of reconciliation. While it is tempting to view the thawing of tensions as a positive development for regional stability, a closer look reveals underlying motives and complexities that warrant skepticism.

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In April, Islamic Horizons welcomed Kiran Ansari to join ISNA’s flagship publication as the Assistant Editor. Ansari has been contributing to the magazine for close to two decades as a freelance writer. She hopes to add value by recruiting more fresh voices and varied content. Her area of expertise is human interest stories.

“I look forward to working under the guidance of Brother Omer bin Abdullah and increasing the print and digital readership of Islamic Horizons,” Ansari said. “There is so much valuable information in these pages that it has to reach more homes across North America.”

Previously, Ansari served as the Editor of the Chicago Crescent newspaper. For three years she was in charge of the monthly newspaper of the Council of Islamic Organizations of Greater Chicago.She has also written about Muslims in America for the Chicago Tribune, Daily Herald, and Chicago Parent among others. 

Born in Pakistan and raised in the U.A.E, she has been calling Chicago home since 1999. She lives in the suburbs with her three children.

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By Ahmed Shaikh

May/June 2023

In 2021, the Khalil Center, Maristan Muslim and other mental health organizations publicized a statement in the Journal of the American Medical Association Psychiatry (JAMA; 2021 Sep; 78(9): 1041–1044.) that Muslims are far more suicidal than non-Muslims or atheists. They then spread this claim throughout much of the media to raise money, especially zakat.

Upon closer inspection, this deeply unethical claim came about due to conflicts of interest and cooking numbers to get a contrived result, followed by outright fraud.

An Opinion Poll

The Institute for Social Policy and Understanding (ISPU) annual “American Muslim Poll” selects a small sample to arrive at generalized conclusions. As with all polls, there is a margin of error.

In 2019, part of the process involved the Institute of Muslim Mental Health (Dr. Hamada Altalib), the Stanford Muslim Mental Health & Islamic Psychology Lab (Dr. Rania Awaad) and the Khalil Center (Dr. Hooman Keshavarzi), who purchased questions on suicide from ISPU to be included in the survey, which focuses on Jews, Muslims and the “general population.”

They found that 7.9% of Muslims, 5.1% of Protestants, 6.1% of Catholics and 3.6% of Jews reported trying to kill themselves at some point. While this is not twice as many Muslims attempting suicide as others, it does look like Muslims in the sample attempted suicide at a higher rate. However, according to ISPU, these numbers are meaningless because the margins of error were quite large. So, comparing the groups with the largest gaps, Jews and Muslims, is actually something not worth discussing. The margin of error for the Muslim survey was ±4.9%, while for Jews it was a whopping ±7.6%.

Indeed, when ISPU first announced the results of their 2019 Muslim poll, they did not mention suicide at all, as doing so would have been pointless.

The authors of the JAMA article used another method to compare religion and suicide attempts. They compared a reference group — Protestants — to Muslims, calculating an “odds ratio.” The authors found that the numbers had a statistically insignificant p-value of 0.1. So, unless they had another way to calculate the rate of suicide among members of different religions, they were out of luck. As it happens, though, they devised a way to adjust the numbers and get headline-grabbing results.

Adjusting for Unknown Demographic Factors

The claim that Muslims were twice as likely as others to attempt suicide was the result of “adjusting for demographic factors” for which the authors had no data. They used “regression analysis” — a technique to adjust for race. This technique found that Muslims are twice as likely to attempt suicide as are non-Muslims.

In a comment and a long-form analysis, Dr. Osman Umarji (statistician and scholar, the Yaqeen Institute) made two important criticisms: (1) Since the authors started with nothing, it was inappropriate for them to perform a “regression analysis” and (2) they were doing regression analysis for non-existent variables. One of the biggest problems here was considering “Arab” as a race — a race assumed to be exclusively Muslim, which is not the case. The ISPU data that the authors worked with contained no non-Muslim Arabs, which caused a “correlation” between the groups “Muslim” and “Arab” (Dr. Umarji’s full reanalysis can be found at tinyurl.com/4n2j6buk).

Regression analysis isn’t designed to work with data that is incomplete in a way that causes a correlation. Statisticians call this effect, which is a little bit like stacking the deck, a “suppressor effect.”

Attack in Public, Agree in Private

Umarji was attacked vigorously online by the study’s authors — Awaad accused him of peddling “disinformation” and Altalib accused him of lying. The authors claimed they had three unnamed statisticians from top institutions look at the numbers, all of whom reportedly deemed the “suppressor effect” found by Umarji “baseless.”

The problem was that before the authors accused Umarji, they had privately written a response to JAMA and conceded that he did have a point about the suppressor effect: “In this sample, being Arab may be a confounder and serve as a suppressor variable. However, as we argue above, it is critical to include race in the model so that readers can see the potential effect. Our intent of publishing this Research Letter is to draw attention to an under-recognized issue and promote further discourse on suicide across communities” (emphasis added).

Elsewhere, the authors claim that a “suppressor” may be a good thing for reasons that appear hypothetical and not grounded in fact. So, they contrived a “fact” that Muslims were twice as likely as others to attempt suicide to “promote further discourse.” One would hope that the envisioned discourse would be based on facts and not fiction.

If you run an organization that advocates for the view that Muslim mental health is in horrible shape and your organization happens to offer a solution — if we send you more money — that may very well color what your research results will look like. A Muslim mental health advocacy group is unlikely to herald a study finding that Muslims attempt suicide at the same rates as everyone else or that they ran the numbers and have no idea about anything either way (leaving aside the question of who would publish such a thing).

The Incredible Shrinking P-Value

One area where the authors did push back both privately and publicly (in a public comment to the JAMA article) was the notion that it was improper for them to do a regression analysis in the first place when they started with nothing.

They claimed that they had in fact started with something — the odds ratios I told you about earlier. The odds ratios had a p-value (for probability) of 0.1 with the reference group, Protestants. Thus, the authors had only statistical noise. However, apparently to bolster their argument while attacking Umarji, they brazenly changed the p-value to 0.05 with no explanation for why an already published number was changed. In other words, they were defending their work with a fake number.

From the JAMA article with the “unadjusted odds ratio.” I point to the critical p-value, which shows no statistical significance.

“Changing the ‘p-value’ here appears to be an attempt to defend doing ‘regression analysis.’ Without the numbers needed to create something that could be published in a medical journal, they ‘tortured’ the data to make it happen. If you torture the data enough, it’ll tell you whatever you want to hear.”

Driven by Conflicts of Interest

Here is the claim (from the JAMA article) that funders had no role:

Dr. Keshavarzi and Dr. Awaad failed to disclose the obvious conflicts of interest (https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/2712191). Both belong to organizations that stood to benefit from their claims.

The authors also claimed that the funders — the organizations headed by the authors themselves — of the study had no role in the “design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review or approval of the manuscript; and the decision to submit the manuscript for publication.”

“Funding/Support: The Stanford Muslim Mental Health & Islamic Psychology Lab, the Khalil Center, and the Institute for Muslim Mental Health contributed funding to include mental health-related questions in the Institute for Social Policy and Understanding national survey. Role of the Funder/Sponsor: The funders had no role in the design and conduct of the study: collection, management, analysis, and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the manuscript; and decision to submit the manuscript for publication. Additional Contributions: We would like to thank the support of the Institute of Muslim Mental Health, the Stanford Muslim Mental Health & Islamic Psychology Lab, and the Khalil Center.”

All three funding organizations were headed by article’s authors. In the same article, it’s clear that the authors were involved with all aspects of the study:

“Author Contributions: Dr Awaad had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis. Concept and design: Awaad, Keshavarzi, Mogahed, Altalib. Acquisition, analysis, or interpretation of data: Awaad, El-Gabalawy, Jackson-Shaheed, Zia, Altalib. Drafting of the manuscript: Awaad, El-Gabalawy, Jackson-Shaheed, Zia, Keshavarzi. Critical revision of the manuscript for important intellectual content: Awaad, El-Gabalawy, Zia, Mogahed, Altalib. Statistical analysis: El-Gabalawy, Jackson-Shaheed, Zia. Obtained funding: Awaad, Altalib. Administrative, technical, or material support: Awaad, El-Gabalawy, Keshavarzi, Mogahed. Supervision: Awaad, Altalib.”

Virtually nothing about this study looks right. The claim was contrived, and much of the Muslim mental health sector comes out looking bad here.

What about Mental Health?

Awaad and the other JAMA Psychiatry paper authors produced a conclusion about Muslim Americans they could not legitimately support and then lied to support it. There should be no confusion about this.

The authors hyped this in the media and raised money, including zakat. They took full advantage of their obvious conflicts of interest, which they did not bother to disclose, slandered a Muslim scholar when they knew he was telling the truth and privately admitted as much. They then doctored the results of a p-value to make themselves look good. Our community needs to know about this, even if it means that the public will have less confidence in Muslim mental health professionals.

When we discuss the stigma surrounding mental health, it doesn’t mean that Muslims fail to seek mental health because they are ignorant. Rather, it’s because of a long history of mental health professionals using mental health as a cover for nefarious purposes, including episodes in recent history like torturing Muslims (www.nytimes.com, May 1, 2015) and Countering Violent Extremism (https://muslimjusticeleague.org/for-health-care-professionals/). Stigma comes from dishonest efforts like the Muslim suicide study.

Unfortunately, too many Muslim donors, especially zakat donors, as well as imams have been taken in by this sham.

Muslim mental health professionals can be a benefit to society. This is more likely to happen without lying and cheating.

Ahmed Shaikh is an estate planning attorney in Southern California and the co-author of “Estate Planning for the Muslim Client” (ABA Publishing, 2019). This article is adapted from his newsletter on Muslim nonprofits and leadership, which is available at ehsan.substack.com.

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