Shahier Rahman (front left) poses with his fellow FSU teammates after winning the mock trial competition.

Shahier Rahman, a hafiz Qur’an, and a member of Jama Masjid, Orlando, won the “Outstanding Attorney Award” at the 29th American Mock Trial Association National Championship Tournament, held in Washington, D.C. this past weekend.

Furthermore, Shahier was the captain of the Florida State’s mock trial team that won the 29th American Mock Trial Association National Championship Tournament. It is the 1st time that Florida became National Champion. With formidable teams such as Duke, Harvard, Princeton, UCLA, UC Irvine, University of Virginia and Yale attending the tournament, the team from Florida, under the leadership of Shahier, wiped the floor with them, earning the title of National Champions.

Shahier worked as the campaign coordinator for downtown Orlando when President Obama was running for the office in 2008. He introduced the President at the Orlando downtown rally. He currently works for the Florida Senate.

Shahier Rahman completed the memorization of the Holy Qur’an at Darul Hifz in 2003 and excelled in Academics thereby went in pursuit of becoming a Lawyer.

15-18

Yes, of course terrorism is real. But that doesn’t mean the hawkish approach to counterterrorism hasn’t been discredited.

By Conor Friedersdorf

The self-assurance of War on Terror hawks is one of the most peculiar phenomena in our politics. You’d think that the failure to foresee or stop the biggest terrorist attack ever carried out on U.S. soil would’ve caused guys like Dick Cheney to question their own geopolitical prescience. Instead, they immediately began urging the invasion of Iraq they’d long desired, insisting it was necessary to keep Americans safe. They got their war. As efforts to “keep us safe” go, it was a spectacular failure: Almost 4,500 Americans died in Iraq. More than 30,000 were wounded. Despite deaths and casualties far greater than on 9/11, the hawks insist to this day that Iraq was a prudent war. They’re ideologues who can’t see or won’t admit failures, facts be damned.

Don’t forget that.

In the wake of the Boston Marathon, the War on Terror hawks are speaking out with characteristic bluster. An uninformed observer might easily mistake their certainty for wisdom or competence. There is, in fact, no reason to trust their judgment on foreign policy or counterterrorism. Their dearth of self-doubt should be unnerving, not reassuring. And most Americans will recognize as much, so long as they’re reminded of the catastrophic policies the hawks unapologetically advocated, the many times their predictions have proven wrong, and the logical flaws in the arguments that they’ve been making in response to last week’s terrorist attack.

One ongoing controversy concerns whether the criminal justice system is capable of grappling with terrorists. Cheney himself warned against a law-enforcement approach to terrorism in a 2009 speech, and much of Congress is averse to trying accused terrorists in the federal court system. You’d think that law enforcement’s success apprehending the Tsarnaev brothers, the elder brother’s death, and the solid evidence against the younger brother would suggest that the criminal justice system is in fact capable of bringing terrorists, or at least these particular suspects, to justice.
John Yoo thinks this case shows the inadequacy of the law-and-order approach.

“How is this a victory for traditional law enforcement?” he asks in an item at the American Enterprise Institute’s blog. “Two young brothers, lightly armed, killed several innocent civilians, wounded 170, killed an officer and wounded another, and shut down one of America’s great cities. We had a whole city trapped in its homes and paramilitary forces in its streets. Law enforcement alone means the nation lies vulnerable to attacks on soft targets and must expend enormous resources to catch the killers afterwards. A pre-emptive strategy based on intelligence and the use of force overseas seeks to prevent such attacks further from our shores. That option should be preferred by everyone compared to what we’ve seen in Boston these last five days.”

What a slippery rhetorician. Obviously, the United States should preempt terrorist attacks using intelligence when possible. Does anyone disagree? Can anyone deny that we already dedicate significant resources to intelligence gathering? Yoo writes as if that wasn’t happening prior to Boston. For years now, we’ve also been preemptively using force overseas. The drone war waged in Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere didn’t stop the Tsarnaevs. And it is difficult to imagine any preemptive war that could have stopped two legal residents of the U.S. from attacking their city. Exactly which country would Yoo have had us invade to stop those bombs? But never mind. Yoo has an ideological predisposition to preemptive war. So he implies that it would’ve made us safer in this case, even though that makes no sense given the facts. It should also be noted that the Tsarnaevs did not shut down a major American city. Boston wasn’t shut down by their bombs. The day after the marathon, Bostonians kept calm and carried on.

The suspects were still at large, and at that point, unknown. The Tsarnaevs failed to shut down Boston with their violent act. Once they were flushed out of hiding and killed a police officer at MIT, once they engaged in a shootout with police, leaving one of them dead, authorities made a decision. Whether prudently or overzealously, it was U.S. authorities who decided to shut down Boston. Since Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found hiding in a Watertown backyard, apparently wounded, it seems that shutting down Greater Boston, however understandable, didn’t save any lives. In hindsight, shutting down a single Watertown neighborhood would’ve been sufficient.

Another ongoing controversy concerns the relationship between Islam and terrorism. No one denies that there are Islamist radicals who regard us as enemies. Mark Steyn wants to go a step farther:

The Tsarnaev brothers had spent most of their lives in the United States, and lived the diversity dream. They seem to have had a droll wit when it comes to symbolism: Last year, the younger brother took his oath of citizenship and became an American on September 11. And, in their final hours of freedom, they added a cruel bit of mockery to their crimes by carjacking a getaway vehicle with a “Co-exist” bumper sticker. Oh, you must have seen them: I bet David Sirota has one. The “C” is the Islamic crescent, the “O” is the hippy peace sign; the “X” is the Star of David, the “T” is the Christian cross; I think there’s some LGBT, Taoist, and Wiccan stuff in there, too. They’re not mandatory on vehicles in Massachusetts; it just seems that way. I wonder, when the “Co-exist” car is returned to its owner, whether he or she will keep the bumper sticker in place. One would not expect him to conclude, as the gays of Amsterdam and the Jews of Toulouse and the Christians of Egypt have bleakly done, that if it weren’t for that Islamic crescent you wouldn’t need a bumper sticker at all. But he may perhaps have learned that life is all a bit more complicated than the smiley-face banalities of the multicultists.

Multiculturalism is its own ideology with its own flaws. Publicly urging Muslims, Christians, Jews, and other ethnic, religious, and ideological groups to coexist peacefully is not one of those flaws. Why would Steyn, surveying all possible targets in this fallen world, choose “Co-exist” to mock, as if the wisdom of merely urging co-existence could be disproved by two terrorists? I suppose a traditionalist conservative could be forgiven for shaking his head wistfully at that bumper sticker. “If only. Alas, the crooked timber of humanity will always war with one another.” In place of that tragic view, Steyn gives us farce, implying that, but for Islam, all others would live in peaceful coexistence, an implication so silly that he wouldn’t dare to state it plainly.

Elsewhere at National Review, Andrew McCarthy, author of a book that posits President Obama is allied with our Islamist enemy in a “grand jihad” against America, has published a column titled, “Jihad Will Not Be Wished Away,” though no one in America has ever argued that it will.

He writes:

Our enemies’ ideology is Islamic supremacism. To challenge and defeat an ideological movement, you have to understand and confront their vision of the world. Imposing your own assumptions and biases will not do. Islamic supremacists do not see a world of Westphalian nation-states. They do not distinguish between Russia and America the way they distinguish between Muslims and non-Muslims. Their ideology frames matters as Dar al-Islamversus Dar al-Harb: the realm of Islam in a fight to the death against the realm of war — which is everyone and everyplace else.

In fact, even if it turns out that Tsarnaev brothers perpetrated a terrorist attack with the struggle in Chechnya specifically in mind — which is far from clear at this point — the fact would remain that the vast majority of Chechen terroristshave distinguished between America, which they haven’t attacked, and Russia, their constant enemy. There are Islamist radicals out there who aspire to global Islamic supremacy, of course, but the vast majority of Chechen fighters would stop fighting if Chechen independence was achieved; the vast majority of Palestinians would stop fighting if their conflict with Israel was resolved; the vast majority of fighters in Iraq will stop trying to kill Americans once we leave. The fact that McCarthy thinks all those fighting us share a single vision of the world is telling. His ideological notions about the War on Terror blind him to the facts. 

Next up is Bill Kristol, writing in The Weekly Standard. The bulk of his column accuses President Obama of lacking the moral clarity to fight the war on terrorism, not because of something he did, or even something he said, but based on the response his spokesperson gave to a reporter’s question.

Elsewhere in the same article, Kristol states:

Haven’t conservatives also lapsed into silence about the barbarians outside? Bush’s “war on terror” has been much mocked, and not just by liberals. Of course the idea is too abstract. Still, on the big question Bush was right. Terror is real, and terrorists must be defeated. Bush’s failure was to stop short in 2004, when he had the terror sponsors on their heels, and to allow them to regain momentum. That momentum has accelerated under President Obama.

Need it really be said?

Everyone save the stray 9/11 truther knows that terrorism (and “terror” itself, for that matter) is real. Of course Bush got that right. Something everyoneknows to be true is not, by definition, a big question. And I don’t know what’s worse, pretending that “terror is fake” is a competing ideology, or really believing that it is. Oklahoma City happened. 9/11 happened. Bali, Madrid, and London happened. Find me anyone, fringe conspiracy-theorists aside, who claims otherwise. Kristol can’t do it. He makes his views seem hardheaded by pretending that the perfectly obvious is a matter of controversy. He raises Mission Accomplished banners over straw men.

Then there’s the other part of his formulation: “Terrorists must be defeated.” Does that mean that people who commit terrorist attacks should be captured or killed? Again, that’s not controversial. Does it mean that all terrorist attacks “must” be preemptively stopped? That’s impossible. Kristol’s formulation of “the big question” is analytically useless. And as I’ve documented at length, his predictions are proven wrong by events as often as any pundit in America.

In an item that actually made several good points, Max Boot engages in the same “terrorism is real” rhetoric. “This terrible bombing has shattered our post-9/11 complacency,” he writes. “There has been a tendency to think that because Osama bin Laden has been killed and there has been no repeat of 9/11 that the threat from terrorism is overhyped. There have been calls to shutter Guantanamo’s detention facility, to stop renditions of suspects, to scale back interrogation and surveillance of suspects, to stop drone strikes and even to repeal the authorization for the use of military force …. We do not yet know if the Tsarnaevs had contact with any terrorist network but, whatever its origins, their attack shows that the threat from terrorism remains real — and that it is not only our airliners that are in the terrorists’ crosshairs. We cannot afford to let down our guard or to repeal the measures that have kept us (relatively) safe since 9/11. Indeed we may need to step up security around ‘soft targets,’ which abound in our large and open country.”

Notice how the whole paragraph is structured as if accepting that “the threat from terrorism remains real,” which no one ever doubted, means embracing Boot’s very particular approach to counterterrorism. He writes as if his critics disagree with his proscriptions because they  think terrorism is fake.

Of course, his critics know full well that terrorism is real. They just believe counterterrorism as Boot would conduct it is immoral and ineffective — that drone strikes which kill hundreds of innocent people, holding prisoners without charges or trial for years on end (even after they’ve been cleared for release by U.S. officials), detainee abuse, and torture are likely to create more terrorists. (As far as I know, nearly everyone in America favors “interrogation and surveillance of suspects.”)

Notice how Boot says the Tsarnaevs are evidence in favor of his worldview regardless of the facts that come out in the future. Also note that, contra Boot, the United States wasn’t “complacent” about terrorism before the Boston bombing. Ask anyone who traveled there on an airplane. Look at how much is spent on counterterrorism in the U.S. budget. Interview any national-security official, or the chief of any big-city police department. Anyone can question the wisdom of our counterterrorism policies, as I often do. To charge that they’re characterized by complacency?

The facts don’t support that conclusion.

Every War on Terror hawk mentioned in this column has a long list of predictions they’ve made about foreign policy and geopolitics, only to see them proved definitely wrong by subsequent events. None of them is among the pundits who grappled with their past errors in any meaningful way. Their pronouncements today are as untempered by self doubt as they ever were. If past performance meant anything in the pundit’s game, their past punditry (and Yoo’s discredited Bush-era legal analysis) would’ve long since stripped them of “War on Terror expert” status.

They’re nevertheless regarded as experts on the right, despite the fact that they treat disagreement with their ideas as if it proves that their interlocutor is unaware that terrorism is a threat. Their most frequent targets are pretend. They can’t conceive of the fact that other people who take terrorism as seriously as they do reach dramatically different conclusions about the best way to respond to it.

As a point of contrast to their unearned self-assurance, it’s worth looking at one more column from the aftermath of the Boston bombing. It ran alongside the Steyn and McCarthy pieces in National Review.

Daniel Foster is young enough that, insofar as I know, he wasn’t around to get anything right or wrong during the early stages of the War on Terrorism. He nevertheless proceeds as if he’s learned a lesson his colleagues haven’t. “The desire to read one’s political biases into acts of violence is unfortunate and, unfortunately, bipartisan,” he writes. “But if there is any little thing to be thankful for about the case of Tamerlan and Dzhokhar, it’s that it defies easy classification. Those who try to tell a simple story about who they were or why they resorted to terrorism will end up like the six blind men and the elephant: each partially in the right, and all in the wrong.”

In these pages, I’ve been a consistent critic of President Obama’s approach to the War on Terror. Conservatives won’t succeed in offering America anything better until the geopolitical thinkers who got so much wrong during the Bush years learn some humility — or are no longer treated, within their movement, as “experts” who never got huge questions wrong.

15-18

By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Wayward Pakistani cricketers Salman Butt and Mohammad Asif have lost their appeals at the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), thus resulting in their bans from cricket being upheld.  Ex-Pakistan captain Butt, bowler Asif and team-mate Mohammad Amir were found guilty of “spot-fixing” (deliberate bowled no-balls for betting purposes) in 2011. They were subsequently convicted and jailed in November of that year.

Butt, 28, is banned for 10 years by the International Cricket Council (ICC), with five years of the penalty suspended. He is reportedly “bitterly disappointed” and his legal team plan to continue to fight the ban. “In the coming days and weeks, we will be exploring every other available avenue,” said one of his legal team. Butt’s legal advisor Amer Rahman added: “Salman has been in a very dark place over the last few years and he was hoping that he would be successful in this appeal.”

CAS stated that Butt did not contest his liability in the case but had requested a shortening of the ban, while Asif had request the annulment of the ICC’s decision on procedural grounds. Swing bowler Asif is banned for seven years, two of which are suspended.  The CAS statement said: “The CAS panel was not persuaded that the sanction imposed by the ICC Tribunal was disproportionate, nor that any of the mitigating factors advanced by Mr Butt qualified as exceptional circumstances. The CAS panel found that there was no evidence advanced by Mr Asif which clearly exculpated him and that his submissions did not break the chain of circumstantial evidence or in any way undermine the reasoning contained in the ICC Tribunal’s decision. For those reasons, the panel was satisfied beyond reasonable doubt that Mr Asif was a party to the spot-fixing conspiracy.” Amir, who was 18 at the time of the offense, was banned for five years. But, he did not appeal his ban.

“All Salman has ever wanted is to play the sport he loves. It is therefore extremely disappointing that the decision has gone against him,” said Daniel Rajah, Butt’s attorney. Butt himself was reflective, and cited the “glorious uncertainties” that make cricket so great. “Looks like I won’t get to play for another two and a half years, by which time I’ll be 30,” he said, before adding: “Isn’t that glorious? Who could have predicted this a few years ago? God, I love this game!” Butt reportedly interrupted himself to do a cartwheel out of joy at the sheer thrill of the unexpected, and added: “I swear, one day you’re on top of the world, captaining Pakistan and trying to make a little extra cash on the side, and the next, you’re hauled into court for it. I’ll say one thing about this game: It certainly keeps you on your toes!”

15-18

By Parvez Fatteh, Founder of http://sportingummah.com, sports@muslimobserver.com

Pakistani tennis star Aisam-ul-Haq Qureshi continues to climb up the Association of Tennis Professions (ATP) world tennis rankings. Qureshi dropped singles tennis years ago to concentrate on being a doubles specialist. And now he and his Dutch partner, Jean-Julien Rojer, have broken into the top three of the ATP doubles rankings. They are behind only the vaunted Bryan brothers of the United States at the top spot, and the Spanish pair of Marcel Granollers and Marc Lopez in the second position.

Qureshi and Rojer are ranked number three with 1510 points. They scored a large amount of points by winning the Miami Open last month, their third overall doubles title together (they won tournaments in Halle, Germany and Estoril, Portugal in 2012). Most recently, however, Qureshi and Rojer lost last week in the quarter-finals of the Monte Carlo Masters.

Qureshi also moved up one spot in the top ten of the men’s doubles individual rankings, and is now ranked at number eight. He is also leading the charge as the Pakistani Davis Cup team appeals a tie that was awarded to New Zealand earlier this month based on a referee’s decision regarding an unplayable surface on a neutral site. Their Davis Cup tie with New Zealand was being played in Myanmar due to security concerns about playing in Pakistan. Pakistan was leading one match to none, when the Sri Lankan referre awarded the entire tie to New Zealand, citing Pakistan’s responsibility for the playing surface in their surrogate home court in Myanmar. The International Tennis Federation (ITF) Board of Directors will hear Pakistan’s appeal next month.

15-18

By Mariam Karouny and Erika Solomon

A Free Syrian Army fighter and a boy hold up weapons on a street at the Syrian town of Tel Abyad, near the border with Turkey, April 23, 2013. Picture taken April 23, 2013. REUTERS/Hamid Khatib

BEIRUT (Reuters) – Syrian forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad seized a strategic town east of Damascus on Wednesday, breaking a critical weapons supply route for the rebels, activists and fighters said.

Rebels have held several suburbs ringing the southern and eastern parts Damascus for months, but they have been struggling to maintain their positions against a ground offensive backed by fierce army shelling and air strikes in recent weeks.

“The disaster has struck, the army entered Otaiba. The regime has managed to turn off the weapons tap,” a fighter from the town told Reuters via Skype.

“The price of a bullet will go from 50 Syrian pounds to 1,000 Syrian pounds ($10) now, but we must pay and retake it. It’s the main if not the only route.”

Rebels said they pulled out of Otaiba, a gateway to the eastern rural suburbs of Damascus known as al-Ghouta, in the early hours after more than 37 days of fighting in which they accused the government of using chemical weapons against them twice.

The government has denied using chemical weapons and accused rebels in turn of firing them in Aleppo.

Rebels used Otaiba for eight months as their main supply route to Damascus for weapons brought in from the Jordanian border, where Saudi Arabia and other private donors are believed to be sending in arms.

Government forces pushed in with tanks and soldiers.

“Now all the villages will start falling one after another, the battle in Eastern Ghouta will be a war of attrition,” another fighter in the area said, speaking by Skype.

More than two years into their struggle to end four decades of Assad family rule, the rebels remain divided by struggles over ideology and fighting for power

Rebels fighting in Otaiba said they sent a distress call to brigades in other parts of Ghouta but it went unanswered by other units with whom they compete for influence and weapons.

“To all mujahedeen (holy warriors): If Otaiba falls, the whole of Eastern Ghouta will fall … come and help ,” part of the message sent to fighters said.

The army appears to have been advancing on fronts across Syria in recent weeks, even in northern provinces where rebels seized large swathes of territory.

Most critically, it has made gains around Damascus and the Lebanese-Syrian border – critical to linking the capital to coastal provinces that are Assad’s stronghold.

The coast is an enclave of Assad’s minority Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam. Alawites have dominated Syria’s power structures during four decades of Assad family rule.

Rebels, mostly from the Sunni Muslim majority, have seized territory in northern and southern Syria, and hold about half of Aleppo, the country’s biggest city. But Assad’s forces have kept control of the capital Damascus and most major cities.

Elsewhere in Damascus, two mortar bombs hit the government-held suburb of Jaramana, killing seven and wounding more than 25, activists and state media said. State news agency SANA blamed the attack on “terrorists”, the term it commonly uses to describe Assad’s armed opponents.

Some rebel units condemned the attack on Jaramana.

“Our brigade loudly condemns these criminal acts, which have nothing to do with Islam in any way,” the Saad bin Abada al-Khudraji brigade said.

Islamist rebel units said on Wednesday they had launched an offensive on the coastal province of Latakia, a move which could further stoke sectarian tensions in a war that has increasingly divided the country along religious and ethnic lines.

Islamist fighters said they had fired two rockets that hit the town of Qurdaha, the birthplace and burial site of Assad’s father, Hafez al-Assad, who ruled Syria for 30 years. Residents in Latakia province who spoke to Reuters by Skype said the rockets hit outside Qurdaha, in a rural area called Slunfeh.

It is impossible to verify the account due to government restrictions on media access in Syria.

Moscow was flying more Russians home after delivering humanitarian aid to Latakia, the Emergencies Ministry said. It was one of several government flights laid on in the past months by Russia, a long-standing arms supplier to Damascus.

The conflict has cost more than 70,000 lives and has also damaged or destroyed many archaeological and architectural treasures, some of them U.N. world heritage sites, such as Aleppo’s Old City where the mosque is located.

The 1,000-year-old minaret of Aleppo’s Umayyad Mosque has collapsed due to clashes between Syrian rebels and Assad’s forces, activists and state media said on Wednesday.

The opposing parties blamed the other for the toppling of the minaret, which predated the medieval-era mosque it stood in. Fighting has ravaged the Old City’s stone-vaulted alleyways for months and had already reduced much of the mosque to rubble.

SANA accused the Nusra Front, an al Qaeda-linked rebel group, of bringing down the minaret. Opposition groups said army tank fire was to blame.

(Editing by Alison Williams)

15-18

By Adil James, TMO

Bloomfield Hills–April 20–Saturday saw a frank and interesting discussion of divorce in the Muslim community with several speakers, and a fundraiser by the ISPU which intends to conduct a serious further scholarly study of divorce in the Muslim community.

This event was cosponsored by the ISPU and the MMCC.  The purpose of the study of divorce is of course to prevent it.

The keynote speaker was the University of Windsor law professor Julie MacFarlane, who conducted a several year long study of the intersection between Shari’ah and civil law in Canada and the US, interviewing imams, social workers, and divorced couples who operate at the intersection of Shari’ah and civil law.  Professor MacFarlane’s principal interest was the extent to which Shari’ah was used instead of civil law, and her principal finding was that Muslim couples who obtain divorces almost all of them, according to both Shari’ah and civil law.
She observed that Muslim divorces have similar causes to non-Muslim divorces, but noted that there is an increased causality towards divorce from differing gender expectations. Another primary issue she noticed is that Muslim couples who are in trouble frequently have nowhere to turn where they can obtain good solid help to solve their problems.

ISPU aims to remedy this problem, and is conducting a study to understand divorce in the Muslim community in America.  As a demonstration of the importance of providing marital counseling, a couple spoke at the event–relatively recently married, the couple had gone through a near divorce and then had come to reconciliation through counseling from a trained and understanding Muslim marital counselor. All those who spoke at the gathering noted the apparent increase in divorces among Muslims and the demoralizing impact of these divorces on the surrounding community.

15-18

By Martin Dokoupil and Marwa Rashad

A general view shows old buildings at the neighbourhood of Shmeisy in Riyadh April 22, 2013. A royal decree in Saudi Arabia has shaken up the way in which the government allocates vast tracts of land, removing an obstacle to a $67 billion programme to ease the country’s housing shortage. Picture taken April 22, 2013. REUTERS/Faisal Al Nasser

DUBAI/RIYADH, April 24 (Reuters) – A royal decree in Saudi Arabia has shaken up the way in which the government allocates vast tracts of land, removing an obstacle to a $67 billion programme to ease the country’s housing shortage.

King Abdullah originally announced the housing scheme in March 2011. His plan to build 500,000 homes over several years was part of a series of official steps to improve social welfare, at a time when social discontent was prompting uprisings in other Arab countries.

But the housing programme has been slow to get underway, partly because of difficulties in obtaining land – an example of how inefficiencies in Saudi Arabia’s economy can slow its growth, despite its oil wealth. Last week’s royal decree may push the programme forward by opening up thousands of acres of state-owned land for construction.

“The decree is an important step that begins to address the gap between demand and supply of land in order to begin building the amount of units promised,” said John Sfakianakis, chief investment strategist at MASIC, a Riyadh-based investment firm.

“It should eventually, as more allocations become available to the ministry of housing, bring down the price of land. Land prices, especially in Riyadh, can only come down if more land is made available as the majority of land still remains idle.”

SHORTAGE

Saudi Arabia has lagged poorer countries in providing housing to its citizens. Some 60 percent of nearly 20 million Saudis are estimated to live in rented accommodation rather than homes they own, and much of the housing is in poor condition, said Mike Williams, head of research at the CBRE property consultancy in neighbouring Bahrain.

Because of the housing shortage, rising rents have been a major source of inflation; rents nationwide rose 3.7 percent from a year earlier in March, though that was far below a peak of 29.7 percent seen in 2008. Apartment rents in Riyadh jumped 8 percent last year, estimates Jones Lang LaSalle.

Faisal al-Dekheel, a 25-year-old government employee, is one person who has grappled with the shortage. He wanted to rent a cheap apartment in Riyadh that would spare him a commute to work of up to 95 minutes, but found he would have to pay an annual rent of 60-80,000 riyals ($16,000-$21,300).

“I cannot afford such an amount. It is impossible,” said Dekheel, who eventually settled for an apartment costing 26,000 riyals a year in the distant eastern suburbs of city. “This is not an easy amount too.”

Part of the problem is that the kingdom’s wealthy have snapped up residential land plots around the country as long-term investments, making them too costly to use for lower-income housing.

Complicating the situation, many plots remain undeveloped because they were given to citizens under a previous system of land grants, and the recipients lacked the money to build on their land.

“The Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs has distributed around 2.2 million plots in this way, but there is no data recording how these plots have actually been utilised,” Williams said in a research report.

“There is the possibility that most of them remain undeveloped, and therefore these grants are proving insufficient in addressing housing needs in the Kingdom.”

In March, local media quoted Housing Minister Shuwaish al-Duwaihi as saying his ministry was able to obtain only a third of the land it needed to carry out housing projects. Ministry officials were not available to elaborate on his comments.

A lack of affordable bank financing is another constraint on home ownership. Partly because of Islamic sensitivities, there are no clear legal provisions for letting banks take away a borrower’s home if he defaults on a housing loan; this causes banks to charge high rates on the loans which they extend.

“The long-documented lack of security for mortgage lenders means that risk is priced into such products, making them unaffordable to all but a few,” Williams said.

INFRASTRUCTURE

Two years after King Abdullah originally announced the housing scheme, last week’s decree may finally put it into top gear. The king instructed the Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs to hand over municipal lands immediately to the Ministry of Housing, which was told to build infrastructure such as roads on them before distributing them to citizens, who would build homes with loans granted by the housing ministry.

The Ministry of Finance was ordered to approve funds for the infrastructure construction. The king also told other departments to provide the housing ministry with the data it needed to decide which citizens were eligible for the land grants and loans – a key issue to avoid waste and corruption.

Even if all the government agencies cooperate smoothly, however, the scale of the task means it is likely to be many years before Saudi Arabia reaches the levels of home ownership – around two-thirds – enjoyed by other rich countries such as the United States and Britain.

The housing ministry said in January it would need a year just to prepare the mechanism for deciding citizens’ eligibility for land grants. Administering it may be a slow process in a country where the state bureaucracy is not known for its efficiency.

Bottlenecks in the construction industry may then delay the delivery of homes. One current bottleneck is in the supply of cement; last week King Abdullah ordered the import of 10 million tonnes to ease a shortage and called for three or four cement plants to be built over the next three years, granting 3 billion riyals towards the scheme, state news agency SPA reported.

“In my calculation, I’ve put 10 years to finish the whole project,” Fahad Alturki, senior economist at Jadwa Investment in Riyadh, said of the housing programme.

With Saudi Arabia’s population expected to grow by 2.1 percent annually in 2010-2015, well above the global average of 1.1 percent, according to a central bank report, the current housing programme may need to be followed by others. In January, minister Duwaihi told local MBC television the country needed 1.1 million housing units.

Dekheel said he was optimistic about buying his own home eventually, but was not expecting it to happen soon. “For sure I will apply to get a land and loan,” he said, adding: “It is going to take at least five years until the youth can have access to this.”

15-18

Near Healdsburg California–April 23rd–This has been a difficult week for the United States – especially American Muslims — for it brings back September 9th, 2001.

The two suspected perpetrators of the rampage of Monday April 15th –Massachusetts’ observation of their State Holiday of Patriots’ Day–which killed three (as of this composing) and horrendously maimed scores of runners and spectators at the finishing line of the Boston Marathon came from the predominantly Muslim North Caucus “state” of Chechnya.  Now, during the Imperial and Soviet periods, the peoples controlled by Moscow were russified, and Islam there would be largely unrecognizable to the majority of Muslims today although there is resurgence in the religion since 1989 there.

The accused perpetrators were two brothers, Tamerian Tsarnaey, 26, who in a violent fire-fight with police died the night after the incident, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaey, 19, who survived and, although barely holding unto life, has been charged with two capital crimes. 

They both were admitted into the United States under asylum consideration, for it had been determined previously by American authorities that they may have faced death or bodily harm in their native Chechnya by military forces of the Russian Federation which Federal District is in open revolt from Moscow, but the North Caucasus rebels (the Emirate of Chechnya) deny any  link to the Boston attack declaring that the Caucasus fighters are not waging any military activities against the United States of America…We are only fighting Russia, which is not only responsible for the occupation of the Caucasus, but monstrous crimes against Muslims!..”  I might add that the Chechnyans have not made it a tactical strategy to attack foreigners in the past.

Further, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, who is responsible for the most sacred sites of Islam, stated that he condemned the Boston Marathon bombing; further, no religion or morals would condone such an attack. 

There is a good chance that these were two lone “wolves,” and there was a report on American media to that effect (Monday the 22nd), but there is the mystery of one brother who went overseas for a sufficient amount of time recently. 

Further, just yesterday (the 22nd again) the Royal Canadian Mounted Police had claimed to have foiled an attempt to blow up a train on its way to the United States which they, presently, attribute to Al-Qaida of Iraq.  Whatever, Takfr elements, which are anathema to normative Islam are operating, but, at the same time, the ugly specter of Islamophobia is, also, unfolding ignorantly in reaction!
I have been corresponding with one of my oldest friends who, incidentally, is Islamophobic.  Because I believe for standing up for what is right, our friendship is slithering away, and I am despondent.  (Let’s identify him as J.)

J. rants on Boston to (Clinical) Professor R., M.D. (emeritus), a most admirable man, whom, — when I first met him at the beginning of his professional career, was serving impoverished Central (Calif.) Valley farm workers — that (i.e., J. states to R. that) “They [Muslims] did this because [of] their religion [Islam] — their prophet [PBUH] – their books – their imams tell them that jihad [this shows J.’s mis-understanding of Islam, for Jihad is more properly spiritual ‘inner struggle,’ and has been usurped by a minor “fundamentalist” interpretation within the faith and Western political scientists as violent resistance] is the pinnacle of religious existence…”

“…my [J.’s] question was – do you think this will get better or worse? You [R.] already know the answer.  I sent it [a prior communication] to honor the dead and injured and…[there will] be more attacks and attempts on U.S. soil…”

Dr. R. was quite philosophically abstract at first:

“[What]is the denominator of [the] statistic[s] you presented?  Without a denominator, you know the numerator has no meaning whatsoever.”  He clarifies later:

Hypothetically, “A Muslim army invades the United States and over 10 years of warfare kills 1.2 million people.  It [the theoretical army] uses guns, bombs, artillery and an assortment of other weapons.  It establishes prisons and tortures America inmates.

“That [this]is no delusion.   An American Army, unprovoked, invaded Iraq and at a conservative estimate killed 100,00 Iraqi civilians – probably 2 or 3 times that. With a population of 31 million, that is equal to 1.2 million adjusted for a US population of 315 million…”  The casualties are proportionally the same. 

We all must come to terms with our own failings in these tragedies. I suspect the roots of the current GWOT (the Global War on Terror) lay in Ronald Reagan’s Administration’s desertion of the Mujahidin during the Soviet-Afghan War of the 1980s to a five-prong Civil War instead of instituting a Marshal (-like) Plan of Development which, in turn, led to the raise of the Taliban and their allies, Al-Qaida’s, irregular interpretation of Islam.

Then, J. continues “…there is good old Cook [me] beating his breast and weeping mea culpa and calling what you [R.] wrote ‘healing words:’”

“My dear Dr. R., thank you for reminding me to fight the evil within my own soul!”

(Former) U.S. Representative Denis Kucinich suggestion of a South African-style Commission of National Reconciliation is definitely called for in the States, and looming amongst the subjects should be our institutionalized Islamophobia, and how one act of aggression has led to another act of aggression back to the Crusades and even to the Battle of Tours, 706 C.E. (the Common Era).

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By Almas Akhtar, TMO

Angelina Jolie is not only a prominent Hollywood movie star, she has dedicated a lot of her time and financial resources to create awareness about problems like genocide, mother/child health care, and illiteracy. Her latest humanitarian project is a school for girls she opened in Afghanistan and plans to fund with profits from retail sales of her Style by Jolie jewelry line.

Many Afghani girls have to sneak out of their homes to attend school, and in most areas there are simply aren’t any schools for girls at all.

In extreme cases schools for girls have been burned down with the teachers threatened or even killed.

Ms Jolie opened the primary school for girls in an area outside Kabul with a large refugee population. It is the second school in Afghanistan funded by Angelina Jolie after one was set up in 2010.

This  girls-only primary school has several hundred students already and is in an area just outside of Kabul in a region known for resistance to education for girls.

Angelina Jolie has built a great humanitarian reputation almost as prominent as her movie-star status. She’s a UN Goodwill Ambassador. She has just returned from a trip to Congo and Rwanda with the British foreign minister to highlight the horrors inflicted on women and girls by the use of rape as a weapon of war in conflicts around the world.

In the past she has visited many other African countries, Afghanistan and Pakistan to highlight child education and health issues concerning women and children.

She and fiancé Brad Pitt have adopted three children from Africa and Asia.

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THE AMERICAN NOTEBOOK

By Asif Jamal

Pakistan’s former President and head of the All Pakistan Muslim League (APML) political party Pervez Musharraf salutes as he arrives to unveil his party manifesto for the forthcoming general election at his residence in Islamabad April 15, 2013. REUTERS/Mian Khursheed

Asif Jamal

President Parvez Musharraf, a man who once was the iron-hand and has seen nothing but the best in his life and has enjoyed power and respect for most part of his life, is now experiencing the other side of the politics that normally a man of his kind of background and credentials doesn’t get to see. 

No doubt, the valor of an army man brought him back to the soil that earned him the two most sought after salutations i.e, general and president.  He was living a lavish life abroad but he landed back to seek the power again and of course to get his name clear from the charges against him but somehow his calculations botched and his aspiration of becoming an democratically elected president washed away when the election commission rejected his application and made him ineligible to contest in the upcoming general elections.  This was the first blow to him as earlier he was thinking that he had very little to prepare his core team for the elections but regardless, he may have not thought if he would ever be nullified to be a part of the such elections that may earn him power democratically but rejection of his election papers destroyed him calculations forever.

This was as it is a shock to those who followed President Musharraf and his ideology until the biggest one came after when the anti-terrorism court rejected the extension of his bail and held him in judicial remand in his home in Chak Shahzad, making his own place a jail.

Many analysts were criticizing President Musharraf’s own action that he was the first-man for nine years, why is he still interested to be the president?  He should have stayed overseas and continued the lectures but he never could have settled so his lust of power or love of service actually brought him down where dirty politics was waiting on him.  So he became victim of his own craving.

However, the official statement to this effect from President Musharraf’s spokesman for North America stipulates their side of reasoning as:  “It is a travesty that General Musharraf, who at one time led the Global War against Terrorism, currently is a strong voice against terrorism on the world stage, has survived 11 terrorist attempts on his life and is presently facing specific and credible terrorist threats, is being charged as a perpetuator of terrorism against Pakistan Judges, that were allegedly detained in 2007. The allegations leveled against the former president in the Judges Detention case are false and politically motivated. The alleged offense is bail-able and we expect the courts to conform to the rule of law and precedence and provide immediate relief.”

“These pre-meditated acts by segments of malicious judiciary, unscrupulous lawyers and fictitious petitioners are a blatant attempt to deny the People of Pakistan the option to consider choosing former President Musharraf as their elected leader in the upcoming elections.  The coordinated manner in which liberal and progressive voices are being muzzled in Pakistan should alert the world; the stage is being set in the upcoming elections in Pakistan, through a combined effort of judicial activism and militant threat, to propel right leaning political parties, which are sympathetic to Taliban and vicious extremist organizations, to win the elections.”

“If this is not true, then why is it that out of more than 23000 candidates that received nominations to participate in the upcoming elections, General Pervez Musharraf is the only candidate whose candidacy was accepted by the Election Commission Returning Officer in Chitral (NA-32), but was subsequently rejected by the Election Tribunal in Peshawar High Court, based on the unlawful presumption of guilt. The leaders of the free world must act immediately to stop this farce.”

Well, that is President Musharraf’s camp voice but that does not match up with others in the power and somewhat neutral corridors as the charges against him are gravely intense and this could cost him high but then again, his body language eulogizes that he is not afraid of any outcome and is ready to face the music to any extent.  Apparently he had calculated all corners to the effect prior to arriving back but looks like he overlooked some areas of concern and that became his week point.  

So muuch talk about Article 6, but interestingly, there are two Article 6, one that obtained in 1999 and 2007 and another one changed by the last parliament and so much to say, the first didn’t contain the word ‘abeyance’, the second one does. 

On the other hand, it also looks like that power against him were not really expecting him to actually return and perhaps took his statement for a statement but his landing proved to be a step as if he does not fear anyone any anything.  Even when the court rejected his bail and ordered to book him on terrorism charges, no police man came forward to arrest him so he was driven back to his house which was later declared as jail. 

The case in process against him can be detrimental but his arrest and extreme case such as high treason, followed by attacks on upcoming general elections candidates in various constituencies are currently creating an uncertain situation in the country as if the far-flung effect could even cause a delay or cancellation of the election until further notice but only time can tell what it entails for the future.

– To participate in this column or for comments and suggestions, you may reach the scribe via email at theamericannotebook@gmail.com & follow him on Twitter @AsifJamalNY

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