As the European bureau chief of the Globe and Mail, Saunders has exhibited a keen interest in the history of immigration and the integration of different cultures in cities.

His last book, Arrival City: The Final Migration and Our Next World, was a brilliant examination of the mass migration of people from rural to urban areas, both within countries and across international boundaries.

He pointed out how poor city planning can hamper the integration process, becoming the catalyst for political unrest, riots, and even revolutions.

His new book, The Myth of the Muslim Tide: Do Immigrants Threaten the West (Knopf Canada), takes on another weighty subject: whether western countries are being overrun by Muslim migrants who pose some sort of threat to democracy and free societies.

This notion is peddled by European political parties, prominent Republicans including Newt Gingrich, FOX News commentators, and numerous authors, including Canadian right winger Mark Steyn.

In a cool-headed manner, Saunders dismantles their claims one at a time with a relentless onslaught of facts.

In The Myth of the Muslim Tide, he cites numerous poll results showing that Muslim immigrants are often significantly more patriotic than non-Muslims, and are increasingly tolerant of homosexuality and supportive of women working outside of the home.

“In general, while their values still lag behind those of their non-immigrant neighbours, and that discrepancy is the source of considerable tension, immigrants of Muslim origin are very clearly progressing toward integration at a rapid pace—especially when you consider that the largest group of these immigrants has arrived in the last 20 years,” Saunders writes. “Moreover, it took European and North Americans decades to build the beginnings of legal and social consensus behind women’s rights, homosexual equality and birth control. Muslim immigrants, coming from a far lower level of economic development, appear to be adopting those views much more rapidly.”

He notes that 63 percent of American Muslims see no conflict between being a devout follower of their faith and living in a modern society. Among U.S. Christians, 64 percent shared this view. A higher percentage of Christian Americans self-identify as Christians first as opposed to Americans first when compared with how U.S. Muslims identify themselves.

Saunders also demolishes the widely held notion that Muslims have extremely high birth rates in the West, which will lead them to becoming a majority in countries like France and Germany.

In addition, Saunders seriously scrutinizes Steyn’s claim that Islam, unlike other faiths, “is a political project” and “a bloodthirsty faith”.

The author proceeds to dismantle this with evidence from the British intelligence agency MI5, showing that it’s generally not devout Muslims who become terrorists. In fact, these violent extremists are often well-educated “religious novices” drawn to peer groups for personal reasons.

He reports that a study of convicted terrorists in Britain and Canada showed that religious radicals “felt genuine affection for Western values of tolerance and pluralism”; terrorists, on the other hand, “were unique in their loathing of Western society and culture”. Moreover, “their degree of interest in the actual teachings of the Koran was fairly minimal.”

In many respects, Saunders shows that the types of people attracted to jihadist organizations have much in common with young, violent left-wing extremists who, in bygone days, joined the Baader-Meinhof Gang in Germany, the Japanese Red Army, and the Weather Underground in the United States.

At times, Saunders’s book reads like a doctoral dissertation as he bludgeons readers with data. But in light of all the hype about the so-called Muslim threat, it’s a prudent approach because it makes Muslim-tide authors like Steyn, Bruce Bawer, Melanie Phillips, and Christopher Caldwell look like buffoons.

Anders Breivik’s influences studied

Unlike almost every other Canadian journalist, Saunders also took the time to read the 1,518-page manifesto by Norwegian mass murder Anders Breivik. Last summer, he bombed a government building and coldly hunted down dozens of children on the island of Utoya while dressed as a police officer.

It was a crime spree of breathtaking cruelty, with 77 dead by the end of it all.

Saunders reveals that Breivik’s book, 2083: A European Declaration of Independence, cited several of the Muslim-tide authors who are treated with such credibility by right-wing media outlets like the Wall Street Journal, FOX News, and Maclean’s magazine.

“He did not develop a new argument at all, but merely cut and pasted theirs, unaltered, and appended his own violent conclusion,” Saunders writes.

Breivik claimed to go on his murderous rampage to stop the enablers of “Eurabia”, Saunders states, with the goal being to halt a “Muslim onslaught”.

Many readers of The Myth of the Muslim Tide will be left wondering if Breivik would have developed these hateful views had the media presented a more accurate picture of Muslims in the West.

Distinctions lacking

The Saunders book isn’t without some drawbacks. There is not enough education for nonbelievers about the different sects of Islam or how the national origins of Muslim immigrants might be influencing their acclimatization to the West.

In Canada, the Ismaili Muslims, for instance, have been a model immigrant community with an extremely progressive view of the rights of women. Saunders notes that in Britain, the Muslim population tends to be more conservative than in other European countries, but there isn’t sufficient exploration about the role that the Saudis might be playing in spreading their repressive Wahhabi faith in that country.

Saunders also doesn’t address the arguments of Canadian writer Tarek Fatah, whose 2010 book The Jew Is Not My Enemy shows how the Koran has been twisted by jihadists to justify intense anti-Semitism. Fatah has also maintained that a great deal of “Islamic” extremism in the West originates in Pakistan.

However, Saunders makes a good case that state power and political rhetoric are being targeted at Muslims generally in the United States, whereas in the past, elected officials used to highlight “good Muslims” and “bad Muslims”. And that, Saunders suggests, is a dangerous trend.

In this regard, he likens the current environment to previous attacks by politicians and writers on waves of Catholic and Jewish immigration to western countries.

“We see it over and over again when a new group of immigrants arrives who are members of a religious minority, usually poor and ill-accustomed to the language and folkways of their new country and the workings of its economy,” Saunders writes. “In response to public alarm at these strange newcomers, writers and politicians offer the same set of frightened, frightening ideas. They are different from previous groups. They do not want to integrate. Their religion compels them to impose their values on us. Their reproduction rates will swamp us. They are disloyal and capable of violence.”

Bashing Muslims has become a veritable industry, Saunders reveals, thanks to millions of dollars in funding from conservative foundations to the bloggers who led Breivik to believe a Muslim majority was in Europe’s future.

SOURCE: straight.com

Three weeks later, after a perilous journey across the choppy waters of the Bay of Bengal, Ashraf’s boat was intercepted by the Thai navy. The tough Rohingya was dragged out to a beach at night, beaten up and questioned by uniformed men and then dumped back into the boat two days later with other Rohingya.

The Thais had removed the boat’s engine before it was towed to the high sea by a big naval ship and then left to drift. “There was no food or water left in the ship, we were left to die on the sea,” Ashraf said two weeks later after he was rescued by Indian coast guards when his boat drifted towards India’s Andaman islands.

By then, Ashraf was on the verge of death, totally dehydrated and emaciated. But after a month in an Indian hospital at Andaman’s Port Blair town, he had recovered and was lucky to survive, unlike most of his friends on that perilous boat journey.

“Some jumped off the boat in desperation when they saw the coastline. Either they were drowned or eaten up by sharks. Others drank sea water to quench thirst and died of disease. I survived by keeping my lips moist with sea water but did not drink it. Allah was merciful,” Ashraf recounted his ordeal at Port Blair.

In the summer of 2008, he was taken back by Bangladesh after India submitted a list of Rohingya rescued off the Andamans, and Dhaka agreed to take only those of them who had Bangladeshi citizenship or a UNHCR refugee certificate. Thankfully, Ashraf’s details matched the records at one of the Rohingya refugee camp run by the UNHCR near Cox’s Bazar. A month later, Ashraf was reunited with his wife and children.

But efforts to trace down Ashraf during a visit to Bangladesh last year were unsuccessful. People in Cox’s Bazar said Ashraf and his whole family were among the thousands of Rohingya who had been repatriated to Myanmar by the Bangladesh government, after the UNHCR cut down on support to run the refugee camps that were first set up when tens of thousands of Rohingya fled into Bangladesh in the late 1970s. More and more camps were added to shelter the continuous flood of Rohingya refugees fleeing Myanmar (then Burma), but they are now being steadily closed down.

Bangladesh’s Awami League-led coalition government wants to send back all the Rohingya refugees to Myanmar. “They are Myanmar citizens and we have sheltered them long enough. Now they must go back and settle down in Myanmar,” Bangladesh Foreign Minister Dipu Moni said recently, after a round of talks with a Myanmar delegation.

Unwanted in Bangladesh

The Awami League is a secular party wedded to Bengali linguistic nationalism, and their leaders see the Rohingya as religious bigots who support their rivals in Bangladesh’s Islamic party, the Jamait-e-Islami. Bangladesh intelligence officials say the Jamait-e-Islami support the Rohingya insurgent groups that have fought Myanmar forces and routed funds from Saudi Arabia and Pakistan to them through a network of Islamic NGOs. The Rohingya groups deny the charge but admit they have sympathisers across the Islamic world.

Unwanted now in an over-populated Bangladesh, the Rohingya are also not wanted in their own country, Myanmar. Even President Thein Sein has said on record that the Rohingyas are migrants from the Chittagong region of neighbouring Bangladesh and not indigenous to Myanmar, so they should be taken away to some other place.

The president is supported by many of his countrymen in his perceptions that the Rohingya are “dangerous trouble-makers” and “Islamic Jihadis”. In late July, dozens of Burmese in Yangon chanted slogans in front of a UN office in Yangon: “Go back Rohingya, get out of Myanmar, we support our president”. They blamed the Rohingya for the recent riots in Rakhine (formerly Arakan) state, though UNHCR officials say the Rohingya have suffered much more than the native Rakhines.

More than 60 of the nearly 80 killed in the riots in Rakhine state this summer are Rohingya. The riots started after Rohingya men were accused of raping a Rakhine woman, and spread when angry Rakhines went on a killing spree. After the army was called out to control the riots and a state of emergency was declared in Rakhine state, more than 1,200 Rohingya are said to have gone missing, according to Tun Khine, president of the Burma Rohingya Organisation in UK (BROUK). And nearly 100,000 of them have been displaced from their homes and herded into makeshift camps. So it is entirely possible that the likes of Ashraf, after spending two decades in refugee camps in Bangladesh, would have been displaced again back home after returning.

The Buddhist Rakhines and the Muslim Rohingya have a long tradition of intense hostility that goes back to the steady flow of Muslim immigrants from Bengal’s Chittagong region into Arakan province, migration that was encouraged by the British. Thousands of Rakhines and Rohingya died in riots in Arakan in 1942 during the Second World War. The Japanese also massacred large number of Rohingya because they supported the British.

In 1947, some Rohingya leaders formed the Mujahid Party and raised the demand for a separate Muslim Autonomous Region in northern Arakan. That upset the Rakhines and the Burmese military junta alike, and General Ne Win unleashed “Operation King Dragon” in the Rohingya-dominated areas of Arakan in 1978. The mass torture and extra-judicial killings, gang rapes and demolition of mosques forced nearly one-third of the Rohingya population to flee to Bangladesh. From there, many of them moved into India enroute to Pakistan and elsewhere in the Middle east.

Indian alert

Now, India has also send out an alert to the states in the country’s northeast to step up vigil against illegal Rohingya migration, after more than 1,400 Rohingyas have been nabbed in the last two years on the borders trying to get into Indian territory.

Chris Lewa, who has researched the Rohingya extensively, says thousands of them have been migrating to Pakistan through India from the refugee camps in Bangladesh. During the course of her research, she found a lot of Rohingya women in the red light districts of Karachi and many Rohingya men in the port city’s thriving fishing industry.

“But the journey through India has become more and more difficult since Islamic terrorist activities began to rise and security agencies in India began to look at any Muslim migrant as a potential trouble-maker, Rohingya included,” says Sabyasachi Basu Roy Choudhury, who has researched migration patterns on India’s eastern frontiers.

After the prospects of migrating to Pakistan and the Middle East began to dry up, Rohingya turned towards Malaysia, travelling there through Thailand. Many could slip in and settle down in Malaysia with the help of clerics and Islamic networks. Some even reached Australia. But as the Thais became more vigilant and tried to deter the Rohingya with harsh punishment like dragging their boats back to high seas without engines, the hapless minority, now numbering between 800,000 to a million in Myanmar, has been rendered short of options to find a safe future.

SOURCE: ALJAZEERA

Over the holy month of Ramadhan, the treatment of the Muslim minority in Myanmar and the silence from the rest of the world was a topic of conversation and consternation in Mosques around our country.

Human Rights Watch claims that security forces have killed and raped members of the Rohingya group and arrested hundreds of others. Over the last week Channel 4 had the first reports from any Western journalists in which they filmed the previously bustling town of Narzi, in the city of Sittwe, now a deserted wasteland – homes raised to the ground – and its 10,000 inhabitants nowhere to be seen. Refugees who are now languishing in camps far from their home town with little food or adequate resources to sustain them were also spoken to in the report.

This current wave of violence erupted on the 4th June after 10 Muslim men were killed when an angry crowd attacked a bus in the Taungup district, apparently mistakenly believing some passengers were responsible for the murder and rape of a young Buddhist woman in Rakhine in May.

Although the historical ties of the Rohingya people to Myanmar is disputed, what is certain is that they have a long history of persecution and suffering in the region.

The Myanmar government considers them to be recent migrants from what is modern day Bangladesh and as a result, the country’s constitution does not include them among indigenous groups qualifying for citizenship.
Building an accurate picture of the situation on the ground is extremely difficult due to the Burmese authorities stopping journalists and aid workers from getting to the most sensitive parts of the state.

Those Rohingya who manage to flee the violence face further anguish when trying to enter neighbouring Bangladesh, whose border control authorities have allegedly refused to take in any refugees, a clear violation of international law. They either turn back to the violence, or wait to die in open waters.

Whilst the world’s attention has been focussed elsewhere there is a real concern that gross human rights violations have been taking place.

If you look carefully it is possible to discover that our Foreign Secretary has issued a statement on the FCO website, which condemns the violence and offers the support of the UK government which he says

‘…stands ready to assist the government of Burma in its efforts to develop Rakhine State, to share our knowledge and experience of tackling the many complex and long-standing issues to be overcome…. and ‘to support an inclusive political settlement that protects the rights of all members of the local population.’

Despite this the Foreign Secretary’s statement, many now feel that our government should be saying and doing more. The statement issued so far does nothing to address this man made humanitarian catastrophe taking place in Myanmar. What compounds the disaster is the lack of awareness in the mainstream media about this. Where are the headline news reports? Why is the loss of human life and massive displacement of tens of thousands and corresponding atrocities only receiving scant attention in the media?
Our concern and anger about this issue should not just be due to the fact that these people are of Islamic faith, nor should we accept the claim that this shows “Muslim lives are cheap”. Our concern should also arise because they are fellow humans who are victims of sickening crimes and have nobody standing up for their human rights.

We urgently need to publicise and shine a light on the atrocities being committed in Rakhine State. Britain has influence over both Myanmar and Bangladesh. We need to demand that the Burmese authorities do all they can to stop, not escalate, the violence and that the international community do more to assist those who have fled persecution and those who can’t.

I have been in contact with both the Foreign Secretary, William Hague MP and the Secretary of State for International Development, Andrew Mitchell MP. Mr Mitchell has confirmed that the British government’s contribution of aid is reaching the Rohingya community in Myanmar through appropriate UN agencies. Also, whilst the government is ‘particularly concerned about the detention of, and reported targeting of, aid workers in Rakhine State’ they are ‘engaged in discussions with the UN about the (Response) Plan to ensure that it meets the most critical humanitarian needs’.

Mr Mitchell also confirmed that the Foreign & Commonwealth Office and the Office for International Development will be working closely together on this issue. My fears are that, without a co-ordinated response from both departments, there is a risk that the persecution of Rohingya could continue and/or the humanitarian crisis could escalate.

Thankfully there are early signs that Myanmar’s leadership are acknowledging the severity of the issue. Just this weekend it was reported that Myanmar has set up a commission to investigate the recent violence. The move was announced by President Thein Sein, who earlier rejected UN calls for an independent inquiry. The UN has welcomed this announcement, saying it could make “important contributions” to restoring peace.

President Sein also confirmed that the 27-member commission would include representatives from different political parties and also religious organisations.

Whilst we should welcome the announcement of this investigation by the Myanmar government, we should be wary of openly celebrating this until we see an end to the violence and displacement of the Rohingya people. This issue will not be resolved just because of the announcement of an investigative commission. We also need to see pragmatic and immediate action from the Myanmar authorities to stop the violence now. We must see that they are taking action against those people who are found to be committing these atrocities.

It is for this reason that we must keep up the pressure on our own government to voice its concerns on this issue to their counterparts in Myanmar, and why we must continue to publicise this wherever possible.

Because I still have concerns with regards to the effectiveness of the commission without, at the very least, some form of UN or independent participation within it, I have been in contact with the Myanmar Ambassador in London. Amongst some of the assurances we need are:

• As to the effectiveness and impartiality of the commission in both its investigative processes and reporting procedure.

• Anyone who is found to be guilty of initiating violence as a result of the commission’s findings will be subject to prosecution and punishment that befits the crimes that have been committed.

• The Rohingya community will be fairly treated throughout the commission’s investigation and they will also be given ample opportunity to offer evidence for consideration of the eventual outcome.

• The currently displaced Rohingya community will be allowed back into Sittwe without fear of reprisals and also given assistance in rebuilding their now damaged lives.

It is my hope that with sustained vocal support for the Rohingya community, we can make sure that this issue stays at the forefront of the minds of those in positions of power and influence, both here in the UK and also abroad.

SOURCE:The Muslim News