With all the dramas currently going on in the Islamic world, the focus for a lot of Muslims living in the West is to give charity to fellow Muslims that are in war torn or natural disaster effected countries. Of course our brothers and sisters in Syria, Burma, Somalia, Afghanistan, Yemen, etc…need our support. But as the Prophetic Sunnah teaches us, charity should always start with those that are closest to you first and then work its way out. A Muslim community group from Sydney, Australia is doing just that this Ramadan by feeding local refugees, families in need and giving eid gifts to Muslim children in hospital. Here is their story..

“Thank YOU so much!! You and your team (Mission of Hope volunteers) were so generous with your time and all the magnificent gifts. Your team brought so much happiness to all the children, their siblings, parents and staff. We enjoyed the day immensely!”

Alhamdulillah this was the reaction of the staff at the Sydney Children’s Hospital Randwick, when we began Day 1 of our Eid Gift Drive there last year. Mission of Hope (MoH) is in its 8th year of running the Eid Gift Drive. Last year the Australian Muslim community donated enough gifts to cover Westmead Children’s Hospital, Canterbury Hospital, Bankstown-Lidcombe Hospital, and the Muslim Foster Children BBQ.

This year, we are aiming to do more. With your support, we hope to cover gifts for the children in six other hospitals and have more volunteers visit nursing homes with gifts. Remember The Prophet (peace and blessings be upon him) said, “He is not of us who does not have mercy on young children, nor honor the elderly”. (Al-Tirmidhi)

MoH in fact has numerous programs to help the disadvantaged Muslims within the Australian community. For the second year running, MoH has organized home cooked meals for every night during the month of Ramadan at Villawood Immigration Detention Centre (VIDC). There are currently 66 fasting Muslims at VIDC who are not blessed with the luxury of choosing which cuisine to eat or which restaurant to dine at. The food provided to them is very basic, making it difficult for them to enjoy the experience of breaking the fast – a privilege we take for granted too often.

Alhamdulillah with the contributions of generous individuals, families and businesses, Mission of Hope is able to provide home cooked dishes from Afghani, Persian, Middle-Eastern, South East Asian and Sub-continent regions, ranging from soups, Pakistani, Sri-Lankan and Fijian-Indian curries, tajines, salads and traditional desserts. The Detainees at VIDC are very appreciative and grateful for all the generous support they’ve received from the Australian Muslim community.

For the disadvantaged refugees outside of detention, MoH initiated the Ramadan Food Packs, now is in it’s 4th year. We have had requests for over 300 hampers for Muslim refugees in Sydney alone. Funds are desperately needed for this program. It is our responsibility to alleviate the suffering of these families during Ramadan and donate to this program.
This Sunday August 5th 2012 our annual MoH iftar will be focusing on the need for multicultural foster care. Families4Children is an innovative community initiative that seeks to raise awareness of the need to recruit foster carers from Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Backgrounds (CALD) to provide short and long term care.

Enjoy a scrumptious meal at the Emporium Bankstown while listening to Nasheeds by Hameed Attai, speeches by current Muslim Foster Carers, DoCS, Shaykh Wissam Cherkawi and Snr Constable Danny Mikati.

If you cannot attend the Iftar we ask that you donate $50/person for a refugee and their family who will be invited to attend for free, to reduce their social isolation and allow them to enjoy iftar with the Muslim community inshaAllah.

SOURCE: muslim village.com

LONDON: The British government has started an investigation after the revelation that some British Muslims of Pakistani origin have joined extremist groups in Syria to overthrow the regime of President Bashar al Assad.

British journalist John Cantlie and Jeroen Oerlemans were captured almost immediately after crossing the Turkish border and held for a week at an extremist training camp in northwestern Syria, revealed British extremists with “Birmingham and South London accents”, who were among a group that shot a British war photographer and his Dutch colleague after taking them hostage in Syria last week.

The photographers, who were both shot during a failed escape attempt, were freed on Thursday night during a raid on the camp by members of the Free Syrian Army (FSA), who returned them to Turkey. Cantlie, who has reported for several British newspapers, said the militants who detained them included several radical Muslims from Britain who were intent on overthrowing the regime of President Bashar al-Assad. As he recovered at the weekend, he told the Sunday newspaper in an email, “Shot in the arm, smashed feet after a botched escape attempt, but safe and sound. Before we were rescued, 30 percent of the extremists who held us were British.” Oerlemans said that their captors were militants from Britain, Bangladesh, Pakistan and Chechnya. He told the Dutch media that some of the group, described as between 30 and 100 strong, had “Birmingham accents”.

An unidentified source described as being close to the incident told The Sunday Telegraph that there were at least six men with British-sounding voices, including one with a heavy South London accent. The source said that some 40 percent of the group apparently spoke English, but it was not clear what nationalities they were.

Oerlemans, who works for the British agency Panos Pictures, described how he and Cantlie had been led into their camp by their guide after becoming lost, only to be surrounded by militants armed with Kalashnikovs. At first the captors promised to free them if they could prove that they were journalists, but later they accused them of working for the CIA, and took their equipment and documents. Oerlemans said that when it became clear that their captors planned to seek ransom, the photographers tried to escape, but were quickly intercepted, with Oerlemans shot in the foot and thigh, and Cantlie in the arm.

Their captors bandaged the wounds but kept the two men handcuffed and blindfolded after that, Oerlemans said, “I don’t think there was one Syrian among them. They were from all over the world.”

He added that they spoke of being under the leadership of an unidentified “amir”. Oerlemans told Dutch media, “They were definitely quite extreme in their religious beliefs. All day we were spoken to about the holy Quran and how they would bring sharia law to Syria. I don’t think they were al Qaeda, they seemed too amateurish for that. They said, ‘We’re not al Qaeda, but al-Qaeda is down the road’. They would cock their weapons and say, ‘Prepare for the afterlife’, or, ‘You better repent and accept Islam’. It was pretty terrifying, I can assure you.”

Oerlemans said he and Cantlie were blindfolded when the FSA entered the militants’ camp during a raid on Thursday night, shouting, “How long has this been going on? This is outrageous.”

SOURCE: Daily Times

Mohammad Hossein Nikzad, a close personal friend and a senior student of political science just called me a few hours ago, worriedly talking about the dire situation of the Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar and the atrocities the Buddhist Rakhines are committing in the East Asian nation.

He called my attention to the mainstream media’s flagrant inattention to the heartrending genocide of the Muslims in Myanmar, saying that they are only a few second-rate news websites and some of the Iranian news agencies which have given coverage to the course of events.

And unfortunately, he was right. My searching for factual reports and articles regarding the massacre of Muslims in Myanmar by the extremist Buddhists yielded no significant results. I only found some pictorial reports of the burning of Myanmarese children published by Iranian news websites, an article by Ramzy Baroud which was republished in some Asian newspapers and an editorial by Dr Ismail Salami on Press TV. Neither Reuters, nor New York Times, nor Washington Post, nor Fox News nor their comrades and cronies in France, Germany, Britain, Australia and Canada had uttered a single word regarding the painful days the Muslims of Myanmar are experiencing.

Rohingyas are a Muslim people living in the Arakan region. As of 2012, 800,000 Rohingyas live in Myanmar. The United Nations says that they are one of the most persecuted minorities of the world. As a result of systematic discrimination they have endured over the past years, many of them have migrated to Bangladesh and Malaysia and currently 300,000 Rohingya Muslims live in Bangladesh and 24,000 in Malaysia.

The persecution of the Rohingya Muslims dates back to the early World War II when the Japanese forces invaded Burma which was then under the British colonial rule. It’s said that on March 28, 1942, about 5,000 Muslims were massacred in Minbya and Mrohaung Townships by the Rakhine nationalists. According to Amnesty International, the Rohingya Muslims have long suffered from human rights violations and as a result, scores of them immigrated to neighbouring Bangladesh for better living conditions.

One instance of discrimination against the Muslims of Rohingya is that they are denied the right of citizenship by the government. Many of them have escaped to Bangladesh and as many as 111,000 of them live in the Thai-Myanmar border.

According to the website of Arakan Rohingya National Organisation (ARNO), Rohingya Muslims require government permission to marry, are forbidden from having more than two children per family and are subjected to modern-day slavery through forced labour. Because the national government denies them the right to citizenship in their homeland, many Rohingyas have their land confiscated and they are restricted from travel. The Human Rights Watch considers the denial of the right of citizenship the most important problem the Muslims of Rohingya face. The government of Myanmar considers the Rohingyas to be “resident foreigners.” This lack of full citizenship rights means that the Rohingya are subject to other abuses, including restrictions on their freedom of movement, discriminatory limitations on access to education and arbitrary confiscation of property.

Some independent sources have told the Human Rights Watch that the government authorities continue to require Rohingya Muslims to perform forced labour. According to HRW, those who refuse or complain are physically threatened, sometimes with death, and children as young as seven years old have been seen on forced labour teams.

But what brought to light the deplorable situation of the Rohingya Muslims once again was the “2012 Rakhine State riots” which led to the killing of 10 Rohingya Muslims who were murdered by a Rakhine mob of 300 while on their way back from the country’s former capital Rangoon. It said that three Rohingya youths allegedly raped and killed a Rakhine woman and as the government sentenced two of them to death, a self-directed group of extremist Rakhine nationalists attacked a bus of Rohingya Muslims and killed ten of them. According to a group of UK-based NGOs, 650 Rohingya Muslims were killed from June 10 to 28, 1,200 went missing and more than 80,000 others were displaced as a result of rioting, arson and rape.

As reported by Associated Press, 1,336 homes belonging to the Rohingya Muslims were burnt during the unrest. However, The Platform, a UK-based human rights organisation puts the number at 6,000. The Burmese army and police were accused of playing a leading role in targeting the Rohingyas through mass arrests and arbitrary violence.

Due to a media blackout in Myanmar and the lack of direct access by the independent journalists to the region, it’s impossible to verify the number of those who have been killed or the homes which were destroyed in the recent riots; however, what is clear is that the Rohingya Muslims are undergoing intolerable hardships and should be paid due attention by the international community.

In the recent weeks, the Burmese opposition leader and 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Aung San Suu Kyi made the headlines when it was announced that she finally delivered her Nobel acceptance speech at Oslo’s City Hall two decades after being awarded the prize and almost two years after being released from house arrest. Suu Kyi, however, unpardonably ignored the plight of the Rohingya Muslims and never spoke a word about the hardships and injustices that have befallen them.

In a blatant act of censorship, the Western mainstream media have also stayed away from the massacre of Rohingya Muslims, showing their strong anti-Muslim bias and their duplicitous attitude toward the concept of human rights.

The Rohingya Muslims of Myanmar are living under extremely appalling circumstances. The dictatorial government of Myanmar has deliberately neglected their ordeal and the international community is overlooking their suffering. Is it in compliance with our human values to remain indifferent and apathetic to this unspeakable tragedy? The Western mass media are run by a number of Islamophobes associated with the Israeli lobby. Isn’t it our duty to stand up and protest their indifference to the suffering of Myanmar Muslims?

Source:The Nation