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1. America the Beautiful in Zionist Grip: blind power, no Direction
Baltimore: 7 murdered in 5 days+ Christmas Scare was Hoax
2. New FBI raids Stun Pakistanis: Prof. Abdul Ghafoor Protests
3. Looking for Al-Qaida in Greensboro, NC !
4. Were you fooled by anti-Taliban Demonization? Read this.
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Health tips from Hadith of the Prophet (pbuh):
1. Make walking, jogging and exercise a part of your life style.
2. Reduce food intake. One third of the stomach should remain empty.
2a. Sit down calmly to eat in peace. Do not eat in a hurry. [Millions around the world have little or no food.]
3. Pray five times a day. Link your future to Allah's guidance. Anxiety and stress will go down dramatically.
4. Avoid processed foods and meats as much as possible. Processed beef is a real 'no, no.'
5. Home cooking is the best. Keep the family together with healthy food and prayer.
6. Whenever you see corruption (on TV, billboards, thoughtless humans), seek Allah's forgiveness. Do not let the evil contaminate your soul. Degradation of women is an inherent part of the system in America. Purge yourself of this evil with "astaghfirullah" repeated each time you see this degradation..
[To be continued.]
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1. "The lightning all but snatches away their sight: every time there is a flash of light, they walk therein and when the darkness returns, they stand still. And if Allah willed, He could take away their ability to hear and see: for Allah has power over all things." (The Qur'an 2:20)
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BALTIMORE, Maryland, 23 miles from Washington, DC: Seven people were murdered in the first five days of the new year 2003. There have been NO ARRESTS in any of the cases. This situation in a premier American city is not even national news. American forces have not arrived in Baltimore to stop the killing. Baltimore is only a little worse than most major cities in America. Drugs have been successfully introduced into the cities and the youth of the new generation are left to kill each other.
In the meantime, the U.S. wants to liberate Iraq, a country thousands of miles away which most Americans cannot place on a map.

AROUND CHRISTMAS, the FBI claimed that five Muslims (ostensibly Pakistanis) had slipped into the United States and could be potential or real terrorists. The WHOLE COUNTRY was urged to look out for these dangerous men.
It's not difficult to imagine the damage this story must have done to Christian-Muslim relations on the most important Christian holiday. The story violated the rights of Pakistanis and Muslims in America by generating a lookout for such people as suspicious characters.

Almost a week into the new year, the FBI shamelessly announced that the whole story was bogus and had come from an accused criminal in Canada named Hamdani whose first two names are those of Christians, not Muslims. This man, we are told, had fabricated the story in exchange for a deal he was making with authorities in Canada.

The Christmas story was taken back by the FBI without an apology. The major media mentioned the recantation in les than 20 seconds and then it was business as usual.
Observers say that the distribution of such a story is certainly not the style of security agencies who really are out to get the "bad guys." If the FBI meant business, it should have gone after the purported "terrorists" without alarming the whole country. Looking back into America's history, "bad guys" have been caught by good police work, not by widespread publicity which simply creates insecurity, fear and suspicion.

The rights of American Muslims are certainly violated by the dissemination of such bogus stories. Muslims would be within their rights to file a class action suit against the FBI and the media which distributed this story.
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2. NEW FBI RAIDS IN PAKISTAN. Stunning Violation of Pakistani's rights in their own homes.

This time it was in Karachi. Pakistani media reported on January 10 that Musharref's security forces, guided by the FBI carried out an operation in the Gulshane Ma'mar area. They broke into a home, C46-W2, and arrested 7 members of a family, including women and children. Among those arrested is a two year old child. The operation, according to witnesses, was supervised by alleged FBI agents in a white colored car with number plate AAB-755.

The assault was carried out like a military attack. The attackers cut off all phone lines to the entire Azizabad area before the attack and sealed off the entire area so much so that worshipers going to the local mosque for fajr prayers were prevented from doing so.

The building is a rented house belonging to Sabiha Shahid, a leader of Jamaate Islami's women's wing who is a member of JI's central shoora. She was on a tour of Sindh but her family members were arrested.

The government claims that those arrested include two "foreigners," a term used by Musharref to label Islamic refugees in Pakistan. The government also claims that those arrested, resisted the police and exchanged gunfire.

Jamaate Islami leader and parliamentarian, Prof. Abdul Ghafoor Ahmed has condemned the raid and said that if there were any charges against the people arrested, they should have been summoned to court. He is quoted as follows:

"We don't know the whereabouts of her family members. We condemn the raid. If such actions continued, it will trigger unrest in the country," he said.

"I also demand that the family of Sabiha Shahid should immediately be released. The arrested foreigners should be produced before the court and should be given right to defend themselves."

ANOTHER SEARCH FOR ISLAMIC DOCTORS:

Earlier, on January 9, the FBI led another raid in an attempt to arrest two Islamic physicians. The raid failed because the two were not there. This raid, again carried out by a big security unit, was in Shah Faisal town on a house called Bostane Rafi'. Number C-19. The targets were Dr. Akmal Waheed and Dr. Arshad Waheed. They are said to have set up medical relief camps for the injured people of Afghanistan during U.S. bombing raids. Akmal is former president of the Pakistan Islamic Medical Association (PIMS) and member of the National Institute of Cardiologists. Their relief organization was known as "Al-Khidmat" and they are said to be supporters of Jamaate Islami.

The security forces left after two-hour long search. Witnesses claim that they saw FBI agents with the raiding party in a white Toyota Corolla number AEF 745.
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3. SEARCHING IN GREENSBORO for AL-QAEDA!

According to a NEWSWEEK ARTICLE, all kinds of suspicions and fears are being generated by attempts to find Al-Qaeda connections in the Triad area of North Carolina. It seems to be the same old story of suspicions and allegations. However, there was a brief reference to the Islamic viewpoint in this article. NEWSWEEK quoted Imam Badi Ali as follows:

"One area Muslim who says he was recently visited by FBI agents accuses the bureau of unfairly targeting the Triads 10,000-strong Islamic community as a supposed rallying point for Muslim opposition to the repressive policies of the U.S. administration. [We] are easy scapegoats for all these problems, says Badi Ali, the Palestinian president of a Greensboro mosque called The Islamic Center of the Triad. We are becoming the usual suspects in all searches, and I feel like we are living in a Third World country where the secret police can interrogate and arrest us and build a case based on secret evidence."
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WERE YOU FOOLED BY THE DEMONIZATION OF THE TALIBAN?
[Ms. Carolyn has sent us this article from Asia Week, published in October 2001.)

Japanese doctor Tetsu Nakamura works with leprosy patients and refugees in Afghanistan and Pakistan. It's a job that keeps him in touch with the raw reality of life in that troubled country. And he says that from what he has seen, the Taliban are being wrongly portrayed internationally. "There's something wrong with the media reports," he says. "This talk of the Taliban being vicious and disliked doesn't fit with reality." Nakamura says the fundamentalists have wide support from the population, particularly in rural areas. "Otherwise, how can they rule 95% of the country with only 15,000 soldiers?"

Villagers around Nakamura's Peshawar base hospital and 10 clinics in both north-western Pakistan and eastern Afghanistan were pleased to see peace established under Taliban rule, he says. The Pushtun people, who make up two-thirds of the Afghan population, can accept strict Muslim codes because they have lived by them all their lives, he says. Women are not deprived of education or jobs, as far as he can see. In fact, half the local doctors at his clinics are women.

So why are the people of the capital, Kabul, reportedly hoping to see the Taliban overthrown? "The Taliban may act differently there," he told me when we met recently in Tokyo. "They're obliged to fix the corrupt urban life. The people most vocal in criticizing the Taliban are upper-class Afghans who have been deprived of their privileges." Nakamura's words reminded me of news footage I have seen several times since the attacks on New York and Washington. Shot by French journalists in Afghanistan, it showed Afghan women speaking critically of the Taliban. Significantly, they are dressed in shiny silk-like costumes, with large rings on their fingers.

Nakamura, 55, says the anti-Taliban Northern Alliance are not the freedom fighters some journalists describe them as. Villagers are frightened of them because they are more violent and cruel than the Taliban, he says. They execute innocent people in horrific ways, though not in public as the Taliban do as a warning to others.

Nakamura works for Peshawarkai Medical Services, a Japanese aid agency based in Fukuoka City that has been operating in the Peshawar district for 17 years. He first visited the area as an alpinist when he was still a medical school student in Fukuoka. Shocked by the lack of medical care in the area, particularly for leprosy patients, he volunteered to work at a local hospital in l984. He says: "I spent most of my time not in straight medical work but in trying to understand my patients, their lifestyles and values -- what makes them weep or what matters most for them. "Luckily, I can eat anything and sleep anywhere," he grins.

Nakamura has seen foreigners visiting Afghanistan and returning home to criticise the Muslim culture -- from a Western perspective. These people may be "heroes or heroines in London or New York," he says, "but they contribute nothing to the welfare of Afghans." As for suggestions the Taliban have cut the country off from the world, Nakamura says the Afghans are perhaps better informed than the Japanese, as they listen daily to BBC radio in their own language.

The doctor's greatest concern is the fate of millions of starving refugees in and around Afghanistan. Over one million of them are suffering from hunger, he says, while up to 40% are bordering on starvation. He thinks 10% could die during the winter. Nakamura and his staff stopped focusing exclusively on leprosy in the l980s as they had so many refugees to deal with, many suffering from malaria, diarrhoea, infections and fever. Severe draught in recent years created hundreds of thousands of refugees. And now the American bombing and the fear of an invasion has brought more. His aid agency helps to dig wells not only to provide water but also for irrigation for farms, so that the refugees can return to their villages.

Back home in Japan temporarily and thinking of his base area in Pakistan and Afghanistan, Nakamura says: "It's all like a mirage far off in the desert." He fondly recalls the red-brown soil of Afghanistan fields, the villagers sharing their joy about water from newly dug wells, and the friendly faces of Taliban soldiers helping villagers. "I have one simple question," he says. "What are the big powers trying to defend by attacking this ailing, tiny country?" It's a good question.
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2003-01-12 Sun 07:50ct