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Bangladesh police arrest 450 people linked to attacks on Hindu homes
and religious sites in worst unrest for over a decade
19 Oct, 2021 11:35
© Reuters / Mohammad Ponir Hossain
Bangladeshi police have arrested 450 people following attacks against Hindus in the Muslim-majority country in some of the worst unrest in over a decade, which has seen Hindu religious sites vandalized and homes destroyed.
Authorities logged 71 cases linked to violence during the major Hindu festival of Durga Puja across different parts of Bangladesh, the police’s assistant inspector general said on Monday.
In the last five days 450 people have been arrested in connection with attacks on puja venues and temples, as well as Hindu homes and businesses, and for spreading rumors on social media during the religious holiday, local media reported.
The senior police official added that the number of arrests and incidents could increase as investigations are still ongoing.
Violence broke out on Friday when hundreds of Muslims protested in the southeastern Noakhali district over an allegedly blasphemous incident involving the Islamic holy scripture, the Koran. Two Hindu men died following that protest, the region’s police chief told Reuters, but it was not clear if their deaths were due to “unlawful assembly, or otherwise.”
On Monday, hundreds of people demonstrated in the Bangladeshi capital of Dhaka, calling for an end to days of religious violence that have seen at least six people dead and several injured.
The United Nations’ resident coordinator in Bangladesh, Mia Seppo, condemned the turbulence on the same day: "Recent attacks on Hindus of Bangladesh, fueled by hate speech on social media, are against the values of the Constitution and need to stop”. She also called for the government to ensure an impartial probe and the protection of minorities.
Communal tensions in Bangladesh, where Hindus account for 10% of the population, have long been a problem in the country. However, the recent religious violence ranks among the worst since Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina's Awami League party came to power in 2009.
In 2017, a thousands-strong mob torched a Hindu village 300km from the capital after accusations that a resident had insulted the Prophet Mohammed in a Facebook post. At least 30 Hindu homes were set ablaze in the assault.
Seems to me that the Muslims are insulting Mohammed with their actions. Surely, Mohammed can protect himself.
Turkey orders arrest of 158 suspects with links to Muslim cleric Gulen,
accused of being behind 2016 coup attempt
19 Oct, 2021 09:10
in Istanbul, Turkey, November 25, 2020. © Reuters / Murad Sezer
Turkish prosecutors have ordered the arrest of 158 suspects, including 33 active-duty soldiers, with alleged links to Muslim cleric Fethullah Gulen, accused by Ankara of being behind the unsuccessful 2016 coup attempt.
The investigations, carried out by the İzmir Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office, spanned 41 provinces, state-owned Anadolu agency said on Tuesday. The latest operation saw 97 people detained, with the search said to be continuing.
Out of the 158 wanted suspects, 48 were serving and former military personnel, while 110 were expelled military students who were dismissed after the coup attempt.
The latest arrests are part of a chain of crackdowns over recent years on people accused of having connections to what has been dubbed by Turkey as the Fethullah Gulen Terrorist Organization.
In April, the arrest of 532 suspects, mainly serving military personnel, was ordered by Istanbul and Izmir prosecutors in a 62-province operation that also spanned Turkish-controlled northern Cyprus.
The group, allegedly led by the US-based Muslim preacher, has been accused by Ankara’s authorities of being behind the failed coup attempt in July 2016, which saw at least 250 people killed. Gulen, a former ally turned foe of President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has lived in self-exile since 1999 overseas in the US. He denies any involvement in the coup.
Following the failed military takeover to overthrow Erdogan, 80,000 people were detained pending trial. Some 150,000 civil servants, military staff and others were either fired or suspended from their posts.
UK’s ‘Prevent’ anti-terror scheme ‘hamstrung’ by PC culture &
ignoring radical Islam threat while targeting far-right, report says
20 Oct, 2021 11:38
The UK’s flagship anti-terror scheme, ‘Prevent’, is reportedly “failing to deliver” after being stymied by political correctness – diverting resources from the “gravest threat” of Islamist terrorism to tackle far-right extremism.
A new report, published in the wake of the fatal stabbing of MP David Amess last week, has criticised agencies with oversight authority on the program for being swayed by “false allegations of Islamophobia.” The analysis claimed there is a “fundamental mismatch” between the threat posed by radical Islam and the attention given to it by Prevent.
There has been renewed scrutiny on the program after media reports emerged that Ali Harbi Ali, the 25-year-old suspect in the Amess killing, had been referred to Prevent five years ago but was not deemed to be enough of a risk to become a “formal subject of interest.” Only 147 individuals from a list of 6,287 terror suspects flagged by British security services in 2019 were apparently still being monitored by the program.
According to the report by counter-terrorism think-tank Henry Jackson Society (HJS), Prevent is devoting increasing amounts of time and money to combating other forms of extremism, such as from the far-right, which constitutes a smaller threat to national security.
“The Prevent scheme has been hamstrung by political correctness following a well-organised campaign by Islamist groups and the political Left of false allegations of ‘Islamophobia’ so that its work is skewed away from the gravest threat – that of radical Islam,” HJS head Alan Mendoza told the Daily Mail.
Data from the Home Office reportedly shows that Islamist extremists account for 22% of all referrals to the program, while 24% relate to neo-Nazi and other far-right extremists. Of the most serious cases taken up last year by Prevent’s ‘Channel’ intervention phase – where a panel of senior council officials, health workers and anti-terror police decide on a course of action, about 30% (210) were related to Islamists compared with 43% (302) for far-right causes.
As recently as five years ago (2015/16), as much as 69% (262) of the most serious cases referred to Prevent were regarding suspected Muslim extremists, while 26% (98) related to far-right beliefs. In the years since, the number of cases tallied as serious far-right extremism has apparently increased yearly, while there has been an 80% drop in the number of initial referrals related to Islamist terrorism.
That shift in focus coincides with the 2016 murder of Labour MP Jo Cox by a white supremacist. Last year, Scotland Yard Assistant Commissioner Neil Basu had warned that the far right was Britain’s fastest growing terror threat.
Basu? Any chance he's a Muslim?
However, an unidentified intelligence source told the Telegraph that right-wing extremists were “by and large... hoodlums” who do not “present the same risk as Islamists by any distance, by a factor of four or five to one.”
Noting that the process had become “unbalanced” due to an emphasis on being “politically correct and not Islamophobic,” the source called for an “honest appraisal about where the threat is actually coming from.”
Earlier this week, British security experts warned that the UK could face lone-wolf terrorist attacks by “bedroom radicals” drawn to extremist content online due to “isolation” during Covid-19 lockdowns. In July, Richard Smith, head of the Metropolitan Police counter-terrorism command, said there had been a “significant decline” during the pandemic in the number of referrals to Prevent.
Meanwhile, an unnamed security source told the Times that an upcoming review of Prevent is likely to recommend the addition of “more hawkish” MI5 and counter-terrorism police officers during the Channel phase and increase the current one-year deradicalisation programs for suspected terrorists to three years.
Let it be so! The extraordinary effort to appear as not-racist when dealing with Muslims is the same problem that allowed 1500 British girls to be groomed, raped, drugged, and trafficked by Pakistanis in Rotherham. Thousands of others in a dozen or more cities in the UK suffered the same fate. It's time for the UK to start dealing with the truth, for a change.
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