An opening for the empowerment of women in Islam - By Ghulam Muhammed

Thursday, November 11, 2010

An opening for the empowerment of women in Islam

The clash of culture or civilization between West and Islam is most visible in matters relating to womenfolk. However, there are ingenious ways that Muslim women can become more useful and rewarding part of society, even while remaining true to their faith and its guidance on modesty. Islam gives extraordinary emphasis on chastity and as such favors separation of men and women who are not related; with a view to obviate the chances of misdemeanor. However, Islam is not averse to women helping society by sparing time and effort from their household duties, and at the same time enriching themselves with knowledge and experiences in the wide world. Nursing and Medical profession is one such field where women can be most helpful provided they are allowed to work in a controlled environment. Just as we have girls’ school, colleges, orphanages, we can have women’s hospitals, exclusively treating women and children. They could be staffed only by women. In such an atmosphere, Muslim lady doctors and lady nurses can not only be most helpful to people, but could even find gainful employment without compromising with the strict Islamic guidelines on morality and chastity.

Necessity is the mother of invention. Islamic countries or countries with substantial Muslim population can be motivated to give women a better chance in life, by promotion of medical education as well as special hospitalization facilities exclusively for women. ‘FOR THE WOMEN, BY THE WOMEN” could be the bench-mark.

Even in countries like India, the demand for medical services is so strong, that any contribution to the work force, be that on any terms, can only help people at large, women opting for medical profession as well the entire nation.

India’s cultural ethos too is overwhelmingly committed/ agreeable/ comfortable with such separate facilities available to womenfolk out of traditional standards of modesty, which should not be made a cause of ongoing friction to impose western norms, in the misguided obsessions that the West is the final and exclusive repository of all wisdom.

In India, reservations of up to 50% could be allotted for women and a suitable proportion for Muslim women, so that the nation can benefit from greater participation of Muslim women in the mainstream, while at the same time helping themselves with a higher standard of living through education and service.

Ghulam Muhammed, Mumbai

ghulammuhammed3@gmail.com

<http://www.ghulammuhammed.blogspot.com>

Bush Interview on US TODAY http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/40105544#40105544

Bush Interview on US TODAY

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21134540/vp/40105544#40105544

Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations - By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG - THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/asia/10prexy.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a21&pagewanted=all

Obama, in Indonesia, Pledges Expanded Ties With Muslim Nations

By SHERYL GAY STOLBERG

Published: November 9, 2010

JAKARTA, Indonesia — President Obama, renewing his call for better relations between the United States and the Muslim world, used a long-awaited homecoming trip to this island nation to make a symbolic visit on Wednesday morning to the largest mosque in southeast Asia — even as he declared that “much more work needs to be done” to fulfill the promise he made 17 months ago in Cairo of a “new beginning.”

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama delivered a speech at the University of Indonesia in Jakarta on Wednesday.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama and his wife, Michelle, with the grand imam during a visit to the Istiqlal Mosque in Jakarta.

 

 

Doug Mills/The New York Times

President Obama with President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono of Indonesia, in hat, after their joint news conference on Tuesday at the State Palace in Jakarta.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Mr. Yudhoyono gave a gift of medals to Mr. Obama on Tuesday during a state dinner at the palace complex in the capital.

Doug Mills/The New York Times

Children lined the street to watch President Obama’s motorcade head to the University of Indonesia on Wednesday.

Indonesia is the world’s largest majority Muslim nation, and Mr. Obama, on a 10-day, four-country trip through Asia, used his brief stay here to hold it up as an example of diversity, tolerance and democracy.


He closed his remarks at a news conference on Tuesday evening with the Muslim greeting “salaam aleikum” and said he intended to reshape American relations with Muslim nations so they were not “focused solely on security issues,” but rather on expanded cooperation across a broad range of areas, from science to education.

In a speech on Wednesday morning to an enthusiastic audience of 6,500 people at the University of Indonesia, he also harked back to his Cairo message.

“I said then, and I will repeat now, that no single speech can eradicate years of mistrust,” Mr. Obama said. “But I believed then, and I believe today, that we do have a choice. We can choose to be defined by our differences, and give in to a future of suspicion and mistrust. Or we can choose to do the hard work of forging common ground, and commit ourselves to the steady pursuit of progress.”

Earlier, at the Istiqlal Mosque, Mr. Obama and his wife, Michelle, followed the Islamic custom of removing their shoes; Mrs. Obama wore a head shawl with beads. They walked along a courtyard on a pale blue carpet escorted by the grand imam, who told Mr. Obama that there was a church next door and that during Christmas parishioners use the mosque’s parking lot because the church does not have enough space.

Mr. Obama turned to reporters and said, “That is an example of the kind of cooperation” between religions in Indonesia.

For Mr. Obama, who suffered a backlash at home this year when he said he favored the right of Muslims to build a proposed Islamic center in Lower Manhattan — and whose personal history makes him the target of anti-Muslim sentiment — the outreach effort is a delicate one. Jakarta is the place that has given rise to many of the myths about Mr. Obama, including the rumor that he is Muslim (he is Christian); that he attended a madrasa that was connected to radical Islam (he attended two schools here, one Roman Catholic and one secular, although most of the students were Muslim); and that he was not born in the United States (he was born in Hawaii).

In his speech, Mr. Obama tried to correct the misperceptions and he spoke about Indonesia’s ability to bridge religious and racial divides. “As a Christian visiting a mosque on this visit,” he said, “I found it in the words of a leader who was asked about my visit and said: ‘Muslims are also allowed in churches. We are all God’s followers.’ ”

The last time Mr. Obama was in Indonesia, in 1992, he spent a month holed up in a rented beachside hut in Bali, where he swam each morning and spent afternoons writing “Dreams From My Father,” the memoir that later became a best seller. In it, he shared memories of his life here as a boy, “running barefoot along a paddy field, with my feet sinking into the cool, wet mud, part of a chain of other brown boys chasing after a tattered kite.”

He has chased after a few other things since then — notably the presidency — and when he returned here, he got the kind of rock-star welcome he no longer receives in the United States.
When Air Force One touched down on Tuesday in a typical Jakarta afternoon thunderstorm, a huge cheer went up inside the State Palace complex — not from average Indonesians, but from the local press corps, watching on television. “Finally, he arrived!” exulted Glenn Jos, a cameraman.

After descending the steps of his plane, Mr. Obama, in a dark suit, accompanied by his wife walked the red carpet that had been laid out for them and stepped into a black Cadillac limousine. He poked his head out the door to give a short wave.

“Yes!” the reporters shouted.

Indonesians have prepared three times previously for a visit from the president, only to be disappointed. Last year, the White House hinted that Mr. Obama might tuck in an Indonesia stop on a November trip to Asia, but it did not materialize.

Then, in March, Mr. Obama, his wife and daughters canceled a trip at the last minute so that he could shepherd his health care bill through Congress. In June, another Indonesia trip was canceled, this time so the president could deal with the BP oil spill.

And once Mr. Obama finally arrived, a cloud of volcanic ash played havoc with his schedule, forcing him to leave a few hours earlier than planned on Wednesday so that he could make it to Seoul, South Korea, to attend the Group of 20 conference of economic powers.

Mr. Obama spent four years, from ages 6 to 10, in Indonesia, living here with his mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, and stepfather, Lolo Soetoro. In his memoir he writes richly of the experience. He described the markets: “the hawkers, the leather workers, the old women chewing betelnut and swatting flies off their fruit with whisk brooms.”

He wrote of his introduction to the food: “dog meat (tough), snake meat (tougher), and roasted grasshopper (crunchy).” And the menagerie in his backyard: “chickens and ducks running every which way, a big yellow dog with a baleful howl, two birds of paradise, a white cockatoo and finally two baby crocodiles.”

Mr. Obama said Tuesday that he had come to “focus not on the past but the future,” but Indonesians seemed to have both in mind. At a state dinner, Mr. Obama was served Indonesian dishes he said he loved as a boy. And in a gesture that Mr. Obama said left him “deeply moved,” President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono presented him with a gold medal in honor of his mother, who worked here for years as an anthropologist and pioneer in microcredit for the poor.

Jakarta has undergone a transformation since Mr. Obama first moved here in 1967. The tallest building he remembered, a shopping mall, has been eclipsed by skyscrapers. Mr. Obama recalled riding on “little taxis, but you stood in the back and it was very crowded” or on bicycle rickshaws.
“Now,” he lamented, “as president I can’t even see all the traffic, because they block all the streets.”

At the university, Mr. Obama sprinkled his speech with Indonesian phrases, mimicking the sing-song sounds of street vendors. Then, in this country’s native tongue, he said, “I’m home.”

 

In Curt Exchange, U.S. Faults Israel on Housing - By MARK LANDLER and ETHAN BRONNER --- THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/world/middleeast/10jerusalem.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a1

In Curt Exchange, U.S. Faults Israel on Housing

Bernat Armangue/Associated Press

Israeli police officers clashed with Palestinians on Tuesday in an area of East Jerusalem, the site of a dispute over settlements.

By MARK LANDLER and ETHAN BRONNER

Published: November 9, 2010

WASHINGTON — President Obama’s criticism of new Israeli housing plans for East Jerusalem, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s even sharper retort, have thrown the Middle East peace talks into jeopardy, with the dispute over Jewish settlements looming as a seemingly insuperable hurdle.
The Obama administration is struggling to restart direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians, which stalled last month after the expiration of a partial freeze on settlement construction in the West Bank. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton plans to meet Mr. Netanyahu in New York on Thursday, while Egypt sent two top officials to Washington to discuss ways to salvage the process.


But the brusque exchange between Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu reflected again the gulf between Israel and the United States over settlements — an issue Mr. Obama initially made the centerpiece of his Middle East diplomacy. Palestinian officials said Israel’s latest announcement threatened the talks and could prompt a unilateral declaration of a Palestinian state.

When asked in about Israel’s plans for 1,000 housing units for a contested part of East Jerusalem, Mr. Obama said, “This kind of activity is never helpful when it comes to peace negotiations.”
“I’m concerned that we’re not seeing each side make the extra effort involved to get a breakthrough,” the president added during his visit to Indonesia. “Each of these incremental steps can end up breaking trust.”

A few hours later, Mr. Netanyahu’s office responded with a statement, saying that “Jerusalem is not a settlement; Jerusalem is the capital of the State of Israel.”

The United States and Israel have well-known differences over Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu’s office said in the statement, adding that building plans should have no effect on the peace talks.
Despite their efforts to build mutual trust, Mr. Obama and Mr. Netanyahu seem to keep talking past each other. On Tuesday, they were worlds apart in symbolism as well as substance: the president voiced his criticism of Israel while on a visit to Jakarta, capital of the world’s most populous Muslim country.

Mr. Netanyahu was in New York, meeting business people, midway through a visit to the United States that included a speech to a Jewish group in New Orleans on Monday, in which he called on Washington to be more aggressive in threatening Iran with a military strike if it did not give up its nuclear program.

Analysts said Mr. Netanyahu’s unyielding tone — a palpable contrast to his chagrined reaction after a similar housing dispute during a visit to Israel by Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. — testified to the altered political environment in the United States. The stinging Democratic defeat in the midterm elections, the analysts said, had emboldened Mr. Netanyahu to push back harder against the administration.

“He is dealing with a president who is politically weakened,” said Daniel C. Kurtzer, a former American ambassador to Israel. “A lot of his friends in Washington are Republicans. He feels more comfortable with them, so he just feels that he’s got a freer hand here.”

Israel’s ambassador to the United States, Michael B. Oren, rejected that view. “We’re not looking for a confrontation with the Obama administration,” he said.

He said Mr. Netanyahu was eager to discuss with Mrs. Clinton “how we are going to move forward, once we get over this hump.”

But Mr. Oren declined to say whether Mr. Netanyahu would offer new proposals for breaking the impasse. The United States has asked him to extend the settlement freeze for 60 days in return for security incentives.

Israeli officials have said Mr. Netanyahu is hemmed in by his right-wing coalition, which opposes extending the freeze. Some officials said that by taking a hard line on Israel’s right to build in Jerusalem, Mr. Netanyahu might gain the political cover to compromise over the West Bank.

On Wednesday, Mrs. Clinton will meet with Egypt’s foreign minister, Ahmed Aboul Gheit, and its intelligence chief, Omar Suleiman. Egypt is worried by the impasse, and American officials said they expected the Egyptians to advance their own ideas for resuscitating the talks, which could include an Israeli pledge to withdraw troops from parts of the West Bank.

Whether that would be enough to satisfy the Palestinians without an extension of the settlement freeze is not clear. In another gesture to the Palestinians, Mrs. Clinton will announce the United States’ annual financial contribution to the Palestinian Authority on Wednesday, an administration official said.

Mr. Netanyahu has supported Mr. Obama’s mix of engagement and sanctions against Iran. But in his speech to the Jewish Federations of North America in New Orleans, he called for a more aggressive approach.

“If the international community, led by the United States, hopes to stop Iran’s nuclear program without resorting to military action,” he declared, “it will have to convince Iran that it is prepared to take such action.”

Dan Diker, a senior foreign policy analyst at the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, said the speech was calculated to “push the military option to the top paragraph of the policy from the third or fourth paragraph.”

But Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates said that the threat of military action was not the best way to deter Tehran. Mr. Gates said the recent United Nations sanctions against the Iranian government were starting to bite.

Israel’s housing announcement came in the form of plans published for public review in local newspapers on Friday, just before Mr. Netanyahu headed to Washington. As with previous announcements, Israeli officials said the timing was determined bureaucratically, not politically.
Still, the timing raised questions about what Mr. Netanyahu knew and when. After Mr. Biden’s visit to Israel was spoiled last March by a similar announcement that Mr. Netanyahu said was a surprise to him, American officials told the Israelis that they wanted no more surprises.

At the time, Mr. Netanyahu’s aides said he sent out letters demanding lists of future settlement plans to avoid surprises while peace talks were under way. It was unclear whether Mr. Netanyahu knew about this one before it was published in newspapers last week. On Tuesday, it also became clear that some 800 units would be built in the West Bank settlement of Ariel.
 
Saeb Erekat, the chief Palestinian negotiator, said Israel’s action was “a call for immediate international recognition of the Palestinian state.”

The Palestinian leadership has been talking about shifting its focus to getting international recognition of a Palestinian state if settlement building continued and the peace talks remained stalled. The Obama administration and Arab states have urged it not to go that route.

Mark Landler reported from Washington, and Ethan Bronner from Jerusalem.

U.S. Says Holocaust Fund Was Defrauded - By Mosi Secret - THE NEW YORK TIMES

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/10/nyregion/10holocaust.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a1

U.S. Says Holocaust Fund Was Defrauded

By MOSI SECRET

Published: November 9, 2010

While fleeing the Nazis in 1941, an 11-year-old girl dodged airplane bombs as she crossed the Dnieper River in Ukraine, ultimately finding refuge in Donetsk, where she and her mother lived in hiding until the liberation of 1944.

A 13-year-old boy escaped from Kiev with his mother and younger sister, shuttling from basements to barns and sometimes the forest, where they often stayed for weeks.
These tales were among thousands of similar accounts given in the name of elderly immigrants who were seeking reparations from the German government through a fund established to provide help to survivors of Nazi persecution.

But many of the stories were works of fiction or embellishment of facts, perpetrated by a group that included six employees and custodians of the fund, which is based in New York, federal prosecutors said on Tuesday. Eleven other defendants were outsiders who recruited and funneled applicants to the programs.

Over 16 years, the suspects used fake identification documents, doctored government records and a knowledge of Holocaust history to defraud the fund of more than $42 million, according to an indictment unsealed Tuesday by the United States attorney in Manhattan, Preet Bharara.

The defendants, the indictment says, would recruit applicants — many of them from Brighton Beach, Brooklyn — through Russian-language newspapers, offering help to people applying for compensation from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany. In many cases, the immigrants’ actual experiences would be manipulated or tailored to fit the requirements of the fund; once the payments were approved, the defendants would receive kickbacks from the applicants, according to the indictment.

Birth dates were changed so people would appear to have been alive during World War II; anecdotes about surviving inhumane conditions in a Nazi-occupied territory were repeated in multiple applications; photos of certain applicants were reused on dozens of unrelated applications.
The conspiracy was directed at two programs run by the claims conference. The conference was established in 1951 to compensate Jewish victims of Nazi persecution; the German government appropriated money for the conference the following year, and has been financing it since.

One of the programs, known as the Hardship Fund, pays reparations to Jews who became refugees when they fled the Nazis; the majority of payments from the Hardship Fund went to people from the former Soviet Bloc countries who were had not under direct Nazi occupation, but who fled to escape the Nazi advance, according to the indictment. The fund pays a one-time payment of approximately $3,600.

The second program, called the Article 2 Fund, compensates survivors who lived in hiding, under a false identity, in a Jewish ghetto, or who were incarcerated in a labor or a concentration camp. This program provides monthly payments of approximately $411 to survivors who make less than $16,000 per year.

“The alleged fraud is as substantial as it is galling,” Mr. Bharara said at a news conference announcing the indictment. The charges followed a yearlong investigation by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. F.B.I. agents arrested 11 of the defendants Tuesday morning; 5 were previously charged.

The suspects are each accused of playing a role in creating, filing and processing fraudulent claims on behalf of applicants who should not have qualified for compensation. Semen Domnitser, who was the director of the Hardship and Article 2 Funds until he was fired on Feb. 3, was accused of being the leader. At the fund, his responsibilities included reviewing all applications for approval before they were sent to Germany.

The claims conference became suspicious when employees noticed two applications that came in within two weeks that had remarkably similar facts, said Gregory Schneider, the executive vice president of the organization. They began to look for patterns and, after finding other problems, alerted the F.B.I. in December 2009.

To date, investigators have found nearly 5,000 false applications from 2000 through 2009 to the Hardship Fund, resulting in a loss of about $18 million. They have found 658 fraudulent applications to the second fund, from 1993 to 2009, with losses of about $24.5 million.

Mr. Schneider said the theft amounted to less than 1 percent of the claims filed since the two programs’ inception. He said his organization had processed 630,000 applications for the two programs over the last two decades. He said he suspected that the nearly 6,000 people involved in the false claims were a mix of those who were aware they were committing fraud and those who may have been used.

When Mr. Bharara was asked whether the thousands of others involved in the fraud could be charged, he said, “the investigation remains open.”

In the example of the 11-year-old girl who crossed the Dnieper River, her application included a government document from the Soviet Union where the dates and location of her primary schooling had been changed to make it appear that she was in hiding then. The document also falsely omitted the existence of a brother and said that her mother had died, so operators of the program could not check her claims.

The man who submitted paperwork detailing his suffering as a 13-year-old used forged government documents to show he went to primary school in Kiev, when in fact he studied in Leningrad, which was never occupied.

Although the fund’s offices are in Midtown, much of the criminal activity was in Brighton Beach, known as Little Odessa because of the community’s large number of Ukrainian immigrants.

Dora Grande, who runs a business near Brighton 12th Street, created false identification documents that were submitted in many of the fraudulent applications, according to the indictment. Valentina Romashova, who lived in Brighton Beach, worked at a law firm that placed advertisements in Russian-language newspapers.

At the luxurious beachfront complex where Ms. Romashova lives, a neighbor, Victor Kason, 85, recalled his own youth during World War II. He said he was 14 when he was moved to a ghetto in Lodz, Poland. He and his parents were then moved to concentration camps; he survived, but his parents did not.

“They committed a crime,” Mr. Kason said of the defendants, adding that he did not know Ms. Romashova. “Let them pay.”

Khristina Narizhnaya contributed reporting.

----------------------------------------------