Family members in government-linked foundation earn RM80,000 a month, says anti-graft group
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/m...-month-says-an
ational Oversight and Whistleblowers (NOW) director Akmal Nasir says a charity foundation under the Prime Minister’s Department gave its top office bearers multiple positions, enabling them to earn huge amounts in allowances. – The Malaysian Insider pic by Kamal Ariffin, November 11, 2015
A charity foundation under the Prime Minister’s Department is again under the spotlight of an anti-graft whistleblower group for giving its top office bearers multiple positions, enabling them to earn huge amounts in allowances.
A family of three, where the wife held seven posts; the son six directorships and the husband a fellowship, took home RM81,700 a month, the National Oversight and Whistleblowers (NOW) said today.
NOW director Akmal Nasir said the woman, who is the deputy chairman of the board of trustees, was also its deputy president, held seven positions in total earning her RM45,500 a month. One of these positions was as chairman of the foundation’s audit committee.
Her son also held six director positions in several of the foundation’s subsidiaries, earning RM31,200 a month, while her husband was appointed as a fellow who received RM5,000 a month.
This meant the family of three earned RM81,700 a month, Akmal told the press. He also produced copies of the allowance statements, the foundation’s organisational chart and appointment letters to the office bearers at the press conference in Kuala Lumpur today.
“This information was from last year. This year there may even be an increase.
“This is evidence obtained from the monthly allowance letters and yearly income statements,” Akmal told reporters.
The chairman of the foundation’s board of trustees, meanwhile, earned a total of RM73,000 a month, also from being its president, in addition to having ten other positions on panels, committees and subsidiaries of the foundation.
The foundation is under the oversight of the minister in charge of Islamic affairs, Datuk Seri Jamil Khir Baharom. The minister has not responded to calls and messages from The Malaysian Insider on the matter.
“This is an institution under the Prime Minister’s Department. Datuk Seri Jamil Khir should come forward to explain how this could happen under his watch,” Akmal said.
NOW has been exposing alleged corruption by this particular government-linked foundation which received public donations as well as government grants.
Earlier this week, NOW revealed the foundation’s involvement in channelling RM223,000 supposedly for community programmes in the Rompin by-election in May this year, that instead went to a Kelantan Wanita Umno leader.
The Wanita Umno leader has also been under investigation by the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) for misappropriating flood relief funds held in trust by the same foundation for flood victims in Kelantan. – November 11, 2015.
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http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/m...-says-minister
Don’t label me racist because I fight for Bumiputera, says minister -
Umno Supreme Council member Datuk Seri Ismail Sabri said he should not be labelled as racist simply because he voiced the interests of the Malays and Bumiputera.
The Rural and Regional Development minister also stressed that he would continue fighting for the Malay and Bumiputera without suppressing the interests of others.
“I have probably been labelled as racist, but my principle is quite easy…we fight for our people, but we do not afflict others. As long as we keep it that way, I think there’s nothing wrong with what we do.
If the Chinese leaders want to talk about Chinese people, go ahead, no problem, but just don’t go calling me racist when I talk about the Malays,” he said in response to MCA central committee member Datuk Choon Hann Lua’s remark accusing him of using electronic cigarettes or vape issue as a racial issue.
Ismail said this to reporters after opening the 14th convocation of Kolej Universiti Agrosains Malaysia at the Putrajaya International Convention Centre today.
Ismail said as Barisan Nasional component party, MCA should understand his responsibility as an Umno leader in helping the Malays because other BN component party leaders would do the same for their respective community.
He said Umno had no problem if MCA tried to so something for the Chinese and even willing to collaborate for the purpose.
Ismail also called Lua to stop labelling him as racist, but instead to focus on winning the hearts of the Chinese voters to support MCA and BN.
He also expressed hope that the Health Ministry would meet and discuss with vape traders to find the best solution to the issue. – Bernama, November 12, 2015.
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DAP hands over ‘racist’ video of Ali Tinju to cops, wants case reopened
http://www.themalaysianinsider.com/m...-case-reopened
Police should reopen investigations against Mohd Ali Baharom, said DAP after the party handed over to the authorities videos of the former soldier allegedly making racist remarks in the July Low Yat Plaza incident.
Chong Zhemin, organising secretary of Perak DAP Socialist Youth, said a CD containing the recordings of Ali, also known as Ali Tinju, was handed over to the police at the Ipoh headquarters.
“Video recordings of Ali Tinju making the inflammatory remarks have gone viral on the Internet and it is inconceivable and unimaginable that the police are unable to come up with the recordings.
“With this evidence of him making racist and seditious remarks, the police should not have any more excuse to drop the charge against Ali Tinju,” Chong said in a statement.
Police have been criticised for dropping sedition charges against Ali, who is president of the Malay Armed Forces Veterans Association, for his role in sparking a racist-fuelled fracas outside Low Yat Plaza in Kuala Lumpur.
In a recent interview with The Malaysian Insider, Attorney-General Tan Sri Mohamed Apandi Ali revealed that the charge was dropped because the police could not come up with recordings of the alleged remarks. – November 14, 2015.
http://www.straitstimes.com/singapor...paign=addtoany
ISIS social media post in May cites Singapore as possible target
Singapore has been identified as a possible target for attack by a recent Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) posting on social media, a report this week said.
ISIS supporters from the region have also cited the Philippines and the United States as targets, the report’s author, S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies analyst Jasminder Singh, told The Straits Times.
This development comes as Malaysia last month nabbed a cell with explosives targeting Putrajaya and the federal Parliament, and as Singapore’s Home Affairs Ministry on Wednesday announced the detention of a 19-year-old student who made plans to join ISIS in Syria and carry out attacks here.
It is not the first time Singapore has been cited by radicals. Last year, extremist English-language magazine Resurgence cited the Phillip Channel and Sembawang Naval Base in a piece on how militants could attack at sea.
The threat to Singapore and the region is set to grow as ISIS’ Malay archipelago combat unit, Katibah Nusantara, formed in Syria last August for South-east Asian fighters who find it easier to communicate in Bahasa Indonesia and Malay rather than Arabic, gains ground.
There are now more than 700 fighters from Indonesia and over 200 fighters from Malaysia fighting in Iraq and Syria, Mr Singh noted in the report published this week. While they make up a small proportion of over 30,000 foreign fighters from 90 countries, the unit scored its first major combat success last month, seizing five Kurdish-held areas in Syria.
The unit is likely to gain importance in ISIS’ strategic goal of setting up a worldwide caliphate, with returning fighters mobilised to undertake attacks and even declare a new branch in this region.
“The downward slide of jihadist appeal and success since 2009 has been reversed by Katibah Nusantara’s success in Iraq and Syria,” Mr Singh wrote.
He said Malaysian fighters have also seized on local issues like the push for an Islamic penal code to win support. More recently, ISIS sympathisers online have called on Rohingya fleeing persecution in Myanmar to go to Syria.
Professor Rohan Gunaratna, who heads Singapore’s International Centre for Political Violence and Terrorism Research, says the unit poses a severe threat to Singapore and South-east Asia.
“It has multiple functions: to train people capable of carrying out attacks in Iraq and Syria, to instigate South-east Asians to mount attacks in their home countries, and to radicalise South-east Asians online, recruit them and physically facilitate their entry into Iraq and Syria,” he said.
Hence, the strategy to counter this influence has to be multi-pronged, from engaging the community to exposing ISIS’ evils online. Muslim leaders worldwide are also leading the effort to counter ISIS, he added.
They include Singapore’s Mufti, Dr Fatris Bakaram, who said it was a religious obligation for Muslims here to report to the authorities those who pose a threat.
A father’s split-second heroism saved countless lives in another terror attack, in Beirut
Adel Termos, a Beirut resident out with his young daughter, witnessed a horrific bombing on Thursday. Then he made a split-second decision that saved countless lives.
s a second suicide bomber moved toward onlookers clustering at the scene of the explosion, Termos rushed the suspect.
“He tackled him to the ground, causing the second suicide bomber to detonate,” says blogger and physician Elie Fares, who lives in Beirut. “There are many many families, hundreds of families probably, who owe their completeness to his sacrifice.”
ISIS has claimed responsibility for the twin suicide bombings that took an estimated 45 lives, including Termos. More than 200 people were wounded. It’s not clear, however, whether the daughter died. Pictures posted recently seem to suggest she survived.
Fares says when similar bombings occurred in Beirut in years past, Lebanese were quick to view the events through the prism of sectarian politics.
“The street is still divided by political and sectarian lines, but this time around the sense is that these are people, period,” Fares says. “They’re dead because of something they had absolutely no role in … They died because of some demented, twisted politics.”
Fares says it would be wrong to call the victims martyrs.
“Calling them martyrs is a sort of Lebanese way to not only dehumanize them, it’s to sort of make ourselves feel better that, yeah, it’s okay, they died, but they’re martyrs which means they’re in heaven and they’re in a better place,” he says. “But the fact of the matter is it’s just sort of a label to make ourselves feel better, and maybe their families feel better because the label of ‘victim’ means there’s a sort of accountability to the process.”
The two blasts hit during the evening rush hour, and devastated a commercial strip of southern Beirut.
Lebanon shares a border with Syria and hosts more than one million refugees from throughout the region.
http://blogs.new.spectator.co.uk/201...do-with-islam/
Will politicians finally admit that the Paris attacks had something to do with Islam?
French president Francois Hollande speaks at the Elysee palace in Paris on November 14, 2015, following a series of coordinated attacks in and around Paris late Friday which left more than 120 people dead (Photo: Getty)
The West’s movement towards the truth is remarkably slow. We drag ourselves towards it painfully, inch by inch, after each bloody Islamist assault.
In France, Britain, Germany, America and nearly every other country in the world it remains government policy to say that any and all attacks carried out in the name of Mohammed have ‘nothing to do with Islam’. It was said by George W. Bush after 9/11, Tony Blair after 7/7 and Tony Abbott after the Sydney attack last month. It is what David Cameron said after two British extremists cut off the head of Drummer Lee Rigby in London, when ‘Jihadi John’ cut off the head of aid worker Alan Henning in the ‘Islamic State’ and when Islamic extremists attacked a Kenyan mall, separated the Muslims from the Christians and shot the latter in the head. It was what President François Hollande said after the massacre of journalists and Jews in Paris in January. And it is all that most politicians will be able to come out with again after the latest atrocities in Paris.
All these leaders are wrong. In private, they and their senior advisers often concede that they are telling a lie. The most sympathetic explanation is that they are telling a ‘noble lie’, provoked by a fear that we — the general public — are a lynch mob in waiting. ‘Noble’ or not, this lie is a mistake. First, because the general public do not rely on politicians for their information and can perfectly well read articles and books about Islam for themselves. Secondly, because the lie helps no one understand the threat we face. Thirdly, because it takes any heat off Muslims to deal with the bad traditions in their own religion. And fourthly, because unless mainstream politicians address these matters then one day perhaps the public will overtake their politicians to a truly alarming extent.
If politicians are so worried about this secondary ‘backlash’ problem then they would do well to remind us not to blame the jihadists’ actions on our peaceful compatriots and then deal with the primary problem — radical Islam — in order that no secondary, reactionary problem will ever grow.
Yet today our political class fuels both cause and nascent effect. Because the truth is there for all to see. To claim that people who punish people by killing them for blaspheming Islam while shouting ‘Allah is greatest’ has ‘nothing to do with Islam’ is madness. Because the violence of the Islamists is, truthfully, only to do with Islam: the worst version of Islam, certainly, but Islam nonetheless.
In January a chink was broken in this wall of disinformation when Sajid Javid, the only Muslim-born member of the British cabinet, and one of its brightest hopes, dipped a toe into this water. After the Charlie Hebdo attacks, he told the BBC: ‘The lazy answer would be to say that this has got nothing whatsoever to do with Islam or Muslims and that should be the end of that. That would be lazy and wrong.’ Sadly, he proceeded to utter the second most lazy thing one can say: ‘These people are using Islam, taking a peaceful religion and using it as a tool to carry out their activities.’
Here we land at the centre of the problem — a centre we have spent the last decade and a half trying to avoid: Islam is not a peaceful religion. No religion is, but Islam is especially not. Nor is it, as some ill-informed people say, solely a religion of war. There are many peaceful verses in the Quran which — luckily for us — the majority of Muslims live by. But it is, by no means, only a religion of peace.
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I say this not because I hate Islam, nor do I have any special animus against Muslims, but simply because this is the verifiable truth based on the texts. Until we accept that we will never defeat the violence, we risk encouraging whole populations to take against all of Islam and abandon all those Muslims who are trying desperately to modernise, reform and de-literalise their faith. And — most importantly — we will give up our own traditions of free speech and historical inquiry and allow one religion to have an unbelievable advantage in the free marketplace of ideas.
It is not surprising that politicians have tried to avoid this debate by spinning a lie. The world would be an infinitely safer place if the historical Mohammed had behaved more like Buddha or Jesus. But he did not and an increasing number of people — Muslim and non-Muslim — have been able to learn this for themselves in recent years. But the light of modern critical inquiry which has begun to fall on Islam is a process which is already proving incredibly painful.
The ‘cartoon wars’ — which began when the Danish paper Jyllands-Posten published a set of cartoons in 2005 — are part of that. But as Flemming Rose, the man who commissioned those cartoons, said when I sat down with him earlier this year, there remains a deep ignorance in the West about what people like the Charlie Hebdo murderers wish to achieve. And we keep ducking it. As Rose said, ‘I wish we had addressed all this nine years ago.’
Contra the political leaders, the Charlie Hebdo murderers and the latest Paris attackers were not lunatics without motive, but highly motivated extremists intent on enforcing their Islamic ideas on 21st-century Europe. If you do not know the ideology — perverted or plausible though it may be — you can neither understand nor prevent such attacks. Nor, without knowing some Islamic history, could you understand why — whether in Mumbai or Paris — the Islamists always target the Jews.
Of course, some people are willing to give up a few of our rights. There seems, as Rose says in his book on the Danish cartoons affair,The Tyranny of Silence, some presumption that a diverse society requires greater limitations on speech, whereas of course the more diverse the society, the more diverse you are going to have to see your speech be. It is not just cartoons, but a whole system of inquiry which is being shut down in the West by way of hard intimidation and soft claims of offence-taking. The result is that, in contemporary Europe, Islam receives not an undue amount of criticism but a free ride which is unfair to all other religions. The night after the Charlie Hebdo atrocities I was pre-recording a Radio 4 programme. My fellow discussant was a very nice Muslim man who works to ‘de-radicalise’ extremists. We agreed on nearly everything. But at some point he said that one reason Muslims shouldn’t react to such cartoons is that Mohammed never objected to critics.
There may be some positive things to be said about Mohammed, but I thought this was pushing things too far and mentioned just one occasion when Mohammed didn’t welcome a critic. Asma bint Marwan was a female poetess who mocked the ‘Prophet’ and who, as a result, Mohammed had killed. It is in the texts. It is not a problem for me. But I can understand why it is a problem for decent Muslims. The moment I said this, my Muslim colleague went berserk. How dare I say this? I replied that it was in the Hadith and had a respectable chain of transmission (an important debate). He said it was a fabrication which he would not allow to stand. The upshot was that he refused to continue unless all mention of this was wiped from the recording. The BBC team agreed and I was left trying to find another way to express the same point. The broadcast had this ‘offensive’ fact left out.
I cannot imagine another religious discussion where this would happen, but it is perfectly normal when discussing Islam. On that occasion I chose one case, but I could have chosen many others, such as the hundreds of Jews Mohammed beheaded with his own hand. Again, that’s in the mainstream Islamic sources. I haven’t made it up. It used to be a problem for Muslims to rationalise, but now there are people trying to imitate such behaviour in our societies it has become a problem for all of us, and I don’t see why people in the free world should have to lie about what we read in historical texts.
We may all share a wish that these traditions were not there but they are and they look set to have serious consequences for us all. We might all agree that the history of Christianity has hardly been un-bloody. But is it not worth asking whether the history of Christianity would have been more bloody or less bloody if, instead of telling his followers to ‘turn the other cheek’, Jesus had called (even once) for his disciples to ‘slay’ non–believers and chop off their heads?
This is a problem with Islam — one that Muslims are going to have to work through. They could do so by a process which forces them to take their foundational texts less literally, or by an intellectually acceptable process of cherry-picking verses. Or prominent clerics could unite to declare the extremists non-Muslim. But there isn’t much hope of this happening. Last month, al-Azhar University in Cairo declared that although Isis members are terrorists they cannot be described as heretics.
We have spent 15 years pretending things about Islam, a complex religion with competing interpretations. It is true that most Muslims live their lives peacefully. But a sizeable portion (around 15 per cent and more in most surveys) follow a far more radical version. The remainder are sitting on a religion which is, in many of its current forms, a deeply unstable component. That has always been a problem for reformist Muslims. But the results of ongoing mass immigration to the West at the same time as a worldwide return to Islamic literalism means that this is now a problem for all of us. To stand even a chance of dealing with it, we are going to have to wake up to it and acknowledge it for what it is.
Paris attacks: French jets attack Islamic State stronghold of Raqqa
Vive la France, la mort des porcs!!!
French fighter jets have launched raids against the Islamic State’s nerve centre of Raqqa in response to the Paris terror attacks.
“The raid … including 10 fighter jets, was launched simultaneously from the United Arab Emirates and Jordan. Twenty bombs were dropped,” the defence ministry said in a statement.
The operation, carried out in coordination with US forces, struck a command centre, recruitment centre for jihadists, a munitions depot and a training camp for fighters, it said.
The targets were identified by French reconnaissance, and the operation was carried out “in co-ordination with American forces”, the ministry said.
Activists in Raqqa told The Washington Post the bombs hit, among other things, a football stadium, a museum and medical facilities.
The strikes had knocked out electricity in the city of about 200,000 people, they said.
The airstrikes come in retaliation for a night of terror in Paris in which more than 130 people were killed and some 350 were injured.
French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, speaking on the sidelines of the G20 summit in Turkey, said France has always said it would react in self defence.
“That’s what we did today with the strikes on Raqqa. We can’t let Daesh attack without a reaction,” Fabius said, using an alternative name for Islamic State.
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The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said the strikes prompted the extremist militia to put its fighters in al-Raqqa on alert.
No casualties have been reported, it said.
France has been bombing Islamic State positions in Iraq and Syria for months as part of a US-led operation.
Raqqa is the main headquarters in Syria of Islamic State fighters, who have proclaimed a caliphate stretching from Syria’s Aleppo province through the Tigris and Euphrates river valleys to the outskirts of Baghdad.
French President Francois Hollande has called the attacks an “act of war” and promised a “ruthless” response against Islamic State, which claimed responsibility.
France has declared three days of national mourning and Hollande will make a rare address to the joint upper and lower houses of parliament on Tuesday (NZT) at the Palace of Versailles, just outside Paris.
http://www.theguardian.com/commentis...s-the-politics
It’s not the religion that creates terrorists, it’s the politics
The word “radical” has always been an overly capacious term, easily filled with whatever meaning the speaker wants to pour into it. There is the radical right, the radical left, even the radical centre, whatever that means. Traditionally associated with the 18th-century English struggle to extend the franchise and with the cause of freedom, it has been one of those words no modern politician can do without. Google any of the current crop of parliamentarians adding the words “radical vision” and see what I mean. They’re all at it, all claiming it. Unless, of course, you put the word Islamic first. And then it immediately becomes a bogey word.
“How do we stop young Muslims becoming radicalised?” is the question we now continually ask. But it’s a deeply misleading question because it points us in the wrong direction. Why? Because it contains a hidden assumption that it is radical ideas, specifically Islamic theological ideas, that are the root cause of turning a young lad from West Yorkshire into an Isis suicide bomber in Iraq. According to the radicalisation hypothesis, it’s conservative Islam and the dangerous ideas contained in the Qur’an that motivate murderous behaviour.
We want to tell ourselves that we are secular and enlightened and so have no part in all of this bloodshed
To me this is about as convincing as arguing that the murderous bits of the Bible were responsible for the brutality of the IRA. For many of the young people who have been persuaded to go off and fight in Syria and Iraq have hardly got past the first chapter of Islam for Dummies. They often know next to nothing about the Qur’an and are about as motivated by reading the few passages they have as the average republican terrorist was motivated by Saul’s genocidal destruction of the Amalekites in the first book of Samuel. Yes, the language of violent jihad may borrow its vocabulary from Islamic theology – it’s a useful marker of shared identity – but root motivation is as it always is: politics. The IRA weren’t Bible-believing Catholics, they were mostly staunch atheists. Catholicism was simply a marker of who counted as “one of us”. And the same is true of Islamic terrorism.
Earlier this year, Professor Arun Kundnani published a fascinating account of how the rhetoric of radicalisation has created “a decade lost”. In it, he summarises the flimsy empirical basis on which the connection between radical theology and terrorism has been built and the extent to which the burgeoning radicalisation industry, especially in academia, is linked by a revolving door to conservative political lobbyists keen to blame conservative Islam for terrorism.
The reason this is important has nothing to do with exonerating religion. I don’t care about apologetics here. So let me acknowledge that both the Qur’an and the Bible have passages that are deeply immoral. But don’t get distracted by this. For this is not how or why people go to Iraq to become murderous criminals. They go – largely – because they believe their tribe is under attack, that Bashar al-Assad is dropping chlorine gas, that the west invaded Iraq, because of torture and Guantánamo Bay, and because they have a warped and misguided sense of adventure in responding to all this.
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We buy into the radicalisation hypothesis because we want evil to be mysterious and other; something that has nothing to do with us. We want to tell ourselves that we are secular and enlightened and so have no part in all of this bloodshed. It’s what people commonly do with evil – we conceptualise it as being as far away from us as possible. But if Islamic terrorism is really all about politics, then we have to admit that the long history of disastrous western interventions in the Middle East is a part of the cause of the horror that continues to unfold. In other words, we have to face our responsibility.
But even more troubling than the evasion of responsibility that is built into the radicalisation hypothesis is the fact that it points us in the wrong direction when looking for how to prevent it. If you want to find a terrorist, look for people buying dodgy chemicals, not people saying their prayers.
@giles_fraser
http://www.thestar.com.my/News/Natio...ed-abu-sayyaf/
Malaysian hostage Bernard Then beheaded
Fuck the Abu Sayef!!!
KOTA KINABALU: Sarawakian Bernard Then (pic), held hostage by the Abu Sayyaf terror group, has been killed in the southern Philippines.
He was beheaded by the gunmen at about 4pm in the island of Jolo.
Then is the first Malaysian hostage to have been beheaded by the Abu Sayyaf.
Brigadier-General Alan Arrojado, commander of the Joint Task Group Sulu, confirmed that Then was decapitated.
Sources from the military and social workers in the Philippines are indicating that the 39-year-old electrical engineer was killed by the Abu Sayyaf gunmen who were being pursued by Philippine military in the Butaran Hill area around Indanan village in Jolo island.
According to Jolo-based social workers, the Abu Sayyaf plan to release a video of the alleged beheading soon.
They said they received news of the beheading, but could not confirm which Abu Sayyaf leader carried out the killing.
The group holding Then was led by Indang Susukan.
So far, Philippines officials have not confirmed the incident.
Sabah Police Commissioner Datuk Jalaluddin Abdul Rahman said that they have yet to receive any word about Then, who was grabbed along with restaurant manager Thien Nyuk Fun, 50, from Ocean King Seafood Restaurant in Sandakan on May 15.
Thien was released on Nov 8 by the gunmen and is now back in Sandakan.
