Saturday, November 21, 2020
Opinion: Republicans Supporting Trump, Remember: Lies Have a Long Half-Life The president’s actions are disgraceful and damaging to our democracy.
Carl Bernstein Rails At ‘Mad King’ Trump’s Assault On Democracy
Judge Brutally Dismisses Rudy Giuliani’s Suit To ‘Disenfranchise’ Pa. Voters
By Ryan J. Reilly
Yet another loss for the Trump campaign, which is attempting to overturn the results of the election in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. A federal judge dismissed President Donald Trump’s campaign’s lawsuit to overturn the election in Pennsylvania on Saturday, calling out Rudy Giuliani’s attempt to “disenfranchise almost 7 million voters” based on zero actual evidence of voter fraud. U.S. District Court Judge Matthew W. Brann, who heard Giuliani’s argument on the case earlier this week, said the court “has been presented with strained legal arguments without merit and speculative accusations” that weren’t tied to the actual complaint nor supported by evidence. “In the United States of America, this cannot justify the disenfranchisement of a single voter, let alone all the voters of its sixth-most-populated state. Our people, laws and institutions demand more,” Brann wrote. Giuliani did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s request for comment on Saturday evening. Asked earlier whether he had made a deal with Trump in exchange for a preemptive pardon, Giuliani told a HuffPost reporter, “Get lost.” Brann said that it was perfectly legitimate for Pennsylvania counties to offer voters an opportunity to “cure” their mail-in ballots. The Trump campaign had complained that elections officials in Democratic-leaning counties had done a better job than officials in Republican-leaning counties advising voters when they made a mistake on their mail-in ballots and argued this amounted to an equal protection violation. Brann said that argument was rubbish. “No county was forced to adopt notice-and-cure; each county made a choice to do so, or not. Because it is not irrational or arbitrary for a state to allow counties to expand the right to vote if they so choose, Individual Plaintiffs fail to state an equal-protection claim,” he wrote. “Even assuming that they can establish that their right to vote has been denied, which they cannot, Plaintiffs seek to remedy the denial of their votes by invalidating the votes of millions of others. Rather than requesting that their votes be counted, they seek to discredit scores of other votes, but only for one race. This is simply not how the Constitution works,” Brann wrote. https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-pennsylvania-giuliani-lawsuit_n_5fb9a3dec5b66bb88c5e7fe9Bilawal hits out at govt as five GB independents join PTI
20 Nov 2020
As the Pakistan Tehreek-i-Insaf (PTI) is set to form its government in Gilgit-Baltistan (GB) with the inclusion of five independents in the party, Pakistan Peoples Party (PPP) chairman Bilawal Bhutto-Zardari claimed that the PTI government in Islamabad would be sent packing by January next year.
“We have to send Imran Khan packing because he has failed on every front whether (it’s) Kashmir cause or Covid-19. This PTI government does not have the capacity,” he said while talking to journalists on Thursday.
The PPP chairman praised the people of GB for making it difficult for the PTI to form the government in the region and appealed to the winning independent candidates not to trade their victories with a government which was about to end.
“Do not become a minister for two to three months,” he said, asking the independent candidates to protect the rights of GB people.
He said the PTI was “cheating independents” by telling each one of them that he was a candidate for the chief minister’s post.
Mr Bhutto-Zardari said the people of GB had shown their trust in the opposition parties by polling more votes for them than the PTI.
He appealed to the people to vote for the PPP during the by-elections on GBLA-3 Gilgit, scheduled to be held on Nov 22.
He again accused the GB chief election commissioner (CEC) of playing a biased role in the elections.
He said a journalist had recently tweeted a photograph of the CEC sitting with the GB governor and federal minister Ali Amin Gandapur. He asked the CEC to clarify his position over the photograph.
He said reports of the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan and Free and Fair Election Network clearly showed that rigging and violation of election laws did happen in the GB elections.
He said he would expose the GB poll rigging at the public meeting of the Pakistan Democratic Movement in Peshawar on Nov 22.
“We will tell the people that the slogan of Vote per daaka namanzoor is gaining momentum in GB,” he said.
“We have a programme of public gatherings, then a long march and then resignations from parliament and we will do everything necessary to send Imran Khan home,” he said.
Independents
Meanwhile, the PTI now has the support of 16 members in the 33-member GBLA as five independent winners on Thursday announced their decision to join the party.
All these independents were aspirants for PTI tickets and contested the elections although they were denied the ticket.
Those who joined the PTI are Wazir Muhammad Saleem, Raja Nasir Ali Khan, Mushtaq Hussain, Abdul Hameed and Javed Ali Manwa.
These independents formally joined the party at various functions and in the presence of PTI’s chief organiser Saifullah Nyazee, federal Minister for Kashmir Affairs and GB Gandapur and GB Governor Raja Jalal Hussain.
On the other hand, GB CEC Raja Shehbaz again rejected rigging allegations and asked the political parties to submit evidence of fraud to the election commission. He claimed fairness in the election process had been hailed at the national and international levels.
He said official results of 20 constituencies had already been declared and the results for GBLA-2, GBLA-17 and GBLA-21 had been delayed on the request of the candidates for recounting of votes.
Sources said that another independent winner Haji Shah Baig was expected to join the PTI on Friday (today). With his inclusion, the PTI will manage to acquire the magical figure of 17 seats, which was required to form the government.
Mr Baig is a former opposition leader in the GBLA and had contested the election as an independent candidate after he was denied a ticket by the Jamiat Ulema-i-Islam-F.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1591360/bilawal-hits-out-at-govt-as-five-gb-independents-join-pti
Pakistan could learn much from recent liberalisation of social values in the rest of the Muslim world - Shockwaves out of UAE
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Morality has apparently been ripped to shreds. In a frankly patriarchal desert culture where local women wear the niqab, what was unthinkable has happened. Still, no internal protest has been reported and neighbouring countries don’t care. Other GCC countries — and even normally hostile Turkey — have not commented. Saudi Arabia, once a bastion of Sunni conservatism, is following a similar path. Theocratic Iran semi-officially admits its alcohol problem and seems resigned. Billboards in Tehran warn against drinking and driving.
No Arab Spring movement is driving this cultural liberalisation nor is popular democracy on the cards. Unless something happens, dynastic rulers and clerics will continue to rule. Various new top-down changes simply aim at making Arab countries more Western tourist and business friendly. The recent opening up to Israel undoubtedly plays some part.
Pakistan seeks to lead the Muslim world but civil society in the Middle East is evolving much faster.
But the new legislative changes freeing cultural behaviour are likely to impact society far more than political changes. They bring with them many key questions: what is sinful and improper and what does Islam forbid or permit? Which values are truly permanent and absolute and which must inevitably change with time?
Notions of right and wrong are being turned upside down everywhere. There is, for example, complete acceptance now of television across the Muslim world. Even in Pakistan — among the most conservative Islamic countries — families spend evenings glued to the drawing room TV set. Men with beards and women from Al Huda casually snap selfies and WhatsApp them around. Yet older citizens cannot forget admonitions that Islam prohibits photography and the strident denunciations of TV as a ‘shaitani ala’ (devil’s tool).
Aniconism, or a prohibition of depicting images of all living beings, was considered immutable and absolute by almost all early Islamic religious authorities. Scholars and clerics took as axiomatic that the creation and depiction of living forms is God’s prerogative, not to be trespassed upon by artists and painters. So, although Muslims can rightfully boast of magnificent Islamic architecture such as Taj Mahal and Dome of the Rock, Islamic art was narrowly restricted to decorative figural designs.
Aniconism was taken so seriously that — although he later relented — a thoroughly liberal and scientific-minded man like Sir Syed Ahmad Khan refused to be photographed. The Afghan Taliban founder, Mullah Omar, never relented and so no known photo of him exists. The 2005 earthquake in Pakistan’s northern areas was widely attributed to watching television and, two days later, local clerics organised a mass smashing of TV sets in the town of Kaghan.
The march of technology, however, made clerics realise they were missing a huge opportunity. Thus began the age of religious TV channels. Although limited initially to audio recitations and images of floating clouds and heavens, talking heads followed. Thereafter televised sermons and religious gatherings became popular and today’s clerical screen personalities have millions of devotees. Asked about earlier restrictions, one such megastar replied in a complicated way that Islam prohibits drawings and photos but not videos.
Such adaptive changes are not unique to Islam or Pakistan. Fundamental transformations of thought and action have happened everywhere. Take slavery. From the 15th century onwards, European colonialists stole manpower for developing Europe by depopulating Africa. But slavery began phasing out after the European Enlightenment. The British Empire formally outlawed it in 1833. For the United States to follow suit took a civil war and an additional 32 years.
Banning slavery from Muslim countries took much longer. Since the Quran discourages but does not forbid slavery, for nearly 13 centuries the possession of slaves was not condemned as sinful or illegal by any religious authority.
In 1909, anti-slavery Young Turks, inspired by the Westernised Kemal Ataturk, forced Sultan Abdul Hamid II to free his personal slaves. Ataturk dismissed the last Ottoman caliph in 1924 and so ended slavery. Turkey formally ratified the 1926 League of Nations convention abolishing slavery in 1933. Though Western driven, it was surely a good thing.
Whether good or bad, the changes in the UAE’s laws are also Western driven. How the country’s authorities will explain them to the world and their people remains to be seen. Quite possibly no explanation will be forthcoming since UAE is a sovereign country where ruling dynasties exercise total control. Its people don’t have a voice.
On the other hand, UAE could try to get endorsements for the new dispensation from pliant muftis and shaikh-ul-Islam. This won’t be the first time. Muslim rulers are thoroughly familiar with using friendly clerics for blessing bank interest disguised to avoid its condemnation as riba. UAE has supported various militant Salafist groups overseas and is said to have considerable control over the authorities of Egypt’s Jamia al-Azhar. This wide outreach could be useful for suppressing possible criticism.
UAE’s rulers could also try a more straightforward explanation. The West thrives and prospers in spite of its evolving values — what was immoral yesterday is now simply the new normal. Until the 1960s, cohabitation was fiercely frowned upon in much of Europe and the US. But religious opposition has since softened and, in fact, most religions are following the trend.
UAE’s rulers might try arguing that Islam, suitably interpreted, can do so as well. As with child marriage, widow remarriage and polygamy, cohabitation will doubtless lead to furious disputes. But, like it or not, the arrow of time is unidirectional and irreversible.
Pakistan could learn much from recent cultural developments and liberalisation of social values in the rest of the Muslim world — a world which it had once aspired to lead. But now in a state of confusion, and dragged willy-nilly by global forces towards an uncertain future, it prefers to keep its eyes fixed firmly upon the past while praying for old times to return.
https://www.dawn.com/news/1591558/shockwaves-out-of-uae
Fishermen fear Pakistan’s new ‘city for the elite’ will end their way of life
What the amazing rise & sudden death of a ‘Holy Warrior’ tell us about Islam & politics in #Pakistan
Khadim Hussain Rizvi was the face of Pakistan’s radical Islamist politics. His sudden death, however, will not end the mass appeal of religious fundamentalism.
Pakistani cleric Khadim Hussain Rizvi died suddenly in Lahore this Thursday. It found only a passing mention in the Indian media.
He was just 54, apparently in terrific health, which glowed on his broad, imposingly bearded face. Nothing you’d see and hear of him in the videos of his fiery speeches at his dharna or siege of Islamabad just a couple of days earlier, would’ve suggested he’d drop dead.
Covid was widely stated as the cause of his death, although the certificate from the hospital didn’t mention any cause. They just declared him “dead on arrival”. Autopsy? Viscera? You do not subject holy warriors to such indignities. Definitely not if they are also seen to be the favourite children of the powers-that-be. Which Rizvi was.
Sure enough, his sudden death has revived the social media conspiracy theory industry. He was apparently not under treatment for any illness, although there are informed rumours now that he was suffering from fever and breathlessness for the past few days. But watch those speeches, especially his last one where he taunts the government saying “What makes you think I need your permission for my dharna? Does Pakistan belong to your daddy? (Tere pyo da haiga Pakistan?)” He doesn’t miss a breath.
I am sorry it loses much flavour and texture in translation from Punjabi. Especially from the distinctive version he spoke, from the region in Pakistani Punjab called Potohar. Located generally between the Jhelum and the Indus, this low plateau has always been the richest catchment area for the Pakistani army. It is one of the reasons a lot of the soldiery was under his influence. And he, in turn, was supposedly under the influence of the generals and their establishment.
Until, as it happens with all such characters, Osama bin Laden included, he grew too big for his jootis. His latest siege on Islamabad caused deep distress to the Imran Khan government and the establishment. He wanted closure of the French embassy, a parliamentary resolution breaking diplomatic relations, and repeatedly exhorted his followers and Muslims anywhere in the world to behead French President Emmanuel Macron.
He was blessed with the kind of clear diction and delivery rabble-rousing demagogues usually are. So you don’t even need much Punjabi to understand that he pronounces the Chechen teenager who beheaded Samuel Paty a ghazi (holy warrior), hailed all Muslims who carry out revenge attacks as such, and in one speech, asked all of Pakistan’s nuclear bombs to be dumped on France so that the “unholy land” ceases to exist.
It wasn’t, by the way, the first time he had given out such a threat to a European nation. In 2018, when Dutch politician Geert Wilders said he’d organise a competition to draw the prophet’s caricatures, Rizvi had promised to nuke the Netherlands as well.
He agreed to unshackle Islamabad and go home, on his own terms as usual — flaunting a press release claiming the government had accepted all demands and that the National Assembly will pass a resolution breaking diplomatic relations with France. He’d gone too far for the establishment’s comfort now. It looks like coronavirus did not like this one bit!
Physically, Rizvi was born on 22 June 1966 in village Pindi Gheb near Attock. But politically, and in a way also spiritually — or if we are allowed to confect an expression ‘politico-spiritually’ — the Rizvi phenomenon was born on 4 January 2011.
This was the day politician Salman Taseer, governor of Pakistani Punjab (and father of author Aatish), was assassinated by Mumtaz Qadri, a constable in his security detail. Salman had written this death warrant the day he met Aasia Bibi, the poor Christian woman sentenced to death for blasphemy, expressed sympathy with her and also asked for the blasphemy law to be repealed. Qadri, apparently, was a follower of the Sunni Sufi Barelvi school of Islam, and Rizvi is its prominent cleric. He was then preaching at Lahore’s famed Data Darbar.
Qadri’s was the first cause Rizvi picked up and grew in prominence. He hailed him as a ghazi too, wanted him pardoned and proclaimed a hero for the faith, and dared the state to hold him guilty. The government stood firm.
Qadri was hanged at Rawalpindi’s Adiala jail on 29 February 2016. Rizvi led angry protests by his organisation, Tehreek-e-Labbaik Ya Rasool Allah (TLYRA). Labbaik is a reference from Muslim prayer and the name means, loosely translated, movement in the service of the holy prophet of Allah. Rizvi’s comrade and co-founder of TLYRA, Muhammad Afzal Qadri, also issued a call to kill all three Supreme Court judges who upheld that sentence. They could be killed, he suggested, by their security guards, drivers, or even cooks. Fortunately, nobody took his advice.
Rizvi’s star was now rising. As he grew in popularity among a rapidly rising population of angry, young, illiterate, unemployed men, especially in Punjab and parts of Sindh to its south, he was soon proclaimed an ‘Allama’ (a great scholar of the faith), a title he carried to his death. He hit the pinnacle of his power the very next year.
Mian Nawaz Sharif was in power. The Army, which treated Rizvi as their own as much as Imran Khan, would’ve been quite happy now to see the cleric lay siege on Islamabad, the first of many. The provocation was an apparently malevolent ‘amendment’ in the nomination form that a Muslim candidate has to sign while contesting elections in Pakistan.
It has a clause stating an unqualified and total commitment to the concept of Khatm-e-Naboowat, meaning that you accept that Muhammad was the last prophet, there can be no successor, and you do not follow anybody else’s teachings. The nuance is that this would keep Ahmadiyyas out.
In the new nomination form, the clause was mentioned as a ‘declaration’ instead of ‘oath’, as in the past. This, Rizvi said, was a conspiracy against Islam and its Holy Prophet. The government said it was a clerical error. He wanted the language restored and the law minister, retired Justice Zahid Hamid, fired. He got both, proclaimed victory. The legend of Allama Khadim Rizvi was born.
He was back in 2018. Now, it was over the Supreme Court pronouncing Aasia Bibi not guilty and acquitting her. He called it a sacrilegious outrage and again laid siege.
By this time, the establishment was in a bind. It wasn’t easy to keep holding on to a poor Christian woman after she’d been acquitted, and when her case had acquired much prominence in the Western world. At one point, she was stealthily taken to Pakistan Air Force Base in Rawalpindi named after Air Marshal Nur Khan (PAF chief during the 1965 war), then flown out on a chartered plane to the Netherlands for asylum.
Rizvi hit more headlines. Like getting a film called Zindagi Tamasha banned on grounds of blasphemy. Apparently, it contained some criticism of the Ulema and also insinuated that ‘bachcha baazi’ (child sexual abuse) was rampant in those circles. A few college and university teachers were also assassinated or injured by young students on charges of blasphemy in Rizvi’s organisation’s name. But he denied any connection.
Rizvi had by now transformed his organisation into a formal political party: Tehreek-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP). His vote counts were rising, although not enough to win many seats. This is the other remarkable thing about Pakistan. That religious parties have great street power, but are never able to impress voters.
In his case though, the challenge was more complex. Because Imran Khan too was running his party and politics mostly in the name of conservative Islam. Play his 2019 speech at the UN General Assembly. How passionately he reminds the (Western) world that it must desist from anything that Muslims see as “maligning our Holy Prophet…it hurts us”. He was reading the blasphemy law to the world in English. Rizvi was saying the same thing in Punjabi. For the voter, there was insufficient product differentiation.
Rizvi is now gone. But the mass-appeal of fundamentalism among a burgeoning, young, illiterate, unemployed and angry population isn’t. Nor is the establishment’s need for such convenient instruments about to disappear. They will find another Rizvi, or maybe more, going ahead. Meanwhile, like most conspiracy theories in Pakistan, one about his sudden death might also endure.
https://theprint.in/national-interest/what-the-amazing-rise-sudden-death-of-a-holy-warrior-tell-us-about-islam-politics-in-pakistan/548945/