Ban US cotton imports from Xinjiang, say human rights campaigners

Petitions issued to US authorities cite ‘integral role of forced labour’ involving Uighur Muslims and other minority groups

Human rights campaigners are calling on US authorities to ban all imports of cotton from the Chinese province of Xinjiang after allegations of widespread forced labour.

Two identical petitions, delivered today to US Custom and Border Protection, cite “substantial evidence” that the Uighur community and other minority groups are being press-ganged into working in the region’s cotton fields.

Related: 'Virtually entire' fashion industry complicit in Uighur forced labour, say rights groups

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'He was such a kind soul': daughter's fight for US man killed at Pakistan blasphemy trial

Mashal Naseem has got used to the death threats since she began campaigning for justice for her father, Tahir Ahmad Naseem, who was shot in a Pakistan courtroom last month

It has only been a few weeks, but Mashal Naseem has already got used to shrugging off the online death threats that started pouring in when she began a campaign for justice for her father.

Tahir Ahmad Naseem – who his daughter remembers as the kindest and most gentle of parents – was on trial in Pakistan for blasphemy when he was shot dead last month in a high-security courtroom.

Related: Man on trial for blasphemy shot dead in court in Pakistan

I will stand for justice for my dad, and if something happens to me, at least I tried to fight for justice

I feel like my dad he was just naive in that sense that he thought that everyone was truthful, because he himself was

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#300 The Quran 17:23 (Surah al-Isra)

Quranic Quotes - Quotes And Verses From The Holy Quran

The Quran 17:23 (Surah al-Isra)

And your Lord has decreed that you not worship except Him, and to parents, good treatment. Whether one or both of them reach old age (while) with you, say not to them (so much as), “uff,” and do not repel them but speak to them a noble word.

The post #300 The Quran 17:23 (Surah al-Isra) appeared first on Quranic Quotes.

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Riots rock Malmö after far-right Swedish activists burn Qur'an

Leading imam condemns violence after police battle more than 300 on streets of the city

The disorderly phalanx of young men and teenagers, many wearing face masks and hooded tops, started to accelerate, excitement rising, as it neared the row of police vans blocking off the troubled district of Rosengård in Malmö.

“We’re gonna fuck this system up because they want to let a man burn the Qur’an,” one of them yelled, as the group starts hurling jagged chunks of concrete paving towards the armoured riot police sheltering behind the vans. “And we’re gonna fuck the police.”

A maximum of five of them are Muslim. You know why? Because a real Muslim doesn’t do this

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#299 The Quran 22:30 (Surah al-Haj)

Quranic Quotes - Quotes And Verses From The Holy Quran

The Quran 22:30 (Surah al-Haj)

That (has been commanded), and whoever honors the sacred ordinances of Allah – it is best for him in the sight of his Lord. And permitted to you are the grazing livestock, except what is recited to you. So avoid the uncleanliness of idols and avoid false statement.

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#298 The Quran 02:83 (Surah al-Baqarah)

Quranic Quotes - Quotes And Verses From The Holy Quran

The Quran 02:83 (Surah al-Baqarah)

And (recall) when We took the covenant from the Children of Israel, (enjoining upon them), “Do not worship except Allah; and to parents do good and to relatives, orphans, and the needy. And speak to people good (words) and establish prayer and give zakah.” Then you turned away, except a few of you, and you were refusing.

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#297 The Quran 33:70 (Surah al-Ahzab)

Quranic Quotes - Quotes And Verses From The Holy Quran

The Quran 33:70 (Surah al-Ahzab)

O you who have believed, fear Allah and speak words of appropriate justice.

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#296 The Quran 06:152 (Surah al-An’am)

Quranic Quotes - Quotes And Verses From The Holy Quran

The Quran 06:152 (Surah al-An’am)

And do not approach the orphan’s property except in a way that is best until he reaches maturity. And give full measure and weight in justice. We do not charge any soul except (with that within) its capacity. And when you testify, be just, even if (it concerns) a near relative. And the Covenant of Allah fulfill. This has He instructed you that you may remember.

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How China uses Muslim press trips to counter claims of Uighur abuse

Heavily supervised visits to indoctrination centres present reporters with smiling inmates and tales of cultural acceptance

Journalist Sherif Sonbol was taking pictures of ethnic dancers during an official tour of China’s far western Xinjiang province when he noticed a room full of women being trained to use sewing machines. He realised he was in one of Beijing’s network of political indoctrination camps, where – according to the United Nations – China is detaining up to one million members of the mostly Muslim Uighur minority.

Sonbol, an Egyptian photographer and editor, was one of at least 80 journalists taken to Xinjiang since 2015 on the “Silk Road Celebrity China Tour”. He left convinced that accounts of mistreatment inside the re-education centres were untrue. “I keep hearing people saying the education centres were where they torture people,” he said. But the enthusiasm of the dancers impressed him, “Look at their faces! You know these are very happy people.”

Related: The 'perfect Uighur': outgoing and hard working – but still not safe from China's camps

Related: The Uighurs' suffering deserves targeted solutions, not anti-Chinese posturing | James Millward

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Ask just the other day i was

Ask just the other day i was looking for my school picture by searching my first and last name and i saw alim had posted my account picture who knows if this website has our information but if you really like using alim you should install antivirus it is free and protects your account and you get alerted when someone is trying to get in but is can stop that please go on google if you have posted a comment and search your first and last name and if you see your account picture install antivirus so it will not happen again and get a new picture for your account thanks.

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j love this surah alim is

j love this surah alim is amazing and when i get kids im gonna remember this web

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I am still learning this

I am still learning this surah and alim is helping me practice regularly and is helping me learn

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The Guardian view on Lebanon's blast: a cabinet resigns, a system must go | Editorial

Without meaningful political change the country could slide into sectarian strife

Days after an enormous explosion tore through the city of Beirut, leaving at least 170 people dead and thousands injured, Lebanon’s cabinet last week resigned. It might have been an opportunity to end a sad chapter of the country’s history. Protesters have been on the streets since last October, angry at official corruption, mismanagement and spiralling inflation. With the politicians resigning en masse, this was surely a turning point. Unfortunately there appear to be many more sad chapters for this tortured nation to endure.

Lebanon’s tragedy today is that it is caught between Iran and the US, a standoff which saw the UAE and Israel – former foes – draw closer last week. Iran backs Hezbollah, a Shia Islamist political party and a US-designated terror group, which has become a pillar of the Lebanese state by weaving a web of multi-sectarian alliances.

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Greed, cruelty, consumption: the world is changed yet its worst persists | Omar Sakr

I have no great hope we will use this chance to transform for the better – but this is an unconvincing darkness, and we do not have to stay in it

• This is part of a series of essays by Australian writers responding to the challenges of 2020

In the pre-dawn hour, as the dark becomes less sure of itself, I get up to go to the hospital. It’s cold, and I have to fast before this surgery, so I take my Lexapro pill with a sip of water right away. I was diagnosed with cholesteatoma before the pandemic locked the world in its grip, and went on to the public waiting list. The ENT specialist told me it was a routine surgery, a cutting away of abnormal growth behind the ear canal; decades ago, people died from this, their own skin growing into their brains. There was some risk of deafness, or damage to a nerve that could paralyse half of my face, but he had never slipped yet.

I’m the kind of man who assumes such odds exist to spite me, so I was not reassured. My fiance, Hannah, drove us to St Vincent’s at 6am, and the roads were busy, maybe because the restrictions were set to ease the next day and people couldn’t wait, or maybe because capitalism is a death cult that will brook no surcease, people gotta eat or work to pay the landlords, and we passed the time by shaking our heads at everyone’s foolishness as a way of ignoring our own.

Related: Where can you be safe in this world? Maybe we're asking the wrong question | Jane Rawson

Let them all grind their bodies to the mill, for somewhere a bank balance must grow

Related: From the wreck of the pandemic we can salvage and resurrect an inner life | Nyadol Nyuon

I take comfort in performance in the absence of control

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Looted landmarks: how Notre-Dame, Big Ben and St Mark's were stolen from the east

They are beacons of western civilisation. But, says an explosive new book, the designs of Europe’s greatest buildings were plundered from the Islamic world – twin towers, rose windows, vaulted ceilings and all

As Notre-Dame cathedral was engulfed by flames last year, thousands bewailed the loss of this great beacon of western civilisation. The ultimate symbol of French cultural identity, the very heart of the nation, was going up in smoke. But Middle East expert Diana Darke was having different thoughts. She knew that the origins of this majestic gothic pile lay not in the pure annals of European Christian history, as many have always assumed, but in the mountainous deserts of Syria, in a village just west of Aleppo to be precise.

“Notre-Dame’s architectural design, like all gothic cathedrals in Europe, comes directly from Syria’s Qalb Lozeh fifth-century church,” Darke tweeted on the morning of 16 April, as the dust was still settling in Paris. “Crusaders brought the ‘twin tower flanking the rose window’ concept back to Europe in the 12th century.”

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Faith leaders join forces to warn of Uighur ‘genocide’

Statement signed by Rowan Williams, bishops, imams and rabbis says Chinese Muslim minority faces ‘human tragedy’

Rowan Williams, the former archbishop of Canterbury, is among more than 70 faith leaders publicly declaring that the Uighurs are facing “one of the most egregious human tragedies since the Holocaust”, and that those responsible for the persecution of the Chinese Muslim minority must be held accountable.

The incarceration of at least a million Uighurs and other Muslims in prison camps, where they are reported to face starvation, torture, murder, sexual violence, slave labour and forced organ extraction, is a potential genocide, say the clerics.

Related: Letters: Len McCluskey and the politics of vanity

As a Jew, the sight of people being boarded onto trains and sent to concentration camps is particularly harrowing

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Salman Rushdie appeals to Twitter over fake Islamophobic tweet

Novelist asks CEO of social media platform to remove quote he claims far-right groups have falsely attributed to him

Salman Rushdie has asked Twitter to remove a post with an Islamophobic quote that he claims has been falsely attributed to him, after it circulated alongside a photo of the author’s face this week.

The quote says that Muslims’ “only goal is to destroy the whole nation by terrorism, bomb blasts, population explosion, riots and jihad in the name of Islam”. It’s not the first time this quote has appeared online: it has been attributed to Rushdie without any source by anti-Islam and far-right groups for years, and in 2015 it was traced by a Twitter user to a message posted online. At the time, Rushdie thanked the user for finding the source of “this fake quote that people can’t seem to stop quoting to justify their own bigotry”.

Related: Not the Booker prize longlist: vote now to decide the 2020 shortlist

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Modi's acolytes have reminded India's Muslims just what he thinks of them | Siddhartha Deb

An image in Times Square celebrated not only the construction of a Hindu temple but the destruction of a mosque

Mussolini confided in his son that one of his nightmares was that he would be put on trial at New York’s Madison Square Garden, in case of capture by the Allies. Narendra Modi’s fantasy was to hold his victory rally there, as he did in September 2014, soon after being elected prime minister of India. Returning triumphantly to the heart of the very empire that denied him a diplomatic visa and revoked his tourist visa for an anti-Muslim pogrom carried out while he was chief minister in Gujarat in 2002, Modi’s presence at Madison Square Garden sparked off the rapturous belligerence of 20,000 supporters. Since then, through events like “Howdy Modi” and “Namaste Trump”, Modi appears to have made America his second home and Donald Trump a buddy, a coming together of civilisations ancient and modern as well as a merger of two failed states with among the highest rates of Covid-19 infection in the world.

Related: Ayodhya: Modi hails 'dawn of new era' as work on controversial temple begins

Modi knows how to unleash beasts as well as how to render them acceptable on a global stage, airbrushed and Disneyfied, while his engine of cruelty rolls on

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A year on from a devastating siege, Kashmir is being turned into a colony | Mirza Waheed

Since erasing the region’s special status India is selling off its rich land and mineral rights – and crushing all dissent

• Mirza Waheed is a novelist and essayist

I’m sure many people have heard of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Argentina. It’s a movement of Argentinian women who staged a silent protest against the disappearance of their children during the military dictatorships of the 1970s and 80s.

From 1977 to about 2006, they gathered at the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires and wore white headscarves embroidered with the names and dates of birth of their children – demanding answers from the state. It was a bleak form of protest, but it succeeded in getting the generals and police officers prosecuted and punished for crimes against humanity.

Local law is frozen. An astonishing 99% of habeas corpus pleas since last August are pending

Related: Modi's brutal treatment of Kashmir exposes his tactics – and their flaws | Arundhati Roy

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Books pulled from the library shelves, songs banned...it’s the new normal in Hong Kong | Louisa Lim

Beijing has lost its patience with the former colony. Its repression may ignite fresh civil society fury

Beijing’s assault on Hong Kong is unfolding at such a pace that the daily news has become a horror show of epic proportions. July began with the imposition of draconian national security legislation enacted sight unseen, even by Hong Kong’s leader, chief executive Carrie Lam. It ended with the sacking of a tenured professor, the arrests of four students for social media posts, the electoral disqualification of 12 pro-democracy politicians, the delay of legislative elections for a year and the issuance of arrest warrants for pro-democracy activists overseas under the new legislation.

In normal times, each of these acts would spark outrage and protests, but this onslaught has been too fast and too overwhelming to fully report, let alone counter, especially during a pandemic when gatherings of more than two people have been banned. Put simply, within a single month, Beijing has dismantled a partially free society and is trying to use its new law to enforce global censorship on speech regarding Hong Kong.

Beijing is trying to use its new law to enforce global censorship on speech about Hong Kong

Related: 'Like in the Cultural Revolution': Hong Kong's educators fear being purged

The criminalisation of certain political posts and slogans heralds the advent of thought crime to Hong Kong

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