Muslims around the world suffer from the threat of terrorism like everyone else on this planet.
Some people though cannot comprehend this and think that all Muslims are terrorists. They spout rubbish which only they think is funny, hiding behind faces of cute koalas.
Thankfully for us, we have Muslims like radio personality, Dzar Ismail.
This was a reply to an article about building a glass wall around the Eiffel Tower.
Rilek1Corner
ive people have reportedly been killed and several injured in a gun attack at a mosque in Québec City, the mosque’s president has said.
The shooting was carried out by three attackers and happened during evening prayers at about 8pm on Sunday, said witnesses.
About 40 people were thought to be in the building – the Québec City Islamic cultural center on Sainte-Foy Street – at the time.
Two arrests have been made, a police spokesman said, but did not release details of the death toll.
A large security cordon has been set up around the site.
Canada’s publics safety minister, Ralph Goodale, said he was “deeply saddened” by the deaths.
In June, during the holy month of Ramadan, a pig’s head was left at the mosque, CBC reported.
Source: www.theguardian.com
I just want to share an opinion which i think maybe i think too much or deep. Just recently, a viral video about cruelty of police officers towards the Rohingyas was captured on tape. To make it worst, a Myanmar police was the one filming their activities without showing any sign of guilt. The officers abused and kicked the Rohingyas who were seated on the ground in a line. After some investigating the Myanmar government have come out to say that 4 officers have been caught for the incident and will be taking action against them. This is good right?? But actually it is really not so let me explain. A few weeks back in the news, a man claimed to be Islam and purposely crashed a lorry in an act of terrorism. He drove the lorry into a Christmas market and killed several people. The police in Germany end up catching the wrong person and because the runaway is a muslim, the case became even bigger and is all over the news. So what is my point? I don’t know how to make comparison of one muslim guy with a entire muslim community (rohingya) anyway but if you look properly how come the one single guy gets more attention instead of the Rohingyas?? Then also what if the video was never captured, will we ever get to hear the Myanmar government admitting to abusing their community because this is rare. Senang cakap, orang melayu sudah kene tindas. Can’t you see that we Muslims have been suppressed?
Siti
Reader’s Contribution
Terrorism and radicalisation will be an inescapable part of our lives from here on, and the main threats for 2017 and beyond should be divided into two parts.
The first is the foreign fighter blowback. With the so-called Islamic State (IS) suffering reverses on the battlefield in Iraq and Syria, many South-east Asian fighters will return home to Indonesia and Malaysia. They may also seek new safe havens such as in the southern Philippines.
In addition, they will seek to leverage issues which give them propaganda mileage that can reinvigorate their social media campaigns — such as the plight of the Rohingya.
And we should not be so quick to assume that it is simply South-east Asian fighters we will need to reckon with. One cannot discount the possibility of a wider movement of battle-hardened Uighur veterans who, for various reasons, cannot return to their home countries elsewhere.
For some sense of what is likely to happen with these returnees, we can look to Europe, where Western fighters have been trickling home for some time now.
Many are embittered by their experiences and disillusioned by the depravity of the IS; but some have come back even more determined to wreak havoc, and even more radicalised.
There is no reason to suppose that a similarly mixed scenario should not play out in South-east Asia.
RADICALS OF ANY FAITH
The second threat is radicalisation in general. We have to accept that this is not simply an issue of Islamist radicalisation. Religious revivalism is increasingly present in other major faiths.
Radicals inhabit the fringes of all these. And the sobering fact is that we live in a future where all sorts of individuals are going to be “radicalised” in some form or other — even those without strong religious convictions.
We should not forget that we have had an individual, a Singapore citizen, who has tried to join Kurdish militia to fight IS. Whatever his motivations — and there is some suggestion of alienation and wanting to do good — we need to understand that, in future, all sorts of people are going to want to fight for causes, or else take up some form of muscular activism.
This will be a rising trend and these impulses, if not managed, will lead to schisms within societies.
Terror networks can be interdicted and taken down. Security services are actually pretty good at this sort of thing. However, what all of us need to get our heads around is the rising tide of intolerance and, more precisely, tolerance for intolerance.
This is the second big issue we need to face. It is a phenomenon that did not start in South-east Asia, but it is creeping in. Traditional forms of syncretistic religious practice that have existed here for centuries (if not longer) are being replaced by a more hardline, less inclusive type of observance.
This type of feeling is fuelled by social media. As Foreign Affairs Minister Vivian Balakrishnan said last year: “We now live in a world of fragmented echo chambers — we hear what we want to hear, we ignore what we don’t want to hear, or inconvenient truths are not heard.
“And in fact, from an academic point of view, this leads to a ‘shallowing’ of discourse, a world in which there is a dearth of deep thought and cogent discussion across diverse perspectives. You get a more monochromatic world and a narrowing of minds.”
Singapore will have to maintain its values of multiculturalism and tolerance. These will be increasingly valued in an era where these are becoming rare commodities (and, indeed, in an era where these qualities are persecuted in some quarters).
It is my view that Singapore will increasingly come to be seen as a beacon, not simply on account of good policymaking, which we have, but because parts of the world and our immediate environment are becoming increasingly insalubrious.
A POST-TRUTH WORLD
The echo chambers that Dr Balakrishnan and other leaders have talked about suggest a milieu in which people can choose simply to hear what they want to hear. This is especially problematic for a number of reasons.
One is that state and non-state actors are increasingly taking advantage of various mechanisms to subvert the truth and to peddle their own information, which may actually be quite distant from the facts. These may all the more easily be lapped up by groups of people within society who, for some reason or the other, might be susceptible to this kind of subversion.
Consider, for example, the masterful information-operations campaign that Russia has waged in Ukraine. There was a cyber takedown of the power grid, but more importantly was the media (including social media) manipulation and distortion of information which led many to believe the Russian point of view.
Seen from that point of view, what Russia had done was an entirely legitimate protection of Russian minorities living under persecution. The real point is, of course, that information had been bent and twisted to a level where no one was sure where fact ended and fiction began.
As commentators have increasingly observed, we live in a post-truth world. One could also argue that Russia did something very similar in the United States election. Why not? A state can nowadays accomplish aims allied to its self-interest that promise outcomes that are much more certain than diplomacy and much less costly than warfare.
BEWARE THE SLOW-BURN ATTACK
The people of Singapore, therefore, should not assume that the “attack”, when it does come, will be a mass-casualty terror incident. This is what our agencies routinely hold drills for.
But the attack might equally be a cyber takedown — either a hacking attempt (and at least one government ministry, the Foreign Affairs Ministry, has suffered a major cyber hack) or some seemingly low-level but nonetheless persistent and insidious cyber effort to chip away at the resilience of our people.
The basic point is that, while keeping a wary lookout for Black Swans, we need to be aware of slow-burn issues too — particularly the kind that amount to attempts to sap away at the will of a people until the nation is itself shrivelled from within.
How do we counter this? Part of the answer lies in critical thinking — the ability to ruthlessly interrogate source material that comes before us. In this, the post-truth era, those digital natives who grow up knowing — either instinctively or through some form of instruction — the difference between the objective facts and fake news will have an intrinsic advantage over others.
A great deal will also boil down to resilience. This could be divided into two kinds. The Government has succeeded in hardening the obvious targets in Singapore and, over the past 10 years or so, focusing some attention on the “bounce-backability” of society.
The second part is more tricky but achievable. This has to do with how our society coheres and prevents fissures from forming after an event. This next leg is about a certain toughness and resolve that we need to develop more of.
Consider, for example, what happened after terror incidents and attacks worldwide. The Sydney hostage-taking in December 2014 was followed by a dignified viral campaign, “I’ll Ride with You”, to show solidarity with Australian Muslims. The Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris in January 2015 saw the ground-up viral campaign “Je Suis Charlie”, while the Jakarta attacks in January 2016 saw the hashtag #KamiTidakTakut (Bahasa Indonesia for “We are not afraid”) go viral.
Each of these was seen to be a grassroots event and response. Do the people of Singapore have the wherewithal and gumption to rise up, to come together with dignity, resilience and resolve, and with minimal government intervention? Whether and how we can we can do this will be a telling indicator of the shape or form in which we make it to SG100.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr Shashi Jayakumar is a Senior Fellow and head of the Centre of Excellence for National Security at the S Rajaratnam School of International Studies, Nanyang Technological University.
Source: Today
Most people think that violent terrorism is a major challenge facing their societies and they support tough measures to counter the problem at the expense of some civil liberties, according to a global survey on public perceptions towards violent terrorism commissioned by the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), based in Washington.
According to the findings released earlier this week — derived from 8,000 respondents in eight countries — one in two people feel that their governments have not taken adequate steps to address violent extremism.
The survey was conducted in August this year and involved participants from China, Egypt, France, India, Indonesia, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Around 25 per cent of the respondents from Turkey and France felt that violent terrorism is the most important issue facing their countries. Overall, around two-thirds of those polled see violent extremism as a major problem in their country.
“In everywhere except China, at least 75 per cent of those surveyed expect a terrorist attack in the next year,” said CSIS in a report of the survey findings.
“On a more alarming note, a majority in every country believes that it is likely that violent extremist groups will acquire and use weapons of mass destruction in their lifetime.”
The majority of respondents in Turkey, France and the US feel their own governments have not taken adequate steps to contain and prevent violent extremism.
In late June, a gun and bomb attack on Istanbul’s Ataturk airport killed more than 40 people and injured more than 230. Yesterday, a Turkish official said police in the capital had fatally shot a suspected Islamic State (IS) group militant who was planning a suicide bombing.
France has also been hit hard by violent terrorism, with 230 deaths and about 700 injuries as a result of attacks said to be carried out by IS.
Both France and Turkey are both sources of a relatively high number of foreign militants fighting in Iraq and Syria, with an estimated 700 French citizens and 500 Turks fighting under the IS flag.
Just last month, an Afghan-born American sowed terror across Manhattan and New Jersey, wounding 29 people before he was arrested — the latest in a spate of lone-wolf attacks to rock the US.
Despite widespread anxiety about the terrorist threat, 73 per cent of respondents in the CSIS survey believe that violent extremism can be eradicated.
When asked about potential measures to counter violent extremism, 90 per cent were in favour of requiring all citizens and visitors to have identification cards.
A similar percentage also supported asking Internet companies to do an even better job of shutting down all content from violent extremist groups, while 71 per cent favoured allowing government agencies to monitor all phone records, email and social media for contacts with terrorists.
Close to 90 per cent of the sample was also supportive of asking Muslim leaders to declare definitively that Islam does not in any way condone violent extremism or the creation of a caliphate. More than 80 per cent of those surveyed also said that immigrants who have not passed rigorous screenings and background checks for connections to extremism should be barred from entering their countries.
On Monday, Iraqi forces, supported by a US-led international coalition, launched a major offensive on the city of Mosul, the IS’ last major stronghold in Iraq.
The US expects IS to use crude chemical weapons as it tries to repel the offensive, although experts say the group’s technical ability to develop such weapons is highly limited.
Source: www.todayonline.com
