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Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer and Contributing Editor for Islamica magazine; an international contemporary affairs magazine headquartered in Los Angeles and with editorial offices in London, Amman and Cambridge, Massachusetts. Read more...
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Columns
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Bollywood Profiling: Flying While Brown |
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August 18, 2009 By Arsalan Iftikhar
True/Slant Contributor As a young six-foot-four brown Muslim male who also happens to be a global media ‘talking head’ on international television, suffice it to say that you can rest assured that I could probably write a book-and-a-half on our current airport profiling phenomenon of ‘flying while brown’ since September 11, 2001. Having said that, I must admit that this recent CNN story about Bollywood film star Shah Rukh Khan elicited a groaned chuckle after reading about his own personal ‘flying while brown’ airline profiling moment @ Newark International Airport in New Jersey. First of all, for anyone who has ever even heard of Bollywood should know that this recent case would be the moral equivalent of pulling Tom Hanks (or Tom Cruise) from a Hollywood-bound airline flight from Newark. Read the rest of Arsalan’s column HERE… |
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Hey Sarkozy: Why Not Ban Bikinis Too? |
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July 30, 2009 By Arsalan Iftikhar
True/Slant Contributor First of all, I am no fan of the burqa… Secondly, I am no fan of French President Nicholas Sarkozy… I love France…Sarkozy, not so much… Third (and most importantly), as an international human rights lawyer, I am no fan of any government in the world (whether it is France or Afghanistan) mandating what a person can (or cannot) wear as a free member of their society. According to a media report in Reuters, a recent French study found that only 367 women in the entire nation of France wear Islamic veils (better known as a burqa) that completely cover their faces and bodies. This report severely undermines the position of right-wing politicians who are pushing for a ban on the garments. President Nicolas Sarkozy has stopped short of backing a ban, but has recently said the veils were “not welcome” in France. The influential French newspaper Le Monde said that in light of the tiny number of women concerned, the idea of a ban should be dropped. Read more… |
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Presidential Birth Certificates: Modern-Day ‘Freedom Papers’? |
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July 23, 2009 By Arsalan Iftikhar
True/Slant Contributor For those of you who are unaware, the ‘Birthers’ movement is a pejorative term (like the 9/11 Truthers) used by the many in American media to ridicule those right-wing polemicists who believe that President Barack Obama’s Hawaiian birth certificate is a ‘fake’ and because they believe that he was ostensibly born in Kenya, not the United States, he was never eligible to be president in the first place. Seriously, all of the people in the ‘birther’ movement need to get a life (and a clue). They need to get out of their mothers’ basements in their tighty-whities and open the front door to inhale some fresh air and a much-needed dose of reality. Sadly, certain right-wing media commentators, including high-profile polemicists like Alan Keyes, Liz Cheney, Rush Limbaugh and Lou Dobbs have all at one point or another doubted the veracity of President Obama’s ‘natural-born’ American citizen status to further their own myopic right-wing agenda and help to distract from the pressing American issues of health care reform, two ongoing wars in the Middle East and a recession that rivals only the Great Depression in its scope and breadth. Read more… |
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Jakarta’s ‘Five-Star’ Hotel Terrorist Bombings |
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July 17, 2009
By Arsalan Iftikhar True/Slant Contributor With over 17,508 islands, Indonesia is known around the globe as the largest archipelago in the world. With a population of over 240.2 million people, it also currently ranks as the 4th most populated nation on earth and has sadly been no stranger to global terrorism. From the horrific 2002 Bali nightclub bombings (which killed over 201 people) to a 2003 bombing at the JW Marriott Hotel (which killed over 12 people and was one of the two sites of the most recent July 2009 terrorist attack); Indonesia has had to face the challenge of being one of the most vibrant multi-ethnic (and multi-religious) democracies in the world today. At around 7:45am local time on Friday July 17, 2009, near-simultaneous explosions tore through both the Ritz-Carlton and JW Marriott hotels in downtown Jakarta during the morning breakfast hour, killing at least nine (9) people and injuring over fifty people, according to an Indonesian presidential spokesman. “I looked out my window and I saw a huge cloud of brownish smoke go up,” said Greg Woolstencroft in a live telephone interview with CNN’s Anderson Cooper right outside the Ritz-Carlton Jakarta; where he had once lived for an entire year. Read the rest of Arsalan’s column on Jakarta bombings at: http://trueslant.com/arsalaniftikhar/2009/07/17/jakartas-five-star-hotel-terrorist-bombings/ |
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If China Had Drawn Some Stupid Cartoons Instead… |
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July 15, 2009
By Arsalan Iftikhar True/Slant Contributor Instead of China brutally cracking down on their Uighur ethnic Muslim minority in western Xinjiang province leading to the recent brutal deaths of nearly 200 people, perhaps if China were drawing sophomorically offensive cartoons (a la Danish newspapers circa December 2005); we would probably (and sadly) see more of a global outcry from the greater Muslim world on Beijing’s most recent human rights catastrophe and “worst civil turmoil since 1989”. Not since the now-infamous Tiananmen Square tragedy of 1989 has the world seen such civil turmoil inside China which revolves around the fulcrum of ethnic identity, societal discrimination and flat-out racism between the predominant ethnic majority Han Chinese (from the eastern parts of China) and minority ethnic Uighur Muslim populations indigenous to Xinjiang province along China’s western frontier. The majority of Uighurs live in Xinjiang, the massive western “autonomous region” that accounts for nearly one-sixth of China’s total land area. At its height in the 9th century, the Uighur empire stretched from the Caspian Sea into eastern China. The Uighurs also managed to establish independent republics twice during the 20th century before being annexed by the People’s Republic of China in 1949. Read the entire True/Slant column at: http://trueslant.com/arsalaniftikhar/2009/07/15/if-china-had-drawn-some-stupid-cartoons-instead%E2%80%A6/ |
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CNN Anderson Cooper 360: The Twitter Tiananmen of Tehran |
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June 21, 2009 Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and is a contributing editor for Islamica magazine in Washington. Watching the events in Tehran unfold over the past week has conjured up tragic memories of what took place in Tiananmen Square more than 20 years ago. In 1989, China’s largest pro-democracy protests in history ended when military tanks rolled onto Tiananmen Square (translated literally as ‘Gate of Heavenly Peace’) and armed Chinese troops opened fire on crowds of more 1 million people. The tragedy sadly resulted in the deaths of between 180 to 500 people, according to a 1989 U.S. State Department briefing on the matter. Following the violence, the government conducted widespread arrests to suppress protesters and their supporters, cracked down on other protests around China, banned the foreign press from the country and strictly controlled coverage of the events. That sounds eerily familiar to what we are seeing transpire on the streets of Tehran, Iran today. In the aftermath of the hotly-contested presidential election between hard-line incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and reformist candidate Mir Hossein Moussavi, we have seen hundreds of thousands of average Iranians take to the streets of Tehran, Isfahan, Shiraz and other Iranian cities. Iranians are demanding their votes to be accurately counted — and certified. It is the closest thing that Iran has seen to a ‘velvet revolution’ in recent historical memory. Through the use of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, average Iranians are putting their own lives on the line serving as ‘citizen journalists’ to report on events in their country. The Iranian government has cracked down on international news organizations, creating an essential media blackout. Read the entire CNN Anderson Cooper 360 column at: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/21/the-twitter-tiananmen-of-tehran/ |
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