June 10, 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.

Now that the ‘legal system’ in North Korea has ‘run its course’, it is imperative that the Obama administration help facilitate a diplomatic agreement, separate and exclusive of any nuclear non-proliferation discussions, to free American journalists Laura Ling and Euna Lee.

Ling, 32, and Lee, 36, both reporters for San Francisco-based Current TV, were sentenced after being accused of a ‘grave crime’ against the North Korean state, according to global media reports.

Their sentence: 12 years in a North Korean labor camp. Their families in the United States are now anxiously hoping the U.S. government can help negotiate a diplomatic rapprochement that will help bring the detained journalists home.

The San Jose Mercury News reported that concern about the women’s safety grew more intense when the rogue nation threatened to use nuclear weapons in a “merciless offensive” if provoked. Meanwhile, North Korea’s critics in the West — including John Bolton, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations — decried the capture as a “kidnapping” and an “act of state terror.”

According to the Boston Globe, both Ling and Lee were investigating a story for Current TV on alleged North Korean defectors to China when they were apprehended by North Korean soldiers on March 17. They were charged with crossing the border from China with intent to commit “hostile acts.” Still, for many within the international community, the circumstances of their arrest remain quite unclear. Human rights observers and members of the press were not allowed to attend their trial, and therefore it is hard to know if they actually

crossed the border, or if they had even done so inadvertently.

Read the entire CNN Anderson Cooper 360 column at: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/10/free-laura-ling-and-euna-lee/

June 4, 2009

By Arsalan Iftikhar
Special to CNN

Editor's Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica magazine in Washington. 

(CNN) Opening the Muslim-world leg of the "Audacity of Hope" world tour with the universal Islamic greeting "Assalamu alaikum" (May peace be with you) to thunderous applause, President Obama began his long-awaited major address by going straight to many of our pressing geopolitical issues.

He spoke from the hallowed halls of Cairo University in the heart of one of the largest Islamic capitals in the world.

From beginning to end, President Obama's speech was a concert of enlightenment compared to President George W. Bush's famous farewell news conference in the Muslim world (which resulted in two Iraqi size-10 shoes being boomeranged toward his head).

From the issues of violent Muslim extremism to the growth of the neo-racism known worldwide as Islamophobia; from Israel-Palestine to his overall Iraq and "Af-Pak" (Afghanistan-Pakistan) strategy, President Obama successfully used his Cairo speech to lay out his framework for several key foreign policy

issues.

Additionally, with major sections of his address covering women's rights, democratic reforms and nuclear weapons, President Obama devoted much of his 40-plus-minute speech to offering concrete and tangible policy initiatives that he plans to implement in the near future.

Continue reading Arsalan’s CNN Column at: http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/06/04/iftikhar.obama.cairo/index.html#

June 3, 2009

Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.

by Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
AC360° Contributor and Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

Tomorrow President Obama will be in Cairo, Egypt where he will give his first major address to the Muslim world.

President Obama should use his speech to show American respect for Muslims worldwide — from the streets of Cairo to the streets of Chicago.

“I thought it was very important to come to the place where Islam began and to seek his majesty’s counsel and to discuss with him many of the issues that we confront here in the Middle East,” President Obama said today from Saudi Arabia, his first stop on a five-day tour of the Middle East and Europe.

During a January 2009 television interview with Al-Arabiya network channel, President Obama said that it was, “My job is to communicate the fact that the United States has a stake in the well-being of the Muslim world, that the language we use has to be a language of respect…I have Muslim members of my family. I have lived in Muslim countries…”

But President Obama has his work cut out for him, both at home and abroad.

A recent CNN/Opinion Research Corp. survey suggests that “more than two in five Americans, or 46 percent, have an unfavorable opinion of Muslim countries”. That’s up nearly five percent from 2002. American public opinion towards Islam and Muslims since 9/11 shows the magnitude of the daunting diplomatic task in front of President Barack Obama in the Muslim world.

For example, a 2004 Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life Poll found that almost 4 in 10 Americans have an unfavorable view of Islam and 46 percent believes that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers. And a March 2005 ABC News Poll found that more than one-third of Americans believe that mainstream Islam encourages violence.

Read the entire CNN Anderson Cooper 360 column at: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/06/03/obama-in-the-middle-east-draft/

May 4, 2009

Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.

by Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

To the 65.8 million wonderful people of Iran:

As an American Muslim human rights lawyer, I write to you today to kindly ask for the immediate release of American journalist Roxana Saberi. In order to continue the advancement of peaceful dialogue between our two nations, it is an absolute moral (and religious) imperative to release Ms. Saberi immediately so that she can continue her work in journalism and continue to give a voice to the majority of voiceless Iranian people to the rest of the world.

Roxana Saberi was first arrested in January 2009 in Iran; her family was told it was for simply buying a bottle of wine — an act banned under the country’s Islamic legal code.

However, Iranian prosecutors have since then decided to accuse her of working as a journalist ‘without a valid press card,’ and finally, last month, of being a ‘spy’ for the United States.

And between January and March 2009, Ms. Saberi was only able to contact her family in the United States twice, according to international human rights group Amnesty International.

“The fact that Roxana Saberi faced a shifting tide of accusations from the time of her arrest until her trial is an indication that the Iranian authorities were looking for any excuse to detain her,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Deputy Director of the Middle East and North Africa Program for Amnesty International. “There is no reason for holding Roxana Saberi, unless the Iranian authorities can provide convincing evidence that she committed a recognizable criminal offense…”

Read the entire CNN Anderson Cooper 360 column at: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/05/04/dear-iran-free-roxana-saberi-now/

April 29, 2009

Editor’s Note: Arsalan Iftikhar is an international human rights lawyer, founder of www.TheMuslimGuy.com and contributing editor for Islamica Magazine in Washington.

by Arsalan Iftikhar | BIO
Founder, TheMuslimGuy.com

“To the Muslim world, we seek a new way forward, based on mutual interest and mutual respect.” When President Barack Obama said that during his January 2009 presidential inaugural address, he sent a clear message to the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims.

A few weeks ago in Ankara, he fulfilled his promise to give a major foreign policy speech from a capital in a Muslim-majority country in the first 100 days of his presidency. Obama told the Turkish Parliament that, “The United States is not, and will never be, at war with Islam.”

So President Obama has done a remarkable job in his outreach to the greater Muslim world, where perception of the United States had suffered immensely from the garbled rhetoric and actions of the George W. Bush administration.

And many American leaders are following suit to bridge the diplomacy gap with the greater Muslim world. A group of 34 — including former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and former Republican Congressman Vin Weber — suggested in a recent report, Changing Course: A New Direction for U.S. Relations with the Muslim World, some ways to improve US-Muslim relations. Moroccan Ambassador Aziz Mekouar called the report “a most constructive blueprint for building relationships of cooperation between the United States and the Muslim world.”

Read the entire CNN Anderson Cooper 360 column at: http://ac360.blogs.cnn.com/2009/04/29/the-first-100-days-for-the-muslim-world/