Twenty-five years after the Bhopal gas tragedy killed over 20,000 people, a local court in Bhopal convicted former Union Carbide of India Limited (UCIL) chairman Keshub Mahindra and seven others in the case, awarding each of them two years in prison.
The Bhopal Gas Tragedy was an industrial catastrophe that occurred at a pesticide plant owned and operated by the American chemical company Union Carbide in Bhopal.
On the night between December 2-3, 1984, the plant released methyl isocyanate (MIC) gas and other toxins, resulting in the exposure of over 500,000 people.
“They show up wearing the kaffiyeh and shouting, and they just want to say Israel is bad, war crimes, apartheid, that is all. But that doesn’t make you pro-Palestine,” the brave Palestinian journalist and Jerusalem Post correspondent Khaled Abu Toameh told me. “That doesn’t make you pro-peace. Instead of organizing Israel Apartheid Week, they should be helping with human rights under Hamas, women’s rights under Hamas. A free press.”
The saga of Amnesty International’s decision to stand by an extremist who characterizes the armed struggle type of jihad as “tourism” has gone from bad to worse. Gita Saghal, who was suspended from her position as head of Amnesty’s Gender Unit for criticizing this relationship in public, succinctly sums up the nefarious themes at work in a recent interview:
Amnesty has come out with a statement saying that Mozzam Begg defends something called defensive jihad. He believes in this concept and we do not believe, (that is Amnesty’s senior leadership) that it is antithetical to human rights. Now that is a most extraordinary statement which they have not made before they were forced to the media and to defend their position in the media…
Now it appears they feel his views are not antithetical to human rights and it seems that they do not understand anything about what defensive jihad means…
Is is extremely worrying if they think that ideologies that are promoting systematic violence and discrimination against women, against religious minorities…
This concept of jihad, according to Begg in an article he wrote, is an individual obligation on all Muslims. Now many Muslims would say that jihad is a spiritual obligation, it’s about an intellectual and spiritual struggle. Not everyone believes it’s about war. He specifically rejects that idea. He thinks that it is about war, and that it is an individual obligation and that people should go and fight.
What do you do when the leaders of an organization most associated with the protection of human rights decide to partner with someone whose agenda would lead to the systematic destruction of human rights? Revoking your membership with Amnesty International and canceling your monthly donations could be a start.
An Afghan parliamentary delegation, that recently visited the Islamic Republic, has reported that over 3000 Afghans there are awaiting their execution…
Reporting back to the 249 member lower house of the bicameral parliament, Mr. Mujahid stated, “They (Officials of the Iranian Supreme Court) have provided us these figures that in 5630 Afghans are in Iranian prisons and from them more than 3000 of them have been sentenced to death on the basis of final verdicts of the Supreme Court.”
How much longer will we have to wait for a demonstration at a Canadian university against the “Islamic Republic’s war on Muslims”?
As Darfur and Rwanda have undermined the international meaning of the phrase “Never Again”, does this expression still have relevance? To Israelis, it absolutely does, though the creed has a much more specific interpretation in this country and among the diaspora:
The phrase, “Never again”, can be taken to mean that we are united in opposing the genocide of any group or nation in a new Holocaust (though Darfurians rightly wonder at why the rest of the world chose not to live up to that creed). But for Jews, it has other meanings as well: never again will they put their security in the hands of those who could and often did make the choice to abandon them in their time of need. Even among those who spilled horrendous blood and treasure to defeat the Nazis, the Israelis wonder why these allies did not, for instance, bomb Auschwitz and destroy a camp where a few hundred prison workers were able to apply industrial methods to murder thousands of people per day.
Update: The full article is also published in the Mark: Never Again?
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