Bosnian woman's fight for her land

Interesting story of a Bosnian woman and her fight to regain her land (excerpts below). However, it is also much more than that. It is also a story about governments taking responsibility and giving people back their rights. You cannot ask victims of oppression and occupation to just forgive, forget, and move on. The wrongs must be acknowledged and corrected, as much as possible, for the healing to begin.

Fata Orlovic's house is easy to find in the village of Konjevic Polje. It is the one with a large Serbian Orthodox church built in its front garden.

"I want them to remove the church and I want soil back on this plot of land," she tells me, furiously motioning towards what would have been her front garden.

Like many Muslims in the hills of eastern Bosnia, she was ethnically cleansed from the village during the war in the early 1990s.

When she returned to Konjevic Polje in 2000, she was outraged to find the church had been built on her land.

"If she doesn't get the church off her land you will never have a society that is governed by the rule of law," explains James Rodehaver, human rights director for the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in Sarajevo.

"It would mean a constant process of dealing with political crises and changes of political will. The legacy of the war would never be resolved."

Only the more nationalist Serbs still oppose Fata, and the government of the Bosnian Serb half of the country has said it will help find a solution.

"It doesn't bother me that it's a church," Fata explains. "It's where they worship and that is fine. I respect churches as much as mosques.

"But if they want a church they should just put it on their own land instead of mine. I respect all nations and religions, but I can't respect people building on my land."

Read on at BBC News

Celebrating 600 years of Islam in Europe

AP Press; SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina

Bosnian Muslims celebrate 600 years of Islam in their nation Saturday with a concert of spiritual music, a prayer for peace, and a gentle reminder to Europe: not all of the continent's Muslims are of immigrant origin.

"Recently we have noticed that Europe is obsessed by the immigrant Muslims from the East," said Mustafa Ceric, head of the Bosnia Islamic Community, the official institution of Bosnia's Muslims. "This is an opportunity to remind that there are indigenous Muslims in Europe."

"By celebrating 600 years of Islam here we want to naturalize Islam in Europe," he said, adding that Bosnia's Muslims have illustrated how Islam can be harmonized with a European way of life.

Read on here

Caption: Two Bosnian women on their way to Friday prayers

Museum of [In]Tolerance

On June 19, 2007, the Museum of Tolerance in LA hosted a program commemorating the UN's Day in Support of Victims of Torture. S. Shaiq, an active member of the So. Cal. Muslim community (and a good friend of mine), decided to keep an open mind and check out the event. She posted her thoughts on her blog, part of which I copied below:

I really want to be a tolerant person...and I really pride myself on being very open minded and self-critical of even my own personal views...I'm obviously not perfect, but I'm trying.

I went to an event at the Museum of Tolerance this week and I was purely dismayed by how hypocritical they are. I had heard some rumors about them but I didn't want to believe them and went in with a very open/clean slate.

I really haven't felt like this in a long time but that day I really felt like I (or things I believed in or stood for) were being attacked or villanized. It was just unnecessary and it was so implicitly shown that to some it may seem like I'm just making a big deal out of nothing but when something can make an otherwise not sensitive person feel scrutinized or attacked than i think it should be looked at twice. I mean if we want to learn anything from history than we should really re-evaluate the demonization of and generalization of any set of peoples.

For example we watched this short film called 'In our time' that kind of went over different genocides in recent history and how we can never let these things happen again 'in our time'. So when they showed the genocide in the Balkans they had a caption up that said 'Serbs, Croats, and Bosnian Muslims all killed each other'- so why not mention Serb Christians, Croat Christians, and Bosnian Muslims if you're going to bring religion into it, especially since the Muslims were the ones that were offended the most in that situation. And then of course they brought in the Darfur situation and said that Arab Muslims were killing Darfurians, which implies that the Darfurians are not Muslim, when in fact they are...so again villanizing Muslims as though they were the aggressors in this situation against innocent non-Muslims.

Continue here.

Sex Deprived...What is going on?

Search Results on Google Trends

By Affad Shaikh
The graph is a three year time frame of the trends in google searches. It show a comparison of two searches that I put in- Sex and Islam. Sex mainly because I thought that it would be a good base line to see how significant the search result is, and anyway I have a closet...(inside head thought, inside head thought!) and Islam because I thought, heck new google service lets play around with it.

I did not imagine that it would become a blog-worthy item, aside from the fact that it was an interesting tool that google was introducing. See these results come from google search statistics. Each of your computers has this thing called an IP address, which is basically a computer physical address on this world wide web. So they use this to track where the searches are coming in from and with all the information they have they have created this database which is now accesible by mere mortals like ourselves to play around with.

When I did my initial search I was playing around and to find that the top ten countries or "regions" as google refers to it were actually Muslim populated areas, disturbed me!

Look at the graph below. Unfortunaly one thing google trends doesnt do is provide numerical values to see the "volume" of searches being done. That is why I used "sex" becuase the saying goes technology is motivated for the access to "pornography"- don't believe me? Just read about the invention of the camera and some the things it was first used for, or read about video technology on phones and what motivates researchers and designers to push the limits of this new technology- from a friend on the inside on these sorts of thing, I personally get stories of what the thinking behind some technology is, and its disturbing.




So this disturbing data leads me to some questions, for which I doubt I have any answers, but its something to reflect on.

1. What is going on?

2. Are Muslims that sex deprived that they have to search it to such an extent in the privacy of their own rooms...or in cafe's?

3. I am assuming this is more Muslim youth then it is adults, so my question is are the countries so corrupt that morality has fallen down the hole?

4. For people who want to jump the gun and say this is because of the "hijab" etc, notice that Iran and Suadia Arabia are not amongst the countries listed, and both institute mandatory "hijab" of women; there might be other factors but still the countries listed are liberalized, I know Pakistan and Pakistan the people using the internet are wholeheartedly liberal, my family is included in them- and Malaysia and Indonesia are for sure liberal and booming economically. So is it the "liberal" society that confuses and conflicts with peoples head to lead to such staggering numbers?

Islam is about modesty and not about social controls, so in a place where there is a Islamic culture it doesnt necessarily mean social controls inhibit individual free will. The norms are there, but people do as people do.

Again the first graph is total worldwide searches. Then the second one is top ten, normalized search results. Now "normalized" means they take the total number of searches for the search words and divide it by percentage of the total search amount to get a top ten list. This might mean that more people using the internet doing more searches in some countries will make the normalized ratio larger then in others. Other factors also deal with how many people access and use google compartively to how people search for these sites elsewhere. Google is popular, but its not the "only" search engine out there.

If you do the same with porn, it gives you much greater hits else where in the world and they are non-Muslim countires in the top ten, click here to see for yourself. You will notice, closet suburban Irvine is quite up there in the ranks when it comes to "porn" searches. Finally, still shocked, I put in "gay" and well, Irvine seems to top the charts- those rich white people are wierd- so vocally homophobic yet so active on the net in searching for that stuff.

So you can't just use statistics to label an entire community one way or another, really you can not do that, if anything you can use it to discuss an issue but to label, I would be hard pressed. I can see Fox news headline now...followed by "White Upper Middle Class suburban Christian community tops the charts in Homosexual Google Searches".

However you look at it, its still a figure that needs to be looked at and taken into consideration.