The Muslim Ummah have abandoned the Rohingyas

by Girish Menon

While the Rohingyas starve, live in fenced in camps or are on boats in high seas with no country willing to accommodate them the Islamic organisations are loudly quiet in their response while western human rights organisations as well as Jewish holocaust survivors espouse their cause. So what happened to the universal brotherhood of Islam? Why don't they offer refuge to their fellow brethren?

The Rohingyas were used by the British during the second world war as a fifth column to defeat the Japanese in Burma. Towards this end they were resettled in the Arakan area of Burma, given arms, money and training by the Allied forces. After the British withdrew from the area and new countries like East Pakistan was created, the Arakan province was to become a part of Burma. At this time the Rohingyas started a jihad against the Burmese government to get their territories to be a part of Jinnah's East Pakistan. Many Islamist organisations were active in this jihad.

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At the time the Rohingyas used the 'dar-ul-harb' concept to refuse to integrate with the Burmese population where they were in a minority. Like their Muslim brethren in the northern plains of India they did not wish to live in a country where they were in a minority. They were actively supported in this jihad by Islamic organisations in Pakistan.

The Burmese, unlike the Indians, when they defined their citizenship laws were unwilling to accommodate this group with a separatist and jihadist motive and the Rohingyas were deemed stateless. So, from then on the only way out for the Rohingyas was to pay smugglers to get them out of the Arakan province into countries where they could lead a decent life.

So why are the Islamist countries not going the extra mile to help their brethren? Why is Pakistan (The holy land for the pure) not inviting these Rohingyas to resettle them in their lands? Why is the Islamic State not taking them to Iraq or Syria nor the al Qaeda making attempts to rescue them? Can we say that NIMBY (Not In My Backyard) supersedes the Islamic Brotherhood?

25 Best British Jokes

From The Telegraph

1. “I’ve been single for so long now, when somebody says to me, 'Who are you with?’, I automatically say: 'Vodafone.’”

Miranda Hart

2. “I went to a restaurant that serves breakfast at any time. So I ordered French Toast during the Renaissance.”

Peter Kay

3. “A friend of mine always wanted to be run over by a steam train. When it happened, he was chuffed to bits.”

Tim Vine

4. “I thought when I was 41, I would be married with kids. Well, to be honest I thought I would be married with weekend access.”

Sean Hughes

5. “I heard a rumour that Cadbury is bringing out an oriental chocolate bar. Could be a Chinese Wispa.”

Rob Auton

6. “I lost my virginity very late. When it finally happened, I wasn’t so much deflowered as deadheaded.”

Holly Walsh

7. “I’m sure wherever my dad is he’s looking down on us. He’s not dead, just very condescending.”

Jack Whitehall

8. “Hedgehogs. Why can’t they just share the hedge?”

Dan Antopolski

9. “Try shoving an ice-cube down your wife’s front at night. 'There’s the chest freezer you wanted.’”

Ken Dodd

10. “You know who really gives kids a bad name? Posh and Becks.”

Stewart Francis

11. “Most of us have a skeleton in the cupboard. David Beckham takes his out in public.”

Andrew Laurence

12. “I’ve just been on a once-in-a-lifetime holiday. I’ll tell you what, never again.”

Tim Vine

13. “I needed a password eight characters long so I picked Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.”

Nick Helm

14. “I waited an hour for my starter so I complained: 'It’s not rocket salad.’”

Lou Sander

15. “I told the ambulance men the wrong blood type for my ex, so he knows what rejection feels like.”

Pippa Evans

16. “I’m in a same-sex marriage… the sex is always the same.”

Alfie Moore

17. “A sewage farm. In what way is it a farm? Is there a farm shop?”

Jack Dee

18. “There are only two conditions where you’re allowed to wake up a woman on a lie-in. It’s snowing or the death of a celebrity.”

Michael McIntyre

19. “For boys, puberty is like turning into the Incredible Hulk - but very, very slowly.”

John Bishop

20. A big girl once came up to me after a show and said 'I think you’re fatist.’ I said 'No. I think you’re fattest.’

Jimmy Carr

21. “In the Bible, God made it rain for 40 days and 40 nights. That’s a pretty good summer for us in Wales. That’s a hosepipe ban waiting to happen. I was eight before I realised you could take a kagoule off.”

Rhod Gilbert

22. “No wonder Bob Geldof is such an expert on famine. He’s been dining off 'I Don’t Like Mondays’ for 30 years.”

Russell Brand

23. 'Toughest job I ever had: selling doors, door to door.’

Bill Bailey

24. “Dogs don’t love you. They’re just glad they don’t live in China.”

Romesh Ranganathan

25. “I was playing chess with my friend and he said, 'Let’s make this interesting’. So we stopped playing chess.”

Matt Kirshen

If we're going to cry foul over Fifa, then we should at least hold our banks to the same standard

Mary Dejevsky in The Independent

Modern life provides many opportunities for bafflement, but the continuing capacity of the British to regard themselves collectively as paragons of public virtue never ceases to amaze.

This week we have seen the lid taken off two prominent areas of our national life – banking (again) and football – to reveal something quite unpleasant beneath. But the response has been – in the first case – to insist yet again on “just a few bad apples” and – in the second – to attack a report that was so misguided as to exonerate Qatar and Russia over their World Cup bids, while fingering England (how dare they?) for being economical with its observance of the rules.

I remember vividly my response to the first reports that bankers in the City of London were suspected of fiddling the Libor rate. I was horrified. Was Libor – the London inter-bank offered rate – not the benchmark for international banking? The standard-setter? If Libor was being manipulated, what did this say about the soundness of UK banking generally? How and why had anyone been able to cook the books for so long? With something as fundamental as Libor, why were there no fail-safe mechanisms for checking?

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The two questions that I asked most often, though, were the most basic. How come the only remedies being mooted were fines on the institutions – fines that would ultimately be paid to a large extent by you and me, the taxpayers, seeing as how we had rescued these banks by taking them into public ownership? And even more basically, why had the reputation of the City of London not been tarnished beyond recall? The Prime Minister and the Chancellor were still, it seemed, lavishing time and energy trying to secure some arrangement with Brussels that would minimise the damage to the City from tighter eurozone regulation. Frankly, why bother? Let City banking lie on the bed it has made.

It then transpired that not only Libor was being rigged, but the foreign-exchange market, too, with gung-ho bankers exchanging jocular emails about what they were doing. And not only doing, but getting away with, until last year. What was the price for such cynical profiteering? More fines on the institutions, no doubt plea-bargained down, and again likely to be paid, one way or another, by you and me. Is it not passing strange that the offending emails could be cited verbatim, but that those who sent them remain unnamed? Even stranger, that there are apparently no criminal charges yet being brought? Oh yes, the Serious Fraud Office is apparently looking into that possibility, but such a tentative response hardly inspires confidence.

 

As a journalist, I find it hard to believe that hacking someone’s voicemail warrants something akin to a show trial and a prison sentence, but swindling the country out of millions of pounds isn’t treated as a crime – at least not one that anyone shows much eagerness to prosecute. Are there frauds that are too big or too brazen to punish? Even the reputational damage seems limited. Far from being diverted to Frankfurt or New York, the money, it seems, continues to roll in. Or is this perhaps a reflection of the sort of money that now flows through London; a quality of money and banking that deserve each other? 

And so to the “national game”. When Fifa published its report into allegations of corruption during the most recent bidding process, and essentially absolved Qatar and Russia, the initial reaction here in Britain seemed to veer between disbelief and resignation. After all, Qatar’s bid had succeeded despite summer temperatures that are now requiring the whole global football schedule for 2022 to be rewritten, while questions over Russia’s capacity for bad behaviour are hardly new. When it emerged, however, that Fifa had put someone in the dock for rule-bending, and that someone was England, the response was apoplectic. Righteous indignation hardly begins to describe it.

The fury was palpable, with MPs talking about a “whitewash” and the English FA categorically rejecting charges that it had tried to “curry favour” with the former Fifa vice-president, Jack Warner, despite a list of actions that at least permitted such an interpretation. The former English FA chairman, Lord Triesman, accepted the findings as “legitimate” and “embarrassing”, while also insisting that the report reflected Fifa’s “dislike” of England.

Already turbid waters were further muddied when the US lawyer, Michael Garcia, who actually conducted the inquiry, complained that the report contained “incomplete and erroneous representations”. There is now pressure for his findings to be released in their entirety. But the self-justifying anger the report prompted in London leaves a sour taste and suggests a verb that can be conjugated “I entertain; you offer encouragement; he/she/it gives bribes”.

One consequence could be that the next time the UK casts aspersions on the probity of an Arab state or Russia, the polite response will cite pots and kettles.

What I fail to understand is why the same seems not to apply to the City of London and its banks.