by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Cairo : An Egyptian court listed 164 Islamists as leaders of terrorist entities, including leading members of Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya (Islamic Group) as well as loyalists of the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group, official MENA news agency reported.
The list includes Assem Abdel-Maged, Mohamed al-Islambouli and Tarek al-Zomor of al-Jamaa al-Islamiya, a self-proclaimed anti-government Islamic group that committed violent and terror activities in Egypt in the 1990s, Xinhua news agency reported on Sunday.
Cairo Criminal Court also ordered to seize their funds to be supervised and run by special committees.
“These are judicial precautionary measures that seek preservation and protection of the society,” said the court, noting that an individual is listed as terrorist after proven guilty of crimes that ruin the principles and values of of the society.
Leading members of Al-Jamaa Al-Islamiya, who have been jailed following the assassination of late Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981, were pardoned and released in the wake of the 2011 uprising that toppled former President Hosni Mubarak.
Most Islamists and Brotherhood loyalists have either been jailed or fugitives since the popular-backed military ouster of former Islamist President Mohamed Morsi in early July 2013.
Many of them have received appealable death sentences and life imprisonments over charges varying from inciting violence and murder to espionage and jailbreak.
Morsi himself is now serving a 20-year prison sentence over inciting deadly clashes between his supporters and opponents in late 2012 and a 25-year jail term over leaking classified documents to Qatar.
Since Morsi’s ouster, Egypt has been facing a wave of terror attacks that killed hundreds of policemen and soldiers as well as civilians.
A Sinai-based militant group affiliated with the Islamic State regional terrorist group claimed responsibility for most of the attacks in Egypt over the past few years.
Meanwhile, the Egyptian forces have killed hundreds of terrorists and arrested thousands of suspects during the country’s anti-terror war declared by President Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, the army chief then, following Morsi’s ouster.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Opinions, Politics
By Naresh Kaushik,
Taking a leaf out of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s book, Congress President Rahul Gandhi used his Europe tour to reach out to non-resident Indians, or NRIs — a group largely known to support Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) in recent years. Throughout the tour, he targeted Modi for his style and policies, bitterly attacked the BJP and its ideological parent, the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS), and tried to project him and the Congress party as a better alternative.
Gandhi comes from a family where access is carefully controlled and only a select few are allowed to reach its members. But in London, he gave the impression that he’s accessible to the common man. He even mingled with the guests at his gatherings and shook their hands.
Speaking to journalists on Saturday (August 25), he mocked Modi for not talking to them openly. He accused the Prime Minister of not having the courage to answer reporters’ questions. This was a reminder of Modi’s public event in London in April, where he was accused of taking pre-planned and selected questions from the audience and not addressing even a single press conference. But one has to remember that Modi was also accessible to the media before he became Prime Minister. The question is, will Gandhi attend such open events and answer unscripted questions if he ever becomes the Prime Minister of India?
But still, this was a new Rahul Gandhi in London — more mature, aggressive, confident and ready to challenge his rivals. His sustained attacks on Modi, the BJP and the RSS were deliberate and sounded like part of a well-planned theme. It’s clear that he wanted to provoke the ruling party in India in order to set an agenda for debate. By comparing the RSS with Muslim Brotherhood, he wanted to plant a doubt in the minds of the Hindu right-wing organisation’s new supporters in India. This was also an attempt to drive away some voters from the BJP.
By targeting Modi and raising the issue of the alleged threat to India’s institutions under his government, Gandhi was trying to become the darling of the intelligentsia that supported the BJP in 2014. By praising Sushma Swaraj, who he’s bitterly criticised in the past, and attacking Modi for isolating her, Gandhi sought to create a wedge in the cabinet and was trying to impress upon the audience that he favoured an inclusive government where individual ministers were as important as the Prime Minister.
But we all know that Modi’S style of functioning is very similar to Rahul Gandhi’s grandmother, Indira Gandhi. And it’s a fact that in present-day India, leaders of all political parties act like dictators and once in government they rarely allow individual ministers to have an independent voice.
In Europe, Rahul Gandhi cleverly avoided talking about his own ambitions of becoming Prime Minister. He didn’t want other opposition leaders to stop dreaming about that ambition and thus jeopardise their support for an anti-BJP front during next year’s elections. It also went with his theme of projecting himself as a consensus politician.
He fumbled at the press meet earlier when he seemed to agree with Pakistan’s position that the main problem currently between the two countries was that India didn’t want to talk. But later, in answer to a direct question about Imran Khan’s election, he made it clear that relations with Pakistan couldn’t improve as long as institutions like the ISI continued to export violence to India.
The Congress president rightly focussed on the unemployment issue and was honest in saying that most countries are facing that problem and don’t know how to tackle it. He wanted India to follow China where he said small and medium industries had resulted in large-scale industrialisation and massive job creation. But he should know that a democratic India can’t be compared to a totalitarian China. In India, no government can take a decision without attracting scrutiny by the opposition and the media.
But where Rahul Gandhi didn’t come out really clever and mature is when he said that the Congress party was not responsible for the massacre of Sikhs after the assassination of his grandmother in 1984. For the second day in London, he failed to correct himself that members of his party were not only responsible but some of them led mobs to kill Sikhs. Although later his party didn’t give them tickets for parliament and state assemblies, they were never expelled.
Gandhi’s explanation that he condemned all violence and wanted the guilty to be punished, is similar to Modi and BJP leaders saying that they condemned all violence, including those by cow vigilantes, and wanted the perpetrators to be brought to justice. All of a sudden, just months before the general election, Gandhi, has given the BJP and the Akali Dal a major political issue. As Sikhs are in large numbers among the NRIs, he has only managed to provoke their anger against the Congress party.
Gandhi still has a long way to go. He still appears to lack new ideas and the political acumen required to take on Modi. But his Europe tour suggests Modi and the BJP will have to take him seriously. The man they dismissed as “Pappu” for a long time appears to have emerged as a tough challenger.
(Naresh Kaushik is a senior journalist based in London. He can be contacted at uknaresh@gmail.com)
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | News, Politics
London : Congress President Rahul Gandhi has once again compared the RSS with the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organisation, and said both were banned after the assassination of the top leaders of India and Egypt — Mahatma Gandhi and Anwar Sadat, respectively.
Speaking here on Saturday at an event organised by Indian Journalists’ Association, Gandhi said: “I said RSS is lot like the Muslim brotherhood. And there is a storm in a teacup back home. Both organisations were founded in the 1920s. Both organisations believe in institutional capture. Both organisations view the electoral process as a means of capturing institutions.”
“Muslim Brotherhood was banned after Anwar Sadat’s (then Egyptian president) assassination (in 1981), RSS was banned after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination (in 1948). So, there are tremendous similarities. And the most interesting one, women are not allowed in either of these organisations. So, they are similar,” Gandhi added.
He also said: They are trying to capture institutions so that democratic organisation is throttled,” he added.
Gandhi had on Friday compared the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) with the Muslim Brotherhood, and said the RSS wanted to “capture” every institution of the country.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Economy, News, Politics
London : Congress President Rahul Gandhi on Friday compared the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) with the Muslim Brotherhood, a Sunni Islamist organization, and said the RSS wanted to “capture” every institution of the country.
The RSS was trying to change the very nature of India, he alleged.
Rahul Gandhi was speaking at an event in London in the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). Gandhi said: “We are fighting an organisation called the RSS, which is trying to change the nature of India. There is no other organisation in India that wants to capture India’s institutions,” he added.
Gandhi said: “What we are dealing with is a completely new idea. It is similar to the idea that exists in the Arab world in the form of Muslim Brotherhood. And the idea is that an ideology should run through every institutions, one idea should crush all other ideas.”
Citing a few examples, he said: “You see the response of four Supreme Court judges, who came out and said ‘we are not being allowed to do our work’. You see Raghuram Rajan (former RBI Governor) and the shock of demonetisation. You can see India’s institions being torn down one by one. That requires a response, a response that has to include all who value what India has achieved,” he said.
Gandhi said the decision on demonetisation bypassed every single institution. “Demonetisation was an attack on small and medium businesses, which is India’s real power,” he said.
“It took a week for economists to figure out what has been done (by demonetization). The RBI was not spoken to, the finance minister didn’t know of it. The cabinet was locked up. The idea came from the RSS directly,” he said.
On lessons learnt from the electoral defeat in 2014, Gandhi said: “That you have to listen, the leadership is about listening, leadership is about empathy. At a party level, I think there was a certain degree of arrogance that had crept into the Congress. So, never forget that the party is actually the people. That’s a lesson for every body in the Congress,” he added.
—IANS
by admin | May 25, 2021 | Muslim World
Cairo : An Egyptian court has decided to place 296 defendants loyal to the banned Muslim Brotherhood on the country’s terror list for three years.
The defendants admitted during investigations that they joined the group, which was deemed as hampering the rule of law and harming national unity through temptations to topple the ruling authority, according to the Cairo Criminal Court on Wednesday, Xinhua reported citing MENA news agency.
The defendants confessed committing acts of violence against people and vital facilities of Armed Forces and police.
On Tuesday, the court made a similar decision against 56 brotherhood defendants.
Egypt has been launching a massive crackdown on the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood group since former President Mohammed Morsi, a brotherhood leader, was removed by the military in July 2013 after mass protests against his one-year rule.
A later dispersal of pro-Morsi sit-ins in the capital and nearby Giza left about 1,000 killed and thousands more arrested and facing mass trials.
Since then, growing anti-government terror attacks left hundreds of police and military men killed, with most of them claimed by a Sinai-based militant group loyal to the regional Islamic State (IS) group.
A judicial panel in charge of the group’s capital chain has previously seized funds of several Brotherhood-run businesses including supermarkets and private schools.
—IANS
