Europe is the current Muslim battlefield but America is their ultimate goal claimed Mr Hoenlein
“Europe is the current Muslim battlefield, but America is their ultimate goal,” claimed Mr Hoenlein. British and English seem to be interchangeable in this context – much to the annoyance of Scottish and Welsh Muslims and non-Muslims.The efforts made by British Muslims to integrate always appear to fall short of Mr Blunkett’s “citizenship requirements”. What is more, any moves Muslims make towards integration provokes the ire of the neo-fascist element in society. There have been numerous manifestations of this in the media, in this country and America.The director of the Conference of Presidents of Major American Jewish Organisations, Malcolm Hoenlein, in an interview with an Israeli newspaper, expressed sentiments that are echoed by our home-grown right-wingers. Labour’s flirtation with Muslims during elections is disingenuous. Sometimes the Prime Minister can be heard praising the Koran to win support from Muslims, but he is also happy to unleash his crusader-like Home Secretary, David Blunkett, when he feels the need to appeal to popular prejudices.Mr Blunkett has gone to great lengths to convince us that the root cause of social disharmony is the failure of immigrants – a euphemism for Muslims – to accept “British ways” and demonstrate their “Englishness”. They are told to integrate, but when they do, via active political participation, they are informed that the “Muslim vote” poses a threat to democracy.
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The result is a dangerous upsurge in Islamophobia.
British Muslims today find themselves caught between a rock and a hard place. The arrest of 13 suspects on terrorist charges on Tuesday highlights the precarious position in which the majority of British Muslims find themselves. The wider Muslim community is struggling to integrate into mainstream British life, but the public spotlight always seems to shine on the extremists. We must also tackle the root causes of child abuse, and instil in societies non-violent means of resolving disputes.. During conflicts, a country’s food production is compromised and malnutrition ensues.As a profession we need to do more. Expenditure on arms decreased in the early 1990s, but the savings were not allocated to children’s needs. A decade of ethnic conflict and civil wars around the world ensued, characterised by deliberate violence against children on a vast scale.During these conflicts, children have been maimed, killed, uprooted, orphaned, exploited and sexually abused They have been abducted and recruited as soldiers.
More recently, the Declaration of Ottawa on the Right of a Child to Health Care encouraged physicians to “eradicate all forms of child abuse”.After the end of the Cold War, the expected “peace dividend” never materialised. Later, after wide consultation, the Declaration of Tokyo was forged. This states that doctors shall not “countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures”. As a profession, we need to have a fundamental rethink on the role we physicians can play both to mitigate the effects of the epidemic of violence and to develop strategies to prevent violence in the longer term.
The World Medical Association was founded in 1947 after the turbulence, terror and torture of the Second World War, to unite physicians worldwide in a shared mission founded on traditional Hippocratic principles. If British officers or agents were complicit in the mistreatment of prisoners there, they – and their superiors – must be held to account. In the meantime, we need to be told precisely what the Government is doing to secure the release of the four British citizens who remain in legal limbo at the US base on Cuba, and why it is all taking so unconscionably long..
Violence is a leading public health problem. The first British response yesterday hardly inspired confidence. Officials said that none of the Britons had alleged abuse during diplomats’ visits, even though one of the three says he submitted a written complaint.British involvement at Guantanamo must be the subject of a thorough investigation. It would appear that even as British ministers were assuring Parliament that they were making strong representations to the Americans and working to secure the British prisoners’ release, the SAS and British intelligence officers were actually co-operating with the Americans in interrogations.It is entirely possible, therefore, that at least parts of British officialdom not only knew that British citizens were being mistreated, but turned a blind eye for the sake of the information they hoped to obtain. Their US guards and interrogators never let them forget that they wielded ultimate power over themAs if their treatment at the hands of their American captors was not reprehensible enough, the charges the three make about British complicity are, if true, nothing short of an outrage. As the “Tipton three” graphically convey, they did not know when, even whether, they would be released. Prisoners told them of being sexually humiliated and made to perform indecent acts.
