Banner Advertiser

Friday, June 10, 2016

[mukto-mona] আজ শনিবার সন্ধ্যা ৯টায় জ্যাকসন হাইটসের ডাইভারসিটি প্লাজায় বিক্ষোভ, মানব বন্ধন ও প্রতিবাদ সভা



https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzvKmUT7JldkdGJIbWlIWnFXRWc/view?usp=sharing

আজ শনিবার সন্ধ্যা ৯টায় জ্যাকসন হাইটসের ডাইভারসিটি প্লাজায় বিক্ষোভ, মানব বন্ধন  প্রতিবাদ সভা

মিতু আক্তার ঝিনাইদহে নিহত পুরোহিত আনন্দ গোপাল গাঙ্গুলীপাবনায় নিত্যানন্দ পান্ডে হত্যাসহ সকল গুম, হত্যা, টার্গেট কিলিংসংখ্যালঘু নির্যাতনের প্রতিবাদে এই শনিবার ১১ জুন সন্ধ্যা ৯টায় জ্যাকসন হাইটসের ডাইভারসিটি প্লাজায় বিক্ষোভ, প্রদীপ প্রজ্জ্বলন, মানব বন্ধনের আয়োজন করা হয়েছে। এতে সবাইকে উপস্থিত থাকার জন্যে অনুরোধ জানানো হয়েছে। আয়োজনে: বাংলাদেশ মাইনরিটি রাইটস গ্রূপ; ঘাতক দালাল নির্মূল কমিটি; সন্মিলিত সাংস্কৃতিক জোট, বাংলাদেশ বুড্ডিস্ট সেন্টার, উদীচী, সম্প্রীতি মঞ্চ এবং গণজাগরণ মঞ্চ।




__._,_.___

Posted by: Sitangshu Guha <guhasb@gmail.com>


****************************************************
Mukto Mona plans for a Grand Darwin Day Celebration: 
Call For Articles:

http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=68

http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?p=585

****************************************************

VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/

****************************************************

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
               -Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190





__,_._,___

[mukto-mona] News from Human Rights Center for Bangladesh (HRCB)- Volunteer at Hindu Ashram in Bangladesh is Hacked to Death





__._,_.___

Posted by: Prodip K Saha <Prodip.kumar@outlook.com>


****************************************************
Mukto Mona plans for a Grand Darwin Day Celebration: 
Call For Articles:

http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=68

http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?p=585

****************************************************

VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/

****************************************************

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
               -Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190





__,_._,___

Re: [mukto-mona] NY Times Article: Bangladesh Says It Now Knows Who’s Killing the Bloggers ........



Well, Dr. Roy, you did not answer my question, "how many guns do you own?"

In any case, you are so wrong! You started talking about Bangladesh, remember? And what are the weapons that are being used there by the criminals that are murdering humanist bloggers and practically all kind of non-Muslims? Are they using illegally owned guns?

To make it short, let me insist on my words to the stupid While American in the Humanist. Please feel free to read that again.

SuBain

========================

On Friday, June 10, 2016 10:31 PM, "Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:


 
Perhaps, you are not understanding the essence of my post; it's about our right to own, when we feel the need, which people of Bangladesh do not have.
Criminal usages of gun by legal-owners are statistically insignificant compared to that by illegal-owners. Also, when something is banned, it goes to the underground market of the illegal-owners, as the case in Bangladesh.



From: "Sukhamaya Bain subain1@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 5:50 PM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] NY Times Article: Bangladesh Says It Now Knows Who's Killing the Bloggers ........

 
BTW Dr. Roy, if you do not mind me asking, how many guns do you own?

Here is how I commented not long back on someone's post in the Humanist:

"I actually feel sorry for the USA when I look at people like you. Your daughter narrowly escaped a mass shooting by a deranged youth, yet you want guns to be so available in the country!! People like you need to realize that if guns were not so callously available in this country, criminals and mentally sick people could not have them so easily. You also need to realize that, when you are living your daily life, it is not realistic for you to be always fully prepared to shoot someone whose intent you do not know, but it is to shoot you. Gun ownership would not make you as safe as you think. Criminals and sick minds should be stopped from owning guns by the country's laws and law enforces. That is how you can realistically be safe living your daily life. You need to educate yourself with the fact that the USA has the highest rate of firearm homicides in the world (3.21 per 100,000, second being Canada with 0.51 per 100,000)."

Now, talking about Bangladeshi Hindus, I think a significant fraction of them should organize mass migration to India nonviolently, fully declaring their intent and risking to be shot at by BSF/BGB. And after they are allowed in on humanitarian ground, the government of India should demand compensation (at least equivalent to the property that the migrants left behind) from the government of Bangladesh.

SuBain

============================


On Friday, June 10, 2016 12:20 PM, "Jiten Roy jnrsr53@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:


 

Today, I heard, another Hindu Priest of the famous Anukul Thakur temple in Pubna was hacked to death; this is the second Hindu Priest hacked in a week.
Bangladesh is not safe for religious minorities and secular people, and Government cannot protect them. What boils down to is - these groups need to think about alternate plans for their safety, instead of being the sitting duck. I know - it is difficult to do in Bangladesh, but what else can be done.
This is exactly why I love the US second amendment right to own and/or bear arms, which gives the self-protection right to the citizen, in case government machinery fails to do the job. Without this right, citizens will always be the victim of either the ruling class and/or the criminal class. This right is the real peoples' power, instead of the mere political slogan of the socialist/communist system.




From: "Sukhamaya Bain subain1@yahoo.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com>
To: mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Friday, June 10, 2016 10:55 AM
Subject: Re: [mukto-mona] NY Times Article: Bangladesh Says It Now Knows Who's Killing the Bloggers ........

 
I am sick of this 'Bangladesh' who knows who's killing the bloggers.If you know and are not doing a damn thing about it, aren't you as guilty as hell like the killers? The killers are doing what, as per Islam, would take them to heaven. By encouraging Islamization of the country, 'Bangladesh' is actually aiding and abetting the killings. Sorry, I could not appreciate the stupidity of apprehending hundreds of potential criminals while producing hundreds of thousands of them.

SuBain

================================


On Friday, June 10, 2016 8:04 AM, "'Jamal G. Khan' M.JamalGhaus@gmail.com [mukto-mona]" <mukto-mona@yahoogroups.com> wrote:


 

NY Times Article: Bangladesh Says It Now Knows Who's Killing the Bloggers

By GEETA ANAND and JULFIKAR ALI MANIKJUNE 8, 2016

alt
Worshipers in March at the Hatembagh Jame Masjid in Dhaka, Bangladesh, where the spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam used to lead prayers. CreditAllison Joyce/Getty Images
DHAKA, Bangladesh — The young man, inching past a crowded checkpoint near a truck stand in Bangladesh's capital, caught the attention of an alert police officer.
His backpack, together with his appearance, from the unshaven beard to the long Punjabi tunic over baggy pants, set off the suspicion that he was an Islamist militant. The man was arrested after he was found to be carrying a machete, an unregistered pistol and six bullets.
The discovery of the weapons raised alarms. For the last three years,atheist writers, freethinkers, foreigners, religious minorities, gay rights activists and others have been terrorized and killed in Bangladesh by shadowy figures who have struck with machetes and sped off on motorbikes.
Little was known about the attackers, except that they were Islamist radicals, and that their assaults have been coming with ever-greater frequency this year.
The detained man refused to discuss much, saying only that he was Saiful Islam, 23 years old and a teacher at a local madrasa, or Islamic school.
But the picture filled in six days later, when two 19-year-old men, arrested after running from the site of another fatal attack, identified the madrasa teacher as a fellow conspirator. That touched off a cascade of revelations that, for the first time, has allowed the Bangladeshi authorities to penetrate the murky world of the attackers and answer questions about the planning, execution and purpose of the attacks that have baffled the country — and, indeed, the world — since the violence began.

KEY FACTS

  • At least 39 people have been killed in attacks with machetes, guns and bombs in Bangladesh since February 2013.
  • The killings, mostly with machete blows to the back of the victim's neck, have been accelerating lately.
  • The Bangladeshi authorities say they believe they have identified the top leadership of the two groups they say are responsible.
  • Even as the government has condemned the killings, it has urged writers not to criticize Islam.
At least 39 people have been killed in attacks with machetes, guns and bombs since February 2013. The killings, mostly with machete blows to the back of the victim's neck, have been accelerating lately, with five people murdered in Aprilfour in May and at least three so far in June.
On Sunday, a Christian grocer andthe wife of a police superintendentwho had been cracking down on militant attacks were killed in separate strikes. On Tuesday, a Hindu priest was killed in southwestern Bangladesh.
In a lengthy interview, the chief of the police counterterrorism unit, Monirul Islam, who assumed his post in February, laid out the findings of his investigation in minute detail.
The killings were organized by two militant Islamic groups that have gathered volunteers and recruits, trained them and eventually seeded them into cells run by a commander, Mr. Islam said. They have tried to pick their targets with care, with the aim of gaining support from the public, he said, and trained teams of killers. Their goal was to convert Bangladesh's mixed secular and religious culture to an Islamist one, the chief investigator said.
The Bangladeshi authorities say that they now believe they have identified the top leadership of the two groups they say are responsible, and that they are preparing to round them up. Only when the leaders are caught, they caution, will the attacks be stopped, and at that, only for a while if the appeal of Islamic fundamentalism is not blunted.

Secular Versus Islamists

Bangladesh, a nation with a Muslim majority adjoining eastern India, gained independence from Pakistan in a vicious war in 1971 and established a secular, democratic government. A military coup in 1975 led to more than three decades of mostly military-backed governments sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalists, until a secular government returned to power in 2009 with an overwhelming majority. But secularism is far from universally accepted in Bangladesh, and has always had to contend with a conservative Islamic culture.
Photo
alt
Bangladeshi police officers inspecting the body of Mahmuda Khanam Mitu, the wife of Babul Akter, a police superintendent, on Sunday. CreditEuropean Pressphoto Agency
To a surprising extent, the militants have succeeded in their aim of discrediting secularism, the chief investigator said.
"In general, people think they have done the right thing, that it's not unjustifiable to kill" the bloggers, gay people and other secularists, he added.
They have also put the secular government on the defensive. As a result, even as the government has condemned the killings, it has urged writers not to criticize Islam and warned that advocating "unnatural sex" is a criminal offense.
Some experts say that only a more widespread crackdown will stop the killings, but that the government has held back, fearful of creating a backlash.
"The politics has been turned into the secular versus the Islamists," said Abdur Rashid, a retired army major general and executive director of the Institute of Conflict, Law and Development Studies in Dhaka. "Therefore the government is cautious."
While the killers' strikes often appear random, Mr. Islam says the terrorism campaign was conceived by the militant groups quite deliberately as a response to mass protests in early 2013, known collectively as the Shahbag movement. Inspired by a group of bloggers who led the protests, the demonstrators advocated an end to religion-based politics and the prosecution of war crimes dating to the 1971 war for independence.
Photo
alt
Mourners carrying the coffin of Ahmed Rajib Haider, a blogger, in Dhaka in February 2013.CreditPavel Rahman/Associated Press
War crimes prosecutions have been a particular source of anger for Islamists. They were shelved during the period of military-backed rule but revived under the new democratic government in 2009. Four of the five convicted and executed in the latest round of trials were leaders in the country's largest Islamist political party, Jamaat-e-Islami, outraging Muslim fundamentalists and others.
Continue reading the main story




Two groups in particular took up the fight against secularism, Mr. Islam said. One, Ansar al-Islam, is led by a fiery cleric and a charismatic, well-trained operational commander, both of whom Mr. Islam declined to identify because they are being watched. Its leaders command about 25 trained killers, some of whom have been involved in three or four attacks, Mr. Islam said.
The second, the Jama'atul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, is the reorganized offshoot of a group banned in 2005 for setting off nearly 500 bombs simultaneously around the country.
While both are radical Islamist groups, Mr. Islam said, neither seems to have direct links to larger terrorist networks like Al Qaeda and the Islamic State, though those groups have occasionally claimed credit for the attacks.

'It Is Your Duty to Kill'

The Islamist groups appear to have reacted quickly to the Shahbag movement, mounting their first fatal attack on Feb. 15, 2013, against ablogger who wrote critically of Islam under the pseudonym Thaba Baba. It was carried out by a group of students from North South University in Dhaka, who were incited by the sermons of the spiritual leader of Ansar al-Islam at the time, a 45-year-old cleric named Jasim Uddin Rahmani.
The students used to attend his Friday speeches at a local mosque where Mr. Rahmani, who has since been arrested, declared a fatwa on bloggers critical of Islam, calling for them to be killed, Mr. Islam said.
Photo
alt
The Bangladeshi police with two suspects in the killing of Mr. Haider, a blogger and secular activist, outside a court in Dhaka in 2015. CreditMunir Uz Zaman/Agence France-Presse — Getty ImagesAs it happened, one of the students, a 32-year-old senior named Redwanul Azad Rana, was also a leader in Ansar al-Islam, Mr. Islam said. He invited the younger students to Mr. Rahmani's sermons and introduced them to the writings of Thaba Baba.
"Being a believer, it is your duty to kill" Thaba Baba, Mr. Rana told the students, one of them said in his confession in court. Prodded by Mr. Rana, "we made a plan to kill Islam's and Prophet Muhammad's insulter Thaba Baba by identifying him," the student, Faisal Bin Nayeem, 24, said in the statement.
He said they found Thaba Baba's picture on Facebook, then searched for someone matching it at the Shahbag protest, still underway at the time. Eventually, they identified a 32-year-old architect, Ahmed Rajib Haider, as Thaba Baba. After studying Mr. Haider's routines, three of them surprised him outside his house around 9 p.m. Mr. Nayeem said he drove his machete into the back of Mr. Haider's neck and hit him twice more as he fell forward.
Ansar al-Islam, with the help of mainstream Islamist groups, then began to publicize Mr. Haider's writings, casting the killers as defenders of Islam against "atheist bloggers."
The writings, published in at least two national dailies, enraged large segments of the population, who had previously been sympathetic to the Shahbag movement, Mr. Islam said.
During the next two months, two more bloggers were killed. The police began arresting the North South University students who were involved in killing Mr. Haider, and also caught Mr. Rahmani, the cleric who inspired them. But Mr. Rana, the student leader, remains at large and is thought to have left the country.Mr. Islam said he believes these arrests stopped Ansar al-Islam — also known as the Ansarullah Bangla Team — from killing more people in 2013 and 2014. But the group reorganized the terrorist cells, he said, and the killing resumed.
In February of last year, Mr. Islam said, Ansar attackers killed Avijit Roy, 42, an American citizen of Bangladeshi origin. Mr. Roy worked by day in the biotechnology industry in the United States and by night as a writer of books on science, homosexuality and religion, in addition to founding a website called Mukto-Mona, Bengali for freethinker.
From the growing number of attackers in detention, the police learned that the newly reconstituted Ansar al-Islam had changed its tactics, now recruiting madrasa students and teachers instead of university students to carry out killings. Mr. Islam said a violent protest by the madrasa students in May 2013 convinced Ansar al-Islam leaders that they were a more promising source of fanatical recruits than their university counterparts.
The training and indoctrination of the recruits became more rigorous and systematic at that time, Mr. Islam said. The cell that assassinated another blogger, Oyasiqur Rahman Babu, 27, just a month after Mr. Roy's killing rented an apartment where two senior operatives worked with the group of would-be killers. One, an operations expert, taught them how to kill with a machete and use a pistol to scatter anyone interrupting the attack.
Armed with Mr. Babu's picture and his address, the assassins were sent to his home to assess the situation and returned to a barrage of questions from the trainer. "What happens if you are stopped? What will you do?" he asked them, Mr. Islam said.
Close to the planned date of the attack, the other operative, an ideologist, introduced the killers to Mr. Babu's writings. The students were given samples calculated to stir them up. "What is the punishment for someone who writes these insults?" the trainer asked them. The group answered in unison, day after day, "Only death," the arrested students told investigators.

Still, the police have now identified a trainer involved in planning the attack on Mr. Babu. Last month they printed the suspect's picture, along with those of five others accused of participating in the killings, in local dailies, offering rewards of up to 500,000 takas, about $6,400, for information leading to their arrests.
Mr. Islam said the hardest part for the police was identifying the leaders, who were so concerned about security that they would not give their real names to the madrasa students they were training.

Costly Slip-Ups

The other militant group, the reorganized Jama'atul Mujahedeen Bangladesh, works independently of Ansar al-Islam and almost exclusively in northern Bangladesh, the chief investigator said. But the group is less professional than Ansar al-Islam, he said, making mistakes that are costing it public support.
The group has trained 50 to 100 madrasa students as killers, he said, organizing them into cells of four or five. But through shoddy research, many of the victims have turned out to be popular local figures. Among them: a homeopathic doctor who used to give free treatment to villagers, and an English professor at Rajshahi University who was not known to have written critically of Islam.
When detained militants learned that a 66-year-old Japanese man they had slaughtered had converted to Islam in 2015, they told investigators they were upset over their mistake.
With all the slip-ups, the communities turned against them. With the public's support, Mr. Islam said, the police quickly rounded up the suspected hit men and several of their handlers in most of the Jama'atul Mujahedeen Bangladesh killings, and were in pursuit of the senior leadership.
Many in Bangladesh continue to live in terror. Twenty-five associates of one victim, a gay rights activist, have taken refuge in safe houses provided by diplomatic missions. Several dozen bloggers have fled the country. Those who remain have grown fatalistic.
"On this journey, we'll lose our lives," Arif Jebtik, 39, one of the leaders of the Shahbag movement, said in an interview in his Dhaka apartment, which he rarely leaves. He has quit his job, closed his blog and stopped dropping his children off at school.
"This is the price we have to pay to history," he said.
A version of this article appears in print on June 9, 2016, on page A1 of the New York edition with the headline: Bloggers, Bangladesh and Insight on 39 Killings. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe



RELATED COVERAGE
















__._,_.___

Posted by: Sukhamaya Bain <subain1@yahoo.com>


****************************************************
Mukto Mona plans for a Grand Darwin Day Celebration: 
Call For Articles:

http://mukto-mona.com/wordpress/?p=68

http://mukto-mona.com/banga_blog/?p=585

****************************************************

VISIT MUKTO-MONA WEB-SITE : http://www.mukto-mona.com/

****************************************************

"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it".
               -Beatrice Hall [pseudonym: S.G. Tallentyre], 190





__,_._,___