Sinhala Extremists eye Uyghur Solution for Muslims

ACL Ameer Ali, in Sunday Observer, 14 July 2019, where the title runs ‘Moulding Muslim Culture’ echoes Chinese Uyghur experiment’

The hidden agenda of the far-right and extremist groups like Bodu Bala Sena (BBS), Mahoson Balakaya, Sinha Le and so on, in respect of the Muslim community needs be understood in light of what was announced in that rally by BBS secretary, Gnanasara. From the beginning, and at least since the Alutgama riots of 2015, the BBS and its obstreperous secretary, were vociferous in demanding the expulsion of all Muslims to Saudi Arabia or any other Arab country, reinventing a 19th century argument advanced by Anagarika Dharmapala and Co. in a different context, that Muslims were ‘aliens’ in Sri Lanka. The fact that this community, like the Sinhalese and the Tamils before, were also foreigners but arrived last and that they were indigenised over one thousand years ago did not matter in the BBS’ twisted [readings of] history. Its ultimate goal is to make this island one hundred percent Sinhala Buddhist. It was this aspiration that was once again reinforced in Kandy, when Gnanasara announced that, “every home must have an owner and Sinhalese are the owners of Sri Lanka.” When saying that he quite naively expected the Tamils also to accept their status as tenants and live until they too would be ejected one day.

Anti-Muslim Violence Present and Past

Shamara Wettimuny, in Sunday Observer, 14 July 2019, where the title is “A brief history of anti-Muslim violence in Sri Lanka”

The recent Easter attacks targeting a number of churches and hotels devastated Sri Lanka. Over 250 people were killed, and many more injured. Within days of the attack, it emerged that the perpetrators of the attack were affiliated to radical Islamist groups in Sri Lanka. However, the identification of the perpetrators as ostensibly adherents of the Islamic faith opened the floodgates of discrimination and violence against the broader Muslim community in Sri Lanka.

The Deep Imprint of Violence within Christianity and Islam

Lisette Thooft, 18 January 2015, in NieuwWij, where the title is “Karen Armstrong: “There is nothing in the Islam that is more violent than Christianity”  .… https://www.nieuwwij.nl/english/karen-armstrong-nothing-islam-violent-christianity/

The terrorist attacks in Paris rendered her new book  Fields of Blood. Religion and the History of Violence suddenly and tragically very urgent. In over five hundred pages Karen Armstrong, once a nun and the respected author of bestsellers like A History of God and The Case for God, answers the question whether religion is the principal cause of violence. A conversation about Islam and terrorists, Western responsibility and the world in which we live.

Karen Armstrong, a former nun

Our Well of Tears for Kieran de Zoysa: Killed on Easter Sunday, 21st April

Kieran Alexander Shafritz de Zoysa, August 7, 2007-April 21, 2019

Kieran was born in New York City, raised in Washington, D.C., and spent summers in Southern California. He schooled at Sidwell Friends, a Quaker school from age five to 10 and looked forward to returning to Sidwell Friends School in September 2019, following 18 months of living in Colombo and attending Elizabeth Moir School.Kieran was a gifted student with a photographic memory, the diligence to natural grasp of maths and science. Teachers in Washington and Colombo loved his enthusiasm for learning and his drive to do his best always.

Dynamite! 9/11 as Dynamite. Friends at War

Michael Roberts

When Islamic zealots within Sri Lanka reaped havoc on people going about their normal practices on Easter Sunday this year 2019 via coordinated suicide attacks that generated carnage and death, I sent A NOTE (see below) around as part of a wider corpus of material on the event.  To my amazement, three friends from disparate backgrounds, French, Canadian and Sri Lankan Australian respectively, expressed strong dissent about the Islamic hand behind the 9//11 carnage in USA — firmly asserting that it was an US government plot.

All four Pics from https://www.reuters.com/news/picture/9-11-iconic-images-idUSRTS20CLO

Diving into Amarasingam’s “Terrorism on the Teardrop Island”

Hassina Leelarathna

In a tweet about his article “Terrorism on the Teardrop Island: Understanding the Easter 2019 Attacks in Sri Lanka,” Amarnath Amarasingam says he’s taking “a deep dive into everything we know so far about the Easter attacks in Sri Lanka” and that he’s providing “new details” along the way. After plumbing the depths of that “deep dive,” I have these comments.

The Wellampitiya bomb factory discovered in early 2019

Jihad in South Asia

Says Amarasingam

• “The Sri Lanka attacks may be early evidence that the Islamic State is taking an important and renewed interest in South Asia, following losses in Syria and Iraq.”
• “With respect to what the Sri Lanka attacks may reveal about the Islamic State’s strategy going forward, two factors are important. First, the author has been asked many times since the attack why the Islamic State would go out of its way to target a small island like Sri Lanka. This is largely the wrong question. As has been seen in Dhaka, Quetta, and other places that have experienced recent attacks, it is not so much that the Islamic State is targeting these countries as it is accepting allegiances by local groups who want to bridge localized grievances with a more transnational brand. As such, it is not that the Islamic State targeted Sri Lanka, but that groups like the NTJ are aligning their cause with international terrorist groups.”

A Patriotic Muslim Sri Lankan … now permanently disabled – shot by the Zahran Hashim Cell

BBC News Item, 31 May 2019, entitled  “The man who might have stopped Sri Lanka’s Easter bombings”

 

When bombs planted in churches and hotels killed more than 200 people in Sri Lanka on Easter Sunday, few had realised that the nation had a problem with Islamist militancy. One man who did, reports the BBC’s Secunder Kermani, was Mohammad Razak Taslim. Lying on a hospital bed, Mohammad Razak Taslim’s face contorts with pain. The left side of his body is completely paralysed, but he reaches out with his right hand, trying to clutch at his wife and brother-in-law who stand anxiously over him. His wife, Fatima, presses a handkerchief to his head. One side of his skull has caved in. It’s where he was shot in the head in March. Ever since, he’s been unable to speak, unable to walk.