A note from Barrister Hamid Bashani Khan

The second International Faiz Ahmed Faiz Peace Festival will take place in Toronto [Canada] on April 26, 2009.Writers, poets and activists from the Greater Toronto Area and from around the world will gather to oppose the culture of war and violence and to promote in their stead, peace, democracy, and social justice. The gathering will include participants attending the concurrent First International Festival of Poetry of Resistance, Toronto, and the South Asian Peoples Unity Conference, Toronto. The Festival is being sponsored by the South Asian Peoples Forum.

The Festival programme includes poetry and paper readings, presentations, dance, and music. International and local personages expected to attend include Muneeza Hashmi, daughter of Faiz Ahmed Faiz from Pakistan, Nancy Morejon, Poet Laureate of Cuba, Allison Hedge Coke, the Reynolds Chair at the University of Nebraska, USA, Gary Geddes, Lieutenant-Governor Award winner in B.C., Canada, Marilyn Lerch, President of the New Brunswick Writers’ Federation, Canada, Jorge Etcheverry, Ambassador in Canada of Poetas del Mundo. Published poets from France, Brazil, and other countries will also attend. The South Asian writers and activists expected to attend include Hamid Akhtar, Muno Bhai, and Abid Hussain Minto from Pakistan and Soma Marik from India. Rekha Suria from India will be the lead singer along with local Pakistani, Bangladeshi, and Indian artistes. Community and youth groups will participate through audio visual presentations and cultural performances.

The Festival will take place at the Port Credit Secondary School Auditorium, in Mississauga, from 6 pm. Around 600 people are expected to attend.

When The Satanic Verses was published in September 1988, it had been expected to set the world alight, though not quite in the way that it did. Salman Rushdie was then perhaps the most celebrated British novelist of his generation. His reputation had been established by Midnight’s Children, his sprawling, humorous mock-epic of post-independence India, which won the Booker Prize in 1981, and went on to win the Booker of Bookers, as the greatest of all Booker Prize winners.

Two years after Midnight’s Children came Shame, which retold the history of Pakistan as a satirical fairytale. And then came The Satanic Verses. Almost five years in the making, and supported by a then almost unheard of $850,000 advance from Penguin, there was something mythical about the novel even before it had been published. But the real myths about it have grown up since its publication.

Within a month The Satanic Verses had been banned in Rushdie’s native India. By the end of the year, protesters had burnt a copy of the novel on the streets of Bolton, England. And then on 14 February 1989 came the event that transformed the affair – the Ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa. The fatwa transformed the Rushdie affair from a dispute largely confined to Britain and the subcontinent into a global conflict with historic repercussions, from a quarrel about blasphemy and free speech into a matter of terror and geopolitics.

For many, the controversy seemed to come out of the blue. For many, too, especially in the West, the image of the burning book and the fatwa seemed to be portents of a new kind of conflict and a new kind of world. From the Notting Hill riots of the 1950s to the Grunwick dispute in 1977 to the inner-city disturbances of the 1980s, blacks and Asians had often been involved in bitter conflicts with British authorities. But these were also, in the main, political conflicts, or issues of law and order. Confrontations over unionisation or discrimination or police harassment were of a kind that was familiar even prior to mass immigration.
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And see the Turkish painter Esref Armagan website:
http://www.esrefarmagan.com/index-en.html
(submitted by a reader)

By Joe Danneman –

LOVELAND, OH (FOX19) – Like a lot of kids, Pranav Veera is good at video games. But unlike a lot of kids, he can name all the United States presidents and their birthdays.

He also knows the planets and how long it takes for them to go around the sun.
He knows the states in alphabetical order, and the alphabet – backwards. Name the date, and he’ll name the day.

Pranav is in kindergarten at McCormick Elementary. His class is learning the ABC’s while he’s learning to multiply.
His IQ is 176, which is one in a million intelligence. He can’t explain how he does it. He just does it.
“Our approach is let’s treat him like a normal child,” said Pranav’s father, Prasad Veera. “Yet leverage the skills and talents that he’s got.”
His parents noticed Pranav’s special talents when he turned four years old.
“I think the dates, particularly, are impressive,” said Prasad. “He can remember the dates and recall them in just a fraction of a second.”
Pranav uses posters, toys and books to exercise his gifted mind, a mind with a photographic memory.
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Portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in Hollywood

By Jack Shaheen

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BGxRWC

(Submitted by a reader)

(submitted by a reader)

Children as young as two experience post-traumatic stress, research shows.

A study on 114 younger children who had been exposed to road traffic accidents in the UK found one in 10 suffered continued anxiety after the event.

Although this is similar to the rate seen in adults, most go unrecognised and untreated, say the King’s College London experts.
Their work is published in the latest edition of the American Journal of Psychiatry.

Undetected
One reason for the lack of knowledge about young children is the difficulty in making psychiatric diagnoses in this age group, as they frequently lack the language ability to talk about their feelings and experiences.
” Children are quite resilient and often parents and close relatives are the best therapy”, Professor David Cottrell, of Young Minds.

And the tools used by doctors to spot and measure post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were designed with adults in mind.

The researchers, from King’s and the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Science Unit Cambridge, used an age-appropriate technique for diagnosing PTSD in the young children that relied on parents’ reporting of how their offspring were coping.

All of the 114 children aged between two and 10 had visited A&E departments in London after a road traffic accident.

Half had been passengers in a car, others were pedestrians or cyclists struck by a car, and all had relatively minor physical injuries.
At assessment in the month following the accident, and again six months later, more than 10% of the children met conditions for a diagnosis of PTSD.

These children had nightmares and difficulty sleeping, displayed avoidance behaviours, such as not wanting to go out in the car or walk on busy roads, and were described by their parents as “jumpy” and “on edge”.

PTSD symptoms:

Flashbacks and nightmares

Avoidance from stressful situations

Increased arousal and feelings of being under constant threat

The symptoms are persistent and disturb everyday life

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(Submitted by a reader)

By Marjorie Cohn

Since he took office, President Obama has instituted many changes that break with the policies of the Bush administration. The new president has ordered that no government agency will be allowed to torture, that the U.S. prison at Guantánamo will be shuttered, and that the CIA’s secret black sites will be closed down. But Obama is non-committal when asked whether he will seek investigation and prosecution of Bush officials who broke the law. “My view is also that nobody’s above the law and, if there are clear instances of wrongdoing, that people should be prosecuted just like any ordinary citizen,” Obama said. “But,” he added, “generally speaking, I’m more interested in looking forward than I am in looking backwards.” Obama fears that holding Team Bush to account will risk alienating Republicans whom he still seeks to win over.

Obama may be off the hook, at least with respect to investigating the lawyers who advised the White House on how to torture and get away with it. The Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) has written a draft report that apparently excoriates former Justice Department lawyers John Yoo and Jay Bybee, authors of the infamous torture memos, according to Newsweek’s Michael Isikoff. OPR can report these lawyers to their state bar associations for possible discipline, or even refer them for criminal investigation. Obama doesn’t have to initiate investigations; the OPR has already launched them, on Bush’s watch.

The smoking gun that may incriminate George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, et al., is the email traffic that passed between the lawyers and the White House. Isikoff revealed the existence of these emails on The Rachel Maddow Show. Some maintain that Bush officials are innocent because they relied in good faith on legal advice from their lawyers. But if the president and vice president told the lawyers to manipulate the law to allow them to commit torture, then that defense won’t fly.

A bipartisan report of the Senate Armed Services Committee found that “senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorized their use against detainees.”

Cheney recently admitted to authorizing waterboarding, which has long been considered torture under U.S. law. Donald Rumsfeld, Condoleezza Rice, George Tenet, Colin Powell, and John Ashcroft met with Cheney in the White House basement and authorized harsh interrogation techniques, including waterboarding, according to an ABC News report. When asked, Bush said he knew about it and approved.
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