Headline News 02/11/2019

Headlines:

New Arab Spring Erupts across Multiple Muslim Countries

US Policy Results In North Korea Further Escalating Military Posturing

After China, Russia also Plans to Secure Itself from the Western-Dominated Internet

Details:

New Arab Spring Erupts across Multiple Muslim Countries

The original Arab Spring of 2010-11 comprising multiple protests and uprisings across the Arab world had until now appeared to have run their course, the last of the uprisings being the Syrian revolution, now apparently brought fully under control. But sincere observers of the generational ascendency of the Muslim Ummah always knew that the thoughts and feelings of the Ummah remained sincere to Islam and that it was only a matter of time before they would again receive public expression. It appears we are beginning to see that now, notably in countries that were not part of the original Arab Spring. According to the Independent:

A Friday of protests across three major capitals and dozens of cities shook the Middle East and North Africa, with young people draped in the flags of their nations demanding a departure of ruling elites in Lebanon, Iraq and Algeria.

During weeks of demonstrations that have been sometimes violently suppressed by Iranian-backed militiamen, Iraqis have called for a clearing out of the entire political class that came to power after the 2003 US toppling of Saddam Hussein’s regime and controls the country’s massive oil wealth. They poured into the streets of central Baghdad and other southern Iraqi cities in what some were calling the largest protests so far. At least six protesters were reported killed on Friday, according to an official of the Iraqi High Commission for Human Rights quoted by local media.

Lebanese protesters similarly are asking for the warlords-turned politicians who have dominated the country’s politics and pilfered its coffers since a 1989 power-sharing agreement that ended the country’s civil war to step aside.

Algerians too, having pushed for the ousting of long-time president Abdelaziz Bouteflika, are pressing for the sweeping away of the entire military and security elites that have run the oil-rich country since the end of its 1990s civil war. They marked the 37th consecutive weeks of protests.

“Algiers is boiling, people marching and shouting out loud [the names of] famous war of revolution martyrs,” wrote Farah Souames, an Algerian journalist, on Twitter. “The entire atmosphere is giving all of us goosebumps.”

The latest protests in the Arab world are taking place in countries that mostly sat out the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings. Many had said that Lebanon, Iraq, Algeria, and even Sudan, which toppled its longtime ruler this year, had been too exhausted by years of armed conflict and disorder to press for change.

That turned out to be wrong, as ordinary people agitating for jobs, and decent public services such as electricity, water, education and healthcare took to the streets this year en masse, including in Egypt, where protesters took on president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi’s security forces in September.

“What the Arab Spring Spring of 2011 did was broke up the fear factor, and the idea that it’s pointless to demonstrate,” said Tamara Coffman Wittes, a Middle East specialist at the Brookings Institute.  The underlying factors building pressure for change have not disappeared. Very few governments in the region have done anything significant to try to address the pressures.”

The Muslim Ummah would long ago have established its state, the righteous Islamic Khilafah (Caliphate) on the method of the Prophet (saw), if not for the continuation by other means of the evil disbelieving Western imperialism, that seeks at every turn to frustrate the movement of the Ummah and protect and support the West’s agent ruling class that continue to impose Western systems of rule upon the Ummah in all domains of life. With Allah’s permission, this agent class shall soon be overthrown and the Ummah will rise again with the Khilafah State once more taking leadership of world affairs with sincerity to the entire of humanity.

US Policy Results in North Korea Further Escalating Military Posturing

The West’s imperialistic foreign policy has created a world of military arms races fuelled by unprecedented weapons of mass destruction. In the case of North Korea specifically, America has deliberately allowed this issue to fester, to provide justification for America’s heavy military presence on China’s Pacific coast. According to the Guardian:

North Korea conducted another test of super-large multiple rocket launchers on Thursday afternoon, calling it a success, the state news agency KCNA said on Friday.

The latest test of the “super-large multiple rocket launchers”, following two tests in August and September of the same weapon that North Korean leader Kim Jong-un oversaw, according to KCNA, indicates the progression of North Korea’s weapons development while talks with the US remain in limbo.

The success of the tests was immediately reported, and Kim “expressed satisfaction” and congratulated the scientists who had developed the weapon, KCNA said, indicating Kim was not at the site.

North Korea’s state newspaper, Rodong Sinmun, showed a photo of the multiple rocket launcher, surrounded by yellow flames and smoke.

Thursday’s test verified that the “continuous fire system” of the multiple rocket launchers was able to “totally destroy” a group target of the enemy by a surprise strike, KCNA added.

“North Korea is engaged in increasingly escalatory behaviour,” Republican US senator Cory Gardner, chairman of the Senate foreign relations subcommittee on east Asia, the Pacific and international cybersecurity policy, said in a statement.

“This launch and continued North Korean aggression underscore the need for the Trump administration to re-commit to the maximum pressure policy” and for Congress to impose additional sanctions against the Kim government, Gardner said.

The weapons test, the first since one day of talks between the US and North Korea ended without an agreement on 5 October in Sweden, comes as North Korea repeatedly emphasises an end-of-the-year deadline for denuclearisation talks with Washington that Kim set earlier this year.

Although Kim and and the US president, Donald Trump, have a “special” relationship, “Washington political circles and DPRK policy makers of the US administration are hostile to the DPRK for no reason”, a North Korean statement on KCNA said last month.

The Islamic foreign policy is based on da’wa and jihad for the sake of spreading the benefits of Islamic civilisation to all of humanity and has nothing to do with the materialist imperialism of the West. In past ages, the Khilafah had managed to confront, contain and calm disruptive states, enabling the entire world to enjoy a golden millennium of peace and prosperity, the West themselves being amongst the foremost beneficiaries of the Islamic world order. With Allah’s permission, the world shall witness another golden age of Islam, led by the re-established Islamic Khilafah State on the method of the Prophet (saw).

After China, Russia also Plans to Secure Itself from the Western-Dominated Internet

The global internet is portrayed as open to the entire world but in reality it is almost completely dominated by Western countries who use its web pages, its social media platforms and its commercial sites to project Western culture and civilisation across the world. It is this that has led China, and now Russia, to protect their countries from Western culture on the internet. According to NPR:

A Russian law has taken effect that, in theory, would allow the Russian government to cut off the country's Internet from the rest of the world.

The "sovereign Internet law," as the government calls it, greatly enhances the Kremlin's control over the Web. It was passed earlier this year and allows Russia's government to cut off the Internet completely or from traffic outside Russia "in an emergency," as the BBC reported. But some of the applications could be more subtle, like the ability to block a single post.

It requires Internet service providers to install software that can "track, filter, and reroute internet traffic," as Human Rights Watch stated. Such technology allows the state telecommunications watchdog "to independently and extrajudicially block access to content that the government deems a threat."

The equipment would conduct what's known as "deep packet inspection," an advanced way to filter network traffic.

Such widespread control is alarming to human rights groups, which fear it could be used to silence dissent.

"Now the government can directly censor content or even turn Russia's Internet into a closed system without telling the public what they are doing or why," Rachel Denber, Human Rights Watch's deputy Europe and Central Asia director, said in a statement. "This jeopardizes the right of people in Russia to free speech and freedom of information online."

The Russian government has justified the law by saying it is needed to prevent U.S. cyberattacks. And, as the BBC reported, Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov has rejected the idea the law could be used to cut off Russia from the rest of the world: "No-one is suggesting cutting the Internet."

The West champions state sovereignty but in reality Western powers care only for their own sovereignty while working to weaken and dismantle the sovereign powers of all other countries in the world, interfering in them politically, economically, militarily, technologically, industrially, educationally and also in media and culture, all in accordance with their renewed styles of imperialist domination. It is incumbent upon Muslims to establish their state, in accordance with the divine law, and work to secure themselves from Western civilisation, including its media penetration. It is not wrong to use the internet for beneficial purposes. But its all-pervasive influence in our countries and our homes must be brought to an end.

Allah (swt) says in the Noble Qur’an:

[وَذَرِ الَّذِينَ اتَّخَذُواْ دِينَهُمْ لَعِبًا وَلَهْوًا وَغَرَّتْهُمُ الْحَيَاةُ الدُّنْيَا وَذَكِّرْ بِهِ أَن تُبْسَلَ نَفْسٌ بِمَا كَسَبَتْ لَيْسَ لَهَا مِن دُونِ اللّهِ وَلِيٌّ وَلاَ شَفِيعٌ وَإِن تَعْدِلْ كُلَّ عَدْلٍ لاَّ يُؤْخَذْ مِنْهَا أُوْلَـئِكَ الَّذِينَ أُبْسِلُواْ بِمَا كَسَبُواْ لَهُمْ شَرَابٌ مِّنْ حَمِيمٍ وَعَذَابٌ أَلِيمٌ بِمَا كَانُواْ يَكْفُرُونَ]

“And leave those who take their religion as amusement and diversion and whom the worldly life has deluded. But remind with the Qur'an, lest a soul be given up to destruction for what it earned; it will have other than Allah no protector and no intercessor. And if it should offer every compensation, it would not be taken from it. Those are the ones who are given to destruction for what they have earned. For them will be a drink of scalding water and a painful punishment because they used to disbelieve.” [al-Anam: 70]