Rahima

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Posts posted by Rahima

  4. Posted

    Mr. Rudd is one heck of a prime minister, such a nice change from that previous rat bag.

     

    His apology speech to the aboriginal people and in particular to the stolen generation was just amazing. Those outside of OZ may not comprehend the significance of this apology, but it is a great day in Australian history and one that is to be remembered.

     

    _____________________________

     

    Part of his speech:

     

    To the stolen generations, I say the following: as Prime Minister of Australia, I am sorry.

     

    On behalf of the government of Australia, I am sorry.

     

    On behalf of the parliament of Australia, I am sorry.

     

    I offer you this apology without qualification.

    We apologise for the hurt, the pain and suffering that we, the parliament, have caused you by the laws that previous parliaments have enacted.

    We apologise for the indignity, the degradation and the humiliation these laws embodied.

    We offer this apology to the mothers, the fathers, the brothers, the sisters, the families and the communities whose lives were ripped apart by the actions of successive governments under successive parliaments.

     

    In making this apology, I would also like to speak personally to the members of the stolen generations and their families: to those here today, so many of you; to those listening across the nation - from Yuendumu, in the central west of the Northern Territory, to Yabara, in North Queensland, and to Pitjantjatjara in South Australia.

     

    I know that, in offering this apology on behalf of the government and the parliament, there is nothing I can say today that can take away the pain you have suffered personally.

     

    Whatever words I speak today, I cannot undo that.

    Words alone are not that powerful; grief is a very personal thing.

     

    I ask those non-indigenous Australians listening today who may not fully understand why what we are doing is so important to imagine for a moment that this had happened to you.

     

    I say to honourable members here present: imagine if this had happened to us. Imagine the crippling effect. Imagine how hard it would be to forgive.

    My proposal is this: if the apology we extend today is accepted in the spirit of reconciliation, in which it is offered, we can today resolve together that there be a new beginning for Australia.

  8. Posted

    The man was itching for an excuse :rolleyes: . If the sister is reading this- good riddance!

     

    As for the Islamic side of it, thus far i haven't seen any appropriate daleel other than a recommendation. Recommendations are one thing, walking out on your wife because of it is another matter.

     

    I hope that the girls posting the fatwas and the like aren't trying to prove that Islam forbids a woman from cutting her hair without seeking the permission of her husband.

  12. Posted

    My bad Che, I just assumed that you guys would know as much about cricket as I do about American football ;) .

     

    Personally am disgusted by Australia, they play hard all the time and taunt players (sledging is what they've named it). Taunt someone enough instead of playing the game as it should be (based on skill and talent) and you’re bound to get something you dislike in return.

     

    It is a gentlemen's game and so it should stay. Ponting (whilst I don’t believe he should be sacked) and his men are nothing more than cry babies.

  13. Posted

    Family planning is not an issue of today though, not for this current generation who will be more or less adopting the Western(or should that be 'modern')values of limiting the number of mouths to feed.

    I’m not sure where you reside, but here in Australia it is still an issue. Basically our generation is repeating the mistakes of the ones before us. Just the other day I ran into an old neighbour, a few years younger than I who now has three children, the eldest is two. Her husband is a labourer with no education, she hasn’t finished high school and they live in the same housing complex her parents live in. All of this doesn’t surprise me really because I see it on a daily basis here. Young girls, 15 year olds are aspiring for marriage. A 15 year old should be thinking about her education, friends and hanging out, not who she would marry and how many children she can pop out by 30. Let’s be honest, our parents generation and older, the value of a woman was generally dictated by who she married and how fertile she was. Not much has changed and hence they find themselves in the same rut that our parents generation (mind you beyond their control) found themselves in when they came to the west as refugees.

     

    I suspect that Somalis in the UK and USA are slightly more advanced then us here since most have only been here for about 10 or so years, but I doubt the situation is much better over there either. There are a few shinning stars in every community, but not enough.

  15. Posted

    Big issue down under- 8 of the 10 top articles on the age website are covering it.

     

    Typical Aly article above.

     

    What's your take folks? Especially the Aussies and Brits who know what cricket is.

  16. Posted

    Waleed Aly

    January 9, 2008

     

    NEVER in recent memory has the noble game felt so dirty. The scorecard of the Sydney Test points to one of cricket's most incredible victories, one that encapsulates why cricket purists insist the long version of the game is incomparably superior to its briefer derivatives. Yet this match's legacy will be the precise opposite. In India, it will be remembered as a symbolic landmark of every malaise in the game, and how Australia is its principal villain.

     

    If you doubt this, then witness the sheer disproportionate ferocity that surrounds this match. Visit YouTube and watch the dozens of videos dedicated to its closing stages. Listen to the quite astonishingly and unprofessionally livid outburst of Indian commentator Sunil Gavaskar on a dubious, crucial umpiring decision. Then, if you're game, read the comments posted below the video. You will see plenty about Australians as liars, cheats and racists. And this after a game in which one player, who was not Australian, was charged with and convicted of a racism offence.

     

    Much of the vitriol directed at Australia is unfair. To be sure, the Australians did themselves no favours this week with their excessive appealing, puerile dissent and graceless victory celebrations that ignored their defeated opponents. But while their actions lacked class, they are not offences that must plunge the game into turmoil.

     

    The response of Indian players, officials, journalists and fans suggests there is more to this than poor umpiring and behaviour in one controversial Test match. All concede India got a raw deal in Sydney, but it is clear many in India suspect something more sinister. The ABC's Harsha Bhogle said as much directly on air.

     

    The present outrage, therefore, has a longer gestation. In purely cricketing terms, it expresses a long-held anger at Australia's often aggressive and uncompromising approach. New Zealanders summarise this in one word: underarm. But the most recent nadir here is Steve Waugh's all-conquering team earlier this decade. Waugh's men proudly pursued what they called the "mental disintegration" of their opponents. Everyone else called it sledging: the hurling of often personal verbal abuse, particularly at batsmen, with the aim of disrupting their concentration and eroding their confidence. Most of the cricketing world considered Australia beyond the pale.

     

    Ricky Ponting has worked hard to project a new image, insisting that his charges are exemplars of cricket's spirit. But the rough reputation has stuck. The apparent Indian consensus after the Sydney Test is that Australian cricketers have long been hypocrites and arrogant bullies, and many in cricket's Asian powerhouses see themselves as long-suffering victims of Australian persecution.

     

    Only this explains the conspiratorial interpretation of events in Indian media. Delhi's Hindustan Times argued extraordinarily in an editorial that "the match, for all purposes, has the stink of being fixed", and that one of the umpires, Steve Bucknor, has an anti-Indian history.

     

    The same paper also quoted an unnamed "senior player" who suggested that something systemic favours Australia to India's detriment. Australia, he said, is "a team that cheats and lies quite blatantly" yet "gets away with everything, every dirty tactic, every dubious call," as though this is a law of nature.

     

    When Indian captain Anil Kumble accused Australia of playing dirty, in the post-match news conference, the Indian media contingent abandoned its formally neutral role and became a cheer squad, breaking into spontaneous applause.

     

    But looming over much of this discontent is a suspicion that arrogance is an Australian trait informed by a barely concealed racism. So, an Australian — even an umpire — who questions whether the bowling action of Sri Lanka's Muttiah Muralitharan is legal is suspected of expressing racist tendencies. The infamous example is umpire Darrell Hair, who was the first to penalise Muralitharan for his action. It is a familiar charge. In the past when visiting sides complained of the obviously dubious decisions of Indian or Pakistani umpires — much as India is doing now — they were also accused of racism.

     

    This suggests an identity politics might be at play here. In this context, cricket is more than a game, and the anger is about more than cricket. On the sub-continent especially, it is an expression of post-colonial independence: the forum in which colonial masters could be defeated — a dimension well illustrated by the Bollywood film Lagann. One detects an assertion of power and pride in repeated subcontinental demands that specified umpires (Darrell Hair, and now Steve Bucknor) be prevented from officiating their games.

     

    In this context, the decision to ban Indian offspinner Harbhajan Singh for three matches on a racism charge is explosive. Reports suggest that unless the ruling is overturned on appeal, India is threatening to take its bats and balls, in the most literal sense, and go home. If this is true, it's contemptuous of cricket's formal processes, but it is informed by a deeply held sense of structural injustice.

     

    Here is Australia benefiting from an anti-racism code when, on this view, they have been cricket's great racial abusers. That the case came down to the Australians' word against the Indians' only exacerbates the emotion.

     

    It is a short-sighted protest in one sense. Two players have previously been suspended for racial abuse: both were white (one Australian) and both incidents arose from matches against Asian nations. India might have more to gain from a strong anti-racism code than they would lose, and they should be loath to undermine it.

     

    But this whole episode is more about hindsight than foresight. Australian cricket will need to come to terms with this if the internecine politics of the international game is to avoid rupture. Australian society should understand it, too, because this anger is more social than sporting.

     

    Waleed Aly is a lecturer in politics at Monash University.

  17. Posted

    Lets be honest here. The Somali boys didn't just wake up one day and decide to be criminals. There were precursors which began in the home. Somali parents have too many kids. How do you expect to raise 10 kids in an expensive city like London? Its just crazy. Somali men are lazy in the UK, they don't work and chew khat every day. I watched the dispatches program and it said 7/10 Somalis don't work. What the hell?

     

    Lazy parents who aren't supportive of their kids leads to these types of boys. Parents are role models for their kids and if they see their mom and dad not working and depending on government aid, this will create a cycle. I'm tired of these unproductive Somali parents expecting the community to raise their kids. Sorry, that job started with you when you decided to pop out 10 kids. Sheesh.

    Same problems we have here in Melbourne.

     

    We have fathers whose life does not go beyond the realms of the taxi, sleep and mukhayad- so ultimately they have withered away to nothing more than sperm donors.

     

    We have mothers who need to be taught to in ay dantooda gartaan. They also need to be introduced to the marvels of modern (not-so-modern to most) medicine- contraceptive. If he isn’t helping you with one and two, don’t hold your breath. Learn to help yourself, get a job, work hard like our grandmothers and some of our mothers did, get out of the ghetto if you can and educate your children so that they don’t end up in juvenile detention or even worse.

     

    As of late the problems of the Somali youth in Melbourne (primarily the boys) is escalating to the point that it’s making the daily news and the tabloid-like vultures of today tonight and a current affairs. A meeting was organized a few weeks back in north Melbourne (for those of you who would know) and guess who came- those that have a mind. The rest who needed to be there were at home watching days of our lives or at the local mukhayad a 100 meters away.

     

    In the end, those who should care don’t really care even if they claim to. If they cared, they’d be making simple changes that would make a big difference.

     

    The saddest part of this dreadful saga is- the new generation of young parents is heading down the exact same track. They live in the same complexes, with slightly better education but no real job opportunities and have also never heard of contraceptive or family planning. These problems are going to continue for a very very long time.

  20. Posted

    December 17, 2007

     

    Entrepreneurs from developing countries are spending on their poorer fellow citizens, writes Landon Thomas.

     

    STUCK in a traffic jam in Istanbul in his bulletproof BMW, the richest man in Turkey lets loose with a satisfied grin.

     

    Since 2000 Husnu Ozyegin has spent more than $US50 million ($58 billion) of his money, building 36 primary schools and girls' dormitories in poor parts of Turkey. Next to the Turkish Government, Ozyegin is the country's biggest individual supporter of schools - and an official from the education ministry has told him his market share is increasing.

     

    "Not bad," the founder of the corporate bank Finansbank says in his gruff, cigarette-scarred voice. "If I can have an impact on 1 million Turkish people in the next 10 years, I will be happy."

     

    The global wealth boom has created a new breed of billionaire in once-destitute countries like Turkey, India, Mexico and Russia.

     

    Propelled by their rising economies, robust currencies and globally competitive companies, they have ridden a surge in local stockmarkets that have reached previously untouchable heights in the past five years. Now a number of them are using their wealth to bolster their standing and push for social changes in their homelands.

     

    These entrepreneurs, who have made their billions in industries like telecommunications, petrochemicals and finance, are distinct from a past generation of billionaires with ties to Middle Eastern oil or valuable land holdings.

     

    For these emerging economies, where loose regulation, opaque privatisation processes and monopolistic business practices abound, this extraordinary and uneven creation of wealth rivals in many ways the great American fortunes made at the turn of the 20th century.

     

    While such countries have long been accustomed to vast disparities between a tiny class of the wealthy elite and the impoverished masses, the new elite shares some characteristics with counterparts in the United States.

     

    And, just as Rockefellers, Carnegies and Morgans once used philanthropy to smooth the rough edges of their cutthroat business reputations - as has a current generation of wealthy Americans that includes Bill Gates, of Microsoft, and Sanford Weill, of Citigroup - local billionaires in emerging markets are trying to do the same.

     

    Carlos Slim Helu, the telecommunications entrepreneur in Mexico who is worth more than $US50 billion, has pledged billions of dollars to his two foundations that will aid health and education.

     

    Roman Abramovich, Russia's richest man, who has a net worth of $US18 billion, has channelled more than $US1 billion into the impoverished Arctic area of Chukotka, where he is the Governor, building schools and hospitals.

     

    In India, Azim Premji, the chairman of the software company Wipro, who is worth $US17 billion, has established his own foundation that supports primary education.

     

    The sums donated are relatively small in light of the pressing social needs of these countries. However, as return-driven philanthropy has gained in popularity through the efforts of Gates and others, emerging billionaires are applying similar bottom-line oriented lessons to their own countries.

     

    "What we are seeing in these countries," says Jane Wales, the president of the Global Philanthropy Forum, "are people emerging from the private sector with tremendous wealth who are attracted to highly strategic philanthropy".

     

    In Turkey, Ozyegin, who is 62 and has a net worth of $US3.5 billion, did not secure his wealth by buying government assets on the cheap or by belonging to a rich family that controls a monopoly.

     

    "I'm first generation - that gives me satisfaction," he said. "Getting to the top is not so easy; staying there is more difficult."

     

    The founder of a mid-tier corporate bank called Finansbank, he cashed in on a rush of interest by foreign financial institutions in Turkish banks last year and sold a controlling stake in his bank to the National Bank of Greece, receiving $US2.7 billion in cash.

     

    Flush with money and ambition, he is doing all that he can to lift Turkish educational standards at the primary and university level.

     

    Sitting in his personal conference room atop Finansbank's main office in Istanbul, Ozyegin recalls the date August 18 last year, when the sale of his 49 per cent stake officially closed.

     

    "I remember that day better than my birthday," he says, leaning back in a plush leather chair. "I was not only a billionaire but the richest man in Turkey. It's a great feeling, but your responsibilities increase."

     

    Like many self-made billionaires, Ozyegin has a direct, demanding manner and a day spent travelling with him does not yield much casual conversation. He carries two cell phones. Throughout a long day he juggles calls from his wife, his assistant, his son and assorted government bureaucrats, as well as the managers of his various businesses.

     

    He typically works 11-hour days, not only from his suite of offices but also from his car, plane or boat, checking on his operations in Turkey as well as in Russia, Romania and China.

     

    "I'm first generation, that gives me satisfaction," he said. "Getting to the top is not so easy; staying there is more difficult."

     

    When Ozyegin visits a school, he is frequently met by the district's mayor, a representative from the education ministry and various other local notables. His visits, like his business meetings, are swift and to the point - a sweep through the school's halls and a barrage of questions directed at school officials.

     

    At a primary school bearing his name, in a working-class district on the outskirts of Istanbul, he marches into a classroom of wide-eyed sixth-graders who jump to their feet with the spirit and alacrity of a platoon hailing its general and he exhorts them to heed their studies.

     

    At another school, he upbraids an official for countenancing stained carpets and trash that lines the building's long hallways.

     

    "This place is full of garbage," he says, his voice low and angry. "Do something about it. It's shameful."

     

    There are touching moments, too. A newly built primary school in a village close to the border with Armenia echoes with shouts of its 360 students as Ozyegin's wife, sister and brother-in-law, who oversee the logistics of the building program, stop by for a visit.

     

    Rarely do the children here attend high school. Many of them speak Kurdish as their first language and their parents eke out an existence as sheep and cow herders.

     

    Clothes are frayed and toes poke through the holes of plastic shoes. But, like the fading evening light on the snowy peak of nearby Mount Ararat, there are glimmers of hope, too.

     

    Danyan Kuba, a tall, nervous seventh-grader dressed in a coat and tie, is asked what he wants to be when he grows up. He shifts awkwardly, looks down at his shoes and back up again. "I want to be a math teacher," he says in a strong, clear voice.

     

    For Ozyegin, becoming one of the richest men in the world has brought its own pressures. He gets many letters each day. Some ask him to erase the debt they have on their Finansbank credit cards.

     

    Others are more poignant - recently he received a letter from an admirer in jail asking for a pair of shoes and a suit, a request he plans to honour.

     

    Like some who have made so much, Ozyegin likes to keep score.

     

    Warren Buffet may be the richest man in the world, but Ozyegin says his wealth has risen faster.

     

    "My compounding is better than Buffet's, but my track record is only one-half as long," he said.

     

    He is also a student of the life of J.P. Morgan: he reels off how much Morgan, who dominated the world of finance at the turn of the 20th century, left to his son, daughter and wife, as well as the salary he awarded the captain of his yacht. But Ozyegin's lack of renown on the larger global stage nags at him.

     

    "I'm giving away 2 per cent of my net income every month," he says. "I don't think Bill Gates is doing that."

     

    The New York Times

  22. Posted

    Salaama Che smile.gif

     

    Yes Che, we all know that Muslims commit the most heinous of all crimes in the most sacred of all places. That however my brother was not the lesson I was hoping nomads would get from this.

     

    I was hoping that it would serve as a reminder for us all, no matter whether or not it’s to our liking, that we as Muslims are to non-Muslims walking examples of Islam. We can either be one of the reasons a person becomes a Muslim or unfortunately the main reason a person turns away from Islam.

  25. Posted

    Are you sure that's possible?

     

    I can't imagine that they would have online articles dating that far back, but then again i could just be behind.