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That is, if it was a toss-up if Celtic could league points faster than the trees could be the last to lose their leaves in autumn explain.

In fact, their 2-0 victory at heart was again on 2 October, the last time I ate Celtic defeat in domestic competition – 19 lights in all.

The state of the team has so radically that the manager is not happy, warned his players that no reward is not delivered on the last Parkhead trophy cabinet.

Celtic have to force through a stuttering start to the season gone, while Hearts campaign is’ by financial problems blighting Tynecastle club was in turmoil. Plus, the first choice goalkeeper Marian Kello from the squad for the Scottish Cup game on Sunday against St Johnstone are removed as a player in the dispute with the club directors.

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The New York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, The associated Press has learned.

In 2006 a University at Buffalo student named Adeela Khan ended up in a report by the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence Unit because she had forwarded an email announcing an Islamic conference in Toronto at which the notorious extremist Tariq Ramadan was a featured speaker.

Update:  See “CAIR to ask Yale, Rutgers to protect rights of Muslim students”, CAIR press release, 19 February 2012

And “Muslim groups press Rutgers to act on NYPD spy reports”, The Record, 19 February 2012

Muslim students from across the Ivy League gathered at Yale this weekend to network and share spiritual and cultural experiences.

Approximately 130 students participated in the third annual Ivy Muslim Conference, which is co-sponsored by the Chaplain’s Office and the Muslim Students Association. the conference was designed to connect Muslim students with their Ivy League peers, and attendees heard from keynote speaker Ingrid Mattson, attended preprofessional panels and learned about community and campus activism. Though the conference is not yet an official University event, Yale coordinator for Muslim life Omer Bajwa said he hopes it will become a fixture of Yale’s religious programming.

“This is an opportunity for fellow Muslim Ivy students to engage intellectually, socially and spiritually,” Bajwa said. “We want to build a sense of community across different campuses.”

The conference began in spring 2010 after Bajwa, who was the interim Muslim chaplain at Cornell until 2008, decided he wanted to organize an event that would integrate Muslim students from different schools. He worked with fellow Muslim chaplains to make the concept a reality.

Though the first conference was small and did not include all the Ivy League schools, Bajwa said those who attended considered it a great success and asked Yale to host the event again in 2011. Attendance doubled that year, and remained high this semester, Bajwa said. the conference was initially supposed to rotate among the Ivies, Bajwa said, but has been held at Yale for the past three years because the University is centrally located between the Ivy League schools and had enthusiastic support from its students.

While most attendees were undergraduates, Bajwa said graduate students and alumni were also invited because they could offer perspectives on living as American Muslims after college and also give students career advice.

Mostafa Al-alusi ’13, president of the Yale Muslim Students Association, said the conference aimed to help people connect their academic or professional lives with their spiritual lives, adding that many Muslim students struggle with the intersection between the two. In her keynote address, Mattson, the first female president of the Islamic Society of North America, discussed what it means to be both a spiritual Muslim and a leader in today’s society.

At various points in the conference, the students broke into smaller discussion groups that Bajwa said were intended to encourage discussion about the challenges Muslim students face, such as how to approach their faith in a secular world, and about possible solutions to those problems.

The event was not solely religious, though the spiritual aspect of the conference was important, said Nooreen Reza ’15, a member of the Yale Muslim Student Association who helped organize the conference. Reza said the conference primarily focused on fostering communication and relations between students in Muslim student associations at different schools. she added that networking events such as career panels and campus and community activism workshops were particularly important in helping students form connections.

Nine student attendees, all of whom identified as Muslim, said they appreciated the sense of community the conference developed.

“The real power is having a collective of smart kids together in once place really trying to focus energies on a certain goal,” Shihan Khan MED ’17 said. “This is a medium for the whole Ivy circuit to come together and grapple with tough issues.”

Dartmouth undergraduates Amir Khan and Tasneem Khalid said they gained ideas for strengthening their college’s Muslim Student Association — which only has about 15 active members ­— by talking with students from other institutions.”

“We can learn from bigger MSAs,” said Amir Khan, a sophomore. “The hardest thing is getting everyone together in the same room to talk about it.”

Abdul Rafay Hanif, a sophomore at Columbia, said his favorite part of the conference was when students got food, played sports and socialized together on Friday night, which he said was helpful in connecting with his peers.

The Yale Chaplain’s office and the Yale Muslim Students Association will co-sponsor the Critical Islamic Reflections Conference on April 14.

NEW YORK (AP) – the new York Police Department monitored Muslim college students far more broadly than previously known, at schools far beyond the city limits, including the Ivy League colleges of Yale and the University of Pennsylvania, the associated Press has learned.

Police talked with local authorities about professors 300 miles away in Buffalo and even sent an undercover agent on a whitewater rafting trip, where he recorded students’ names and noted in police intelligence files how many times they prayed.       Detectives trawled Muslim student websites every day and, although professors and students had not been accused of any wrongdoing, their names were recorded in reports prepared for Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly.

Asked about the monitoring, police spokesman Paul Browne provided a list of 12 people arrested or convicted on terrorism charges in the United States and abroad who had once been members of Muslim student associations, which the NYPD referred to as MSAs. Jesse Morton, who this month pleaded guilty to posting online threats against the creators of “South Park,” had once tried to recruit followers at Stony Brook University on Long Island, Browne said.

“As a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSAs,” Browne said in an email. He said police monitored student websites and collected publicly available information, but did so only between 2006 and 2007.

“I see a violation of civil rights here,” said Tanweer Haq, chaplain of the Muslim Student Association at Syracuse. “Nobody wants to be on the list of the FBI or the NYPD or whatever. Muslim students want to have their own lives, their own privacy and enjoy the same freedoms and opportunities that everybody else has.”

In recent months, the AP has revealed secret programs the NYPD, built with help from the CIA, to monitor Muslims at the places where they eat, shop and worship. the AP also published details about how police placed undercover officers at Muslim student associations in colleges within the city limits; this revelation has outraged faculty and student groups.

Though the NYPD says it follows the same rules as the FBI, some of the NYPD’s activities go beyond what the FBI is allowed to do.

Kelly and new York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg repeatedly have said that the police only follow legitimate leads about suspected criminal activity.

But the latest documents mention no wrongdoing by any students.

In one report, an undercover officer describes accompanying 18 Muslim students from the City College of new York on a whitewater rafting trip in upstate new York on April 21, 2008. the officer noted the names of attendees who were officers of the Muslim Student Association.

“in addition to the regularly scheduled events (Rafting), the group prayed at least four times a day, and much of the conversation was spent discussing Islam and was religious in nature,” the report says.

Praying five times a day is one of the core traditions of Islam.

Jawad Rasul, one of the students on the trip, said he was stunned that his name was included in the police report.

“it forces me to look around wherever I am now,” Rasul said.

But another student, Ali Ahmed, whom the NYPD said appeared to be in charge of the trip, said he understood the police department’s concern.

“I can’t blame them for doing their job,” Ahmed said. “There’s lots of Muslims doing some bad things and it gives a bad name to all of us, so they have to take their due diligence.”

City College criticized the surveillance and said it was unaware the NYPD was watching students.

“the City College of new York does not accept or condone any investigation of any student organization based on the political or religious content of its ideas,” the college said in a written statement. “Absent specific evidence linking a member of the City College community to criminal activity, we do not condone this kind of investigation.”

Browne said undercover officers go wherever people they’re investigating go. There is no indication that, in the nearly four years since the report, the NYPD brought charges connecting City College students to terrorism.

Student groups were of particular interest to the NYPD because they attract young Muslim men, a demographic that terrorist groups frequently draw from. Police worried about which Muslim scholars were influencing these students and feared that extracurricular activities such as paintball outings could be used as terrorist training.

The AP first reported in October that the NYPD had placed informants or undercover officers in the Muslim Student Associations at City College, Brooklyn College, Baruch College, Hunter College, City College of new York, Queens College, La Guardia Community College and St. John’s University.  All of those colleges are within the new York City limits.

A person familiar with the program, who like others insisted on anonymity because he was not authorized to discuss it, said the NYPD also had a student informant at Syracuse.

Police also were interested in the Muslim student group at Rutgers, in new Brunswick, N.J. in 2009, undercover NYPD officers had a safe house in an apartment not far from campus. the operation was blown when the building superintendent stumbled upon the safe house and, thinking it was some sort of a terrorist cell, called 911.

The FBI responded and determined that monitoring Rutgers students was one of the operation’s objectives, current and former federal officials said.

The Rutgers police chief at the time, Rhonda Harris, would not discuss the fallout. in a written statement, university spokesman E.J. Miranda said: “the university was not aware of this at the time and we have nothing to add on this matter.”

Another NYPD intelligence report from Jan. 2, 2009, described a trip by three NYPD officers to Buffalo, where they met with a high-ranking member of the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and agreed “to develop assets jointly in the Buffalo area, to act as listening posts within the ethnic Somalian community.”

The sheriff’s department official noted “that there are some Somali Professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo and it would be worthwhile to further analyze that population,” the report says.

Browne said the NYPD did not follow that recommendation. a spokesman for the university, John DellaContrada, said the NYPD never contacted the administration. Sheriff’s Departments spokeswoman Mary Murray could not immediately confirm the meeting or say whether the proposal went any further.

Another report, entitled “Weekly MSA Report” and dated Nov. 22, 2006, explained that officers from the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence unit visited the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a “daily routine.”

The universities included Yale; Columbia; the University of Pennsylvania; Syracuse; new York University; Clarkson University; the Newark and new Brunswick campuses of Rutgers; and the State University of new York campuses in Buffalo, Albany, Stony Brook and Potsdam, N.Y.; Queens College, Baruch College, Brooklyn College and La Guardia Community College.

“Students who advertised events or sent emails about regular events should not be worried about a `terrorism file’ being kept on them. NYPD only investigated persons who we had reasonable suspicion to believe might be involved in unlawful activities,” Browne said.

But such assurances seem to offer little comfort to some former students.

One University at Buffalo student, Adeela Khan, did end up in a police report after receiving an email on Nov. 9, 2006, announcing an upcoming Islamic conference in Toronto. the email said “highly respected scholars” would be attending, but did not say who or give any details of the program. Khan says she clicked “forward,” sent it to a Yahoo chat group of fellow Muslims and promptly forgot about it.

“a couple people had gone the year prior and they said they had a really nice time, so I was just passing the information on forward. That’s really all it was,” said Khan, who has since graduated.

Khan was a board member of the Muslim Student Association at the University at Buffalo at the time. she says she never went to the conference, was not affiliated with it and had no idea who was speaking at it.

But officer Mahmood Ahmad of the NYPD’s Cyber Intelligence Unit took notice and listed Khan in his weekly report for Kelly. the officer began researching the Toronto conference and found that one of the speakers, Tariq Ramadan, had his U.S. visa revoked in 2004. the U.S. government said it was because Ramadan had given money to a Palestinian group. it reinstated his visa in 2010.

The officer’s report notes three other speakers. one, Siraj Wahaj, is a prominent but controversial new York imam who has attracted the attention of authorities for years. Prosecutors included his name on a 3 1/2-page list of people they said “may be alleged as co-conspirators” in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, though he was never charged.

The other two are Hamza Yusuf and Zaid Shakir, two of the nation’s most prominent Muslim scholars. both have lectured at top universities in the U.S.. Yusuf met with President George W. Bush at the White House following the 2001 terrorist attacks.

The post about the academic event was enough to get Khan’s name mentioned in the weekly MSA report, which was stamped “SECRET” in red letters and sent to Kelly’s office.

There is no indication that the investigation went any further, or that Khan was ever implicated in anything. But she worries about being associated with the police report.

“It’s just a waste of resources, if you ask me,” she said. “I understand why they’re doing it, but it’s just kind of like a Catch-22. I’m not the one doing anything wrong.”

The university said it was unaware its students were being monitored.

“UB does not conduct this kind of surveillance and if asked, UB would not voluntarily cooperate with such a request,” the university said in a written statement. “As a public university, UB strongly supports the values of freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, and a reasonable expectation of privacy.”

The same Nov. 22, 2006, report also noted seminars announced on the websites of the Muslim student associations at new York University and Rutgers University’s campus in Newark, N.J.

Browne, the police department spokesman, said intelligence analysts were interested in recruiting by the Islamic Thinkers Society, a new York-based group that wants to see the United States governed under Islamic law. Morton was a leader of the group and went to Stony Brook University’s MSA to recruit students that same month.

“one thing that our open source searches were interested in determining at the time was, where do Islamic Thinkers Society go – in terms of MSAs for recruiting,” Browne said.

Yale declined comment. the University of Pennsylvania did not immediately respond to requests for comment. other colleges on the list said they worried the monitoring infringed on students’ freedom of speech.

“Like new York City itself, American universities are admired across the globe as places that welcome a diversity of people and viewpoints. so we would obviously be concerned about anything that could chill our essential values of academic freedom or intrude on student privacy,” Columbia University spokesman Robert Hornsby said in a written statement.

Danish Munir, an alumnus adviser for the University of Pennsylvania’s Muslim Student Association, said he believes police are wasting their time by watching college students.

“What do they expect to find here?” Munir said. “These are all kids coming from rich families or good families, and they’re just trying to make a living, have a good career, have a good college experience. It’s a futile allocation of resources.”

(Copyright 2012 by the associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Despite winning nine seats in the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) elections this year, compared to seven in 2007, the Samajwadi Party has blamed the Congress for cornering its Muslim votebank.

Samajwadi Party (SP) state president Abu Azmi said, ?There are many wards in the city where Congress has defeated our candidates by a margin of less than 200 votes. It has manipulated the Muslim votebank and further divided the votes by dividing the Muslim category votes into different castes.?

He also said if one goes by the performance of the Congress in the city, the party has not done any development work for the Muslims. ?Whether we talk of job reservations for Muslims or legalising the slums till year 2000, Congress has just made empty promises. It has been using Muslims as a votebank and has ensured that they stay in bad condition so that the party can play the poverty card and win over them,? he added.

Although the Congress has been repeatedly alleging that the SP had eaten into its votebank which has led to its defeat, it is the lack of work on the part of Congress and NCP workers which has led to their poor performance, said Azmi.

While the SP is keen to contest from various areas in the upcoming parliamentary elections, Azmi said if the Congress is willing to fight for the issues which SP believes in, the party will not contest next elections.

?If Congress is not supporting me in taking up issues close to SP, then we will contest from all the Congress strongholds including North Mumbai, where Sanjay Nirupam has a stronghold,? said Azmi.

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Posted on February 20, 2012, Monday

KUALA LUMPUR: Datuk Seri Najib Tun Razak said yesterday his every action at religious celebrations of non-Muslims in the country is in accordance with the permissible tenets of Islam.

The prime minister said he emulated the example set by Prophet Muhammad in showing respect for other religions without any breach of the Islamic faith.

“I uphold my faith. I also uphold my role as a Muslim leader. We must follow the ways of the Prophet in respecting the religions of other people without failing in terms of our own faith,” he said when closing the 2012 National Assembly of Muslim Scholars, Intellectuals and Virtual Writers at the Putra World Trade Centre, here.

Najib said that in this way, Muslims and Islam would gain respect and the Muslim leadership would bring blessings to not only Muslims but also all the people in the country.

Touching on the statement by Perak Mufti Tan Sri Dr Harussani Zakaria on his (Najib’s) presence at the Thaipusam celebration at Batu Caves recently, Najib said he was relieved when the former said that his actions had not contravened Islamic laws and that this was also confirmed by the National Fatwa (Edict) Council.

“I explained to him (Dr Harussani) why I was there and where I was at that time,” he said, adding that he did not enter the (temple) proper or participate in the religious ceremony and that he spoke on the socio-economic issue of Indians of the Hindu faith. — Bernama

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a group of Islamic leaders is urging Muslim business owners to stop selling alcohol, tobacco and drug paraphernalia, which are prohibited in the Quran because they contribute to the destruction of humanity.

The United Muslim Coalition for Chester Citizens Against Violence and Crime mailed out a letter detailing the request to 16 Muslim-owned businesses last month.

The coalition wants the businesses to stop selling such products because they run counter to Islam and also contribute to the drug and violence problem plaguing Chester. The coalition claims the business owners are ignoring passages in the Quran that call for Muslims to protect others from harm.

“They’re preying on the addictions that plague our community,” Imam Haneef Mahdi said. “We’re trying to eradicate from the root those things that are hurting our community.”

“We have a right to request that you stop contributing to the death of your community,” Keith Muhammad said. “We are asking as a community for you to stop. That should be respected. certainly, out of the law of Islam, you should be moved.”

The University of Buffalo released the following statement in response to an Associated Press report on widespread surveillance by the NYPD of Muslim college students attending higher ed institutions far outside the limits of new York City – including some at UB:

“This was the first time that the university learned of this matter. University at Buffalo officials were not contacted by NYPD, and the university did not provide any information to the NYPD.”

“UB does not conduct this kind of surveillance, and, if asked, UB would not voluntarily cooperate with such a request.”

“as a public university, UB strongly supports the values of freedom of speech and assembly, freedom of religion, and a reasonable expectation of privacy. UB welcomes students, faculty and staff from a wide range of diverse backgrounds.”

“the university is committed to ensuring equal employment, educational opportunity, and equal access to services, programs, and activities without regard to an individual’s race, color, national origin, sex, religion, age, disability, gender, pregnancy, gender identity, sexual orientation, predisposing genetic characteristics, marital status, veteran status, military status, domestic violence victim status, or ex-offender status.”

The AP story cites a NYPD intelligence report from Jan. 2, 2009 that described a trip by three NYC officers to Buffalo, where they met with a high-ranking member of the Erie County Sheriff’s Department and agreed “to develop assets jointly in the Buffalo area, to act as listening posts within the ethnic Somalian community.”

According to this report, the sheriff’s department official noted “that there are some Somali Professors and students at SUNY-Buffalo and it would be worthwhile to further analyze that population.” An NYPD spokesman said the department did not follow that recommendation.

Another NYPD report dated Nov. 22, 2006 indicated officers fro the department’s Cyber Intelligence unit visited the websites, blogs and forums of Muslim student associations as a “daily routine” at a number of universities, including Syracuse University and four SUNY schools: Stonybook, Potsdam, Albany and Buffalo.

A UB student who was a Muslim Student Association board member ended up in a police report for forwarding an email in 2006 about an Islamic conference in Toronto.

The Erie County Sheriff’s Department issued this statement:

“some of the most dangerous Western Al Qaeda linked/inspired terrorists since 9/11 were radicalized and/or recruited at Muslim Student Associations.”

“as a result, the NYPD deemed it prudent to get a better handle on what was occurring at MSA’s via open sources like websites – hence we lawfully assembled reports under Handshu guidelines on same in 2006 and 2007.”

“We were focused on radicalization and/or recruitment specifically by groups like Al Muhajiroun, Islamic Thinkers Society, Revolution Muslim and others.”

Cairo – the Arab world’s most famous comic actor, Adel Imam, has received a three-month jail sentence for insulting Islam in films and plays, a court document showed on Thursday.

Imam, who has frequently poked fun at authorities and politicians of all colors during a 40-year career, has one month to appeal the sentence and will remain out of jail until the appeal process is concluded.

The sentence on Wednesday evening came weeks after Islamists swept most seats in a parliamentary election. the case was brought by Asran Mansour, a lawyer with ties to Islamist groups, and had languished in court for months, judicial sources said.

Mansour accused the actor of offending Islam and its symbols, including beards and the Jilbab, a loose-fitting garment worn by some Muslims, the Egyptian news portal Ahramonline reported.

Among films and plays targeted by the lawyer were the movie “Morgan Ahmed Morgan” and the play “Al-Zaeem” (“the Leader”), the report said.

Imam was also handed a fine of 1 000 Egyptian pounds ($170) in absentia, the court document showed. He could not immediately be reached for comment.

Court cases against directors, actors, artists and intellectuals for failing to respect religious authority are common in Egypt. but the case against Imam is likely to draw attention due to his high profile and the timing of the verdict.

Egypt’s most successful movie star, Imam has been a box-office sell-out for much of his career. His more serious films have dealt with the rise the Islamist militancy and taken aim at incompetent government officials.

“I think the lawyer who filed the case against Imam is taking advantage of the current circumstances with Islamists gaining power in Egypt,” said Nabil Abdel Fattah, an analyst and researcher at al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies in Cairo.

He said the sentence had likely been handed down because Imam had failed to appear in court, and expected it to be overturned on appeal.

Egyptian telecom tycoon and political liberal Naguib Sawiris also faces trial on a charge of showing contempt for religion in a case brought by another Islamist lawyer. Sawiris, a prominent figure in Egypt’s Coptic Christian community, was accused of showing contempt by tweeting a cartoon seen as insulting to Islam. – Reuters

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Calcutta News.NetSaturday 18th February, 2012 Tweet

‘O Imam Ali, can you tell us how far it is to heaven?’ asked a group of Muslim pilgrims to which the wise one replied, ‘Just two Steps Away’… the cover of a new Islamic text reaches out to children worldwide with its witty quips.a pictorial anthology, ’40 Sufi Comics’ by Bangalore-based entrepreneurs and creative artists Arif and Ali Vakil, has brought anecdotes, fables, lessons and traditions from Islam and Sufism in English for younger generations of Muslims across the world.the book, launched in the capital Feb 17, is already in use in madrassas – Islamic seminaries – across Canada, Australia, Pakistan, Africa and Dubai which have stocked their libraries.the Islamic Shia Study Centre (ISSC) at West Madrasah in Ontario has included the book in the syllabus, said Ali Vakil.the book has been translated into French, Russian, German and Indonesian.’We decided to create the pictorial book three years ago. It started as an experiment. We were running a spiritual blog to share with friends and family. and we thought why not put the stories from Islam in the form of a picture book with Islamic texts and share it with the world,’ Ali Vakil told IANS.Vakil said the seeds of the book were sown during their (brothers Arif and Ali) childhood in Dubai.’We went to school in the morning and a madrassa in the evening to study Islam. our teachers would narrate stories of faith, wit, love, sacrifice and adventure. the stories stayed with us,’ the young writer said.the Vakil brothers have also launched an I-pad app of the book in colour strips.’We are trying to get it translated in Persian and Urdu for use in India,’ Vakil said.the book is divided into five segments – ‘Ethics, Spirituality, Philosophy, Existence of God and References for Tradition’.the book conveys Islam to children through ‘exchanges of simple and practical wisdom’.'When a man asked the prophet to explain nobility of character to him, he replied, ‘It means that you should forgive him who wronged you, re-establish ties with him who has broken them off, give to him who has denied you something, and tell the truth even if it is against your own interests.’The book even teaches the correct postures and thoughts for prayer in an illustrated section, ‘Secrets of Prayer Taught by Imam Jafar Sadiq’.'When you face the Qiblah, you should despair of this world, what it contains of creation and what others are occupied with, empty your heart of all pre-occupation which might distract you from Allah,’ the book teaches beginners, ‘Opening the Prayer’.the anthology has culled its texts from ‘Prophetic Traditions in Islam’, ‘Nahjul Balaga’, a collection of sermons from Imam Ali, ‘Sahife Sajjadiya’ from Psalms of Islam, ‘Lantern of the Path’, a collection of sayings by Imam Jafar Sadiq and Mizan Al-Hikmah, the scale of wisdom.’We are working on the second volume of the Sufi comic in colour with short anecdotes,’ he said. Islamic pictorial books are still unfamiliar in India, Vakil said.Mumbai-based Goodword Islamic Books, is one of the biggest publishers of Islamic children books and pictorial texts in the country with categories like ‘Treasury of stories From Quran’, ‘Tell me About Series’, ‘Quran stories from Little Hearts’, ‘Treasured Islamic Tales’ and ‘Ramadan and Eid Stories’.(Madhusree Chatterjee can be contacted at ) 

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