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L’application de la peine de mort est au cœur de la campagne électoral du Rassemblement national démocratique (RND). Le chef du parti promet l’entrée en vigueur de cette peine au cas où le RND gagnait aux élections législatives du 12 juin. Lors d’un meeting électoral organisé hier, le secrétaire général du RND, Tayeb Zitouni, a, […]

L’article Législatives : « La peine de mort » au cœur de la campagne électorale du RND est apparu en premier sur .

The French government demands guarantees about a return to civilian rule in the West African nation.

Victime des attentats terroristes de 2015 à Paris, un Algérien de 26 ans risque l’expulsion alors que toute sa famille réside en France. Dans une déclaration au média français Actu Fr, le jeune algérien a raconté son calvaire qui vit suite à un avis d’expulsion notifié par la préfecture de police de paris (France). L’Algérien […]

L’article France : Vers l’expulsion d’un algérien victime de terrorisme est apparu en premier sur .

Aus Angst, ihren Herzoginnen-Titel zu verlieren, will Meghan ihren Mann Prinz Harry dazu anhalten, jetzt mit Angriffen auf die britische Königsfamilie zurückschrauben.

Weil sich zwei Athletinnen vom Spitzensport verabschieden, gibt es für das Nationalkader der Rhythmischen Gymnastik vorerst keine Zukunft.

Une alerte à la bombe sur un vol, reliant N’Djamena à Paris, de la compagnie Air France provoque une panique en France, alertant l’armée de l’air française qui a mobilisé deux avions de chasse. L’alerte a été donnée par un homme inconnu qui, selon le média français Europe 1, a pu se connecter à la […]

L’article Alerte à la bombe sur un vol Air France : Il leur demande d’atterrir en Algérie est apparu en premier sur .

Les aliments transformés de nos jours ont une connotation négative, nous faisant oublier que les innovations dans la transformation des aliments ont également contribué à améliorer la nutrition, à réduire le gaspillage alimentaire et à nous offrir plus de temps libre.

Auch die Türkei, an der EM der dritte Vorrunden-Gegner unserer Nati, gewinnt ihr letztes Vorbereitungsspiel.

Les perquisitions menées chez trois grévistes du climat vaudois divisent l’opinion. Enquête banale ou intimidation politique? Le ton monte à Berne.

Newsletter - 7-10 June 2021 - Strasbourg plenary session

Source : © European Union, 2021 - EP

Tausendfach wird derzeit auf Whatsapp ein Link zu Gewinnspielen von Luxusmarken wie Rolex und Hermes geteilt. Blick erklärt, was dahinter steckt.

Der polizeilich gesuchte Attila Hildmann (40) hetzt auf Telegram gegen das Luzerner Kurhotel Sonnmatt. Dort hagelt es seither böse Telefonate und Mails.

Le premier responsable de la wilaya de Mostaganem, à l’Ouest de l’Algérie, « recadre » le directeur de la santé de la wilaya sur l’État des services d’urgence de l’hôpital de la ville. Ce jeudi 3 juin, le wali de Mostaganem, Aïssa Boulahia, a effectué une visite de travail et d’inspection à l’hôpital de la wilaya. À […]

L’article Etat de l’hôpital de Mostaganem : Les avertissements du Wali est apparu en premier sur .

Im Töff-Zirkus kehrt nach dem Tod von Jason Dupasquier schon wieder der Alltag ein. Aber MotoGP-WM-Leader Fabio Quartararo blickt nochmals auf seinen emotionalen Tribut von Mugello zurück.

Die Rückkehr von Stan Wawrinka (36) auf die ATP-Tour verzögert sich weiter. Nach den French Open lässt der Romand auch Wimbledon aus.

National control mechanisms will be responsible for ensuring that the EU recovery funds are not affected by corruption or fraud, although the European Commission is also getting ready to use the new rule of law mechanism as soon as possible.

Die Corona-Zahlen sinken – trotz den Lockerungen. Sogar die Maskenpflicht könnte in der Schweiz bald für einige Bereiche gelockert werden. Hat der Corona-Spuk damit endlich mal ein Ende, oder droht im Herbst der nächste Lockdown?

Stop Islamophobia

By Mariya Salim
NEW DELHI, India, Jun 3 2021 (IPS)

A Muslim call centre operator at a COVID-19 ‘war room’, who once saw himself a COVID-warrior, is now unemployed after being falsely branded by a top politician as a key member of a bed-for-bribe scam. He is a victim of the rise in Islamophobia in India as the country grapples with the COVID-19 pandemic – with scant evidence of condemnation from the authorities, say activists.

Early in May, a member of Parliament for the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), Tejasvi Surya, stormed into a COVID-19 ‘war room’ ostensibly to expose an alleged bed-for-bribe scam.

In a video live streamed on his social media and later repeatedly shown by many media houses, he read out 16 names, cherry-picked out of the 205 municipal helpline operators. All the 16 names were Muslims.

In the video, BJP member of the Legislative Assembly (MLA) and Surya’s uncle, Ravi Subramanya, asks: “Have you appointed them to some sort of a madrasa (Islamic school) or a corporation?”.

The ‘war room’ is a Bruhat Bengaluru Mahanagara Palike (BBMP) South zone COVID-19 war room with 400 lines and receives about 3 000 calls from citizens across the city every day, according to reports.

What followed were WhatsApp texts with the names listed by Surya – with the named employees labelled as “terrorists”. The viral messages on social media claimed this “team of terrorists” were scamming patients by offering Intensive Care Unit (ICU) beds at exorbitant fees and even reserving those beds for those in the Muslim community.

According to reports, the 16 were fired. IPS reached out to one of the named call centre operators who spoke to us on condition of anonymity.

“In April this year, I would proudly call myself a ‘COVID warrior’, helping those who needed urgent information related to the disease,” Faiz Akhtar (name changed) said in an exclusive interview. “My heart sank when I saw the term ‘terrorist’ written next to my name in WhatsApp messages soon after the MP called my name out in public alleging corruption against me.”

He told IPS he was taken in a van, like a common criminal, to the police station and had his pictures taken as if he had committed a crime. “Having a Muslim name perhaps was my crime,” he said.

Faiz, who is the sole supporter of his family, said that despite there being no evidence against him and the other 16 people named, he is yet to be reinstated into his job. This despite assurances from the BBMP south zone management.

While India was (and is) reeling under the second wave of Covid-19, which at its height recorded more than 300 000 cases a day, the blatant Islamophobia around the pandemic and misinformation around Indian Muslims and their link to the virus continues.

The past year saw Muslims labelled as ‘corona spreaders’, and this trend has not stopped.

Dr Zafarul Islam Khan, Delhi Minorities Commission former chairperson, in an exclusive interview to IPS, said when the national lockdown was declared in India last year, the Tableeghi Jamaat people were removed from their centre by the police “like they were criminals”.

The Tableeghi Jamaat are an international group of Muslims who gather in Delhi each year for a religious congregation.

The eviction and arrests received significant live media coverage.

The group had already started its annual conference at its centre in the Nizamuddin area in Delhi before the official lockdown was announced.

“They were taken to various ‘quarantine centres’ across Delhi. But these ‘quarantine centres’ were like jails where they were locked up with little care, untimely food, no medicine or doctors,” Khan said.

As the Delhi Minorities Commission chairperson at the time, he relentlessly lobbied authorities in the Delhi government until the conditions of the inmates improved.

Reports indicate that the centre continued to be targeted by police after the COVID-19 emergency was declared.

Later the courts criticized the scapegoating of the congregation, many of whom were foreigners, for the pandemic.

“This was a golden opportunity for the godi (lapdog) media which started a narrative saying that Muslims were executing a heinous and planned conspiracy to spread the coronavirus in the country, and the term “Corona Jihad” was coined to describe this so-called conspiracy,” Khan added.

What aids and abets a stereotype is when it appears to get government sanction and when those seemingly liberal and anti-communal use their position of privilege to further the witch-hunt that a community is facing. There are significant indications that this is the case in India.

Surya’s open pronouncement of select Muslim employees allegedly involved in the bed scam in Bangalore and the Delhi State Government and the Central Government giving separate figures of Tablighi Jamaat related COVID-19 patients in their daily press briefings has made life very difficult for the Muslim minority in India.

Khan wrote a letter to the Health Minister of Delhi saying that it was unfair that the Jamaat cases were mentioned separately – when no other religious communities’ figures were singled out.

“The health minister conceded to my request, and two days later, separate mention of the Jamaat in daily briefings was stopped. A day later, the central government also stopped this questionable practice,” said Khan.

Prateek Sinha, one of the co-founders of a leading fact-checking platform called Altnews, told IPS how communal information had been the mainstay of the Indian misinformation scene right since they started their platform.

“We saw a deliberate attempt to show Muslims in a bad light, trying to ascribe blame for different things that are happening in the country to Muslims,” said Sinha.

During the pandemic, there had been misinformation of all kinds. However, the way Muslims have been made scapegoats by the media, by political parties and liberals alike had been a worrying trend.

From being called Corona Jihadi (a term used to falsely ascribe the spread of the disease by Muslims as a conspiracy to kill non-Muslims) to being singled out in alleged scams without any substantiated evidence, India’s largest minority continues to face a pandemic of discrimination and scapegoating, within the larger pandemic that the world is facing.

Mariya Salim is a fellow at IPS UN Bureau

 

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Lady Gaga 2022-re halasztotta a Chromatica Ball-turnét, hogy megvárja vele, amíg elmúlik a koronavírus-járvány.

Geknickte Schweizer nach dem Viertelfinal-Aus gegen Deutschland (2:3 n.P.). «Wir haben verloren. Das macht weh. Wir haben einmal mehr in der letzten Minute den Ausgleich kassiert», sagt Nati-Coach Patrick Fischer.