Obama names special envoy to global Islamic group

President Barack Obama on Saturday named a White House lawyer as his special envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference, part of his continuing effort to repair strained U.S. relations with the world's Muslims.

Obama announced Rashad Hussain's appointment during a video address to the 7th U.S.-Islamic World Forum meeting in Doha, Qatar.

As his liaison to the OIC, the president said Hussain will continue working to repair U.S.-Islamic relations and develop the types of partnerships Obama called for when he addressed the Muslim world during a speech last year in Cairo.

U.S. relations with the Muslim world became strained after the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In the video address, Obama said he called in Cairo for the U.S. and Muslims to start anew "based on mutual interest and mutual respect" because the relationship had "slipped into a cycle of misunderstanding and mistrust that can lead to conflict rather than cooperation."

He said he looked forward to continuing the dialogue next month when he visits Indonesia, the world's most populous Muslim country. Obama also spent several of his childhood years living in Indonesia with his mother and stepfather.

Obama recounted efforts by his administration to foster partnerships with Muslims on education, economic development, global health, and science and technology. He touched on the plan to remove all U.S. combat troops from Iraq by the end of August, and his administration's efforts to return Israelis and Palestinians to the negotiating table to jump-start stalled peace talks.

Obama also announced a summit on entrepreneurship in April with Muslim business leaders and entrepreneurs from around the world.

The president said Hussain's goal, as special envoy to the OIC, will be to deepen existing partnerships and develop others. The OIC represents nearly 60 Muslim states across four continents and promotes Muslim solidarity in social and political affairs.

Hussain is a deputy associate counsel to Obama who focuses on national security, new media, and science and technology issues. He also has worked with the national security staff to help repair U.S.-Muslim relations. Obama said Hussain is a hafiz of the Quran, meaning Hussain has memorized the Muslim holy book.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton was scheduled to speak at the meeting in Doha on Sunday.

Obama is not the first president to name a special envoy to the Islamic conference. In his final year in office, George W. Bush named Texas entrepreneur Sada Cumber, a Muslim, as his special envoy.

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Muslim Students No Terrorists: UK Court

CAIRO — A British court has quashed terrorism charges against five Muslim students accused of downloading "extremist" materials, the Guardian reported on Thursday, February 14.
"The basis upon which the appellants were convicted is shown to have been unsound," the Court of Appeal ruled.

The Muslim students were arrested in July 2006 on charges of downloading "extremist" materials and were sentenced to between two and three years in prison.

The prosecution claimed they had been "intoxicated" by extremism and were planning to go to Pakistan for training before fighting in Afghanistan.

The students denied the charges, saying they were researching ideology, including visiting websites about violence.

The students were prosecuted under section 57 of the 2000 Terrorism Act, which makes it an offence to have books or items inciting terrorism.

The appeal court said the prosecution's case against the Muslim students was weak.

"While they lent support to the prosecution case that the appellants had formed a plan to go to Pakistan to train and then to Afghanistan to fight, there was nothing that evidenced expressly the use, or intention to use, the extremist literature to incite each other to do this."

The ruling was the first to be quashed by the court of appeal since Washington's so-called "war on terror" in 2001.

The Home Office said it would study the ruling carefully.

Nightmare

Usman Malik, one of the student, said his arrest had made his life a hell.

"The last 18 months have been worse than a nightmare," he said through his lawyer, denying charges of supporting violence.

"I was away from home for the first time when I was arrested and accused of being a terrorist.

"I was never a terrorist and have never supported violence."

Imran Khan, the lawyer of student Aitzaz Zafar, said young Muslims seeking to explore the world of their religion should no longer be victimized.

"My client is over the moon. He says it is surreal and cannot see why he has spent the last two years in prison for looking at material which he had no intention of using for terrorism," he said.

"Young people should not be frightened of exploring their world."

The Muslim Council of Britain, the umbrella representation body of British Muslims, has complained that some Muslims are being criminalized under the draconian anti-terror measures in Britain for "silly thoughts."

British Muslims, estimated at nearly two million, have been in the eye of storm since the July 2005 bombings, which killed 56 people, including four Muslim bombers.

The sizable minority has vehemently condemned all terrorist attacks and offered full cooperation with police.

A recent Populus survey found a whooping 98 percent of British Muslims would feel shame if a family member decided to join Al-Qaeda.

Read more: Islam online

Iran launches rocket into space

ran successfully launched a can of worms into space today, prompting a jubilant President Ahmadinejad to brag that the Islamic Republic would soon be sending its own astronauts to orbit Earth.

About a dozen worms joined a rat and two turtles in a research capsule aboard a Kavoshgar-3 satellite-carrying rocket launched this morning as part of an ambitious Iranian space programme that has worried Western experts who fear the same technology could be used to deliver atomic warheads.

France reacted to the rocket launch with "great concern". A Foreign Ministry spokesman said: "This announcement can only reinforce the concerns of the international community as Iran in parallel develops a nuclear programme that has no identifiable civil aims."

Paradoxically, the launch came only a few hours after Mr Ahmadinejad suggested that Iran would be willing to go back to a UN-brokered deal it rejected last year and send its low-enriched uranium for processing abroad. The proposal was given a cautious welcome in Western capitals.

Iranian state television showed footage of the Kavoshgar rocket being fired from a desert launchpad. A few minutes later the grainy images showed the capsule detaching from the rocket and spinning off into orbit – although there were no details of its fate after that. The station reported that the rocket had "the ability to send back empirical data".

State television also carried pictures of Mr Ahmadinejad unveiling another home-built rocket dubbed the Simorgh (phoenix). The milk-bottle shaped rocket, emblazoned in blue with the words "Satellite Carrier Simorgh", is equipped to carry a 100kg (220lb) satellite 500km (310 miles) into orbit.

At the ceremony, at which he also unveiled three home-built satellites, Mr Ahmadinejad hailed the progress Iran was making in its space programme and said that it was only through science that it could "break the global domineering system".

"It is a great job that living organisms can be sent into space – we do experiments on them and they return to Earth," the President said. "We are going to send a satellite 500km up.

"The next steps are 700km and 1,000km. Everyone knows that reaching the 1,000km orbit allows you to reach all orbits.

"This was a huge breakthrough... and we hope we can send our own astronauts into space soon."

Iran launched its first home-built satellite, Omid (hope), in February last year to coincide with the 30th anniversary of the Islamic revolution. The previous year it launched two rockets – Kavoshgar (Explorer) and Kavoshgar 2, although neither was carrying any payload.

Tehran has said that it wants to put satellites into orbit to monitor natural disasters in the earthquake-prone nation and improve its telecommunications, but it is already locked in a stand-off with the West over its nuclear programme – which it insists is for the generation of electricity – and its technological advances have set alarm bells ringing.

Source : Times Online