There is no doubt that you would have seen the calamities that have affected Japan in recent days. So far, at least 2,500 casualties have been confirmed, with 1,800 injured and over 3,700 people missing. And that’s without mentioning the millions that are without access to clean water, fuel or food.

There have also been three explosions at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear facility, and technicians are struggling to prevent a meltdown. Civilians have been evacuated from a 12-mile radius around the area.

The Red Cross is the main organisation overseeing donation collection, and they have around 80 teams on the ground.

One of the amazing things is that countries who have undergone recent disasters of their own have pledged aid to Japan, such as Pakistan and Bolivia. On Sunday, Reuters reported that the mayor of Kandahar city in Afghanistan has pledged $50,000 to relief efforts.

Aid doesn’t have to be in the form of money either; the president of Maldives is sending 86,400 cans of tuna to help with food shortages. This is in acknowledgement of Japan’s help following the 2004 tsunami.

Unfortunately, scammers have jumped on the donation bandwagon and have created illegitimate websites to hoax people into sending money. According to one set of research, an estimated 1.7 million scam websites can be found through Google (although multiple pages will be listed with different search terms), and 14,200 were added between Sunday and Monday.

There are a number of ways that you can help those in need:

• The British Red Cross
• PayPal are also offering a donation service, where you can choose a charity to send money to
• Google Crisis Response has a page with plenty of resources and an online donation facility for the Japanese Red Cross Society
• Mashable also has a list of ways to donate through text, Facebook, iTunes and more

You can also try and raise money in your local community through bake sales, football tournaments or other sponsored initiatives.
There has been some debate as to whether we should be sending money and aid to Japan, as they are a wealthy country themselves. However, what gives us the authority to say who should be on the receiving end of a helping hand?
Indeed, the Messenger of God has said: “Give to a beggar even if he comes on a horse.” (Malik)

by Tabassam Hamid

The notion that alcohol is a just a bit of harmless fun is one of the most invidious falsities of our age. A government that has launched a crusade against smoking and drugs has failed to acknowledge just how harmful a substance alcohol is. I make this observation in light of a very specific context.

The context is this: Person A walks to his local supermarket early in the morning but finds he is there before opening time. As he stands there waiting, person B walks by and shouts ‘what you looking at?’ Person A ignores the question. A few minutes later Person B again shouts, aggressively, ‘what you looking at?!’ At that moment person A’s gaze meets person B’s and there is no doubt as to who is the subject of the question. Person A replies by asking what person B wants. Person B then rushes towards person A and motions to pull out a weapon. Person A will not stand to observe the object of his potential demise and runs, as B chases. It turns out that B was just ‘a bit drunk’ and that he did not in fact possess a weapon. So, has no harm been done, no crime committed? No, I would argue, a wrong has definitely been done. An injustice has been done and its seriousness is undermined because drunkenness can be used as an excuse. Person A has fled fearing for his life, comes home breathless and shaken, will take a few days (at least) to get over the whole episode; and yet the drunkard is excused because he was intoxicated.

This event has crystallised for me the very deep perniciousness of alcohol. Disorderly behaviour caused by drink is one of the least serious consequences of drinking. The more serious effects are alcohol addiction that destroys lives and alcohol addiction that takes lives. Who can forget, for example, the story of George Best: he was one of the greatest players to grace the world of football and yet his dependency on alcohol cut short a glittering career and finally killed him. Even after receiving a life-saving liver transplant, Best couldn’t resist the lure of alcohol; his return to it proved fatal.

The Office for National Statistics has found that alcohol-related deaths have more than doubled between 1992 and 2009. Alcohol use has also been connected to a spectrum of illnesses, including mouth, gullet, colon, and breast cancer. And this apart from all the moral degeneration it facilitates. Young men and women adorning the pavements at 3 a.m. in the morning, listless and stupefied, bathed in puddles of sick- this is 21^st century Britain, and nobody would deny it. You don’t need to be a Muslim to see that alcohol is a problem; any reasonable human being would arrive at the same conclusion.

According to a study by totaljobs.com, two-fifths of graduates end up on the dole following graduation. This news builds on a remorseless barrage of negativity for our aspiring youngsters. It begins at college where poorer students no longer have access to the Education Maintenance Allowance. Then, those who will manage to overcome this and who want to get into a respectable university studying something traditional and rigorous have a much, much tougher time than their predecessors. Those who get into the university and course of their choice then become laden with enormous debts, and those who graduate will have to face the prospect of joblessness because they are deemed to be inadequate in some other respect.

Employers will wail in disbelief because these so-called graduates have no skills or skills of little relevance to anything important in the ‘real world’. Students have nothing but howls of incredulity, disdain and disappointment to look forward to. Nobody will give you a job because everyone wants you to have the pre-requisite experience, but not many will have the pre-requisite experience because employers won’t offer it unless you have some…previous experience. It really is an astoundingly absurd condition of the modern job market. And I hate it with some fervour.
Hate, however, is not a solution per se. But one solution might be for universities to abandon certain courses. To be absolutely blunt, if you are the type of person to commit three years of your life to a BA in ‘Wayne Rooney studies’ at some random university, then you sort of deserve a period of destitution so that you may spend some time engaged in genuine reflection. Secondly, the government should stop telling us that we’re all equally capable at everything. This message is a manifest nonsense and has probably contributed to the vast array of unemployed youth we have.
We should quite simply have fewer but more capable people going to university. As a result, we should have suitably rigorous courses producing a small number of graduates of the highest calibre competing with fewer other graduates for the same number of jobs. In a nutshell, competition in education and the job market has morphed into something grotesque. We should retrace our steps on this unfortunate route and revaluate our understanding of what is in people’s best interests.

Are you or anyone you know currently facing this situation? We’d love to hear your thoughts.

Wherever you are right now, close your eyes and listen to what you hear. We are always surrounded by the constant humming and whirring of technology around us. Right now at the moment, I hear the tapping of keys, and the scrolling of a mouse control.

What all this noise does to us over the course of a day is tire us out. We’re not always aware of it, but it’s something that effects our productivity a lot. I spotted this very interesting article that shows you what you can do to reduce excess noise around you.

You can read the article here

Please leave your thoughts and comments below

Peace Out

Robi

Having achieved so much in 2010, we have a lot to look forward over the forthcoming issues:

Dr Joel Hayward, Dean of the Royal Airforce School joins us as a Comment writer with his reflections on political and social issues.

We are introducing a brand new Sports section, highlight upcoming tournaments and featuring exclusive interviews with high profile sports personalities.

‘Diary of a Beardless Rumi’ will also be a new addition to the magazine, telling the tale of one man’s search for the meaning of life.

Highlighting the great contribution made by our elders as they migrated to foreign countries, we bring you ‘Generation Story’.

And last, but definitely not least, a historical piece entitled ‘Looking Back’ will highlight important events throughout Islamic history.

Do you ever feel guilty about spending money on luxuries you don’t need? Do you ever think: ‘Am I justified in splurging on myself when there are people in the world who are dying of hunger or some easily curable disease as I pay for something I can survive without?’ Do you ever wonder the extent of your moral obligation to other human beings?

In a world where information flows are nearly instantaneous, claiming ignorance is no longer an option. So what’s the solution? Should we live in a perpetual sense of guilt every time we spend money on items we don’t require? Toby Ord, a professor at the University of Oxford, describes his own internal wranglings and provides a solution to the problem.

“When it began, I would be down in the supermarket agonising about whether to buy a more expensive cereal or not but I realise [sic] that’s a road to a nervous breakdown and that it was much more sensible to work out at the start what you can live on [give away the rest in a lump sum] and then after a year readjust – can I live on less, am I pushing it too hard – instead of perpetually agonising about it.”

Initially he vowed to give away any income over £20,000. Now he’s revised it down to £18,000. But he lives a pretty comfortable middle class life, in his own words. Every fortnight he goes out for dinner and once a week, he treats himself to a visit at a coffee shop. Arguably, he has fewer expenses than most people. With no children to speak of, it’s just him and his wife. He spends approximately £5,000 on rent a year and £4,000 on day-to-day living expenses. The rest goes to savings and an annual week-long holiday in Italy and France.

While most of us have higher mortgages or children to cater for, arguably the principle remains the same. Is there some level of income that we require to satisfy our basic needs and a few luxuries in life, without giving into our every desire? Sometimes, I feel that life loses some of its meaning when I get everything that I want. Part of the enjoyment is waiting for something. It’s like waiting for presents on Eid or birthdays. If we had everything we wanted, life would be a whole lot less exciting. And there’s the moral dimension of it as well. Should we satisfy our every desire, when there are people (many of whom we are aware of) struggling to survive on a daily basis?

In March 1993 award winning photographer Kevin Carter made a trip to Sudan. The sound of soft, high-pitched whimpering near the village of Ayod attracted Carter to an emaciated Sudanese toddler. The girl had stopped to rest while struggling to a feeding center, whereupon a vulture had landed nearby. He said that he waited about 20 minutes, hoping that the vulture would spread its wings. It didn't. Carter snapped the haunting photograph and chased the vulture away.

Salams and Greetings All,

Our friends over at Ciné lumière at the French Institute in London are always coming out with a whole range of interesting films across a variety of thought provoking subject areas. The latest film to catch our eye is ‘Slackistan’, directed by Hammad Khan who describes the film as a “very personal film”.

Slackistan is a film about a group of university graduates who waste their lives away in the capital city of Islamabad. They struggle to face their life decisions as the country outside of their own small bubble begins to fall apart.

The director also states -

“There is this intense focus on terrorism in the news, but that didn’t gel with my experience of living in Islamabad, and I felt it was important to get a different image across. Whatever the circumstances, young people are kind of the same all over the world: they get up, have relationships and try and figure out what to do with their lives, and I wanted to reflect that.”

emel have two pairs of tickets to give away to the screening of Slackistan at Ciné lumière in London. The Competition is now closed and winners will be notified by email.

By Khadija Gulamhusein

It’s the top story on every credible news outlet: the latest Wiki Leaks releases. The contents of approximately 250 000 classified cables from US embassies worldwide were leaked to the whistle-blowing website and a proportion of these are now fully available for public scrutiny. Understandably, the US government isn’t at all thrilled; apart from leaking potentially sensitive information, the content of some of the cables defy all conventional rules of diplomatic decorum and are likely to make American diplomats worldwide squirm with embarrassment.

Here is my pick of the most politically/diplomatically damaging leaks, the text of which is extracted from this Guardian article.

• “The US has particularly intimate dealings with Britain, and some of the dispatches from the London embassy in Grosvenor Square will make uncomfortable reading in Whitehall and Westminster. They range from political criticisms of David Cameron to requests for specific intelligence about individual MPs.”
• “The cables names Saudi donors as the biggest financiers of terror groups, and provide an extraordinarily detailed account of an agreement between Washington and Yemen to cover up the use of US planes to bomb al-Qaida targets. One cable records that during a meeting in January with General David Petraeus, then US commander in the Middle East, Yemeni president Abdullah Saleh said: “We’ll continue saying they are our bombs, not yours.””
• “The cables contain specific allegations of corruption, as well as harsh criticism by US embassy staff of their host governments, from Caribbean islands to China and Russia. The material includes a reference to Putin as an “alpha-dog” and Hamid Karzai as being “driven by paranoia”, while Angela Merkel allegedly “avoids risk and is rarely creative”. There is also a comparison between Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Adolf Hitler.”
• “Classified “human intelligence directives” issued in the name of Clinton or her predecessor, Condoleezza Rice, instruct officials to gather information on military installations, weapons markings, vehicle details of political leaders as well as iris scans, fingerprints and DNA. The most controversial target was the UN leadership. That directive requested the specification of telecoms and IT systems used by top officials and their staff and details of “private VIP networks used for official communication, to include upgrades, security measures, passwords, personal encryption keys”.

We’d love to hear what interesting leaks you’ve come across and your take on the whole issue.

Police are joining forces with the Muslim community to stop the fraudsters who steal hundreds of thousands of pounds from pilgrims travelling to Mecca.

The criminals pose as legitimate travel operators, often offering discounts of up to 50 per cent on the normal price, but shortly before the departure the tour operator closes leaving the victim with no tour and no refund.

Last year more than 600 Muslims reported falling victim to Hajj fraud, some losing up to £20,000 and being left to sleep on the streets of Mecca.

And with the Association of British Hujjaj estimating only 10 per cent of Hajj fraud is reported, the true extent of the crime is yet to be uncovered, leaving fraudsters free to operate undetected.

As this year’s Hajj approaches (Nov 14-17), the City of London Police, supported by the Muslim community and PROFIT (Prevention of Fraud in Travel), is launching a campaign to counter this threat.

Fraud prevention advice is being circulated through Muslim groups, police forces, travel bodies, local authorities, trading standards and the media, while victims of Hajj fraud are being urged to report this crime to police.

The new National Fraud Intelligence Bureau (NFIB) can use this information to quickly pinpoint where fraudsters are operating, and help police bring them to justice.

There are a number of things you can to avoid falling victim to Hajj fraud:

• Make sure your travel agent/tour operator is ATOL (Air Travel Organisers’ Licensing) protected
• Check that your travel agent/tour operator is accredited by the Saudi Embassy
• Check exactly what you are paying for
• Get everything in writing

Police Constable Asif Sadiq is the Chairman of the Muslim Consultative Committee, and one of the many people who has been conned by Hajj fraudsters.

While attending a Muslim event he was sold a week slot in a timeshare apartment in newly built hotels in Saudi Arabia. But a year later, after receiving the title deeds and contract, the company sent an email saying the scheme had been cancelled. When he visited the hotel close to Mecca they had no knowledge of the enterprise, leaving him with no way of getting his money back.

PC Sadiq said:

“I feel cheated out of my hard earned savings, and as far as I am aware thousands of other people have been tricked into investing in the same bogus scheme.

“This experience means I will never be able to book a Hajj or Umrah package without being suspicious throughout the trip, ruining the whole religious experience for me for life.”

The Director of the NFIB, Det Supt Tony Crampton said:

“Hajj fraud is a particularly cruel crime, robbing people of the means to make what could have been their once in a life-time trip to Mecca.

“The fraudsters thrive on the Muslim community and the police not knowing where they are and what they are doing. But by working together we can stop the criminals who cause so much misery and help protect those planning to make their own pilgrimage in 2011.”

The Deputy Secretary General of the Muslim Council for Britain, Dr Shuja Shafi, said:

“The Muslim Council for Britain (MCB) fully supports this important campaign by the City of London Police.  We believe the majority of Hajj tour operators provide a conscientious and reliable service, but there are a few bad apples.

“The prospective Hajjis are urged to remain careful and vigilant and do due diligence by checking if there tour operator is a current ATOL holder. The MCB also encourages Muslims to report any fraudulent activity to the police as soon as possible.”

For more information go to www.nfib.police.uk

"At the Batcave, catching up on paperwork"

By Ali Khimji

There used to be a time when following someone could lead to some sort of reprimand, but we now live in an age where it is commonplace to follow a range of celebrities, as well as friends and family. (If you’re lucky, they may even follow you back).

In-case you don’t know, Twitter is the social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to send out ‘tweets’, a post of up to 140 characters. But if I want to see your ‘tweets’, then I have to ‘follow’ you, and if you want to see mine, then you have to ‘follow’ me.

The site has over 100 million users, and has been growing since its launch in 2006. Following the LA Lakers’ win over the Boston Celtics in this year’s NBA Finals, tweets reached a record 3,085 per second.

Twitter is used by a range of people, celebrities and organisations. Last month, a mother decided to tweet during the 13 hour labour of her son. But most recently, Greater Manchester police posted updates on the incidents they were covering within 24 hours. The tweets can be seen here.

Posts included police attending to reports of a man holding a baby over a bridge (the ‘baby’ turned out to be a dog that didn’t like bridges). Another relayed that credit had been stolen from a mobile phone, and one told us of a man that acted strangely when his bank card was refused.

The police service insisted that the reasoning behind this was to show the general public the varying nature of the work that they do, and going through the Twitter page, it is apparent that they have a massive workload.

But is this what Twitter should be used for? Pear Analytics, an American market research firm, analysed 2000 tweets in August 2009 and found that 40% was Pointless Babble, 38% was conversational, and 9% was Self-Promotion. The remaining 13% was spread between Self-promotion, Spam and News.

The website also rose to prominence during last year’s Iranian elections, when people were able to send out real-time updates of the situation. Surely this would be essential in a country that has media censorship?

However, Malcolm Gladwell, author of The Tipping Point, argues that social networks do not promote the passionate collective engagement that causes individuals to make commitments that result in social change. In particular, the Facebook page for the ‘Save Darfur Coaltion’ has 1,282,339 members, but the financial commitment of each member amounts to 15 cents each.

We want to hear your views (you can use more than 140 characters to tell us!).

How do you think Twitter and Facebook should be used? Do you think your local hospital should send out updates of which operations they’ve done that day? Or maybe emel should let you know what we’ve been up to each hour?