FaithWorld

Islamist charity aims to be Pakistanis’ salvation in flood crisis

Myra MacDonald

Sep 4, 2010 04:45 EDT

Lime green dresses for girls spill out of the sack of food, supplies and shoes — a gift from the Islamist charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa (JuD) to help flood victims celebrate the Muslim festival of Eid this month.

Blacklisted by the U.N. over its links to the Lashkar-e-Taiba militant group blamed for the 2008 attack on Mumbai, the JuD has been quick to help people hit by Pakistan’s floods, raising fears among U.S. officials that Islamists use aid to gain recruits.

But it does not have the capacity to establish a big presence — the devastation was so vast that roads were cut and the only means of transport is helicopter — so JuD officials say they are trying to make up for this by other, thoughtful, means.

“We don’t have the resources to meet their demands or get their houses rebuilt or give compensation for their crops,” said Yahya Mujahid, a JuD spokesman, inside the group’s headquarters in Lahore, the capital of Punjab province. “So this idea came up … let’s give them this package so that they can forget their problems for at least one day.”

Read the full article here.

.

Pakistan to clamp down on Islamist militant charities in flood areas

Reuters Staff

Aug 24, 2010 04:39 EDT

Pakistan has said  it will clamp down on charities linked to Islamist militants amid fears their involvement in flood relief could exploit anger against the government and undermine the fight against groups like the Taliban.  Islamist charities have moved swiftly to fill the vacuum left by a government overwhelmed by the scale of the disaster and struggling to reach millions of people in dire need of shelter, food and drinking water.

It would not be the first time the government has announced restrictions against charities tied to militant groups, but critics say banned organisations often re-emerge with new names and authorities are not serious about stopping them.

“The banned organisations are not allowed to visit flood-hit areas,” Interior Minister Rehman Malik told Reuters on Friday. “We will arrest members of banned organisations collecting funds and will try them under the Anti-Terrorism Act.” More than 4 million Pakistanis have been made homeless by nearly three weeks of floods, making urgent the critical task of securing enough aid.

Pakistani President Asif Ali Zardari warned on Thursday that militants were trying to exploit the floods to promote their agendas — as they did after a devastating earthquake in Kashmir in 2005.

Read the full story here.

Taiwan Buddhist charity Tzu Chi sets up shop in atheist China

China’s ruling Communist Party has a testy and often bitter relationship with religion.  During the chaos of the 1966-76 Cultural Revolution, temples and churches were shut, statues smashed, scriptures burned, and monks and nuns forced to return to secular life, often after receiving a good beating or even jail.

While the officially atheist Communist Party hardly pushes religion these days, its attitude has softened considerably, though rights groups frequently complain of sometimes harsh restrictions on Christians and Muslims especially.

On Friday, the Taiwanese Buddhist charity the Tzu Chi Foundation opened its Chinese chapter, in the historic eastern Chinese city of Suzhou, perhaps better known in the outside world for its stunning gardens. Officials say Tzu Chi is the first overseas non-governmental organisation to receive the Ministry of Civil Affairs’ blessing to operate in China. Normally they have to register with the Commerce Ministry as businesses.

It is another sign of China’s Communist rulers’ growing but still limited religious tolerance and part of a drive to win the hearts and minds of Taiwanese. The Chinese government is generally less fearful of Buddhism

with its home-grown roots, but maintains tight control especially in Tibet where monks have been jailed for supporting their exiled spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.

Yet Tzu Chi is barred from preaching and cannot raise funds from ordinary Chinese without government approval on an ad hoc basis. “We will not make it a point to preach when we do charity work on the mainland, but if people ask me my religion, I will say I’m Buddhist,” foundation spokesman Rey-sheng Her told Reuters.

“We will use compassion to care for every suffering person and enlighten them to use love to help others,” said Her, a former Taiwan television news anchor.

Pakistanis start Ramadan fasting month amid flood misery

Reuters Staff

Aug 13, 2010 06:06 EDT

They’ve been left homeless and hungry by the worst flooding in decades, but for many Pakistanis, their suffering is no reason to ignore Ramadan, the Muslim fasting month that began in their country on Thursday.

Floods triggered by heavy monsoon rain over much of Pakistan began nearly two weeks ago, and have killed about 1,600 people and disrupted the lives of about 14 million, including about two million who have been forced from their homes.

Many survivors from flooded villages have lost their stores of food as well as crops in the field and livestock, and are surviving on occasional handouts, living in the open.

But despite the hunger and hardship, for most people not observing the fast during the most sacred of months is unthinkable.

“We will fast but we don’t know how will be break the fast, whether we will find any food or not. Only Allah knows,” said Nusrat Shah, sitting beside a bridge in Sukkur, where she had laid out bedding for her family under the sky.

Greek Orthodox Church gears up to provide relief for crisis victims

Tom Heneghan

May 7, 2010 06:19 EDT

The Greek Orthodox Church is gearing up to provide relief supplies and psychological help when the country’s financial crisis really hits ordinary people after the summer, a senior churchman has said.

Greece plans draconian budget cuts to tackle a debt crisis threatening to spread across Europe. Some 50,000 Greeks marched against the austerity programme in Athens on Wednesday in a protest that saw three people killed in a fire-bombed bank.

“We know that the consequences of the measures will be more strongly felt after the summer, so we are getting ready (and) training parish priests to deal with the crisis,” Rev. Gabriel Papanicolaou told the World Council of Churches news service on Thursday.

Papanicolaou, who spoke in Geneva while attending a WCC meeting, said churches had to bring hope to their followers.

“But we are also preparing to supply food, clothes and other relief items, as well as to care for the needs of the people who lose their jobs (and) assist them with pastoral and psychological attention,” he said.

The cleric said the Orthodox Church, which officially represents more than 90 percent of Greece’s 11 million population, believed consumerism and greed had pushed people to spend without limits.

“This isn’t just an economic or financial crisis, but also a crisis of values,” he said. “We need to recover the spirit of humbleness.”

Buddhist charity turns bottles into blankets for disaster victims

A plastic bottle thrown into a Taipei recycling bin could be reincarnated as a blanket to warm disaster victims in any of 20 countries, thanks to a unique project by the world’s largest Buddhist charity.

The Taiwan Buddhist Tzu Chi Foundation has been taking plastic bottles from the waste stream of Taipei, a city of 2.6 million, for three years to convert them into about 244,000 polyester blankets intended for disaster zones. It has sent volunteers with relief supplies to some of the world’s biggest disasters, including Hurricane Katrina in the United States in 2005 and last year’s devastating Sichuan earthquake in China.

This week, Tzu Chi expanded its one-of-a-kind recycling effort to begin making shirts, scarves and cloth shopping bags.  It sends the plastic bottles to a factory that breaks them down into a polyester fabric, which is then sent to crew of volunteers who fashion it into blankets or garments.

“They’re faster than a normal factory because they’re driven by kind-heartedness,” said lead volunteer Wu Yueh-yin, as more than 100 others cut, stitched, folded and boxed the grey polyester fabric into blankets and scarves for the next crisis.

Read the whole story here.

Here’s a video from Tzu Chi USA called “Green is the new Black” on the foundation’s use of recycled plastic bottles: