The AMC advocated for the Rohingya Muslims on Capitol Hill, supporting the Burma Act of 2017 in the House, and the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act of 2017 in the Senate.
Source/Credit: KHTS Radio
By Michael Brown | February 20, 2018
In an effort to support Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, approximately 100 members of the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community spoke to over 200 congressional offices, including Santa Clarita resident Nasir Karamat.
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This is the 8th Muslims on the Hill event that has been organized by the the Ahmadiyya Muslim Community, known as AMC, according to Karamat, who is the director of public affairs for the organization.
AMC officials said the focus of this year’s event is Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar, also known as Burma.
“There are people living in Myanmar who have been there for centuries, and the Burmese military has been going through an ethnic cleansing,” said Karamat. “In total, 13,000 have been massacred, including women and children.”
In 2016, roughly 300 armed men attacked border posts in the state of Rakhine in Myanmar which led to a government crackdown, according to CNN.
Since then, at least 6,700 people died as a result of the violence in Rakhine state and hundreds of thousands have fled the country, according to officials.
An estimated 688,000 refugees have fled to Bangladesh over the past six months, according to the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration (IOM). Of these 688,000 refugees, roughly sixty percent are children, according to officials.
Over 900 thousand Rohingya now live in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh and are in increased need of humanitarian assistance, according to a report from the IOM.
The AMC advocated for the Rohingya Muslims on Capitol Hill, supporting the Burma Act of 2017 in the House, and the Burma Human Rights and Freedom Act of 2017 in the Senate.
These pieces of legislation would demand that the Burmese military government stop the ethnic cleansing, that the Rohingya Muslims would be given citizenship, and that they would be allowed to live peacefully in the region. It would also give the estimated 1.6 refugees the opportunity to come back, according to Karamat.
Karamat said that he was personally able to meet with four representatives from California during the event.
“We were very well received,” said Karamat. “We are continually told that ‘Your team is doing an outstanding job.’”
The AMC has over 20,000,000 members worldwide, with five chapters of the community in Southern California alone, according to Karamat.
“The Ahmadiyya Muslim community is a global organization,” said Karamat. “We are the only Muslim organization under one leader, Mirza Masroor Ahmad.”
When asked how residents of Santa Clarita could support the AMC’s cause, Karamat gave three answers.
“We have a campaign called True Islam, and our goal is to combat radicalism and extremism perpetuated by other Muslim groups,” said Karamat. “People can support by going to trueislam.com. People can also support the Muslims For Life Blood Drive we host every year on 9/11, and they of course can write to their members of Congress, and request them to support the two bills in support of the Rohingya Muslims.”
Karamat went on to clarify certain aspects of Islam, stressing the misunderstanding of the word “jihad.”
“The most misunderstood word is jihad,” he said. “When they think of jihad, they see people who are misguided and terrorists and kill people. That is extremism, not jihad. Our Messiah, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, said back in 1900 that, ‘Jihad is not the jihad of the sword, but the jihad of the pen.’”
Read original post here: USA: Ahmadiyya Muslim Community Representatives vist Capitol Hill; Advocates for Rohingya Muslims
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