Dollar Falls to 15-Year Low Versus Yen on Fed Policy Outlook
The dollar depreciated below 81 yen, a 15-year low, and reached its weakest since January against the euro before reports likely to fuel speculation the Federal Reserve will ease monetary policy further.
The Dollar Index, which tracks the dollar against the currencies of six major trading partners, reached a 10-month low before data forecast to show slower gains in U.S. wholesale costs and consumer prices. Singapore’s dollar rose to a record as the island’s central bank said it will widen the currency’s trading band to curb inflation. Australia’s dollar reached the highest since it began trading freely in 1983 as Asian stocks extended a global rally. The U.S. and Canadian dollars reached parity, the greenback’s weakest level since April, as minutes this week suggested the Fed may pump more cash into the economy.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Economist Raghuram Rajan Warns of Currency Conflict
In a SPIEGEL interview, renowned Chicago-based economist Raghuram Rajan discusses the dangers of a global currency war, the risks of persistently low interest rates and the growing income and wealth inequality in the United States
SPIEGEL: Professor Rajan, the tensions between the United States and China are rising, several countries are trying to weaken their currencies. Is this the beginning of a global currency war?
Rajan: This is certainly a skirmish, with countries using different tools to get an advantage. The industrial economies are using ultra-loose monetary policy, while the emerging markets are using currency intervention and capital controls.
SPIEGEL: Where are the risks?
Rajan: The tools they are using will create distortions — both ultra-loose monetary policy and intervention risk creating excess liquidity and asset price bubbles. If capital is too cheap, we will tend to use it too much. If the exchange rate is too low, we will focus on producing for exports. And if tempers boil over, we could get ugly protectionism.
SPIEGEL: China has kept its currency artificially undervalued against the dollar for years. Are the Chinese using unfair means?
Rajan: It is detrimental to China’s development. Undervaluation of the currency is a form of subsidy for export companies. But they are beyond the stage where they need protection because they can already stand on their own feet. So to keep the currency undervalued is creating distortions in the economy, and this is neither efficient nor fair.
SPIEGEL: China, in other words, should increase the value of the yuan?
Rajan: It should, but an increasingly assertive China is likely to take its time doing so…
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Italian Poor More Than Eight Million
Over half a million more than official statistics says charity
(ANSA) — Rome, October 13 — The number of people living in poverty in Italy is at least half a million more than shows up in official statistics, Catholic charity Caritas said in its tenth report on poverty Wednesday.
“The real figure should be 8.37 million, not the 7.81 million in the official data from (national statistics agency) Istat,” said a Caritas spokesman. The difference, some 560,000 more, translated into a 3.7% rise. To this figure, Caritas said, should be added another 10%, or 800,000 Italians, who are “impoverished” and live in “great economic fragility”.
Most of the poor are living in Italy’s underdeveloped South, the Mezzogiorno, Caritas said.
Commenting on the figures, Msgr Mariano Crociata, Secretary-General of the Italian Bishops Conference, said: “Tax elusion and evasion hurt the honest and cut help to the poor”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
‘We’re at Risk of Financial Collapse’: Ken Clarke’s Warning for Western Economies
The West is in ‘grave danger of financial collapse’, Kenneth Clarke warned last night.
We face ‘quite the most dramatic’ spending cuts in ‘living memory’, the former chancellor added as the Coalition prepares to unveil plans to rein in the unprecedented budget deficit left by Labour.
‘I actually am one of those who believes, with a grave danger of financial collapse, we’re not out of the woods in the Western world yet,’ he said in the extraordinary address.
‘There is an extremely serious financial crisis.’
His remarks appeared to contradict the Prime Minister, who insisted days ago that the Coalition’s early decisions have put Britain ‘out of the danger zone’.
Mr Clarke said the UK had ‘rescued ourselves at the moment’, but added: ‘If we fail to deliver with the [cuts] programme we’re going to set out, we’ll be back there all too soon.’
Speaking ahead of next week’s comprehensive spending review, which will see most Government departments’ budgets cut by 25 per cent over four years, the Justice Secretary said: ‘These are difficult circumstances.’
In unscripted remarks to a conference of prison governors, Mr Clarke said the review would be ‘quite the most dramatic in living memory’.
That also undermined attempts by Mr Cameron and Liberal Democrat Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg to assure voters that £83billion cuts will not mean an end to life as we know it.
Both have pointed out that by the time of the next election in 2015, government spending will simply have been reduced to the same level as in 2006.
But Mr Clarke insisted: ‘There’s no one alive who remembers a crisis of this kind. It is not the usual public spending squeeze.’
Blaming the last government for the financial crisis, he added that he had never ‘hidden my disapproval of a state that spends the equivalent of half of the GDP’.
‘The current levels of spending are simply unsustainable and it would be irresponsible for the Government not to get to grips with it,’ he added.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Democratic Congressman: ‘I Think the Constitution is Wrong’
Democratic Rep. James McGovern (MA-3) made this statement during a debate in Shrewsbury, MA on October 13. The audience seemed to be aware of the gravity of the statement Rep. McGovern had just made as you can barely make out the sound of one hand clapping at the end.
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Dozens Charged With Largest Medicare Scam Ever
A vast network of Armenian gangsters and their associates used phantom health care clinics and other means to try to cheat Medicare out of $163 million, the largest fraud by one criminal enterprise in the program’s history, U.S. authorities said Wednesday.
Federal prosecutors in New York and elsewhere charged 73 people. Most of the defendants were captured during raids Wednesday morning in New York City and Los Angeles, but there also were arrests in New Mexico, Georgia and Ohio.
The scheme’s scope and sophistication “puts the traditional Mafia to shame,” U.S. Attorney Preet Bharara said at a Manhattan news conference. “They ran a veritable fraud franchise.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Tea Party Luring US into Adventures in Irrationality
Compared with what may be in store for the US, George W. Bush’s administration looks positively friendly to science, says Chris Mooney
THE Tea Party isn’t nearly as entertaining as it ought to be. It is still unclear whether this particular brand of patriotic extremism is a passing fad or something more. Come the US mid-term elections on 2 November, those of us who care about science and rationality may not be laughing.
On the surface, the movement seems impelled by the economic pain Americans are feeling. But look more closely and it’s hard to miss what historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” in US politics, marked by “exaggeration, suspiciousness, and conspiratorial fantasy”. An essential strand of that is anti-intellectualism and disdain for science.
Nearly every Senate candidate with Tea Party backing rejects the established reality of human-caused global warming, usually with gusto…
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
U.S. Troops to Deal With Rioting Americans
U.S. troops now being trained to boss communities and run local governments are being readied to oversee a post-collapse America in which riots and civil unrest similar to that now exploding in Europe over austerity measures and pension cuts ravage the United States and are met with the iron fist of a militarized police state.
Reaction to our earlier story about the 3rd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division being prepared for a situation where “in essence they will become the local government” by working with local officials has been strong, with some refusing to believe that the program is geared towards anything other than operations overseas.
However, as we outlined in our article, similar deployments by Northcom are admittedly focused around “homeland patrols” and training troops to deal with “civil unrest” and “crowd control”.
We have documented numerous incidents over the past several years where active duty troops or national guard have been used in domestic law enforcement operations.
The military are now being called upon to undertake roles normally designated to police as Americans are incrementally acclimated to accept the presence of troops on the streets as an everyday occurrence, in preparation for them to be used should the United States enter a post-collapse period of turmoil and unrest.
We covered a case in Kingman Arizona last September, where National Guardsmen were filmed “providing security” and directing traffic.
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When Reagan Conservatives and Libertarians Collide — the “Right” And the “Radical”
Links between Socialists and modern day Libertarians are many — and frightening
Libertarians today, compared to those when the movement was gaining momentum as a respite to the Liberal party circa 1975 — thereby garnering Reagan’s attention briefly — are as crooked as they come. They are routinely bought and sold across party lines (favoring Clinton one cycle, hugs and kisses to Bush the next); degrading of the Constitution to suit their flights of fancy (claiming Americans must advocate isolationism as if Washington’s farewell speech somehow penned such “hands-off” rhetoric in invisible ink through an amendment no one can find); and routinely racist, bigoted morons who believe their millions banked off-shore somehow preclude them from practicing moral behaviors.
No, today’s Libertarians are not the “Libertarian-Conservatives” Reagan once praised, they are, indeed, Socialists. They advocate a one-nation, isolated country, similar to that witnessed under the Lenin and Stalin regimes. A vision that if realized would run its course to the end result of an American implosion, the world as we know it resorting to anarchy; terrorists, bigots, fascists, murderous dictators rising again to rule, with our enemies that have battled us from the days of the Barbary Wars taking hold throughout the globe. Today’s Libertarians, by endorsing a system wherein “The strongest man on the block will run the neighborhood” — thank you again Reagan for the analogy — are sanctioning not only global restructuring but the very installation of state-by-state Socialism wherein anarchy would indeed soon follow.
[…]
Libertarians destroy the Constitution to suit their agendas. For example, read Ron Paul’s “The Revolution”. He uses Washington’s Farewell Address to lay claim our Founding Father’s demanded isolationism and that to ignore such a claim Americans may as well just flush the entire Constitution down the toilet. Washington’s address was 20 years removed from the Constitution’s signing and 5 years removed from the Barbary Wars. Read his positions on the issues; another strange and convoluted attempt to marry the Constitution and his demands for compassion for Jihadists. The man wants America to return land to the very people who blew up the towers on 9/11; claiming it’s the fault of the United States we were attacked. And he’s not the only Libertarian espousing these views.
Through researching platforms, voting records and public policy statements of Ron Paul, Bob Barr, Ross Perot as well as other Libertarians on the ballots today, and by reading Reagan’s interview from 1975, then comparing all the raw data, it is clear that the Libertarians of today are in no way related to those of 35 years ago.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Al-Qaeda Targets Danish Pedestrians
Terrorist organisation’s magazine blames country’s support of Israel and America
Al-Qaeda’s primary propaganda magazine has come out with a direct incitement for its supporters to carry out attacks in Denmark — if necessary, by running pedestrians down with vehicles.
According to TV2 News, the organisation’s ‘Inspire’ magazine suggests fitting blades on the front of cars to ‘cut through Allah’s enemies at high speed’.
Denmark is mentioned in the issue as one of the countries whose ‘government and public support the Israeli occupation of Palestine and the American invasion of Iraq’.
In the first-ever issue of Inspire, a death list was printed that included the names of three of the Jyllands-Posten newspaper employees associated with the Mohammed drawings.
| — Hat tip: TB | [Return to headlines] |
Berlin’s Unwanted Roma
France’s expulsions of Roma have caused international outrage, but what’s life like in Germany for the people once known as Gypsies? Robert Rigney explored Berlin’s Roma community for Exberliner magazine.
Like no other thoroughfare in Berlin, Flughafenstraße in the Neukölln district is a street marked by a new influx of Bulgarian and Romanian Roma families who have come to Berlin since their countries’ accession to the EU in 2007.
Up and down the street, which stretches from Karl-Marx-Straße to Hermannstraße, you can find tacky new nightclubs with names like “Sofia” advertising well-known Bulgarian Gypsy chalga singers. Intermingled with Turkish bistros, Arab shops, African hair salons and second-hand furniture stores are brand-new bordellos with flashing red lights operated by the Bulgarian mafia.
No one knows exactly how many recent arrivals there are, but everyone has stories about Gypsies in this part of Neukölln. Zoran Markovic, owner of a Serbian music and grocery store called “Kod Zoran — Balkan Spezialitäten,” has been running his Flughafenstraße shop for more than two decades.
“The Gypsies are the worst,” says Zoran. “Especially the Bosnian Gypsies. They come in here and steal everything. I had a Gypsy woman come in here the other day with a baby in her arms. I watched her steal a CD and stick it under her baby. I said, ‘Give me the CD.’ She said, ‘What CD?’ I took the CD from out under her baby and hit her over the head with it and told her, ‘Get out of here! Before I call the police’.”
“There’s no doubt about it, the Gypsies steal the most,” says Metin, who works in a family-run Späti nearby. “They come in with their babies, don’t speak any German. It’s clear they are Gypsies.”
“Of course they steal,” says Hamze Bytyci, an activist from a Roma advocacy group called Amaro Drom, which this past September organized a “Roma Action Day” aimed at drawing attention to the problems faced by Balkan Roma families in Neukölln.
“They have no choice. But let’s not forget that these Roma from Bulgaria and Romania have been driven here by the EU. For years now, the EU has been dismantling the traditional jobs of the Roma in Bulgaria. These people have no other choice but to come to the rich West. And some of them do steal.”
For centuries, Roma have lived in large numbers in eastern Europe and the Balkans, sometimes in harmony with their neighbours and sometimes suffering overt persecution.
But one thing is clear: in countries like Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania, the Roma belong to the cultural and physical landscape. They intermarry, play music at gajo weddings and funerals, and live in Roma mahallas (ghettos) or else side-by side with their Slavic neighbours, making money and prospering like everyone else. They are nothing new.
Now western Europe has a ‘Roma problem’. Since Romania and Bulgaria joined the EU, countries like France, Italy and Germany have been finally making contact with the Roma people, who number about 10 million, constitute Europe’s biggest minority, and are testing its alleged principles of tolerance and multiculturalism.
In Italy, on the outskirts of Rome, Roma camps were cleared out by the police last year. Now Sarkozy’s France is at the center of a scandal over the systematic and accelerating deportation of Roma back to their home countries. Germany does not have large Roma encampments to speak of, but when some 50 Roma from Romania set up camp in Kreuzberg’s Görlitzer Park last summer, police were quick to disperse them; they were hunted from site to site until finally the families were flown back to Romania.
The first Roma to come to Germany were from the Balkans and arrived with the Gastarbeiter of the 1970s and 1980s. According to Südost Europa Kultur, an organization that promotes Balkan culture in Berlin, these Roma are now fairly integrated and spread out throughout the city. The next wave came with the war in Bosnia. Many Roma — particularly from the town of Bijeljina — came to Berlin as refugees, then forced to leave when the conflict ended.
However, many returned to Berlin by hook or by crook, and many of these Gypsies from the 1990s now live in Neukölln and Wedding. The most recent wave consists of Romanian and Bulgarian Roma, who live predominantly in the “Schillerkiez” area of Neukölln.
According to the Berlin Institute for Population and Development, there are 120,000 Roma in Germany. Up to 20,000 are estimated to live in Berlin.
A burning issue is the fate of the more than 130,000 Roma who fled Kosovo in the wake of intense persecution, including arson attacks and expulsions. Many of these came to Germany. Under a deal signed in April, 14,000 refugees are to be returned to Kosovo — 10,000 of whom are Roma.
“Now, 10 years on, Germany is trying to deport the Roma living here. Most don’t want to go; 4,000 have already been deported,” says Hamze Bytyci of Amaro Drom.
According to Unicef, half of the Roma to be deported are children, most of whom were born and raised in Germany. But unlike France’s Roma (who mostly originate from, and have been expelled back to, Romania and Bulgaria), they do not have the right to return because they are not EU citizens.
Bytyci is himself a Kosovan Roma. He came to Berlin as a refugee during the war and married a German. “Seventy years ago, Roma were killed by Nazis in this country,” he says. “And Germany was massively involved in supporting the nationalist forces in Kosovo and the UÇK [Kosovo Liberation Army], which resulted in the expulsion and persecution of Roma. We think that Germany has a responsibility towards these people.”
But it seems no one wants the Roma. The media in Berlin, be it B.Z. or Bild, focuses on Gypsy squeegee gangs and Gypsy petty crime, presenting a stereotypical and overwhelmingly negative picture of the city’s Balkan Roma. And then there is Heinz Buschkowsky, the controversial mayor of Neukölln, who — while never explicitly singling out the Roma — spoke at length about his so-called “problem families”.
His threats to cut Kindergeld in half has succeeded in riling up many Neukölln Roma, who tend to have a lot of children and often live off of the state.
“And the latest thing is that he wants to make all our children go to kindergarten. Children should stay with their parents. It just means that people with children will leave Neukölln… It’s like fascism,” says Slavisa Markovic, a Neukölln Roma from Niš, Serbia, who runs Rroma Aether Klub Theater with his brother. “Heinz Buschkowsky can go to hell. You can tell him a Zigeuner said that.”
While Roma might have a hard time ‘integrating’ into Germany’s society and school system, Germans are not making the process any easier: Markovic recalls that finding a space for his café/theater wasn’t easy. “We said we were Roma. ‘Roma?’ they said. ‘You mean you come from Rome?’ ‘No, like Gypsies,’ we said. ‘Zigeuner’. ‘Oh, no, please — we have enough problems as it is.’“
It is a Saturday night in Neukölln in mid-September. The day has been marked by rallies and demonstrations: an anti-nuclear power demo at Hauptbahnhof, a neo-Nazi rally in Schöneweide and an open-air anti-police hip-hop concert in Neukölln organized by Autonomen and immigrant groups.
And today, September 18 — although not many people know it — is Roma Action Day and Neukölln Roma have been meeting to discuss issues amongst themselves or with journalists and town-hall officials. Now it’s party time.
Niko, a Romanian Roma with long sideburns and tattoos, takes the stage in the cellar of Shangl Hangl Musikcafé, a popular hangout for Gypsy musicians. He treats the mostly Roma crowd to some fierce Balkan accordion riffs and emotive singing, before ceding his spot to a four-piece Gypsy-style jazz outfit. The dancing continues late into the morning.
People puff on joints and sip shots of slivovitz. Niko takes a breath of fresh air outside. He doesn’t want to talk to journalists about the Roma. “Are you going to say something positive or negative?” he asks skeptically. The only thing he will say is that “Sarkozy is an asshole.”
Samir Biberovic — a Roma from the former Yugoslavia who lived in Berlin for a stint during the Yugoslav Wars and was then deported, only to come back again — is more open. He speaks of lively Gypsy parties in Roma nightclubs in Kreuzberg and Neukölln, scandals and fights and well-known Roma personalities (like Refik Petrovic, the owner of Hollywood, a popular Yugo disco on Potsdamer Straße that’s popular among Bosnian expats. Petrovic came here in 1990s from Bijeljina as a refugee, and made money selling cars before buying a club).
“What bothers me,” says Biberovic, “is that all we see in the media are pictures of poor Gypsies. We never see any pictures of the rich ones. And there are successful Gypsies, both down in the Balkans and here in Berlin.”
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
British Anti-Islam Group Seeks US Tea Party Ties
Tentative links are developing between supporters of the Tea Party movement in the United States and right-wing fringe groups in Britain that are opposed to what they call the “Islamification” of Europe. The movements are not formally aligned, but the relatively new English Defense League — which warns that Islamic fundamentalism will soon engulf Britain — is seeking guidance and inspiration from some U.S. figures taking a similar stance. The British activists are less drawn to the anti-tax, anti-big-government Tea Party message and more attracted to elements taking an active stance against the spread of Islam, like Rabbi Nachum Shifren, a long-shot Republican candidate for the California state legislature who plans to visit England next week in a trip sponsored in part by the English Defense League. The trip was organized by Roberta Moore, an English Defense League activist who has formed a “Jewish division” of the group. She said the rabbi will speak at an Oct. 24 rally in London. “He plans to speak about the dangers of Islamification both in this country and in America,” Moore told The Associated Press. “He will talk about the issues we have with immigration and the danger of Sharia law coming to the UK. We have the same objectives as the groups in the USA, and we want to exchange information and work with them.” Matthew Goodwin, a University of Nottingham professor and author of a new book about extremist groups in Britain, said the links being developed with American activists are potentially important. “We’re seeing groups across Europe trying to form a transnational challenge to Islam,” he said. “Going to the United States is particularly interesting because the far right in Britain has never gone that way, it has always gone toward Europe. If it did forge strong links to the Tea Party, it would be important because the Tea Party has significant resources.” He said the English Defense League has gained momentum in the last year and can now draw roughly one thousand people to its confrontational rallies. The membership includes mostly white, working class men, including many with links to football hooliganism, he said.
Some English Defense League protests have turned into clashes with police and the group United Against Fascism, which opposes the anti-Muslim movement. Shifren — sometimes called the surfing rabbi because of his penchant for riding the waves — has given talks at Tea Party events. He said in a telephone interview that he plans to warn Britons that their country is being lost as fundamentalist Islam gains strength. “I see England going down and I want to cry out and do everything I can to prevent that, to work with the EDL,” he said.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Budapest Experiences a New Wave of Hate
Budapest survived fascism and communism and blossomed after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Now the Hungarian capital is experiencing a rebirth of anti-Semitism. The far-right Jobbik party is part of the government and Jews are being openly intimidated.
The city was always good for drama — for intrigues about life and death, for eternal love and murderous betrayal, for torture, political heroism and sexual escapades. Founded by the Romans, improved by the Mongols and oppressed by the Ottoman Turks, Budapest has reinvented itself time and again, flexible in the flux of time. It has also served as a laboratory of sorts for varying political ideologies, from National Socialism to fascism to communism.
The United Nations has named four spots in the city UNESCO world heritage sites: the panorama on the Danube River embankment, the Buda castle district, the Millennium underground railway and Andrássy Avenue. The Hungarians wanted to use the magnificent boulevard, which was designed and built as part of preparations for the nation’s mythical millennium celebration in 1896, to demonstrate that they had assumed their rightful place in the center of the continent. The country fell to the Nazis 40 years later. The Arrow Cross Party, a Hungarian national socialist party briefly in power from October 1944 to March 1945, was still driving Jews into extermination camps after Adolf Eichmann, the “architect of the Holocaust,” had already fled.
The Real Budapest
The New York Times recently dubbed Budapest “Hollywood on the Danube.” More international films are produced there than in any other European city, partly because Budapest has state-of-the-art production studios and receives generous tax breaks from the government. Most of all, however, it’s because of the city itself. Budapest is Europe in a nutshell, the perfect double for Rome, Paris, Madrid or Munich and the ideal setting for all kinds of movies. Anthony Hopkins is currently filming a thriller there, while Nicole Kidman appears in a comedy being produced in Budapest. Earlier this year, Robert Pattinson, the star of the “Twilight” films, shot scenes on Budapest’s landmark Széchenyi Chain Bridge for the upcoming film “Bel Ami.”
But there is also news from the real Budapest, and the real Hungary of recent months.
Neo-fascist thugs attacked Roma families, killing six people in a series of murders. The right-wing populists of the Fidesz Party won a two-thirds majority in the parliament, while the anti-Semitic Jobbik party captured 16.7 percent of the vote, making it the third-largest party in Hungary, next to the Socialists. Unknown vandals defiled the Holocaust Memorial with bloody pigs’ feet. A new law granted the government direct or indirect control over about 80 percent of the media. The television channel Echo TV showed an image of Nobel laureate and Auschwitz survivor Imre Kertész together with a voiceover about rats. Civil servants can now be fired without cause. Krisztina Morvai, a member of the European Parliament for Jobbik, suggested that “liberal-Bolshevik Zionists” should start thinking about “where to flee and where to hide.”
Nazi Allusions
On May 14, 2010, Gábor Vona, the chairman of Jobbik, was about to make an appearance at the Hungarian parliament, whose seat is probably the world’s most beautiful parliament building, a domed, neo-Gothic structure protected by bronze lions. Everyone was concerned that Vona would appear dressed in a fascist uniform from the past. As it happened, he showed up in a black suit, to the relief of many in the audience. But shortly before the swearing-in ceremony, the radical right-wing politician threw off his jacket to reveal a vest reminiscent of the uniforms of the Arrow Cross Party. Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung described it as “sort of a Nazi outfit.”
All of this is happening in a country that belongs to the European Union and NATO, a country normally associated more with the famous romantic relationship between Elisabeth of Bavaria, the former Empress of Austria and Queen of Hungary, and Count Andrássy, or the landscapes of the Puszta, or Hungarian steppes. Hungary is a country that was dubbed “the happiest barrack of the Eastern bloc” during the Cold War, where respectable citizens cut the hole into the border fences that put an end to the Iron Curtain more than 20 years ago. Now, in the wake of the Fidesz victory in communal elections on Oct. 3, the capital is getting a right-wing mayor for the first time, the 62-year engineer István Tarlós.
What’s going on in Budapest?…
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Cambridge University Hosts Training Session for British Muslims
The first course launched by Al-Azhar University in collaboration with the University of Cambridge has come to an end.
Al-Azhar University in Cairo offered British Muslims studying at the Prince Alwaleed Centre of Islamic Studies in Cambridge the chance to attend its Imam training. The course was especially designed for young British Muslims studying in Darul Ulooms (Islamic seminaries) which often produce future Imams and Muslim chaplains.
The 15 week programme hoped to provide students with a challenging series of seminars, lectures and personal study assignments that will help them with potential roles as leaders in their faith communities.
During the course, students spent time at both Cambridge and Al-Azhar and met with representatives from community organisations of different faiths to learn about pastoral care, interfaith working and community leadership.
Beth Caldwell, a British Council English teacher, said, “Our students are now engaging with the world — the real and the virtual — on a level which would have been impossible with their level of English just a short time ago.”
Al-Azhar student Alaa Eddin Ibrahim is using his English to speak to others via social networking. He said, “Al Azhar graduates need to have the opportunity to interact with the world outside of Egypt, to show the world, particularly the West, the right image of Islam.”
This course marks just one of the ways in which Al-Azhar has a blossoming relationship with British universities. In 2008 Al-Azhar set up an English Training Centre which has opened the door to a whole host of opportunities in non-Muslim countries.
Professor Yasir Suleiman, Director of the Centre of Islamic Studies at Cambridge, spoke enthusiastically of the international achievements of the course.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Christianity in France is Fading
I was brought up without religion. For as long as I can remember, my mother always insisted she would “let me decide about such matters when old enough to make up my mind”. By choosing to bring me up this way she broke new ground — I am part of the first generation of my French family not to get baptised and not to be enrolled at Sunday school. My family seems to have gradually lost faith, or at least lost any sustained interest in it, during the past 25 years.
At no point did my mother ever discourage me from exploring faith systems. We would visit churches, and she’d answer any questions I would have. I was taught in school, at length during my history classes, about Christianity, Islam and Judaism. But I never found any need for God. I recently developed a healthy enthusiasm for the Society of Friends, and enjoy reading about small factions of believers such as the Mennonites, or the Amish. But I remain an atheist, and my core political beliefs are resolutely secularist.
Thinking back about my relationship with religion, two memories stand out. In the first, I am spending a Saturday afternoon at my neighbour’s house. He’s my best friend, and we are no older than 10. His is an observant Catholic-Portuguese family, his parents having immigrated to France during Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s dictatorship in the 1960s. We’re upstairs in his sister’s bedroom, when a part of a necklace we were admiring drops and rolls under the bed. We rush to the floor to look for it, without much luck. Panicked, my friend exclaims: “Well, we have to pray to Saint Antoine de Padoue. That will help!” I raise an eyebrow, and he explains that the saint in question “helps you find lost things” — and that his family prays to him often. Having never heard of him before, I just think it’s another of his quirky family’s antics.
The second anecdote takes place little less than a year later, when another close friend shares her excitement following her confirmation. She tells me about the day she spent with other kids from our class and their families, and how nervous she felt beforehand. What struck me then, however, was the long list of presents which followed, proudly enumerated by my friend: “jewellery, a lot of sweets, a lot of money from different family members, clothes and, best of all, a brand new CD player” (CD players were quite the new thing at the time). “And you got those just for going to church?” I asked, not without a tinge of jealousy. “Pretty much,” she replied.
Soon after confirmation, hormones and school crushes replaced Sunday school for most of my friends, who didn’t set foot in a church for years afterwards. I suppose it was felt that baptism, communion and confirmation were things that “had to be done”, but church attendance beyond those events wasn’t enforced. Parents rarely went to church themselves once their last child was confirmed; the strict minimum had been completed.
Of the vast majority of my classmates at the time, my neighbour is one of the few who remains an enthusiastic believer. But his — and his parents’ — faith wasn’t affected or constrained by what my young mind interpreted to be appearances or external pressures. Their faith just is. It is earnest and accompanies them all week long, not just on Sundays, in everything they do. It was noticeable from the crucifix in my neighbour’s bedroom, to his mother’s endearing superstitions and the epic tales about his father completing pilgrimages (he had once even walked the last 200 metres to the Chapel of Apparitions in Fatima on his knees, as custom requires. I was told it hurt quite a bit, and remember being in awe of that — without completely understanding it).
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Controversial ‘Naked’ Body Scanners Made Compulsory at Major Airport
Controversial ‘naked’ body scanners have been made compulsory at a major airport.
The machines — which have drawn heavy criticism for showing clear outlines of passengers’ genitals — will be in place at Manchester Airport by the end of the year.
But while bosses insist most passengers prefer the security screening to a traditional ‘pat down’, the move is likely to spark anger among civil liberties campaigners and those who object on religious grounds.
The X-Ray machines were launched in October 2009 amid headlines over privacy issues and health concerns.
Two Muslim women later became the first passengers to refuse to subject themselves to the screening.
Instead the pair — who security officials insist were selected at random — opted to miss their flight to Pakistan and forfeit tickets worth £400 each.
One of the women refused to go through the full-body scanner at the airport in Manchester because of her religious views while her companion declined for ‘medical reasons’.
But they have apparently since been given a tour of the operation to allay their fears.
The trial in Manchester saw 400,000 people pass through the scanners in a year.
The technology has been credited with reducing the time each passenger spends being security screened. While a ‘pat down’ can take up to two minutes, the use of the machines has reduced the check to 25 seconds per person.
Some 95 per cent of passengers were said to prefer the scanners.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: Fear of an Islamic Fatherland
The current debate about Islam’s place in German society is often skewed by a perverse interpretation of the religion that most average Muslim citizens do not recognize, writes Thomas Seibert from Der Tagesspiegel.
President Christian Wulff recently riled his fellow conservative Christian Democrats (CDU) by declaring that Islam was part of Germany just like Christianity and Judaism.
He won praise for his comments from Germany’s large Turkish community, but the uproar over the Wulff’s speech must seem rather hypocritical back in Ankara and Istanbul.
Turkey constantly faces European criticism — justifiably — for its treatment of religious minorities, but is now being told by the CDU’s Bavarian sister party the Christian Social Union (CSU) that religious freedom is not the same as religious equality. Had a Turkish politician made a similar remark, the CSU would have no doubt warned against allowing Turkey into the European Union.
In the heated debate surrounding Islam in Germany, the perverse interpretation created by the Osama bin Ladens of the world is often presented as the “true” core of the religion. But average Muslims in both Turkey and Germany do not recognize this distortion of their faith.
A frequent argument heard is that a literal interpretation of the Koran cannot be squared with western democratic values — as if a literal interpretation of the Bible could. Another common criticism is that the Muslim world has yet to go though any sort of Enlightenment, the period that curbed the role of religion in western society.
But who said that the history of Europe was the standard for all things, and that such a radical break with religion is necessary? Perhaps in other religions certain things developed in different ways than they did for the European Christians.
Plenty of Islamic scholars around the world devote their energies to asking what modern Islam should be like. The Turkish Ministry of Religion, for example, has branded forced marriage, ‘honour’ killings and the disenfranchisement of women as un-Islamic.
The late Muhammad Sayyid Tantawy, who as head of the al-Azhar University in Cairo was one of the world’s leading Islamic scholars, dismissed women’s veils as pure tradition without religious foundation in Islam.
But such voices and developments barely register in the West, where Islam is presented as a violent, reactionary block hopelessly resistant to reform. Such crude generalizations about Islam and the criticism of Wulff are mainly born of fear and the desire for excluding something seen as foreign.
Wulff’s statement that Islam belongs to Germany provokes the Germans because it touches anxieties of an alien force invading and taking over the country. Thilo Sarrazin’s theories have been so successful because they seem to prove to his readers that such fears are justified.
Of course, the problems with Germany’s integration policies need to be discussed. But in this very emotional debate, Islamic extremists need to be described as what they are — marginal figures.
No-one demands of average Christian Europeans that they distance themselves from the war criminals of the Lord’s Resistance Army in Uganda, who kill, maim and terrorize their victims and recruit child soldiers in the name of their Christian God. Muslims in Europe see themselves as being put under a general suspicion of being Osama bin Laden’s remotely controlled jihadists waiting for the moment to draw their scimitars.
The failure to make this distinction is not just bad for the integration of millions of Muslims in Germany and Europe. It also makes it more difficult to deal with the real threat of extremists like al-Qaida. If you equate Islam with terror, injustice and the Dark Ages, then you can no longer tell the difference between friend and enemy.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Hate Campaign Discovered Against South London Ahmadiyya Islamic Minority
An international hate campaign by Islamic fundamentalists against a minority sect has spread to Britain and is causing a dangerous rift in south London’s Muslim community.
The situation has been likened to the “beginnings of the Holocaust” by a leading expert who is urging the police to act.
Lord Avebury, the long-serving vice-chairman of the Parliamentary Human Rights Group, said the extremist views were being imported from Pakistan and compared the vilification of Ahmadiyya Muslims with the beginnings of the Holocaust.
Our investigation has revealed shocking examples of Ahmadi residents, businessmen and politicians being demonised and ostracised by UK Islamic fundamentalist group Khatme Nabuwat (KN).
Ahmadi-owned businesses have been boycotted and face ruin, while employers have been pressurised into sacking Ahmadi workers.
The hate campaign even infected the General Election result after a campaign to discourage Muslims voting for an Ahmadi Liberal Democrat candidate in Tooting.
There are an estimated 13,000 Ahmadi Muslims living and working in south west London, who were drawn to the area after its first mosque was built in Southfields.
Ahmadiyya Muslims differ from mainstream Islam by believing the second coming of the Messiah has already happened and is embodied by their founder, Mirza Ghulam Ahmad.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Hillary Clinton Says US Worried Over UK Defence Budget
Hillary Clinton has admitted Washington is “worried” over the scale of the UK coalition government’s planned spending cuts on defence.
The US secretary of state told the BBC that Nato must be “maintained”, as it was “most successful” defensive alliance “in the history of the world”.
Mrs Clinton’s comments precede next week’s defence spending review, when the scale of cuts will be revealed.
Downing Street said an agreement had been “very nearly” finalised.
The Treasury has been pushing for a reduction of up to 10% on the £37bn Ministry of Defence budget between 2011 and 2015.
However, leading military figures the UK’s defensive capabilities must be maintained.
Defence Secretary Liam Fox warned Prime Minister David Cameron, in a letter leaked last month, against imposing “draconian” cuts during a time when the UK is at war.
But Mr Cameron later said any fears over defence capabilities were “unfounded”.
‘Must be maintained’ Asked whether the scale of defence spending reductions in countries like the UK “worried” Washington, Mrs Clinton told BBC Parliament: “It does, and the reason it does is because I think we do have to have an alliance where there is a commitment to the common defence.
“Nato has been the most successful alliance for defensive purposes in the history of the world, I guess, but it has to be maintained.
“Now, each country has to be able to make its appropriate contributions.”
Mrs Clinton also said: “We face new and different threats. Of course there are cuts that we’re making but then there are new responsibilities, like cyber security or missile defence, that we’re going to have to assume.
“But I have great confidence in the commitment to Nato by member nations and I believe that, despite the budgetary pressures that we all feel, we will continue to be committed to our mutual efforts.”
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Letter From France: Hamburger Chain’s Decision Sparks Tensions Over Islam
IN LA COURNEUVE, FRANCE Sami Desadjri, an observant French Muslim, used to have a problem when he and his high school classmates hit the local burger joint for lunch. Since the meat was not halal, or slaughtered according to Islamic guidelines, he was forced to fall back on fish sandwiches, assaulting his adolescent taste buds and splitting him from the clique.
But those awkward times are over. In a telling measure of the growing Muslim presence in France, Quick, a homegrown hamburger chain trying to compete with McDonald’s, began serving halal hamburgers last month in 22 of its 367 restaurants, including the busy establishment frequented by Desadjri and his friends in this heavily Muslim suburb just north of Paris.
“It’s really important for me,” said Desadjri, a bright-eyed 16-year-old with wavy black hair who was gulping a hamburger and fries the other day alongside a non-Muslim pal, Darren de Lemos, 17. “I used to come here before, but I could never eat what I wanted. Now, we can all eat the same thing.”
The decision to serve halal burgers, with its bow to Muslim buying power, has produced an outcry among some political leaders, who regard it as an affront to France’s Christian traditions and official secularism. As a result, the lowly hamburger has become an unlikely new symbol of the unease spreading across Western Europe over an influx of immigrants, including many Muslims, who as their numbers increase demand respect for their traditions.
The great hamburger debate has not risen to the national level, where President Nicolas Sarkozy’s government has occupied the backlash scene by cracking down on illegal residents, particularly Roma from Eastern Europe, and instituting a ban on full-face Islamic veils in public. But Quick’s decision has roiled a number of mayors, from the political left as well as the right, in communities where the new halal restaurants are becoming popular.
Rene Vandierendonck, the Socialist mayor of Roubaix in northern France, charged Quick with discrimination when it turned its Roubaix restaurant into a halal-only operation. He acted after a protest from Marine Le Pen, a leader of the far-right National Front and the daughter of its founder and former presidential candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen.
In response, authorities in nearby Lille opened a criminal investigation. But Vandierendonck withdrew his complaint after Quick offered to negotiate a compromise under which those who preferred could order non-halal hamburgers.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
New Right-Wing Dutch Cabinet Sworn in
Mark Rutte assumed office Thursday as Dutch prime minister, pledging an era of austerity and tighter regulation of immigration but distancing himself from the anti-Islam philosophy of populist politician Geert Wilders, whose support is vital for the new minority government. The alliance of Rutte’s Liberal party, known as the VVD, and the Christian Democratic Appeal signaled a continuing shift to the right for a country that has long been known for its generous social welfare policies and which was once a favored destination of political refugees. But the two parties cannot form a majority coalition and have turned to Wilders, an anti-Islam firebrand, to prop up the nation’s first minority coalition since World War II. Wilders is currently on trial for inciting hatred and discrimination against Muslims through his speeches and writings in recent years. His support gives Rutte’s government the slimmest-possible majority — one seat — in parliament’s 150-seat lower house. In return, Rutte agreed to clamp down on immigration by tightening asylum procedures and making it harder for new immigrants to bring their families to the Netherlands. He also plans to pursue laws banning face-covering burqas and force immigrants to pay for their mandatory citizenship classes. “It is absolutely necessary that we in the Netherlands tighten the immigration rules,” Rutte told a news conference after Queen Beatrix swore in his Cabinet. The new premier said the country “will always be open for asylum seekers who appeal fairly and honestly to Dutch hospitality … (but) we can’t go on allowing such large numbers of immigrants to come to the Netherlands.” While Rutte and Wilders agree on slashing immigration, they differ on Islam. Wilders calls Islam a “political ideology,” while Rutte and the Christian Democrats recognize it as a religion. “I am not concerned with Islam,” Rutte said, adding that he and Wilders had agreed to disagree on the issue. “That’s the reason the PVV is not in the government,” he said, referring to Wilders’ Freedom Party by its Dutch acronym.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan Militant Variety Tests West Security: U.S.
(Reuters) — The sheer variety of foreign nationalities involved in Pakistan’s “melting pot” of radicals is complicating the job of countering a plot that triggered a U.S. travel alert for Europe, a U.S. official said on Thursday.
U.S. State Department Coordinator for Counter-Terrorism Daniel Benjamin added in a briefing for reporters that another challenge to coordinating a response to what he called a threat “of great concern” was a growing tendency of Pakistan armed groups to act jointly.
Nationals from “pretty every much country you can imagine have gone out there,” he said.
“It’s been well publicized that there are a number of German nationals who have gone through training there, but there are also plenty of others. Our lives would be a lot simpler if there were only one nationality.”
The United States on October3 issued a travel advisory warning Americans to exercise caution if traveling to Europe. The same day, Britain raised the threat level to “high” from “general” for its citizens traveling to Germany and France.
Security sources say the alert was triggered by information about attack plans for Europe obtained from a German Islamist held by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and interrogated since July.
He was subsequently identified as Ahmed Siddiqi, a German of Afghan origin among a group of 10 or 11 militants who left Hamburg for armed training in northwest Pakistan in March 2009.
Analysts have said Germany faces a growing threat from al Qaeda-allied militant groups based in Pakistan because of a stepped-up flow of militants from Germany to northwest Pakistan for training with pro-al Qaeda organizations.
But other European Islamists of varying nationalities and ethnic backgrounds are also believed to have made the journey.
Benjamin said U.S. cooperation with European countries on countering the plot was good, but the West’s understanding of militancy in Pakistan was complicated by an increasingly blurry distinction between some radical communities there.
“This has been the kind of melting pot of violent extremists and it is harder and harder to draw the line … There is an awful lot of interaction between the groups, strong bonds and fusion.”
He said these groups included al Qaeda’s core leadership, the Pakistani Taliban, Jaish-e-Mohammad and Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT).
He called LeT, a Punjab-based group that has mainly targeted India and has links to attempted attacks in the West, “a huge source of concern for us and our European partners.”
The vague U.S. alert, which mentioned no country, met a muted response in Europe. Germany played down concerns, saying the country faced no imminent threat of attack. Pakistani officials also said they were not aware of any such threat.
Benjamin defended the alert.
| — Hat tip: Block Ness Monster | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Pupil Defaces Artwork During School Field Trip
When a class from a Södertälje high school visited Stockholm’s Moderna Museet art museum last week, a pupil drew a line on one of the artworks, reported the local Länstidningen Södertälje daily.
The museum is now analysing the damage to the painting “Portrait of Una” by the Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, before deciding whether to contact the police.
“It is very regrettable. I don’t want to speculate on what will happen before we make our assessment,” Gabriel Gunnarsson at the museum press office told the newspaper.
The class, from Igelstaviken High School visited the museum on October 7th. The museum subsequently discovered that a line had been drawn on the painting.
The museum is unable to specify what the Malevich is worth, as it is part of the permanent collection and has thus not been valued for sale.
The school’s principal has been in contact with the pupil’s parents in connection with the incident, and is awaiting the result of Moderna’s assessment of the damage, Länstidningen Södertälje reported.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: US Jewish Centre Seeks Ban on Malmö Mayor
US Jewish organisation the Simon Wiesenthal Center has called for the disqualification of Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu from nominees for the World Mayor 2010 prize, citing his comments in the spring regarding the city’s Jewish population.
Malmö mayor Ilmar Reepalu has been nominated on the 25 person short-list for the international title of World Mayor 2010.
But Reepalu’s nomination has been roundly criticised by Los Angeles-based Jewish organization the Simon Wiesenthal Centre.
The centre argued that Reepalu should be ruled out of contention “due to what he has said and done to the Jews of Malmö” in an open letter signed by Shimon Samuels, the centre’s director for international relations, to the City Mayors and World Mayor coordinator, Tann vom Hove.
Samuels argues that Reepalu’s nomination contradicts the qualities highlighted by the award “to foster good relations between communities from different cultural, racial and social backgrounds”.
Samuels then goes on to cite Reepalu’s comments in response to a series of articles on Malmö’s Jews in the Skånska Dagbladet daily in the spring.
“When interviewed, Mayor Reepalu blamed the situation on the Jews themselves as the community did not ‘distance itself from Israel’,” wrote Samuels.
The letter from the centre also refers to interviews given by Ilmar Reepalu with the UK Sunday Telegraph in which he appeared to deny that Jews had been subjected to attacks and harassment, and referred to further comments wherein Reepalu proceeded to question if he was the victim of an “Israel lobby” smear campaign.
The Centre argued that “a Mayor who fails to stand up for all his citizens cannot be a role model and what Reepalu has said and done against Sweden’s Jews, especially in Malmo, should disqualify his candidacy for World Mayor 2010.”
Ilmar Reepalu has in his defence argued that he felt that his comments had been misrepresented by Skånska Dagbladet, later arguing that he does not feel that Malmö Jews have any connection to, or responsibility for, the Israel-Palestine conflict in the Middle East.
The Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Los Angeles claims the support of over 400,000 US Jewish families and describes itself as “one of the largest international Jewish human rights organizations.”
The World Mayor prize is awarded annually by the City Mayors project which was set up in 2003. Previous winners include Cape Town’s Helen Zille, Melbourne’s John So, and Athens’ Dora Bakoyannis.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Turkish Immigrants Fear Spread of Xenophobia in German Society
A recent survey showing high levels of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant sentiment in Germany alarms the country’s Turkish community, which fears such beliefs could flare into violence. The study released this week indicates that xenophobic feelings are spreading from extremists at the margins of society to the middle-class heart of the European country
Recent survey findings that say xenophobic and racist sentiments have penetrated to the middle-class heart of German society have left a bitter taste among members of the country’s Turkish community.
“What is most dangerous is that racism in Germany is going from a Nazi appearance to a ‘black-tie racism,’“ Kenan Kolat, a leader of the Turkish community in Germany, told the Hürriyet Daily News & Economic Review on Thursday. “The existing racism is heading toward the center of society, to cultural, white-collar racism.”
Conducted by the University of Leipzig for the Friedrich Ebert Foundation, in connection with the Social Democratic Party, the survey released this week, “Right-wing Extremism in Germany 2010,” shows a high number of Germans agree with xenophobic statements. Foreigners as well as Muslims are being treated with suspicion, according to the study’s findings.
“Anti-Semitism is being replaced by Islamophobia,” Bekir Alboga of the Turkish-Islamic Union, or DÄ°TÄ°B, in Germany told the Daily News. “It is alarming that anti-Islamic sentiments are on the rise despite the German government’s efforts to tackle the integration problem.”
The survey, which was broadcast by Deutsche Welle, shows 32 percent of Germans approve of the statement, “When there’s a shortage of jobs, foreigners should be sent back home”; 34 percent agree or strongly agree with the statement that “Foreigners only come here to exploit Germany’s social welfare system”; and 35 percent think that “Germany has a dangerous level of foreign influence as a result of the many foreigners in the country.”
The presence of such sentiments among Germans is not a new development, Kolat said, but added that the broader willingness to express them is worrying.
“Foreigners are met with suspicion here in Germany, but what’s new is that the middle-class, white-collar-and-tie Germans, who have long refrained from expressing their opinions toward foreigners, are now speaking out,” he said.
Germany has a sizeable Turkish community of around 2.5 million and a total Muslim population of some 4 million. German central bank board member Thilo Sarrazin recently caused outrage among Muslim immigrants when he accused Turks and Arabs of exploiting the welfare state, refusing to integrate and lowering the country’s average intelligence.
“A policy of humiliation and exclusion is supported by German society,” Kolat said.
Anti-Islam feelings on the rise
The survey showed the strongest negative opinions when it comes to Islam, with 55 percent of respondents saying they could understand that people find Arabs unpleasant, and 58 percent saying the practicing of the Muslim religion should be “considerably restricted.”
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Failed by the NHS Twice: Pensioner Loses Her Leg… Then Her Life in British Hospital
A woman’s two admissions to hospital resulted in her losing a leg — and then her life, an inquest has heard.
Six years ago Doris Innes went into Cheltenham General Hospital with a broken leg but contracted superbug MRSA and later had to have the leg amputated.
Last year Mrs Innes, 89, was back in the same hospital to have a catheter fitted — but the procedure went wrong and pierced her bowel, causing sepsis from which she died.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: July 7 Bombers Bought Special Mobile Phones
The 7/7 bombers borrowed techniques used by criminal gangs by using unregistered pay-as-you-go mobile phones, the inquests have been told.
A police expert said they used “tradecraft” counter-surveillance methods to keep the plot secret.
Det Sgt Mark Stuart said they bought “operational” phones while planning the bombings but kept them separate from their personal mobiles.
The inquests into the 52 deaths in 2005 are expected to last for months.
Det Sgt Stuart, a telecommunications expert, said that from May 2005 until the attacks Mohammad Sidique Khan, 30, Shehzad Tanweer, 22, and Hasib Hussain, 18, used four different operational phones each and Germaine Lindsay, 19, used three.
He said the mobiles belonging to Khan, Hussain and Lindsay were recovered from the bomb sites.
Det Sgt Stuart said they recovered data from Lindsay’s phone, including text messages he sent and received.
The inquests have already heard that the four were hoping to launch the attack 24 hours earlier to coincide with the announcement of who was to host the 2012 Olympic Games.
But Khan postponed it, apparently because of complications his wife was having with her pregnancy, and texted Lindsay at 0435 on 6 July to say: “Havin major problem cant make time will ring ya when i got it sorted wait at home.”
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Rape ‘Impossible’ In Marriage, Says Muslim Cleric
A senior Muslim cleric who runs the country’s largest network of sharia courts has sparked controversy by claiming that there is no such thing as rape within marriage.
Sheikh Maulana Abu Sayeed, president of the Islamic Sharia Council in Britain, said that men who rape their wives should not be prosecuted because “sex is part of marriage”. And he claimed that many married women who alleged rape were lying.
His comments have angered senior police officers, who say that such statements undermine the work they do to encourage women to report rape, a notoriously under-reported crime.
Sheikh Sayeed made the comments in an interview with the blog The Samosa, before reiterating them later when contacted by The Independent.
He told the website: “Clearly there cannot be any rape within the marriage. Maybe aggression, maybe indecent activity… Because when they got married, the understanding was that sexual intercourse was part of the marriage, so there cannot be anything against sex in marriage. Of course, if it happened without her desire, that is no good, that is not desirable.”
Later he told this newspaper: “In Islamic sharia, rape is adultery by force. So long as the woman is his wife, it cannot be termed as rape. It is reprehensible, but we do not call it rape.”
British law was changed in 1991, making rape within marriage illegal.
Dave Whatton, Chief Constable of Cheshire and spokesman on rape for the Association of Chief Police Officers, said: “We know that the majority of rapes do not take place through strangers attacking women late at night but between acquaintances and within marriages and partnerships.
“It is a fundamental principle that sharia law should not replace the laws of the UK. Putting out views that rape can be dealt with in another way fundamentally undermines everything we are trying to do.”
The cleric’s comments come just days after Germaine Greer suggested that rape victims should name and shame their attackers online instead of reporting it to the police.
Mr Whatton added: “The comments of Sheikh Sayeed and Germaine Greer suggest there are other ways of dealing with rape. If that happens, victims of rape do not get the medical and counselling support they need to overcome this traumatic experience — and we are not in a position to effectively prosecute offenders.”
In the interview on the website, Sheikh Sayeed suggests that women who claim to have been raped by their husbands should not immediately go to the police, saying: “Not in the beginning, unless we establish that it really happened. Because in most of the cases, wives… have been advised by their solicitors that one of the four reasons for which a wife can get a divorce is rape, so they are encouraged to say things like this.”
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Road Rage Killer Kenneth Noye Could Walk Free From Jail in Months
One of Britain’s most notorious murderers could soon walk free after his case was sensationally referred to the Court of Appeal yesterday.
Gangster Kenneth Noye was told by the Criminal Cases Review Commission that there is a ‘real possibility’ his conviction could be quashed.
The move, which shocked his victim’s family, comes after CCRC officials questioned the evidence given by a now disgraced pathologist at the murder trial ten years ago.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Victory at Last… After 5,000 Hours Carving 104 Miniature Guns, 200ft of Rope and 37 Sails From a Piece of Nelson’s Flagship
This stunning wooden replica of HMS Victory is the result of 17 years of dedication and skill.
It is also a ship off the old block — for sculptor Ian Brennan has spent 5,000 hours carving it from a piece of timber from the real thing.
The model of Nelson’s flagship contains 200ft of intricate ‘rope’, 104 miniature guns, 37 little wind-filled sails, and flags spelling out Nelson’s stirring signal: ‘England expects every man to do his duty.’
[…]
The oak, taken from Victory’s lower gun deck, was so hard that Mr Brennan said it felt like carving concrete, and the project took much longer to complete than he imagined.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt Says Espersen Apologises
Lene Espersen denies having apologised in Egypt for caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
Denmark’s Foreign Minister Lene Espersen says that claims in Egypt that she should have apologised for the media printing caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed, are a misunderstanding.
The English-language Egyptian Gazette has reported under the headline ‘Denmark apologises to Musims for cartoons’ that Espersen apologised for the cartoons during a visit to Cairo recently.
The Gazette reports the apology as falling during a visit with Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayyeb, the Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar.
“The minister renewed her country’s apology for the publication of these cartoons and pointed out Denmark’s efforts to issue a law criminalising contempt of religions,” el-Tayyeb is reported as saying during a joint news conference with Espersen yesterday. El-Tayyeb is further reported as saying that he could not apologise for any reactions by Muslims following the publication of the cartoons.
Speaking from Brussels where she is taking part in a NATO meeting, Espersen denies having apologised.
“I fully refute having apologised… I am always very careful in explaining exactly what Denmark’s position is on this issue. So I can fully deny having apologised,” Espersen tells Politiken.
Espersen suggests that the misunderstanding may have occurred as a result of her explanation of Danish law.
“I can confirm that I have told several of my conversation partners that freedom of speech is not without limits in Denmark. There are two limits: the blasphemy paragraph, which is paragraph 140 in criminal law and the racism paragraph as in paragraph 266b,” Espersen says.
“It may be here that he (Ed: Sheikh Ahmed el-Tayyeb) has not quite understood. I have simply explained that we have some legal rules in Denmark: You can say what you want, but you are legally held to account for what you say,” the minister adds.
The Danish embassy in Cairo has issued a news release in which it has clarified what Espersen said.
Linguistically, the part of the statement concerned could be misinterpreted as an apology for the cartoons, as it is not fully clear what the regret refers to, and in translation into Arabic, or in oral conversation, could easily be misconstrued as an apology for them.
| — Hat tip: TB | [Return to headlines] |
‘Burka Rage’ Teacher Faces Jail in France After Ripping Off Muslim Woman’s Face Veil
A retired teacher is facing three years in prison for ripping off a Muslim’s face veil in the world’s first known case of ‘burka rage’.
The 63-year-old woman, so far only referred to by her first name Marlene, appeared before the Paris Correctional Court to defend her attack on Shaika, 26, who originally comes from the United Arab Emirates.
The happened in February when both women were out shopping in an upmarket suburb of the French capital, with Marlene claiming: ‘For me the wearing of the veil is an aggressive act, there is no burka in my country.’
The case comes at an extremely sensitive time as France has just banned the burka and the niqab following an impassioned public debate more than two years.
Marlene, who is accused of aggravated violence, is said to have ‘lost control’ when she saw Shaika choosing furniture in a department store.
‘I knew I would crack one day,’ said Marlene. ‘This whole saga of the burka was really getting to me.’
Speaking in English to her victim, Marlene, who has taught in Morocco and Saudi Arabia, said: ‘I told her to take off the veil she had on her face. I grabbed and pulled it.
‘To me wearing a full veil is an attack on being a woman. As a woman, I felt attacked.’
A few minutes later Marlene is said to have started hitting Shaika, who refused to take her veil off.
‘I went over to her and tore her veil,’ said Marlene in a police report. ‘We came to blows. I was very upset.’
After allegedly slapping Shaika, Marlene bit her hand before successfully removing the veil, shouting: ‘Now I can see your face.’
Security guards had to separate the women, with one describing the fight as being motivated by ‘pure burka rage’.
Shaika suffered cuts and bruises and had to take two days off work. She was so upset that she has now left France and returned to the Emirates, and will not attend today’s court case.
Marlene’s defence for the attack was that ‘we do not wear the burka in my country’ but in fact no ban was in place in February.
Even if it was, it would not be up to people to make citizen’s arrests, said a legal source involved in the case.
Marlene said: ‘I’ve taught in countries like Morocco and Saudi Arabia and know how these women walk three paces behind their husbands.
‘When I saw a burka in a Paris shop I thought it was very provocative. I did not hit or use any violence against this woman. I just wanted to pull her burqa off. I know I shouldn’t have got angry, but I lost it.’
Lotfi Ouled Ben Hafsia, for Shaika, said his client had been living in Paris for three years, but would never return because of the ‘racist attack’.
It is now a criminal offence to wear a burka in France, with woman facing fines and even a prison sentence when the law is enforced in six months time.
The case continues.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
In Middle East, Democracy is the ‘Great Jihad’
by John L Allen Jr
Rome — There’s nothing like the realistic possibility of extinction to push people beyond euphemisms, forcing them to lay it on the line. That was the spirit of several presentations yesterday afternoon during the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East, as Catholic leaders from the region described a future that might be paraphrased as “democracy or death.”
The disappearance of Christians from the Middle East also poses the real and present danger, speakers said, of exacerbating a “clash of civilizations” between Christian and Islam.
The Synod of Bishops for the Middle East is being held in Rome Oct. 10-24.
Read NCR’s full coverage of the Synod of Bishops for the Middle East: Index of stories from the Synod.
Greek-Melkite Patriarch Gregorios III Laham of Syria offered perhaps the most forceful diagnosis, warning that the steady migration of Christians out of the region poses a whole series of worrying consequences.
“It will make Arab society a mono-color society, exclusively Muslim, facing a society in Europe that’s said to be Christian,” Laham said. “If that happens, and the East is emptied of its Christians, it could mean a new clash of cultures, civilizations and religions, a destructive conflict between an Arab Muslim East and the Christian West.”
In order to convince Christians to stay put, Laham said, it’s time to speak frankly to Muslims about why Christians are afraid.
That, he said, means talking bluntly about “the separation between religion and the state, ‘arabness,’ democracy, whether the nation is Arab or Muslim, human rights and laws that propose Islam as the lone or principal source of legislation — which constitute an obstacle to the equality of Christians as citizens before the law.”
“There are also fundamentalist parties, Islamic integralism, to which are attributed acts of terrorism, killings, burnings of churches, extortion, all in the name of religion, which rely on the strength of being a majority to humiliate their neighbors.”
All of that, Laham said, makes peace-making the great challenge of the region — what he called its Great Jihad.”
Archbishop Georges Casmoussa of Iraq struck a similar note, warning that increasingly Christians are seen in the Muslim street as “troops led by and for the so-called Christian West, and thus considered a parasitic body within the nation.”
Places where Christians have been present since long before the rise of Islam, Casmoussa said, are becoming a “Dar el-Islam” where Christians feel unwanted.
Too often, Casmoussa said, Christians living in an Islamic nation feel compelled to choose between “invisibility or exile.”
Hare’s Chéhab, the secretary general of a national committee for Islamic-Christian dialogue in Lebanon, insisted that the exodus of Christians out of the Middle East cannot be understood solely as a function of the region’s economic problems.
“If that were the case, the entire region would be depopulated,” he said. “It’s obvious that discrimination, persecution in some places, fear in other, the absence of freedom, [and] a disparity in rights are at the basis of this movement.”
Chéhab spelled out the challenges: “The relationship between religion and the state, in other words between with is spiritual and what’s temporal, secularity, extremism, fundamentalism, terrorism.”
He called for a more direct language in discussing these realities with Muslims, in order to “make them aware of the reality of our problems.”…
| — Hat tip: 4symbols | [Return to headlines] |
Iran’s 18 Revolutionary Guards Killed in Blast
(RTTNews) — More than 18 Revolutionary guards were killed and 14 others wounded in an explosion Tuesday at a base of the Islamic Revolutionary Guards (IRG) Corps in the Western Iranian province of Lurestan, reported Iran’s official news agency IRNA Wednesday.
A Deputy Commander of the Corps said that blast resulted from a fire that spread to a munitions depot at the corps’s base in Khoramabad, 300 miles southwest of the capital, Tehran, and close to Iran’s restive Kurdistan region.
Police and fire-and-rescue teams were rushed to the IRG base and the injured were taken to a hospital in Khoramabad, the agency said.
The base houses underground launching and storage facilities for Iran’s medium-range Shahab-3 ballistic missiles, said research group Global Security.
Lorestan Governor General Hassan Shariatnejad visited the injured persons hospitalized and offered his condolences over the tragic incident. Local officials declared a two-day mourning Wednesday and a funeral was scheduled for Thursday.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
Not Much of a Choice
EGYPT, Jordan and Bahrain (see article), three of the West’s closest Arab allies, are all poised to hold general elections. No big surprises are expected, largely because the rulers of each have found ways to keep loyalists in charge and critics at bay. None of their parliaments has much say, in any case. Even so, the contests provide a rare platform for organised dissent and, just as important, for testing the regimes’ skill at boxing in challengers, particularly Islamists, without provoking too strong a backlash from their supporters.
With its 85m people, its strategic position, its cultural influence among Arabs and an ageing leader with no obvious successor, Egypt’s poll, in late November (the precise date is yet to be announced) will have much the biggest impact. After more than three decades in power, President Hosni Mubarak’s National Democratic Party (NDP) conducts the political game to his liking. Its friends run the police, the security service, the courts and official boards that do such things as license other parties and oversee elections. NDP people have the deepest pockets, so the party can hand out favours at election time. Best of all, the NDP can count on the opposition to split into bickering factions, assuring itself of another smooth return to office.
The score of recognised opposition parties preparing for next month’s poll are all small. The most powerful, the Muslim Brotherhood, is technically illegal, so its candidates run as “independents”. Earlier this year it joined three of the largest secular parties in a united front to demand guarantees that the voting would be fair. The government ignored them, as it has ignored pleas from Western governments to admit independent election monitors. But this united front has been crumbling, as the Brothers have joined a rush by most of Egypt’s smaller parties, including some that are suspected of concluding back-room deals with the NDP for token seats, to register candidates.
This breaking of ranks has fractured not only the broader opposition but also many of the parties. Even the highly disciplined Brotherhood has sprouted a vocal dissident wing that charges the group’s leadership with lending legitimacy to what it believes will be an electoral farce. It backed instead a campaign to boycott the poll that was launched by Mohamed ElBaradei, a former head of the United Nations’ nuclear watchdog. His return to Egypt this year and his sharp critiques of Mr Mubarak’s regime had roused a wave of support, stirring many Egyptians who had previously shunned politics as pointless. Almost a million voters signed a petition sponsored by Mr ElBaradei, and promoted by the Brotherhood, which demanded constitutional changes to institute normal democratic practices. That now looks hollow.
Keenness to enter the electoral fray may seem surprising, considering that very few Egyptians bother to vote and few expect this year’s procedures or counting to differ much from those of the previous general election, in 2005. That one was marked by violence and blatant fraud, yet still produced a record advance by the Muslim Brothers, who won a fifth of seats despite contesting only a third of them. This humiliation prompted Egypt’s government to tighten the rules further, making it even harder to challenge the NDP, and to intensify harassment of the Brotherhood, including the jailing of senior members.
Such pressures appeared to lighten in recent months, perhaps to lure the Brotherhood into the electoral game. Yet in the few days since it said it would run, intimidation has risen sharply again. Police stations have refused to grant some Brothers the certificates of good conduct needed to register as candidates. Dozens of local campaigners have been detained, joining the hundreds who are already in jail (not to mention the much larger number of more extreme Islamists behind bars).
The state has also tightened media controls. Private broadcasters and newspapers, a growing new influence in Egyptian politics and a rare sign of democratic evolution, have been pressed to mute critics of the regime. Companies that generate mass-mailing of telephone text messages, including news services and electoral advertising, must now be licensed and subjected to state monitoring.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
The Vanishing Christians of the Middle East
Islamization of Europe and the DeChristianization of the Middle East
The Synod of Bishops for the Middle East is meant to address the decline of Christians in the Muslim world. The reason for the decline is obvious. It is the willingness to discuss that reason which is at issue.
Christians in the Middle East are a minority in a Muslim region. Even the more moderate Muslim countries, such as Egypt, marginalize Christians and routinely deprive them of basic civil rights. Egypt is an American ally and nearly 10 percent of the country is Christian, yet that 10 percent live as second-class citizens, discriminated against and constantly subject to violence.
The rising tide of Islamization
The rising tide of Islamization has made it more dangerous than ever to be a non-Muslim in a Muslim country, in ways that range from everyday discrimination to terrorist attacks. But the West is suffused by a narrative which insists that Islam is tolerant and promotes tolerance. Such a false narrative makes it extremely difficult to address or recognize the problem.
Meanwhile growing Muslim migration into Europe raises questions about the future of Christianity even in the West. If Christians are denied basic civil rights even in moderate Muslim countries, what will their fate be if France and Germany go the way of Byzantium? The fact that Christians do not generally enjoy equal rights in the Muslim world, suggests that they would also not enjoy such rights in Eurabia. The root of the problem lies in Sharia, Islamic law, which treats non-Muslims and women as second-class citizens.
[…]
The very fact that Kairos Palestine demands “an independent Palestinian state with Al-Quds as its capital”, telegraphs that this is a document driven by a Muslim agenda, not a Christian one. Al Quds is the Islamic name for Jerusalem, not the Christian one. The Biblical Latin name for Jerusalem was Hierosolyma, the Biblical Greek name for it was HierousalÄ”m. The Pre-Islamic Arabic name for it was ŪrÅ¡alaym. When a supposed Christian document replaces the traditional name for Jerusalem, with the Islamic Al Quds, it demonstrates that its worldview is Islamic, not Christian.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Afghanistan: La Russa Wants Parliament’s OK to Arm Planes
Defense minister says formal vote not necessary
(ANSA) — Rome, October 13 — Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa told the Senate on Wednesday that he wanted parliament to back any decision to arm Italian planes deployed in Afghanistan.
“This approval for me is more important than the debate on whether or not to arm the planes because it would send a strong message of the country’s support to our boys and girls out there in the field,” La Russa said.
The minister added that this approval need not be a vote in parliament “but an opinion by the proper parliamentary commissions”.
“Our soldiers over there told me that we are the only ones not to put bombs on their aircraft… and this has created a certain sense of embarrassment for our troops, who feel they are second string to the other allies who do arm their planes,” La Russa said In regard to the situation in Afghanistan, where four Italian soldiers were killed at the weekend, the defense minister said “it is clear that our mission there involves actions which can be defined as acts of war. But these acts are carried out using adequate force, a legitimate use of force in an area where the threats to our contingent are real”.
In response to criticism that arming the aircraft could lead to greater casualties among the civilian population, La Russa said “I can say with pride that there has never been an incident in which an Italian soldier went beyond the legitimate use of force and we have never caused any damage or harm to civilians”. Turning his attention to the future, the defense minister said that Italian forces should be able to hand over to Afghan authorities most of the territory in the west “before the end of 2011”.
After that, he added, “our mission there will only be one of training, perhaps with an increase in the number of our instructors”.
On Tuesday, Foreign Minsiter Franco Frattini said that Italy would gradually start pulling its troops out of Afghanistan next summer and seek to complete the withdrawal by the end of 21014.
However, La Russa said, “in no way do we think we can turn Afghansitan into a Switzerland. What we want to do is hand over to the legitimate government territory which is sufficiently under control”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
‘Plot’ To Kill Pakistan PM Foiled
Pakistani police say they have arrested a group of Islamist fighters who were plotting to kill the prime minister in a gun and suicide bomb attack at his house.
Officials said on Thursday that the seven men were also planning to assassinate other government leaders.
Fighters in Pakistan have frequently attacked government officials, security officers and political leaders as part of a campaign to destabilise the US-allied government. Opposition leader and ex-prime minister Benazir Bhutto was killed in a gun-and-bomb attack near the capital, Islamabad, in 2007.
Police officials said the conspiracy against Yousuf Raza Gilani, Pakistan’s prime minister, was nearly complete. They accused the suspects of belonging to the al-Qaeda-linked Lashkar-e-Jhangvi group.
Their plan included monitoring Gilani’s movements and storming his private residence in the central city of Multan with guns and a suicide bomber, police investigator Waris Bharwana said.
“These terrorists were arrested in a timely fashion, and surely we have averted an attack on the prime minister”, he said.
Authorities did not offer any evidence to back up their allegations. Like other top officials, Gilani does not publicise his movements ahead of time and travels with extensive security.
Multiple attacks planned
Abid Qadri, a regional police chief, said authorities learned about the plot during an initial interrogation of the seven fighters, who were arrested on Wednesday after a shootout near a village in central Pakistan.
The fighters opened fire when police tried to pull their car over for a routine check, Qadri said. Nobody was wounded in the shooting, but two men managed to escape, he said.
A judge has ordered the seven suspects be held and questioned in a prison. Their next court date is October 27.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi, a banned Sunni Muslim group, has been linked to the Taliban as well as al-Qaeda. The group has been accused of attacking minority Shia worship places and security forces.
Some of the suspects are believed to have taken part in an attack last year on the offices of Pakistan’s main spy agency in Multan that left 12 people dead, Qadri said.
The men were also conspiring to kill Shah Mahmood Qureshi, Pakistan’s foreign minister, as well as the minister for religious affairs, who last year survived an assassination attempt in Islamabad.
Qadri also said the suspects had plans to attack a dam, a bridge and military installations.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Three Suspected Militants Killed in Indian Kashmir
India — Indian troops have killed three suspected militants in Kashmir where months of deadly protests against Indian rule have left over 100 people dead, police said Thursday. The three, believed to be the members of the region’s most powerful militant group Hizbul Mujahedin, were killed during a gunbattle with security forces in the southern town of Shopian late Wednesday, a police statement said. “One of the houses where they were holed up has also been damaged,” it said. The insurgency against Indian rule in Muslim-majority Kashmir has left more than 47,000 people dead by official count since it erupted in 1989.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Nobel Part of ‘Ideological War’ Against China: State Media
State-run Chinese media on Thursday accused the West of waging “endless ideological wars” against China, which is furious after jailed dissident Liu Xiaobo was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. “The Nobel Peace Prize is not a lone voice,” said an editorial in the official Global Times.
“It is part of a concerto supplemented by various NGOs, economic entities and international organisations orchestrated by the developed countries,” the English-language newspaper said.
“They hope to harass China’s growth and press China to surrender more economic interests. They even hope that China will one day collapse under the West’s ideological crusade.”
The editorial was headlined “the endless ideological wars against China.”
Liu, a 54-year-old writer and former professor who is currently serving 11 years in jail for subversion, was awarded the peace prize by the Oslo-based Nobel Committee on Friday.
He was jailed last December after authoring an appeal for political reform in one-party China.
China has denounced last Friday’s award by Oslo’s Nobel Committee, and cancelled some official meetings with Norway in retaliation.
It also called Liu a “criminal” and has placed the dissident’s wife Liu Xia under house arrest.
“The West will continue to target China in its ideological war. It seems the Western way has to be the only way and people around the globe should adopt the Western attitudes,” the editorial said.
“In the minds of some Westerners, even if China grows and develops to an advanced level, it still needs to surrender to Western ideology.”
The Global Times is a branch of the Communist mouthpiece the People’s Daily and is aimed at an overseas audience. It is known for its occasionally strident anti-Western tone.
Chinese-language state media have remained largely mute on the award, as Beijing has tried to impose an information blackout on the Nobel news.
“From Google threatening to withdraw from China earlier this year, to the Nobel Peace Prize being awarded to a Chinese criminal, the ideological war against China is far from over,” the editorial said.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Nigeria: Islamic Sect Issues Demand for Amnesty
Nigeria — A feared Islamic sect responsible for a recent federal prison break and targeted killings in northern Nigeria has demanded an amnesty offer from the government to stop the violence. The communication from the Boko Haram sect said the group wanted a deal similar to one made to militants in Nigeria’s restive and oil-rich southern delta last year that slowed attacks there. However, such a demand could exploit regional and religious tensions that run through Africa’s most populous nation and put new pressures on its Christian president. Boko Haram made its demands via interviews with an anonymous spokesman to the Hausa language radio services of the BBC and the Voice of America late Wednesday night. The group said it wanted the government to release 195 detained sect members and for officials to allow members in hiding to re-emerge. The group also asked for freedom to practice its form of Islam, the unconditional release of its seized mosques by government forces and “justice and equity” in local government affairs. “We are law-abiding citizens, even though we do not subscribe with the unjust government of the western orientation that is being used to govern us here in Nigeria,” the spokesman said in Hausa, the local language. Despite that pledge, the spokesman went on to take responsibility for a recent bomb attack on a police station, as well as the targeted killings of local officials by motorcycle taxi-riding assassins. The spokesman said the government brought the attacks on themselves after the death of Boko Haram leader Mohammed Yusuf in July 2009 after the group rioted, leading to a security crackdown that left 700 dead in total. Human rights groups say Yusuf was executed by police while in their custody, but officials claimed he attempted to escape custody, though his hands were tied behind his back. “Unless government ensures justice and equity and allow us to practice our religion … we will continue with these (killings) and we have our targets,” the spokesman said.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Britain Sitting on a £195billion Immigration Timebomb
BRITAIN is sitting on a £195billion immigration timebomb, a devastating new report reveals today.
A shocking picture is painted of the massive bill taxpayers face to educate the extra kids born as a result of record-breaking migration.
There will be a staggering 2.3million additional BIRTHS in the quarter-century between 2008 and 2033, according to the report from campaign group Migrationwatch.
Britain will need 1.3million more school places to cope with the surge in numbers.
It would take 3,800 new SCHOOLS to house the extra pupils and another 75,000 TEACHERS to educate them.
Total costs over the 25-year period will hit £195billion, say the findings based on official population figures produced by the Office for National Statistics.
Migrationwatch chairman Sir Andrew Green said: “These are some of the consequences of one of the most reckless and unpopular policies of any Government in generations.
“The public are waking up to the speed and scale at which fundamental changes are being forced upon them, thanks to the policies of the previous administration, and schools are just one example.
Background
“It will be replicated in many areas of our national life such as health, housing, natural resources and infrastructure.
“And the costs will continue to increase for many years to come — all against a background of severe financial stringency.”
The report estimates we will need an extra 500,000 school places by 2015 alone, an increase that will cost £40billion.
By 2020, Britain will need a million more, with the bill over the next decade hitting £100billion.
The problem has been fuelled by the high birth rates among many migrant mothers.
One in four new babies have mums who were born abroad, double the figure of 15 years ago.
Between 1998 and 2008 the number of births by women born in the UK fell by 3.2 per cent. In contrast, the number with mums or dads born abroad rocketed by 134 per cent.
The increases have already caused problems in some parts of Britain.
Birmingham is facing a shortfall of 3,000 primary places over the next decade.
And London has seen its birth rate since 2001 soar to 20.5 per cent, well ahead of the national average of 16.8 per cent.
Challenged
It is even higher in some parts of the capital — with the borough of Barking and Dagenham in East London, for example, having hit a birth rate of 40 per cent.
However last night the findings of the report were challenged by Jasmin Bukic, operations manager of the Migrants Resource Centre in London.
She said: “The success of many schools in London in recent years is a result of the arrival of migrant children with a strong belief in hard work and discipline.
“The parents of these children are working hard too and paying taxes which help to fund the schools.”
| — Hat tip: Steen | [Return to headlines] |
France Pledges to Comply With EU Migration Rules
The row over the expulsion of Roma this summer prompted Brussels to give France an Oct. 15 deadline to incorporate European law on migration or face legal proceedings. With days to go Paris is complying with the demand.
France is moving to adapt its immigration rules just days before an EU ultimatum runs out that could have dragged Paris before the courts over its controversial expulsion of Roma people.
French Immigration Minister Eric Besson announced this week that the government would be drawing up appropriate legislation this week that would ensure that France was correctly incorporating the EU’s 2004 regulations on the freedom of movement into its national legislation. He said the law would go before parliament by December or January.
At the end of July President Nicolas Sarkozy gave a controversial speech that raised the ire of Brussels. He announced that his government would be taking a tougher line on crime and specifically, that he could not accept the presence of illegal encampments of Roma people in France. The authorities have since cleared over 50 camps and repatriated over 1,000 Roma to Romania and Bulgaria, either forcibly or after paying them to leave. According to French immigration rules, people from the two new EU states need work or residency permits if they wish to stay in the country longer than three months.
What appeared to be the targeting of a specific ethnic group for expulsion raised a diplomatic storm and France came in for tough criticism, particularly from the European Justice Commissioner Viviane Reding, who compared the deportations to those during World War II.
Finalizing the Response
At the end of September the European Commission warned that it was prepared to launch legal proceedings against France if it did not comply with the EU directives on freedom of movement by Oct. 15. However, the EU executive shied away from accusing Paris of discrimination.
Brussels has said it wants assurances from the French that each case was individually assessed, something that Besson says France will provide. “We will deliver all the proof and guarantees that in August the cases were handled individually,” he told the Public Senat broadcaster on Tuesday.
“We already have in our legislation all the guarantees demanded by the Commission … and we are applying them,” Besson told Reuters on Wednesday. However, he said, the government was still going to “commute some elements (from EU law), for example into the immigration law which will be debated in the Senate at the end of the year or the beginning of the next.”
Besson said the cabinet would be sending its response to the Commission after finalizing it this Thursday. The guarantee that France will be complying with the EU request should help avoid an infringement procedure, which could have seen the country having to defend itself before the European Court of Justice.
“It would be very good if the French were to respond positively to the EU Commission’s ultimatum,” an EU official told the German press agency, dpa, on Wednesday. “Our indication is that this could happen. However, we have not seen a document yet and the clock is ticking.”
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: CSU Hardens Stance Against Immigration
The general secretary of the Christian Social Union has declared that “Germany is not an immigration country,” signalling that the Bavarian conservatives were defiantly standing their ground over recent attacks on immigrants.
Alexander Dobrindt stepped up his party’s offensive on immigration with his remarks Wednesday night to broadcaster ARD, which are likely to fuel and already incendiary debate on the issue.
“The USA is an immigration country. Germany is not an immigration country. We have a culture that has grown over centuries.”
The hardening stance by the CSU, which is the Bavarian sister party of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats, is also likely to put it at odds with ruling coalition partners the Free Democrats (FDP), which has floated the idea of solving Germany’s looming skills shortages by lifting the rate at which educated and qualified immigrants settle here.
On that issue, Dobrindt said the problems had to be solved “without repeating the problems of the last wave of immigration, which we still have not fixed today.”
Regarding his party boss, CSU leader and Bavarian premier Horst Seehofer’s recent call to stop Turkish and Arab immigration, Dobrindt said “truth doesn’t defame.”
An apology was Seehofer was not necessary, he said. The problems with some immigration groups were bigger than the problems with others, he added.
Seehofer told news magazine Focus at the weekend that “immigrants from other cultures, such as those from Turkey and Arab countries have more difficulties” integrating into German culture. Therefore he had drawn the “conclusion that we need no additional immigration from other cultural areas.”
Meanwhile a poll released on Wednesday showed that one-tenth of Germans want a “Führer,” while a quarter admitted to strong xenophobic attitudes — up from one-fifth in 2008. The results appeared to show the acrid immigration debate sparked this summer by former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin was having an effect on the German public.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Naples Pastor Says He Received Threat From Muslim at the Islamic Center of Southwest Florida
A conservative Christian pastor, who hosts a television program and radio show, has reported he was threatened by a Muslim at the Islamic Center of Southwest Florida.
According to Bill Keller of Naples, an individual at the center left a message for him, saying he was a “bad man,” that he would “soon be finished” and threatened a “jihad” on him.
A suspect has been named, but no arrests have been made, as the case is still under investigation by the Collier County Sheriff’s Office.
Keller, who hosts liveprayer.com, said because he takes a hard line against controversial issues like abortion and homosexuality, he has received death threats in the past. However, he is especially concerned about this, he said, because the caller was so specific.
“I guess the specificity of this particular message, the location and all that, was more the issue,” Keller said. “I certainly don’t live my life in fear, but I’m not going to be foolish when there is the opportunity to report this to authorities.”
He said as a Christian, he believes Islam is a false religion and one of violence and hatred.
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Climate Science Corruption: Practiced and Perpetuated by Scientific Societies
A recent Pew Center poll shows public concern about global warming continues very low and even declining slightly. They’ve been there for a year now as comparison of their 2009/2010 results show. The most significant shift is in Energy, which dropped from 60 to 49 percent. Partly due to the declining gas prices, but also lower concern about failure of the basic energy sources and reduced threat of carbon taxes.
People pushing or accepting the false science of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are reacting. Responses reveal agendas are political not science. Obama’s White House leads the charge, but all governments continue to pursue policies that make them appear green, while ignoring the facts. The policies are unnecessary, extremely expensive, and economically destructive. The real motive is increased taxation and government control. For some, like Obama, it’s about total government control and destruction of the industrial based economy.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Climate Science’s Worst Week in History
It is time for the COMMON PEOPLE to rise up against the Royalist, Monopolists and Elitist Alliance.
There now appears to be a photo finish in the horse race for the ‘worst week in climate science history’ with that already infamous week of the Climate-Gate hacking, aka the “East Anglia Event Horizon”. The universal increase in knowledge has been devastating to the Royalist-Monopolist-Elitist Alliance hell bent on universal serfdom.
There was so much bad news that it can only be covered as bullet points with one common theme. What had been presented as an appeal to authority, i.e. scientific consensus, is now being presented as an appeal to the COMMON PEOPLE. A point that will be emphasized throughout this article.
The week included the Michael Mann open letter in the Washington Post, begging the COMMON PEOPLE to vote for Democrats. In his best Elmer Fudd impression, Mann complains that the “waskily wepublicans will wack Mann if elected”. Yes, two coats of Penn State whitewash might not hold up under serious Congressional science inquiry.
The Eco-snuff flick “No Pressure” by the lovely 10:10 Division of the Climate Action group brought universal stinging rebukes. First, the two largest sponsors withdrew their support. Then over 20,000 supporters requested to be removed for the 10:10 rolls as supporters.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
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