Algeria: Why is Bab El-Oued Up in Arms?
Protesting youths clashed with security forces on Wednesday night in the neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued in Algiers. Our Observer, who witnessed the riots, tells us why this impoverished and historically restive neighbourhood is once again up in arms.
Rising food prices are the main reason behind the unrest, which started in the western coastal towns of Tipaza and Oran on Monday before spreading to the capital. Over the past week, the price of a kilogram of sugar rose from 80 to 120 dinars (0,8 to 1,2 euros). The cost of five litres of cooking oil rose by 150 dinars (1.5 euros). In 2010, the country experienced an overall inflation rate of 4%.
For our Observer, the rising living costs were simply the last straw for young Algerians, who are increasingly resentful of the high unemployment rate and lack of freedom in the country.
Everything started when kids set a police car on fire on the square that leads to “El Kettani” (the seafront road) around 7pm. After that, a gang of youths tried to storm the police station, and police responded by firing warning shots.
That didn’t scare the rioters off, on the contrary. They were joined by more locals, and rapidly a crowd of several hundred young men formed in front of the police station. The riot police was sent in, and they cordoned off the entire neighbourhood of Bab el-Oued.
The rioters re-grouped not far from the main marketplace, burning cars and trash cans and clashing with police along the way. They also vandalized phone booths and billboards. Police fired tear gas to try to disperse the crowd, but the youths responded by yanking cobblestones off the road and throwing them at security forces.
The clashes went on until around 2am, at which point quiet returned to the streets. But in the morning, you could sense that the situation was still tense. Most stores remained closed, and some friends told me to avoid going through certain parts of Algiers.
“Families of twelve live in tiny one-bedroom flats”
It’s no coincidence if riots broke out in Bab el-Oued rather than another part of the capital. The neighbourhood has historically been prone to revolts [notably in the case of the 1988 October riots]. It’s one of the oldest in Algiers — a gritty, working class and densely populated part of town (over 100,000 residents live in Bab el-Oued alone). The living conditions are miserable, especially in terms of housing. The buildings are more than a century old and are never restored by their owners or city authorities. A few months ago, the roof of a building in the city centre caved in, killing one person and leaving several others seriously injured. Families of twelve live in tiny one-bedroom flats. People can’t take this wretched poverty anymore. They feel abandoned.
The rising food prices were simply the straw that broke the camel’s back. People here haven’t been able to buy milk for over two months, and they’re announcing flour shortages until the month of March.
“If they really want to make their voices heard, they should use other means than violence”
Some people wonder why it is youths who are out in the streets when rising food prices primarily affect those who have a family to feed. I think the food prices were just the spark that set off the fire. Young Algerians feel suffocated, they are the worst hit by the high unemployment rate and have no access to leisure activities that could relax and distract them. But if they really want to make their voices heard, they should use other means than violence. The burned cars don’t belong to the police, they belong to the people.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Cheap Electricity Gone With the Wind
Experts forecast bills will triple under burden of power-line financing
The Obama administration is changing the way wind energy projects in the American Midwest are financed by “spreading the costs” to consumers and businesses in other states, possibly doubling or perhaps tripling energy bills in the region in the coming years, experts are telling WND.
Obama’s team at the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, which regulates much of the coal, gas, hydroelectric and oil industries, late last month approved a scheme long sought by environmentalists that links windmills and windmill farms to conventional energy transmission grid lines in the nation’s heartland.
FERC Chairman Jon Wellinghoff announced new federal rules that would in essence socialize the cost of transmission lines across the 13 states of the Midwest at a price tag of approximately $20 billion.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
China Continues to Grow Confirming Its Place as the Second Global Economy
Beijing estimates that the economy grew by about 10% in 2010, with an average of 11.4% in 5 years. Driving force was the increase in domestic consumption. For 2011, a rapid, albeit more moderate, growth it is expected to continue. But growing inflation is an unknown factor.
Beijing (AsiaNews / Agencies) — China’s gross domestic product grew by about 10% in 2010 according to the government estimate and those of the highest Chinese financial bodies.
So stated the Chinese vice premier Li Keqiang (pictured), during meetings with businessmen in Madrid and Berlin on January 5 and 6, during a nine day visit to Spain, Germany and Britain, which also aimed to reassure governments and entrepreneurs that China continues to grow and provide profitable investment opportunities. In Berlin, he also indicated that retail sales increased by 18.5% in 2010 compared to 2009 and says that the further growth depended 90% on rising domestic demand. Among the leading sectors were car sales, which the Ford Motors Co. indicated amounted to a record 582,467 vehicles, an increase of 40% in 2010.
In Spain, Li said that “China still faces difficulties in its development and continues to expand trade and investment with other countries to ensure further growth.” Li’s estimate confirms that the Governor of the Central Bank of China Zhou Xiaochuan, who also indicated a growth in 2010 of “about 10%” and insisted that the government should promote economic reform based on market indications. Li is considered by experts as the most likely successor to Prime Minister Wen Jiabao, when he leaves office in 2012.
These data confirm that China has surpassed Japan as the world’s second largest economy after the United States. The average growth in the country was 11 .4% in the last 5 years and Beijing has said in recent days that it expects “a stable and relatively rapid development” in 2011. Analysts expect growth of around 9%, 3 times that of the U.S. and 6 times higher than the estimates for the European Union.
The big problem remains the country’s inflation reached 5.1% in November. The increases mainly affect the prices of food and other essential items to the detriment of the majority of the population whose income loses purchasing power, despite the country’s economy being increasingly rich. This causes a widening of the gap in wealth distribution, with the risk that masses of angry residents may protest to the streets for economic justice.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Germany May Agree to Expand €750bn Bail-Out Fund, As ECB Buys Bonds
Portuguese sovereign debt came under pressure in early trading, after the country’s president was forced to deny the need for a €80bn (£66bn) bail-out.
Aníbal Cavaco Silva, the Portuguese president, said on Sunday that he had no intention of asking the International Monetary Fund (IMF) or Europe for financial help.
The comments came after Germany’s Der Spiegel magazine and senior eurozone sources claimed that Germany and France would push Portugal to tap the rescue fund set up for European countries facing debt problems. The cost of insuring against default on European sovereign debt climbed to records and European stocks fell amid investor concern. The ECB took action mid-morning, Bloomberg reported, with Portuguese 10-year bonds recovering and yields falling nine basis points to 6.9pc. The yield on the equivalent-maturity Irish security fell 16 ticks to 8.7pc, with Greek yields declining 14 to 12.4pc…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Ireland: Ruins of Prosperity
“The magical light, that everyone who knows Ireland rhapsodises about, makes bearable even the bungalows which are falling into ruin.”
Zurich-born author Hansjörg Schertenleib writes about the traces which the economic boom has left behind in the countryside of his adopted home.
The sky is low, low and almost black — not for long, to be sure, for the Irish weather really is as unsettled and changeable as the cliché has it. In any case, it is only a few minutes before gusts of wind have torn holes in the blanket of cloud, holes, gaps, rifts, allowing shafts of light to penetrate as if searchlights were being played over the hills — look! there, there and there.
In the next moment the countryside is bathed in soft light, the magical light that everyone who knows Ireland rhapsodises about. It is as if a blurred copy of itself had settled over the hills; there seem to be two outlines: the sleeping face superimposed on the one that is awake. This soft focus makes even the bungalows bearable — not beautiful, but bearable — the bungalows which during the boom years sprang up everywhere like mushrooms.
Living on credit
House after house was built, as politicians and bankers vaunted the strength, nay, the invulnerability of the Celtic tiger, and Irish men and women ran up credit and took out mortgages as if there was no tomorrow, as if there was only the here and now, as if growth and success were the only possibility.
Credit for televisions the size of cinema screens, credit for second and third cars, for deep freezers, for suites of furniture, computers, kitchens, bathrooms, for three or four holidays a year. Mortgages for houses and mortgages for holiday homes — as an investment — on the Black Sea in Bulgaria, in Ibiza, Mallorca or Madeira.
My timid question as to whether perhaps this new, modern, successful lifestyle, so far removed from the one the older generation knew, this way of living on the never-never, might not rest on rather flimsy foundations, was met with pitying smiles: Ah, listen to the blow-in, he knows better than we do! He thinks he´s the clever one!
Hansjörg Schertenleib (RDB)
Building boom
The houses which sprang up everywhere, sometimes literally almost overnight, the bungalows which spread over the countryside as if every spare spot needed to be occupied, were often ostentatious, but at the same time badly built, because they were put up too fast.
There was little comfort in the fact that all round Dublin, Galway, Cork and Limerick residential estates of terraced houses sprouted as if from nowhere, or huge developments sprang up, spreading out further and further the commuter belt surrounding Irish cities— nor in the fact that these developments were the spitting image of ones in Switzerland, and remind me of rabbit hutches.
Ireland was booming, Ireland was building, all of a sudden Ireland was successful, and was showing other states just what you can get up to with EU money.
In my neighbourhood — a first sign of crisis — many of the houses that were in the process of being built never got completed. Bungalows stood waiting to be plastered, without doors, without windows, unroofed, walls only half built. Everywhere there were overflowing building skips; carefully sawn plastic pipes, pieces of insulating material and boards lay strewn over the ground. Plots had been cleared and then abandoned, the wind blew through the spaces where windows should have been, scattering over the countryside plastic packaging that had once contained heaven knows what, and torn cement sacks, the dancing harbingers of collapse.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Portugal’s Borrowing Reaches All-Time High as Up to 100billion Euro Bailout Looms
Portugal’s borrowing rates spiked to euro-era highs on Monday amid reports Germany and France are pushing it to accept take outside help and prevent poisoning other countries.
Analysts estimate Portugal, which has been dogged by low growth and rising debt levels, would need international assistance of between 50 and 100 billion euros.
The yield on Portuguese 10-year bonds — a key gauge of investor sentiment — rose for a fourth straight day, hitting a potentially unsustainable 7.16 percent at one stage.
The spike higher follows a report in German newspaper ‘Der Spiegel’ that France and Germany are both pressing Portugal to tap a European rescue fund to keep the crisis from spreading to Spain.
‘Germany is not pressuring anyone, and has not pressured anyone in the past,’ German government spokesman Christoph Steegmans said.
The French government declined to comment.
Even though Portugal denies it needs a rescue, analysts said there are distinct echoes of what went on with Ireland just a couple of months back.
Before Ireland was forced to accept a rescue from its partners in the European Union and the International Monetary Fund, there were numerous reports suggesting that Germany, in particular, was pressuring Dublin to take the funds to stop the crisis spreading…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: House Prices to Fall to 2004 Levels
Prices fell 1.3pc, an average of more than £2,000, to £163,435 between November and December, Halifax said — far more than the 0.4pc widely forecast — as buyers stayed away from the market. Howard Archer, chief UK economist at IHS Global Insight, now expects a 7pc fall in prices this year to £152,500, and Paul Diggle, property economist at Capital Economics, warned of a 10pc decline.
Even on the more conservative measure, homeowners would be left with properties worth less than at any time since the first quarter of 2004, Halifax data show.
Such sharp declines would outstrip the official forecast for a 2.7pc decline in 2011, and roughly match forecasts by National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) that “real” house prices, after accounting for inflation, would still be at 2003 levels in 2015. Homeowners problems could be compounded by an interest rate rise. Mr Archer said: “Current mounting speculation that the Bank of England could be forced into an early raising of interest rates by rising inflation adds to the downward pressure on house prices.” About two-thirds of households are on variable rate mortgages, exposing them to higher costs if rates rise and potentially increasing the number of forced sellers. However, Martin Ellis, Halifax’s housing economist, said falling prices may deter sellers from putting their homes on the market, helping to “reverse the imbalance between buyers and sellers”. He added: “Looking forward, we expect limited movement in house prices during 2011 but with the risks on the downside. Uncertainty about the economy, weak earnings growth and higher taxes could put some downward pressure on demand.”
House prices are currently about 18pc below their pre-crisis peak of £199,766 in the third quarter of 2007, according to Halifax data. After bottoming out at £157,767 in second quarter of 2009, they rebounded to £168,032 in the first quarter of 2010 but are now 3.4pc lower than in December 2009…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: One Million People to Receive New Tax Demands
They will be told they have underpaid or overpaid after HM Revenue & Customs made errors on their tax codes.
The victims will join nearly six million people sent revised demands last year after a new computer system picked up on the errors dating back to 2008.
A Government insider told The Sun newspaper: “At least one million more will learn they too are on the wrong tax code. Some have overpaid and some have underpaid. It is another tax fiasco.” And Liberal Democrat Treasury spokesman Matthew Oakeshott told The Daily Telegraph: “Long suffering taxpayers are being hammered yet again as a result of Labour’s false economy in cutting resources so savagely from HMRC.”
Last year, HMRC admitted it had got the tax of 5.7 million people wrong since 2008…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Arizona Shooting: Wild West Politics
Every Republican and media loudmouth who has flirted with insurrectionary rhetoric should examine their consciences
Faced with a terrible event like the shooting of Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, it is important neither to leap to cute conspiratorial conclusions nor to be in any way naive about the circumstances in which such things can happen. The United States is not the only country in which politicians are at risk of their lives. Think Sweden, think the Netherlands, think Russia, never mind Iraq, Israel, India, Ireland or, only last week, Pakistan.
Pause to think, too, before vaulting into the tempting comfort of doom-laden pontificating about the dangers of armed mad people in America, about three Conservative MPs murdered by the IRA in the not so distant past, or about Stephen Timms, the Labour MP who was shockingly stabbed by a constituent in east London last year when he, just like Ms Giffords at the weekend, was doing his job, listening to his voters’ problems. Sometimes even heirs to the throne are at risk from dangerous people.
But what happened in Tucson cannot be brushed aside as one of those things that could happen to anyone in public life anywhere. It happened to an articulate, moderate, pro-business, pro-gun, female Democrat in the United States at a time of deepening and increasingly obsessive partisan polarisation. The US already had a distinctive history of political violence in the modern era. The assassinations of the 1960s, the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995 and a series of attacks on abortion clinics have all been evidence of the readiness of a small but significant group of mainly male, mainly white, mainly rightwing, mainly religious conservative Americans to use lawless, lethal violence against real or imagined examples of political movements or institutions by which they deem themselves threatened. Now Congresswoman Giffords and the score of people who were shot with her in Tucson are their latest victims, gunned down in the 21st-century wild west.
It is too early to say with certainty that the Tucson shooter was linked to or even inspired by the reckless rhetoric that now marks American politics and which has helped swing the new Congress decisively away from Ms Giffords’ Democrats. What is clear, though, is that every Republican and media loudmouth who has flirted with insurrectionary rhetoric — and a lot have — should examine their consciences. It is hard not to disagree with Sheriff Clarence Dupnik in Tucson, who lamented after the shooting that “the anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous”. In many countries, an event like this might shock the political class into collective determination to change the tone. It is a measure of how different American politics has now become that it is hard to expect any such thing.
[JP note: Mindless, opportunistic drivel from the Guardian editors.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Arizona Shooting: ‘Does She Have Any Enemies?’ ‘Yeah. The Whole Tea Party.’
Shock turns to anger as mourners blame vitriolic rightwing rhetoric for creating climate of violence in US politics
Paul Wellman laid his handwritten sign among the collection of candles, flowers and messages keeping vigil outside congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords’s office. Then he stepped back and surveyed the scene. To the right, another sign said: “Hate speech = murder”. But Wellman went further with his angry declaration in large black letters on white cardboard: “Blame Palin. Blame the Tea Party”.
The 60-something former miner did not wait to explain why. “They’re trying to say that a lone nut was responsible for this, but Sarah Palin and the Tea Party might as well have put the gun in his hand. They are the ones who painted Giffords as some kind of traitor,” he said. Wellman did not take much notice of the small woman with the camera watching him from the edge of the car park. After he moved off, she stepped forward. “There have been a number of these,” she said grabbing his sign and declining to give her name. “It’s wrong. Why make it about politics?”
Then she carried off Wellman’s sign to dump it. Another sign had already been removed: “Republicans are murderers and un-American”. As much of Tucson unites in keeping watch on the fate of their badly wounded Democratic party congresswoman after she was shot in the head at a meeting with constituents at a shopping centre, and mourns six others, including a nine year-old girl, anger at the shootings is finding very different targets.
Some see the accused killer, Jared Loughner, as a deranged individual acting on his own. Giffords’s father was among the first to point a finger elsewhere. As he rushed to his daughter’s hospital bed, 75-year-old Spencer Giffords was asked if she had any enemies. He wept and replied: “Yeah, the whole Tea Party.”
Loughner is not telling police why he unloaded his semi-automatic gun into the congresswoman from Tucson at a Safeway supermarket where Giffords was holding one of her regular “Congress on your corner” meetings with constituents. The 22-year-old asked to talk to the congresswoman and was directed to the back of a line of people before breaking away a few minutes later and opening fire as he moved towards her. He continued squeezing the trigger of his semi-automatic pistol until he was wrestled to the ground.
Police released CCTV footage of a man in his 50s who was believed to have been with Loughner in the supermarket before the killings, but was later ruled out of the investigation. Pima County sheriff’s deputy Jason Ogan said the man was a cab driver who drove the gunman to the store and went into the store because he apparently had not paid his fare. With one eye on the gunman’s rambling, disjointed denunciations of authority on the internet, critics said it was difficult to separate the shooting from increasingly menacing tone of anti-government sentiment on the right, some of it targeted directly at Giffords.
Republicans rushed to denounce the attack. Tea Partiers, recognising that their movement might be badly tainted, quickly portrayed the shooting as the work of a lone, unhinged misfit. But the local sheriff, Clarence Dupnik, said he suspected that the growing vitriol, hate and anger against the government, and the widening rhetoric of armed resistance in the political discourse, played a role in the shootings. The National Jewish Democratic Council said: “Many have contributed to the building levels of vitriol in our political discourse.”
The congresswoman, the first Jewish woman elected from Arizona, was a target for Tea Party rage after she voted in favour of what Palin denounced as the president’s “socialist” healthcare reforms and opposed what many described as racist new anti-immigration laws in Arizona.
The windows of her office were stoned or shot out, and Tea Party protests were regularly held at which Giffords was denounced as a traitor to the constitution and the country. Like other members of Congress who supported healthcare reform, Giffords faced vitriolic attacks at town hall meetings by what she would call the “crazies”. Across the country, Tea Partiers accused their elected representatives of betraying America, of being Nazis or communists for supporting Obama’s attempt to ensure that everyone has access to healthcare. With the rhetoric came the regular allusions to armed resistance.
In August, the police removed a protester who arrived at a constituency meeting held by Giffords after a gun he was carrying in a holster fell out and clattered on the floor. Another activist arrived carrying a rifle, legally, at a protest during an appearance in Arizona by Obama. During last year’s elections, Giffords was among Democrats targeted on Palin’s Facebook page through the crosshairs of a rifle. After protests, Palin removed the crosshairs. Giffords was also the target of a campaign advert by her Tea Party-backed Republican opponent, Jesse Kelly, a former marine who served in Iraq, who she beat by the slimmest of margins. “Get on Target for Victory in November. Help remove Gabrielle Giffords from office. Shoot a fully automatic M16 with Jesse Kelly,” it said. Kelly appeared on his own website in camouflage gear, holding a gun to promote the event.
Probably unintentionally, Loughner also killed another hate figure when he opened fire at the shopping centre. John Roll was a federal judge who drew scorn and vitriol for ruling in favour of illegal immigrants in a lawsuit against an Arizona rancher in 2009. The police at the time said extremists made serious threats to kill Roll and his family, in part spurred by local talk radio hosts. US marshals put the judge and his wife under round-the-clock protection for a time.
Tea Party leaders are clearly worried by an association with the shootings. Today, Palin offered her “sincere condolences” to Giffords’s family and said she was praying for the victims of the shooting “and for peace and justice”. Judson Phillips, the founder of Tea Party Nation, said on his website that Giffords was a liberal but “that does not matter now. No one should be a victim of violence because of their political beliefs”.
But Dupnik said he saw a link between vicious anti-government rhetoric and the shootings. “When you look at unbalanced people, how they respond to the vitriol that comes out of certain mouths about tearing down the government. The anger, the hatred, the bigotry that goes on in this country is getting to be outrageous,” he said. “And unfortunately, Arizona, I think, has become the capital. We have become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.”
Giffords herself recognised the dangers. “They really need to realise that the rhetoric and firing people up, and, you know, even things for example, we’re on Sarah Palin’s targeted list, but the thing is, that the way that she has it depicted has the crosshairs of a gunsight over our district. When people do that, you gotta realise there’s consequences to that action,” she told MSNBC last year.
Not all of Giffords’s supporters agreed. As Natalie Kujawa — a Democrat who voted for Giffords — laid flowers outside the congresswoman’s office, she said that only one man was to blame for the tragedy. “It was a mentally unstable person. It’s terrible but I think if everyone can take the higher road and conduct themselves with a little bit of grace. There’s a lot of people who are angry and I don’t think that’s going to do any of us any good.”
Kujawa laid her flowers near a sign that read: “Don’t make this about politics. Republicans and Democrats deplore this kind of hatred and violence.” None of that mattered to a young nine-year-old boy called Sammy who arrived at the memorial carrying flowers with his father. He was there, he said, because the young girl who died, Christina-Taylor Green, had been the same age as him. Sammy said he didn’t know what to call the circumstances of her death. “It’s just very sad that anyone would shoot anyone,” he said.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
AZ Shooter’s High School Used Curriculum Founded by Commie Bill Ayers
(WND) — Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday’s Arizona shooting, attended a high school that is part of a network in which teachers are trained and provided resources by a liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and funded by President Obama, WND has learned.
The group, Small Schools Workshop, has been led by a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers. Obama provided the group with funds in the 1990s when he worked at an education reform group alongside Ayers.
Loughner attended Mountain View High School, which is part of Arizona’s Morana Unified School District. Since 2003, Mountain View has been part of what is known as the Smaller Learning Community, a network of schools that have been restructured to create a more personalized learning environment where students often have the same teachers and fellow students from grade to grade.
Mountain View was part of the Smaller Learning Communities throughout Loughner’s entire attendance there, from 9th grade until he withdrew without graduating before his senior year.
The high school received grants to research the concepts of Smaller Learning Communities and work to implement them…
| — Hat tip: Van Grungy | [Return to headlines] |
Bill Ayers, Communist Provided Arizona Shooter’s Curriculum?
High school part of learning community funded jointly by Obama and domestic terrorist
Jared Lee Loughner, the suspected gunman in Saturday’s Arizona shooting, attended a high school that is part of a network in which teachers are trained and provided resources by a liberal group founded by Weatherman terrorist Bill Ayers and funded by President Obama, WND has learned.
The group, Small Schools Workshop, has been led by a former top communist activist who is an associate of Ayers.
Obama provided the group with funds in the 1990s when he worked at an education reform group alongside Ayers.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Fears of Higher Petrol Prices as Alaskan Pipeline is Shutdown After Leak
Motorists could face even higher prices at the pumps after the shutdown of a major BP pipeline in Alaska that carries around 12 of America’s oil output.
The Trans-Alaska pipeline system, which transports oil from the Prudhoe Bay field, was closed on Saturday following the discovery of a leak.
This morning shares in BP — the largest shareholder in the Alyeska Pipeline Service company which runs the pipeline — fell 2.5 per.
Prudoe Bay oil field in Alaska where 95 per cent of production has been cut because of an leak
Prudhoe Bay is America’s largest oil reserve, producing around 630,000 barrels of oil a day — equivalent to around 40 per cent of the UK’s daily consumption.
The leak occurred at a pumping station at Alaska’s North Slope, and forced oil production to be cut by 95 per cent.
With the price of a barrel of US crude oil rising by almost one per cent to $89.92 in early trading, motorists could soon pay the price on garage forecourts.
A BP spokesman based in America told the Guardian the leak was “a significant event” and it is not clear how long it will take to restart production.
The 33-year-old pipeline is producing fewer and fewer barrels of oil because it is ageing and becoming more expensive to maintain
BP was the biggest faller in the FTSE 100 when trading began, with shares dropping as much as 12p to 480.7p…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Frightening, Twisted Shrine in Arizona Killer Jared Lee Loughner’s Yard
A sinister shrine reveals a chilling occult dimension in the mind of the deranged gunman accused of shooting a member of Congress and 19 others.
Hidden within a camouflage tent behind Jared Lee Loughner’s home sits an alarming altar with a skull sitting atop a pot filled with shriveled oranges.
A row of ceremonial candles and a bag of potting soil lay nearby, photos reveal.
Experts on Sunday said the elements are featured in the ceremonies of a number of occult groups.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Gabrielle Giffords Shooting Reignites Row Over Rightwing Rhetoric in US
Sarah Palin at centre of storm over political vitriol after spree leaves six dead and congresswoman in critical condition
The US was tonight seized by a fierce debate over whether inflammatory rightwing rhetoric was to blame for a shooting spree in Tucson, Arizona, that targeted congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords and left six dead, including a nine-year-old child.
Giffords, 40, who remains critically ill in hospital after being shot through the head but is expected to live, criticised Sarah Palin last year for putting her and 19 other Democrats on a hitlist of districts, each shown as being in crosshairs. “When people do that, they have got to realise there are consequences to that action,” Giffords said. Palin today distanced herself from the shooting, as did leading figures of the Tea Party movement. Conservative bloggers accused liberals of seeking to exploit the attack.
[…]
[JP note: Quick-to-the-trigger Guardian exploiting the Tuscon shooting tragedy for all it is worth. Scum.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
GOP Activist’s Muslim Ties — Paul Sperry
Suhail Khan, a major Republican sup porter of the Ground Zero mosque, has been lobbying GOP leaders on the Hill to back off their opposition. He’s got their ear, mainly because he portrays himself as a moderate, patriotic Muslim. Yet newly surfaced videos contradict that.
Khan, a Bush administration vet who sits on the board of the American Conservative Union, assures skeptics that “Park 51 community center” imam Feisal Rauf is a “moderate.” Fears over the mosque are overblown, he insists, fomented by “anti-Muslim bigotry.” In a recent letter to fellow Republicans, he warned the party was “alienating millions of Arab-American and Muslim-American voters.”
But Khan’s assurances ring hollow against his own connections to radicals. While he strenuously denies such ties, evidence has emerged — including exclusive video footage — that exposes Khan comfortably in the company of known Islamic extremists. Consider:
- In June 2001, Khan personally accepted an award from the now-notorious Abdurahman Alamoudi, then head of the American Muslim Council.
- “We have with us a dear brother,” Alamoudi said as he prepared to honor Khan with a plaque at the group’s annual conference. “I’m really proud to be with Suhail Khan. Some of you saw him today in the White House, but inshallah [Allah willing], you will see him in better places in the White House, inshallah.”
Khan thanked his patron, saying “Abdurahman Alamoudi has been very supportive of me. . . . I hope, inshallah, we can keep working together.”
Just days earlier, Sen. Arlen Specter of the Judiciary Committee had cited a New York Post report documenting how Alamoudi had supported terrorists and “declared an interest in destroying America.” By 2003, Alamoudi had been busted for plotting a terrorist attack; the top al Qaeda fundraiser is now serving 23 years in federal prison. - In September 2001, four days before the 9/11 attacks, Khan spoke at the Islamic Society of North America’s convention. Introducing him was Jamal Barzinji, whose offices and home were raided by federal agents after 9/11. “Barzinji is not only closely associated with PIJ [Palestinian Islamic Jihad], but also with Hamas,” according to the search-warrant affidavit. (A lawyer for Barzinji, who has not been charged, says he is the victim of a government “witch hunt.”)…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Hillary Clinton Compares Gabrielle Giffords Shooting to 9/11 Attacks
In a television broadcast filmed before students in Abu Dhabi, Mrs Clinton was asked why the 9/11 terror attacks, the work of a handful of men, had been allowed to colour American views of a whole people. She replied that America was “proud” of its many Muslim citizens and public servants, and said that the media exaggerated the voices of those who presented hostile views of the Muslim and Arab worlds. She then raised the shooting at the weekend of the Arizona Democratic congresswoman, Gabrielle Giffords.
“We have extremists in our country,” she said. “A wonderful and incredibly brave young woman congress member was just shot by extremists in our country.
“We have the same kinds of problems, so rather than standing off of each other we should work to try and prevent the extremists wherever they are from being able to commit violence.”
Ascribing the Arizona shootings to political extremism rather than the work of a mentally deranged loner has already proved controversial, and President Barack Obama avoided doing so directly in his address to the American people afterwards.
Mrs Clinton may be taking an even bigger risk in comparing the attack, even obliquely, to al-Qaeda’s war on America. She was taking part in the first event of a tour of the Middle East aimed at securing continued support for sanctions against Iran and showing American diplomatic commitment to the region. The state department was severely embarrassed by WikiLeaks cables which revealed private conversations between the region’s leaders and American diplomats, often contradicting governments’ official policies…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
How Can You Condemn Hate Speech While Ranting About Blood-Drenched Conservatives?
The immediate aftermath of a tragedy is the worst possible moment to draw broad policy conclusions, let alone to toss blame about. Sadly, the modern technological environment militates against patience. Bloggers and Tweeters rush to make judgments, to infer lessons, to discuss ramifications. On both sides of the Atlantic, the horrible shooting of Gabrielle Giffords, and the killing of six bystanders, have been laid at the door of the Right in general, and the Tea Party in particular. In its front page story, The Independent described the abomination as “an event that seemed to grow out of America’s present disturbed and angry climate, like a killer-tornado or hurricane: awful, yes, but part of the weather, and, in some sense, only to be expected” [my italics]. Nor was the Indy unusual. The same accusation has been made by several commentators, bloggers and columnists.
Michael Daly in the New York Daily News writes that Sarah Palin may now have “the blood of more than some poor caribou on her hands”. Jane Fonda blames Glenn Beck. Not all Lefties are taking this line, of course; perhaps not most. But it is striking that those who complain most loudly about hate speech then go on to indulge in the very phenomenon they purport to be condemning.
There is something repulsive about attacking your opponents for their intemperate language and in the same breath accusing them of complicity in murder. There is something blindly narcissistic about calling for a calmer debate while at the same time attacking Sarah Palin in terms that come close to incitement. Odium is not confined to any political faction. Spend five minutes reading the online reactions to the atrocity to see how readily Leftists resort to accusations of evil…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Islam: Beware of Extremist Tactics
I am not a supporter of ACT! America, nor am I antagonistic toward the Council on Arab-Islamic Relations, CAIR.
I am an American concerned about the disturbing facts about the spread of Islam around the world and its potential impact on America.
I am a videographer and have had the pleasure of filming many weddings over 10 years. One was an African-Muslim family. Two were for Orthodox Jewish families, one for a Russian-Catholic family, as well as several Indonesian and Lebanese family weddings. The customs were all different, some strange and others endearing.
During each wedding, I engaged in small talk with the apparent elders within the families and eventually asked them “What brought you to America?” Almost to a person, the answer was religious persecution; most by Muslims against infidels or for unacceptable Muslim practices.
I have become friends with many shopkeepers and store clerks from either the Middle East or Eastern European countries dominated by Muslims. All have said that they are here because of brutal treatment by Muslims because they were infidels. Some have horrific stories to share.
I have family in Britain. A daughter of a prominent sheik used to stay with them when she visited England. After there was a regime change and she married a Muslim man, she has been forbidden to leave her house and certainly is not allowed to visit infidels. Her daughters cannot go to a school. These people are not talking about terrorist enclaves; they are citing experiences perpetrated on them by ordinary citizens or friendly governments to the U.S.
We are told that the Quran teaches to be tolerant and to love people of all religions. This is certainly not the case in practice; it is a whitewash of the truth. I know, I have heard it time and time again.
Sharia courts are allowed in some British enclaves, circumventing British courts because of politically correct politicians. This is true of many cities throughout Europe.
Could it come here? If we aren’t attentive to the threat, our politically correct politicians will indeed allow it. Beware! Talk to your neighbors or working people of foreign descent and you will learn…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Jury Selection Begins in NY Beheading Case
Jury selection has started at the second-degree murder trial of a New York television executive charged with beheading his wife.
Prosecution and defense lawyers expect it will take longer than usual to seat 12 jurors for Muzzammil Hassan’s (moo-ZAHM’-mel HAH’-sahns) trial because of media attention the case has received since February 2009.
That’s when Hassan walked into the Orchard Park police station in suburban Buffalo to tell them his wife was dead. Police then found Aasiya Hassan’s body inside the studios of Bridges TV, the Muslim-American television station the couple ran.
Hassan’s defense is expected to include claims he was a battered spouse…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Large Award Given to Arizona’s Morana Unified School District in 2008 for Bill Ayers Designed Smaller Learning Communities Program
Since finding out about the school the Tucson Twinkie attended before he left prematurely, I did a little digging…
According to the US Department of Education, Arizona’s Morana Unified School District received a $2,234,931 award in 2008. “This project will improve and strengthen the smaller learning communities programs at the district’s two large high schools, Marana and Mountain View.”
http://www2.ed.gov/programs/slcp/slcfy08awards.doc
Isn’t that about the same time Jared Lee Loughner quit highschool?
Just something to think about… follow the money…
| [Return to headlines] |
The Congressional Probe of Islamofascism — A Suggested Agenda
Anyone who’s watched Congressman Peter King on TV knows that he is fearless. The self-appointed gatekeepers of “political correctness” don’t scare him.
Actually, he scares them. And that’s why — even before the New York Republican (Long Island) has been able to assemble a full staff of investigators and researchers — they are already piling on merely for his plans to hold congressional hearings on Islamofascism. Is radical Islam inserting itself into our society by sowing discord and fear, as well as through infiltration, “political correctness,” threats, and violence?
So as Chairman King prepares his House Committee on Homeland Security (HCHS) for the inquiry, we have some suggestions as to what topics might be explored. He is going to rattle some cages no matter what he does, so he might just as well go full bore.
Defining our terms
Nearly ten years after the attacks of 9/11, the enemy is making progress in its ongoing effort to lull as back to sleep.
Our leaders dare not use the term Islamofascism. Even War on Terror has become verboten. So the committee’s hearings should be predicated on the understanding that we do have an enemy. That enemy is making war on us.
Most Americans abhor war. Who doesn’t? Put it this way: Though Leon Trotsky was an evil man (who was murdered on the orders of an even more evil man, Stalin), he got one thing right when he said, “You may not be interested in war, but war may be interested in you.” Indeed. And much of today’s war (in which our fervent enemy is deeply “interested”) is being waged right here on our own soil.
As David Rubin opines in his book Islamic Tsunami, Islamofascism is a far more dangerous enemy than either Nazism or Communism. This time, our enemy is a death-worshipping, blood-soaked, suicide-honoring ideology masquerading under the cover of “religion.”
Ideas for the probe
Arab-American Christian scholar Dr. Anis Shorrosh has listed many facets of this war and how the enemy is destroying the ability of the U.S. and its people to resist the onslaught. Here are some of them:…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
The Shame and Hypocrisy of the New York Times
We noted yesterday the fingerwagging at CNN over the Fort Hood shootings and the urge to link it to radical Islam, and the rush at the network to blame another mass murder on Republicans like Sarah Palin and Tea Party activists, even though the shooter had no known link to either. Many of our commenters rightly stated that CNN was hardly alone in this utter hypocrisy, and Philip Klein at the American Spectator provides another air-tight case. He compares editorials from the New York Times then and now to expose the Gray Lady as a shrieking hysteric and a sickening example of media sources that act more like attack dogs than journalists:…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Danish Attack Plot Details Emerge
THE mother-in-law of one of the Danish terror attack plot suspects has said she had no idea what he was up to.
Helena Benaouda, who is also the head of the Swedish Muslim Council, whose daughter is married to one of four men held over a foiled plot to massacre staff at a Danish newspaper, said on Monday she “was clueless” about her son-in-law’s alleged attack plans.
“I was clueless,” Helena Benaouda said in an interview with daily Dagens Nyheter (DN), speaking publicly for the first time since the arrest last month of son-in-law Munir Awad.
Awad, a 29-year-old Swede born in Lebanon, is currently detained — along with three other men, including two Swedish citizens — on suspicion of planning a December attack on the Jyllands-Posten daily which had published caricatures of the prophet Mohammed.
He had been twice detained abroad suspected of terror links — once in Somalia in 2007 and in Pakistan in 2009 — both times with his wife, Benaouda’s daughter Safia.
Benaouda, who previously said she had never come across any Muslim extremists, said it was possible her daughter did not know of the plot.
But she added she should have been suspicious about her son-in-law’s plans.
“Safia says ‘I don’t get it and I don’t know what he is up to’. And I should have known myself. How is it possible to hide such things to those close to you?,” she told the paper.
Awad had also shared a Stockholm-area flat with one of two Swedes of Somali origin who were sent to jail in December for “planning terrorist crimes” in Somalia.
When Awad’s former flatmate was arrested in June, Benaouda told her son-in-law “that he shouldn’t mix with people who get arrested. But I didn’t say more, because I don’t have such a close relationship to him”, she told DN…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Dutch Turkish Community Raises Alarm About Its Disaffected Youth
A group of Dutch Turkish professionals, including teachers, researchers and civil servants, has written to the Volkskrant to raise the alarm about the ‘extremely worrying’ position of many Dutch Turkish youngsters.
A growing number of Dutch-born Turks are suffering from psychological problems and apathy and are either turning to crime or radical Islam, the group says in its open letter.
‘The Turkish community is very inward-looking. We have tried to solve the problems ourselves but our self reliance has not worked,’ one of the signatories, Aydid Daldal told the paper.
A growing number of young Turks feel they are ‘second class citizens and will remain so,’ the letter states. They are addressed as outsiders — as ‘immigrant, Turk or Muslim’ and increasingly shut out or discriminated against.
Action needed
The letter says the Dutch Turkish community itself is partly to blame for failing to produce strong role models and tackle issues such as domestic violence and the family and community pressures on youngsters.
But the hardening of attitudes towards ethnic minorities in the Netherlands is also having an effect, the letter states.
The signatories urge the government, education system, industry and the Turkish community to take action and make sure these youngsters get the education and leadership they need.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Dutch Muslims Laud IPC for Dawa Guidance for European Muslims
Dutch Muslim activists are all praise for the Islam Presentation Committee of Kuwait (IPC) for organizing workshops and training courses to guide new European Muslims in organizational skills for Dawah (propagation) work. Waleed Duisters, chairman of Dutch National Platform for New Muslims, was one of those Muslims from Europe who participated in the IPC courses held in Kuwait in December. “It was a workshop for those Muslims who have a leading role in their countries, to give them information a
bout organizational and leadership skills, in order to help Muslims and non-Muslims in Europe,”? Duisters said.
This was my first visit to Kuwait. It was very good and useful because normally you get information about Islam but not about organizational skills. We also attended some good lectures by famous Kuwaiti scholars like Tariq Swuaidan,” he added. Duisters spoke at the sidelines of the Fourth Dutch Muslim Converts’ National Day held in the Dutch city of The Hague on Saturday. The one-day event was organized by the OntdekIslam (Discover Islam) foundation and the Dutch National Platform for New Muslims.
He noted that 1600 participants came from Holland, Belgium and a few other European countries to attend the conference. “The aim of the conference is to give a good idea about Islam to the new converts,”? said Duisters noting that the western media tries to portray the new converts as being very strict and extreme.
We want to present the real picture that the converts to Islam are not extremists but Muslims just like other Muslims from other countries and that we are just as Dutch as before we converted to Islam,”? he said. “Our message to the new converts in the Netherlands is to show that you can be a Muslim as a Dutch person because some right-wing Dutch politicians like Geert Wilders claim that you cannot be a Muslim and a Dutch person,”? he stated.
If you look at the people here, they live as Muslims in a democratic country and they don’t have any problems with that,”? added the Dutch Muslim activist.
Three Dutch girls converted to Islam during the Dutch Muslim Converts’ National Day. Duisters pointed out that figures released in 2007 showed there were between 12,000 and 14000 Dutch converts to Islam, but he thought the number is more than that as not all converts say that they have converted to Islam.
There are nearly one million Muslims in the Netherlands from Morocco, Turkey, Surinam and other countries. The population of the Netherlands is around 17 million. Leonardo, a Dutch Muslim but with origins from El Salvador also attended to IPC course in Kuwait. “We learnt another form of Dawa not the traditional way but the focus was on akhlaq (character), because the first thing people see in Europe is the behavior of the Muslims,”? he said…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Former Tory Donor Stuart Wheeler Becomes UKIP Treasurer
The wealthy former Conservative Party donor Stuart Wheeler has joined the UK Independence Party as its treasurer.
The spread-betting tycoon, who gave the Tories £5m in a single donation in 2001, was expelled from the party in 2009 after donating £100,000 to UKIP.
Mr Wheeler, who has criticised David Cameron’s attitude to the EU, said UKIP’s success was “vital”.
He unsuccessfully ran for Parliament last year, after setting up his own “anti-corruption” party.
The announcement of Mr Wheeler’s decision to join UKIP as treasurer was made at a press conference in Oldham East and Saddleworth, where a by-election is taking place this Thursday.
‘Honoured’
He said: “I believe that what UKIP is doing is vital for this country, and of course the party’s financial management is crucial.
“So I am very honoured to have been appointed Treasurer and I shall do my very best in both helping to raise money for the party and in the management of its financial affairs under Nigel Farage as leader and Steve Crowther as executive chairman.”
Mr Farage said: “I am absolutely thrilled that Stuart Wheeler has become UKIP’s Treasurer. Our policies are now mainstream in British politics: all that is holding us back is a lack of funds and I believe that a highly respected Eurosceptic like Stuart will help us do the job.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
France: Marine Le Pen: Her Heart Still Belongs to Daddy
by Peter Beaumont
She says she will modernise France’s Front National, once led by her father, Jean-Marie, but her critics say that she has inherited his bigotry and intolerance
Seven years ago, Marine Le Pen, youngest daughter of the French racist demagogue Jean-Marie, spoke at the conference of the Front National in Nice about her plans to transform her father’s party. She aimed, she declared, to make it more attractive to “young people and women”, to “normalise” a party associated — through her father’s pronouncements — with outright bigotry, Holocaust-denial and antisemitism. To “de-demonise” it as Marine would later say. Make it less “tacky”.
Marine was speaking in the wake of the political upset the previous year when her father shocked France’s political establishment by gaining the second-highest number of votes in the first round of the 2002 presidential election behind Jacques Chirac, ejecting the socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, from the second round of voting. Now Jean-Marie is retiring, shuffling off the stage of the party he founded in 1972. And the chic and telegenic Marine is the runaway favourite to take over the family franchise for xenophobic politics at a party congress in Tours that begins on 15 January.
Her emergence as the favourite is a mark of her success since that conference in Nice in 2003 in overturning the old guard of her party, represented by the only other aspirant for her father’s job, Bruno Gollnisch. In the last few months, Marine, who has said she intends to widen the appeal of her party from the right to “all French people”, has pursued a relentless campaign. She has travelled the length and breadth of France to persuade the party’s faithful she should lead it. And the French political classes, who have long treated her party as something foul smelling, have been compelled to take notice of her.
Twice in the last year, she has been invited on to France’s flagship politics programme A vous de juger (You, the Judge), while she has been interviewed by Time, Newsweek and the New York Times. All have been interested in a single question: whether the twice-divorced single mother — who named one of her daughters Jehanne, the original name of Joan of Arc, the symbol of her father’s movement — has transformed the Front National.
It is a moot point. Under the tutelage of the 42-year-old lawyer, town councillor in Hénin-Beaumont and Eurosceptic MP, the party has jettisoned the kind of neofascist views her father once represented when he complained about too many blacks in the French national football team or described the gas chambers at Auschwitz as a “detail of history”. Instead, in common with other political leaders on Europe’s far right, Marine Le Pen has latched on to a rising, right-wing, populist sentiment that describes Islam as predominantly the enemy within, a view shared, according to a recent poll, by 42% of French people.
Marine Le Pen has spliced that message to a second, far more personal narrative of the kind that has been deployed so effectively by such figures as Sarah Palin and the Tea Party movement in the US — playing on her image as the political outsider, loathed by the establishment but in touch with the concerns of ordinary people. While extremely private about her present relationship, Le Pen has had no qualms about playing heavily on her own history (divorced mother of three) to show how “modern” her experience is in comparison with that of her father and his cronies, rooted in the same social concerns of the largely working-class electorate to whom Marine appeals.
She has spoken, too, about the misery of her parents’ divorce when she was 19. That concluded with her mother, Pierrette, fleeing to the United States with her father’s biographer and posing for a spread in Playboy wearing only an apron and wielding a mop, revenge for Jean-Marie’s angry declaration that she “should clean houses” rather than demand alimony from him.
In recent interviews, Marine has presented herself as her father’s unwilling heir who has found herself “in politics, when most of my life I tried to escape from that”. She has made much, too, of how being her father’s daughter has made her a victim, describing the bomb attack at the family home in Paris in 1976 when she was eight years old and how both as a student and a young lawyer no one wished to be associated with the woman called Le Pen.
It is a formula that appears to be succeeding, according to a survey last month which placed Marine’s approval rating at 27% (although only 13% would actually vote for the party), far more than Papa Le Pen could ever muster. But like her claimed transformation of the party, her positioning as the reluctant inheritor of her father’s legacy, which she described as like catching “a political virus”, is little more than a public relations exercise.
In reality, Marine has long been a leading activist in her father’s party which she joined in 1986 aged 18, for a while heading its youth wing, appropriately named Generations Le Pen, appearing on French television in a party capacity for the first time in 2002. During the 1990s, Marine was also one of two leaders with Gollnisch of a faction named Tout sauf Mégret (Anybody but Mégret) which was opposed to Le Pen’s deputy, Bruno Mégret, who was then plotting against her father. In 2007, indeed, she managed her father’s electoral campaign. Some political analysts have noted that her real aim is to bring the party into coalition with the mainstream right and closer to the centre of power, just as Geert Wilders has managed to do in Holland. And it is, perhaps, just that which marks the biggest difference with her father, a figure usually more happy grandstanding at the edges of the political debate. All of which leads to the question, what does this allegedly “more moderate” and “softer” face of French extremism really represent? While Marine insists that the existence of the gas chambers is a non-negotiable fact of history, and that her party is less extreme than the Tea Party, she has not, however, disavowed her father’s most repellent statements, instead defending them.
Challenged by the Independent last year about her father’s comments that immigration was a Jewish conspiracy designed to bring down France, the best Marine could manage was that her father “used a few provocative remarks to make himself heard when the political and media classes would give no space to our ideas”. In an interview in the far-right magazine Rivarol six years ago, Marine was no less evasive, defending her refusal to join the “witch hunt” against her present rival Gollnisch for doubting the existence of the gas chambers, while describing him as a French “patriot”.
While she has stopped public utterance, at least, of a handful of the most obnoxious of ideas that infected her father’s party, Marine’s Front National still stands for many of the same things. Anti-immigration, hostile to the European Union (which she compared to the Soviet Union), it favours trade protection over globalisation and a policy of “national preference” ring-fencing jobs, benefits and public housing for French citizens over outsiders.
But it is over the issue of Islam that Marine has shown herself truly her father’s daughter, prompting widespread outrage last month when, on A vous de juger, she compared Muslims praying in the streets to the “Nazi occupation”, an outburst calculated, some say, to reassure hardliners thinking of voting for Gollnisch. Marine, like her fellow travellers in Europe’s increasingly vocal and numerous far right, denies she is “anti-Islam” or even racist. Instead, she wheels out the most popular of the far right’s current straw men: that she is simply against those Islamic “radicals” who would impose sharia on the French majority. And while few see Marine as a serious political contender in her own right, her recent success in reaching outside the core of Front National support has already had a profound impact on the country’s politics.
Marine Le Pen has so alarmed conservative Nicolas Sarkozy — currently enjoying abysmal ratings — that he has tacked ever further to the right. The rising popularity of the Front National has been blamed for Sarkozy’s clumsy “war on crime” that saw the expulsion of thousands of Roma last year, while a third of the members of his own party, the UMP, would now not oppose an electoral alliance that has been for decades unthinkable. With presidential elections due in 2012, Marine has warned she will make her country’s political classes “tremble”. Some seem to be trembling already.
THE LE PEN FILE
Born Marion Anne Perrine Le Pen on 5 August 1968 to Jean-Marie Le Pen and Pierrette. Universally known as Marine. She joined her father’s party in 1986, aged 18, and studied as a criminal lawyer. In 1998 she took over the legal service of the Front National. Twice divorced, from Franck Chauffroy, a businessman, and Eric Iorio, a regional Front National councillor. She has three children.
Best of times Her appearance on A Vous de Juger last month attracted 3.3 million viewers, 14% of the TV audience.
Worst of times Her mother’s appearance in a centrefold of Playboy wearing nothing but an apron after leaving her father.
What she says “For those who want to talk a lot about World War II, if it’s about occupation, then we could also talk about it [Muslim prayers in the streets], because that is occupation of territory… It is an occupation of sections of the territory, of districts in which religious laws apply. It’s an occupation. There are of course no tanks, there are no soldiers, but it is nevertheless an occupation…” On A Vous de Juger, December 2010.
What others say “Marine Le Pen, through her remarks about Muslims, has reminded us that she is the carrier of a profoundly discriminatory position.” Pierre Moscovici, Socialist deputy, December 2010
[JP note: Bigoted, extreme leftwing hack reveals his lack of knowledge about events in France.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: Last Bundeswehr Conscripts Report for Duty
Germany’s final batch of military conscripts, some 12,000 young men, reported for duty on Monday, as the country moves toward a smaller, professional armed forces.
As of March 1, the Bundeswehr will accept only volunteers into its ranks and military service will be phased out entirely by July 1. Conscription will remain allowed by the German constitution, however.
The 12,000 men showing up for their six-month stint on Monday will be the last to take part in Germany’s once-obligatory military service, which was first instituted in West Germany in 1957. The decision to end the Wehrdienst, as conscription is known in Germany, is part of a wider reform of the country’s armed forces.
Defence Minister Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg has agreed to reduce the Bundeswehr from its current size of 240,000 soldiers to an all-professional force of around 170,000. The ministry expects 7,000 to 15,000 volunteers each year, compared with the military’s present 28,500 conscripts.
Hellmut Königshaus, parliament’s liaison to the military, on Monday expressed understanding for the nation’s last batch of grudging conscripts forced to report against their will.
“I can’t sympathize with those seeing this draft as unjust, because military service will affect only a very small group of young men this year,” he told regional daily Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung.
Accordingly, he called on military officials to show flexibility and consideration for those men that would be exposed to particular hardship because of their service.
“For example, if someone has to put off their university studies for an entire year because of military service, the Bundeswehr should attempt to avoid this,” he said. “The army should be generous in this regard, as it has been in the past.”
Königshaus also warned the German armed forces must become a more attractive employer in order to draw talent in a post-conscription world. “More has to be done in order to compete for skilled specialists,” he said.
Showing how the military needed to become more accommodating, he pointed out that a disproportionately high number of German soldiers commuted each weekend to where their families lived.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: Pitfalls of Green Energy Revolution
Public Resistance Grows to New ‘Monster’ Power Masts
Germany’s dream of converting to renewable power generation requires the construction of unsightly new overland power lines carried by masts 80 meters tall. Citizens’ groups and local authorities are resisting the projects in a campaign that poses risks for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservatives.
The northern German state of Lower Saxony is bracing for a wave of public protests against plans to build new power lines with 80-meter-high (260 feet) masts that are needed to prepare the country for a future of green electricity generation.
The resistance being mobilized by local communities across the state poses a political risk for Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) nine months ahead of local elections there.
CDU state governor David McAllister wants to avoid the public backlash suffered by the governor of the southwestern state of Baden-Württemberg, Stefan Mappus, who has seen his support slump ahead of a key state vote in March due in part to demonstrations against the deeply controversial “Stuttgart 21” project to build a new train station in Stuttgart.
The new high-capacity power lines are crucial to Merkel’s plan to expand renewable energy to four-fifths of power generation by 2050 from 16 percent now. They will be needed to transport wind power down from northern to southern Germany and to develop a far more integrated, pan-European smart grid.
In order to stick to the timetable of achieving 40 percent renewable power output by 2025, a total of 3,600 kilometers (2,236 miles) of new power lines will need to be built, according to calculations by the German Energy Agency. The Lower Saxony government estimates that at least 1,000 kilometers of those lines will run through the state because of its size and its strong wind power generation, especially in offshore wind farms in the North Sea.
The green revolution will radically change the region’s landscape. The sleepy spa town of Bad Gandersheim, population 11,500, is up in arms over a plan by network operator Tennet to build a 380,000-volt, 190-kilometer overland power cable nearby linking transformer stations in Wahle near Braunschweig with Mecklar in the central state of Hesse.
‘Monster Masts’
Norbert Braun, the spokesman for a local campaign against the project, says the “monster masts,” four times higher than Bad Gandersheim’s church spire, will ruin the countryside. A total of 800 local people demonstrated in the town center in pouring rain in August in an unprecedented display of public protest. Fifteen further citizens’ groups have been set up in villages up and down the planned route of the line.
In October, they lit 300 fires stretching more than 100 kilometers, with each fire marking the possible spot of a towering pylon. “It was a wonderful signal against the destruction of nature,” says Braun.
In the nearby village of Billerbeck, every inhabitant signed a petition against the power line. The region is worried about the impact of the project on tourists, and Bad Gandersheim sees its reputation as a spa town under threat. Citizens are also afraid of the electric “smog” from the high-voltage cables, and are worried that real estate prices may fall. Local councils have joined in the campaign. “We’re all together on this” says Ronny Rode, the mayor of the neighbouring town of Kreiensen.
Even the local church has joined the fight. God’s creation must not be “mutilated by steel crosses in the sky,” thundered Protestant pastor Bernd Kuchmetzki-Ludwig from his pulpit.
Same Aim
It’s a similar story in towns and villages across Germany, where a bitter row is raging between two groups that basically have the same aim: to protect the environment.
Lower Saxony already has thousands of wind turbines which are destined to be replaced by bigger versions up to 150 meters (492 feet) tall thanks to ample government subsidies and an increasing shortage of space.
Governor McAllister is trying to defuse tensions by pandering to both sides. He knows that the big power projects aren’t just opposed by Greens and environmental campaigners, but also by many supporters of his own party. That is why he has blocked planned research into underground CO2 storage in the state.
And when he voices support for Merkel’s green energy revolution, he does so where it attracts least attention, like in a guest editorial in the little-known regional newspaper Rundblick in which he said: “Those who in the same breath criticize nuclear power, coal-fired power stations and the expansion of network power lines that are indispensable for renewable energies are endangering our economic prospects.”
Tennet, the construction firm, has tried hard to keep local communities informed about the Wahle-Mecklar power line and says it has submitted 1,835 folders of documents to local authorities.
“We stand for openness and transparency,” says Lex Hartman, the head of Tennet Deutschland, a Dutchman who arrived in Germany a few months ago. “No one likes power masts, I don’t either,” says the 54-year-old. “But we must ensure that the network expansion is accepted nevertheless.”
Delays Also Due to Red Tape
In addition to local protests, complex planning approval procedures are delaying construction. For the Wahle-Mecklar line, Tennet proposed seven different routes. The Lower Saxony authorities had to check the impact of each one on five different airfields and several nature conservation areas. But officials acknowledge that all this effort is unlikely to persuade people to accept the masts.
Inconsistencies between regional and national planning laws are also causing confusion and delays. Near the northern city of Bremen, a 56-kilometer, 380,000- volt line was originally due to have gone into operation in 2010 — but it hasn’t even reached the stage of planning approval. The power line operator has submitted three different construction plans in response to requirements stipulated by various authorities. First as a purely overland line. Then with half the line laid underground. Under the latest plan only eight kilometres of line is to be laid underground — local people and the municipalities affected have already filed a legal complaint against the latter plan.
Putting power cables underground is expensive and renders them less effective because they can’t cool off as well as overland cables — that means less power can be transmitted via underground cables. In addition, they dry out the soil above them because they reach temperatures of 90 degrees Celsius.
The lower capacity means network operators must lay twice as many cables underground as would be needed above ground, driving up costs. Repairs are also more difficult and take longer. “Underground cables are four-to-seven times more expensive,” says Hartman of Tennet…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Guarding the Pork Barrel: Germany Opposes Attempts to Reform EU Agricultural Subsidies
The European Commission wants to reform the Common Agricultural Policy, which eats up almost half of the EU’s budget and which primarily benefits large farms in “old” member states. But Germany and France are resisting moves to change the system so it favors smaller, organic farms. The status quo suits them very nicely.
An old cobblestone road leads to Carl-Albrecht Bartmer’s property. Small, detached houses line Lindenstrasse in the village of Löbnitz an der Bode, near Magdeburg in eastern Germany. A light blue Trabi, the iconic East German car, sits parked by the side of the road.
Bartmer, 49, is an ardent marathon runner and has his hair parted meticulously to one side. After the collapse of Communism, he took over an agricultural cooperative formerly run by the East German government, on a piece of property that had belonged to his family before World War II. Bartmer, who has a degree in agricultural economics and is also president of the German Agricultural Society, cultivates nearly 1,000 hectares (2,500 acres) of land, work for which he requires no more than four employees. He doesn’t like the word “farmer,” however, preferring to be called an “entrepreneur.” Bartmer believes that those who work in agriculture need to take advantage of technological progress to produce food for a “hungry world” under conditions of “fair competition” and with as little state aid as possible.
It’s interesting that Bartmer argues in favor of independence from the state, since the landowner collects €300 ($400) in subsidies from the European Union for each hectare of his land. That adds up to a total of around €300,000 — per year.
Exporting EU Carrots to Russia
The road that leads to Janusz Sakowicz’s farm is also paved with cobblestones. The 60-year-old lives in an old house in the community of Choroszcz in northeastern Poland, near the Belarusian border. Sakowicz, a short man with blue eyes and large hands, inherited seven hectares of land from his father in 2002, but the soil was too poor to support crops and the local dairy paid only a pittance for milk from his cows. “We couldn’t make a living from that,” he says.
A German foundation helped Sakowicz and his wife Teresa set up a small organic cheese dairy. The couple produces a smoked cheese, a cheese with herbs and one with garlic. They sell their wares to gourmet shops in the nearby city of Bialystok and to private customers who come to buy from the farm directly.
The Sakowiczs receive aid from Brussels too, but Sakowicz considers the EU’s agricultural policies unfair. He can’t understand why farmers in neighboring Germany receive twice as much money as he does for every hectare of land they work. He’s similarly amazed that his neighbors collect premiums for land they own but don’t cultivate. And he watches Belgian trucks pass through Poland, on their way to deliver carrots to Russia with the help of EU export subsidies. “How can they compete with our cheap products?” Sakowicz wonders. “There’s something completely out of balance here.”
Few topics carry such a tradition of controversy within the EU as the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). That’s no surprise — a lot of money is at stake. Around €56 billion — nearly half the entire EU budget — flowed from Brussels into European agriculture in 2009.
Inefficient and Unfair
Negotiations over agricultural policy reforms are scheduled to begin in the first quarter of 2011, and they’re likely to involve tougher haggling than ever before. It’s already apparent that there will be less money available in total starting in 2014, while the European Parliament will have an equal say in these negotiations for the first time, thanks to the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty.
Many, including Berlin and Paris, want things to remain as they are. Both governments are influenced by a powerful agricultural lobby. Others would rather do away with state aid entirely. Only one thing is certain: There hasn’t been a convincing reason for the flood of subsidies from Brussels for a long time. The system is not only inefficient and unfair, but also has a dubious environmental impact.
Currently, farmers in the “old” EU member states receive, on average, three times as much in direct payments per hectare as their Eastern European neighbors. The amount in France is twice that in Hungary, while it’s four times as much in the Netherlands as in Slovakia. The leader of the pack is Greece, where farmers collect more than 10 times as much per hectare as their counterparts in Romania. Additionally, the larger a farm is, the more subsidies it can pocket.
EU Agriculture Commissioner Dacian Ciolos from Romania has proposed an ambitious package of reforms. Ciolos wants to redistribute funds from the old to the new EU member states, slash subsidies for large-scale operations, instead supporting active farmers and small farms and link direct payments more closely to environmental protection requirements.
Ciolos’ opponents were lining up before the commissioner had even publicized his proposals. Germany and France issued a joint statement arguing for “European agricultural competitiveness” and against environmental requirements tied to subsidies. Both countries also insisted there should be no “redistribution between member states.”…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Schengen Membership Delayed for Bulgaria and Romania
Failure to address corruption issues and make judicial reforms means Bulgaria and Romania must wait until October 2011 at the earliest before they can join the passport-free Schengen zone. While Bulgaria appears to have accepted the situation, Romania has reacted with resentment.
For Romanians and Bulgarians, the prospect of passport-free travel within Europe has just slipped further into the future. Sandor Pinter, the interior minister of Hungary, which took over the rotating presidency of the European Union last week, announced on Thursday that Romania and Bulgaria would not be able to join the open-borders Schengen area until October 2011 at the earliest, instead of March as had been originally planned.
Pinter said it was now clear to both countries what requirements they still had to fulfill. He said he would try to broker an EU political agreement on Schengen enlargement by the end of June. “I am an optimist — I never regard anything as a lost cause,” he said. “We are aware of the French and German positions, but there is a defined course of legal steps of action that has to be followed.” The interior and justice ministers of the Schengen countries will be the key decision makers in the process.
This decision is a positive result for France and Germany, who recommended in December that both countries be refused entry into the Schengen zone until they showed measurable improvements in terms of judicial reform and managed to tackle organized crime. Berlin and Paris demanded that both countries should conform to the Cooperation and Verification Mechanism (CVM), an anti-corruption monitoring procedure imposed by the EU in 2007. This special mechanism was established to smooth the entry of both countries into the EU, help them address their shortcomings and simultaneously safeguard the workings of EU policies and institutions. The French and German point of view was shared by other EU countries and gained majority support with the 25 Schengen member countries themselves.
Resentful Romania
Romania has reacted angrily to France and Germany’s objections. President Traian Basescu said on public television on Thursday that the French and German leaders had kept him in the dark at the EU summit in December about their intentions to block their membership a week later. “The problem is not so much that our Schengen entry will be delayed by a few months … but the abuse. Either we are equal partners or not.”
In an interview with Romania’s NewsIn news agency, Romanian Foreign Minister Teodor Baconschi apologized for his previous suggestion that Romania could put hurdles in the way of Croatia’s accession to the EU as a retaliatory measure. Romanian MPs had also said they could delay ratification of a Lisbon Treaty protocol on allowing 18 new MEPs to join the EU parliament.
Despite his bitterness, Basescu admitted that Romania had numerous corruption problems. In a speech to the government and top judges on Wednesday, he said that Romania would not take retaliatory measures against Croatia or other incoming MEPs and that he “assumes political responsibility” for the delay.
Meanwhile in Bulgaria, reactions have been much more relaxed. In December, Bulgarian Prime Minister Boyko Borisov described France and Germany’s criticism as “completely justified” and said they were working on the problems.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Muslim Council Head ‘Clueless’ Over Terror Plot
The head of the Muslim Council of Sweden has said she had no idea that the man with whom her daughter has two children was suspected of plotting an attack on a Danish newspaper when he was arrested last month.
In late December, Munir Awad, a 29-year-old Swede born in Lebanon, is currently detained — along with three other men, including two Swedish citizens — on suspicion of planning a December attack on the Jyllands-Posten daily which had published caricatures of the prophet Muhammad.
Awad, who has been arrested abroad under suspicious circumstances twice before, has two children with the daughter of Helena Benaouda, who heads the Muslim Council of Sweden.
In an interview with the Dagens Nyheter (DN) newspaper, Benaouda said she first learned of Awad’s arrest when she received a call from a journalist.
“I asked my daughter and when we looked for him, he wasn’t anywhere to be found,” Benaouda told the newspaper.
She said that if the suspicions against Awad prove to be true, it would be surprising that her daughter didn’t know anything.
Even though the couple don’t currently live together, they have frequent contact, she explained.
Benaouda, who has previously said she had never come across any Muslim extremists, said it was possible her daughter did not know of the plot.
But she added she should have been suspicious about her son-in-law’s plans.
“Safia says ‘I don’t get it and I don’t know what he is up to’. And I should have known myself. How is it possible to hide such things to those close to you?,” she told the paper.
Awad had also shared a Stockholm-area flat with one of two Swedes of Somali origin who were sent to jail in December for “planning terrorist crimes” in Somalia.
When Awad’s former flatmate was arrested in June, Benaouda told her son-in-law “that he shouldn’t mix with people who get arrested. But I didn’t say more, because I don’t have such a close relationship to him”, she told DN.
At the same time, Benaouda added that extremists often keep their plans secret from relatives.
“Men who really are extremists mistrust society and vice-versa. And at the same time women become suspected by society because everyone thinks they know something,” she said.
Benaouda admitted as well that she was “completely clueless” about the trip Awad and her daughter took to Somalia in 2007, which her daughter had described at the time as a spontaneous side trip from the couple’s Christmas break trip to Dubai.
“I don’t understand myself why someone would want to travel to Somalia,” she said.
Awad has been imprisoned on two previous occasions, once in Ethiopia in 2007 and once in Pakistan in 2009. He also has unpaid debts registered with the Swedish Enforcement Agency (Kronofogden) because the Swedish foreign ministry paid for his trip home from Ethiopia following his release.
However, questions also remain as to how he paid for his trip home from Pakistan.
“I don’t have any insight into their finances. But I know that my daughter doesn’t have any money. She said that Munir paid,” said Benaouda.
Benaouda said she had received threats and not publicly spoken about her son-in-law’s arrest to take the time to deal with the family crisis.
She condemned all forms of extremism in Islam, including Sweden’s first suicide attack, carried out in December by an Iraqi-born Swede who killed only himself after sending a message saying he was acting in the name of Islam.
“There are no holy wars in Islam,” Benaouda said.
“For me, the Stockholm suicide bomber is a criminal. I distance myself from all Islamic extremism. The use of violence is always unacceptable.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
UK: ‘Not Just White Girls, Pak Muslim Men Sexually Target Hindu and Sikh Girls as Well
A day after UKs’ former home secretary Jack Straw blamed some Pakistani Muslim men for targeting “vulnerable” White girls sexually, UK’s Hindu and Sikh organizations also publicly accused Muslim groups of the same offence.
Straw, in an interview to the BBC recently, had said, “…there is a specific problem which involves Pakistani heritage men…who target vulnerable young white girls…they see these young women, white girls who are vulnerable, some of them in care … who they think are easy meat.”
Feeling emboldened by Straw’s statement, UK’s Hindu and Sikh organizations have also come in open and accused some Pakistani men of specifically targeting Hindu and Sikh girls. “This has been a serious concern for the last decade,” said Hardeep Singh of Network of Sikh Organizations (NSO) while talking to TOI on Monday.
Sikhs and Hindus are annoyed that Straw had shown concern for White girls and not the Hindu and the Sikh teenage girls who have been coaxed by some Pakistani men for sex and religious conversion.
“Straw does other communities a disservice by suggesting that only white girls were targets of this predatory behaviour. We raised the issue of our girls with the previous government and the police on several occasions over the last decade. This phenomenon has been there because a minority of Islamic extremists view all ‘non believers’ as legitimate targets,” said director NSO Inderjit Singh.
Targeted sexual offences and forced conversions of Hindu and Sikh girls was not a new phenomenon in the UK, said Ashish Joshio from Media Monitoring group.
“This has been going on for decades in the UK . Young Muslim men have been boasting about seducing the Kaffir (unbeliever) women. The Hindu and the Sikh communities must be commended for showing both restraint and maturity under such provocation,” he added.
Hardeep said that in 2007, The Hindu Forum of Britain claimed that hundreds of Hindu and Sikh girls had been first romantically coaxed and later intimidated and converted by Muslim men…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Britain’s Most Workshy Community: Cottsmeadow Estate in Birmingham
The rundown Cottsmeadow Estate in Washwood Heath, Birmingham tops a table of jobless communities. Figures show that 99.1 per cent there live off benefits.
Britain’s worst benefits blackspot has been revealed — an area where just one person works for a living.
The rundown Cottsmeadow Estate in Washwood Heath, Birmingham tops a table of workshy communities.
Official figures show that 99.1 per cent of working-age adults there live off state handouts.
Among 105 people who could hold jobs, forklift truck driver James Beards is believed to be the only resident who is in full-time employment.
‘I’d never dream of claiming benefits,’ he told the News of the World.
‘It annoys me that I work hard to make a living and other people can just live for free off the state.’
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Call for Inquiry After Undercover Policeman Turns Against the Met
The trial of six protesters accused of conspiring to shut down the coal-fired Ratcliffe-on-Soar power station in Nottinghamshire in 2009 collapsed after Pc Mark Kennedy offered to assist their case, although the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) denied the link. Defence lawyer Mike Schwarz said the officer’s identity was only discovered after he was confronted by campaigners and added that if his evidence had been kept secret there could have been a serious miscarriage of justice.
He said the case raised concerns over the role of an officer as “agent provocateur”, called for an inquiry into “murky” police tactics, and questioned the necessity of spending vast amounts of money and resources infiltrating a “peaceful, accountable and democratic” group. Mr Schwarz said: “My clients were not guilty. They did not agree to join in any plan to occupy the power station. The evidence of Pc Kennedy presumably confirmed this. Yet that evidence, had it been kept secret, could have led to a miscarriage of justice.
“The police need to answer some serious questions about their conduct relating to peaceful protesters.”
He questioned whether it was reasonable to incur costs of hundreds of thousands of pounds to infiltrate “peaceful, accountable, open, democratic” protesters, adding: “These are key questions about the budgets and accountability of the police, particularly when the police seem to be unhappy about answering any questions about their policy on undercover police officers and peaceful protesters. “One expects there to be undercover police on serious operations to investigate serious crime. This was quite the opposite. This was civil disobedience which has a long history in this country and should be protected.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: While Muslim Sexual Predators Have Been Jailed, It is White Britain’s Hypocritical Values That Are to Blame
Not for the first time, Jack Straw has ignited a firestorm of controversy by expressing serious concerns about behaviour within the British Muslim community.
Mr Straw, whose Blackburn constituency is heavily populated by Muslims, spoke out after two British men of Pakistani descent were jailed last week for a series of rapes and sexual assaults on vulnerable young girls, whom they also groomed for sex with other gangs members or their relatives.
This was far from a one-off case. Police operations going back to 1996 have revealed a disturbingly similar pattern of collective abuse involving small groups of Muslim men committing a particular type of sexual crime.
This has typically involved abducting, raping or otherwise sexually attacking hundreds of mainly white girls aged 11 to 16, as well as enslaving them through alcohol and drugs and grooming them for sex.
Mr Straw said the reason was that some British Pakistani men regarded emotionally ‘vulnerable’ white girls as ‘easy meat’ whom they trapped through plying them with gifts and drugs.
The reaction to his remarks from certain quarters was all too predictable.
Keith Vaz, chairman of the Home Affairs Select Committee, said Straw’s comments were ‘pretty dangerous’. Others accused him of being ‘inflammatory’ or ‘stereo- typing’ an entire community.
What all this merely illustrated, however, was the politically correct denial which exculpates the guilty by ruling out of bounds any criticism of the community to which they belong.
For far too long, this has served to suppress an absolutely vital debate which desperately needs to be had. For while, of course, most Muslims repudiate any kind of sexual crime, the fact remains that the majority of those who are involved in this particular kind of predatory activity are Muslim.
The picture is certainly complicated. The overwhelming majority of people who are convicted in general of sex crimes — including sexual abuse within families — are white men.
Nevertheless, we do now know that most cases of gang-led, on-street grooming that have come to light involve British Muslim offenders and young white girls.
Most disturbingly, the police say that these convictions form only a small proportion of a ‘tidal wave’ of such crimes. Yet, until now, there has been a conspiracy of silence over this phenomenon.
[…]
Charities such as Barnardo’s won’t even discuss the cultural background of such criminals. The Home Office refuses to collect such statistics. And, of course, the Guardianistas condemn any such analysis as ‘racialising crime’.
Actually, there is more than a grain of truth in that particular criticism. For this is certainly not a racial issue. Indeed, one of the many red herrings in this debate is that — if cultural characteristics are discussed at all — the gangs tend to be described as ‘Asian’.
But this is to besmirch Sikhs, Hindus, Chinese and other Asians. For these particular gang members are overwhelmingly Muslim men. And the common characteristic is not ethnicity, but religion.
For these gang members select their victims from communities which they believe to be ‘unbelievers’ — non-Muslims whom they view with disdain and hostility.
You can see that this is not a racial but a religious animosity from the fact that, while the vast majority of the girls who are targeted are white, the victims include Sikhs and Hindus, too.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Serbia’s Sandzak Languishes Amid Bitter Muslim Divide
Overwhelmed by cheap Chinese competition and divided by rival Muslim groups, Serbia’s once-thriving Sandzak region is languishing in a deep economic and social malaise that has sparked the first calls for autonomy.
The remote area tucked between Kosovo and Montenegro was once the centre of the Balkans’ black-market textile industry, with factories churning out high-quality replicas of brand-name jeans and shoes to hungry local markets squeezed by sanctions.
But today its main city Novi Pazar is a picture of decline, with many factories standing idle and more than 50 percent of the population estimated at 400,000 to 500,000 unemployed, local officials said. Teenagers hang around in the city’s main square with little to do. Most are glum about their future prospects, and complain about politicians who promise more than they deliver and “muftis who drive around in BMWs or SUVs”.
“My impression is that everything is at a stand-still,” said a woman in her 40s who gave her name as Azra.
“This is a catastrophe. All most young people think about is going abroad. Some have turned to drugs,” she said. Much of the economic malaise is put down to the lifting of economic sanctions following the ouster of Serbian strongman Slobodan Milosevic in 2000, which allowed cheap Chinese and Turkish imports to compete with local products.
In the 1990s as ethnic wars raged in Bosnia and Croatia following the breakup of the old Yugoslav federation, the Sandzak region carved out a profitable niche supplying black-market goods for Serbia and Montenegro, which were under international sanctions for fueling the fighting. Now, business leaders are pinning their hopes on the European market, with Serbia working to obtain European Union candidate status next year. “Our principal trump card is that we are in Europe. We can make smaller batches and export quickly,” said Tigrin Kacar, a local businessman. The economic crisis, however, has fanned internal tensions in the predominantly Muslim Sandzak region — which borders Kosovo, which unilaterally declared independence from Serbia in 2008 in a move not recognised by Belgrade.
In recent years, a bitter battle has been waged for influence among Sandzak’s Muslim religious community, stoked by two rival muftis. So far incidents have been minor, mainly skirmishes over rival property claims. On one side of the divide is a group led by Adem Zilkic, which is based in the capital Belgrade and recognised by the Serbian government as the official interlocutor for the country’s Muslims. But his influence is being undercut by the mufti of Novi Pazar, Muamer Zukorlic, who accuses his rival of kowtowing to Belgrade and who set up a rival organisation in 2007…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Flurry of Threats Against Copts Posted on Islamic Sites
Cairo, 5 Jan. (AKI) — Numerous threats to Egypt’s Copts have been posted on fundamentalist Muslim websites ahead of the Coptic Christian Church’s Christmas and in the wake of the New Year’s Eve attack in Alexandria, which killed 23 people.
A recent message posted on the al-Shumukh website and others considered close to Al-Qaeda addressed themselves directly to Coptic pope Shenuda III who was warned of “imminent new strikes” against Egyptian Copts.
One message on a forum promised that “we will strike you all in a new attack. We have warned you as Allah is my witness.”
A missive posted on website Mujahideen simply warned: “There will be new attacks very soon.”
The Coptic church of Saint Mary and Saint Mark in the Paris suburb of Chatenay-Malabry had reportedly been threatened. Copts in Germany have also asked for protection after receiving similar threats.
The Austrian interior ministry on Monday announced that that country’s Copt community was put under protection after the discovery of a list of 150 Copts targeted for attack. England has also implemented security measures.
Barnaba El Soryani, who is a religious leader for the Copt population in the northern city of Turin, in an interview with Adnkronos International said he has “asked for protection by the Italian police during a prayers” that will take place on 6 January, the day that marks Christmas Eve on the Coptic calendar.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: North Africa in Revolt, Domino Effect Via Web
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, JANUARY 10 — Is it an “awakening” within the Arab world, which “is getting ready to rise up against dictatorships”? This question is travelling via Facebook and Twitter among young Egyptians, who are closely watching the bread revolt — first in Tunisia and then in Algeria. One of them also came up with the idea to hold a demonstration out of solidarity with Tunisian protestors, which was later called off due to the attack in Alexandria, while among opposition journalists and commentators the prevailing idea is that what has been happening in the two North African countries will have a domino effect on Egypt, which saw similar protests in 2008.
In web messages the most disillusioned young people compared ideas with those seeing the revolt in North African countries almost as a sort of example for Egypt. “You are forgetting that nothing is happening here,” wrote one young person, while another said there was instead a need to “encourage people not to be overwhelmed by passiveness and desperation”. “Here is a population which is dying for its country and not for a football match,” was the comment made by one internet user, referring to the violence which broke out in Egypt when Algeria defeated its national football team, thereby excluding it from the South African World Cup. Change will come from Upper Egypt “due to the difficult conditions in which young people find themselves”, predicts another blogger, while slogans such as “Yes to Democracy, No to fraud and corruption” are also seen. The well-known opposition blogger Mohamed arei told ANSA that he and other bloggers had considered holding a support protest on Sunday in central Cairo but that after the attack in Alexandria it had been put on hold. “Arab dictatorial and police-state regimes have failed. The situation began to explode in Tunisia and then spread to Algeria, and it will undoubtedly also spread to other Arab countries,” Marei said.
While on the web there is lively debate, the events in Tunisia and Algeria have not yet received much attention in Egyptian press sources, which are focusing on the Alexandria attack. A few newspapers have highlighted the news, especially those from Algeria. According a commentator from the independent newspaper Al Masri Al Youm, Hassan Nafaa, “Egypt and Tunisia share some common denominators. A single family rules the country. Ben Ali controls the situation thanks to the police while his wife and children control the economy. The same situation is seen in Egypt.” “Egyptians are more patient,” he noted, though in his opinion there will also be a domino effect in Egypt. “The political situation is tense: there is disappointment within the population over the vote rigging in the December elections, with the spectre of a transition within the presidency from father to son hanging over the situation.” According to Abdallah el Senawi, editor-in-chief of the Nasserite newspaper El Arabi, there are analogies between the Algerian and Tunisian situations with those of other countries.
“In Egypt,” he noted, “high living costs, oppression by the police, a monopoly on the economy and the political sphere by a small minority leads to the prediction that violence is inevitable.”
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
North Africa’s Disenfranchised Youth Break Their Silence
The suicide of a young Tunisian university graduate in protest at rising unemployment has set off a wave of unrest and resonated with a generation of North African youth who see no opportunity to better their lives.
Tunisia is experiencing its third week of unrest touched off by the suicide of an unemployed youth, Mohamed Bouzizi, whose dramatic end has come to embody the frustration and anger shared by youth across North Africa.
The 26-year-old university graduate died Tuesday from burn wounds after dousing himself in petrol and setting himself ablaze on December 17. The act of despair reportedly came after police confiscated the fruits and vegetables he sold without a permit.
“The self-immolation reflects the deep anguish felt by North African youth,” said Pierre Vermeren, a regional expert who teaches at the Sorbonne University in Paris. “The youth are part of an economic situation they don’t understand, and they feel like they don’t have control over their future.”
Clashes with police erupted in the country following the youth’s extreme act of protest, leaving three people dead, several wounded and cars and buildings set ablaze. People attending Bouazizi’s funeral on Wednesday blamed the government for the young man’s death and vowed revenge.
On the same day in neighbouring Algeria, dozens of youths burned cars and businesses and clashed with police in a poor district of the capital. The riots reportedly broke out in protest at soaring food prices, and were only the latest in a series of sporadic but recurrent protests in several key Algerian cities.
Few jobs, high prices
“It’s evident there is a trend of contagion,” said Burhan Ghalioun, Director of the Centre for Contemporary Oriental Studies at the Sorbonne.
The unrest Tunisians have witnessed is rare. The government, which is routinely criticised for its human rights record, has been effective at silencing any opposition. But the suicide of Bouazizi has resonated with the population, who like in Algeria, complain of the rising price of basic food items and the lack of jobs.
Unemployment stands at around 14 percent in Tunisia, but is much higher outside the capital and beachside tourist zones; in regions like Sidi Bouzid in the centre-west, where Bouazizi took his life. The many university-educated youths who cannot find jobs are particularly frustrated.
Similar spaces
According to Vermeren, the mostly blue-collar based economies of Algeria and Tunisia offer few and unappealing prospects to the growing number of university graduates. The recent protests, Vermeren said, are prompted by the youths’ sense of despair, but are also inspired by trends elsewhere.
Ghalioun agreed about the shared regional malaise: “These populations live in geographic proximity, but also inhabit similar political, psychological and economic spaces. They see what is happening, understand that something needs to be done and join in.”
According to Ghalioun, the tightly controlled countries of North Africa have no means other than repression to respond to the current uprisings, and will once again prove what he describes as their unsustainable nature.
“The governing systems in the Maghreb are similar. They exclude, repress and concentrate wealth among a few people,” said Ghalioun. “They will continue to manage these small bursts of opposition, but eventually, they can’t hold.”
The Sorbonne scholar also warns of the radicalisation of social movements like the one launched in Tunisia by students. For Ghalioun, the new protesters lack the utopian impetus or the religious zeal of past generations, but their irrepressible feeling of discontent is just as strong.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Debate in Turkey Over Armenia Friendship Monument
Modern art or a blight on the landscape? A giant monument to friendship between historic enemies Turkey and Armenia has become a symbol of controversy rather than healing.
Turkey’s prime minister said the monument near the Armenian border is a “freak” that overshadows a nearby Islamic shrine, underscoring complex tensions in predominantly Muslim Turkey over religious piety and free expression in a society torn between the modern and the traditional.
The monument features a divided human figure, with one half extending a hand to the other half. It is meant to symbolize the pain of division and the hope of reconciliation, and was sculpted from stone by Mehmet Aksoy, a prominent Turkish artist.
“We would not show any sign of disrespect against any artist or tear down and discard his work of art,” Culture Minister Ertugrul Gunay said Monday. “The theme of the monument is correct, it gives the message of friendship. But there has been a controversy over the location of it for several years.”
The monument has yet to be completed, and local authorities halted its construction on grounds that it was built on a historic military site, Timur Pasha emplacement, used to defend the city in the 16th century. Newspapers published pictures of the monument with a gigantic hand, which has to be installed, sitting on the foreground.
On a weekend visit to Kars, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan described the monument as an affront to the shrine of Hasan Harakani, one of the pioneers of Islam in the area in the 11th century.
“They have put a freak near the shrine,” Hurriyet newspaper quoted Erdogan as saying. “They have erected something weird. The municipality will turn that place into a nice park.”
Hurriyet cited Aksoy as saying that he wanted to finish the monument.
“If it still does not make sense, then I will join them in tearing it down,” he said.
Some hardline nationalists criticized the monument on grounds that it suggested Turkey was apologetic toward Armenia…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Iran: Leading Human Rights Lawyer ‘Jailed for 11 Years’
Tehran, 10 Jan. (AKI) — Prominent Iranian human rights lawyer Nasrin Sotoudeh has been sentenced to 11 years in jail, according to her family. She was also banned from practising law and travelling abroad for 20 years, her family said.
The New-York based International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran deplored Sotoudeh’s sentence as a “gross miscarriage of justice” and said that it should be overturned by an appeals court.
The judge sentenced her to five years in prison on charge of “acting against national security,” another five years for “not wearing hijab (the face-covering Islamic veil) during a videotaped message,” and one year for “propaganda against the regime,” The International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran said.
Reza Khandan, Sotoudeh’s husband, said she was also found guilty of membership of the Human Rights Defenders’ Centre, a group headed by Iranian Nobel peace prize winner Shirin Ebadi.
Reza Khandan, Sotoudeh’s husband, in an interview with the Campaign described the ruling as “highly strange and unjust.”
The accusations were levelled against Sotoudeh, mainly over interviews with foreign-based media about her clients jailed after Iran’s disputed June 2009 presidential election, Khandan said.
Sotoudeh has defended Iranian opposition activists and politicians and has defended many of those arrested during and after the 2009 presidential polls. The Iranian opposition alleges the polls were rigged to ensure hardliner Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election.
Ebadi, is one of Sotoudeh’s clients and has campaigned strenuously for due process to be observed in her case. Ebadi is reported to have organised a sit-in at the UN Human Rights Council to raise awareness about the case and to plead for more international support.
Sotoudeh, a 45-year-old mother of two, was arrested on 4 September 2010, accused of acting against national security. Detained for long periods in solitary confinement, and denied contact with her family and lawyer, she nearly died after three dry hunger strikes to protest her prison conditions and violations of due process, according to the Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.
She has reportedly been tortured in prison in order to force her to confess to crimes. Her physical condition had deteriorated to the point that her children cried in shock when they were finally allowed to see her, the group said.
UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Navy Pillay expressed concern about Sotoudeh on 23 November 2010, stating: “I am very concerned that Nasrin Sotoudeh’s case is part of a much broader crackdown, and that the situation of human rights defenders in Iran is growing more and more difficult.”
On 7 January, Shiva Nazarahari, co-founder of the Committee of Human Rights Reporters rights group and a prominent activist was sentenced to four years in prison and 74 lashes.
On 30 October 2010, Branch 15 of Tehran’s Revolutionary Court sentenced prominent lawyer Mohammad Seifzadeh to nine years in prison and a ten year ban from practising law.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Persecution of Christians in the Middle East
The New Year began for Christians in the Middle East in the same manner as the last one had ended: twenty-one Egyptian Christians were murdered in a bomb attack in Alexandria, just weeks after more than fifty Iraqi Catholics had been slaughtered inside their church by Islamic terrorists. Perhaps all this is best described as the work of some crazed, gruesome optician, because while Christians in Islamic states have suffered for decades now much of the world, including and sometimes particularly the Christian world, seemed blind to what was going on. It has taken the horrors of Egypt and Iraq to clear the vision of at least some who prefer political myopia.
Let’s be clear why these innocent men, women and children were slain while at prayer in Egypt and in Iraq. Militant Muslims at best grudgingly tolerate Christianity and often see it as a foreign, western, heretical cancer that has to be removed from the body of Islam. There are eight million Christians in Egypt, in a country of 70 million Muslims. They face daily persecution, regular violence, and a frequent refusal by the police and state to provide basic protection. In Iraq there has also been a determined attempt to provoke Christians into joining the virtual civil war between Sunni, Shiite and the rest. So far and to their great credit Christians have not retaliated. What they have done, and what Christians have done throughout the Middle East, is to leave, resulting in the evaporation of an historic community that pre-dates Islam and has worshiped as followers of Christ while those who knew Him personally were still alive. One of the horrible ironies of the Iraqi situation is that under Saddam Hussein Christians were not singled out for persecution and even enjoyed religious toleration in what was — contrary to what some would have believe — a secular state where religious fundamentalism was not only controlled but vehemently rejected.
Syria has a similar approach and the thriving Christian community, around 10 per cent of the population, is part of the fabric of the country. The same applies to a large extent in Jordan. In Egypt the situation was different in the past, but the rise in Islamic fundamentalism has made sure that Christians face a difficult time. In Saudi Arabia it is illegal to announce one’s Christianity and virtually impossible to live as a Christian.
Palestine is more complex. Christians and Muslims co-existed in the area and continued to do so long after Israel was created in 1948. Christians left more often than Muslims because they tended to be more educated, were less attached to the notion of “the land” and had more connections in and familiarity with the west.
Today there are still numerous parts of the West Bank where Palestinian Christians live equal and full lives but, tragically, Islamic fundamentalism here and especially in Gaza has created a whole sea of problems and many Christians would rather swim to a foreign shore than drown at home. Supporters of Israel will argue that the Christian exodus from towns such as Bethlehem is all the fault of Islam, enemies of the Jewish state will tell you it’s about Israeli aggression. Truth is it’s a combination of both…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Rewarding Bad Behavior
By Barry Rubin
US President Barack Obama’s recent decision to appoint a new ambassador to Damascus is further proof positive of the effectiveness of the strategy pursued by Syria over the last half decade. It also showcases the sense that the current US administration appears to be navigating without a compass in its Middle East diplomacy.
The appointment of experienced and highly regarded regional hand Robert Ford to the embassy in Damascus is not quite the final burial of the policy to “isolate” Syria. The 2003 Syria Accountability Act and its sanctions remain in effect. But with Syria now in possession of a newly minted American ambassador, in supposedly pivotal negotiations with Saudi Arabia over the Special Tribunal in Lebanon, with its alliance with Iran intact, having repaired relations with Iraq, and in continued, apparently cost-free defiance of the International Atomic Energy Agency over inspections of its nuclear sites, the office of President Bashar Assad could be forgiven for feeling slightly smug.
Syrian policy appears to have worked. And since there are few more worthy pursuits than learning from success, it is worth observing closely its actions on the way to bringing about its resurgence.
Syria’s regional standing was at its nadir in 2005: Assad was forced to abandon his country’s valued and profitable occupation of Lebanon; the US was in control in Iraq; Israel appeared to have turned back the assault of Damascus-based Islamist terror groups. The future seemed bleak for the Assad family regime.
How did we get from there to here? The formula has been a simple and familiar one, involving the potential and actual use of political violence and the subsequent offer of restraint.
Thus, Syria set out to successfully prevent the achievement of stability in Lebanon. A string of murders of anti-Syrian political figures, journalists and officials began almost before the dust had cleared from the departure of the last APC across the border in 2005.
The semicoup undertaken by Syrian-allied Hizbullah and its allies in May 2008 set the price of further isolation of Damascus at a rate higher than either the US or “pro- Western” Arab states were willing to pay. The process of Saudi-Syrian rapprochement began shortly afterward.
It has now reached the somewhat surreal stage where Damascus, which was almost certainly involved in the killing of Rafik Hariri, is being treated as a key player in helping to prevent the possibility of violence by Syrian and Iranian sponsored organizations in the event of their members being indicted for the murder.
With regard to Israel, the defense establishment and part of the political establishment maintain an attitude of patience and forgiveness toward the Syrian regime. This, to be sure, has its limits. Damascus’s attempt to develop a nuclear capacity was swiftly and effectively dealt with in 2007. On two known occasions in recent years, Israel has brushed aside Syria’s domestic defenses to engage in targeted killings against senior military or paramilitary figures on Syrian soil.
Yet the belief that Syria seeks a way out of the supposedly stifling bear hug of the Iranians remains prevalent in defense circles and in large parts of the political establishment.
This perennial article of faith means that in the event of Syria’s feeling lonely, it need only raise an eyebrow in Israel’s direction for the eager suitor to come running.
This took place, for example, in October 2007, at a time when Syria had good reason for feeling isolated…
| — Hat tip: Barry Rubin | [Return to headlines] |
The Real Reason of the Massacres of Christians and Jews in the Middle East
Il Giornale, January 5, 2011
How can we stop the slaughter of Christians in the Islamic world, how can we prevent the next massacre in Iraq, Turkey, the Philippines, Nigeria, wherever Islamic groups may be? First of all, we should start calling things by their real name: this is not ideological “religious intolerance” and the perpetrators are not random “fundamentalist groups” or “some terrorist”. If we look at the map, we can find examples in many countries: massacres, expulsions, kidnapping of women, acts of vandalism on churches… It is the entire Islamist world that is battering Christians with the terrible inexorability of its hatred, but all those who — opportunistically or for fear of reprisals against Christians — have kept silent, in hopes of appeasing the aggressors, share in the responsibility. The fact that as soon as the Pope protested, calling a spade a “spade”, namely calling Islam “Islam”, the Mufti of Al Azhar blasted him for “interference”, says a lot about the paradoxical attitude of institutional Islam: what do a few murders matter? The perpetual Roman enemy has no right to speak out.
If we ask the theologian and professor Father Peter Madros, now in the Patriarcate of Jerusalem, formerly director for many years of the Frères College in Bethlehem, where he fought the decimation of Christians without making discounts to the Israelis either, he can clearly indicate the explanation in the text of the Quran: “After pages where the text explains that harmony must reign within the People of the Book, though with the subjection of Christians and Jews who (verse 9/29) must in any case pay Jizya (the tax for non-Muslims, ed.note) unless they convert to Islam, there is another revealing verse (5/51): do not allow either Jews or Christians to rule over you”.
The heart of the problem is right here: the Islamist world is determined to build a world in which the other two main faiths are held in a state of cultural, religious and political subjection. And instead, in the last seven centuries the western world has been dominanting and, in the bigoted interpretation of vast organizations and even entire countries like Iran, this amounts to a declaration of war. This is the war that Islamism now wants to win. Not everyone in that world feels that way, but bombs make a lot of noise, while good will remains silent.
In 1919, the Egyptian revolution adopted a green flag with the crescent and the cross. Both Muslims and Christians participated in the nationalist revolution against British colonialism. But mostly since the assassination of Sadat, who had signed a peace agreement with Israel, the new élites left room to a process of gradual Islamization aimed at appeasing the most aggressive organizations, like the Muslim Brotherhood. The textbooks used in the schools today describe Egypt as an Islamic country only, and the children read also anti-Christian texts. As the Jerusalem Post writes, organ transplants between Muslims and Copts are prohibited by a decision of the physicians’ union. Labor unions indeed are often dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The government recently halted construction of a stairway in a Coptic church and Copts are under constant attack (8 were killed also a year ago). Despite being no less than 10 percent of the population, they have no political representation.
Mubarak, by acting this way, keeps the Brotherhood at bay, and thus succeeded to marginalize it in the last elections. This is the way that Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Syria, Jordan and Pakistan behave: they think they have tamed the tamer, who actually becomes stronger and stronger, thereby threatening even his leadership.
The Iranian, Lebanese and Turkish television have accused “Zionists” of the New Year’s massacre in Alexandria. Oh sure, let’s try to put at least some of the blame on the Jews once again! That is their style: from the Farhud pogrom of Baghdad in 1941, in which 180 Jews were killed, and then in Libya (130 dead) and also in Turkey (three attacks on the Nevè Shalom synagogue from 1986 to the present, with 47 dead), to all the violence that has caused the flight of almost all the Jews, the Islamic world has kicked out of the Arab countries between 800,000 and a million Jews. These are refugees that the U.N. has always refused to recognize, like the Christians in flight from the same countries, where the Christian population, once the native one and the majority, is now reduced to 6 percent.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Washington Concerned as Turkey is Leaving the West
Since taking power in landslide democratic elections in 2002, the Justice and Development Party, or AKP, is leading Turkey in a new direction, both domestically and in terms of foreign policy. This direction includes rapprochement with Iran; working more closely with the Islamist regime of Sudan despite the indictment of its president on genocide charges; supporting the Hamas movement which rules Gaza; and fostering stronger ties with Russia and China. Turkey’s leaders have distanced themselves from the United States and have deliberately worked to undermine relations with the country’s former friend and ally Israel while failing to reach a breakthrough with neighboring Armenia.
From the point of view of the U.S., this direction is detrimental to Turkey’s traditional secular democracy, as well as to its close relations with the West. Washington sees AKP leadership championing a process in which Turkey is coming under the rule of a populist authoritarian regime rooted in Islamism.
Increasing Turkish frustration with the European Union’s haughtiness and the United States’ perceived indifference opened a window of opportunity for Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu to begin implementing a policy described in his book “Strategic Depth.”
In his work, Davutoglu emphasizes a “zero problems with neighbors” approach to regional foreign policy relations. Thus, Turkey’s new foreign policy concept is to emerge as a regional hegemon through developing economic presence, interdependence, and a conspicuously important diplomatic role. To this end, Turkey has promoted visa-free tree travel with “Shams” — the former greater Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire, including Lebanon, Syria and Jordan. It has also moved closer to Russia, China, Iran, and the neighboring Muslim states.
In December 2004, Vladimir Putin became the first Russian president to visit Turkey in 32 years. His visit precipitated increased high-level political contact with Moscow and Turkey’s relations with Russia have been improving notably since then, with Ankara and Moscow sharing business and geopolitical interests. Russia became Turkey’s largest trade partner in 2008 and there are hopes that trade could reach a volume of $100 billion over the next five years. Such a major increase in trade would be, in part, due to the $20 billion nuclear plant agreement signed by the two leaders in May 2010, to be built near Mersin on Turkey’s southern coast.
As well as economic advances, Turkey has developed a no-visa requirement treaty with the Russians. This burgeoning close relationship with Prime Minister Putin’s assertive and revisionist Russia also marks the progress of Turkey’s realignment away from its traditional allies. It is also forging new and closer friendships in the Middle East.
The return of the Sultan?
Turkey’s relations throughout the Middle East combine elements of the old and the new: Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Davutoglu clearly oppose any strengthening of the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK, and Kurdish autonomy in northern Iraq. However, they have shown that they are willing to protect Islamic interests on the basis of their common faith.
Despite the designation of Hamas as a terrorist organization by both the EU and the U.S., the AKP administration has opened communication with the Islamist group. In 2010, Davutoglu met with Khaled Meshaal, the Damascus-based leader of Hamas’ political wing. Prime Minister Erdogan also defended Hamas at a Konya rally in June 2010. “I do not think that Hamas is a terrorist organization. I said the same thing to the United States…” he said. Davutoglu’s surrogates defended Turkey’s outreach to a number of terrorist groups as part of its “zero problems with neighbors” policy.
However, this willingness to talk does not apparently apply to relations with Israel. Even after its welcomed extension of fire-fighting assistance to Israel, President Abdullah Gül and Prime Minister Erdogan hastened to clarify that “friendship with Israel is over” and “it is out of the question for Israel to use NATO facilities,” apparently referring to a NATO missile defense radar to be deployed in the future. As often happens, the Turkish leaders made a mistake, alleging that “Israel does not even cooperate with NATO.” In reality, NATO-Israel ties are robust, within the Mediterranean Dialogue and beyond.
Turkey’s position on Israel, its former Middle Eastern ally, has shifted dramatically in the course of this geopolitical realignment. Turkey gradually abandoned its role as a neutral mediator between Israel and its Arab neighbors and has become an active supporter of Arab and Muslim causes against Israel.
The relationship disintegrated after the tragic Gaza flotilla incident. The Turkish response was overwhelming. Turkey withdrew its ambassador, announcing he would not return unless Israel apologized and paid compensation to the relatives of those killed during the infamous fight. Furthermore, when Ankara rewrote its national security threat assessment document (“the Red Book”) in 2010, it removed Iran and placed Israel on the critical threats list.
Iran: The litmus test
Above all else, however, it is Turkey’s support for Iran’s nuclear program that proves to Washington that Turkey’s foreign policy objectives are changing. Ankara, once an important ally in helping to contain Iran, has become a friendly diplomatic ally of the Islamist dictatorship in Tehran.
Working with the Lula government in Brazil, Ankara aided and abetted Iran’s efforts to forestall U.N. sanctions in response to its long-standing nuclear defiance. Turkey and Brazil colluded with Iran to resurrect a nuclear fuel swap proposal originally hatched by the Obama Administration in the fall of 2009. Erdogan’s administration even defended his decision by suggesting that a U.S. presidential letter, addressed to Brazil’s leadership, authorized them to pursue the plan despite the international call for sanctions on Iran. However, the Obama letter warned Brazil about previous Iranian perfidy in conducting nuclear talks while ignoring such important and self-evident issues as the necessity to expatriate all of the nuclear mass produced by its enrichment program, install IAEA controls, and verifiably shut down any potential military applications — including enrichment. Thus, the letter was anything but a green light for Brazil, let alone NATO ally Turkey, to pursue a separate track in dealing with Iran.
US concerns ignored
How does Turkey’s foreign policy realignment impact on U.S.-Turkish relations? While Obama used the term “model relationship” to describe diplomatic engagements between the U.S. and Turkey in 2009, Erdogan’s reforms have limited the country’s democracy and Turkey’s unwillingness to work with the U.S. has brought the partnership into question.
After all, the AKP government offered Russia a condominium in the Caucasus during the Russo-Georgian war, delayed U.S. aid from reaching Georgia during the same 2008 conflict, became an advocate for Iran, possibly facilitated arms transfers to al-Qaeda and Hezbollah, and ignored Obama’s requests to improve relations with Israel.
It is true that Turkey has devoted resources to the war in Afghanistan and peacekeeping in the Balkans — and for that the U.S. is grateful. But such acts do represent sufficient grounds to assume that all is well in the relationship.
Turkey is facing a tough choice: if it wants to emerge as a “First World” economy and a liberal democracy, it needs to protect its interests in the West and expand ties with the United States. Such a choice would dictate both internal and foreign policy priorities, different from policies aimed at becoming a leader of the Muslim and Middle Eastern worlds.
If, instead, Turkey prefers to be a “Sultan” of the East, it will continue to emphasize the priorities that are now in place: attack Israel, develop ties with radical Islamists from Tehran to Gaza to Khartoum, and irreversibly change the nature of the country.
*Ariel Cohen is senior research fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy at the Davis Institute for International Studies at The Heritage Foundation. The full version of this article was published in the fall 2010 issue of Turkish Policy Quarterly.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Azerbaijani Islamic Party Members Arrested, Sentenced
Five members of the unregistered Azerbaijan Islam Party (AIP) have been arrested by police in Baku for resisting arrest in what is being called a crackdown on the party, RFE/RL’s Azerbaijani Service reports.
AIP head Movsum Samadov, 45, was detained on January 7 along with three other party members. They were sentenced to 10-15 days in jail.
Party press secretary Akif Heydarli was detained on January 9.
Heydarli told RFE/RL that Samadov and three other party members were stopped by police while driving in a car. They were asked for their documents and then told they were resisting arrest and detained.
AIP member Inqilab Ahadli told RFE/RL today that the whereabouts of Samadov and Heydarli were currently unknown.
Party officials called the charges against the men baseless and said the arrests and sentences were politically motivated.
On January 2, Samadov gave a speech during a party meeting in Baku in which he sharply criticized a recent government ban on head scarves in Azerbaijani middle schools.
In the speech (see video here), Samadov referred to a “Washington Post” article from last year alleging that Azerbaijani President Ilham Aliyev has millions of dollars worth of property in Dubai.
“We are against those who are against our religion. We have to destroy such a cruel regime and its head,” he continued. Attendees at the meeting chanted slogans such as “Allahu Akbar!” (God is great).
The Interior Ministry said in a press release that it had received information that Samadov gave instructions to his cousin, Dayanat Samadov, to cause a disturbance, “violate security,” and “provoke people to jihad.”
The ministry said it searched the electrical shop where Dayanat Samadov works and found three hand grenades as well as seven automatic rifle cartridges at his home. It said it had arrested him and the shop owner and launched an investigation…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Attempted Murder of an Indian Christian Leader in Karnataka
The attack took place yesterday evening at a prayer service in Davanagere. The victim was hit with a cleaver and was saved by a miracle. Hindu radicals ‘anti-conversion’ law behind the attack. “It ‘s an excuse for anti-Christian violence,” says the chairman of the Global Council of Indian Christians, recalling the Pope’s message on religious freedom.
Mumbai (AsiaNews) — There has been a murder attempt of a Christian leader in India. Pastor Isaac Samuel, coordinator of the Global Council of Indian Christians in Davanagere in the state of Karnataka, was attacked yesterday, Sunday, Jan. 2, at 20:30. Isaac Samuel was leading a prayer service for some Christians who belong to the nomadic community, the Pikk Akki, and live in a camp near the bus station in Davanagere. The attack took place in front of his wife and two sons.
“The Hindu fundamentalists who were opposed to the prayer service attacked the Pastor with a cleaver with the clear intention of killing him,” Sajan George, president of the Global Council of Indian Christians told AsiaNews. “Thank God the blade missed his head, getting him instead in the neck and shoulder, however seriously injuring the pastor.” The victim was transported to the state hospital Chigateri at Davanagere, where doctors closed the wound with twelve stitches. He is still under treatment, and although he had to undergo a blood transfusion, seems out of danger.
“The attack on Samuel Isaac underscores the timeliness of the Holy Father’s urgent appeal that freedom of religion is the path to peace,” said Sajan George. “Furthermore, the government of the Bharatiya Janata Party must realise that the ‘anti-conversion’ law has a history of misuse by Hindu fundamentalists, and has provided an excuse for anti-Christian violence in other states.” Thanks to the Global Council of Indian Christians, the police took action and initiated an investigation into the aggression, which was widely covered by local media and television. A man, identified only by the name of Bansava, has been arrested. With the collaboration of Santosh Digal
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
German FM’s Visit: Pakistan May be Asked to Act Against German Jihadists
The presence of German nationals with al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan’s tribal regions is likely to be discussed when German Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle hold talks with political and military leadership here this weekend. He is scheduled to arrive in Islamabad on Saturday. He is also likely to meet the head of Pakistan’s powerful spy agency, the Inter Services Intelligence (ISI). Officials said the German foreign minister is likely to urge key officials in Islamabad and Rawalpindi to “eliminate German militants undergoing terrorism training in tribal regions”. According to an estimate, around 150 ‘homegrown’ German militants have joined al-Qaeda in various parts of the world…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Indonesian in Court in Danish Embassy Case
A court case has begun in Indonesia against a man accused of preparing an attack against the Danish embassy.
A militant Islamist is in court in Indonesia today charged with planning a terrorist attack against the Danish embassy in Jakarta, according to the international media.
According to the police, SS, 28, was part of a terrorist cell which planned the attack as revenge for the publication by Jyllands-Posten of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed.
SS, was arrested in June 2010 and police maintain he was part of a larger cell run by a man who was also arrested at the time. Police told the Indonesian news agency Antara at the time that the cell had planned to attack a police anniversary celebration on July 1, 2010 as well as the Danish embassy.
He risks receiving the death penalty if found guilty.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: Punjab: Salman Taseer’s Assassin Linked to Islamist Movements
Mumtaz Qadri affiliated with the conservative group Dawat-e-Islami. The fundamentalist leaders celebrate the killing and call for a boycott of the mourning for the death of the governor. Marches tomorrow in Karachi in favour of the blasphemy law. Catholics pray for Taseer and call for “thorough investigations” into killing.
Lahore (AsiaNews) — Mumtaz Hussain Qadri, the murderer of Salman Taseer — Governor of Punjab, who was killed on January 4 — belongs to the Dawat-e-Islami group, an Islamic Association of political and (officially) non-violent nature, which is based on the Barelvi conservative movement. A march organized by Islamic radicals against the “conspirators” who want to repeal the blasphemy law is planned for tomorrow in Karachi. Meanwhile, Catholic leaders in Pakistan, having decided not to attend Taseer’s funeral of to avoid further incidents, have laid flowers and prayed at the governor’s tomb. The leadership of the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) has also called for “thorough investigations” and demanded that the guilty be “brought to justice.”
A colleague of Mumtaz Qadri (pictured) has confirmed that he belonged to the Dawat-i-Islami group, close to the Sunni Muslim movement Barelvi. Founded in 1880, it has spread throughout the Indian sub-continent and has been characterized for its promotion of Islamic tradition and the fight against any attempt to modernize doctrine. More than 500 Islamic leaders of the movement have paid tribute to the murderer and called on “Muslims all over the country” to boycott the days of mourning in memory of Salman Taseer. Tomorrow a Tahfuz Namoos-e-Rislat March will be held in Karachi, an initiative against any “conspiracy” to repeal the blasphemy law. The leaders of the Tehreek-e-Namoos Rislat have met people and personalities from all walks of life, inviting the population to join the mass march. The city has been plastered with posters and billboards, leaflets, lauding the “march of the million” to support the infamous law.
Meanwhile, the leader of the Catholic Church of Pakistan has paid tribute to the figure of Salman Taseer and his efforts against the fundamentalist current that is sweeping through Pakistan. Fr. Emmanuel Yousaf Mani, director of the National Commission for Justice and Peace (NCJP) has laid flowers at the tomb of the governor and prayed for the deceased and the family. The priest has called on “ the government to investigate and ensure that the guilty be” brought to justice. “ He also expects “a clear position” from the executive and “effective legislative initiatives” to eradicate religious extremism from Pakistani society, putting into practice “the necessary measures to stop misuse of the blasphemy law.”
In a statement Archishop Lawrence Saldanha of Lahore and chairman of the Bishops’ Conference of Pakistan, has honoured the memory of Salman Taseer. Expressing “deep regret” and “sincere condolences” for the death of the governor, the Archbishop spoke of “the admiration and respect” of the Christian community for “his courageous position in favour of Asia Bibi” and his request to “repeal the law blasphemy. “ His death, the bishop concludes, is a signal of growing religious fanaticism in Pakistan, a country that shows “zero tolerance” for the faithful of minorities or those who think differently.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: Fury Over Doctor’s Book on Sex Education for Muslims
Dr Mobin Akhtar is on a mission to educate Pakistanis in sexual matters, but his latest attempt to do so has caused controversy.
The release of his book — Sex Education for Muslims — aims to teach people about sex in a way that is in keeping with Islamic instruction.
Dr Akhtar, 81, says the fact that sex is not discussed in Pakistan is having serious repercussions. As a psychiatrist, he says he has witnessed them himself, and that is why he felt the need to write his book.
“There’s a huge problem in our country,” he says.
“Adolescents, especially boys, when they get to puberty, and the changes that come with puberty, they think it’s due to some disease.
“They start masturbating, and they are told that is very dangerous to health, and that this is sinful, very sinful.”
‘Misconceptions’
Dr Akhtar says he has seen cases where teenagers, not understanding what is happening to their bodies, have become depressed and even committed suicide.
“I myself passed through that stage with all these concerns, and there’s no-one to tell you otherwise, and that these are wrong perceptions. It was only when I entered medical college that I found out that these were all misconceptions.”
He says even now in Pakistan, many doctors do not discuss sexual matters openly, and that teachers and parents are embarrassed about the issues. There is no sex education teaching in government schools.
Dr Akhtar says it is not seen as appropriate to broach the subject of sex in the conservative culture of Pakistan, and that it is also felt that doing so might encourage young people to behave in an “un-Islamic” way…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Sermons Motivated Killer of Pakistani Politician
The confessed killer of a liberal Pakistani politician provided a judge Monday with the names of two men whose sermons allegedly sparked him to act, as YouTube footage emerged of the assassin chanting Islamic verses in police custody.
The slaying of Punjab province Gov. Salman Taseer nearly a week ago shocked many around the world, but tens of thousands of Pakistanis have expressed support for 26-year-old Mumtaz Qadri, who said he killed the governor for criticizing laws that carry the death penalty for insulting Islam.
That support — and the lack of criticism of the assassination by many politicians — shows the increasing influence of hardline Islamist ideology in Pakistan, a key ally in Washington’s war against Taliban and al-Qaida militants in the region.
Pope Benedict XVI spoke out against Pakistan’s blasphemy laws Monday, saying they should be repealed because they were used as a pretext for violence against non-Muslims.
“I once more encourage the leaders of that country (Pakistan) to take the necessary steps to abrogate that law,” said the pope. “The tragic murder of the governor of Punjab shows the urgent need to make progress in this direction. The worship of God furthers fraternity and love, not hatred and division.”
Human rights activists have also said Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are used to settle rivalries and persecute religious minorities. Governor Taseer had called them “black” laws, but he wasn’t demanding they be repealed. Instead, he wanted them reformed so they wouldn’t be misused. Taseer became energized by the case of a Christian woman, Asia Bibi, who he said was wrongly sentenced to death for insulting Islam’s prophet, Muhammad. The pope also called for her release. Qadri told a judge Monday in written testimony that he decided to kill Taseer after he attended a gathering on Dec. 31 organized by Shahab-e-Islam, a small Islamist group that operated in his neighborhood in Rawalpindi, just outside the capital, Islamabad. He said speeches given by a cleric leading the group, Qari Hanif, and another member, Ishtiaq Shah, played a major role in his decision…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Sodomy and Sufism in Afgaynistan
By Spengler
Social scientists attached to the Second Marine Battalion in Afghanistan last year circulated a startling report on Pashtun sociology, in the form of a human terrain report on male sexuality among America’s Afghan allies. The document, made available by military sources, is not classified, just disturbing. Don’t ask, don’t tell doesn’t begin to qualify the problem. These are things you didn’t want to know, and regret having heard. The marines got their money’s worth from their Human Terrain adjuncts, but the report might have considered whether male pedophilia in Afghanistan has a religious dimension as well as a cultural one. I will explain why below.
Most Pashtun men, Human Terrain Team AF-6 reports, engage in sex with men — boys — in fact, the vast majority of their sexual contacts are with males. “A culturally-contrived homosexuality [significantly not termed as such by its practitioners] appears to affect a far greater population base then some researchers would argue is attributable to natural inclination. Some of its root causes lie in the severe segregation of women, the prohibitive cost of marriage within Pashtun tribal codes, and the depressed economic situation into which young Pashtun men are placed.”
The human terrain team responded to scandalous interactions between Pashtun fighters and North Atlantic Treaty Organization troops, some reported with hilarity by the media. An article in the Scotsman of May 24, 2002, reported, for example: “In Bagram, British marines returning from an operation deep in the Afghan mountains spoke last night of an alarming new threat — being propositioned by swarms of gay local farmers. An Arbroath marine, James Fletcher, said: ‘They were more terrifying than the al-Qaeda. One bloke who had painted toenails was offering to paint ours. They go about hand in hand, mincing around the village.’ While the marines failed to find any al-Qaeda during the seven-day Operation Condor, they were propositioned by dozens of men in villages the troops were ordered to search.”
Another interviewee in the article, a marine in his 20s, stated, “It was hell. Every village we went into we got a group of men wearing makeup coming up, stroking our hair and cheeks and making kissing noises.”
The trouble, the researchers surmise, is “Pashtun society’s extremely limited access to women,” citing a Los Angeles Times interview with a young Pashtun identified as Daud. He only has sex with men, explaining: “I like boys, but I like girls better. It’s just that we can’t see the women to see if they are beautiful. But we can see the boys, and so we can tell which of them is beautiful.”
Many of the Pashtuns interviewed allow “that homosexuality is indeed prohibited within Islam, warranting great shame and condemnation. However, homosexuality is then narrowly and specifically defined as the love of another man. Loving a man would therefore be unacceptable and a major sin within this cultural interpretation of Islam, but using another man for sexual gratification would be regarded as a foible -undesirable but far preferable to sex with a ineligible woman, which in the context of Pashtun honor, would likely result in issues of revenge and honor killings.”
How prevalent are homosexual relations among Pashtuns?…
| — Hat tip: TB | [Return to headlines] |
US Concerned Over China’s New Weapons: Gates
US Defense Secretary Robert Gates voiced concern over China’s latest hi-tech weaponry and called for improving uneasy military relations with Beijing to help defuse tensions.
Speaking to reporters en route to Beijing for three days of talks, Gates said the Chinese appeared to have made more progress in building its first stealth fighter jet than previously thought and that an anti-ship missile posed a potential threat to the US military.
“They clearly have the potential to put some of our capabilities at risk. And we have to pay attention to them, we have to respond appropriately with our own programs,” Gates said.
But he said the advances in weaponry underlined the importance of building a dialogue with the Chinese military, and said his visit starting Sunday hopefully would lay the ground for deeper defense ties with Asia’s rising power.
“My hope is that through the strategic dialogue that I’m talking about that maybe the need for some of these capabilities is reduced,” Gates said.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Australia: Muslim Culture Hard for Converts to Penetrate
AUSTRALIAN women who convert to Islam often find themselves with a foot in two camps and a tent in neither. A Muslim community may be very welcoming, but converts often find ethnic and language barriers difficult.
And, though they find themselves acting as spokeswomen for their new faith because they are more confident with the language, more certain of their entitlement to be heard, and are less likely to be inhibited by a perception that Muslims are negatively stereotyped in the culture at large, they are not always popular with Muslims, or non-Muslims, when they speak out.
So said Jamila Hussein, an academic who lectures in Islamic studies at the University of Technology, Sydney, who converted to Islam in 1988.
New research by Swansea University on behalf of Faith Matters showed that over the past decade the number of converts to Islam in Britain has risen from 60,000 to 100,000 — a big jump — and that 5200 people converted last year alone, among them Lauren Booth, the sister-in-law of the former prime minister, Tony Blair.
While there is nothing like the same sort of conversion rate in Australia, it is an under-the-radar phenomenon that brings with it unheralded problems that converts must rely on themselves to face.
Ms Hussein, for example, who says there are two types of convert — “boots-and-all, tending to extremist”, or “rational and gradual” such as herself — belongs to a group of Muslim women, mostly converts, who meet in Auburn every Friday evening to discuss their faith, explode myths for newcomers and share the peculiarity of their experience.
“Suddenly you are not a part of mainstream Anglo society, and yet you might not feel entirely accepted by local Muslim communities either,” Ms Hussein said. Her views are echoed by Silma Ihram, formerly principal of the Noor al-Houda Islamic College, and a convert…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Bloodshed Mars Sudan Ballot
Violence in a contested Sudanese territory has marred a historic independence referendum in Africa’s biggest country, with more than 70 people reportedly killed.
Clashes between feuding ethnic groups in Abyei started on January 7, two days before nearly 4m people in southern Sudan began casting ballots on whether or not to secede from the Arab-led Muslim north.
Results of the seven-day poll are likely to show they have voted overwhelmingly for partition.
Residents from Sudan’s central Abyei region were promised their own referendum on whether to join the north or the south, but leaders could not agree on how to run the poll and the vote did not go ahead.
Estimates of the bloodshed in Abyei vary, with some sources saying that more than 73 people have been killed and 54 wounded in fighting between the Misseriya Arab and Ngok Dinka peoples.
Southern Sudan’s army, the SPLA, reported more than 20 dead and 30 wounded near the border with Abyei but said the area was calm on Monday.
“We are assuming that the Misseriya were worried that Dinka want to effect a unilateral decision on the 9th [to secede from the north],” Deng Mading of the Abyei Referendum Forum, a Dinka activist organisation, told the Financial Times. “They want also to disturb and disrupt the referendum going on in the south through the Abyei.”
Other people suggested the dispute in Abyei started with more local grievances between cattle herdsman and police. Elsewhere, the polling across southern Sudan has been largely peaceful.
John Prendergast, founder of the Enough Project campaign group, warned that Abyei represents “flash-to-bang potential” and could explode into “a full-scale war”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Fears Grow for Minorities in North Sudan if South Votes to Secede
As southern Sudanese prepare to vote for independence tomorrow, the jubilation at the prospective breakup of Sudan that is so widespread in the south is not shared by everyone in the north.
Particularly concerned are people in the two “contested areas” — South Kordofan and Blue Nile — who fought alongside the southerners in the civil war but have been left in the north by Sudan’s comprehensive peace agreement (CPA).
With predominantly African populations of Nuba and Ingessana, who practise Christianity and traditional religions in addition to Islam, the people of the two areas are now being referred to as janubeen jadeed — the new southerners. This reflects their potential future status as marginalised Africans on the southern periphery of an integrated Arab-Islamist state. Precisely the same situation that led to the southerners calling for independence.
To complicate matters, virtually all of north Sudan’s current oil production is in South Kordofan. If Southerners vote to secede, Khartoum stands to lose the 80% of its oil supplies currently produced in the south, and is unlikely to countenance losing the rest.
Under the CPA, the two areas are supposed to have “popular consultation” on their future status, but this process — like the referendum for Abyei district — is completely off-track and people are extremely nervous about their future should the south vote to secede and President Omar al-Bashir carry out his threat to amend the constitution to consolidate north Sudan as an Arab-Islamic state with no concessions for racial or religious minorities.
Bashir recently declared: “If south Sudan secedes, we will change the constitution, and at that time there will be no time to speak of diversity of culture and ethnicity … sharia and Islam will be the main source for the constitution, Islam the official religion and Arabic the official language.”
This statement — coupled with his defiant stance on Islamic law after international condemnation of a YouTube video of a woman being flogged by laughing policemen — has caused massive unease among north Sudan’s minorities. Bashir said those calling for an investigation into the ill-treatment misunderstood Islam, because “sharia law has always stipulated that one must whip, cut, or kill”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Islamic Militants Ban Somali Men and Women From Shaking Hands on Pain of Death
People who break the rules could be imprisoned, whipped or even executed.
The insurgents have already banned women in the south of the country from working in public, leaving many mothers with a terrible choice: Either risk execution by going to sell some tea or vegetables in the marketplace, or stay at home and watch their children slowly starve.
Judge and jury: Somali militia of Al-Shabab at their military training camp outside Mogadishu.
‘It’s an awful rule. I feel like I’m under arrest. I’ve started to ignore the greetings of the women I know to avoid punishment,’ said Hussein Ali from the southern town of Jowhar.
The edict is also being enforced in the town of Elasha, said student Hamdi Osman, where gunmen are searching buses for ‘improperly dressed’ women or women travelling alone.
She said she was once beaten for wearing Somali traditional dress instead of the long, shapeless robes favoured by the fighters.
The Islamists’ insistence that women wear the heavy robes also forces many women to stay at home because they can’t afford the new clothing.
Al-Shabab controls most of southern and central Somalia, and the group is trying to overthrow the weak UN-backed government.
Analysts believe that many Somalis don’t support the insurgency because of the harsh punishments and severe restrictions it imposes, and because it often kidnaps children to use as fighters.
But after 20 years of civil war, the government is too weak, corrupt and divided to present a credible challenge to the insurgents.
The Somali government is protected by 8,000 heavily-armed African Union peacekeepers but has failed to deliver any security or services to the population.
The insurgents even control parts of the capital Mogadishu, brazenly carrying out amputations, whippings and stonings in public places. The list of forbidden things differs from town to town and commander to commander.
In Jowhar, the insurgents are now also insisting that men grow their beards but shave their moustaches, said another resident, who asked not to be named for fear of retribution.
The Islamists have also banned the cinema, music, and even bras because they say they are all un-Islamic.
Such restrictions are influenced by foreign fighters practicing Wahhabi Islam, a strict form of Islam which originates from Saudi Arabia.
Somalia’s own traditional Sufi Islam has a more relaxed view of permissible lifestyles, and incorporates a long tradition of poetry and song.
‘The last time I listened a song or music, was two years ago, before the insurgents managed the full control of my village,’ said Bile Hassan.
Now, he says, even the memory of music makes him feel afraid.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Nigeria: Policeman Guarding a Church is Killed
Gunmen suspected to be part of a radical Muslim sect attacked a church and killed a policeman in northeast Nigeria, just weeks after police assigned officers to protect churches in the region, authorities said Monday.
At least eight other people died in weekend rioting in the central Nigerian city of Jos, a flashpoint of religious tension between Christians and Muslims, police said. Security forces patrolled the city’s empty streets, as many stayed home out of fear of new attacks.
The policemen was killed after gunmen in Maiduguri opened fire on the church in a drive-by shooting near the Maiduguri International Airport after the sunset Sunday night, Borno state police commissioner Mohammed Abubakar said. Abubakar said the attackers also shot the church’s watchman in the leg and in the shoulder.
“We were in the house when we heard some gunshots — pow, pow, pow — and within four minutes, the gunmen fired several gunshots into the church wall and entrances,” Rev. Elshah Gufwan said.
Abubakar blamed a sect known locally as Boko Haram for the attack. Security forces thought they had crushed Boko Haram after rioting in 2009 and the death of its leader. Now, members have stepped up their attacks, ambushing policemen at security checkpoints and orchestrating attacks in broad daylight.
Sunday’s assault was the latest since two Christmas Eve church attacks left six people dead, including a pastor and choir members who had been practicing for a late-night carol service…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Nigerian City of Jos Becomes Ghost Town After Clashes
Nigeria’s central city of Jos is a ghost town after weekend clashes between rival groups left at least 18 people dead.
Journalist Andrew Agbese told the BBC banks, schools and markets were closed as residents feared more violence.
More buildings were set alight in one area of the city on Monday and extra security forces have been deployed.
Jos lies in Nigeria’s volatile Middle Belt — between the mainly Muslim north and largely Christian south.
It has been blighted by violence between rival ethnic groups over the past decade, with deadly riots in 2001, 2008 and last year.
Wedding bus attack
“The whole town is deserted — the usually busy terminus area, where there is high commercial activities, is at a standstill; there is nobody there and all the shops are locked,” Mr Agbese, from Nigeria’s Daily Trust newspaper, told the BBC’s Focus on Africa programme…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: More Immigrant Plans Lined Up
Floating prisons and old army camps may be used as reception centers; rally against fence organized
Greece is considering using both floating prisons and old army bases to house undocumented migrants, the government has revealed as its idea of constructing a fence on the Greek-Turkish border to deter illegal immigration continues to attract criticism.
Citizens’ Protection Minister Christos Papoutsis revealed on Wednesday after a Cabinet meeting that the government is considering at least a couple of options regarding how to handle the large number of immigrants entering Greece.
“We are looking at military facilities that are not being used by the Greek armed forces… to allow humane living conditions for immigrants who enter our country,” he told Mega TV.
“There must be some order, Greece can no longer tolerate the situation: 200 to 300 people enter the country every day without papers.”
Greece says about 128,000 immigrants arrived in the country illegally last year, the highest figure for any European Union member state.
Papoutsis also admitted that the government was looking into the possibility of using floating detention centers to house immigrants who are arrested. “We must review the difficulties, which include the high cost of the transfer of such a vessel and various docking issues.”
The Netherlands uses such floating facilities and there have been reports that Greek government officials are due to visit the fellow EU member to gather information about them.
Papoutsis’s proposals come just a few days after he announced plans to build a 12.5-kilometer fence near the Evros River in northeastern Greece, which he suggested would prevent some illegal immigrants from entering the country.
However, human rights groups and labor unions have slammed the plan. The civil servants’ union ADEDY and a group called United Against Racism and the Fascist Threat have called a rally for Saturday, January 15 to protest against the fence’s construction.
“When we heard about the fence, it evoked memories of concentration camps,” said City of Athens councilor and protest organizer Petros Constantinou. “The government is talking about stopping illegal immigrants getting into the country when some of these people are refugees who warrant international protection.”
“They are trying to turn the Greek worker against migrants by claiming that they are stealing his bread,” said ADEDY board member Despina Spanou. “It is not true.”
Turkey’s Minister for European Union Affairs Egemen Bagis said Ankara was not worried by the plans for a fence but doubts it will be effective. “The decision to construct a fence on the Greek-Turkish border is not an act aimed at Turkish citizens,” he said. “But it is not a solution, it will just move the problem somewhere else.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Immigration: Border Control Must Not Encroach on Asylum Seekers’ Needs — UN Agency
NEW YORK, United States-The United Nations refugee agency has voiced concern that States trying to prevent the entry of irregular migrants into their territories are doing so without establishing guarantees to ensure the protection of those in need. The UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) said it has received inquiries about recent statements by Greece about the possibility of building a 12-kilometer fence along its side of the border with Turkey in the Evros region.
“While every State has the right to control its borders, it is clear that among the many people crossing Turkey toward the European Union [EU], there are a significant number who are fleeing violence and persecution,” said Melissa Fleming, the UNHCR spokesperson in Geneva. “Establishing border control mechanisms which are sensitive to the needs of people seeking protection is therefore vital,” she said.
Fleming said that building fences rarely solves the underlying problem of migratory pressures, including those of people seeking protection. There is a risk that those requesting asylum will resort to even riskier routes to safety-a reason why large numbers of asylum-seekers find themselves in the hands of groups that smuggle human beings, she added. The problem in Greece is compounded by the fact that the asylum system is still not functioning properly, despite ongoing reform efforts, according to Fleming. UNHCR is working with government partners to establish a fair process for assessing the claims of asylum-seekers. Currently, thousands of asylum-seekers are “living in limbo in Greece,” she said. In Turkey, the government continues to implement a geographic limitation to the 1951 Convention relating to the Status of Refugees, a move that will allow the country to take responsibility for granting asylum only to refugees who come from European countries. However, most asylum-seekers in Turkey originate from Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia, Fleming said.
Claims of asylum-seekers of non-European origin in Turkey are assessed by UNHCR and those who are found to be refugees are permitted to remain, pending resettlement to a third country. However, the number of resettlement places falls short of the needs and at present there are approximately 10,000 refugees awaiting resettlement from Turkey. “UNHCR is encouraging more countries, and in particular EU member-states, to show solidarity with Turkey by participating in the resettlement effort,” said Fleming.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Immigration: UN Refugee Agency Warns on Greek Anti-Immigrant Fence
GENEVA, Jan 7 (Reuters) — The U.N. refugee agency voiced concern on Friday that Greece’s proposed 12.5 km-long fence at its border with Turkey will shut out asylum-seekers fleeing violence and abuse in their troubled homelands. The fence could lead illegal migrants, including people in need of international protection, to resort to even riskier routes with the help of unscrupulous human traffickers, it said.
Greece said on Monday it planned a fence at its border with Turkey in the Evros region to prevent a wave of immigrants flowing into the debt-choked country. Nine out of 10 illegal immigrants use Greece as their springboard into the European Union. “While every state has the right to control its borders, it is clear that among the many people crossing Turkey toward the European Union, there are a significant number who are fleeing violence and persecution,” Melissa Fleming, spokeswoman for the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, told a news briefing. “Building fences, we believe, rarely solves the underlying problem of migratory pressures,” she said.
Immigration was likely to be discussed during Friday’s visit by Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou to Turkey. Greece must establish border control mechanisms that provide concrete guarantees to people seeking international protection, according to UNHCR. Asylum seekers from Afghanistan form the biggest group entering Greece, followed by those from Somalia, Iraq and Eritrea.
Jean-Philippe Chauzy of the International Organisation for Migration echoed the concerns. “What we’ve seen in all parts of the world is when a wall is being built to seal a border, smuggling networks basically take migrants and asylum-seekers on increasingly dangerous routes. Obviously there is a human cost.” Greece’s land border with non-EU Turkey is more than 200 km (125 miles) long and mostly runs along a river. The fence will be built in the area where most migrants arrive, officials say. “That route is already dangerous. In fact there are large numbers of migrants and people seeking asylum, potentially, who are drowning en route at the hands of notorious smugglers. So we’re concerned that this could get even worse,” Fleming said. The problem is compounded by Greece’s asylum system which UNHCR qualifies as “dysfunctional” despite reform efforts. (Editing by Jonathan Lynn and Angus MacSwan)
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Asylum Seeker Who Claimed to Have Been Gang-Raped and Witnessed Family’s Murder in Somalia Exposed as £250k Benefit Fraudster
An asylum seeker who claimed she had been gang-raped in Somalia was jailed today for swindling more than £250,000 in a ‘professionally planned’ benefit scam.
Amina Muse, 38, also conned Swedish authorities out of £50,000, spending the money on luxury living and holidays in Africa.
While she claimed asylum in the UK based on ‘appalling atrocities’ committed against her in Somalia, investigators found she was living in Sweden at the time.
Handing her a four-and-a-half-year prison term at Harrow Crown Court, in north London, Judge Stephen Holt told her: ‘One of the most serious aspects of this case is your cynical, dishonest manipulation of the whole system of asylum.’
Muse, a mother of six, who also went by the name of Ayan Abdulle, sought refuge in Britain after moving to Sweden in 1995 where she was granted citizenship and enjoyed a ‘comfortable’ life.
On her UK asylum application, disclosed today, she claimed militiamen stormed and looted her family home in war-torn Somalia on December 1, 1998, because she was a member of a minority group.
‘They opened fire at us and then broke into our house by force,’ she said. ‘They shot dead my brothers Asad and Burhan. They died instantly in our presence.’
But investigators, who suspect the Muse to be of Kenyan descent, found this to be the date on which she gave birth to a child in Sweden.
Between June 2004 and May 2010, Muse, from Neasden, north-west London, claimed a total of £261,358.14 in income support, disability living allowance for one of her children and carer’s allowance for herself.
This included child benefit, child tax credits and housing benefit from various local authorities.
She received a total of £112,985.51 from the borough of Camden where she lived in a four-bedroom property.
Condemning her deceit, Judge Holt said: ‘In my view it was fraud from the outset. It was professionally planned.’
He added: ‘In 1995 you and your family, as it then was, arrived in Sweden in the name of Abdulle and you were given Swedish passports and your children were given Swedish passports.
‘You had, as I understand it, two more children in Sweden and one in Denmark and you decided in June 2003 to come to this country and you entered this country under the name of Amina Muse which the jury found, and I’m quite satisfied, was entirely false.
‘You applied for asylum in this country and in your long statement for asylum, you set out appalling atrocities that had happened to yourself and your immediate family, including murder and rape of some of your nearest and dearest during the time when you were living comfort in Sweden at the expense of the Swedish taxpayer.
‘That document was entirely false.’
Andrew Evans, prosecuting, told the court Muse made her asylum application on the grounds she had a well-founded fear of persecution if she returned to Somalia.
Besides the murder of her two brothers, she said her niece had been raped, tortured and beaten and that she, herself, had been gang-raped while three-months pregnant, leading to a miscarriage.
But jurors did not believe her claims.
Judge Holt told Muse she had exploited the British asylum system which relied on ‘goodwill’.
This was done to make as ‘much money for yourself as possible’ in an act which amounted to ‘professional fraud’, he said.
‘Your actions harm the people who really do need and deserve asylum.
‘Having gained entry to this country, over the next six years you applied for every single benefit in the name of Amina Muse.’
She managed to draw further handouts under the name of Abdulle, he told the court, adding: ‘I hear evidence of you flying backwards and forwards between Sweden and London and taking holidays back in Africa.
‘In total you took somewhere in the region of £261,358.14 from the British taxpayer and have shown absolutely no remorse.’
The international investigation involved HMRC, the Department for Work and Pensions, the UK Border Agency, two local authorities and the authorities in Sweden.
This and the subsequent prosecution cost the public purse a further £150,000.
Of her four-and-a-half year jail sentence, Muse will serve half in prison and the rest on licence.
The judge said this was a more lenient sentence than might have been imposed and took into consideration the welfare of Muse’s children, the ‘real victims in this case’.
The court was told the defendant cannot be deported because she is a British citizen, a matter to be reviewed by the Home Office.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Latvian Sham Marriage Bride Irina Iljina Caught in Bed With Another Man
This is the first picture of a bride-to-be who was rumbled on the eve of her sham wedding — when she was found in bed with another man.
Irina Iljina from Latvia, 22, was due to marry Indian national Parminder Singh, 22, on December 17.
As the husband of a European national Mr Singh would have been granted long-term UK residency and benefits.
But suspicious UK Border Agency officers decided to raid Ms Iljina’s home the night before her big day.
She was found in bed with her boyfriend in what officials described as ‘compromising circumstances’.
The pair living in Peterborough both pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to breach immigration laws.
Mr Singh also admitted a perjury charge when they appeared at Peterborough Crown Court on Friday.
The court heard that the UK Border Agency was notified when the couple registered their intention to marry on November 30.
The registrar contacted officials as the couple were not interacting and seemed to know very little about each other.
Sam Bullimore, UK Border Agency assistant director, said: ‘It’s reasonable to say the compromising circumstances in which Iljina was arrested cast further serious doubt on what was an already dubious relationship.
‘Where we uncover suspicious marriages, we will challenge them and prosecute where appropriate.’
Both Mr Singh and Ms Iljina are due to be sentenced on January 28 at Peterborough Crown Court…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Carolyn McCarthy Readies Gun Control Bill
One of the fiercest gun control advocates in Congress, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy (D-N.Y.), pounced on the shooting massacre in Tucson, Ariz., Sunday, promising to introduce legislation as soon as Monday targeting the high-capacity ammunition clip the gunman used.
McCarthy ran for Congress after her husband was gunned down and her son seriously injured in a shooting in 1993 on a Long Island commuter train.
“My staff is working on looking at the different legislation fixes that we might be able to do and we might be able to introduce as early as tomorrow,” McCarthy told POLITICO in a Sunday afternoon phone interview.
Sen. Frank R. Lautenberg (D-NJ) said he’s preparing to introduce a similar bill in the Senate.
“The only reason to have 33 bullets loaded in a handgun is to kill a lot of people very quickly,” Lautenberg said in a statement. “These high-capacity clips simply should not be on the market.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Muslim Clerics Across the World to Unite Against Terrorism.
Sahit Muja: Muslim clerics across the world to unite against terrorism. Muslim clerics across the world used their Friday prayer ceremony today to discuss tolerance and call on Christians and Muslims to unite against terrorism, as they condemned a deadly bombing outside a Coptic church in Egypt last week.
Coptic Christians around the world are celebrating their Christmas Day on Friday.
Having lived in Muslim country’s, I know that most Muslims are just trying to do what the rest of the world is . Feed and shelter their families and live secure and peaceful life. The Question is, why such people, who are undoubtedly in the vast majority, are so silent when things like this happen.
Where is the outrage that should be there? Where is the leadership in cutting off funding to terrorist outlaws? Why is there virtually no guidance from Islamic religious leaders to counter the propaganda of the radicals? And does anybody, other that the poor misguided foot soldiers of the extremist movement, really believe that power, money, and perverted pleasure in bloodshed are not the true motivations of extremist leaders?
Unfortunately, Islamic radicalism will continue to prosper in the face of such weakness on the part of mainstream Muslims and their leaders. Unless all Muslims condemned and act against terrorism.
Islam is a religion based on justice and equity, which does not admit terrorism, extremism and injustice.
Islam strongly condemned terrorism and extremism, and warned of strict punishment for those who spilled blood.
As Albanian Muslim myself I have repeatedly warned Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and other Muslin nation that some institutions and mosques are hotbeds of Islamist radicalization. Some of the institutions are making Islam religion a tyrant and a persecutor…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
No Extra Time for US Particle Lab
The hunt for the elusive Higgs boson particle — crucial to current theories of physics — looks set to become a one horse race.
A US “particle smasher” has been denied an extension that would have kept it running until 2014.
The Tevatron accelerator will now end operations this year as was originally planned.
After that, Europe’s Large Hadron Collider (LHC) will have a clear run at searching for the particle.
The Tevatron facility is operated by the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory (Fermilab) which is in turn run by the US Department of Energy (DOE).
In October last year, an expert panel recommended extending the Tevatron’s lifetime by three years, allowing physicists to continue using the accelerator in their hunt for the Higgs.
Fermilab employees have now been told that a difficult US budget situation means the panel’s recommendation will not be followed, and the particle smasher will be closed this year.
But scientists are keen not to write off the Tevatron, which will continue to gather data until September 2011…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
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