10 Reasons Why the Latest Unemployment Numbers Are No Reason to Cheer
The U.S. government is telling us that the unemployment rate fell all the way down to 9.0% in January. Should we all cheer? Is it now going to be a lot easier to find a job? Has the economy finally turned around? Are happy days here again? Well, it is a good thing to have a positive attitude, but the truth is that there is just not much to cheer about when you take a closer look at the recent unemployment numbers. First of all, the U.S. economy only added 36,000 jobs in January. Economists had been expecting an increase of about 145,000 jobs, and an increase of 150,000 jobs per month is necessary just to keep up with population growth. So why did the unemployment rate go down? Well, the government says that over half a million Americans suddenly dropped out of the labor force in January. That doesn’t make a lot of sense, but this is how the government calculates their numbers. So what happened to those 500,000 Americans? Did they all win the lottery? Have they all become independently wealthy? Did they all die? No, the vast majority of them are still around and the vast majority of them still desperately need jobs. It is just that the government does not count them as “looking for work” anymore.
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U.S. workers have been merged into a “global labor pool” where we are expected to directly compete for jobs with people making slave labor wages on the other side of the globe.
The more time you spend thinking about that, the more you start realizing that the standard of living of average American families is going to continue to decline.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
EU Debt Crisis: The Axis Reclaims Its Power
Le Monde Paris
The ‘competitiveness pact’ hammered out between Paris and Berlin could yet be a milestone in the construction of Europe, says Le Monde. If only they had not relegated the other member states and the Commission itself to mere onlookers.
Paris and Berlin have not always seen eye-to-eye on issues of economic governance, but now that is set to change with the a pact designed to bring about policy convergence in the 17 Eurozone countries, and ideally in the rest of the Union, which will include provisions on public sector wages, corporation tax, retirement, and public spending. The initiative marks a major shift in the position of Chancellor Angela Merkel and her colleagues in the German government, who were so reluctant to come to the aid of the Greece in the spring of 2010 — and should be hailed as a positive development.
There is no longer any question of German isolationism. On the contrary, Mrs Merkel now aims to launch a major drive for economic and monetary consolidation within the EU, and her renewed commitment to the European project should certainly be praised. At the same time, however, her proposal raises a number of questions that are cause for concern.
First and foremost, there is the issue of the content of the “competitiveness pact”. There is no denying the need for financially stable pension systems, but Germany’s suggestion that raising the retirement age to 67 contributes to competitiveness is highly debatable. The country, which could be criticised for having no minimum wage legislation, should be careful that its pact does not become a mechanism to undermine the welfare state.
‘Dangerous precedent’
Secondly, there is the issue of the manner in which Germany and France have forged ahead with this plan, which has effectively relegated the European Commission to the role of expert consultant. That is not to say that the Franco-German initiative does not deserve a positive welcome, but that in the long-term it may set a dangerous precedent that could undermine the prerogatives of the European Commission.
Thirdly, there is the question of European development. The competitiveness of the European Union is simply a matter of national economies, and in this regard, it is worth noting that the pact does not include any mention of infrastructure projects, notably in the field of energy, which could enable the EU to be more competitive.
However, in spite of these reservations, the fact that Europe’s politicians are no longer content to simply put out fires but are actively taking control of a difficult situation is certainly positive. The pact project is the first step towards greater economic coordination in Eurozone which is most definitely necessary…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Lebanon: Import in 2010 +10.6%, Italy First European Supplier
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 4 — Lebanon’s imports for 2010 totalled 17.96 billion dollars, a 10.6% increase on 2009. The country’s trade deficit reached 13.71 billion dollars (7.5% more than in 2009), despite the 22.07% increase in exports, which stood at 4.25 billion.
The figures, which have been published by the Office of Statistics of Lebanese Customs and analysed by the Italian Trade Commission in Beirut, suggest that Italy is Lebanon’s main European supplier, and is in third position overall, behind the United States and China.
Over the period in question, the value of Italian exports towards Lebanon was of 1.39 billion dollars, with a market share of 7.8% (a 7.5% increase compared to the same period of the previous year). In comparison to 2009, Italian exports continue to record the highest increase among its main competitors (+13.8%).
From a sector-by-sector perspective, Italian exports, in order, were refined oil, with 37.9% of total exports (529 million dollars), mechanics (13.8% of the share, 192 million dollars), chemical products (8.2%, 115 million), textiles and clothing (6.7%, 94 million), metal products (5.7%), food and drink (3.4%), construction materials and transport vehicles (3.3% for both), plastic and rubber (2.9%) and shoes (2.4%). The figures again demonstrate the healthy structure of Italian export compared to some of its main competitors. Indeed, 46.2% of US exports are in refined oil and 15.6% in mechanics; vehicles make up 53.2% of German exports, while 34% of the figure from France is from refined oil, with 17.9% from perfumes and cosmetics.
The main products involved in Lebanese exports, meanwhile, are gold and jewellery, with 1.11 billion dollars (a 26.1% share of the total export), machinery with 742 million dollars (17.4%), metals and metalwork (460 million, 10.8%), vehicles (361 million, 8.5%) and food (324 million, 7.6%).
Italy imported only 31 million dollars in goods from Lebanon (+6.9% on 2009), chiefly scrap metal and fertilisers.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
AFL-CIO’s Trumka Backs New Anti Mubarak Egyptian Labor Federation
AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka is backing the Egyptian revolution.
From the Communist Party USA’s Peoples World.
“Egyptian workers…have broken away to form their own independent unions and federation and join the popular protests against President Hosni Mubarak’s dictatorial rule.”
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“We salute you in this brave endeavor” of forming the new labor federation “and join the international labor movement in standing with you,” Trumka added. “The peoples’ movement for democracy in Egypt and the role unions are playing for freedom and worker rights inspires us and will not be forgotten,” he concluded.
Who will Trumka blame when American workers pay double to fill their gas tanks?
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Among Nation’s Youngest, Analysis Finds Fewer Whites
WASHINGTON — Whites continued to decline as a share of the American population in 2009, and they now represent less than half of all 3-year-olds, according to a Brookings Institution analysis of census data released Monday.
The country’s young population is more diverse than ever, with whites now in the minority in nursery schools, preschools and kindergartens in eight states — Arizona, California, Florida, Hawaii, Mississippi, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas — and the District of Columbia, according to William H. Frey, a demographer at Brookings. That was up from six states in 2000.
“We are on our way to having a majority of minority students in U.S. schools,” Mr. Frey said.
Nationally, whites accounted for 58.8 percent of all school enrollment in 2009, Mr. Frey said, citing the new data, which measured enrollment from preschool to graduate school as of October 2009. That was down from 64.6 percent in 2000, a decline that came with falling birthrates as the white population aged.
Population growth has come instead from Hispanics, blacks and Asians, whose children represent ever larger shares of the school population. Twenty-three percent of children in kindergarten were Hispanic in 2009, up from 18 percent in 2000 and 10 percent in 1989. Hispanics now account for nearly a fifth of all enrollment from nursery school through college, Mr. Frey said.
The United States has been experiencing the biggest surge of immigrants since the late 19th and early 20th centuries, when European immigrants considerably expanded the population.
And while immigrants have long taken to cities, more recently they have spread throughout the nation, creating diverse student populations in places that had been overwhelmingly white.
The states whose white children dipped to below 50 percent of nursery school and kindergarten enrollment most recently were Arizona, Florida and Nevada, Mr. Frey said. Next in line are Georgia, Louisiana and Maryland, he said.
The gap between the country’s diverse young population and its older white one is raising difficult issues for policy makers, who are trying to balance the growing costs associated with the aging white population with the need for financing to educate an increasingly diverse youth.
Education experts who have studied the issue say the United States is lagging behind in educating minority students. The past big wave of immigrants took more than a generation to integrate into the economy through education, they say, a delay the country can ill afford in today’s age of global competitiveness.
“These students will be an important source of our labor-force growth as baby boomers begin retiring,” Mr. Frey said.
| — Hat tip: Paul Green | [Return to headlines] |
AOL to Buy the Huffington Post in $315 Million Deal
The Huffington Post, which began in 2005 with a meager $1 million investment and has grown into one of the most heavily visited news Web sites in the country, is being acquired by AOL in a deal that creates an unlikely pairing of two online media giants.
The two companies completed the sale Sunday evening and were expected to announce the deal Monday morning. The deal will allow AOL to greatly expand its news gathering and original content creation, areas that its chief executive, Tim Armstrong, views as vital to reversing a decade-long decline.
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Big Lie in Bill O’Reilly’s Obama Interview: The Muslim Brotherhood Has Only One Strain, An Islamic Supremacist Virus
Bill O’Reilly conducted a live pre-Super Bowl interview yesterday of President Obama from the White House on Fox. Given the time constraints and the protocols governing respect for the office of the President, O’Reilly’s tone was more constrained than usual, but he still managed to elicit some disturbing insights into Obama’s thinking.
For example, President Obama told O’Reilly that he’s not terribly concerned about the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. After all, according to Obama, who invited members of the Muslim Brotherhood to attend his own speech in Cairo in June 2009 and who has invited the president of a Muslim Brotherhood-affiliated Islamic organization in America to the White House for Ramadan dinners, only certain “strains” of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology “are against the U.S.” and the Muslim Brotherhood is only “one faction in Egypt.”
That’s like saying that there are only certain strains of a dangerous virus that will kill us immediately as opposed to causing a long painful illness. Could Obama be hoping for something in his Obamacare legislation that will provide a cure?
Perhaps the President has forgotten that the Muslim Brotherhood spawned the terrorist organization Hamas. Perhaps he skipped over the senior London-based Muslim Brotherhood leader Muhammad Ghanem’s statement to Iran’s Arabic-language news station, Al-Alam, that the Egyptian people “should be prepared for war against Israel.”
Backing Ghanem’s stance, Muslim Brotherhood deputy leader in Egypt Rashad al-Bayoumi later told Japan’s NHK TV that a new provisional government, presumably including Muslim Brotherhood participants, should dissolve the 30 year old peace treaty with Israel. Is war against Israel one of those “strains” of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideology that President Obama is willing to accept? How about their call for the immediate closing of the Suez Canal?
But the Muslim Brotherhood does not have to be a carbon copy of al Qaeda to pose a danger to the United States and Israel and to freedom loving people in Egypt as well.
Just to remind President Obama of what the Muslim Brotherhood’s supreme leader Muhammad Badie has said recently:
According to the Islamic shari’a that Allah [has bequeathed] to mankind, the status of the Muslims, compared to that of the infidel nations that arrogantly [disdain] his shari’a, is measured in a kind of scale, in which, when one side is in a state of superiority, the other is in a state of inferiority…Resistance is the only solution against the Zio-American arrogance and tyranny, and all we need is for the Arab and Muslim peoples to stand behind it and support it…The U.S. is now experiencing the beginning of its end, and is heading towards its demise
The Muslim Brotherhood’s stance on the implementation of Islamic law, women’s rights and policies toward Egypt’s sizeable Coptic Christian minority does not represent just some mutant strain of fringe elements of the radical Islamic group. It represents the heart of the Muslim Brotherhood’s Islamic supremacist, misogynist ideology that is lethal to the freedom loving ideals of Western civilization…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Frank Gaffney: Friend of Shariah
Like ordinary folks, presidents of the United States are known by the company they keep. It is a test of their character. Often it shapes their policies. And, in the case of Barack Obama, it may blight his legacy and our nation’s security interests.
Until now, one of the most egregious examples of the problem were the “Friends of Bill” who played prominent roles in William Jefferson Clinton’s presidency. Those folks included a mix of unsavory political operatives, Chinese agents and convicted felons. [Their overnight stays in the Lincoln bedroom, legally challenged fundraising and eleventh-hour pardons raised serious questions not just about President Clinton’s ethics, but his judgment.]
President Obama’s trusted circle has been, if anything, even more problematic. For example, Mr. Obama has consorted with people who are revolutionaries, communists, liberation theologians and Islamists. Some have even been appointed “czars” in his administration.
At the moment, though, we must be concerned not only with who Barack Obama considers his friends, but with those who deem him to be one of theirs: The record suggests he must be seen as a “Friend of Shariah.”
How else can we explain the seeming inconsistency between, on the one hand, the president’s indifference to demonstrations in Iran last year that were vastly larger and more sustained than those to date in Egypt, and, on the other, his insistence after a week’s worth of protests in the latter that there be nothing less than complete “regime change,” starting immediately?…
| — Hat tip: CSP | [Return to headlines] |
Muslim TV Executive Convicted of Beheading His Wife at Station They Co-Founded
The founder of a Muslim-oriented New York television station has been convicted of beheading his wife in 2009.
Muzzammil ‘Mo’ Hassan, 46, never denied that he killed Aasiyah Hassan, 37 inside the suburban Buffalo station the couple established to promote cultural understanding.
A jury on Monday rejected his claim he was the victim of spousal abuse.
Hassan went through several lawyers and in the end represented himself
Hassan acted as his own lawyer during the trial in Buffalo.
The Pakistan-born Hassan has been in custody since Feb. 12, 2009, when he walked into the Orchard Park police station and told officers his wife was dead.
Her decapitated body was found at the studios of Bridges TV in town.
The Hassans had two young children.
The murder took place soon after his wife filed for divorce. Hassan was accused of stabbing and decapitating his wife inside the studios of Bridges TV.
The Pakistan-born couple founded the station to counter negative images of Muslims after 9/11.
But in divorce papers signed six days before she died, Aasiya Hassan says she was the one who was abused.
Police have said they responded to several domestic violence calls at the couple’s arrest but no arrests were ever made.
It has been claimed in a local newspaper bythe victim’s family that her husband had begun another relationship and had ‘taunted’ his spouse about his new lover.
While Hassan founded Bridges TV, his wife had served as the station’s general manager after its 2004 launch.
The network, available across the U.S. and Canada, was believed to be the first English-language cable station aimed at the rapidly growing Muslim demographic…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Now Obama Wants to Force His Way on TV During an Emergency
Just like Hugo Chavez, Barack Obama wants to ram his way onto your television sets.
Maybe when he starts interrupting “Glee” and “American Idol” more people will wake up to this man’s intrusion on our lives.
Federal News Radio reported:
Everybody has heard the national Emergency Alert System (EAS). Those familiar “duck calls” that reassure listeners “THIS is a test…this is ONLY a test…”
The FCC is planning an upgrade to the tests by including presidential announcements in the system.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Senate Fort Hood Report Whitewashes Obama’s Culpability in Mass Killing
The base commander at Fort Hood says soldiers who witnessed a shooting rampage that left 13 people dead reported that the gunman shouted “Allahu Akbar!” before opening fire at the Texas post. (NOLA.com)
Although the Senate panel confirmed last week that the Fort Hood Shooting in 2009 could have been prevented. It gave Barack Obama a complete pass on his reverse-profiling orders that prevented authorities from acting on information they knew about the dangerous killer before the attack.
The Senate Fort Hood report whitewashes Obama’s culpability.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Video: Socialist in Chief: Obama Tells American Businessess That Profits Must be Shared With Workers
His answer to everything… Socialism.
Obama told the Chamber of Commerce today that, “Corporate Profits “Have To Be Shared By American Workers”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
British Library Returns 900-Year-Old Religious Manuscript to Italy
A British lawyer who acted for the archdiocese of Benevento, handed back the manuscript personally. The codex was written on parchment around 1100.
“The return of the missal had become highly symbolic for Benevento and its cathedral, so they were absolutely delighted to have it back,” Mr Scott said.
“It was a tremendously emotional event. It will now be kept in the chapter library, attached to the cathedral, which was rebuilt after the very bad damage it sustained during the war.” The early 12th century liturgical book is the first item to be returned by a British institution since the UK adopted a law regarding the looting of cultural treasures during the Nazi era, from Hitler’s appointment as Chancellor in 1933 to the end of the war in 1945. The Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act enabled the Beneventan Missal to be returned to the town of Benevento, near Naples, 66 years after it left Italian soil…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Cameron Begins Extremism Crackdown as Cash Withheld From ‘Suspect Groups’
The government has already started to withdraw state cash from what it regards as suspect Islamist groups that had previously been funded to reach young Muslims at risk of being drawn to terrorist networks. New, tougher criteria are being applied, with hundreds of thousands of pounds being withdrawn from specific groups after it was deemed they were too soft on Islamic extremism.
Ministers are also awaiting a report in the next fortnight from a Universities UK working group, which has been in preparation for a year, on how to combat Islamic extremism on university campuses.
The working group, including eight vice-chancellors, was established in response to the arrest of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in the US for an attempted act of terrorism. Abdulmutallab studied at University College London between 2005 and 2008.
The report is likely to call for greater rigour in the selection of speakers and stronger oversight of religious societies. University vice-chancellors have been accused by thinktanks such as Quilliam, a Muslim counter-extremist group, of being complacent about the radicalisation that is taking place in higher education.
Today, it was being stressed by the government that David Cameron’s call for a more “muscular liberalism” to combat home-grown terror, made in a speech in Munich on Saturday, was not simply rhetorical. It would lead to practical changes, including the wholesale review of the Prevent strategy set up by Labour.
One outcome is likely to lead to a greater focus on specific areas where propagandists for terrorism are known to be operating, including community centres and gyms. There is also expected to be a clearer separation of resources to fight terrorism, and general community cohesion work.
With Labour claiming Cameron’s speech was ill-timed, coming on the day of a march by the English Defence League (EDL), Cameron’s aides said he had been preparing the speech since Christmas following seminars at Chequers, and it was always intended to be delivered at the Munich security conference this weekend.
One government source said: “There is going to be a real shift in who we fund and who ministers share platforms with. It has already started. There used to be a view in the home office that the best way to engage dangerous people was through some people who were not themselves extremists, but shared much of their thinking . We think it is better to confront all forms of extremism — the kind of people that support Jihad abroad, but say no Jihad here, or at least not now.”
The “British values” set out by Cameron in his speech — freedom of speech, freedom of speech and equality between sexes — will be the criteria by which the government will engage in future.
Haras Rafiq, director of anti-extremist organisation Centri, said he fully supported the prime minister’s call for a ban on the public funding of Muslim groups that did little to tackle extremism. He blamed some of the current misdirection of funds on failings by the Prevent programme, which has spent £53m on more than 1,000 counter-terrorism projects since it was set up in 2007 in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings.
Rafiq said: “A lot of funding is going to groups that hold vile views that are not acceptable in a tolerant, liberal society like the UK. Some support suicide bombing, attacks on British troops in Iraq or Afghanistan and other forms of violent extremism, but they are supported by the government so long as they don’t support violence in the UK — even where they support unacceptable domestic policies like saying it’s wrong for Muslims to vote or it’s sinful for a woman to get into a taxi alone with a man she’s not related to. But my biggest concern is that by funding and promoting fringe elements within British Muslim society, it is tarnishing the whole Muslim community.”
But Mohammed Shafiq of the Ramadhan Foundation, a Muslim youth group, said Cameron had been “deeply irresponsible” to suggest that some publicly-funded groups did little to tackle extremism.
“Where are these Muslim organisations that support extremism? I don’t believe they exist, and if the prime minister believes otherwise he should have the confidence to name them.” Farooq Murad, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, said it was important to identify which groups Cameron had been referring to. “The MCB itself, though not in receipt of government funding, has consistently spoken in favour of British values that acknowledge universal human rights and pluralism,” said Murad.
No shadow ministers today followed shadow justice secretary, Sadiq Khan, in claiming David Cameron was involved in “writing propaganda for the EDL” on the day 3,000 English Defence League members held a rally in Luton. Yvette Cooper said Cameron was “unwise” not to have also criticised the EDL, but foreign secretary William Hague said a PM’s speech should not be shelved “because some people have chosen to march down a street”.
Trevor Phillips, Equalities and Human Rights Commission chair, refused to criticise the claim that multiculturalism had failed, but said the PM “may have made life a bit more difficult for himself” by combining the issues of terrorism and integration in one speech.
| — Hat tip: heroyalwhyness | [Return to headlines] |
Debt Crisis: An EU Made in Germany
3 February 2011 Die Zeit Hamburg
To save the eurozone, do as the Germans. Much repeated by Angela Merkel, this message is getting through to her partners. But for the crisis-ridden EU, such is the price to pay, argues Die Zeit.
Petra Pinzler
Suddenly, the Chancellor is ready to do something she has long denied wanting to do. Suddenly, she wants to bind Germany more closely to other European countries — even to countries like Greece, which can hardly claim to be creditworthy. Suddenly, Germany is to collaborate even more closely with its neighbors: in savings, in taxes, even in the matter of retirement age. Suddenly, Europe should be dearer to us than ever — and yet without knowing for sure whether the others want just our money or whether they are actually willing to accept our rules and principles.
All this lies behind the idea of a European economic government. And all this is incredibly unpopular here in Germany. Since the debt crisis broke, the fear of further European integration has grown again. When Germans today hear the word “Europe”, many imagine a loss of control. And fewer and fewer really believe that the euro will one day be as safe and solid as the German mark once was.
So why is Angela Merkel taking this course? And why now? We have to look back to how things stood a year ago. The Greek crisis was escalating through the financial markets, speculators were betting on the collapse of the monetary union, and just before the crash Germany was one of the states that helped out the Greeks with billions of euros in loans. At the same time, though, European governments were bickering over almost every single reform to economic policy. The south demanded unconditional solidarity in particular (read: “more money”). The north wanted security, which to them meant rigid austerity. In the end there was a little of both. But the problem remained. To date, neither the debt crisis nor the question of how to build a Europe that can fight off recession have been resolved.
To end the euro crisis for good, we have to think big
A year ago, more events yet were still to unfold. Just as most Germans did, the Federal Government expected the situation to calm down. And they assumed that our finances would be protected best when as little of our money and power as possible was shifted to Europe. That proved to be a fallacy. For now other countries were being targeted by speculators, accompanied by ever renewed rumours about the impending end of the euro. So yet more billions were needed to rescue the currency. And the German Chancellor was forced to act.
In the long run no government can allow this…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Dengue Fever Rises Among Swedes
Dengue fever is becoming more and more widespread among the Swedish population due largely to to increasing numbers travelling on holiday to Thailand.
The tropical disease is affecting more and more Swedes year on year. In 2010 151 cases of the disease were reported by those returning from foreign trips, up from 100 the previous year.
In most cases, those infected discover the symptoms on their return, with about half of all cases picked up from trips to Thailand, according to the Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control (Smittskyddsinstitutet).
The disease is carried by the mosquito Aedes aegypti. The most common symptoms are high fever, headaches and pains in the joints.
There is currently no available vaccine for dengue fever, but measures to reduce number of mosquitoes, and limiting exposure to bites, are being used to stem the growing number of reported cases.
Dengue fever is not life threatening but in the most severe cases a blood transfusion is sometimes necessary. Normally treamtent is done by rehydrating the person infected, either orally or with an intravenous drip.
The rate of infection has increased rapidly over the last 50 years, with around 50—100 million people catching the disease annually.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark: Religious Tensions on Rise in Public Housing
In Vollsmose in Odense, Christian and Jewish residents need to go into hiding because they are being threatened with beatings and some have had their cars burned. In Gellerup in Aarhus, the local Christian church has been forced to hire security patrols to prevent vandalism, and in Copenhagen, Jewish kids applying to secondary schools near housing areas densely populated with Muslims have been advised by authorities to look elsewhere if they want to avoid trouble. “We receive regular reports of religious crimes,” Niels-Erik Hansen, the head of the Advisory Centre for Racial Discrimination told Politiken newspaper. “If we don’t do something about it now, we could end up with Apartheid-like conditions, with certain residents unable to live in certain housing areas.”
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Dutch Populist Wilders Returns to Court for Allegedly Inciting Race Hate
The anti-Islam Dutch politician Geert Wilders appeared in court in Amsterdam on Monday on charges of inciting hatred towards Muslims, Moroccans and other non-Western groups in the Netherlands.
Wilders, one of the most powerful men in the Dutch parliament, told a panel of judges that he thinks he’s the victim of political persecution, saying they must drop the charges against him in order to protect free speech.
“Citizens who criticize Islam pay a bitter price. They are threatened, persecuted and criminalized,” Wilders told judges at a hearing that was meant to decide how the case would continue.
Wilders has repeatedly referred to Islam as a “fascist” faith, has likened the Koran to Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” and is under 24-hour protection following death threats. The specific charges against the parliamentarian stem from comments made in his campaign “stop the Islamization of the Netherlands.” Wilders could face a 7,600 euro ($10,300) fine or up to a year in jail if found guilty.
His populist group, called the Freedom Party, is the third largest in parliament in the Hague, and is a crucial unofficial ally for the minority coalition government of Christian Democrats and Liberals.
Unclear how trial will proceed
Monday’s hearing was a procedural one, deciding how Wilders’ trial should progress. The initial trial was interrupted last October, after a judicial review ruled that the judges were not impartial.
Lawyers from both sides put their cases to the new judges, with Wilders’ lawyer calling for the trial to be moved to the Hague, so it could be better coordinated with the politician’s work in parliament.
Defense lawyer Bram Moszkowicz also wants the trial to restart from scratch and is lobbying for permission to call more Islamic experts as witnesses, some of whom were not allowed to testify last time around.
Moszkowicz told the judges that Wilders has never written or said anything disparaging about Muslims. Rather, the lawyer argued, his client had only ever criticized Islam and its holy text, the Koran, something which is not illegal under Dutch law.
Prosecutors, meanwhile, want the case to pick up where it left off, although they had admitted their case against the politician was weak in the last round of proceedings. They had submitted that while Wilders’ comments were certainly hurtful towards Muslims and other immigrant communities, especially Moroccans, they were not a criminal offence under Dutch law.
The judges are due to decide on how the case should proceed next week…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
‘Europe’s Human Rights Court is Out of Control… We Must Pull Out’: Call by Top British Judge After Ruling That Prisoners Should Get the Vote
One of Britain’s most senior judges called last night for Britain to pull out of the European Court of Human Rights following its controversial ruling that prisoners should be given the vote.
Lord Hoffmann, who served as a Law Lord for 14 years until last year, said the court had gone beyond its remit in a way that would have ‘astonished’ its founding fathers.
The prominent human rights campaigner said that in recent years ‘human rights have become, like health and safety, a byword for foolish decisions by courts and administrators’.
He said the 60-year-old principles of the European Convention on Human Rights were ‘in general terms admirable’.
But he said the Strasbourg court had got out of control, handing itself ‘an extraordinary power to micromanage the legal systems (of member states)’. He said the court was ‘in practice answerable to no one’.
Lord Hoffmann’s intervention comes as MPs prepare for a symbolic vote this week on whether Britain should bow to the demands of the court to end the blanket ban on allowing prisoners to vote. Ministers have warned that failure to abide by the ruling could leave the taxpayer open to compensation claims from prisoners running into tens of millions of pounds.
David Cameron, who has said the prospect of giving prisoners the vote makes him feel ‘physically ill’, has given his MPs a free vote.
But other Cabinet ministers, including Justice Secretary Ken Clarke, Attorney General Dominic Grieve and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, have warned that Britain will have to bow to the court’s ruling in the end or pay massive compensation. Successive governments have argued that the UK would be forced to quit the EU if it tried to pull out of the European Convention on Human Rights.
But Lord Hoffmann argues that Britain could withdraw from the jurisdiction of the Strasbourg court without abandoning the convention. The move would mean that British courts would become the arbiter of human rights law, removing the right of foreign judges to dictate the law to Britain.
He believes that with support of other European states which have also been at odds with the court, it may be possible to ‘repatriate our law of human rights’.
Lord Hoffmann’s intervention is particularly powerful given his close association with the human rights group Amnesty International. He was a director of the group’s charitable arm for many years.
His comments came in the foreword to a major report on the operation of the Strasbourg court by the centre-Right think tank Policy Exchange.
The report found that European judges had overruled British law on 26 occasions in the past decade, since Labour passed the Human Rights Act.
It said Britain should press for major reform of the Strasbourg court to rein it in. If the negotiations are unsuccessful the UK should withdraw from Strasbourg.
The report said there was ‘strong evidence’ that withdrawing from the Strasbourg court’s jurisdiction would not affect Britain’s membership of the EU.
The study said judges in Strasbourg had ‘stretched’ the original convention on human rights ‘to fit situations well outside the expectation of those who drafted and ratified it’.
It said it was questionable whether the court had jurisdiction to rule on the question of votes for prisoners, given that it was a longstanding principle of British law.
The study questioned the ‘competence’ of some Strasbourg judges, saying that many came from relatively undemocratic countries such as Russia and Armenia.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Faith Matters: Tariq Ramadan, Point Man of the Caliphate
Martin Luther considered the rise of Islam a sign of the impending apocalypse and God’s ferule for the backs of a wayward church. He was by no means the first great theologian to believe this. St. John of Damascus (676-749 A.D.) and the medieval mystic Joachim of Fiore (1135-1202 A.D.) viewed Islam as an anti-Christian power of the end of time and Mohammed as a precursor of the Antichrist.
None of these sages presumed to speculate on a precise date of Christ’s Second Coming in the way some contemporary sects do today. “The Son of Man will come at an hour when you do not expect him,” Christ himself said (Matthew 24:43-44), and: “I will come like a thief” (Revelation 3:3). Therefore, warned Luther, predicting a date for this event was impossible and unnecessary.
Nonetheless, watching the blood-curdling events unfold in Egypt and other parts of the Middle East, it is worth remembering the historical circumstances under which John, Joachim and Luther interpreted Islam in apocalyptical terms. All three witnessed a weak, confused, splintered and often unfaithful Church.
In John’s day, Islam wiped out flourishing Christian cultures in North Africa and the Eastern Mediterranean regions undermined by bickering, often heretical churches; some of these Christians even welcomed Muslims as liberators from their oppression by other Christians. Joachim was born in the aftermath of the Great Schism of 1054 A.D., which split Christendom into two hostile camps, the Roman Catholic and the Eastern Orthodox. In Luther’s day, the Turks had conquered much of southeastern Europe and were laying siege on Vienna.
The parallels between those historical sets of circumstances and today’s scenario must not be overlooked. True, the world’s 1.5 billion Muslims are also beset by schisms and the encroachment of modernity. But it is also true that among them are forces with more determination and, much clearer goals and seemingly more staying power that most Christians. TV showman Glenn Beck has been foolishly ridiculed for insisting that the Muslim Brotherhood, which seems to play a key role in the Egyptian crisis, is busy scheming to establish a worldwide Caliphate ruling by Islamic law. But this is no wayward notion. Ever since it was founded by the Egyptian schoolteacher and imam Hassan al-Banna in 1928, the Brotherhood has displayed incredible flexibility and strategic skills in pursing this goal, including courting the Nazis and collaborating with Marxist-Leninists.
Amazingly, of all major American media personalities, only Beck has mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood’s point man in the West, a Teflon character by the name of Tariq Ramadan. He is a Swiss citizen, a much-admired scholar. He is also al-Banna’s grandson, and he speaks, in the words of French journalist Caroline Fourest, “from both corners of his mouth.” Currently a professor of Contemporary Islamic Studies at Oxford University, he claims to champion the re-interpretation of Islamic texts and emphasizes the heterogeneous nature of West Muslims, he sounds alarmingly duplicitous to discerning European ears.
When in 2003 Nicolas Sarkozy, then the French interior minister, now president, asked Ramadan about his brother Hani’s justification of the stoning of adulteresses, he replied, “I am in favor of a moratorium so that they stop applying punishments of this kind in the Muslim world. What’s important is for people’s thinking to evolve. What is necessary is a pedagogical approach.” Should we perhaps read this as a suggestion to teach first, and stone later?
Ramadan also termed terrorist acts “contextually” justified, told French television that “violence is legitimate” and, according to Swiss intelligence, been involved with Al Qaida leaders such as Ayman Al-Zawahiri and Omar Abdel Rahman as long ago as 1991. In 2009, the traditionally liberal Erasmus University of Rotterdam fired him for chairing the “Islam & Life” program of Press TV, a network wholly owned by the Iranian regime.
In that same year, the Obama administration issued Ramadan a 10-year scholar’s visa after he had been banned from entering the United States in 2004 when offered a professorship at Notre Dame University. The reasons why the Department of Homeland Security prevented his entry then are rarely discussed. According to Islam critic Daniel Pipes they included: Ramadan’s praise for the brutal policies of the Sudanese political leader Hassan a-Turabi; Ramadan’s contacts with an Algerian terrorist and his “routine contacts” with an Algerian indicted for Al Qaida activities; his public references to the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, and to the bloodbaths of Madrid and Bali as mere “interventions.” Still, Foreign Policy magazine rated him 49th among the world’s most important intellectuals today.
Tariq Ramadan, who wrote his doctoral dissertations on German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, knows the feeble state of Western Christianity well. Living in Europe, he cannot help observing the consequences of the scarcity of clergymen in France where the church no longer provides pastoral care, and where in most cases old ladies now conduct Christian funerals because no priests are available. A scholar of his intelligence won’t find it hard to appreciate the depravity of Protestantism in Germany where the synods (parliaments) of most of the 22 state-related regional churches voted to allow homosexual pastors to live with their partners in parsonages. When Ramadan eventually reaches U.S. shores he will find a similar state of affairs in American mainline denominations…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: President Says Won’t Sign Federalism Decree
But govt says will make necessary moves in parliament
(ANSA) — Rome, February 4 — Italian President Giorgio Napolitano on Friday said he could not sign an emergency decree on fiscal federalism the cabinet issued Thursday night despite the plan being defeated at a House-Senate panel earlier Thursday.
In a letter to Premier Silvio Berlusconi, the president said the “conditions do not exist” to sign the decree.
He said he could not support the use of a decree for “a measure of such great significance”.
Napolitano said the government should have tried to muster support in parliament for the measure before issuing a decree, which bypasses parliamentary debate.
But Northern League leader and Reform Minister Umberto Bossi issued a statement shortly after the president’s, saying he had spoken to Napolitano and promised to make the necessary “communication” to parliament for the measure to pass.
The president’s rejection of the decree had been expected by some observers although Berlusconi earlier Friday voiced the hope that Napolitano would have no quibbles about signing it.
Several commentators in the Italian media had raised doubts the president might not rubberstamp the measure amid opposition accusations the government had ignored parliament in an “unprecedented” way.
Asked if he thought Napolitano might not sign, Berlusconi replied on his way into a European Union summit here: “I don’t think so, and I hope not”.
Critics have said a landmark reform like fiscal federalism should not be rammed through parliament but backed by the widest consensus possible.
The bicameral committee on Thursday was deadlocked 15-15 on the issue, amounting to a rejection that briefly appeared to rock the government since the project’s backer, the Northern League, had said approval was a condition for remaining in government.
But League leader Umberto Bossi later stressed he wanted to see how the government got on in a vote on the premier’s latest sex scandal.
In the House, where the government has had a very thin majority in recent votes, Milan prosecutors’ request to search the offices of Berlusconi’s accountant in a probe into underage prostitution and abuse of office was rejected by a thumping 17 votes as the government almost achieved its cherished goal of an absolute majority of 316 votes in the 630-seat chamber.
This emboldened Bossi and Berlusconi to say they would press on with reforms including a stimulus plan, aid for the south, and revived versions of wiretap and trial-cap bills that were sunk last year and are seen by some as aimed at reining in hostile prosecutors.
Berlusconi on Friday returned to the issue of the prosecutors he says are hounding him, this time for claiming he had sex with a teen Moroccan belly dancer known as Ruby and later phoned police to get her out of a scrape, saying she was Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s granddaughter.
“We are now in a republic ruled by the judiciary, taken over by prosecutors,” the premier told reporters in Brussels. Amid opposition claims that he has been luring centrists with promises and other inducements, the premier also said he was about to name 12 new undersecretaries.
The Milan prosecutors have said that on Monday or Tuesday they will request the premier face a fast-track trial in the Ruby case.
They said they were unfazed by the rejection of the request to search the accountant’s office, which was motivated by government parties’ claims that the premier was trying to avoid a diplomatic incident with Egypt when he phoned the Milan police station in May after Ruby was held for alleged theft.
The House therefore voted to send back some 600 pages of wiretaps and other evidence, saying the prosecutors were not competent in the abuse of office case and Berlusconi should instead face a special tribunal that deals with alleged crimes committed by ministers in the performance of their duties.
“This will not stop us,” the prosecutors said.
After the request is filed a preliminary hearings judge is expected to take five days to assess whether there is enough evidence for Berlusconi to face a trial which would then be scheduled to start within two months, legal experts say.
According to political pundits, despite the government’s claimed victory in the federalism issue, this could still coincide with the start of an election campaign, two years earlier than the end of the government’s term in 2013.
LEAGUE BATTLE.
The League, whose heartland is the richer north of Italy, has fought for years to change the country’s political geography so that more tax money remains where it is generated.
They said the measure will also empower the poorer south to take charge of its own development, as more spending powers would be given to local authorities there too.
Some critics say the project will widen the gap between the affluent northern regions and the south, or Mezzogiorno, while some local authorities have expressed doubts about the technicalities of how the plan will function.
The opposition has said it wants federalism too but not in the form the government has now pushed through parliament.
In particular, it says local officials will be forced to push up levies while being denied key sources of funding such as property tax, which was abolished by the Berlusconi government.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Brown Bear Threatened Despite Gains on Poaching
Multi-million-euro conservation project in five Italian regions
(ANSA) — Rome, February 2 — The nearly extinct Marsican brown bear has failed to increase its numbers despite legal protection and diminished pressure from poachers. The latest census found just 50 Marsican bears still exist in the wild, and are largely confined to the National Park of Abruzzo, Lazio and Molise. The number has not budged since a 2008 census, though the bears have managed to hang on for decades despite near-extinction levels. A 1969 census counted 60 bears.
“We’re talking about a number that is clearly below the threshold of survival,” explained the president of the park, Giuseppe Rossi, to reporters. “We are clearly very worried for the future of these specimens”.
Rossi reported violent deaths by poaching were reduced by a third, from an average of 2.5 per year over the period 1980 to 2003 to an average of 1.7 per year from 2004 to 2010. Whereas poachers once killed 5% of the bears each year, they now extinguish 3.2% of the population each year. Rossi credited energetic local vigilance for the gains, but said more must be done on behalf of the bears. He announced a new 3.6-million-euro program to strengthen conservation efforts involving five Italian regions, environmental associations and several nature reserves. The new effort aims to better protect not only the Marsican brown bear but also the Alpine brown bear, which is even closer to extinction. A Trentino park website states that there are roughly 30 known brown bears in the central Alps, and that their numbers are only that high thanks to an effort made from 1999 to 2002 to reintroduce 10 specimens to the wild. “The goal of the effort is to create synergy between the two conservation areas in Italy for the brown bear,” said Cinzia Sulli, scientific leader for the Life-Arctos project, which is financed by the European Union and the regions affected. “That is the Alps for the Alpine brown bear and the central Apennines for the Marsican brown bear.” Fearsome-looking brown bears were perceived for centuries as a menace to people and their animals, and thus were fair game for hunters. Poachers and the encroaching presence of people in their habitat threaten them with violent death or hunger. The Marsican bear, which once roamed regions from southern to central Italy, is nearly vegetarian, with 90% of its diet coming from plants. They also eat small vertebrates and invertebrates and only sporadically kill other large animals, preferring to scavenge carcasses. Their calorie-poor diet requires them to eat vast quantities of food, as they weigh 90 to 150 kilograms, food they must somehow gather in the wooded mountains remaining.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Fini: Impossible to Carry Out Shared Reform With Berlusconi
(AGI) Rome — In the current climate, it is impossible to carry out shared reform with Silvio Berlusconi. This is according to FLI leader Gianfranco Fini, who emphasised that Tatarella “was seeking a common denominator” because he realised that “reaching an agreement would signify overcoming division.” However, Fini said, Berlusconi “kept the Bicamerale meetings on the hop from morning to night so as not to have to deal with the question of shared reform, because his concept of politics is muscular and antagonistic. The Bicamerale would have enabled the stage at which the other side is antagonistic of necessity to have been overcome.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Football: US Investors Set to Acquire AS Roma
Rome, 4 Feb. (AKI/Bloomberg) — A group of investors from the United States led by Thomas DiBenedetto, part owner of the Boston Red Sox, will hold exclusive talks to buy three-time Italian soccer champion AS Roma with the club’s owners, UniCredit and the Sensi family.
Julian Movsesian, a member of the bidding group, said in a telephone interview that the US investors hope to conclude the deal in about two weeks. He said UniCredit was likely to keep a minority stake in the club, which was founded in 1927 and last won the Serie A title in 2001.
“We could be the proud owners in two weeks” after legalities are finalized, Movsesian, president of Succession Capital Alliance, said yesterday from Newport Beach, California. “We are going to work on the details. I’m pretty excited.”
AS Roma shares rose 2.4 percent today to 1.24 euros in Milan trading, up from 1.21 euros yesterday, giving the company a market value of about 164 million euros.
DiBenedetto AS Roma, the company led by DiBenedetto, a partner in the holding company that owns the Red Sox and English soccer club Liverpool, had “the most competitive offer” of the five purchase bids AS Roma received, according to Compagnia Italpetroli, the Sensi family’s holding.
The US investors will “provide further information,” a process that will take “a few days” and lead to an “exclusive period” for talks, Italpetroli said in a statement distributed by the Italian exchange yesterday.
All the proceeds of the sale will be used to pay back 277 million euros of debt owed to UniCredit. Italy’s biggest bank became co-owner of the team after a debt-for-equity swap last year with the Sensi family. UniCredit owns 49 percent and Italpetroli 51 percent of Newco Roma, the holding company that holds 67 percent of AS Roma.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Judge Releases Ex-Guantanamo Tunisian Detainee
(AGI) Milan — Milan preliminary hearing judge Maria Vicidomini granted extenuation to a former Guantanamo detainee. The provision was granted on the grounds of having served an unlawful detention in the American base, thus reducing his sentence to 2 years in prison, also in view of the discount on sentence applied through plea bargaining. This are the grounds for the release of Ben Mabrouk Adel, an alleged Tunisian terrorist who was brought to the Italian justice in November 2009 on the basis of the USA-Italy agreement.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: More People Leave Catholic Church
Some 23,000 people officially left the Catholic church in the Netherlands last year, up 25% on 2009, according to Radboud University researchers.
In particular, many young people aged 20 to 40 wrote themselves out of the official church register, the researchers said.
The researchers say the sexual abuse scandal and the row over the refusal of a priest to give communion to an openly gay man has led to some people leaving the church.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: Multi-Ethnic Schools Not a Priority
De Volkskrant, 7 February 2011
“The government accepts the possibility of “black” schools,” a Dutch expression denoting schools where a majority of the students are from immigrant backgrounds, reports Volkskrant. In an interview with the daily, Education Minister Marja van Bijsterveldt explains that the fight to promote ethnic diversity in schools will no longer be a priority. As it stands, certain Dutch municipal authorities oblige parents to send their children to local schools, a measure that is designed to ensure racial integration in the classroom. The Christian-democrat minister insists that the main priority will now be the “the quality of teaching, which is more important than than the fact that a child is enrolled in a black or white school” — a position, which Volkskrant notes marks a “significant shift” in multicultural policy in the Netherlands.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Averroé Meetings; Three Culture Paradigm
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, FEBRUARY 4 — ‘Cordoba, a paradigm of identity and diversity’ was the theme that Arabists, Hebraists, philosophers, journalists and writers discussed in the city of three religions as part of the Averroé Meetings. Organised by the Casa Arabe, the UNESCO Chair on Conflict Resolution in Cordoba and the Cordoba Ciudad Cultural Foundation, the event is part of a programme the involves film screenings, music, and bookstore area to debate the current issues in the Arab-Islamic and Western world as part of the initiatives for the candidacy of Cordoba as the European Capital of Culture in 2016. With the initiative, the Andalusian city joins the Averroé network established in 1994 by the city of Marseille (2013 European Capital of Culture) and which was joined by Rabat in 2009, said the organisers. Thus, the philosopher and legal scholar born in 1126 in Cordoba who introduced Aristotle to Europe and who was an expert on Islamic philosophy, has made a homecoming. “The use of the image of Averroé is symbolic,” they explained at the Casa Arabe, “because it emphasises the rational and intercultural spirit that he represents.” The coexistence of the three religions in the city during the magnificent era of the Caliphate of Cordoba was the focus of the first debate of the event, which was opened yesterday by UNED Professor of Medieval Philosophy, Andres Martinez Lorca, in which professor at the University of Seville and Director of the Mediterranean Observatory Emilio Gonzalez Ferrin, and Aurora Salvatierra Osorio, Hebraist and lecturer at the University of Granada also took part.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Petrol Station: Living Within 100m of a Garage is Bad for Your Health
Living near a petrol station can be a health hazard, researchers warn.
They say the air in the immediate vicinity of garages is often polluted with airborne particles from evaporated fuel and therefore harmful to local residents.
Scientists from the University of Murcia in Spain studied the effects of contamination at petrol stations.
They found dangerous airborne pollutants from garages could contaminate buildings as far as 100m away.
The scientists said a ‘minimum’ distance of 50 metres should therefore be maintained between petrol stations and housing, and 100 metres for ‘especially vulnerable’ facilities such as hospitals, health centres, schools and old people’s homes.
Study co author Marta Doval, said: ‘Some airborne organic compounds — such as benzene, which increases the risk of cancer — have been recorded at petrol stations at levels above the average levels for urban areas where traffic is the primary source of emission.’
The study, published in the Journal of Environmental Management, shows the air at petrol stations and in their immediate surroundings is especially affected by emissions stemming from evaporated vehicle fuels. This includes unburnt fuel from fuel loading and unloading operations, refuelling and liquid spillages.
The research team measured the levels of ‘typical traffic’ pollutants in different parts of the urban area of Murcia. They then calculated the quotients for the levels of an aromatic compound (benzene) and a hydrocarbon (n-hexane) at three Murcia petrol stations — near the petrol pumps and surrounding areas — to find the distance at which the service stations stop having an impact.
In the three cases studied a maximum distances of influence of close to 100 metres was found although the average distance of contamination was around 50 metres.
But the distances depend on the number of petrol pumps, the amount of fuel drawn from them, traffic intensity, the structure of the surroundings, and weather conditions…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Three Muslims Murderers ‘Launched Knife Attack on Bosnian-Serb General in British Prison as Revenge for War Atrocities’
A war criminal jailed in Britain for helping cause the deaths of thousands of Muslims was repeatedly knifed by three fellow inmates intent on avenging his victims, a UK court has heard.
According to prosecutors, former Bosnian-Serb army general Radislav Krstic was lucky to survive the frenzied attack at Wakefield Prison last year, which left him with multiple wounds and one 12cm slash across his neck.
Krstic is serving 35 years in jail for aiding and abetting in the 1995 massacre of 8,100 Bosniak men and boys at Srebrenica in Bosnia and Hersegovina. He was convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia in the Hague in 2001.
But today the former defendant appeared at Leeds Crown Court as the key prosecution witness, describing how he was the victim of an alleged revenge attack in his British prison.
Indrit Krasniqi, 23, Iliyas Khalid, 24, and Quam Ogumbiyi, 29, all deny attempted murder and wounding with intent to commit grievous bodily harm.
The 62-year-old confirmed his conviction to the court when he said through an interpreter: ‘Yes, this is how it was written in the judgment of the International Court in The Hague.’
Krstic was giving evidence on the first day of the trial of three convicted murderers, all practising Muslims, who are alleged to have entered his cell at the top security prison and slashed him with knives or blades in revenge for his role at Srebrenica.
Julian Goose QC, prosecuting, told the jury of seven woman and five men the former soldier suffered a number of injuries on May 7, last year. Refering to Krstic’s neck wound, Mr Goose said: ‘The cut was deep and long.
‘It was deliberately aimed to cut vital vessels in the neck so as to kill him.’
He told the jury: ‘The motive for the attempt to murder him was as a punishment or revenge.
‘This was, we say as the prosecution, a planned and determined attack in which the three defendants intended to kill Radislav Krstic.
‘The three defendants are practising Muslims.’
Mr Goose added: ‘He (Krstic) is a Bosnian Serb national who was serving a 35-year sentence for his involvement as a General-Major in the Bosnian Serb Army which killed many Bosnian Muslim men in Srebrenica in 1995.
‘Mr Krstic’s background was known to others within Wakefield Prison, including many of the prisoners.’
Krstic, who right leg was amputated in 1995 after he stepped on a landmine, took to the witness box with four prisoner officers sitting behind him.
He spoke using an interpreter.
The judge, Mr Justices Henriques, asked him if he wanted to sit but he replied: ‘In respect to the court and auditorium I will stand.’
All three defendants are serving life sentences.
The trial continues.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey Clarifies ‘Fascist’ EU Claim
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS — The European Commission has said Turkish EU affairs Minister Egemen Bagis could have been “better chosen” his words after he used a Holocaust commemoration event in Auschwitz to say the EU risks emulating “fascist methods of [the] 1930s”.
On Thursday (3 February) a spokeswoman for EU enlargement commissioner Stefan Fule said Mr Bagis later gave clarifications by phone after his initial comments raised eyebrows in Brussels and further afield.
“Minister Bagis explained to the commissioner that his words were intended to express his concern at the rising role of some extremist groups in the EU and … that this could contribute to a potential lessening of tolerance towards minorities,” said Natasha Butler.
The commissioner was “grateful for this clarification” although “the original words could have been better chosen”, especially “given the timing and the location of their pronouncement,” she added.
Rising intolerance in the EU and the efforts of Turkish diplomats to save the lives of Jews being persecuted by the Nazi regime were among the topics raised by Mr Bagis is his controversial speech on Tuesday.
“The EU, founded in order to eliminate the threats of that period to peace, is today under the risk of being overtaken by a racist mentality that cannot internalise its own values and emulates the fascist methods of 1930s,” he told an audience inside the former German concentration camp.
“Unfortunately today Turkey and the Turkish people in Europe bear the consequences of being different… Turkish people, implicitly or openly, are being told this: ‘You are different and you have no place among us.’“
“The best response to these people would be to support and adopt the values of the European Union and principles of democracy more. The only remedy for this distorted mentality is Turkey’s accession to the EU.”
Mr Bagis outlined the heroic actions of certain Turkish diplomats who served in central and eastern European countries during the period of National Socialism and “risked their lives in order to protect and save the Jews”.
However, he rounded on the current Israeli government, demanding an apology for the recent killing of Turkish citizens aboard a relief ship headed to Palestinians in the Gaza strip.
“This unfair and persistent attitude of the Israeli government is not consistent with the historical perspective,” he said. “May God not let any nation or country suffer such pain.”
Turkey itself has faced repeated criticism over the government’s failure to fully recognise what many historians call the ‘Armenian genocide’ — the killing of an estimated 1.5 million Armenians between 1915 and 1917.
The Swedish and French parliaments are among those who have passed resolutions recognising the event as a ‘genocide’, while the European Parliament has also spoken out on the issue.
In a highly critical report adopted by a broad majority of MEPs in the foreign relations committee on 4 September 2006, members voted for the inclusion of a clause calling on Turkey “to recognise the Armenian genocide as a condition for its EU accession”.
This requirement was later dropped on 27 September 2006 by the general assembly of the parliament after extensive lobbying from Turkey.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Cameron’s Multicultural Speech: Sadiq Khan and Politics of Hate
Labour frontbencher Sadiq Khan should be thoroughly ashamed of his despicable, though utterly predictable, attack on David Cameron.
Far from bolstering the Far Right, the Prime Minister has commendably reclaimed the debate about state-sponsored multiculturalism. His speech was measured and not in the slightest way inflammatory.
For too long, anyone who has questioned this pernicious doctrine has been smeared as ‘racist’. Labour spent a decade and a half trashing those who expressed concerns about unlimited immigration and the refusal of some ethnic groups to integrate into British society.
And as a consequence, decent people found themselves smeared as extremists and a minority regrettably sought refuge in the arms of the BNP.
Some of those same people are now flirting with the street thugs of the English Defence League. It’s because they feel they have nowhere else to go.
But be under no illusion, Nick Griffin is the bastard son of Jack Straw and every other Left-wing politician who has consistently tried to close down debate on this sensitive subject and routinely rubbished their opponents as racists and ‘Little Englanders’.
Falsely accusing someone of racism is as repellent as racism itself. But Khan will keep his job.
You can hurl the most vile smears at anyone these days, provided you insert the word ‘Tory’.
Take the case of the Conservative MP Paul Maynard, who suffers from cerebral palsy and was cruelly mocked by Labour members in the Commons.
Can you begin to imagine the reaction if some Conservatives had abused a disabled Labour MP?
They’ll get away with it, though, because he’s a ‘Tory’, so deserves all the contempt he gets. If the lads from Top Gear had insulted Tories instead of Mexicans they would have been hailed as heroes by the Left.
Most of the real hatred and bitterness in Britain comes from those who noisily proclaim their own ‘tolerance’ and are quickest to take offence at any real or perceived slight. After ‘homophobe’, ‘Islamophobe’, ‘sexist’ and ‘racist’, ‘Tory’ is their favourite slur.
Last week a moderate students’ union leader in Leeds was subjected to a barrage of abuse from demonstrators who called him ‘Tory Jew scum’ — despite him being neither Jewish nor a Conservative.
But like ‘Tory’, ‘Jew’ is now an acceptable insult on the Left. So virulent is their hatred of Israel that all Jews are considered fair game.
As I exposed in a TV documentary a couple of years ago, the worrying rise in anti-semitism in Britain stems from an unholy alliance between the fascist Left and militant Islam.
If these protesters had been screaming ‘Muslim scum’ there would have been a whole host of arrests, questions in the House and a Panorama special on the BBC.
You might expect the Labour leader to have a view on this. Yet Ed Miliband, who is himself Jewish, has stayed silent. His energies are employed in denouncing the wicked ‘Tory cuts’. There’s an entire industry devoted to seeking out offence and persecuting people for inoffensive remarks…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Home Wreckers: Gypsy Family of 14 Who Live on Benefits ‘Ruin Their £1.2m Council House and Make Life Hell for Neighbours’
A family of gypsies has wrecked a £1.2million home where they were housed by a council, neighbours have claimed.
Tom O’Leary, his girlfriend Tanya Walsh and their 12 children have apparently ‘made life misery’ for their wealthy neighbours, who now want them thrown out of the five-bedroom home.
Residents in the upmarket London area claim the family, who live on benefits, dump used toilet roll in neighbouring properties, hurls beer cans into next door gardens and abuse residents as rich b*******.
The twelve O’Leary children, aged between one and 16, are also said to invade neighbouring gardens and roam around naked, according to the Sun.
Council officials said a final warning has been issued to the O’Learys, who face eviction if their anti-social behaviour does not stop.
The travellers have also trashed the interior of the flat, according to the newspaper which found collapsed ceilings, paint stripped from walls, and electrical sockets hanging out.
The back garden has been used as a rubbish dump for fire extinguishers and rubble, while floors inside the property are filthy and strewn with with bicycles and matresses.
Twenty eight complaints have been made about the O’Learys by neighbours this year, in addition to previous ones last year.
The family has reportedly been housed in 20 different homes in the past decade, one of which allegedly burned down.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: How Widespread is Campus Extremism?
A delayed report on how to tackle violent extremism on university campuses is expected to be published soon. But there is still widespread disagreement about how serious the problem of “radicalisation” is.
This time last year the square behind London’s City University was the scene of a confrontation, between some Muslim students and the university authorities.
In a case study, the counter-extremism think tank Quilliam claimed an Islamic society at City University, headed by a charismatic leader, capitalised on a row over a prayer room.
Muslim students protested by praying on the street in the square. Some think it was a period when conditions on the campus were ripe for radicalisation.
“Universities are places where young people come together, meet one another, become enthused, and of course, to use that word, they can become ‘radicalised’“, former Vice Chancellor Julius Weinberg told the BBC. He was in charge at the university at the time.
“In my day we sat in because of the US involvement in Vietnam. Students are passionate young people and they should be.”
Radical positions
But they did not go on to try to blow themselves up on planes did they?
“I think if you were to look back in history many ‘terrorists’, many of those who’ve taken radical positions, will have been to university. That does not mean they were radicalised at university.”
The government and the Security Service MI5 are worried about some universities, worried enough to offer them money.
The Department of Business, Innovation and Skills has confirmed that 39 universities have been offered extra funding to improve staff training because, to use the government’s words, they “might be at risk”.
The Universities Minister David Willetts does not believe there is a pattern.
“It certainly does look as if there are individual incidents when young people may have been radicalised on campus,” he said.
“But it’s very hard to pin down, when an individual goes off the rails like that, exactly what has triggered it.”
The most recent case was the alleged “underpants bomber”, Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. He had been a student at University College London and deeply involved with its Islamic Society.
Liquid bomb plot
The British-based man Taimour Abdulwahab al-Abdaly, who blew himself up in Sweden last December, had been a student at university in Luton. He was involved in an Islamic Society there before he was forced out of his local mosque because of his extreme views.
Prime Minister David Cameron is in no doubt that there is a problem. Before Christmas he told Parliament the government needs to make sure “we de-radicalise our universities”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Killed for His iPhone 4: Mugger Stabs Robbery Victim in the Head With a Screwdriver
A robbery victim died after he was stabbed in the head with a screwdriver while trying to get his iPhone back.
Police believe Keith Soons was attempting to recover his iPhone 4 when he suffered fatal head injuries in an assault in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire.
The 36-year-old, from Gloucester, was found by a member of the public in Wellington Lane at around 8am on Saturday.
Mr Soons, father to a two-year-old daughter, suffered serious head injuries. He was taken to hospital but died later that day.
Detectives said Mr Soons’ mobile phone was missing and they believe he may have been killed as he tried to get it back.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Lockerbie: David Cameron Attacks Labour After Report Finds Government Aided Bomber Release
Cabinet Secretary Sir Gus O’Donnell has found that Labour did “all it could” to facilitate Libya in its appeal to the Scottish government to release Megrahi on compassionate grounds.
In a statement to MPs, Mr Cameron said: “Insufficient consideration was given to the most basic question of all — was it really right for the British government to facilitate an appeal by the Libyans to the Scottish government in the case of an individual who was convicted of murdering 270 people, including 43 British citizens and 190 Americans and 19 other nationalities?
“That for me is the biggest lesson of this entire affair. For my part I repeat, I believe it was profoundly wrong.”
The Prime Minister said Sir Gus’s review did not justify calls for a new inquiry but provided further evidence it was a “flawed decision” by the Scottish Executive.
Mr Cameron ordered Sir Gus to carry out a review of the papers following his visit to the United States last year.
In his report, Sir Gus said: “Policy was, therefore, progressively developed that HMG should do all it could, while respecting devolved competencies, to facilitate an appeal by the Libyans to the Scottish government for Mr Megrahi’s transfer under the PTA (Prisoner Transfer Agreement) or for release on compassionate grounds.” As Mr Cameron reported the Cabinet Secretary’s findings, Conservative MPs jeered and cried “Shame!” and “Disgusting!” The PM quoted from a Foreign Office paper dated January 2009: “We now need to go further and work actively but discreetly to ensure that Megrahi is transferred back to Libya under the PTA or failing that released on compassionate grounds.”
Mr Cameron told MPs: “Frankly, this tells us something that was not made clear at the time. It goes further than the account that the former Prime Minister and the former foreign secretary gave. “We weren’t told about facilitating an appeal, about facilitating contact or game plans.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Paramedic ‘Refused to Enter Pub to Treat Collapsed Woman’ Who Later Died
A mother has told an inquest how a paramedic refused to come into a pub to treat her daughter after she collapsed.
Melissa Procter-Blain, 32, collapsed at The Crown pub in Spondon, Derbyshire, in July 2009.
An inquest at Derby Coroner’s Court heard the mother-of-three previously had surgery on her knee after falling over at the same pub in May 2009.
Her mother Diane Page described how friends called an ambulance after Miss Procter-Blain, who was in a wheelchair at the time, collapsed in the pub toilets on July 11, 2009.
‘One of her mates called me into the toilet, I went in to see her, her eyes were rolling,’ she said.
She told the court friends wheeled her daughter out into the pub, while someone called for an ambulance.
‘It seemed ages,’ she said, ‘but roughly time-wise I can’t remember.
‘I was in such a state I can’t honestly say, only people asking her to hurry up and help us.
‘She wasn’t responding, she was just standing by the door saying she couldn’t come in.’
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Seven New Human Rights Cases Against Britain Every Day… And Strasbourg Court’s Judgments Are Already Costing the Taxpayer £2billion a Year
At least seven new cases are being lodged against Britain at the European Court of Human Rights every day, causing a huge backlog and a massive bill for UK taxpayers.
The Strasbourg-based court was accused of presiding over a ‘field day for criminals’ after the number of actions against the UK almost doubled in the last 12 months.
Official figures released by the court revealed yesterday that the total number of cases pending against Britain rose from 1,690 in 2009 to 3,172 last year.
On average, more than 50 new actions a week were lodged against the UK at the Strasbourg court. The rate of cases being brought is rising five times more quickly in Britain than in the rest of Europe.
This helped to increase the court’s overall backlog of cases by 17 per cent last year to a staggering 140,000 — up from 120,000 the previous year.
The soaring number of cases against the UK is hugely unwelcome at a time of financial strictures. Research by the TaxPayers’ Alliance suggests that the cost of complying with the court’s judgments is already running at more than £2billion a year.
The astonishing figures led to renewed calls for ministers to ‘draw a line in the sand’ with the court, which has prompted fury by ruling that Britain must give prisoners the vote. Failure to comply could lead to further claims for compensation running into many millions of pounds.
Tory MP Dominic Raab said the figures underlined the need for ministers to take decisive action to assert Britain’s sovereignty over the court.
Mr Raab, a former international lawyer, said: ‘We’ve seen a surge in litigation against Britain as Strasbourg rewrites UK law — a field day for criminals avoiding deportation or suing the prison service, and a nightmare for the British taxpayer.
‘It’s time to draw a line in the sand.’
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Teacher is Suspended for ‘Encouraging Pupils to Skip Classes and for Tuition Fee Protest’
A teacher accused of encouraging her pupils to skip school to take part in tuition fee protests has been suspended.
Sue Caldwell is thought to be the first member of school staff to face disciplinary action for suggesting pupils play truant to attend the protests at the end of last year.
Scores of school pupils, many in school uniform, were pictured at the demonstrations last year which turned to anarchy as activists ran amok in London.
Some school girls were seen brazenly vandalising and graffiti-ing a police van in Trafalgar Square after protesters were hemmed in to the area on November 24.
Miss Caldwell is understood to have been suspended from her post at Friern Barnet school in north London last month after a complaint from a parent. She denies the allegation.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
EU: Serbia: Frattini: Mladic Arrest No Precondition
(ANSAmed) — BELGRADE, FEBRUARY 7 — The arrest of the war criminal Ratko Mladic cannot be considered a pre-condition for Serbia to be granted the status of candidates for joining the EU. So said Italy’s Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, who was answering questions following a meeting in Belgrade with his Serbian counterpart, Vuk Jeremic.
“The status of candidate country depends on criteria established for all countries, without exceptions or integration,” Frattini said. “The rules of the game cannot be changed halfway through”. With regards to Serbia, the need has been repeated for “full collaboration by Belgrade with the Tribunal in The Hague, for the arrest of the war criminals still at large”. Serbia, Frattini pointed out, “has modified and strengthened its judicial and security system to guarantee full collaboration”. The result of this, he added, could lead to the arrest of the criminals.
Serbia’s European prospects are at the centre of Frattini’s visit to Belgrade, with the Foreign Minister subsequently due to travel to Prague.
During the visit, Frattini’s Serbian counterpart, Vuk Jeremic, announced that the second bilateral summit between Italy and Serbia would be held in Belgrade in May. “We hope that the summit will give fresh impetus to relations between our countries, both politically and economically,” Jeremic explained.
Frattini, who confirmed the summit would take place in May, added that a number of Ministers would also take part in the event alongside the heads of both governments.
The first bilateral summit between Italy and Serbia was held in Rome in November 2009. The second was scheduled for December last year but was postponed due to the health problems of the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Days of Rage in Alexandria
For days, residents of Egypt’s second-largest city, Alexandria, have been living in a largely lawless zone. And while there is anger and rage on the streets, there is little of the enthusiasm and joy that usually marks a revolution.
There are revolutions that smell like jasmine, but not this one. There are revolutions where people celebrate what they’ve accomplished and are so happy that they can only repeat the word “crazy” in stunned disbelief, like when the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The revolution in Alexandria isn’t one of these either. Instead, the revolution here reeks of growing piles of garbage, and it sounds like the sticks the revolutionaries beat upon the empty pavement to bolster their courage.
For days, Alexandria’s four million inhabitants have been living without a state. Near Alexandria Stadium, a young man in a hoodie pulls a board studded with nails into the street to stop cars. What looks like a 15-year-old boy with a hockey stick resting on his shoulder helps him out. Others have steel rods, pipes and machetes. They have now tasted what it feels like to have power.
The police station behind the stadium in the Bab Sharqi (or “eastern gate”) district of the city has been burnt down. Torched personnel carriers once belonging to elite police units are now lying on the street surrounded by soaked bundles of files and drawers.
An old man with a book on his knees is sitting in the midst of this debris. He is Mahmoud Roshdy, a retired professor of cybernetics. He and a friend hastily cleared some space in the hallway and stuck a piece of paper on the wall with packaging tape that reads: “Public Committee for Citizens’ Issues.”
For now, Roshdy is the state. “If someone is missing their car, where should they go?” he asks. “There are no longer any public offices here or any police.” Given these circumstances, Rushdi decided to step in for the authorities. He logs all the reports, notifications and complaints in his book, which he will take to the military outposts later on.
Roshdy says that the people must learn that the police are not only responsible for tear gas and bribes. “The military has promised not to shoot. Good. But it’s also not shooting at Mubarak,” Rushdi adds. “So the mood is subdued. Our revolution hasn’t experienced its moment of joy yet. The Bastille is still standing.”
Days of Rage
People come to visit the Bab Sharqi police station to take pictures of the ruins and of themselves standing in front of them. All of a sudden, a stout man wearing sunglasses jumps out of his car and yells: “What’s going on here?” before laying into the elderly men. “You traitors! You spies!” he shouts, beside himself with rage because foreigners are being shown the humiliation of the state authority. The man cannot be calmed down. When he starts throwing punches, the shoulder holster peeks out from under his leather jacket. The bystanders just look on.
The Bastille might still be standing, but the counter-revolution has already begun. The revolution in Alexandria skipped a few stages: the rapture, the feeling of airy anticipation of empowerment, the carnival.
There are only a few people on the streets and hardly any women. The people are in hiding, as if it were somehow too eerie to be left to their own devices. Only the yellow-and-black Lada taxis continue to race through the run-down streets of the old town as they always have — like a roused swarm of wasps.
Not far from the main railway station, two archaeologists are standing guard in front of the Roman amphitheater. They have hidden two police cars on the site behind Corinthian columns to protect them from the popular rage. They ask for no photographs to be taken, saying: “Things are chaotic here. So you have to follow the rules.” Across the way, a man covered in filth is squatting on the street and sorting through the garbage around him as contentedly as a young boy with his pieces of Lego…
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Digital Activists in Egypt Being Trained by Internet Experts in New York
Training Central for digital activists is the Alliance for Youth Movement.
The revolution in Egypt is being masterminded by a phalanx of young Internet executives in the Big Apple’s SoHo, specially set up for fomenting revolutions, and the unwitting American taxpayer is paying for it.
When it comes to Revolution, today’s third world, digital activists are being better trained than anything to be found in Sun Tzu’s famed Art of War, and the ultimate fate of countless people who have never met them is being determined from afar by government-funded computer geeks.
Stealth and the cover of anonymity keep the internet warrior trainers safe in offices and homes, but not the tens of thousands on the ground. Identifying revolution rabble rousers would be akin to tracing back flash mobs.
Training Central for digital activists is the Alliance for Youth Movement (AYM), a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting, connecting, and supporting digital activists from around the world.
The April 6 group, identified as the main mastermind behind the violent protests in Egypt has roots in the Alliance of AYM—tentacles of which reach all the way into the US State Department.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Suleiman, Mubarak Will Not be Like Ben Ali
(ANSAmed) — NEW YORK, FEBRUARY 4 — “Egypt will in no way be like Tunisia” and President Mubarak “will not leave the country” as Tunisia’s President Ben Ali was forced to do by the country’s people. This is according to Egypt’s Vice-President, Omar Suleiman, who was speaking in an exclusive interview to the American channel ABC and their journalist Christiane Amanpour.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt’s Revolution Belongs to the Young People, Not the Muslim Brotherhood
The real protagonists of change are young Christians and Muslims. Muslim Brotherhood trying to highjack transition. Fear and silence of Church authorities. Accounts of real “national unity”. The analysis of a noted political analyst and director of the Jesuit Cultural Centre of Alexandria.
Cairo (AsiaNews) — Fr Henry Boulad, Director of the Jesuit Cultural Centre of Alexandria, and Soliman Chafik, journalist and political analyst, sent us this reading of recent events in Egypt.
Predicted, prepared, planned and preannounced, this revolution is the result of a long journey and a long gestation. The first question we must ask is who is behind this upheaval? Who are the real protagonists? The Muslim Brotherhood? Mossad? Iran? America? The West? This or that foreign agent? Or simply that the Egyptian people — a people who had endured too long, suffered too much, borne too much — a people tired of being crushed, exploited, trampled on, and who suddenly exploded?
The people … but which people? Not the little people who always lived in fear and submission …. but some very specific categories: young people, specifically those between 25 and 35, just graduated, and still unemployed, frustrated, unemployed, homeless, without future prospects.
These young people beyond a brutalizing scholastic education, beyond empty religious slogans without substance, beyond alienating social and moral constraints, are searching for their own way to give meaning to their lives through the Internet, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.
These young people, with eyes and ears wide open, absorb, consume, assimilate all day and all night everything that today’s world offers them on the net … the best and the worst. These young people, some of whom attend foreign schools or American university dream of openness and modernity.
These young people — open, emancipated, capable of reflection and criticism — have dreamed, organized and brought this revolution into the world. But once brought into the world, this revolution has almost immediately been latched onto by the Muslim Brotherhood, who has tried to lay claim to it, to make it a thing of their own, to steal it from the grasp of the young people who are its creators and inventors.
So on the one hand we have the young people, the real authors and protagonists of this revolution, and on the other, the Muslim Brotherhood who are trying to appropriate it … But who else? Are their other protagonists behind the events taking place in Egypt? Certainly there the are men of power, the President in first place, who do not want to give up, leave their posts, who are clinging onto the power they have held for decades by the skin of their nails. This clique, often corrupt, bloated by privileges, rich with billions at the expense of the common people, now feel everything slipping away and are desperately trying to react and cope with the situation. Without doubt this clique is behind the brutal attack on Wednesday, February 5, when thugs equipped with knives and guns, on horseback or on camels, blindly stormed an unarmed crowd that had chosen a peaceful revolution based on dialogue and negotiation.
In fact, these brutes appear to not only to be in the pay of the old ruling clique, but also of the captains of industry, commerce and finance who for years took advantage of the “system”. This mob will suffer in having to let go of power, and no doubt mobilized these bandits with neither conscience nor creed, to intimidate people and break their determination.
Are there any other players? Probably some foreign elements trying to take advantage of the situation to fish in troubled waters. But they are a tiny minority. Finally, there are the thugs, bandits and petty robbers, who looted the shops, burgled the flats, robbed passers-by … and who would like to see the disorder continue.
Who else?
The army, of course! So far neutral, it is the only guarantor of order. The army is close to the people and an enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood, whom they will strongly oppose should they attempt to seize power. Will we have a new military dictatorship, which would bring us back to square one, namely the coup of 1952? Is it possible? Are there no other scenarios?
And the Church in all this? Catholics — hierarchy, clergy, religious and faithful — maintain a prudent silence and take refuge in their churches, masses and prayer meetings. The Coptic Catholic Patriarch breaks the silence with a statement which assures Mubarak of our support and our prayers.
The Coptic Orthodox Church, which represents the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, are more divided than ever. At the level of the hierarchy, the race is on for the succession in an end of era atmosphere. For his part Shenouda, also praised the President assuring him of his prayers, in spite of a strong secularist current that rejects his statement and find that he is seriously compromising his position by taking sides. They believe he should adopt a more neutral stance so that later, they will not be accused of collaboration with the old regime. “
The majority of Christians, apart from a few activists or intellectuals, have distanced themselves from these political conflicts, and have, it seems, been encouraged to do so by a part of the hierarchy. In reality they live in fear and expect the worst should the Muslim Brotherhood take power. For the moment, thank God, there have been no inter-confessional episodes, although churches and convents are no longer protected by the police.
Let us return to the last, and first, protagonist of these events: the people themselves. Taken by surprise by the sudden disappearance of the security forces and the surprising release of prisoners, at first they gave in to panic when faced with the mob of delinquents that was released on the city. But almost as quickly they re-grouped and re-organised to face the onslaught. Civil defence committees spontaneously sprouted everywhere, deploying themselves in front of buildings, on street corners, to defend, protect families and property, to direct circulation and waste collection.
This assumption of responsibility by the people is truly remarkable and at the moment everything is being run with a surprising calm, courteousness and efficiency. In a sign of gratitude and recognition, women in the neighbourhood give meals to all those volunteers, lovingly prepared with their own hands. One of them, wanting to pay the butcher to buy meat for this purpose, was told: “Ma’am, how can I accept money for what you do for free for these young volunteers?”. I had tears in my eyes listening to this lady who told me about the episode.
This “tidal wave” of solidarity at the grassroots level has generated in all levels of society, a brotherhood that has revealed the extraordinary goodness of the Egyptian people. The lady I spoke to told me this: “This is Egypt, these are the Egyptians! Not the ones stealing, robbing, looting, but all these simple-hearted people who only aspire to peace and brotherhood. “
Let us hope that the new regime will help us to build, beyond all partisan and sectarian battles, this “national unity” that seems to many a pure utopia. But I believe that the utopia of today may become tomorrow’s reality if we really believe in it and if, in order to build it, we invest all our heart, intelligence and energy in it. A prophetic sign of this future harmony was the image this morning in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square of a multitude of people gathered hand in hand and chanting with one voice: “We are all one.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Press: Israel Against More Troops in Sinai
(ANSAmed) — TEL AVIV, FEBRUARY 7 — Israel has rejected Egypt’s request to introduce more Egyptian military units in the Sinai, making an exception to the demilitarisation agreement that was signed in 1979, newspaper Maariv writes. Last week Israel already made an exception by allowing around 800 troops to enter the Sinai. Egypt, Maariv continue, asked Israel to be allowed to send more troops to the peninsula after last Saturday’s explosion of the Egyptian gas pipeline in el-Arish (northern), as measure against terrorism. But this time the answer was negative, according to the newspaper. Israel in fact fears it will undermie the demilitarisation agreements and has already informed Egypt that the troops that were allowed to enter last week will have to withdraw as soon as the situation in the Sinai calms down again.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: The Realist Scenario
by Srdja Trifkovic
The image of the “democratic revolution” in Egypt, as constructed by the mainstream media in North America and Europe over the past two weeks, evokes the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in 1989.. The BBC World Service, NPR and other Western media outlets bring us young, articulate, lightly-accented demonstrators who talk of democracy, freedom, human rights and the rule of law. Hosni Mubarak is presented as a latter-day Erich Honecker, heading a corrupt and sclerotic regime on the wrong side of history.
The image is attractive but inaccurate. The unrest may be brought under control by Mubarak’s loyalists working in tandem with the military, or it may lead to one free election resulting in the establishment of an Islamic republic, but it will not produce a Western-style democracy. Political Islam, embodied in the Muslim Brotherhood, is the only well organized force capable of supplanting the regime and the only group with deep popular roots. The Brotherhood has let the secular reformists take the lead in the streets, confident that it will reap the benefits.
President Obama begs to differ. “The Egyptian people want freedom, they want free and fair elections, they want a representative government,” he told Bill O’Reilly in an interview just ahead of the Super Bowl. Downplaying concerns that the Brotherhood could take power and install a government hostile to U.S. interests, Obama described it as “one faction in Egypt” devoid of majority support:…
| — Hat tip: Srdja Trifkovic | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: What if the Problem Really is the People?
Mubarak’s government does not execute apostates or adulterers. But a democratic Egypt will.
A thousand talking heads and neo-conservative experts on the region assure us that a bright future stretches out before Egypt like a magic carpet. “Democracy,” “Freedom”, “Representative Government” are the buzzwords that trickle wetly out of their printers. All cynicism is disdained and skepticism swept into the dustbin. History is being made here. But the tricky thing about history is that it isn’t a point on a map, but a continuous wave. Like the tide, history is made and remade over and over again, formed and repeated, washed and beached on the shores of time.
Mubarak is the problem, we are told. And he certainly is their problem. The pesky 82 year old air force officer standing in the way of their dreams of a new Egypt. If not for him, Egypt would be a liberal model for the region. Just like Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq. But is it the dictator or the people who are the problem? The protesters are unified by a desire to push out Mubarak. But what do they actually stand for, besides open elections.’
59 percent of Egyptians want democracy and 95 percent want Islam to play a large part in politics. (As Egypt has approximately 5 percent of Christians that means 100 percent of Muslims want Islam to play a large part in politics.) 84 percent believe apostates should face the death penalty. That is what Egyptian democracy will look like. A unanimous majority that wants an Islamic state and a bare majority that wants democracy. Which one do you think will win out? A democratic majority of the country supports murdering people in the name of Islam. Mubarak’s government does not execute apostates or adulterers. But a democratic Egypt will. Why? Because it’s the will of the people.
The cheerleaders shaking their pom poms for Egyptian democracy don’t seem to grasp that the outcome could be anything other than positive. It’s an article of faith for them that freedom leads to freedom. That open elections give rise to human rights. That the problem can only be the dictator, not the people. Never the people. That is their ideology and they will stick to it.
[…]
Handing out democracy like candy does not fix existing cultural problems. It does not end bigotry, free women or stop murder in the name of Allah. Open elections are only as good as the people participating in them. And the 84 percent of Egyptians who want to murder apostates have issues that democracy will not solve. The problem with Egypt is not Mubarak—but the Egyptians.
Let’s take another example. In Jordan, the next target on the freedom tour, King Hussein passed a bill to criminalize the honor killings of women. And their democratically elected parliament voted 60 to 25 to strike the bill down. It took them only 3 minutes. That’s what democracy would mean for the Jordanian girls murdered by their husbands, brothers and fathers. The right of the people and their duly elected representatives to legalize the murder of women.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Egyptian Uprising Enables Jailed Hamas Militant to Escape
In a small cell in Egypt’s al-Marj prison, the BBC World Service brought encouraging news to Ayman Nofel. The senior Hamas commander from Gaza had just passed the third anniversary of his imprisonment on unspecified charges.
The voice coming from his radio told him that prisoners at another Egyptian jail had been freed amid the chaotic uprising sweeping the country. He saw his chance and wasted no time.
“I shouted to other prisoners to break down the doors and gates,” said Nofel, who described himself as the only political prisoner among al-Marj’s criminal population. Using smuggled mobile phones to mobilise locals to storm the prison gates, Nofel and his fellow-prisoners fought their way outside the walls and to freedom.
In an unintended consequence of the Egyptian people’s revolt against decades of repression and economic misery, the Hamas militant accused of planning bomb attacks against Israel found himself at the centre of a hero’s welcome in the Nuseirat refugee camp in central Gaza.
One by one, men queueing under the blue tarpaulin of a reception tent stepped forward to embrace the commander of the al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s military wing. They flung arms around his shoulders, clapped his back vigorously and planted kisses on each cheek before turning to accept a celebratory sticky pastry and cup of potent Arabic coffee. Despite the festivities, Nofel, 37, a stocky man in a checked shirt, said he was ready to return to “work”. Three years “and a few days” in the dank and wretched conditions of an Egyptian jail had not dulled his eagerness for what he described as “the next battle”.
The Hamas commander claimed he was held for political reasons in Egypt after being detained at a security checkpoint in Sinai in 2008. “I never went on trial. My family got a lawyer, who went to court and got an order to release me but I was never freed.”
His escape came amid the chaos of the early days of Egypt’s revolution. Having broken out of the prison with help from local people he contacted “people here in Gaza”. Hamas? “Yes, of course. They arranged for some Egyptians to pick me up,” he said. Nofel stayed in a house in the area for about seven days “until the situation was more stable”. Finally he was brought through a tunnel dug beneath the Egypt-Gaza border to his home and family. He was grateful to the Egyptian protesters who “inspired us to rise up against the prison guards. This should have happened earlier. They have spent 30 years being enslaved by the regime.” He hoped to see the Muslim Brotherhood in power in Egypt — “and all over the world, not just Egypt”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Egyptian Opposition Says No Deal Until Hosni Mubarak Steps Down
Leading opposition groups in Egypt, including the Muslim Brotherhood, are standing by a demand that President Hosni Mubarak resign before there can be a political agreement to end two weeks of mass protests against his regime.
Pro-democracy campaigners called another mass demonstration for Tuesday to keep up the pressure on Mubarak to quit in the face of the government’s attempts to marginalise the street protests as no longer relevant because political talks are under way.
In Washington, Barack Obama expressed optimism about developments in Egypt. “Obviously Egypt has to negotiate a path, and I think they’re making progress,” he said.
But there remains considerable suspicion within the opposition about the intentions of Mubarak’s vice-president, Omar Suleiman, who is overseeing the political transition and leading the negotiations, particularly after the continued arrest of opposition activists and fresh harassment of the press.
Mubarak’s new cabinet, installed after he sacked the previous one in an attempt to placate protesters, held its first meeting today and promptly announced a 15% pay rise for government employees in an apparent attempt to buy support among workers hit by sharply rising food prices.
The government also promised investigations into official corruption and widespread fraud that delivered the ruling party its large victory in last year’s parliamentary election. The curfew was relaxed by an hour.
But the government’s attempts to return Egypt to normality with a call for a return to work and an end to the demonstrations met with only partial success. Banks opened for a second day but the stock exchange, which the government hoped would be trading, remained closed, as did schools and many businesses. The value of the Egyptian pound fell sharply.
Suleiman met major opposition groups, including the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood, yesterday and made a series of concessions in the hope of defusing the protests. But Muslim Brotherhood members who attended the meeting said today that they “will continue in dialogue only if people’s demands are respected”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt Without a Pharaoh Portends a Storm
Two kinds of concerns have characterised Israeli reaction to events in Egypt — one obvious, the other less so. The first was that 30 years of peace between Israel and the premier Arab country might be in jeopardy if Egypt descends into chaos or the Muslim Brotherhood, which has consistently opposed the peace treaty with Israel, comes to power.
The other focuses on Washington, not Cairo. Many in Israel have been shocked and dismayed by the inconsistency, bordering on amateurism, of the US response to events in Egypt. First the president, then Hillary Clinton, secretary of state, then again the president’s special envoy to Hosni Mubarak, have oscillated between distancing themselves from one of America’s staunchest allies and calling for him to step down, further calls for him to do it as soon as possible and then, taking a U-turn, endorsing an “orderly transition” headed by Omar Suleiman, his intelligence chief. Not for the first time, it transpired that the first intellectual to occupy the White House since Woodrow Wilson obviously does not live up to his battle cry of “Yes, we can”.
The conundrum facing Israel is obvious: as a democracy, Israel should hail democratisation among its neighbours; yet Mr Mubarak’s regime was, for Israel, a mainstay of peace, while popular forces have opposed the peace treaty.
Israelis have been there before. When in 1952 the Egyptian Free Officers, one of whose leaders was Gamal Abdul Nasser, brought down King Farouk’s corrupt regime, David Ben-Gurion, prime minister, welcomed them as harbingers of democracy and social justice. The result, however, was Nasserism — a toxic amalgam of expansionist pan-Arab nationalism, statist autocratic socialism, anti-western (and anti-Israeli) ideology — and a one-party state, eventually a Soviet client.
If Egypt develops into a stable democracy, this can turn peace with Israel from an act of raison d’état into a reality based on common values. This would, of course, require a much more flexible approach from the Israeli government regarding negotiations with the Palestinians. Given a truly democratic development in Egypt, one can imagine successful internal pressure in Israel in that direction.
But other alternatives are also possible. For decades, the effective running of Egypt was guaranteed by the army: the restraint shown by the military towards the demonstrators and their respect for the soldiers perched on their tanks suggest a complex, symbiotic relationship, in which the army is viewed not just as the arm of the dictatorial oppressor (which in reality it is) but also as a symbol of national pride. This mainstay of the traditional pharaonic system may be the only guarantee the transition will be relatively peaceful. The symbols of such a military-controlled transition are already in place — Omar Suleiman, vice-president, and Ahmed Shafik, prime minister, both former generals. So, runs current Israeli thinking, relations with Israel may in the short run continue on an even keel.
But what of the Muslim Brotherhood? It has kept a low profile in the protests: its militant Islamism frightens many secular Egyptians, and certainly the large
Christian Coptic community. A high profile would also dampen western support for what looks as a popular uprising. While western observers tend to see Turkey’s AK party as a model for the Brotherhood, Israelis, on the other hand, regardless of party affiliation, view the idea of the Brotherhood in government with alarm.
The reasons are obvious: for 30 years the Muslim Brotherhood opposed the peace treaty. Anwar Sadat’s assassin came from the Brotherhood’s environment, as did some of al-Qaeda’s future leaders. The Brotherhood’s ideology has consistently opposed Israel’s very existence. The Brotherhood supports Hamas in Gaza, and its ascent to power will certainly strengthen its supporters in Jordan, as well as undermine the secular Palestinian Authority, thus making an Israeli-Palestinian accord even more distant,
After decades of enjoying peace with two of its neighbours, Israelis see what is happening in Egypt not just as the ascent of democracy, but as a possible unravelling of their dream: peace and acceptance by the Arab world. What looks from a distance as a new dawn may appear regionally as the flashes of lightning announcing a gathering storm.
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt Crisis: Hosni Mubarak Loses Control of State Media
Hoping to sap the momentum from street protests demanding his overthrow, the president has instructed his deputy to launch potentially protracted negotiations with secular and Islamist opposition parties. The talks continued for a second day on Monday without yielding a significant breakthrough.
But Mr Mubarak was dealt a significant setback as the state-controlled Al-Ahram, Egypt’s second oldest newspaper and one of the most famous media publications in the Middle East, abandoned its long-standing position of slavish support for the regime.
In a front-page leader, the newspaper’s editor-in-chief, Osama Saraya hailed the “nobility” of what he described as a “revolution” and demanded that the government embark of irreversible constitutional and legislative changes.
“The state and all its denizens, the elder generation, the politicians and all other powers on the political stage must humble themselves and rein themselves in to understand the ambitions of the young and the dreams of this nation,” he wrote.
There was no call on the president to resign and while it may yet prove that Al Ahram’s editorial shift may be tactical rather than genuine, opposition supporters expressed astonishment at the development. Mr Saraya built his reputation as a dependable apologist for the president.
Last year, he became the subject of opposition mockery after Al-Ahram doctored a photo to show Mr Mubarak striding in front of President Barack Obama and other world leaders at the White House, when in fact he was at the rear. Caught out, Mr Saraya defended the deception as legitimate “expressionism”.
Mr Saraya’s change of heart comes amid growing anger among state journalists following the killing of Ahmed Mohamed Mahmoud, a reporter for an affiliate of Al-Ahram, which was founded in 1875. Mr Mahmoud, who died last Friday, was shot dead, allegedly by a secret policeman, as he filmed opposition protests from the window of his office with his mobile telephone.
On Monday over 200 Egyptian journalists, many from state controlled publications, marched through Cairo’s streets chanting anti-Mubarak slogans and holding aloft a model coffin.
Highlighting the depth of the rebellion, the reporters had earlier surrounded Makram Mohamed Ahmed, the powerful head of Egypt’s press syndicate and an ardent regime loyalist, chanting: “killer! killer!” and “down with the mouthpiece of the regime”.
Like Al Ahram, which initially dismissed the protests as a non-event, state television has also been forced to modify its coverage of the uprising after a senior anchorwoman and a leading reporter resigned in protest.
Having repeatedly insisted that the demonstrations had drawn no more than 5,000 people, most of them in the pay of foreign media outlets, government broadcasters have for the first time acknowledged a major presence in Cairo’s Tahrir Square…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
EU and US Warn Against Early Egypt Elections
EUOBSERVER / BRUSSELS — EU and US leaders have warned of the “chaos” that could result if President Hosni Mubarak steps down immediately, with a top US diplomat describing the role of the hardman as “utterly critical” and praising his “legacy.”
“Early elections at the beginning of the democratisation process is probably the wrong approach,” German Chancellor Angela Merkel told some 400 senior government officials and security experts at a high-level conference in Munich over the weekend.
“We did not want to wait for German reunification,” she said, comparing the events in north Africa to the Cold War rupture in 1989 in Europe. “We did not have enough time to prepare, to set out a program, to inform the public … You don’t stand a chance if you do not set up new structures.”
“There will be a change in Egypt, but it needs to be change in such a way that it is peaceful and orderly.”
Speaking on a panel with EU Council President Herman van Rompuy, US secretary of state Hilary Clinton encouraged support for the new negotiations between the government and the opposition and for the first time explicitly backed September — a date previously named by Mr Mubarak himself — as the best moment for any changeover.
“There are forces which are trying to derail this process. It is important to support the Egyptian transition process and ensure that it is transparent and inclusive. The outcome must be an orderly conduct of elections in September,” she said.
Her government’s envoy to Egypt, diplomat Frank Wisner, went much further, saying that Mr Mubarak must be free to “write his legacy.”
“President Mubarak remains utterly critical in the days ahead as we sort our way toward the future,” he told the Munich meeting. “The president must stay in office to steer those changes through. I therefore believe that President Mubarak’s continued leadership is critical; it’s his opportunity to write his own legacy. He has given 60 years of his life to the service of his country.”
For his part, the EU’s Mr Van Rompuy criticised policies that emphasise stability over democracy.
“We stand behind the Egyptian people,” he said. “Events in Tunisia and Egypt show that stability can result in immobility … Therefore stability alone cannot be the ultimate answer.”
Sweden’s foreign minister, Carl Bildt, who has been critical of the EU’s stance over north Africa over the last fortnight, repeated his opinion in an interview with the Reuters news agency. “The story of the West in the Middle East is nearly all the story of failures” he said.
The freshly-apointed Egyptian vice president Omar Suleiman on Saturday opened talks with opposition forces, including the Muslim Brotherhood, secular parties and a representative of Nobel Peace Prize laureate Mohamed ElBaradei. According to a statement from Mr Suleiman, the administration has offered to make constitutional amendments, to liberalise media, fight corruption and lift the state of emergency.
Support for Mr Suleiman, the head of Egypt’s Mukhabarat, or intelligence service, for the past 18 years, as co-ordinator of any transition appears to be coalescing amongst EU and US policymakers. Protesters however say that the vice-president, who stands accused by human rights groups of overseeing the widespread use of torture — frequently in the service of Western governments during the war on terror, should be overthrown as well.
Meanwhile, German legislators said on Sunday that Mr Mubarak would be welcome in their country for an extended health check, according to domestic media.
‘We need a peaceful transition in Egypt. If Germany can make a constructive contribution in the international framework, we should receive Hosny Mubarak — if he wants that,’ said Andreas Schockenhoff, a senior Christian Democrat MP, reported Bild am Sontag, a statement echoed by the party’s liberal Free Democrat coalition partners.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Lost, Blindfolded, Cuffed and Questioned in Chaotic Cairo
WHEN you’re sitting in an army vehicle blindfolded and handcuffed and the man in front of you is apparently being bashed, the word “welcome” sounds hollow.
That was the experience I and seven others had in Cairo last night. At an unknown location, for an hour or so, soldiers walked around the bus — which had had all of its windows smashed — asking our names and jobs.
The drama began as I and Fairfax colleague Jason Koutsoukis and two German journalists were returning about 9.50pm to our hotel from dinner nearby. Many roads were blocked so our taxi took back streets. The 10-day-old curfew was technically in place, but thousands had been ignoring it and the government had been saying things were returning to normal. In the embassy precinct, Garden City, we were stopped by men with sticks — whom we found out were undercover police.
We were asked to hand over our passports and mobile phones.
The main policeman apologised, saying there were many criminals on the streets with stolen machine guns and that things were very dangerous. A boy brought us hot tea.
One of the Germans lives in Cairo and said he was not nervous but would get nervous if we were taken to the Interior Ministry.
After 30 minutes, we were told to get back into the taxi. A soldier got in with us. We were driven behind a van that had foreigners who were handcuffed. We got out at an army station. We sat there for 30 minutes or so. The commander brought in a pile of medical bandages and tape; I didn’t think anything of it at the time.
One soldier appeared to be downloading our mobile phones on to a computer.
There were eight of us — two Australians, two Germans, two Frenchwomen, a Belgian man and one of their Egyptian boyfriends. One of the women said she’d been in bed when the soldiers arrived after detaining her boyfriend, who had been walking with a camera.
“We will blindfold you and take you to state intelligence,” the commander told us. He said we should not panic as we would not be hurt.
Someone asked why blindfolding was necessary. “So you don’t see where you are going,” was the reply. They told the Egyptian man to do the blindfolding — he went from one to the other taping our eyes. First cottonwool, then tape.
It probably sounds strange but as he tried to blindfold me I felt claustrophobic and almost began vomiting. When I said it was making me feel sick, the commander gave me one of those eyeshades airlines give you. At least I could see the ground, which made it easier to walk.
It’s extraordinary the psychological effect a blindfold can have — suddenly you are totally vulnerable.
Many journalists are being detained and bashed and this was a bad time to be a foreign journalist in Cairo. The soldiers tied our hands behind our backs with electrical wire that dug into our wrists. With a soldier holding one arm, we were walked to the street and put into a vehicle.
A second Egyptian man joined us. From his screams, it sounded as if he was going mad. We drove for probably 45 minutes — we felt some relief that the length of the drive meant we were not going to the inner-city Interior Ministry, which one local described as “a torture chamber”.
Once we arrived, my fear was we would be separated and tortured. A Spanish journalist detained the day before watched Egyptians have electrodes attached to their necks and chests. The engine of the bus was kept running.
Soldiers would ask a question then appear to head away. “What your name?” one would say. “Me?” It was impossible to tell who they were asking.
“What your jube?” they asked. Four of us answered, in turn, journalist. “You take photos?” they asked. “You been in any rallies?”
One of the women described her job as “political analyst”. The Belgian said he was a “cultural organiser” — that bamboozled them but it sounded much better at this stage than journalist.
Every so often the Egyptian in front of us would let out a crazed sound — and appeared to be hit for it. When we could remove the blindfolds, we saw cuts on his forehead. “Why you break curfew?” one said. I said I had thought taxis were permitted. “Why you think that?”
The soldiers would walk around the bus, asking questions. None of us knew who was being asked a question. A different voice would appear and ask the same questions: when one of the women answered that she was from France, one soldier replied: “Welcome.”
It sounded bizarre. This was not “welcome” territory.
When we asked whether we could remove the blindfolds as we were now at the location, one of them said “five minutes”. They apologised and said they were doing this for our safety.
One of them apparently said to another that he was thinking of handing us over to state intelligence but decided we were not serious cases.
Finally, the bus began driving again. They said we could take off the blindfolds. There were seven soldiers with AK-47s.
While the ordeal had been unpleasant for us foreigners, for the apparently deranged Egyptian it would get worse.
The bus took a side street that was blocked by vigilantes. Had we not had soldiers, we might well have been in trouble again.
It was about 2am and two soldiers got out — the vigilantes stopped approaching.
One soldier grabbed the Egyptian man and took him from the bus. He was still blindfolded and now hunched as well.
The soldier pushed him into the mob. One of the mob put a kick into him. They then took him around the corner. Unlike us, he had no embassy or newspaper to call on.
Mobs now roam Cairo looking for something to do — this man was their new entertainment. This is today’s Cairo.
| — Hat tip: Nilk | [Return to headlines] |
MENA: Measures Launched to Avoid Popular Anger
(ANSAmed) — ROME, FEBRUARY 7 — The governors of the Arab countries have started to launch several measures in an attempt to absorb the anger of the people. For example, they have increased their expenditure to contain energy and food prices and have promised to create many jobs for young people.
Economic experts and rating agencies, Al Jazeera reports on its website, warn that the “weapon” of economic measures used by the Arab leaders could jam due to rising food and energy prices. The leaders have little room for manoeuvre due to the deficit of the national budgets and the negative forecasts on the Arab markets, the website continues. The recent demonstrations of Arab people who ask for more political freedom reflect a collective feeling of frustration over the widespread corruption in the high ranks of power. After last month’s popular uprising in Tunisia, many Arab governments, from Algeria to Yemen, have taken measures to reduce the economic pressure on their citizens. These measures were taken in Egypt, where the government is trying to hold on to power, and in Jordan, a country with a high deficit rate that is highly dependent on foreign aid. In the past two weeks, the government of Jordan unexpectedly announced that wages would be raised and that USD 125 million would be allocated to support prices of energy and food products, like sugar and rice. In that context, Algeria and Libya have lowered their taxes on food imports. The Moroccan government, which already offered generous contributions on food and energy, recently promised to keep food prices within acceptable limits.
Syria has been forced to give up its plans to introduce a new energy tax, and now offers civil servants a 73% contribution to the cost of heating gas. The economies of Gulf countries like Saudi Arabia and Qatar don’t feel the same pressure because their budgets record a surplus, which will raise purchasing power, thanks to rising oil prices. Kuwait has decided to offer contributions and free food products to its citizens until March 2012, in order to reduce the burden of price rises. Economic experts say that the governments in the MENA area want to stay in power and want to control their expenditure to recover from the crisis at the same time, a difficult balancing act. Ange Benoit, manager of Banque Societè General, has said that excessive government support or the use of resources to satisfy the people is a short-term solution, which could cause economic problems on the long run. He underlines that the problem of the governors is to find urgent solutions that will allow them to stay in power. The rating agencies announced that the increased government support could aggravate the budget deficit. As a consequence, the governments will be unable to pay their debts if investors decide to withdraw.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Morocco: Authorities Give Nod to Anti-Govt Protests Organised on Facebook
Rabat, 4 Feb. (AKI) — In an unprecedented move, Moroccan authorities have okayed an anti-government protest being planned on the popular social networking site Facebook, local newspaper Hespress reports.
The paper said several Moroccan youth movements have announced on Facebook that they are planning to organise an Egypt-style anti-government protest on 20 February, a move apparently welcomed by the government.
“We intend to reassure those who are organising protests on the internet that this is an entirely normal thing and is part of the democratic life of Morocco,” Hespress quoted telecommunications minister Khaled al-Nasiri, as saying.
The protest will counter a rally planned this Sunday by government supporters, which is also being organised on Facebook.
“We are used to such initiatives growing up and have for years been open to freedom of opinion and expression,” al-Nasiri said.
Anti-government protests began in Egypt last week aimed at ousting its authoritarian president Hosni Mubarak from power and mass protests have also been taking place in Yemen against its president Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been in power for 30 years.
The protests appear to have drawn inspiration from a revolt in Tunisia which ousted president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali from office after over 23 years in power in what was dubbed the ‘Jasmine’ revolution.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Muslim Brotherhood Looks to Gains in Egypt Protest
Egypt’s banned Muslim Brotherhood, country’s strongest organized opposition group, which has been officially banned for decades, is sure to be a major force in any post-Mubarak era. The Brotherhood’s strength is on display sincethe group has rushed to take a stronger role in the unprecedented protests that erupted 10 days ago
Anti-government protesters pray while clashes with pro-government supporters take place behind them on the other side of metal barricades, near the Egyptian Museum. AP photo.
Egypt’s wave of protests has brought the fundamentalist Muslim Brotherhood within sight of a long-sought dream: Not outright power, as some fear, but a recognized and open role in the politics of this top U.S. ally.
Vice President Omar Suleiman on Thursday said he had invited the Brotherhood into negotiations over Egypt’s future and the transition to democracy — a stunning concession to a group that the regime considers its worst enemy and has cracked down on ferociously in the past years.
The Brotherhood has rushed to take a stronger role in the unprecedented protests that erupted 10 days ago, led by more secular young activists demanding the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak. The Brotherhood’s strength was on display in the pitched battles in Wednesday and Thursday against government supporters who attacked the protesters’ camp in Cairo’s central Tahrir Square.
Brothers — distinguishable by their close-cropped beards — dominated the front lines, often lining up to pray for “victory or martyrdom,” before throwing themselves into the fray, hurling stones, sticks and firebombs at the attackers while shouting “God is great.”
The potential of the Brotherhood gaining greater power has clearly weighed on the United States as it presses Mubarak to bow out. U.S. officials have said they want the transition to democracy to be stable to prevent any group from imposing its ideology.
Israel has been more alarmist in fears of an Islamic militant takeover, and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has warned that any government that emerges from Egypt’s turmoil must preserve the 1979 peace deal between the two countries.
And Egypt’s government has been happy to fuel those worries, long warning the U.S. and Egyptians themselves that the Brotherhood aims to take over the country and lead it into Islamic radicalism. Mubarak, in an interview with ABC News, blamed the Brotherhood for the past two days of clashes.
The Brotherhood, founded in 1928 and outlawed in 1954, renounced violence decades ago and its strain of conservative Islam falls far short of the radicalism of Afghanistan’s Taliban or even the ultrapuritanism that reigns in U.S. ally Saudi Arabia.
Founded by schoolteacher Hassan al-Banna in 1928 as a grass-roots movement opposed to colonialism and Zionism, the group has largely succeeded in its main goal of encouraging Egyptians to embrace Islam in public life.
Brotherhood leaders insist they are not seeking a leadership role in the protests. That reflects a wariness of breaking its fragile alliance with secular activists and prompting a backlash against it. “We are very clear: We are out there, but only so far as what fits and meets the requirements of the nation,” Mohammed Mursi, a senior Brotherhood leader, said. “We are not wavering, but we are not being reckless either,” he said.
The Brotherhood’s presence among protesters has visibly grown. Their supporters — men in beards and women in veils cloaking their entire faces except their eyes — were checking the ID of people coming into the square and searching them.
One secular woman protester, Selma Abu al-Dahab, said Thursday that as she and three others like her dressed in chic clothes without Islamic headscarves entered Tahrir, a bearded young man told them the TV was reporting that there are growing numbers of Islamists in the protest “so please congregate to show this is not the case.”
Diaa Rashwan, a prominent Egyptian expert on Islamic groups, believes that the Brotherhood may be moving to top gear to take full advantage of the situation created by the protests. “They are a highly organized group and have been wanting to gain power for a long time,” he said. “At this point in time, they have gone on a high alert and are mobilizing all their assets. They would be fools not to.”
The disparate young leftists and secularists who launched the protests and still make up a majority on the streets view the Brotherhood with suspicion. But they also insist that its power and the popular support it would have in a democratic system are exaggerated. “The Brotherhood looks big in a nation like ours where politics are basically a one-party system,” said Fathi Farid, a 23-year-old blogger with a ponytail. “But once we have a nation where everyone is free and the law is above everyone, it will be just one of the players.”
The Brotherhood maintains a deliberate ambivalence over its intentions. It says, for example, that it opposes Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel and endorses the right to armed resistance against the Jewish nation, but says that it will not actively seek to rescind the agreement since it was adopted by the parliament of the time. “We in the Brotherhood are not living in dreamland,” Mursi said when asked whether the group would rescind Egypt’s peace treaty with Israel if in power.
It continues to maintain that its objective is to create a purist Islamic state in Egypt, but says it will not force women to wear the Islamic veil in public. Its stand on whether Egypt’s Christian minority should have equal rights with Muslims and women’s role in society are less clear. Mursi himself maintained that the Brotherhood was unlikely to win a majority in a free and fair election in Egypt.
But this, critics contend, is a Brotherhood tactic to play down its abilities and conceal its real intentions. The Brotherhood has long been seen as the best organized opposition movement in Egypt, despite the ban against it, with a disciplined political network across the country. Much of the Brotherhood’s popular support comes from its network of social services, which in some cases offer the public a more efficient service than the government’s.
It runs candidates as independents in parliamentary elections, and its best showing came in 2005, when it won 20 percent of the legislature’s seats. However, it failed to win a single seat in last year’s elections, rigged to ensure that Mubarak’s ruling party won all but a small fraction of the 518-member chamber.
Thousands of Brotherhood members have been arrested in crackdowns in recent years. That in part was what made Suleiman’s offer of negotiations so startling. The vice president, a former intelligence chief and diehard military man, dangled before the group the seat at the table that it has long sought, calling it a “valuable opportunity.”
So far, the Brotherhood and other groups involved in the protests have rejected any talks until Mubarak goes. The military, Egypt’s most powerful institution, is known to oppose the Brotherhood but may be willing to tolerate it as a part of the political spectrum, not a dominant force.
Ammar Ali Hassan, an expert on Islamist groups, said the past 10 day’s turmoil has shown the strengths and limits of the Brotherhood’s popular support. “In the climate of freedom of the past week, the Brotherhood was seen for what it really is away from the regime’s exaggerations of the threat it poses.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Muslim Brotherhood’s Rashad Al-Bayoumi: ‘The Revolution Will Continue Until Our Demands Are Met’
The West is worried that the Islamist group Muslim Brotherhood will take on an influential role in post-Mubarak Egypt. SPIEGEL spoke with the group’s deputy leader, Rashad al-Bayoumi, about what the Brotherhood wants, the West’s “refusal to listen,” and non-violence.
Bayoumi: The West refuses to listen to us. We are not demons. We want peace, not violence. Our religion is not a diabolical religion. Our religion respects people of other faiths, these are our principles. But this regime purposely misrepresents us and manipulates public opinion.
SPIEGEL: How many members does your movement have?
Bayoumi: I don’t know — we don’t count them. The government says that there are over three million of us. All I know is that we are everywhere, in every city, every village, every neighborhood. We are an essential part of the people…
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Playing Chess With the Muslim Brotherhood
The US is facing a dilemma on how to deal with the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. On one hand, accepting it means accepting an Islamist system that will certainly have an anti-American and anti-Israeli agenda. On the other hand, rejecting and delegitimizing this group can turn some of its members to the use of violence.
The group has very strong anti-American and anti- Israeli views, and hence defeating it requires wisdom similar to playing chess rather than direct confrontations, especially in the current volatile situation.
This approach is possible because we know that the leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, unlike other jihadi groups, can sit at a table and negotiate. In chess, one may win the game by executing a proper gambit, or a well-calculated sacrifice. Direct confrontations with the Muslim Brotherhood may be much less effective than well-planned gambits.
THE CURRENT reality in Egypt is that despite being officially banned, the Muslim Brotherhood very much exists. For nearly 30 years, the Mubarak regime has been unable to suppress the spread of its ideology. For example, the Brotherhood managed during the rule of President Hosni Mubarak to increase the Islamic-based hatred of Israel, and both anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism have reached very high levels in the country.
In addition, it managed to Islamize a significant portion of the society. Currently, most Muslim women are wearing the hijab, Islamic jargon is used in mainstream media and the support of Shari’a is prevalent among the population. During the time of Anwar Sadat, anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism were declining, and during Gamal Abdel Nasser’s time, signs of Islamization of the society were virtually nonexistent. This indicates that the Muslim Brotherhood thrived during the Mubarak regime.
The reliance of Israel and the US on one person in power in Egypt without pressuring him to change the educational system and the government-controlled media to actively fight anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism was a short-sighted approach that was doomed to fail. It was much better that the US — instead of pressuring Mubarak on democracy — should have used its relation with him to make changes in education and to implement effective strategies to weaken Islamism. This would have guaranteed a much better long-term relationship between Egypt and the US and Israel.
Mubarak’s approach that allowed anti-Semitism to flourish while pretending to be a friend to Israel was schizophrenic and indicates that he was not a true ally. His refusal to visit Israel even once during his 30 years of presidency is another indication of the lack of sincerity in his relationship — despite receiving billions of dollars in aid from the US.
A man who truly believes in peace would not have allowed anti-Semitism to flourish to such pathological levels in his country. For example, Sadat, who believed in peace, took many active steps to change Egyptian society and used religion effectively to fight rather than promote anti-Semitism. Sadat’s approach was to a great extent successful in decreasing anti-Semitism — despite his being assassinated by extremists who deemed him an “apostate.”
WHILE THE Muslim Brotherhood flourished over the last few decades, it lost a significant amount of its popularity in the last few years due to several reasons: * The emergence of open criticism of Islam and the exposure of radical teachings that contradict human conscience. The Internet and modern media allowed a level of debate and discussion that weakened the appeal of political Islam to many people. This was evident by the refusal of the protesters in Egypt to use the flag of the Muslim Brotherhood…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Possible Exile in Germany: Clinic Near Baden-Baden Considered for Mubarak
Will Hosni Mubarak travel to Germany as a patient as part of a graceful exit strategy for the Egyptian president? Plans for a possible hospital stay here appear to be more concrete than previously believed. SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned that a luxury clinic near Baden-Baden is being favored.
The United States government’s scenario for an end to the political chaos in Egypt appears to be this: President Hosni Mubarak travels to Germany for a “prolonged health check” that would offer the 82-year-old a dignified departure. Over the weekend, the New York Times reported that secret talks to that effect were being held between the US government and Egyptian military officials.
According to information obtained by SPIEGEL ONLINE, plans for a possible hospital stay in Germany are far more concrete than had been assumed so far. Talks are already being held with suitable hospitals, particularly with the Max-Grundig-Klinik Bühlerhöhe in the southwestern town of Bühl near Baden-Baden, SPIEGEL ONLINE has learned from sources close to the clinic. The hospital management declined to comment.
The luxury clinic has an excellent reputation, as well as a respected oncology department, and says on its website it offers “first-class medical care” and the “comfort and service of a top hotel.” Patients are accommodated in suites up to 200 square meters (2,152 square feet) in size. Former Ukrainian President Vickor Yushchenko and former Russian Economics Minister German Gref have been treated there.
In the past there have been rumors that Mubarak is suffering from cancer. During the spring of 2010, Mubarak had his gallbladder and an intestinal polyp removed in the Heidelberg University Clinic. Doctors in Heidelberg quashed the cancer rumors at the time.
Currently, Mubarak is residing in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in a holiday villa. Politicians from Germany’s center-right coalition government under Chancellor Angela Merkel have said in recent days they were open to a hospital stay by Mubarak in Germany.
“We need a peaceful transition in Egypt. If Germany can make a constructive contribution in an international framework, we should receive Hosni Mubarak — if he wants that,” said Andreas Schockenhoff, a senior member of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party.
Elke Hof, security policy spokeswoman for the business-friendly Free Democratic Party, the junior coalition partner to the CDU, said: “I would welcome an early departure by Mubarak if this can contribute to stabilizing the situation in Egypt.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Ministry of Social Affairs Attacked
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, FEBRUARY 7 — The headquarters of the Ministry for Social Affairs in Tunis have been attacked by hundreds of protesters. Staff were able to leave the building through service doors and under the protection of the military.
On Saturday, the Minister announced the opening of regional offices, with the aim of dealing with requests from citizens and supplying urgent aid. The aid is not distributed from the building that was attacked today.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
US Urges Egypt to Uphold International Treaties
The US led pressure Monday on Egypt’s future leaders to honor existing treaties, alluding to the peace process as the Muslim Brotherhood joined talks on the Arab nation’s political transition. Washington “will be a partner” to an Egyptian government, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs vowed.
But he warned: “We would expect that that partner would uphold particularly the treaties and the obligations that the government of Egypt, and ultimately the people of Egypt, have entered into.” Egypt has played a key role in the Middle East peace process, becoming the first Arab country to officially recognize Israel with a peace treaty signed in 1979. But the historic accord has been sharply criticized by the Muslim Brotherhood.
Egyptian Vice President Omar Suleiman Sunday tried to appease days of anti-government protests by inviting several opposition groups to join him on a panel to pilot democratic reform.
Opposition parties, including the powerful Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, repeated their demand that beleaguered President Hosni Mubarak must stand down or immediately delegate his powers to Suleiman. Since the start of the unrest, Israel — Washington’s biggest ally in the region — has voiced fears Islamists could seize power in Cairo, threaten to tear up the peace treaty and destabilize the geo-political map.
In Jerusalem, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in a speech to European lawmakers urged “the international community to demand that a future government in Egypt respect the peace treaty with Israel.” US President Barack Obama said Monday he believed progress was being made amid all the upheaval in Egypt. “Obviously, Egypt has to negotiate a path and they’re making progress,” he told journalists. Gibbs stressed, however, the Obama administration has not been in contact with the Muslim Brotherhood, noting significant disagreements with the powerful Islamist movement that has long been officially banned from Egyptian politics.
“We have many disagreements with the rhetoric of some of the leaders in that organization,” he told reporters at the White House. “The anti-American rhetoric… that goes very counter to the very regional peace and stability that I spoke of is, of course, not something that is supported by the United States,” Gibbs added…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Digging on Temple Mount ‘To Erase Traces of Jewish Altar’
Muslim religious authorities are concluding a clandestine eight-month dig on the Temple Mount that is intended to erase traces of the Jewish Temple’s Altar, Temple activists charge.
The digs have been taking place under the Dome of the Chain, believed to have been built over 1300 years ago. For eight months, the dome — which has a diameter of 14 meters — has been surrounded by a metal fence and black cloth, which hide whatever activity has been going on there from outside inspection. The Muslim Waqf religious authority has claimed the activity is simply a refurbishing of the structure, but refuses adamantly to let Jews or tourists near.
Jewish activists made various attempts to enter the Dome, but met with no success. In the end, the Our Temple Mount news outlet found an Arab who was willing to take photos inside the compound in return for a handsome fee (see below). The man said that it appears the Waqf has already completed its digs and is now covering the dig with dirt.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
WikiLeaks: Israel’s Secret Hotline to the Man Tipped to Replace Mubarak
Mr Suleiman, who is widely tipped to take over from Hosni Mubarak as president, was named as Israel’s preferred candidate for the job after discussions with American officials in 2008.
As a key figure working for Middle East peace, he once suggested that Israeli troops would be “welcome” to invade Egypt to stop weapons being smuggled to Hamas terrorists in neighbouring Gaza. The details, which emerged in secret files obtained by WikiLeaks and passed to The Daily Telegraph, come after Mr Suleiman began talks with opposition groups on the future for Egypt’s government. On Saturday, Mr Suleiman won the backing of Hillary Clinton, the US Secretary of State, to lead the “transition” to democracy after two weeks of demonstrations calling for President Mubarak to resign. David Cameron, the Prime Minister, spoke to Mr Suleiman yesterday and urged him to take “bold and credible steps” to show the world that Egypt is embarking on an “irreversible, urgent and real” transition. Leaked cables from American embassies in Cairo and Tel Aviv disclose the close co-operation between Mr Suleiman and the US and Israeli governments as well as diplomats’ intense interest in likely successors to the ageing President Mubarak, 83.
The documents highlight the delicate position which the Egyptian government seeks to maintain in Middle East politics, as a leading Arab nation with a strong relationship with the US and Israel. By 2008, Mr Suleiman, who was head of the foreign intelligence service, had become Israel’s main point of contact in the Egyptian government. David Hacham, a senior adviser from the Israeli Ministry of Defence, told the American embassy in Tel Aviv that a delegation led by Israel’s defence minister, Ehud Barak had been impressed by Mr Suleiman, whose name is spelled “Soliman” in some cables.
But Mr Hacham was “shocked” by President Mubarak’s “aged appearance and slurred speech”.
The cable, from August 2008, said: “Hacham was full of praise for Soliman, however, and noted that a ‘hot line’ set up between the MOD and Egyptian General Intelligence Service is now in daily use. “Hacham noted that the Israelis believe Soliman is likely to serve as at least an interim President if Mubarak dies or is incapacitated.” The Tel Aviv diplomats added: “We defer to Embassy Cairo for analysis of Egyptian succession scenarios, but there is no question that Israel is most comfortable with the prospect of Omar Soliman.” Elsewhere the documents disclose that Mr Suleiman was stung by Israeli criticism of Egypt’s inability to stop arms smugglers transporting weapons to Palestinian militants in Gaza. At one point he suggested that Israel send troops into the Egyptian border region of Philadelphi to “stop the smuggling”.
“In their moments of greatest frustration, [Egyptian Defence Minister] Tantawi and Soliman each have claimed that the IDF [Israel Defence Forces] would be ‘welcome’ to re-invade Philadelphi, if the IDF thought that would stop the smuggling,” the cable said…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Babies Behind Bars: Turkey’s Unique Policy for Incarcerated Mothers
A university and two nongovernmental organizations launch a project at Bakirköy Women’s Prison to help inmates who are incarcerated with their young children. According to project leaders, Turkey is the only country where children younger than 6 stay with their mothers in prison, a situation they say is unacceptable
The question of whether it is healthier for a child to grow up without a mother present, or to be raised in prison next to an incarcerated mother, is a difficult one to answer.
Turkey’s unprecedented approach to this dilemma is to allow children below the age of 6 to stay behind bars with their mothers. But no one has determined how they might be affected later in life by this situation.
According to figures provided by the Justice Ministry, as of six months ago, 479 “innocent inmates” were living inside the country’s prisons with their mothers.
Three women — one academic and two representatives of nongovernmental organizations — who were in frequent touch with inmates for different research purposes started wondering about the children in this situation. This led them to prepare a project with the support of Istanbul’s Dogus University and the Netherlands Consulate General and with assistance from two graduate students in clinical psychology.
The group first examined the Bakirköy Women’s Prison Correctional Facility in Istanbul. “Kids in prison live isolated from the sunlight, from men, vehicles, dogs and streets, but, on the other hand, we know very well that mother-child bonding is essential,” said Asli Aktas Mitrani from Dogus University’s Psychology Department.
“Low education levels, young motherhood, many children — all of these are stress factors seriously affecting mothers’ patience, endurance and disciplinary skills, in addition to the prison conditions,” she added.
Noting that mothers’ stress levels are a key risk factor in both domestic violence and child-abuse cases, Mitrani elaborated on the conditions in the prison. “Think of the mothers in a prison dormitory shared by 15 or 20 inmates…. We began the project by asking how we could help mothers provide good-quality childrearing, to the extent the conditions of such facilities allow,” she said. “How could we explain why we were there, how could we answer their children and how could we react to the children’s emotional problems without harming them?”
Birgül Haznedaroglu, a Civilian Society Association representative at the Department of Corrections and a clinical psychologist, noted that the children are separated from their mothers at the age of 6 and must leave the prisons.
“How will the mother explain this to her child, how will the child perceive the outside world?” she asked. “If we equip these mothers, even a little bit, their lives would be easier. That’s what we consider. In order to increase communication between incarcerated mothers and their children, we will set up play rooms. We don’t have a role model or example, because other countries do not allow a child to remain with their mother in prisons until the age of 6. Some send children outside after they are no longer breastfeeding and others at 12 months. No other country allows a child in prison over the age of 18 months.”
Solution: nurseries outside
According to Fulya Giray, a representative of the Turkish Freedom for Children Again Foundation and expert sociologist, the ideal solution would be to allow children in prison to encounter the outside world periodically. Project Manager Gökhan Malkoç believes a change of perception on raising these children is critical.
“The world represented to a child will most likely affect his or her life,” he said. “Norms formed in a child’s mind will most likely stem from that world. If we want do something good for this society, we should be interested in and care about what’s going on here. Rather than pity, we should take responsibility.”
Sample practical guidelines to be prepared
Project leaders say the number of children living behind bars in Turkey varies by prison. However, according to the data they have, the highest number of children is in the Bakirköy Women’s Prison. The project, as prepared thus far, is expected to last for one year and consists of three steps. The establishment of play rooms for mothers and children and the education of incarcerated mothers are the first two phases of the project. The third phase concerns adolescent boys and girls, between the ages of 12 and 18.
A five-week group study is recommended to examine anger management, stress control, violence in the family, adolescents’ problems and sexuality. Concurrently, project coordinators will work to give training to prison personnel.
“These children are living with people who have criminal records or pasts. They see and take after such people,” said Giray. “Having parents who go to work in the morning and come back in the evening is something that’s ordinary for our children. But these children do not have such parents. In fact, for the women prisoners, spending time with a university student is also a kind of education. We are trying to teach them it is possible to have a different life.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Lieberman: Radical Islam Taking Over
Radical Islam is taking over the Middle East, with no major force facing it at this time, Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman said Monday in a convention attended by European diplomats who support Israel.
Referring to the fatwa issued against author Salman Rushdie, Lieberman said “there is no spiritual or political leader today who stands up and condemns this, and this is a great problem for the whole of society.”
“Today we see that the Arab world is weakening,” the foreign minister added, noting that the three major Mideastern players at this time — Iran, Turkey and Israel — are not Arab. He added that domestic problems in Arab states are prompting many clashes within Islamic society.
The great gulf between Islamic states and the Free World has to do with differing values, Lieberman said. “Our demand for the Muslim world and our neighbors is first of all to accept different values. Today it’s clear that Israel is the only strategic ally in the Middle East for the European Union and the United States, and it stems from shared values,” he said.
Similarly there is no political or spiritual leader who condemns the demolition of Buddha statues in Afghanistan by the Taliban or the riots that broke out following the Mohammad caricatures, the foreign minister said.
‘What about human rights?’
Referring to what he views as the minor significance of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to the region, Lieberman said: “I’m monitoring events in Tunisia and Algeria and asking myself what’s their connection to the conflict, or what’s the connection between our problems with the Palestinians and the tension in Lebanon or current situation in Egypt.”
“The conflict with the Palestinians is less than 1% of the problems in the Middle East,” he said.
Lieberman noted that the Iran-Iraq war alone claimed more than a million lives, also making note of the civil wars in Lebanon, Yemen and Algeria. Those who claimed that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the heart of the problem are merely aiming to evade reality, the minister said.
Lieberman also argued that the world at this time is divided into a moderate and radical camp. “At the end of the day, both Abbas and Salam Fayyad know that the great threat is not Israel and Zionism, but rather Hamas and Jihad,” he said.
In conclusion, Lieberman said he was sorry to see many states adopting a foreign policy based on economic rather than moral values, pointing to Saudi Arabia as an example and wondering why the West doesn’t question the Saudi ban on building synagogues and churches in the country.
“Why aren’t they asking basic questions regarding human rights? The European Union, US and the Free World must answer these questions; this is the only way to prevent the next crisis.”…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey: Who Lost the West?
Richard Reid
A shrewd foreign policy aims at more than a show of independence. It aims at strengthening a country’s alliances and increasing its global leverage. It takes in the broad picture. It weighs itself realistically.
Two elements of Turkey’s current foreign policy have a good chance, in fact, of driving away its allies and undercutting its leverage. These two are its stances on Israel and Iran. Ankara’s policies on them stand opposite to the overwhelming majority of opinion among the world’s main decision-makers. Few topics inflame global opinion more than those concerning Iran or Israel. Merely naming either of them can evoke mixed outpourings of hate and fanatical support.
In spurning Israel and embracing Iran, Turkey has rolled the dice, betting the whole of its strategy on the hope that Israel’s powerful supporters in the West will not be too bothered by Turkey’s having seemingly joined Israel’s enemies — or that if the West is bothered, its reactions can be managed. There’s a reckless wishfulness in this.
The other hope in Ankara’s gamble is that friendship with Tehran, and popularity on the Islamic street, will pay off handsomely enough to compensate for any loss of Western favor.
Gamble is not too strong a word. One wonders what weight Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu and his advisers gave to the alarm and re-thinking that Turkey’s shifts in friends would certainly begin to produce in the United States and Europe. Did they imagine that divine providence would carry the day?
Turkey is riding high now, its place on the world stage more prominent than at any time in its recent history. That does not mean that more powerful actors will see it as indispensable if Turkey pushes too hard, and push comes to shove. In the near future the West can find ways of coping without Turkey more easily that Turkey can do without the West. This hard fact does not demean Turkey. It simply needs to be at the core of any workable foreign policy.
How, specifically, could Turkey’s present Israel and Iran policies damage it? They could make Turkey less welcome in — could begin to shut the country out of — the global power councils it wants to enter. Unwelcome in those councils, it could find itself confined to a thankless Big Sister-nanny role in the world’s least promising neighborhood, the Middle East.
Turkish foreign policy utopians need to see that the powers that call most of the shots in the world are not much interested in the possible moral rightness or wrongness of a policy, or whether that policy may be in Turkey’s best interests. Their only focus will be on the dislocations Turkey is causing, and on the psychological and other impacts these dislocations will have on their publics and their own policies.
No doubt the break with Tel Aviv has endeared Turkey to the Arab countries. Certainly Turkey’s warmth has been welcomed by Iran. Most non-Western countries — a large segment of humanity — have cheered as Turkey takes a stance counter to the positions of the traditional big boys. The cheering, however, is unlikely to balance out the damage that will come once Turkey’s policies are massaged by the Western media, and become part of public perceptions in the West.
The Israel policy will hurt Turkey the most. In the with-us-or-against-us simplification of issues that is common to the half-informed everywhere, Turkey will lose — in the minds of those who can apply their power, rather than those who shout in the streets. As Turkey comes to be seen as the anti-Israel, it will be lumped with the Arab countries.
The United States stands out in this context. For reasons laid out last year in this column, the U.S. is deeply and reflexively defensive of Israel. This will not change, however often the facts of the Gaza bombardment and the Mavi Marmara episode are explained.
Europe as a whole is not as reflexively pro-Israel as the United States (but neither, Ankara should remember, is it as pro-Turkey as the U.S.). Collective Holocaust guilt, centered on the pro-Israel conscience of Germany, combined with strong and growing anti-immigrant (and, by association, anti-Turkish) feeling elsewhere in Europe, would dash most of Ankara’s hopes for understanding among the EU countries — or in Russia, which recently signed a long-term defense agreement with Israel.
Iran? Even for Westerners uninterested in the world affairs, Iran has a fierce bogeyman image, and nothing in sight seems likely to change this. A strong case can be made for maintaining active trade ties with Iran. That makes compelling economic sense. But seeming to pair up with Iran politically can look almost like a goodbye taunt. U.S. and European leaders generally view Tehran the same way Tehran views them — with distaste and hostility. A Turkey viewed by the West as Iran’s lawyer and apologist will win no contests for Western hearts and minds, regardless of the goodwill behind the attempt to mediate on Tehran’s nuclear project.
It’s difficult to imagine how Turkey blundered into a policy that is likely to alienate the world’s most powerful countries and win no truly important friends. Overconfidence must be the answer. It is a fact that the country has been punching above its weight for the past couple of years — and will probably continue to rise. But a sense of caution is needed.
People in Washington have begun to ask: Who lost Turkey? Europeans are echoing the question. One hopes Ankara pulls back before Turkish commentators begin to ask:
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Media Accuse Patriarch Kirill of Being State Official
President Medvedev addresses close of the Council of Russian Orthodox bishops. Debate continues in the media about the growing cooperation between church and state in Russia. Priests invited to stand for election in “exceptional cases”.
Moscow (AsiaNews) — The growing interpenetration between the Russian Orthodox Church and political power, the public privileges which Patriarch Kirill enjoys and the proposal to establish a “civil orthodox ideology” to combat Islamic terrorism in Russia are issues at the heart of a debate on cooperation between church and state. The theme is again under the spotlight in Russian media as a series of events coincide: the Council of Russian Orthodox bishops (2 to 5 February), the second anniversary of the Patriarch Kirill’s installation and the efforts of the Kremlin to find solutions to the long standing problem of terrorism, especially after the attack on January 24th on Moscow’s International Airport Domodedovo.
Priests candidates for election
During the Council, held in the Cathedral of Christ the Savoir in Moscow, discussions were dominated by the subject of the role of the church in society. This relationship is a leitmotif that has accompanied Kirill’s mandate from the outset. So much so that, on the anniversary of his election as leader of the Russian Orthodox Church, he stressed the need for the Church to be allowed operate in society and act in the public sphere against those who, instead, would have it relegated to the margins of the nation’s life.
As if to reinforce this position, the Council has authorized priests to participate in elections even if only in exceptional cases. If, that is, “the election of members of the hierarchy or the clergy in legislative bodies is suggested by the need to oppose those forces, including those that are schismatic or unorthodox, that attempt to use the vote to fight the Orthodox Church.”
The Kremlin continues to give signs of its approval. Speaking at the council, President Dmtri Medvedev reminded the religious leaders of the importance of teaching the basics of Orthodox culture and religion “in high schools, as well as the presence of clergy in the army, two of the major achievements over the last three years achieved by the Church on a social level”. The leader of the Kremlin, dealing with a country under constant threat of Islamic terrorism and a growing xenophobia against migrants from the Caucasus and former Soviet republics, the Church’s presence in schools and support in the military is “fundamental in the fight against bigotry and the promotion of interethnic and interreligious dialogue”.
Against terrorism, a civil orthodox ideology
One of Russia’s most renowned political analysts Vitaly Tretyakov, also addressed this issue. In an article in the newspaper Izvestia, entitled “Ideology of Terror”, he proposed creating a ‘civil orthodox ideology “to fight terrorists. He argues society should be based on a kind of civic ideology inspired by Orthodox values, because “without faith and ideas we can not be truly overcome extremism.”
Medvedev explicitly asked the Patriarchate to help the government to “consolidate” relations with Russians in the world. Common spiritual values are “an effective factor of consolidation for the entire Orthodox world and the parishes are points of attraction for the Diaspora and help to maintain cultural and spiritual ties with their homeland,” said the President. He concluded by saying that the state and the Orthodox Church will continue to cooperate actively and fruitfully for the good of the country.
The polemics against Kirill
These statements and facts are fanning the flames of controversy against Kirill. The Nezavisimaya Gazeta claims that his ambition is “more political than religious.” In a lengthy analysis after the closing of the Council, the newspaper recalled that one of the first initiatives by Patriarch Kirill was the establishment of the Synodal Department for Relations between the Church and society. In truth the body, notes Nezavisimaya, “works more with the state than society, and together they watch over the public interest, mixing terrestrial and spiritual.”
The Moscow Times is of the same opinion. Last weekend it devoted a front page article on the “privileges of state” received by the Patriarch. In it, a representative of the Zdravomysliye group (“Common sense”), denounces that although the Russian Constitution establishes the division between church and state, Kirill is treated like a senior civil servant. Among the privileges appear to have free use of the security services provided by the Federal Police Guard and a car with flashing blue siren, which is prohibited to all other religious leaders. Just like a senior official of the State.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
‘Super Pack’ Of 400 Wolves Terrorise Remote Russian Town After Killing 30 Horses in Just Four Days
A ‘super pack’ of wolves has been terrifying a town after leaving more than 30 horses dead in just four days.
Four hundred bloodthirsty wolves have been spotted prowling around the edges of Verkhoyansk, in Russia, attacking livestock at will.
Twenty four teams of hunters have been put together to get rid of the wolves, with a bounty of £210 for every wolf skin brought to officials.
Stepan Rozhin, an administration official for the Verkhoyansk district in Russia, said: ‘To protect the town we are creating 24 teams of armed hunters, who will patrol the neighbourhood on snowmobiles and set wolf traps.
‘But we need more people. Once the daylight increases, the hunters will start shooting predators from helicopters.’
A pack of wolves this size is unheard of, with the animals usually preferring to hunt in smaller groups of just six or seven.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Barack Obama Vows to Defeat Al-Qaeda
“I can’t say anything with 100 per cent certainty but am confident that our troops have done an incredible amount of work,” Mr Obama said. “They are on the offensive rather than being on the defensive and we’re starting to transition so that Afghan security forces are taking over.” Pressed by Fox television if the United States would win the nine-year war in Afghanistan, Mr Obama said: “I can say we will defeat al Qaeda and that the Taliban will not be retaking Afghanistan,” but conceded: “the Taliban are still going to be an element in Afghanistan.” In his State of the Union address last month, Mr Obama reiterated pledges to start withdrawing some of the nearly 100,000 US troops in July and to begin handing over security duties to Afghan forces this year.
Top US officials have suggested an initial mid-2011 withdrawal date will only involve the return of a small number of troops, with Nato leaders aiming to hand over security for to Afghan forces by the end of 2014…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Indonesia: NGO Leaders Gather to Condemn Sunday Killings
(AKI/Jakarta Post) — Dozens of prominent figures gathered Monday with non-government-organisation representatives to condemn the fatal Sunday attack on followers of the Ahamdiyah Islamic religious sect in Banten, which claimed 3 lives and injured six others.
Among the figures were senior antigraft activist Todung Mulya Lubis, International Center for Transitional Justice (ICTJ) analyst Usman Hamid, Indonesian Legal Aid Foundation (YLBHI) chairwoman Erna Ratnaningsih, Indonesia Conference on Religion and Peace (ICRP) secretary general Johanes Hariyanto, lawyer Taufik Basari and Human Rights Working Group (HRWG) deputy executive director Choirul Anam.
Others were from NGOs including Imparsial, the Commission for Missing Persons and Victims of Violence (Kontras), the Wahid Institute, the Ma’arif Institute, and the Institute for Policy Research and Advocacy (Elsam).
Zafrullah Ahmad Pontoh, a spokesman for Ahmadiyah Indonesia, also joined the conference.
“This attack was not the first of its kind. I’m afraid it will not be the last either. The government has repeatedly voiced concerns and made promises but no significant change has been accomplished,” Todung said.
Taufik said the government’s negligence to prevent the attack was effectively facilitating violence.
“The government, especially the religious affairs minister, instead made policies like the joint ministerial decree, which tends to ‘legitimate’ violence against Ahmadiyah followers,” he said.
In 2008, a joint ministerial decree was issued to ban Ahmadiyah from propagating its teachings, citing theological differences between it and mainstream Islam.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Indonesia: Java: 1500 Muslim Extremists Attack an Ahmadi Family: Three Dead, Cars and Houses in Flames
Moderate Muslims and members of civil society condemn sectarian violence. Controversy around President Yudhoyono and the executive, unable to ensure security and protection of minorities. Muslim scholar: strike those who “use violence and manipulate Islam for political ends.”
Jakarta (AsiaNews) — Members of civil society, religious leaders and personalities from the moderate Islamic world strongly condemn the attack that took place yesterday against the Ahmadi community in Indonesia, which has caused death and devastation. The controversy has also embroiled President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono and the executive, unable to guarantee the safety of all citizens and freedom of worship in the country. The head of state warned that the violence against minorities “in the name of religion” must be stopped, despite his appeal, there is increasing lack of confidence in his abilities.
The latest in a long streak of blood against the Ahmadi community — a victim of violence in other Muslim-majority nations such as Pakistan — took place yesterday morning. A crowd of at least 1500 Muslim extremists attacked the house of a family in the village of Umbulan, in the Cikeusik sub-district, Pandeglang regency (Banten province on the island of Java), torturing the occupants. The toll of the assault is three dead, several injured people, two cars and a house burned.
The episode has raised controversy and fuelled the political confrontation that, in recent weeks, has involved the Indonesian president, unable to guarantee security and the right to religious freedom. Daniel Sparingga, a spokesman for Yudhoyono, revealed that an order has been issued by the President to the Chief of Police, calling for an end to violence. “Enough is enough — said the head of state — violence and attacks against any minority, made in the name of religion, must be stopped.”
However, members of civil society and moderate Muslim leaders — condemning the attack — have denounced the lack of interest shown to date by Yudhoyono, unable to curb sectarian violence. Ulul Huda, a Muslim scholar from Central Java, confirmed to AsiaNews, “the inertia of the government,” adding that “the Ahmadis in the past have contributed to the struggle for independence in Indonesia. Speaking of the attackers, the scholar labels them “extremists” who “use violence and manipulate Islam for political ends.”
The Nahdlatul Ulama (NU), the leading moderate Muslim organization in the country has also condemned the attack on the Ahmadiyya community, along with Setara and the Wahid Institute. Professor Azyumardi Azra, from the State Islamic University in South Jakarta , explains to AsiaNews that “violence in the name of religion against certain groups, including the Ahmadis or any other, can not and should not be tolerated.”
The Ahmadi sect is considered heretical because it does not recognize Muhammad as the last prophet. It is the victim of attacks in Indonesia, Pakistan, Bangladesh and many other countries where Islam is the most prevalent religion. According to preliminary reports, the mob’s anger was unleashed by rumours of an alleged “invasion” of the village of Umbulan by dozens of Ahmadi. In fact, some non-native Ahmadis came to the village to solve a problem related to residence permits. A Filipino woman, the wife of an Ahmadi faithful has started procedures to regularize the situation with the immigration office.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Islamic Sect Attacked in Indonesia [Video]
WARNING: the video is very graphic.
Video footage has emerged of a gang of Muslim men beating to death three members of the Ahmadiyah sect in Indonesia.
Rights groups and the Indonesian government have condemned the killings, but some critics say a three-year-old law banning Ahmadis from spreading their
[…]
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
My Big Fat Afghan Wedding: Lavish Receptions to be Curbed Due to Financial Constraints
Ministers are considering the legislation amid concern competition to show wedding hospitality is causing acute financial distress for the grooms who must fund the escalating festivities. Family pressure means each groom tries to outdo previous celebrations, often leaving him with no choice but to get into debt or postpone marriage for years and work abroad to save money. Ministry of justice officials told the Daily Telegraph that clerics feared a generation of men would be unable to marry, leading to a rise in unmarried sex and prostitution.
Unemployment across Afghanistan is rife and the average annual income is little more than a few hundred pounds.
Young men in Kabul complain it is now commonplace for an average wedding to cost £6,500 and entertain 600 guests. Well-off families may spend five times that.
The law would also seek to ban the deeply-rooted tradition of grooms paying dowries and having to regularly buy gifts such as gold for their fiancées and her relatives.
Farid Ahmad Najibi, spokesman for the justice ministry, said the law would stem from an article in the Afghan constitution which directs the state to protect family life.
He said: “We are doing this because it is a big problem for young men and we must protect the family.
“Unfortunately in Afghan society when one of your relatives has a big wedding with lots of guests, you must have a bigger wedding or it is deeply shameful.”
Conservative clerics are also expected to use the legislation to seek restrictions on dancing and mixing of sexes during receptions…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: Balochistan: Hindu Families Victim of Abductions and Targeted Killings
A group of armed men kill a merchant during a botched kidnapping attempt. An 85-year-old Hindu religious leader has been missing for more than month. In the Pakistani province, more than 100 groups are involved in kidnappings. Last year, 86 kidnappings took place.
Lahore (AsiaNews) — Armed men killed a Hindu merchant during an attempted abduction. The incident, which occurred in Quetta, capital of Balochistan in south-west Pakistan, highlights the growing problem of attacks (abductions and targeted killings) against the province’s Hindu minority.
Provincial authorities in Balochistan and Sindh have pledged greater security for minority Hindus but have failed to stop the violence. In fact, abductions have doubled in the past year.
In Quetta, three merchants have been murdered, and mystery still shrouds the kidnapping of a local Hindu leader more than a month ago.
A few days ago, Eam Singh Sodho, a Hindu member of the Sindh legislature for the Pakistan Muslim League (Q), resigned and fled to India where he applied for refugee status, after receiving death threats.
A merchant was killed in Quetta yesterday during an attempted kidnapping, an all too common event in the area that has forced entire families to flee.
The abduction of 85-year-old Hindu priest Maharaj Sain Lakmee Geer, who had held his religious office since 1946 in Balochistan, has raised fears among Pakistani Hindus, leaving many with no option but to migrate to India.
“As many as 27 Hindu families from Balochistan have sent applications to the Indian embassy for asylum,” disclosed the regional director for the federal Ministry of Human Rights, Saeed Ahmed Khan.
Over 100 groups involved in kidnappings Hindus for ransom are operating in Balochistan. As many as 86 cases of abductions were registered in 2010 compared to 43 in 2009.
Members of the Balochi Hindu community have been compelled to lodge strong protest. Many protested, shouting slogans like “Provide us protection or allow us to migrate”.
Balochistan is home to more than 100,000 Hindus who have lived there for centuries. Now, they are increasingly feeling insecure.
When Pakistan was founded, many Hindus chose to move to India. Tens of thousands decided instead to stay in their native land.
Now, with rising religious fanaticism and widespread poverty, many of those who stayed behind complain about the lack of security and want to leave.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: Widow of Man Shot Dead by US Consul Official Commits Suicide
Grieving relatives of three men killed in mysterious circumstances have told The Daily Telegraph they will not accept a deal to free Raymond Davis, even as US officials step demands that he be granted diplomatic immunity.
Ali Naqi, a doctor in Faisalabad city, said Shumaila Kanwal, the widow of Muhammad Faheem, was admitted on Sunday night after swallowing rat poison.
She spoke to reporters at her bedside shortly before her death. “I want blood for blood. The way my husband was shot, his killer should be shot in the same fashion,” she said.
Davis has been detained for 10 days since shooting dead two men, whom he says were trying to rob him in a Lahore street. A third man was killed by a 4x4 vehicle that arrived to rescue the American. Imran Haider, whose brother 22-year-old brother Faizan died in hospital after being hit by five bullets, said he feared diplomatic considerations would overshadow his family’s quest for justice. “We are angry as well as sad. No-one is listening to us. It is like we are criminals,” he said.
Faizan had married recently and his wife is expecting their first child. Mr Haider said his brother was being smeared as a “dacoit” — or bandit — in order to justify releasing Davis.
“He was clean,” he added. “All we want is for this American to go on trial and for a proper investigation to be done. He should face the death penalty.
No deals.”
Mystery surrounds the case, which has soured relations between the two countries and fuelled anti-American sentiment. The US initially said Davis was a consular employee, before later upgrading his status to a diplomat and demanding he be granted immunity. However, the Lahore High Court has blocked his release and demanded more time to decide whether he is entitled to diplomatic status. The case is desperately awkward for both countries. Pakistan swirls with rumours that CIA or military contractors are secretly at work, gathering intelligence or fomenting terror attacks to justify the war in Afghanistan…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Report Casts Doubt on Taliban’s Ties With Al Qaeda
KABUL, Afghanistan — The Afghan Taliban have been wrongly perceived as close ideological allies of Al Qaeda, and they could be persuaded to renounce the global terrorist group, according to a report to be published Monday by New York University.
The report goes on to say that there was substantial friction between the groups’ leaders before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and that hostility has only intensified.
The authors, Alex Strick van Linschoten and Felix Kuehn, have worked in Afghanistan for years and edited the autobiography of a Taliban diplomat, many of whose ideas are reflected in the report. The authors are among a small group of experts who say the only way to end the war in Afghanistan is to begin peace overtures to the Taliban.
The prevailing view in Washington, however, is “that the Taliban and Al Qaeda share the same ideology,” said Tom Gregg, a former United Nations official in Afghanistan and a fellow at the Center on International Cooperation at N.Y.U., which is publishing the report. “It is not an ideology they share; it is more a pragmatic political alliance. And therefore a political approach to the Taliban ultimately could deliver a more practical separation between the two groups.”
Some American officials have argued that the military surge in Afghanistan will weaken the Taliban and increase the incentive to negotiate. But the report cautions that the campaign may make it harder to reach a settlement.
The report, “Separating the Taliban from Al Qaeda: The Core of Success in Afghanistan,” says attacks on Taliban field commanders and provincial leaders will leave the movement open to younger, more radical fighters and will give Al Qaeda greater influence. The authors suggest that the United States should engage older Taliban leaders before they lose control of the movement.
The authors do not oppose NATO’s war, but suggest that negotiations should accompany the fighting. A political settlement is necessary to address the underlying reasons for the insurgency, they write. Otherwise, they warn, the conflict will escalate.
The report draws on the authors’ interviews with unnamed Taliban officials in Kabul, Kandahar and Khost, and on published statements by the Taliban leadership. The authors indicate that Taliban officials fear retribution if they make on-the-record statements opposing Al Qaeda.
Nevertheless, Taliban leaders have issued statements in the last two years that indicate they are distancing their movement from Al Qaeda. The report says the Taliban will not renounce Al Qaeda as a condition to negotiations, but will offer to do so in return for guarantees of security.
The report reflects many of the arguments put forward by Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, whose autobiography, published in English as “My Life With the Taliban,” the authors edited. Mullah Zaeef lives under a loose house arrest in Kabul after being held at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and has been an intermediary between the Afghan president, Hamid Karzai, and the Taliban.
The report argues that Taliban leaders did not know of the Sept. 11 attacks in advance and that they appeared to have been manipulated by Osama bin Laden, who then lived in Afghanistan.
In November 2002, the report says, senior Taliban figures gathered in Pakistan and agreed to join a process of political engagement and reconciliation with the new government of Afghanistan. Yet the decision came to nothing, since neither the Afghan government nor the American government saw any reason to engage with the Taliban, the report says.
A member of the Haqqani family, which leads what American officials regard as the most dangerous Taliban group, came to Kabul in 2002 to discuss reconciliation, but he was detained and badly treated, the report states.
Bruce Riedel, a former C.I.A. officer who prepared a strategic policy review on Afghanistan and Pakistan for President Obama in 2009, places the Afghan Taliban alongside Al Qaeda in the “syndicate of terrorists” threatening the United States. Mullah Mohammad Omar, the Taliban leader, has maintained an “alliance, even friendship” with Mr. bin Laden that “seems to have remained intact to this day,” Mr. Riedel writes in his book “Deadly Embrace: Pakistan, America and the Future of the Global Jihad.”
Yet others say that there is a clear ideological divide between the two groups and that the Taliban are not engaged in international terrorism.
“Al Qaeda is an organization that has a clearly articulated vision of global jihad, and that is not the case with the Haqqanis and the Taliban,” Mr. Gregg said. “Their focus is on Afghanistan, the country they are from.”
| — Hat tip: TV | [Return to headlines] |
South African President Jacob Zuma Accused of Blasphemy for ‘Vote ANC Go to Heaven’
South African President Jacob Zuma has been accused of blasphemy after he claimed voting for his party would help supporters get to heaven.
The African National Congress leader has been heavily criticised by religious groups after the remarks he made during a rally in Mthatha in the country’s Eastern Cape province.
Mr Zuma, a Zulu and self-professed Christian, told the crowd of supporters they risked going to hell if they failed to back his ANC party at local elections later this year.
Speaking in Zulu, he said: ‘When you vote for the ANC, you are also choosing to go to heaven.
‘When you don’t vote for the ANC you should know that you are choosing that man who carries a fork, who cooks people.
‘When you are carrying an ANC membership card, you are blessed. When you get up there, there are different cards used but when you have an ANC card, you will be let through to go to heaven.’
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Sudan’s President Accepts Southern Secession
“We respect the people of south Sudan’s choice and we accept the result of the referendum according to what the commission announces,” the Sudanese leadership said in a statement broadcast on state television. “South Sudan has chosen secession. But we are committed to the links between the north and the south, and we are committed to good relations based on co-operation,” Mr Bashir himself said earlier, in a speech at the headquarters of his ruling National Congress Party. The January 9-15 referendum defied expectations by taking place on time and largely without incident, despite the major logistical challenges facing the organisers and fears that the Khartoum government might try to block a process certain to split Africa’s largest nation in two. The vote was the centrepiece of a 2005 peace deal that ended a devastating 22-year conflict in Sudan between the largely African Christian south and the mainly Arab Muslim north that killed around two million people…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Candidate Rejects Claims He Lied to Stay in Ireland
A FORMER asylum seeker running as a candidate in the general election has denied allegations he lied about his past in an effort to stay in Ireland.
Nigerian-born Rotimi Adebari (47), who was the country’s first black mayor, has been dogged by the claims for the past four years.
The Portlaoise-based Independent county councillor maintains he fled his home country to come to Ireland in 2000 after coming under pressure from relatives over his conversion from Islam to Christianity.
However, several London Underground workers claim he actually worked as a train driver in the English capital in the late 1990s before moving to Ireland.
Mr Adebari denied their claims last night, saying: “My position remains the same. I stand by what I said before.”
He pointed to the fact he had recently been granted Irish citizenship as proof that the claims were incorrect.
“As you are well aware, Ireland is not a country that easily gives citizenship,” he said.
Mr Adebari is a candidate in the Laois/Offaly constituency. Claims about his past first surfaced shortly after he was elected mayor in 2007.
A Nigerian newspaper, ‘This Day’, published an article claiming Mr Adebari had not fled religious persecution.
Months later, Paddy Clarke, a retired London tube driver from Dundalk, Co Louth, came forward claiming he worked with Mr Adebari in 1999.
He said the politician had been a train operator working out of the Queens Park depot on the Bakerloo tube line.
Residency
Mr Adebari arrived in Ireland in 2000. He says he travelled directly from Nigeria, via Paris, and never worked or lived in London at any time. He applied for asylum, but the application was refused.
However, he gained automatic residency when his wife gave birth shortly after they arrived…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt Protests: Hosni Mubarak Turmoil ‘Will Fuel Illegal Wave UK Migration’ Warns NATO
Unrest in Egypt could lead to more illegal immigrants heading for Britain and the EU, the head of Nato warned last night.
With the nation at a virtual standstill and other Middle East economies in turmoil, Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen said more refugees could try to flee the hardship.
He claimed that regional instability could ‘in the longer-term perspective have a negative impact on economies, which might lead to illegal immigration in Europe’.
Welcome to freedom: An Egyptian anti-Mubarak spells out what he and the other hundreds of thousands of demonstrators are looking for
Speaking in Brussels, he said the uprising was not a direct threat to Nato’s 28 members.
Urging European governments to maintain their defence budgets, Mr Rasmussen said the wave of Middle East protests did ‘serve as a timely reminder that we cannot take security for granted, even in our immediate neighbourhood’.
But he did not address growing concerns in the U.S. that a regime change could trigger a nuclear arms race in one of the world’s most volatile regions.
During his three decades in office, Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak is said to have overseen extensive research into weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear, chemical, biological and missile technology.
U.S. officials reportedly overlooked the tests because of Washington’s close ties with Mubarak.
Analysts now fear that a new Egyptian government could end the country’s close relationship with the U.S. and threaten to quit the nuclear non-proliferation treaty unless constraints are put on Israel’s nuclear arsenal.
That would mean Egypt would no longer have any restraints on its development of nuclear technology, and would almost certainly lead to Israel increasing its atomic capabilities if it perceived a threat…
| — Hat tip: DF | [Return to headlines] |
How Illegal Aliens Drive the Cost of Health Care Through the Stratosphere
The following video was posted in 2009, but it continues to serve as an example of how illegal immigrants are contributing to the bankruptcy of the country.
Carol Plato, an executive director of Martin Memorial Medical Center in Florida, gives a briefing on the specific costs and liabilities the hospital has incurred while treating illegal immigrants. It’s actually really outrageous to hear the itemized costs these hospitals have to incur while knowingly treating illegal immigrants. Even more outrageous is that one of them who was deported back to his home country by the hospital — after wracking up millions in free legal bills — is now suing the hospital. Only in America folks, can something like this happen. Other countries forcibly deport, imprison, and generally make the lives miserable of illegal immigrants, while we roll out the red carpet and subsidize their lifestyles.
| [Return to headlines] |
Senators Look for Immigration Deal
Sens. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.) and Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) have rekindled their alliance on immigration reform, taking some early steps to test the political will for addressing the contentious issue this year.
Their call list hasn’t focused so much on House and Senate members who’ve been reliable pro-immigration votes in the past. Instead, they’re looking to a strange-bedfellows mix of conservative and liberal constituencies that can provide a “safety net” of support, as Graham put it, once the issue heats up.
“It’s in the infant stage,” Graham told POLITICO. “I don’t know what the political appetite is to do something.”
For all the groups getting a call from the pair, it is the presence of Graham himself who elevates the odds — however bleak — that the Senate could move on a comprehensive, bipartisan overhaul bill. Graham abruptly departed the talks last spring and took with him any hope of getting a bill in the past Congress.
Now, conservative evangelicals, the AFL-CIO, the Service Employees International Union, business organizations and immigrant advocacy groups say they have gotten word from Schumer’s office that a renewed effort is under way. The U.S. Chamber of Commerce confirmed that it is back in the mix, after a hasty exit last year when Schumer proposed a legislative framework with a temporary worker program that favored labor unions.
And Schumer and his staff have quietly begun reaching out to some unlikely players in the Senate, including Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who has professed a newfound freedom since winning reelection last year without the Republican Party’s help.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Migration Ban on Welders and Hair Stylists in Bid to Protect British Workers
Migrants will be refused visas to work as hair salon managers, estate agents and shop managers under proposals to protect British workers.
Government advisers have suggested cutting by a third the number of occupations which qualify as ‘skilled’ under immigration rules.
If accepted by ministers, the number of visas issued to non-EU workers would drop by around 10,000.
Other occupations which could go from the list include beauty salon managers, laboratory technicians, florists, pipe fitters, steel erectors and welders.
However, midwives, chartered surveyors and management accountants would remain, along with dancers, entertainers and environmental protection officers.
In its report, the Migration Advisory Committee proposed cutting the number of jobs eligible for so-called Tier 2 visas from 192 to 121.
But campaigners for tougher migration controls called for ministers to go further to protect British jobs.
Sir Andrew Green, chairman of the MigrationWatch think-tank said: ‘The definition of graduate has been set rather low in these recommendations. Minister: Damien Green wants only skilled workers from outside the EU
Minister: Damien Green wants only skilled workers from outside the EU
‘Given the extent of unemployment we now face, ministers should set the bar at university level.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Unrest in North Africa Sends Illegal Immigrants to Italian Island
For the past decade, the tiny island of Lampedusa has seen ebbs and flows of desperate immigrants arriving. Already in the past week, political upheaval in Tunisia looks set to spark a new wave.
After two days of perfect calm, a north wind is blowing again. The gusts are strong and sudden, like an alarm waking the island of Lampedusa from a year-long reverie.
Since the revolt climaxed in Tunisia two weeks ago — forcing its long-time president, Zine El Abidine Bel Ali into exile — 190 Tunisians have fled to this small Sicilian island by boat. There are as many as three landings a day. Just the day before, 62 people, including several children, were crowding the dock, which had been virtually deserted since March 2010, following the debarkation of a group of immigrants from Libya.
The new wave of immigration is raising fears that Lampedusa will find itself in yet another emergency, one that national and local authorities thought was finally over. “I’m Tunisian, I’m Tunisian, I’m Tunisian,” a group of young men and nine boys — there are no women — keep repeating. They are cold and their clothes are soaked. Last Sunday, 32 landed here. The day before, 26 arrived on three different boats. Ten days earlier, a stricken luxury yacht dropped anchor off shore. “We are Ben Alì’s followers. They told us to bring the boat to safety. We cannot come back. We’re seeking political asylum,” said two sailors, before being sent away.
“We don’t want to raise the alarm yet but we cannot hide our concern,” admits Dino De Rubeis, mayor of Lampedusa. Everyone wants to play down the situation. But everyone knows the arrival of these immigrants might be the first crack in a Tunisian emigration front that was supposed to be sealed, calling into question the sanctity of bilateral agreements between Italy and Tunisia.
A visit to the former military base Loran at Capo Ponente, the headquarters of a now-closed immigration center, offers insight into what is going on. A fishing boat that arrived yesterday morning is seized here. “This is not a small boat stolen by runaways in the dark of the night. It looks like a well-organized landing,” says one local who has seen many arrivals over the years. People are arriving from all parts of Tunisia — the south, the north, cities and the countryside.
They talk of their disappointment for what they now consider a sham revolution. “Ben Alì ran away, but his men are still in power,” they whisper, before being taken by plane to another immigrant center in Brindisi in southeastern Italy, a stopover on their way back to Tunisia.
On the dock, someone suggests that political prisoners released from Monastir prison after the revolution may have fled here, because there were people with scars typical of those who had been jailed there. The prisoners were reportedly marked with one scar for each year spent in jail. Loyalists, disillusioned opponents, all of them desperate, arrive here together. And all of them are sent home together.
At 4:45 pm, an Air Mistral plane to Brindisi leaves with its latest cargo of sorrow. It follows the same route that it did the last two days. It is too problematic for the authorities to keep the immigrants here — or to admit that Lampedusa’s immigrant center is still, at least partially, open. The centre was the scene of dramatic riots in August 2008. “During those days, there were 1,200 immigrants crowded in there, living in extreme conditions. There were people who injected their own urine to cause infections. Others mutilated themselves, just to find a way out,” says Enza Malatino, psychotherapist at the local health center.
Malatino has listened to the stories of mothers who had to throw their children’s corpses into the sea, the stories of boys who were treated like dogs. She knows those postcards from hell, the nightmare that the island does not want to live anymore. They prefer to pay for a hotel for the immigrants forced to spend the night here, rather than reopen, even for a day, the 760-bed shelter. “I understand the national government’s policy,” says the mayor. “If we reopen that shelter even for an hour we’ll give them the pretext to come. Following the new political crisis in the Maghreb, Lampedusa could become once again a favorite destination.”
Lampedusa’s municipal authority wants to turn the shelter into schools. Pietro Busetta, the town councilor for tourism and an economist at the University of Palermo, is working to open an immigration museum like the one on Ellis Island in New York harbor. “To honor the memory of people who arrived here and to show the great tradition of hospitality that this island has always had,” he says. Like the tides, history always returns — and it is once-again knocking on Lampedusa’s door.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Deutsche Bank Boss Slammed for Women Quota Gaffe
The head of Germany’s largest bank, Deutsche Bank, has drawn ire by saying that appointing more women to its executive board would make it “prettier and more colourful,” a press report said Monday.
Amid a debate on whether Germany should set quotas for women on the boards of major groups, Josef Ackermann acknowledged there were none on the bank’s executive committee, a subordinate body to the board of directors.
“But I hope it will be prettier and more colourful one day” when more women are placed in leadership positions, he told business daily Handelsblatt last week.
Ilse Aigner, the conservative Agriculture and Consumer Affairs Minister shot back in the newspaper on Monday, saying: “Those who like pretty and colourful things should go take a walk in a field of flowers or a museum.”
Free Democratic member of the European Union parliament Silvan Koch-Mehrin had already suggested that Ackermann hang pictures on his walls if he desired more colour, the paper reported.
Head of German women’s television station Sixx, Katja Hofem-Best, told the paper that the workplace was not just made “prettier and more colourful” by women, but also “more effective and successful.”
Deutsche Bank’s chief spokesman told Handelsblatt that Ackermann’s remarks were taken out of context and that he was “a gentlemen from the old school.”
Ackermann made the comments during the group’s annual press conference last week, after underscoring “the necessity to have more women in senior positions,” a spokesman told AFP.
Germany’s ruling coalition is divided on the idea of introducing quotas to correct a flagrant under-representation of women on corporate boards, an option both Chancellor Angela Merkel and Ackermann oppose.
Women represent 44.3 percent of all Deutsche Bank staff but only 16.1 percent of senior managers,Handelsblatt said.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
UK: ‘Why is Cleverness Frowned Upon?’
Having three children in the state primary system, I’ve seen the results of New Labour’s Brave New World anti-intellectualism up close. Academic work has been largely dropped. Times tables, spelling, grammar and good handwriting are not taught. One teacher told us that correcting spelling might interrupt “the creative flow”. In the playground, age-old games such as conkers and It are banned, as they might upset someone. The local authority, we are told, has also banned the ancient game of football, because it encourages competitive behaviour. Instead, pupils are treated to lavish praise, sex education and colouring in, plus a big dose of television via the whiteboards. The place is awash with laptops. There is a therapeutic ethos, and in “circle time”, pupils are encouraged to talk about their problems at home. Cleverness is frowned upon: yesterday my daughter said she didn’t like being clever and was considering doing bad work so she would be moved down a set.
As it gradually dawned on my wife and me that there was very little of what we would call teaching going on, we decided to step in and fill the gaps ourselves. (Mr Gove has promised a return to a more traditional agenda, but how long will it take?) So now at home we drill the children in times tables, teach them the rudiments of grammar, and we all learn Latin together with a tutor via Skype. We play competitive games and do wrestling. We tell them off. We praise them for good work, but tick them off for bad work. And in a sense this is all the wrong way round: schools are doing the parenting and the parents are doing the schooling.
The upside, it’s true, is that children enjoy school. Our kids react with horror when we threaten them with home education. The downside is that parents are forced to take on the burden of educating their children properly, as the state has shrugged it off.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Couples Turn to Benefit Fraud Because We Don’t Support Marriage Says Iain Duncan Smith as He Attacks Britain’s ‘Crazy’ Welfare System
Britain’s ‘crazy’ welfare system is turning committed young couples into fraudsters because getting married or living together means they will take a drastic cut in income, Iain Duncan Smith warns today.
So, instead of seeing their living standards plummet, many co-habiting couples on benefits are deceiving the State by pretending to live at different addresses.
Making the strongest defence of marriage from a senior government minister for more than a decade, he will launch a scathing attack on Labour for creating this ‘couple penalty’ in the welfare system.
In remarks that set him dramatically at odds with Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, the Work and Pensions Secretary will insist the Coalition is determined to support marriage as ‘our most basic and successful institution’.
Mr Duncan Smith, who has long championed measures to support stable, two-parent families, will promise reforms to both benefits and tax in their favour.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: David Cameron Urged to ‘Put Marriage Back on State Forms’
The Prime Minister has been told to put marriage back on government forms after they were banned by Labour six years ago in the name of gay equality.
David Cameron was urged yesterday to bring marriage back to state documents and records.
References to marriage in government forms were banned by Labour six years ago in the name of gay equality.
The shift was criticised as one of Tony Blair’s most blatant attempts to downgrade the institution of marriage.
The removal of information on ‘marital status’ from benefits, tax and immigration forms also meant that data on marriage and its effects will no longer be available to researchers.
Campaigners said yesterday that restoring the marital status box to state forms would give Mr Cameron a chance to demonstrate his commitment to the institution.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Jungle Drums and the Politics of Hate
Labour frontbencher Sadiq Khan should be thoroughly ashamed of his despicable, though utterly predictable, attack on David Cameron.
Far from bolstering the Far Right, the Prime Minister has commendably reclaimed the debate about state-sponsored multiculturalism. His speech was measured and not in the slightest way inflammatory.
For too long, anyone who has questioned this pernicious doctrine has been smeared as ‘racist’. Labour spent a decade and a half trashing those who expressed concerns about unlimited immigration and the refusal of some ethnic groups to integrate into British society.
And as a consequence, decent people found themselves smeared as extremists and a minority regrettably sought refuge in the arms of the BNP.
Some of those same people are now flirting with the street thugs of the English Defence League. It’s because they feel they have nowhere else to go.
But be under no illusion, Nick Griffin is the bastard son of Jack Straw and every other Left-wing politician who has consistently tried to close down debate on this sensitive subject and routinely rubbished their opponents as racists and ‘Little Englanders’.
Falsely accusing someone of racism is as repellent as racism itself. But Khan will keep his job.
You can hurl the most vile smears at anyone these days, provided you insert the word ‘Tory’.
[…]
As I exposed in a TV documentary a couple of years ago, the worrying rise in anti-semitism in Britain stems from an unholy alliance between the fascist Left and militant Islam.
If these protesters had been screaming ‘Muslim scum’ there would have been a whole host of arrests, questions in the House and a Panorama special on the BBC.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Earth-Like Worlds Might be as ‘Common as Ants at a Picnic’
NASA’s Kepler Space Telescope found 1,235 planet candidates beyond our solar system, according to an announcement Wednesday (Feb. 2). Of those, 68 are thought to be about the size of Earth, and 54 are at a distance from their stars where liquid water should be able to exist. However, none of those planets are actually confirmed to exist — they are merely potential planets that must be verified with follow-up studies. Furthermore, none of them are guaranteed to be habitable — scientists know only that there is a chance they are, based on the picture we have now.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Guillaume Faye — Back to the Archeo-Future
In conclusion, we present little more than a sketch of the author’s own sketches. Faye’s vision is far-reaching and surprisingly optimistic, even though the transition to archeofuturism will not be pleasant, but require much economic displacement and much violence. Whether archeofuturistic ideas can ever manifest, or whether it will be something else, is a big question. Our future is certain to be one of economic catastrophe coupled with increased social violence.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
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