Pressure on Greek Bonds, Spread Over 930 Points
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 8 — Pressure continues to mount on Greek government bonds after Athens’ rating was cut by Moody’s: the yield on Greece’s 10-year bonds increased by 15 basis points to 12.48% and the spread compared to the benchmark German bund increased by 26 basis points to 932 points. The increase brings the level to its highest since January 11. Today Athens has scheduled an auction of 6-month bonds for 1.25 billion euros.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
The State Pension Time Bomb
For decades state officials have encouraged adults to believe in the financial equivalent of the Tooth Fairy: that state pensions can yield high returns while being risk-free. Now taxpayers are in for a serious toothache.
Nearly every state offers defined-benefit pension plans for public employees. Financed through a mix of employee and employer contributions along with the investment returns on pension funds, a defined-benefit plan represents a contractual obligation to dole out a set amount in annual payments for as long as the recipient lives, regardless of whether there are sufficient assets in the fund at the time of the employee’s retirement.
One would think this obligation to pay no matter what would have led states to invest conservatively and plan ahead. Instead, they have been following accounting rules that pretty much guarantee the funds will be unsustainable.
First, by law, states are not required to pony up regular contributions to pension systems. Lawmakers generally jump on any opportunity to be fiscally irresponsible, so many states have deferred pension payments and used their share of the contribution to increase spending in other areas.
Second, government accounting standards systematically underestimate fund liabilities, which in turn encourages pension deferrals. Eileen Norcross, my colleague at the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, argued in a December 2010 paper that the difference between government and private-sector accounting rules is at the root of the unfunded liability crisis.
For accounting purposes, private pension plans use the market value of their liabilities. This rule requires future liabilities to be discounted at an interest rate that matches the risks associated with the assets; the resulting value represents the amount a private insurance company would demand to issue annuities covering all the benefits owed by a given plan. By contrast, states calculate the value of pension liabilities based on the returns they expect from investing pension assets. And on average, the states assume an unrealistically high 8 percent annual return on pension investments while the actual rate should be closer to the yield of 15-year treasury bonds. Here is why that’s so problematic.
Pension funds need to assume a certain rate of return on their current assets in order to gauge whether or not the assets held today will be enough to pay future benefits. Obviously, the assumed interest rate or rate of return has a major impact on whether a pension plan is adequately funded. Most pension plans would rather play it conservatively and assume a lower rate of return, so that they ensure that the assets they have today will be enough to cover tomorrow’s promised benefits. But the states would rather put less money up front today, so they’re pinning all their hopes of being able to pay benefits tomorrow on an 8.5 percent annual growth rate. If that 8.5 percent growth rate doesn’t come to fruition, either tomorrow’s beneficiaries will see a cut in their benefits or taxpayers will be asked to pick up the tab. It would be much more prudent to assume an adequate risk-adjusted rate of return closer to the rate offered on 15-year Treasury bonds—3.5 percent, say—and fund their plan accordingly…
| — Hat tip: DS | [Return to headlines] |
Hearing on Terrorist Status for Islamic Charity
MEDFORD, Ore. — A federal appeals court will hear arguments on whether the government violated the constitutional rights of an Islamic charity that it declared a terrorist organization.
The Medford Mail Tribune reports that the 9th U.S. Circuit court of Appeals will hold a hearing Wednesday in Portland on the now-defunct American branch of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Lockheed Martin Tried to Trade F-16s for Frozen Chickens
The secretive world of international arms sales just became a little less secret thanks to a special report by Reuters. After an in-depth review of last year’s leaked State Department cables, the wire service has uncovered several strange and unsettling dealings between military contractors and foreign governments, with U.S. diplomats obseqiously paving the way. There are a bunch of oddball deals in here, but want to know our two favorites? The deal to give Chad planes to kill pro-democracy demonstrators and the part where Lockheed Martin nearly sold Thailand F-16s in exchange for several boatloads of frozen chickens. Behold.
The Deal: Lockheed Martin wanted to sell C-130 military transport planes to Chad
The Problem: Chad couldn’t afford the planes and lied about what it wanted to use them for (supressing a pro-democracy uprising)
The Role of U.S. Diplomats: The U.S. ambassador to Chad knew about Chad’s lack of funds and even its intentions to use the planes for ill. Despite that, it promoted the deal: “Our conclusion is that, like it or not, our interests line up in favor of allowing the sale in some form to go forward.”
The Other Deal: Lockheed Martin wanted to sell F-16 fighter jets to the Thai government
The Problem: Lockheed Martin was competing with Russia’s Sukhoi and Sweden’s Saab. Also the Thai government didn’t want to pay in cash, so it proposed paying with 80,000 tons of frozen chickens.
The Role of U.S. Diplomats: They actually worked to promote the odd-ball deal since it A) helped Lockheed and B) kept the Russians from winning the deal. Incredibly, Lockheed indicated that it was “was willing to play ball” and accept chickens as payment. Nevertheless, the chickens-for-jets plan never panned out because the Thai regime was ousted in a military coup.
The Takeaway? Reuters’ Ben Berkowitz puts it like this:
[The review of documents] paints a picture of foreign service officers and political appointees willing to go to great lengths to sell American products and services, and to prevent similar sales by other countries.
To be sure, that has been a big part of their job since the end of the Cold War. Nor do the cables point to any wrongdoing. But in some cases, the efforts were so strenuous they raise the question of where if anywhere the line is being drawn between diplomacy and salesmanship.
| — Hat tip: Zenster | [Return to headlines] |
Look Out! Unions Plan “Movement-Wide Dramatic Actions”
The U.S. labor movement is going on a nationwide offensive to push, not only for the protection of collective bargaining “rights”, but also for a socialist “wish list” including an end to the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a “massive public works program”, socialized health care, higher taxes on the “rich” and “international worker solidarity”.
In an Emergency labor meeting (ELM) in Cleveland Ohio, last Friday/Saturday, labor bosses hunkered down to plan a national fightback against the Tea Party driven GOP agenda of government spending cuts, balanced budgets and smaller government.
The unions are planning more than mere street marches. This is “not-business-as-usual” but will involve unspecified “movement-wide dramatic actions.”
[…]
The unions and their socialist bosses understand that this is a battle for America’s soul.
If the Tea Party/GOP has enough backbone to win the day, America has a shot at restoring liberty and prosperity for all. Think Maggie Thatcher, communist inspired coal strike , 1983.
If the unions win, America as we have known her, is finished.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Wisconsin Senate Advances Bill Opposed by Unions
Republicans in the Wisconsin Senate voted Wednesday night to strip nearly all collective bargaining rights from public workers after discovering a way to bypass the chamber’s missing Democrats.
All 14 Senate Democrats fled to Illinois nearly three weeks ago, preventing the chamber from having enough members present to consider Gov. Scott Walker’s so-called “budget repair bill” — a proposal introduced to plug a $137 million budget shortfall.
The Senate requires a quorum to take up any measures that spend money. But Republicans on Wednesday split from the legislation the proposal to curtail union rights, which spends no money, and a special conference committee of state lawmakers approved the bill a short time later.
| [Return to headlines] |
Bossi Denies Asking Gheddafi for Aid to Liberate Padania — “We’ve Got the Guns”
“Gheddafi is a drowning cat. Those who open fire on their own people come to a bad end, like Umberto I”
MILAN — Did you ever ask Gheddafi for assistance in creating Padania? “Oh, come on. Luckily, we have plenty of men and guns are made in Lombardy”. Umberto Bossi was replying to a French television interviewer who had asked him to comment on the Libyan leader’s claim that the Northern League secretary had sought assistance for Padania’s secession. His answer sparked off a political row. Mr Bossi added that Gheddafi “is a drowning cat clutching at straws. History shows that those who open fire on their own people come to a bad end. Remember King Umberto I, assassinated at Monza”.
MARONI — “I don’t think Bossi has ever met Gheddafi”, interior minister Roberto Maroni pointed out on La7 television news. “So I don’t think this has any basis in fact”…
English translation by Giles Watson
www.watson.it
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
European Parliament to Give German MEP Elmar Brok Immunity From Prosecution for Tax Evasion.
Elmar Brok, here he is, plump and fabulously well-paid as only a German politician at the top of the European Parliament can be. You know how these people live, so I don’t have to go into the details again: the pay, the expenses, the ever-increasing allowances for staff, the free travel, the free spa treatments, the pensions, the entertainment allowances, the special low rate of income tax. But here is a new perk. The committee on legal affairs at the European Parliament has just decided that politicians such as Brok must have immunity from prosecution for tax evasion if the revenue authorities in their home country catch them trousering undeclared thousands.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Book on Nazi Massacres During WWII Published
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, MARCH 8 — A book entitled “Greek Holocausts — 1940-45”, chronicling the massacres committed by Axis occupation forces in 90 towns and villages across Greece was unveiled by the recently formed Network of Martyr Cities and Villages of Greece During WWII. As ANA reports, the 414-page book (Livanis Publishing House) includes detailed evidence on the reprisals unleashed by the German, Italian and Bulgarian occupation forces against civilian populations. Notes signed by the mayors or local community presidents of each city or village mentioned pay tribute to the victims of the massacres and demand compensation for the losses.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy Claims Win in EU Patent Fight
Court of Justice rules against ad hoc tribunal
(ANSA) — Brussels, March 8 — Italy on Tuesday claimed a victory in its fight against a European Union-wide patent it opposes because it will only be written in French, English and German.
The European Court of Justice turned down the idea of an ad hoc tribunal to govern the unified patent procedures, a development which Italy immediately seized on “with satisfaction”.
And although the European Commission said the court’s opinion would have “little impact” on the patent going forward, Italy said it still hopes to reverse the mechanism by which the patent was agreed in January, starting at an EU competitiveness council on Thursday, Italian government sources said. Last month Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi wrote to European Union President Herman Van Rompuy and European Commission President Jose’ Manuel Barroso requesting further talks on the patent.
In the letter Berlusconi called for a patent that “respects the integrity of the single market and involves all the member states”.
Italy, allied with Spain, has been fighting to have the patent written in more languages for months.
In mid-December it said it would fight with all the means at its disposal the proposed single patent which is to be translated only into the three most widely spoken languages.
Speaking after the European Commission said it would endorse the rarely used mechanism of ‘enhanced cooperation’ among 11 countries to speed the keenly awaited move, Foreign Undersecretary Alfredo Mantica said: “We will resort to all instruments to make sure this linguistic rule does not come about.
“There will be a thousand opportunities to create disturbances,” he said.
Asked where Italy would pick its fights, Mantica replied: “We can do it any time. But don’t ask me how we’re going to fight this war”.
On December 9, 12 other countries backed the 11 who requested enhanced cooperation with only the Czech Republic and Cyprus voicing reservations, aside from Italy and Spain.
Spain has been fighting the patent as fiercely as Italy and its secretary of state for the EU, Diego Lopez Garrido, said at the time the two countries intended to “proceed with all the legal means laid down in the (EU) Treaty to safeguard our interests”.
Lopez Garrido argued that “it is still possible to reach a consensus without arriving at enhanced cooperation”.
But Internal Market Commissioner Michel Barnier predicted that with the backing of the 23, the approval process “should be swift” and the patent would be ready for use by the end of 2011.
He added that, under the new system, a patent will cost European firms between 5,000 and 6,000 euros compared to 18,000 euros at present and the 850 euros that patents cost in the United States.
On Tuesday Italy said it had not ruled out challenging the use of enhanced cooperation at the Court of Justice.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Soccer: Serb Fan ‘Ivan the Terrible’ Gets Three Years
Riot caused October Euro qualifier to be abandoned
(ANSA) — Genoa, March 8 — The ringleader of Serbian hooligans who caused the October 12 Euro 2012 qualifier between Italy and Serbia in Genoa to be abandoned was sentenced to more than three years in jail Tuesday.
Ivan Bogdanov, 29, nicknamed ‘Ivan the Terrible’, received a prison term of three years, three months after a fast-track trial.
Bogdanov is expected to be deported after he serves his sentence.
Three other hooligans who took part in the stadium riot received sentences ranging from two and a half to three years.
The terms reflected what prosecutors had requested.
The sentences came despite a post-match apology from Bogdanov.
“We never intended to hurt Italy, a country I like a lot.
I’d never been here, but it’s beautiful,” he said a few days after the incident.
“It was a protest against the Serbian football federation.
I didn’t even expect the match to be suspended”.
Thanks largely to his distinctive tattoos, Bogdanov was swiftly identified as the imposing masked thug who sat on a pitch-line barrier making obscene gestures as he cut away a net erected to stop objects being thrown on the pitch amid scenes of mayhem.
This enabled the Serb hooligans to halt proceedings soon after the delayed kickoff by throwing a flare into a section containing Italian fans and another towards Azzurri keeper Emiliano Viviano.
Bogdanov was eventually arrested after being found in the trunk of a coach following clashes with police in Genoa that ran late into the night.
He confirmed that much of the fans’ anger was directed at keeper Vladimir Stojkovic, who pulled out of the team at the last minute after reported intimidation.
Stojkovic let in three goals in Serbia’s shock 3-1 defeat to Estonia days before, but Bogdanov said the fans were more angry about him “betraying” Red Star Belgrade by leaving them for city rivals Partizan.
Because of the riot, Italy were awarded a 3-0 win by UEFA, giving them 10 points from four games in qualifying Group C, three clear of second-placed Slovenia.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Muslims and Jews Warn Europe: Mainstreaming of Far-Right Parties is Unacceptable
Prominent Muslim and Jewish leaders from across Europe gathered in Paris have pledged to stand together against the rise of far-right xenophobic and racist parties that represent an escalating peril to ethnic and religious minorities across Europe, including Jews and Muslims. Members of the Coordinating Committee of European Muslim and Jewish Leaders, including top communal leaders from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the US, announced plans for a series of public events in European capitals, on 9 May (Europe Day). The leaders expressed deep concern about the emergence into the political mainstream of extremist parties in many European countries and declared that it was “totally unacceptable” that several of these parties had been accepted by governing coalitions as tacit partners where they are allowed to help shape the agenda.
Contending that “Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racism must never be allowed to become respectable,” the leaders expressed disquiet over recent pronouncements by European statesmen including President Sarkozy of France, Chancellor Merkel of Germany and Prime Minister Cameron of Britain, characterizing multiculturalism as a failure; comments that have been cited by far-right parties as evidence that they are winning the battle for public opinion in Europe. Promising to press European decision-makers not to co-operate in any way with extremist parties, the Jewish and Muslim leaders vowed: “We will not allow ourselves to be separated, but will stand together to fight bigotry against Muslims, Jews and other minorities. An attack on any of us is an attack on all of us.”….
| — Hat tip: Kitman | [Return to headlines] |
Sexual Apathy Drives Italian Couples to Stray
Appetites down at home but booming outside, study says
(ANSA) — Milan, March 7 — Italian couples increasingly seek to satisfy their libidos outside their union, reports the Italian Matrimonial Lawyers Association (AMI). Married couples and domestic partners split almost as often due to sexual apathy at home as they do on account of insufferable in-laws, who, the AMI reports, are responsible for 30% of marital separations in Italy.
“The sexual activity of Italians has not diminished at all. It has, if anything, decreased within the couple, creating so-called ‘white marriages’, which are unions characterized by the absolute or relative absence of sexual activity, either from the beginning of the marriage, or after the first seven years of its celebration,” explained AMI president Gian Ettore Gassani.
In Italy, zero or insufficient sex between partners is behind 20% of marital separations, according to recent studies overseen by the AMI, the Italian Andrology Society, and CENSIS, a sociological and economic research company. In the vast majority of these cases — roughly 70% — it is the male who suffers the proverbial ‘headache’ or finds other excuses to avoid sex with his female partner.
A growing number of wives are also unfaithful, however, according to the studies.
“There are cases where wives are apparently insensitive to sex within the context of the marriage, but then show themselves to be particularly active and imaginative outside the home,” reports Gassani.
The phenomenon is particularly diffuse among new spouses, and not seasoned ones, notes AMI. Separation and divorce papers often demonstrate that “the spouses lacking sexual appetite within the couple are not at all insensitive to sex (in general) and that many manage even more than one extramarital relationship”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Boy, 5, Scarred for Life After Yob Throws Slate Slab From Motorway Bridge Onto Father’s Car
[Comments: WARNING: Graphic content.]
The father of a five-year-old boy has told how his son may be facially scarred for life after a yob threw a slate slab from a motorway bridge onto their car.
Alun Thomas, 39, was driving home from Tesco with his son Cian just before 7pm when the Vauxhall Zafira was hit.
The slab, hurled from a bridge on the A55 at Caerhun near Bangor in North Wales, last Thursday smashed through the windscreen and cut into Cian’s face, just missing his left eye.
Mr Thomas, of Bethesda, swerved before he regained control of the vehicle but then noticed that his son’s face was ‘covered in blood’.
He drove Cian to nearby Gwynedd Hospital before being rushed by ambulance to Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan, where the five-year-old had stitches stretching from his eye to the top of his lip.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Salim Chand: Hit-and-Run Driver Who Killed Church-Going Grandmother Jailed for 9 Years
Salim Chand, 27, pictured, who had already been banned from driving, knocked over Freda Holt, 70, as she stepped out into the road in Blackburn, Lancashire.
A hit-and-run driver who mowed down and killed a church-going grandmother while doing 70mph in a 30 zone has been jailed for nine years.
Salim Chand, 27, who had already been banned from driving, knocked over Freda Holt, 70, in a supercar as she stepped out into the narrow residential road outside her home.
Mrs Holt’s husband Ray, 72, was seconds away from the scene and saw his wife’s body in the road in Blackburn, Lancashire.
The driver was in a Mercedes C63 AMG he hired as an ‘item of boast’ for a wedding, the court heard.
Instead of stopping after the crash, Chand sped off and phoned the rental company and reported a ‘minor bump’ from a mile down the road.
Witnesses claimed they had seen Chand speeding at up to 100mph in the moments leading up to the crash.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
9 Christians Killed, 150 Injured in Attack by 15,000 Muslims and Egyptian Army
by Mary Abdelmassih
(AINA) — According to Father Abram Fahmy, pastor of St. Simon the Tanner Monastery in Mokatam Hills, on the outskirts of Cairo, Copts were killed and injured today in a fresh attack by Muslims. It was reported the Egyptian army fired live ammunition on Copts. The attack has claimed until now the lives of 9 Copts and injured 150, 45 seriously.
Muslims threw fire balls at the Monastery from the top of the hills. Coptic youth have arrested five of them, who are now being held within the Monastery grounds, waiting to be handed over to the authorities.
Eight homes and 20 garbage recycling factories owned by Copts have been torched, as well as 30 garbage collection vehicles.
The incident started when 500 Coptic demonstrators from Manshier Nasr, also known as “Garbage City,” which is near the Monastery, were on their way to join the Coptic protest near the Egyptian TV Building, to show their solidarity with the Copts of the village of Soul in Atfif, who were forcibly displaced from their village and their church torched (AINA 3-5-2011). Nearly 15,000 Muslims from the nearby area of Sayeda Aisha and Mokattam, who were armed with weapons including automatic guns, confronted the Copts.
The clashes first started with hurling of stones at the Coptic demonstrators, then Molotov Cocktails. According to eyewitnesses the Copts called the army which arrived at the scene at 15:00 with 10 tanks . At first the military stood by watching, then shot in the air, then at the Coptic side with live ammunition.
“We were at one side and the Muslim on the other, we have hundreds of injured at the Coptic side,” said an eyewitness. “The Muslims were also shooting from behind the army tanks.”
First-aid was given to the injured in the clinic attached to the Monastery, “But there are only 3 doctors here, not enough to look after all the injured,” said the Church custodian. According to one of the doctors all injuries were caused by gun shots. The injured were transported by private persons to various hospitals around Cairo, as ambulances refused to respond to their calls.
It was reported that Muslims stood at the head of the road and any garbage collecting vehicle belonging to Copts from “Garbage City” was confiscated and the owners beaten.
Attorney Wagih Anwar Abou Saad, an eyewitness, told Free Coptic Voice the army has been firing live ammunition on the Copts since 3 PM. “The army is protecting the Muslims, who sought shelter behind the army tanks,” he said.
There was a media blackout on the incident. There are no reports of any Muslim casualties.
The Coptic sit-in in front of the Egyptian TV building (AINA 3-8-2011) in Cairo has been ongoing since Saturday March 5, as the army has not yet fulfilled its promise to the Copts of handing over the torched church in the village of Soul, under the pretext that Muslim are demonstrating near the church.
| — Hat tip: Mary Abdelmassih | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Police Officials Arrested, Documents Destroyed
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, MARCH 7 — Forty-seven police officers and security officials were arrested on accusations of burning documents and damaging computers belonging to the state security agency after a decision made by the country’s chief prosecutor, according to MENA. Protestors have been raiding the offices of the state security agency for days, calling for them to be closed, and saying that there is currently a vast effort being made to burn and destroy documents kept at the offices. The raids are partly due to the long-time difficult relations between the population and special police forces, who have been accused of abusing their power, causing people to disappear who have later been found dead, and for having an ironclad control over several activities associated with biased interests, as well as suspicions that there an attempt is currently being made by officials to destroy compromising documents concerning their illegal activities.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Mubarak Sons’ 5% Commission on Gas to Israel, Press
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 7 — The sons of former Egyptian president Mubarak received a 5% commission on the contract for gas supply to Israel, worth 2.5 billion dollars overall. Negotiations on the gas agreement were carried out under the direct supervision of Gamal Mubarak, according to the Kuwaiti newspaper Al Jareeda Al Kuwaitia, which has published secret documents. The deal for the commission to Mubarak’s sons was made — according to the daily — in a luxury hotel in Sharm El Sheik, far from the Egyptian government in Cairo. In addition to the two sons of the former Egyptian president, also involved in the deal were entrepreneur Husain Salem, very close to the Mubarak family, and the then Oil Minister Sameh Fahmi.
Mubarak’s sons demanded 10% but the Israeli negotiator, underscored the daily paper, refused, saying it was too high of a percentage. According to the Israeli negotiator Isac Mizari, the Israeli government had approved 2.5% for Gamal Mubarak, 1% for Egyptian negotiator Husain Salem and another 1% for the former Egyptian Oil Minister.
The daily claims that the reduction in the percentage led to a number of arguments between the Egyptian parties involved in the commission. Following lengthy talks and threats to call off the deal, the Israeli government decided to agree to 5% commission. The agreement between Israel and Egypt provides for Egyptian gas supplies of 1.7 billion cubic metres per year for twenty years.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Death Toll Rises in Christian-Muslim Violence
Cairo, 9 March (AKI) — At least ten people were killed in violence between minority Christians and Muslims in Cairo late Tuesday, state news agency MENA reported on Wednesday. Initial reports said six people had died in the clashes which began during a protest by Copts against the burning of a church last Saturday.
MENA quoted a senior health ministry official as saying 110 people were wounded in the violence which erupted when Coptic Christian protesters blocked a highway in the Egyptian capital, protesting against Saturday’s burning of the church in the province of Helwan.
The clashes between Christians and Muslims erupted in the poor working-class district of Moqattam after at least 1,000 Christians gathered there to protest the torching of the Helwan church.
Christians and Muslims began throwing stones and Molotov cocktails at each other in Moqattam, a security source was quoted as saying. Several cars were reportedly set alight.
An army statement said it “successfully handled the riots on Tuesday.” The military reportedly fired shots in the air to break up the riot but took some time to quell it.
One 18-year old Christian was reportedly killed by a bullet that struck him in the back but it was unclear who fired the shot. Some witnesses were cited as saying they saw protesters carrying weapons.
A mob set the Helwan church on fire last Saturday after clashes between Coptis and Muslims that left two people dead.
The violence was reportedly triggered by a feud between two families, which disapproved of a romantic relationship between a Christian man and a Muslim woman in the village of Sol, residents were quoted as telling Egyptian state TV.
Mohammed Hussein Tantawi, head of the ruling military council that is governing the country after former president Hosni Mubarak’s ouster on 11 February, said on Monday the army would rebuild the church before the Easter holidays.
There is a long history of animosity between Copts and Muslims in Egypt. Christians, who make up about 10 percent of Egypt’s 80 million population, complain of systematic discrimination and have been the target of a number of sectarian attacks.
Twenty-three people were killed on New Year’s Eve when a suspected suicide bomber blew himself up as worshippers left a church in the northern port city of Alexandria and scores were injured.
No one has yet claimed responsibility for the attack, which came after an Al-Qaeda-linked group said it was behind a deadly bombing of a Baghdad church on 31 October last year and threatened Coptic Christians as well.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Coptic Priest: Army Shot at Protestors
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, MARCH 9 — The victims of the violent clashes between Coptic Christians and Muslims last night were caused by shots fired by the army, said Father Yohanna of the church of the Holy Virgin of Mokattam, the site of the violence during which 10 people were killed, while speaking to ANSA. “The army fired at the Copts and we have the bullets to prove it. One was extracted this morning from the body of a 14-year-old boy,” he explained, reporting that young Muslims threw stones, bottles and incendiary shells, which set three homes on fire, as well as three plastic storehouses and three cardboard storehouses.
The priest also denounced the scarce presence of the army this morning to protect the area. “The situation is critical, and the army is only at one of the six entrances to the neighbourhood of the Zabbaleen,” a Christian community that serves as Cairo’s informal garbage collectors. “We are also worried about what might happen during the funeral,” said Father Yohanna.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Death Toll Rises, Muslim Brotherhood Accuses PND
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, MARCH 9 — The death toll is up to 13 after the violent clashes last night between Coptic Christians and Muslims in a Christian-majority neighbourhood in Cairo, report security sources, which added that the number of injuries has risen to 140.
Meanwhile, the Muslim Brotherhood has accused the Democratic National Party of former President Mubarak and state security officials of the Interior Ministry of being at the origin of the clashes between Copts and Muslims, which killed 13 and injured 140 last night in Mokattam, to the southeast of Cairo.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Gaddafi Supporters Marching on Centre of Zawiyah
(AGI) Cairo — Libyan state television has reported that groups of Gaddafi supporters are marching on the centre of the city of Zawiyah. Libyan television was however unable to show any images of these protests. More recent news from the city, under siege from Gaddaffi’s forces, indicates that the city is still held by insurgents .
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy Wants Naval Blockade of Gaddafi’s Libya
(AGI) Rome — Italy will propose to the next extraordinary European Council that the European Union and NATO coordinate naval forces to enforce a naval blockade of Libya. The announcement was made by Foreign Minister Franco Frattini during a joint meeting of the Foreign Affairs Commission in parliament. “We need to take action,” said Frattini, “to enforce respect for sanctions, but we must avoid, as is the case with piracy, two operations, one NATO and one EU.” .
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Contact With Provisional Council, Italian Minister
(ANSAmed) — ROME — Italy has begun contact with the Libyan national council, but in a “discrete manner”, said Foreign Minister Franco Frattini. “We have better knowledge than others,” said Frattini, “and are often in demand in these hours.
We know the former justice minister who is now head of the Benghazi provisional council and the network of Libyan ambassadors who have said they are now in the service of the population and not the regime, with some of them carrying out an important role in bringing together consensus. We are doing this but in a discrete manner and I believe this is the best solution.” The foreign minister also said that “it is very unlikely that Italian aircraft will be involved in Libyan territory, but our EU and NATO loyalty requires that military bases and logistics support cannot be denied” were a no-fly zone to be set up.
Frattini added that there is the need to be aware that the “tragedy we are seeing before our eyes”, with the situation now that of a “civil war”, “cannot be stopped by us tomorrow if not through war and war is not a videogame, war is a serious matter”.
He also said that a no-fly zone “means that there are planes that fly over and stop other aircraft from taking off, and if the need arises they also shoot, and so the only serious thing to do is to consider how, objectively, countries like Italy can contribute”. The availability of bases, ensured the minister, “has already been confirmed by Italy on the condition that it be within a framework of international legitimacy, a UN Security Council resolution, on which member countries are already working, and a NATO resolution.
Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi accused France of “interfering” with Libyan domestic affairs and repeated his accusations against al Qaeda in an interview with France 24 television. When asked about France’s support to the Libyan national council that has been formed by the rebels in Bengasi, in the east of the country, Gaddafi said: “That’s ridiculous: interfering in the domestic affairs of a country. If we were to interfere in what is happening in Corsica and Sardinia?”. Gaddafi then added that a “ploy” is in progress in Libya and he mentioned the presence of “armed extremists”, of “small groups” and “dormant cells” of al Qaeda “which have armed themselves against the police, the army. We are part of the fight against terrorism”. Regarding his ties with the United States and the European Union, Gaddafi responded: “It’s strange, our relations were good. Perhaps there is a security issue on Mediterranean level, to block emigration….. We also have large Spanish or French oil companies in Libya, and suddenly these countries have forgotten their interests”. The Italian ship Libra has entered the Libyan port of Benghazi this morning, carrying 25 tonnes of aid and materials for humanitarian purposes from the Foreign Ministry to the Benghazi population. Onboard, in addition to four electricity generators, there are family-sized tents, 4,000 blankets, water purification units and 40 medical kits for general illnesses.
The patrol boat is also transporting water in two tanks and food donated by the Italian Foreign Ministry’s Cooperation Office.
Meanwhile, the government counteroffensive continues against the rebels: two air raid have been witnessed in Ras Lanuf this morning, while artillery and tanks were used in Misurata yesterday. In Tripoli pro-Gaddafi demonstrations were held in the streets, and the government announced the abolition of import tariffs on consumer goods as well as a reduction in consumer and production taxes. According to the reports in the Independent, the United States has asked Saudi Arabia to supply weapons to Libyan rebels to avoid direct involvement in the civil war, but Jeddah has not yet responded. “Saudi Arabia,” reports the British daily, “is the only Arab ally of the United States located strategically and able to supply weapons to the guerrilla forces in Libya.
Their aid would enable Washington to deny any military involvement in the supply chain…the weapons would be from the US and paid for by Saudis.” Saudi Arabia is also dealing with protests by the Shia minority group (10% of the population), which has recently demonstrated in the street a number of times after similar protests held in Bahrain. The minority group has called a “day of rage” for Friday, march 11. The government in Jeddah has prohibited all demonstrations in response. Meanwhile, over 200,000 people have fled Libya, according to the latest figures provided by the United Nations. According to the International Organisation for Migration (IOM), since the beginning of the revolts to Saturday, 203,756 people — especially migrant workers — have left the North African country.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Press: Shootout at Barracks After Gaddafi’s Sons Argue
(ANSAmed) — BEIRUT, MARCH 8 — The Gaddafi family is reportedly split down the middle between the sons of the Libyan leader who are in favour of using “all military means” to repress the revolt, and the others who are against the idea and who are willing to negotiate with the rebels. The dispute was reported this morning by pan-Arab daily Asharq al Awsat, which cited an eyewitness of the clashes that took place four days ago inside of the Bab al Aziziya barracks in Tripoli, where Muammar Gaddafi and his sons and closest collaborators are reportedly holed up. The source cited by the daily, identified only with the name “Fares”, and who says that he received confirmation of his story from “friends, high-ranking officials in the Libyan army,” says that “at around 5am” on Friday “there was an all-out gun fight inside of the barracks” following an argument between Gaddafi’s sons. According to the source, “Sayf al Islam, Saadi, Motassem and Khamis support Gaddafi’s plan to crush the popular revolt with all available military means, while the other three — Aisha, Hannibal and first-born son Muhammad — are opposed to the idea”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Gaddafi: Colonialist Plot, Al Qaeda Influence
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 9 — “Colonialist plot”, Gaddafi has once again called the uprising on TV, saying that “the rebels are under the influence of Al Qaeda”. Meanwhile, government forces have stepped up attacks in Zawiya while today the European Parliament is discussing the Libyan crisis and Vice President Biden is in Moscow, with talks of a no-fly zone over Libya on the agenda. Tomorrow will see a meeting of EU Defence and Foreign Ministers, and on Saturday the Arab League will be meeting. The Organisation of the Islamic Conference is in favour of a no-fly zone, and Great Britain and France are drawing up a new UN resolution. Yesterday the head of the Libyan Interim Transitional National Council set up in Benghazi, former Justice Minister Jalil, gave Gaddafi an ultmiatum, saying that if the latter were to leave in the next 72 hours then they would not seek to bring him to justice. Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi has accused Western countries, and especially France, of leading a “colonialist plot” against his country. Gaddafi spoke in an interview broadcast this morning by the French TV station LCI. To a question on the position of Western countries, and in particular France, who have given their support to the rebels, Gaddafi responded that “they want to colonise Libya once again.
It is a colonialist plot.” When the journalist asked him whether he planned on adopting “retaliatory measures against France”, the Libyan leader simply said that “we’ll see”, and said he was sure there would be future “visits” to Europe once “all of this is over”. In the eyes of Gaddafi, rebel forces fighting against the government have been subjected to brainwashing by Al Qaeda, reports Al Jazeera. Zawiya, the Western Libyan city where forces loyal to Gaddafi have intensified attacks on rebels, may be close to falling, while in Misurata government forces are advancing but rebels are putting up strong resistance, according to sources in Tripoli.
Sources have also spoken of about fifty armoured tanks and heavy battles, but say that though there are rebels in the city, the latter tend to stay hidden from public view.
Tanks of the pro-Gaddafi armed forces are approaching the square held by rebels in Zawiya, Reuters was told by one of the rebels in a telephone call. “We can see the tanks. Tanks are all over the place,” he said.
Sources contacted in Tripoli have said that rebels are putting up stiff resistance in Misurata. According to the Libyan government, among the rebels in Misurata there are Algerians and Tunisians from Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQMI).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Gaddafi’s Emissary in Cairo, Leader Challenges West
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 9 — One of Muammar Gaddafi’s airplanes, with his emissary on board, landed in Cairo after flying over Greek airspace, according to sources in the Egyptian airports. According to Al Jazeera, however, three of the colonel’s airplanes departed from Tripoli. Today Gaddafi spoke again on Libyan state television and in interviews with two foreign television networks, and did not make any mention of an ultimatum to leave the country within 72 hours to avoid suffering any criminal consequences, given to him by the interim government established by the rebels. The Libyan leader talked about the possibility of a no-fly zone, threatening to fight the West if they attempted to impose this type of measure. Gaddafi also mentioned Al Qaida, the group that the leader holds responsible for fuelling the uprising by recruiting young “weak” young people, forecasting scenarios of “chaos extending to Israel” if the terrorist network takes over Libya. In the first of three televised interviews broadcast this morning, with French television network Lci, Gaddafi accused the West, and France in particular, of conducting a “colonialist conspiracy” against his country. A concept that he reiterated in an interview with Libyan state television during which he accused “colonialist countries” of “weaving a conspiracy to humiliate the Libyan people, enslaving them and controlling their oil resources”. Gaddafi said that he would declare war on the West if a no-fly zone is imposed. “The Libyan people will take up arms against the Western powers if they try to impose a no-fly zone,” he said in a televised interview with Turkish television network Trt. He also sent another message to the West: if Al Qaida takes over his country, the entire region all the way to Israel will fall into chaos. Gaddafi also called the terrorist network the only group responsible for the uprising in Libya. The rebels who are fighting against the government, he said, have been brainwashed by Al Qaida. According to the Libyan leader, “foreign forces” have recruited young and vulnerable people in the cities of Benghazi, Zawiya and Zenten, which are currently under rebel control “They focus on the weak,” said Gaddafi. “Otherwise, why didn’t they come to where you are? This means that they target the scum who are not able to be strong.”
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: European Leader Working for Safe Passage for Gaddafi
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 9 — “A Western head of state who is very close to Colonel Gaddafi, is trying to form a European delegation that could also include the presidents of oil companies operating in Libya to go to Tripoli to offer the leader a proposal to be able to leave the country safely without having to face trial.” The news was reported by Assharq Al Awsat daily, citing Arab and Western diplomatic sources. In order to obtain Arab support for this European initiative, the Arab League is involved in preliminary talks, underlined the newspaper. Time will reveal that there is no military solution for the Libyan crisis, according to diplomatic sources. This is why it is necessary to convince the colonel to step down from power without any further bloodshed.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Strasbourg Wants NTC Recognised, Ashton Refuses
(ANSAmed) — STRASBOURG, MARCH 9 — Conflicting views have arisen within the European Parliament on recognition of Libya’s Interim Transitional National Council.
This morning the EU foreign policy chief spoke on the matter in her opening address to the parliamentary debate on Libya.
After leaders of the largest groups and most deputies had instead said that they were in favour of the “immediate recognition” which had been requested yesterday by two representatives of the NTC invited to Strasbourg by liberal democrats, Ashton said that “it is not within my mandate. The Council of the Heads of State and Government must be the ones to make this decision”. Ashton’s reply brought reactions from ALDE leader Guy Verhofstadt as well as Greens leader Daniel Cohn Bendit and PDL leader Mario Mauro. “Ashton,” said Verhofstadt,” must propose the recognition to the Council since she must also respond to the European Parliament.” The issue of recognition will be discussed by the European heads of state and government summit on Friday in Brussels.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Rebels Withdraw From Ras Lanuf
(AGI) Ras Lanuf — Libyan rebels have withdrawn from the Ras Lanuf oil refining hub onboard of dozens of vehicles after an air raid. The attack was launched by the artillery forces of Government troops. The rebels did an about face after an intense several-hour attack and at least three air raids in the region West of the coastal Mediterranean city.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libyan Test for Refocused Al-Qaeda
By Syed Saleem Shahzad
ISLAMABAD — The Libyan political upheaval that is rapidly turning into a civil war has unambiguously split Libyan society between the west of the country and the pro-Muammar Gaddafi bloc, and the “rebels” to the east centered around Benghazi and beyond.
The root of the unrest is intrinsically liberal and secular — as it was in Egypt and Tunisia — leaving very little ground on which Islamic political forces can operate.
During these turbulent times in the Arab world, al-Qaeda has been only a spectator; however, it is poised to pounce on any opportunity that might arise to allow it to become a part of the action in Libya.
In a way, this places al-Qaeda in the same position as Western countries, some of which are positioning to actively intervene in Libya, even if it is at the least by enforcing a no-fly zone to protect the rebels from Gaddafi’s fighter planes and bombers.
Al-Qaeda’s most powerful Libyan cluster, al-Jamaa al-Muqatilah (Libyan Islamic Fighting Group), is apprehensive of being marginalized, according to members of the Libyan militant camp in Pakistan’s North Waziristan tribal area.
They believe that al-Qaeda needs to kick in to give an ideological mooring to the armed opposition and to prevent the situation from falling into the hands of pro-Western agitators, especially with Western capitals looking for an arrangement to prop up liberal and secular forces, even through direct military intervention.
Most of al-Jamaa al-Muqatilah’s members come from the Benghazi area and the group has provided some of the best commanders among al-Qaeda’s contingents in Afghanistan. These include Abu Laith al-Libi, killed in a drone attack in 2008, who led a failed coup against Gaddafi in 1994. It was after the coup attempt that Libi headed for Afghanistan, where he led several high-profile operations, including the attack on Bagram base outside the capital Kabul in 2007 during then-United States vice president Dick Cheney’s visit.
Asia Times Online contacts in the militant camps say that current al-Qaeda ideologue and military strategist Abu Yahya al-Libi is now trying to mobilize of al-Qaeda’s cadre in Libya to quickly jump onto the unrest bandwagon. Libi, who comes from Benghazi and who has authored many books, played a significant role in al-Qaeda’s mobilization in Yemen and Somalia while living in Afghanistan and the Pakistani tribal areas.
Libi escaped from the US detention facility at Bagram in 2005 and was recently elevated as one of al-Qaeda’s main leaders and he now often chairs shura (council) meetings to make important decisions in the absence of Osama bin Laden and his deputy Dr Ayman al-Zawahiri.
Al-Qaeda’s agitation over playing an active role in Libya goes against an earlier decision to stay in the background when the unrest broke out in North Africa and beyond early this year. Al-Qaeda resolved to simply work alongside Islamic forces to strengthen the position of Islamic movements against liberal and secular forces. With all-out civil war imminent in Libya, though, al-Qaeda does not want to become sidelined.
Crucially, though, although al-Qaeda will try to play an active role in Libya, it will be in conjunction with Islamic parties to prop up the masses — and it will not incorporate the terror operations that have characterized al-Qaeda’s operations over the past years, notably in Iraq.
This marks a fundamental shift in al-Qaeda’s philosophy that began last year when one of its ideologues, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, wrote a thesis Twenty Guidelines for Jihad that was published on a pro-al-Qaeda website. (See Broadside fired at al-Qaeda leaders Asia Times Online, December 10, 2010.) Ghaith questioned al-Qaeda’s go-it-alone policy, criticized the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US as well as the decision to sever ties with international Islamic movements. This, argued Ghaith, had led to a complete disconnect with Muslim societies.
This discourse reached a climax when Saif al-Adil (or Saiful Adil) wrote an article for the same website in January in which he called for al-Qaeda to support Islamic political parties in the Arab world and urged Muslim scholars to refrain from criticizing them. The two ideologues pointed to an urgent need for al-Qaeda to tap into the mainstream of the Muslim world by drawing opinion from its varied societies, intelligentsia and Islamic movements.
Al-Qaeda down the evolutionary road
Academics across the Muslim world were unable to justify the September 11 attacks as they were mainly directed against civilians and went against the basic norms for launching a battle against any usurper anti-Muslim force. Yet al-Qaeda claimed they were the only way to organize a backlash in the Muslim world against Western hegemony in the lopsided global politics following the end of the Cold War in the early 1990s. Further, many Muslim regimes were allied with the American camp.
Following the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in late 2001 and then of Iraq in 2003, al-Qaeda’s focus remained to strengthen polarization in Muslim-majority states to bring them all to a single point of revolt against Western influence and Western-supported regimes in the Muslim world.
Al-Qaeda went so aggressively in pursuit of this that it turned against its ideological parent — the Muslim Brotherhood — as well as against partner organizations like Hamas in Gaza and the Pakistani militant groups Jamaat-e-Islami and Lashkar-e-Taiba when they refused to support al-Qaeda-led struggles for revolts in Muslim states.
Several international events during al-Qaeda’s engagement with world powers in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the global recession and food riots in Egypt in 2008, fired the imagination of some al-Qaeda leaders. They believed al-Qaeda’s military operations had reached a level at which the Americans were being squeezed through loss of resources in the war theaters of Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Thus, the American ability to maneuver through injecting money into Muslim-majority states was limited.
Economic hard times and political polarization were the natural outcome, however, al-Qaeda’s limited structure was unable to manipulate the situation, besides, the circumstances warranted serious political moves to prop up the masses rather than terror operations.
Therefore, after Iran released several senior al-Qaeda leaders early last year and they went to Afghanistan, they initiated top-level debate through Twenty Guidelines for Jihad.
Finally, al-Qaeda’s leaders reconciled to a new direction and in recent weeks Zawahiri — who previously had justified each and every terror attack against civilians — came out with a statement that essentially marks a major paradigm shift in al-Qaeda’s policies and indicates the beginning of its mainstreaming into Muslim world politics…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Rebels Withdraw From Zawiyah, At Least 40 Killed
(AGI) Tripoli — Forces loyal to Gaddafi have taken control of the city of Zawiyah; at least 40 people killed in today’s clashes. It was reported by some eyewitnesses who said the rebels initially withdrew before striking back. Meanwhile, medical sources reported that Ghaddafi forces were among the at least 40 people killed in today’s clashes, including a general and a colonel.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Rebels ‘In Contact With Italy’ As Gaddafi Puts $400,000 Bounty on Their Leader’s Head
Benghazi, 9 March (AKI) — Libyan rebels on Wednesday said they were in contact with Rome as state television announced Libya’s embattled leader Muammar Gaddafi had offered a reward of 400,000 dollars for the capture of rebel leader Mustafa Abdel Jalil.
In a banner headline, Libyan state television described Jalil as a “spy” and also offered 200,000 (163,000 dollars) for information leading to his arrest.
A former Libyan justice minister, Jalil has been based in the eastern city of Benghazi, where the revolt to end Gaddafi’s iron-fisted 41 years in power began in mid-February. He chairs the rebel National Council.
“We’ve had telephone contact since yesterday with Italy’s foreign minister Franco Frattini,” a spokesman for the National Council, Abel Hafiz Al Ghogha, told journalists Benghazi — Libya’s second city. He did not disclose the content of their discussions.
Frattini told the Italian parliament’s foreign affairs committees on Wednesday he was “not aware” that any Libyan private jets flying from Tripoli had landed in Italy on their way to Brussels or elsewhere.
Frattini’s denial followed a flurry of media reports on Wednesday that private Libyan jets were flying to Brussels, Cairo and Vienna with top Gaddafi aides on board — and possibly Gaddafi himself.
Frattini said the directors of Rome and Milan’s main airports had denied that any Libyan private jets had landed. “But we will be investigating the reports,” he added.
Thousands of people are believed to have been killed and 212,000 people — most of them migrant workers — have fled the country as the conflict between forces loyal to Gaddafi and the rebels has escalated into warfare.
Italy, which colonised Libya from 1911-1943 is the country that does the most business with the oil-rich Arab state. It has said it would let its military bases be used by allied warplanes if the United Nations Security Council passed a resolution authorising a no-fly zone over Libya to stop Gaddafi bombing rebel positions.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
March 8: Women Kicked Out of Tahrir Square
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, MARCH 8 — Small groups of women protesting in Egypt’s Tahrir Square to mark International Women’s Day, have been removed from the square by young men who have treated the women aggressively, snatched their placards and thrown them to the ground. Tahrir Square was the focal point of the January 25 revolt in the country.
“I am very upset. It is not possible that women, whose presence contributed so much to the success of the Egyptian unrest, be denied their rights,” the former Minister for Families, Moushira Khattab, told ANSA. After arriving in Tahrir Square, Khattab stayed only for a few minutes, disgusted at anti-female slogans being chanted by groups of men.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Security Still an Emergency
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, MARCH 8 — The security problem is still a priority for the “new Tunisia,” and the first person to be aware of this is Premier Essebsi, who has made the issue the focus of the actions to be taken in the near future by the government, together with the path towards a new electoral law. The “Jasmine revolution” has had two faces until now: a joyful and determined side of the thousands of young people who took to the streets and squares to demand freedom and democracy, and a darker side, regarding many other young people who turned to violence mainly against businesses. And not just the businesses associated with the hated family of Leila Trabelsi, the powerful wife of President Ben Ali, capable of creating a vast and bountiful network of interests for the family, which has yet to be precisely defined. Everyone has paid a price due to this wave of violence, not just the store owners, who today, while the country attempts to return to normality, fear more raids carried out with urban guerrilla warfare tactics. Young people, always a few dozen, show up in front of supermarkets or shopping centres, bust in, break windows and ransack everything. Actions that have little to do with the spirit of the revolution. The most recent target to be sacked by a group of criminals was Le Palmarium, a shopping centre in downtown Tunis located a few metres from Avenue Bourghiba and the highly fortified Interior Ministry. The owners of the stores in the shopping complex have been forced to tally their losses yet again, while keeping their fingers crossed for the future. For several days, for what it’s worth, security guards at Le Palmarium, in addition to two-way radios, have equipped themselves with long nightsticks. Probably an insufficient measure if you have to deal with criminals armed with iron bars and knives. Fears of new episodes of violence erupting is palpable in the streets, especially when seeing a group of a dozen young people together, who may have just gotten out of school and have their backpacks filled with books instead of bats and rocks, change direction as they are afraid crossing paths with bands of thugs.
But it is not as if the security situation in Tunisia was perfect under Ben Ali (petty crime was always a frequent occurrence), but perhaps the oppressive presence of men in uniform provided the country with more peace. But this is no longer the case: where are the police? This is the question that can be heard most when walking the streets in the centre and in the neighbourhoods and in the endless commentaries sent to the newspapers destined illicit a response from the readers. The explanation lies in the fact there are less police in sight compared to a few months ago because they are being deployed in strategic positions, and not everywhere as they were before.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Ramallah Becomes Recreation Paradise, Economic Boom
(ANSAmed) — JERUSALEM, MARCH 8 — Spending the weekend in Ramallah has become a group ritual, if not a mass ritual, among young Israeli Arabs. After the tradition Friday prayer they go by car to the Kalandia checkpoint, the entrance to the city, for a night of dancing and fun. New bars, restaurants and trendy clubs have been opened, and last weekend there was even a fashion show, the first ever to be organised in the Territories.
This Friday-night fever is one of the faces of the controversial Palestinian economic miracle. A surprising growth of the economy — the most recent data show a 7% growth — whose impact is mainly (some people say exclusively) felt in Ramallah, “the pearl of the West Bank”.
But analysts issue a warning: the boom is an inflated soap bubble with dangerous contradictions. “Smoke and mirrors” was the comment made some time ago by the chairman of the Confederation of Palestinian industry, Mahdi al-Masri. Zakaria al-Qaq, professor at the Arab al-Quds University, breeding ground of Palestinian intelligentsia, and co-director of the Israeli-Palestinian research centre in Jerusalem, agrees. “The Economic miracle” he told ANSAmed, “is an illusion. The West wants to hear a success story and has decided to stress the economic results of Ramallah and part of the Territories, area A, run by the Palestinian National Authority. They praise the theory of Netanyahu’s economic peace, but the truth is that most Palestinians are still living below the poverty threshold. There can be no economic development without political independence”.
The idea of the Israeli Prime Minister, to a certain extend supported by Palestinian Premier Salam Fayyad, an established economist, is to improve the economic conditions of the Territories. Certain obstacles are removed, within certain limits: for example, in the past two years several checkpoints have been dismantled to make it easier for people and goods to move around. But that is far from sufficient, argues al-Qaq: “The Palestinian economy depends on international cooperation, which pays its wages and infrastructure. A total of 38% of the aid we receive is used to finance the security sector, which pleases Israel because it finds security an important issue; agriculture receives only 4%, healthcare 10%. We are forming a police State”. The flow of foreign money — 7.7 billion USD in the 2008-2010 period — drugs the Palestinian economy and facilitates corruption, sources in Italian cooperation said. “The Palestinians receive donations from around 40 countries. They don’t set a maximum budget when they have to implement a project: if the funds don’t come from one side, they will come from the other and the costs rise. This is a vicious circle”.
But people who benefit from this growth really do believe in the miracle. Katreene Khalil is head of communications for the Movenpick hotel, Ramallah’s only 5-star hotel, a 40 million dollar project that was opened a few months ago. “Our guests”, she says, “are mainly businessmen, whose numbers recently increased. As employee of this hotel and as citizen I notice a clear difference from the past years, investors are coming from abroad and create jobs. Our hotel, for example, employs more than 200 Palestinians”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Arab Revolt Reworks the World Order
By M K Bhadrakumar
India, Brazil and South Africa have put a spoke in the American wheel, which seemed up until Tuesday inexorably moving, turning and turning in the direction of imposing a “no-fly” zone over Libya.
Arguably, the United States can still impose a zone, but then President Barack Obama will have to drink from the poisoned chalice and resurrect his predecessor’s controversial post-Cold War doctrine of “unilateralism” and the “coalition of the willing” to do that. If he does so, Obama will have no place to hide and all he has done in his presidency to neutralize America’s image as a “bully” will come unstuck.
New Delhi hosted a foreign minister-level meeting with Brazil and South Africa on Tuesday, which was to have been an innocuous occasion for some rhetorical “South-South” cooperation. On the contrary, the event soared into the realm of the troubled world order and shaky contemporary international system. The meeting took a clear-cut position of nyet vis-a-vis the growing Western design to impose a “no-fly” zone over Libya.
All indications are that the US and its allies who are assisting the Libyan rebels politically, militarily and financially have been hoping to extract a “request” from the Libyan people within a day or two at the most as a fig-leaf to approach the United Nations Security Council for a mandate to impose sanctions under the auspices of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). The Libyan rebels are a divided house: nationalist elements staunchly oppose outside intervention and the Islamists among them are against any form of Western intervention.
‘Unilateralism’ only option on table
NATO defense ministers held a meeting in Brussels on Tuesday to give practical touches to a possible intervention by the alliance in Libya. That the meeting was attended by US Defense Secretary Robert Gates was indicative of the importance attached to the run-up to the alliance’s proposed intervention in Libya. Gates missed an earlier informal NATO defense ministers’ meeting on Libya held on the outskirts of Budapest a fortnight ago.
United States-British diplomacy was moving on a parallel track drumming up a unified position by the Libyan rebels to seek an international intervention in their country and specifically in the form of a “no-fly” zone. The Arab League and the African Union also maintain an ambiguous stance on the issue of such a zone.
Obama’s calculation is that if only a Libyan “people’s request” could be generated, that would in historical terms absolve him and the West of the blame of invading a sovereign member country of the United Nations — from a moral and political angle, at least — as well as push the Arab League and African Union into the enterprise.
Being a famously cerebral intellectual also, Obama is a politician with a difference and can be trusted to have an acute sense of history. His predecessor George W Bush would have acted in similar circumstances with “audacity”, an idiom that is ironically associated with Obama.
Obama’s tryst with history is indeed bugging him in his decision-making over Libya. Robert Fisk, the well-known chronicler of Middle Eastern affairs for the Independent newspaper of London, wrote a sensational dispatch on Monday that the Obama administration had sought help from King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia for secretly ferrying American weapons to the Libyan rebels in Benghazi, for which Riyadh would pick up the tab so that the White House would need no accountability to the US Congress and leave no traceable trail to Washington.
The moral depravity of the move — chartering the services of an autocrat to further the frontiers of democracy — underscores Obama’s obsessive desire to camouflage any US unilateral intervention in Libya with “deniability” at all costs.
Now comes the body blow from the Delhi meeting. The three foreign ministers belonging to the forum that is known by the cute acronym IBSA (India-Brazil-South Africa) thwarted Obama’s best-laid plans by issuing a joint communique on Tuesday in which they “underscored that a ‘no-fly’ zone on the Libyan air space or any coercive measures additional to those foreseen in Resolution 1970 can only be legitimately contemplated in full compliance with the UN Charter and within the Security Council of the United Nations”.
Brazilian Foreign Minister Antonio de Aguiar Patriota told the media in Delhi that the IBSA statement was an “important measure” of what the non-Western world was thinking”. He said, “The resort to a ‘no-fly’ zone is seen as expedient when adopted by a country but it weakens the system of collective security and provokes indirect consequences prejudicial to the objective we have been trying to achieve.” Patriota added:
It is very problematic to intervene militarily in a situation of internal turmoil, Any decision to adopt military intervention needs to be considered within the UN framework and in close coordination with the African Union and the Arab League. It is very important to keep in touch with them and identify with their perception of the situation.
He explained that measures like a no-fly zone might make a bad situation worse by giving fillip to anti-US and anti-Western sentiments “that have not been present so far”.
Equally significant was the fact that the trio of foreign ministers also penned a joint statement on the overall situation in the Middle East. Dubbed as the “IBSA Declaration”, it reiterated the three countries’ expectation that the changes sweeping across the Middle East and North Africa should “follow a peaceful course” and expressed their confidence in a “positive outcome in harmony with the aspirations of the people”.
A highly significant part of the statement was its recognition right at the outset that the Palestinian problem lay at the very core of the great Middle Eastern alienation and the “recent developments in the Region may offer a chance for a comprehensive peace … This process should include the solution of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict … that will lead to a two-state solution, with the creation of a sovereign, independent, united and viable Palestinian State, coexisting peacefully alongside Israel, with secure, pre-1967 borders, and with East Jerusalem as its capital.”
‘P-5’ loses shine
Israel will be hopping mad over the declaration. That apart, does it matter to Obama and NATO if three countries from three faraway continents stand up with a common stance on a “no-fly” zone? Who are these countries anyway? But, it does matter. Put simply, the three countries also happen to be currently serving as non-permanent members of the UN Security Council and their stance happens to have high visibility in the world’s pecking order on Libya.
The indications in Delhi are that at least one more non-permanent member of the Security Council is their “fellow-traveler” — Lebanon. Which means the “Arab voice” in the Security Council. In short, what we hear is an Afro-Asian, Arab and Latin American collective voice and it cannot be easily dismissed. More importantly, the IBSA stance puts at least two permanent veto-wielding great powers within the Security Council on the horns of an acute dilemma.
Russia claims to have a foreign policy that opposes the US’s “unilateralism” and which strictly abides by the canons of international law and the UN charter. China insists that it represents developing countries. Now, the IBSA stance makes it virtually impossible for them to enter into any Faustian deal with the US and Western powers over Libya within the sequestered caucus of the veto-holding powers of the Security Council — commonly known as the P-5.
Therefore, the IBSA joint statement, much like the Turkish-Brazilian move on the Iran nuclear problem, is virtually mocking at the moral hypocrisy of the P-5 and their secretive ways.
Ironically, Delhi adopted the IBSA communique even as US Vice President Joseph Biden was winging his way to Moscow for wide-ranging discussions on the future trajectory of the US-Russia reset. Any US-Russian tradeoff over Libya within the ambit of the reset would now get badly exposed as an act of unprincipled political opportunism.
China’s predicament will be no less acute if it resorts to realpolitik. China is hosting the summit meeting of the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) in Beijing in April. Three “brics” out of BRICS come from IBSA. Can the BRICS afford to water down the IBSA joint communique on Libya? Can China go against the stance of three prominent “developing countries”?
On balance, however, China may heave a sigh of relief. The IBSA position may let the US pressure off China and delist the Libyan “no-fly” zone issue from morphing into a bilateral Sino-American issue. China cooperated with last week’s Security Council resolution on Libya. It was an unusual move for China to vote for a resolution that smacked of “intervention” in the internal affairs of a sovereign country.
Western commentators were euphoric over the shift in Chinese behavior at the high table of world politics and were egging on the leadership at Beijing to finally shape up as a responsible world power that is willing to work with the West as a “stakeholder” in the international system — like Russia does.
Clearly, China is being cajoled to go a step further and jettison its other red line regarding a “no-fly” zone. There is no indication that China is about to concede its red line by succumbing to flattery. But, now, if China indeed does, it will be in broad daylight under the gaze of the developing countries. And it will be very difficult for Beijing to cover up such “pragmatism” with the veneer of principles. In a way, therefore, pressure is off China on the “no-fly” zone issue.
India regains identity
An interesting thought occurs: Is India forcing China’s hand? Delhi has certainly taken note that the Libyan crisis provided China with a great opportunity to work with the US in a cooperative spirit that would have much positive spin-offs for the overall Sino-American relationship. The “no-fly” zone issue would have been turf where China and the US could have created an entirely new alchemy in their relationship. Beijing knows that Obama’s presidency critically depends on how he acquits in the Middle East crisis.
All the same, Delhi’s move cannot be dismissed as merely “China-centric”. In geopolitical terms, it constitutes a highly visible slap on the American face. And there will be a price to pay in terms of Obama’s wrath. That Delhi is willing to pay such a price — when so much is at stake in its bid for a permanent seat in the UN Security Council — makes the IBSA move highly significant. Indeed, it is after a very long time that Delhi will be refusing to stand up and be counted on a major American foreign policy front.
It is much more than a coincidence, too, that the declaration vociferously supported the Palestinian cause. India has taken the calculated risk of incurring the displeasure of Israel and the Israel lobby in the US. Besides, there are other signs, too, that Delhi has embarked on a major overhaul of its Middle East policies and the IBSA is only one template of the policy rethink — and, possibly not even the most far-reaching in the geopolitics of the region.
Even as the IBSA adopted its stance on Libya and the Middle East situation staunchly favoring Arab nationalism, India’s National Security Adviser Shiv Shankar Menon, a key policymaker of high reputation as a consummate diplomat and who works directly under Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, was engaged in an engrossing and meaningful conversation elsewhere in the Middle East — with Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Cathay Cabin Crew Want Riyadh Layover Dropped
Flight attendants fear ‘hotel lizards’
Cathay Pacific (SEHK: 0293)’s cabin crew union has called for a halt to overnight crew stays in Saudi Arabia after a male guest tried to force his way into a female flight attendant’s hotel room late at night….
Cathay’s female staff are being issued full body-covers on landing in case a member of the religion of peace should happen to see them uncovered and thus naturally unable to control himself, are now complaining about local men trying to force their way into the hotel rooms of cabin crew.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
Historic Ottoman Railway to Operate Again
(ANSAmed) — TEL AVIV, MARCH 7 — If everything goes as planned, within 5 years a section of what used to be the historic Hejaz Railway of the Ottoman Empire, which connected Damascus with Medina, also made famous in the movies in Lawrence of Arabia, will be back in service. For now, the railway is only planned to operate in Israel, running from Haifa, on the coast, to Betshean, through the biblical Jezreel Valley, to the border with Jordan. But optimists look to the future with hope, dreaming that one day it will bring cargo and passengers to Amman and Damascus and vice-versa. With the opening today of the first bids to build the first segment of a line which will be 60km long and have five stations when complete, a decision will begin to take shape made by the Israeli government back in 2005, but which was later shelved in favour of more important projects.
The project for the railway, which will only cover part of its historical route, was conceived also with the intent, in more favourable future political conditions, to have it connect with the city of Irbid in Jordan, providing Israel’s neighbour with convenient access to the Mediterranean through the port of Haifa. The Damascus-Haifa line was opened in 1905 by Turkey for political and strategic reasons, as an alternative to the port of Beirut, which was under French influence at the time. The line was conceived as a section of the Hejaz railway — completed in 1908 and 1300 km long — which ran from the Syrian capital to Medina. The Haifa-Damascus stretch was shut down in 1948 when the first Arab-Israeli conflict erupted. The only part operating today is the Amman-Damascus section of the Hejaz railway — which for decades carried adventurers, diplomats, spies and soldiers, similar to the more famous Orient Express of the Belle Epoque, in addition to masses of Muslim pilgrims.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Lebanon: Thousands Protest Against ‘Confessional Regime’
(ANSAmed) — BEIRUT, MARCH 7 — About 6,000 Lebanese have staged a protest in Beirut for the second time in ten days to call for an “end to the confessional regime” in de facto force in the country since its creation as an independent state almost seventy years ago.
On the wave of anti-regime protests underway for the past few weeks across the Arab world, Lebanese civil society organisations have launched a fresh appeal taken up yesterday by thousands of young people, the elderly and families to “bring down the confessional system”, according to which all political and administrative roles in the State must be divided according to a specific division among the 18 different religious communities in the country. The protestors, hundreds of whom demonstrated in Beirut’s streets ten days ago, also yelled out slogans against the current political-confessional polarisation, saying that they identified with neither the pro-Saudi side under outgoing Sunni premier Saad Hariri nor the pro-Iranian one under the Shia movement Hezbollah. A “mass mobilisation” has been called for March 13 in Beirut by the followers of the coalition under Hariri against the “illegal weapons” of the anti-Israeli movement Hezbollah. The organisers of the protests against the system along confessional lines have also announced more peaceful demonstrations to be held in Beirut and other cities in the country.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
March 8: Women in Jordan Marginalized and Abused
(by Mohammad Ben Hussein) (ANSAmed) — AMMAN, MARCH 8 — Women in the conservative Jordan are marginalized and victims to rampant abuse despite legislations to empower them economically and politically, according to activists. The current parliament has 10 women as MPs after the government increased quota of women in the parliament from 4 seats in what has been hailed as a step forward in women’s right. Additionally, the judiciary has adopted an iron fist policy on women abuse, imposing tough penalties on those who kill in the name of houner. But activists said authorities are not doing enough to empower or protect women.
“The law must be clearer on issues related to honour killing.
The law should be cancelled to make it very difficult to get away with killing women in the name of honour,” said women rights activist Reem Abu Hassan, in reference to legislations that allow killers receive sentences between 3 months to six months behind bars.
Figures revealed that violence against women showed no sign of abating, despite passing of some tough legislations to curb violence against the pink race. The National Centre for Human Rights has recorded 770 complaints in 2010, of which 30 per cent are from abused women. Officials at the national centre for forensic medicine said most cases are of domestic abuse by husbands and siblings. Wounds range from simple cuts to burns and broken bones.
Additionally, every year an average of 15 women are killed in the name of honour. Flirtation or a romantic adventure is seen by many as a good reason for honour killings, according to police records. Several victims of honour crimes are discovered to be virgins and killed for the wrong reasons, according to Mohammad Khateeb, spokesman of the public security department. The government also said it will increase participation of women in the private sector by pushing employers to cough up a minimum wage.
However, activists said women remain marginalized and prone to more abuse in the male dominated society. According to Muna Mutamen, deputy president of the national committee for women said equality among men and women should be taken into consideration when drafting legislations.
“We should see equal opportunities for men and women concerning pay and promotion. This is not the case in Jordan,” said Mutamen. Official figures indicate dismal participation of women in the labour market, despite having a higher rate of education compared to male counter part.
Women make up 14 percent of labour force in the private sector, according to a study released by the Phoenix Centre for Economic and Informatics Studies (PCEIS) released on Tuesday.
The public sector, however absorbed a larger number, with 37 cent of the civil servants are women, said the study.
In total, women’s contribution to the economy stands at 14.5 percent, compared to 20 percent around the Middle East and north Africa. The study showed women represent 51 percent of bachelor degree holders. “The labour market is unfair to women. They are being used as a fuel to drive the economy, but are being paid much less than men,” said Fathallah Emrani, president of the Jordan textile industry federation, one of the largest sectors to employ women.
Emrani said labour unions and other official institutions are responsible to raise awareness among women about their rights, and must protect them against abusers. “Women feel vulnerable in the labour market and often accept wages much less than men,” he told ANSAmed.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
S. Arabia: Gov’t Raises Farming Subsidies From 25 to 75%
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 8 — In yesterday’s meeting, the Saudi Council of Ministers has approved the proposal made by the Finance Minister to increase farming subsidies from 25% to 75% in order to promote modern irrigation methods and projects, and support firms that want to use greenhouses. Al Arabiya’s website reports that Saudi Arabia is trying to increase the size of its farming sector and reduce its dependence on food imports by boosting farming activities and investments in the African countries, in order to increase its food supplies.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Saudi Columnist Criticizes Phenomenon of Pleasure Marriages
In a satirical article in the Saudi daily ‘Okaz, liberal Saudi columnist Khalaf Al-Harbi criticized the phenomenon of religiously-sanctioned pleasure marriages in Saudi Arabia. The article described a new form of marriage that has emerged in the country, called ‘day marriage,’ in which a man, single or married, may marry one or more women and meet with them during his work hours for sexual purposes, all as part of a religiously-sanctioned arrangement.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Swedish Government Censored Assyrian Genocide
A minor scandal has unfolded in Sweden as Assyrian and Armenian groups revealed the Swedish government censored the minister of integration after he mentioned the Seyfo genocide in a speech. Seyfo (sword) is the Assyrian name of the Turkish genocide of Assyrians in World War One.
The entire speech was then posted on the official Swedish government webpage and subsequently censored. The entire quotation above was removed from the speech. Armenian and Assyrian groups soon discovered an article on the homepage of the Turkish federation of Sweden in which the Turks proudly proclaimed the passage about Seyfo was removed after the Turkish embassy in Stockholm pressured the Swedish government.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
The Perfect (Desert) Storm
By Pepe Escobar
The great 2011 Arab revolt, the cry for democracy in Northern Africa, the mostly Shi’ite revolt in the Persian Gulf, the Western despair over the price of oil, and the new United States Middle East doctrine of “regime alteration” — not to mention the Pentagon’s full-spectrum dominance doctrine — have been convoluted into the ultimate political storm in MENA (Middle East/Northern Africa). The storm deploys devastating gusts of hypocritical winds.
For starters, the enlightened, democratic West has decided Muammar Gaddafi has to be taken down — or out.
The George W Bush administration invaded both Afghanistan and Iraq, killing hundreds of thousands of people in the process, directly and indirectly; and as everyone knows, with no end in sight, and with total impunity. Now it’s the turn for the law of the (wild) West to be applied, via the Barack Obama administration, to the African king of kings — as in it’s OK if we bearers of the White Man’s Burden kill a lot of people, but not OK if the killer is a John Galliano-dressed Bedouin weirdo.
This is the absolute bottom line; either the West arms the eastern liberated Libya rebels to their teeth, or Muammar Gaddafi will win this war, by switching the fight from cities to the desert, and by applying slightly increasing degrees of force. Thus, in a slightly duller version of endless plot advancements in mafia movies, the “debate” from Washington and Brussels to Riyadh concerns the most effective method for taking him down (or out). Enter plans A and B.
People change beats regime change
Plan A — Washington has placed a “highly classified” request for the House of Saud to arm the rebels, as The Independent’s Robert Fisk has advanced, without details (none available in Arab media, either). So essentially this would be — what else is new — history repeating itself as farce; a remix of the Ronald Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal, with Washington possibly betting on control of Libya’s oil and gas (echoes of Iraq neo-conned; make it history twice repeating itself as farce).
The House of Saud has every reason to arm liberated eastern Libya with much-needed anti-tank rockets, mortars and ground-to-air missiles against Gaddafi — not least because aging Saudi King Abdullah hates his guts (no wonder; Gaddafi put a contract to kill the king over a year ago). According to al-Arabiyya — a mouthpiece of the House of Saud — Gaddafi is the only Arab dictator left in power, which proves once again that the desert family oil hacienda is indeed impervious to irony.
The added irony that this scheme also copies the Saudis distributing weapons for the mujahideen in Afghanistan in the 1980s via Pakistan (make it history thrice repeating itself as farce) obviously escaped everyone in Washington. Hail to Benghazi as the new Peshawar!
Anyway, the Saudi reward for riding along is already inbuilt in the Obama administration’s brand new Middle East strategy of “regime alteration”. Everything one needs to know about the doctrine is here.
Next Friday, an Egyptian-style day of rage is planned for Saudi Arabia. Preemptive repression has been fierce — including a ban on all demonstrations, because, says the Interior Ministry, they are against sharia law. A big round of applause here to the hardline Prince Nayef bin Abdul-Aziz, one of the king’s brothers, for his efforts previous and post-day of rage.
And then there’s the mostly Shi’ite rebellion in neighborly Bahrain — home of the US 5th Fleet — which must be contained at all costs, lest it spills over to oil-producing, Shi’ite majority northeast Saudi Arabia. So according to “regime alteration” (“help keep longtime allies who are willing to reform in power”), and all in the name of “stability”, US President Barack Obama can’t say a word if the House of Saud cracks down big time over its Shi’ites, or if it helps the al-Khalifas in Bahrain with tanks and troops to crack down big time over their Shi’ites. Translation: screw the democratic aspirations of the people of Bahrain and a substantial chunk of the people of Saudi Arabia; Washington just can’t get enough of its valuable allies, the al-Khalifa monarchy in Bahrain and the House of Saud.
Humanitarian hell-raisers, rejoice
Then there’s Plan B — the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) takes over to fight “crimes against humanity” and “genocide”. Essentially this would be Kosovo all over again (make it history repeating itself for the fourth time).
As a no-fly zone over Libya is the object of fiery debate, NATO has already decided to increase AWACs surveillance flights over Libyan territory to 24/7, according to US ambassador to NATO Ivo Daalder. Translation; they’re already searching for targets. Even as a reticent Pentagon has admitted on the record that a no-fly zone means war, febrile NATO secretary general Anders Fogh Rasmussen insisted NATO is ready to raise hell until, predictably, he backtracked.
As this is not a remix of Bush and the neo-conservatives — at least not officially — first there must be a mandate from the United Nations Security Council; France and Britain are feverishly working on a draft resolution. And then support must be assured from Russia (already said no), China (already said nothing), the toothless Arab League (almost a given) and the African Union (more complicated, because Gaddafi bought a lot of its leaders).
As for all those US-protected beacons of equality in the Persian Gulf — now hands-free to keep repressing the democratic aspirations of their people and the army of Asian slaves who service their elites — support is a cakewalk. A statement released by the foreign ministers from the six-member Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) “demands that the UN Security Council take all necessary measures to protect civilians, including enforcing a no-fly zone over Libya”.
NATO intervention, if it happens, will be sold to the whole planet as the return of humanitarian imperialism. From the point of view of NATO/ Pentagon/European Union public relations purposes, that’s another cakewalk. Former terrorist Gaddafi has now been rebranded as “the new Hitler”, after Slobodan Milosevic in Yugoslavia (as well as Saddam Hussein in Iraq; make it history repeating itself as farce for the fifth time). And Gaddafi is a much easier sell; the total terrorist freak show package.
Cui bono?
There’s no question Gaddafi and his gang are practicing “human-rights abuses” in Libya. But what about those tens of thousands killed by the Pentagon from Baghdad to Fallujah and beyond? Were they inhuman, and holders of no rights, by any chance?
Moreover, the same enlightened West that’s now so worried about the people of Libya did not give much of a damn to the people of Egypt until it was absolutely certain that Mubarakism was gone. (Gaddafi by the way was perfectly aligned with Obama, French President Nicolas Sarkozy, British Prime Minister David Cameron and Italian Premier Silvio Berlusconi in the early days of Tahrir Square).
While he was servicing the masters, the walking terrorist freak show with his portable tent and Ukrainian nurses could not be a better friend. He merrily embraced neo-liberalism; he opened up the energy holy grail to European corporations (BP, Repsol, Total, ENI); he lavishly bought their weapons (Italy, France, UK and Germany were the top four providers); he got the US$70 billion of the Libyan Investment Authority to prop up European businesses; and most of all he put a lid over the migratory flux from the Maghreb and black Africa towards Europe.
And what about then-US secretary of state Condoleezza Rice in 2008 extolling the US and Libya’s permanent shared interests, including “human rights and democracy”?
The problem now is that the West is simply clueless on what post-Gaddafi Libya could turn out to be. The “rebels” include everyone from progressive, secular intellectuals to hardcore Islamists and neo-liberal-addicted businessmen. Libya is not Tunisia or Egypt — which can be monitored and even relatively tamed by Washington/Brussels.
Libya without Gaddafi could be a complex collection of clannish tribes with no experience of Western-style political culture slouching towards “anarchy”. Thus the reasoning for a NATO intervention; so “we”, the enlightened, can control those barbarians’ worst impulses, facilitate an “orderly transition” (US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, anyone?) and profit from their energy wealth. Besides, the Mediterranean is a NATO lake already.
There’s NATO — but there’s also NATO’s Partnership for Peace. Every single nation in the 27-nation European Union is a member of one or the other (Cyprus was the last one to adhere, last month)…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey: Serious Deadlock Over Negotiations With EU, Minister
(ANSAmed) — ISTANBUL, MARCH 7 — Turkey faced serious deadlock over opening of chapters to EU negotiations, Anatolia news agency reports quoting Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu as saying. Speaking at a joint press conference with Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini in Istanbul on Saturday, Davutoglu said that they wanted the EU to have a strategic vision in its approach to Turkey. Sweden and Italy support Turkey both in the EU process and other international platforms. Sweden and Italy are the friends of Turkey, Davutoglu said. “Today, we discussed Turkey-EU relations. We evaluated the developments with Turkey’s strong supporters Italy and Sweden. I once again conveyed our disappointment over the EU’s recent decision pertaining to visas. The two countries had extended strong support to Turkey but, due to certain countries, a decision was not taken to begin talks on visa exemption,” Davutoglu said. Touching on the recent developments in Libya, Davutoglu said that all sides should refrain from making things worse in Libya. Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said that he was disappointed with the EU’s applying double standards to Turkey. “We have always supported visa exemption (for Turkey). While other countries are accepted, we notice that the EU is unwilling to provide visa exemption to Turkey,” Frattini said. “We look at such an attitude as double standards”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
200 Soldiers Deployed to Help Lampedusa Police
(AGI) Rome — Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa has deployed 200 soldiers to help police address the emergency caused by refugees arriving in Lampedusa. “Fifty will be put to work in Mineo’s solidarity village, while the others can help out in Lampedusa. This decision does not depend on us, but on the prefect and the Interior Ministry,” he said during a conference held at the Capitol.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Australia: International Immigrants Fill Gap as Locals Flee Costly and Dirty Cities
CONGESTION, pollution and the high cost of living are transforming Sydney, forcing out thousands of residents who are being replaced primarily by immigrants.
As NSW voters prepare to go to the polls, and the Gillard government works on a sustainable growth strategy, researchers have found immigrants are largely responsible for Sydney’s continued population growth. Graeme Hugo and Kevin Harris from the University of Adelaide, in a draft report of their study for the Department of Immigration and Citizenship, have highlighted how immigrants filled the vacuum left by 121,000 people moving out of Sydney between 2001 and 2006 — the largest exodus in the nation. “The fact that Sydney, and several other capital cities, are recording net losses due to internal migration is little recognised in public discourse in Australia, where the common opinion is that the largest cities are draining population from the rest of the states,” they write.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
EU Agency Hammers Greek Response to Immigration Wave
The living conditions suffered by irregular immigrants held in Greek detention centres are “worrisome”, while the general response of Greek authorities in handling the flows is hugely inadequate, an EU rights agency has said.
Adding to the damning conclusions, the report by the Vienna-based EU Fundamental Rights Agency (FRA) on Tuesday (8 March) said Greece had failed to use money given by the EU to alleviate the crisis.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
German Flees Tunisia on Refugee Boat to Escape Ex-Husband
Their nightmare trip across the sea lasted 20 hours: German mother Tina R. fled Tunisia with her young daughter on a crowded refugee boat, before eventually arriving safely in Italy. Her ex-husband, a doctor from Djerba, had refused to let go of the girl — forcing the 40-year-old to put their lives in the hands of human traffickers.
The refugees arrived in Lampedusa in three boats in the early hours of Monday. The small fishing vessels were hopelessly overloaded as they made their way from Tunisia to Italy. Only two of the boats made it safely to the promised land of Europe under their own power — the third was in danger of sinking when it reached Italian territorial waters, and the Coast Guard had to help dozens of people reach land.
Among those on board was what must have been an unexpected refugee to most — Tina R. of Düsseldorf. “It was freezing,” the 40-year-old told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “I stood in water up to my stomach as we waded to the boats before leaving.”
Tina R. had to pay the smugglers 4,000 dinar (around €2,000) for the trip to get herself and her daughter across the Mediterannean, she added. A total of 110 people were crowded onto their boat. With difficulty, she had pressed her daughter Amira Jasmine and their luggage against herself, simply hoping to survive the 20-hour crossing. “It was indescribable,” said R., “yet, for me, it was not the worst moment of the past four years.”
When the anxious mother finally came ashore, it was a huge surprise for the authorities and the gathered international media on Lampedusa to see, amongst the thousands of immigrants from Tunisia, a “beautiful German, tall and blond, with a nine-year-old daughter in her arms,” as the clichéd report in the Italian daily Corriere Della Sera put it.
The 40-year-old said she had been trying for four years to get her daughter back from her ex-husband, a Tunisian doctor on the island of Djerba. The couple separated in 2007 — according to R., alleging she had been beaten by the man. “The divorce is final, I was awarded custody of the child, even in Tunisia,” R. said Nonetheless, she was not able to bring her daughter back to Germany. Again and again, she went to Tunisia, and even hired a lawyer in Tunis — without success. “It was absurd that the law was on my side, but I could not enforce it.”
Because her ex-husband had good contacts with the authorities under the former regime, Tina R. claims he got the Tunisian police to withdraw her passport. She lived at her husband’s side, isolated and at his mercy. But at some point, the despair was so great that she fled to the mountains with Amira to stay with friends.
The doctor was furious — he filed charges of child abduction and had the police search for his ex-wife. She and her daughter, however, managed to successfully stay hidden for a few weeks by living the simple rural life of the mountains and waiting for their chance to escape.
‘I Only Want to Go Home’
When the uprising began in Tunisia, Tina R. felt the moment had come. There was no way out of the country by air, leaving only the long and dangerous journey across the sea. She thus followed the popular and often deadly path from a beach in Djerba to Lampedusa.
In the refugee camp, mother and daughter were cared for by volunteers from the aid organization Save the Children, before Tina R. booked a hotel room following talks with the German Embassy in Rome. She spoke to the media there that evening; journalists who wanted to document her personal miracle in these current turbulent times.
Little Amira is doing well under the circumstances. She has a slight fever, but it is hoped that she will recover soon. “I only want to go home. I’m terrified that something will happen to prevent that,” Tina R. said. Her new partner and their 18-month-old son are waiting for them in Düsseldorf. “I have already been with him in Tunisia, when he was just six weeks old.”
R. said the terrible experiences of the past few years have not affected her great love for Tunisia, though. But does she still fear her ex-husband? “He only has power over me and my daughter in Tunisia,” she said. “If I were to go back there, he would have me arrested, that’s for sure.”
It is still unclear when R. will be able to leave for Germany. The Foreign Ministry in Berlin declined to comment about the case to SPIEGEL ONLINE, citing privacy protection. But R. said that according to the local police, a German citizen with valid papers should have no problems leaving the country…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: FDP’s Lindner Compares Bavaria’s CSU With Islam
Bavaria’s conservative Christian Social Democrats are no strangers to anti-Islam sentiment, but a recent remark by Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich has inspired political rival to suggest that his party needed to integrate as well.
On Tuesday, the general secretary for the pro-business Free Democrats, Christian Lindner, delivered the tongue-in-cheek response to CSU member Friedrich’s controversial statement that Islam did not “belong” in Germany because it lacked a historical foundation there.
“The CSU also wasn’t a formative force in Germany history … But it is still a societal reality that we must live with,” he said of the Bavarian sister party to Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democrats. “Today we must also integrate the CSU.”
Linder, whose Free Democrats are Merkel’s junior coalition partners, went on to say: “The Bavarian cultural identity came about when Bavaria was still a monarchy. There was no CSU …. and it’s the same with Islam. It didn’t form our current cultural identity, but we need to integrate it.”
Linder’s comments fell on Shrove Tuesday, part of the Karneval season, a time when politicians tend to impart political truths with humour.
In light of that fact, CSU general secretary Alexander Dobrindt suggested that Lindner had been wearing a “red clown nose” when he compared the party to Islam.
Lindner’s comments came in response to controversial remarks made last week by Friedrich.
During his first public appearance as Interior Minister where he answered questions by reporters about the shooting of two US airmen in Frankfurt by an alleged Islamist, Friedrich said that Muslims living in Germany were part of society, “but that Islam belongs in Germany is something that has no historical foundation.”
His comment sparked an angry outcry from opposition parties and members of the FDP, including Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger.
“Of course Islam belongs in Germany,” she said. “I assume that the new interior minister, along with his predecessors such as Thomas de Maizière, takes the responsibility for integration in his department seriously and is committed to solidarity and not marginalization.”
FDP integration policy expert Serkan Tören recommended that in light of Friedrich’s sentiments the Justice Ministry take over the Islam conference, a meeting between the government and Islamic groups, from the Interior Ministry.
Friedrich’s comments mirrored similar statements he made last autumn amid a rancorous debate over whether Muslim immigrants are capable of integrating into German society.
The debate was sparked by former Bundesbank board member Thilo Sarrazin, who made a number of anti-immigrant statements aimed mainly at Turks and Arabs, coinciding with the publication of his controversial book Deutschland schafft sich ab — Wie wir unser Land aufs Spiel setzen, or “Abolishing Germany — How we’re putting our country in jeopardy.”
Later in the week a spokesperson for Friedrich attempted to calm tempers, saying that Islam was a reality in Germany.
“That does not stand in opposition to the fact that Germany and German culture are above all characterized by the Christian religion and will remain so in the future,” the spokesman said.
Last week Friedrich was named as former Interior Minister Thomas de Maizière’s successor after he took over the Defence Ministry from the disgraced Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, who resigned in the wake of a plagiarism scandal.
The government’s Islam conference was initiated by former Interior Minister Wolfgang Schäuble in 2006 as an attempt to promote a healthier dialogue with the approximately four million Muslims living in Germany.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: France’s Far-Right Le Pen Due to Visit Italy to Warn Against Migrants
Rome, 9 March (AKI) — Marine Le Pen, leader of France’s far-right National Front party, said she may travel to the tiny Italian island of Lampedusa where thousands of illegal immigrants have arrived recently from former French colony Tunisia.
She said her visit — tentatively scheduled for 14 March — would be used to send a message to the European Union to act against the immigrants who are illegally arriving in Europe North Africa where a popular upheaval has toppled authoritarian governments in Tunisia and Egypt and is pressuring other countries, most notably Libya.
“Europe is like a sieve,” she said. France must work with Spain and Italy “to curb the risk of mass clandestine immigration.” “Now they are in the thousands, which can become millions. And then they will try come into Europe,” she was quoted as saying in news reports.
More than 9,000 Tunisians have arrived by boat to Lampedusa, around 113 kilometres from Tunisia and 205 kilometres south of Sicily. Italian interior minister Roberto Maroni — member of the anti-immigrant Northern League party — has warned of a wave of immigrants of “biblical proportions” and requested aid from the EU to help manage the situation.
Commenting on Le Pen’s pending visit, Maroni said: “Let’s hope she doesn’t cause any damage,” he said in an interview late Tuesday with La7 television. “The situation is very delicate in Lampedusa,” Maroni said in an interview with La7 television.
“I hope no-one goes there to throw fuel on the fire,” he said, adding that Italy will ensure her visit “is not used as propaganda for French domestic politics,”
Le Pen in January took the helm of the National Front party from her father Jean-Marie Le Pen. In a recent survey on candidates for national elections due in 2012 she polled higher than incumbent president Nicolas Sarkozy.
If elections were held today she would win 23 per cent of the vote, ahead of Sarkozy, who would get 21 per cent, according to the poll by Harris Interactive.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Night in Zarzis, 1,500 Euros for Lampedusa
(ANSAmed) — ZARZIS (TUNISIA), MARCH 7 — It is still night time in Zarzis, in Tunisia, when four fishing boats leave the coast heading for Lampedusa. Some 400 men are on board, all of them from Ben Guerdane and surrounding inland villages, and have a journey of at least 18 hours ahead of them.
For days, rough seas have meant that the men remained on the “waiting lists” of the local “rais”, the organisers of the trip who, after buying the battered boats off local fishermen, sell the “passage” to Europe at a cost of 3,000 dinars, around 1,500 euros. The trip costs less for those who are prepared to be packed more tightly into larger boats.
The crossing on board the battered boats is a gamble, and one that is lost immediately by the largest fishing boat, which turns back after only a few miles. So more than 200 people are grounded after a false start. Tomorrow, “Inchallah”, if the sea is calm, they will try again.
The boats are boarded in the dark, in pitch blank. The only concession comes from sporadic signals from car headlights, which show passengers the meeting point on the beach of Ogla.
The agitation is clear from the late night traffic of cars, which is very rare on roads that are usually deserted on the outskirts of the sea-facing town. Cars and vans cross at low speed. They stop, the drivers exchanging a few words, before heading down one of the smaller roads that leads to the sea.
There are also small fridge vans, which are also used to carry men and luggage. In scenes usually associated with airport terminals, other people take luggage out of boots, say their goodbyes on the street to those who have taken them this far, relatives perhaps, and walk towards the shore. There, small boats carry out shuttle runs, ferrying passengers from the water’s edge to the fishing boats anchored a little further out.
There are no soldiers to be seen, and no police cars either. Control networks are more sparse, not least due to efforts being made with refugees a hundred kilometres east of here in Ras Jadir, on the border with Libya.
The day is beginning to break. The beaches have now emptied. Outside the few cafe’s already open, the men working for the “rais” await bookings for the next journeys. In the meantime, they count the money received in the night.
It is certain that the boats, even on favourable nights without the moon such as last night, have never been earned their owners so much.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Italy Asks Tunis for More Checks
(ANSAmed) — ROME, MARCH 8 — Visiting day in Ras Jadir, in Tunisia, in the Choucha tent city, on the border with Libya.
While 12,000 Bengalis wait to hear their name — the roll call lasts for hours before being able to regain one’s passport — Margherita Boniver, special envoy of foreign minister Franco Frattini, asked the Tunisian government to increase checks because Lampedusa is “saturated”.
A few hours later UNHCR High Commissioner Antonio Guterres also arrived in the camp. He pointed out, meeting the press, that the increase in landings in Sicily and the Libyan crisis are not related. He explained that “These people want to return home, their destination is not Europe”. And so the landings in Lampedusa, where the refugee centre already has 1,600 guests, fall into the context of “migrations”. Guterres then drew attention to the Bengali community, “15,000 refugees who must be helped to return home”. The difference between refugee emergency and immigration was reported as ascertained by the Italian foreign ministry as well.
What however remains is the request for help to the Tunisian people. Boniver stated that “I want to reassert that, despite distinguishing the two emergencies, the one of the refugees escaping Libya and the one that concerns the increasing flow of illegal aliens to Lampedusa, I am also here to ask the Tunisian transitional government to implement greater control of the coasts”. A message that was also reasserted later over the phone to ANSA: “It is a matter that concerns the Italian government, since we are mostly dealing with young people who arrive in Lampedusa looking for work and therefore are, to all effects, illegal and clandestine immigrants”.
The worries are over the summer: “It is possible to think of new flows coming from a territory that is clearly not controlled that are a burden on structures set up to receive immigrants that are now totally saturated”.
The Italian government’s envoy was also asked a few questions on the inadequacy of the intervention and the delayed reactions, in Italy and Europe, to the refugee emergency. But Boniver defended Italy’s actions, calling them “calibrated, moderated and useful”, and pointed out the assistance offered in repatriations with three flights to Egypt, one to Mali, and flights leaving tomorrow for Bangladesh. What must instead be avoided are useless and above all unrequested interventions, because there is the risk of a “humanitarian neo-colonialism” that would benefit nobody, she said
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
UK & Australia: Treason by Immigration
Two passports are given to UK immigrants every minute. 1,500,000 were issued since Labour was elected in 1997.
The former UK Labor Party immigration minister, Phil Woolas, admitted Feb 25 that his own children have ‘suffered’ because the influx of migrants has taken a toll on local communities and services.
Woolas’ bizarre declaration came as new official figures revealed the number of foreigners given UK passports has soared.
A total of 203,865 people were handed British citizenship in 2009 — an increase of 58 per cent on the previous year.
Tens of thousands more immigrants were also given the right to settle in the UK, with the total up 30 per cent to more than 190,000. Quarterly immigration figures, published by the Office for National Statistics, also showed a 30 per cent increase in student visa numbers last year compared to 2008.
In the final three months of 2009, 61,715 student visas were issued — an astonishing rise of 92 per cent on the same period in 2008.
Whitehall documents revealed this week confirm Labour encouraged mass immigration despite voter opposition.
The Government said the public stance was down to ‘racism’ and ministers were told to try to alter the population’s attitude.
The approach was unveiled after a document from 2000 showed that ministers were advised that only the ill-educated and those who had never met a migrant were opposed to immigration.
They were also told that large-scale immigration would bring increases in crime, but they concealed these concerns from the public.
Sections of the paper, which underpinned Labour policies that admitted between two and three million immigrants to Britain in less than a decade, have already been made public.
These have showed that Labour aimed to use immigration not only for economic reasons but also to change the social make-up of the country.
Now we turn to Australia:
The European character of Australia can be eliminated by swamping the nation with Third World immigration.
Genocide by migration can succeed via several factors:
- High rates of immigration from the Third World, especially Asia.
- High birth rates of non-White immigrants
- Increasing the number of student visas issued, making it easier for foreign students to remain after graduation, guaranteeing that immigrants will be better paid and achieve higher social status than native-born White Australians.
- Lower birth rates of those from British/European backgrounds, via pressure from taxation and the transfer of benefits to non-White immigrants.
| [Return to headlines] |
America Must Discriminate
To survive as an independent nation, America must discriminate. America must exclude, and no longer tolerate its enemies. America must be prejudiced. History presents no example of any nation with a constitutional invitation to all foreigners, all religions, all values, or all social institutions. So-called Americans who advocate plurality, diversity, and the multicultural ‘melting pot’ approach to nationhood are not Americans, but the enemies of America.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Chuck Norris: U.S. Public Schools: Progressive Indoctrination Camps
Why should liberals want to change the public educational system when it is turning out the product they have been striving for years to produce?
[…]
On Dec. 27, 1820, Thomas Jefferson wrote about his vision for the University of Virginia (chartered in 1819), “This institution will be based on the illimitable freedom of the human mind. For here we are not afraid to follow the truth wherever it may lead, nor to tolerate any error as long as reason is left free to combat it.”
But what should happen 200 years later when our public schools and universities avoid the testing of truths? Or suppress alternate opinions because they are unpopular or politically incorrect? Or no longer tolerate opinions now considered errors or obsolete by the elite? What happens when sociopolitical agendas or scientific paradigms dominate academic views to the exclusion of a minority even being mentioned?
What happens when the political and public educational pendulum swings from concern for the tyranny of sectarianism in Jefferson’s day to secularism in ours? What happens when U.S. public schools become progressive indoctrination camps?
Dr. Jim Nelson Black, founder and senior policy analyst of the Sentinel Research Associates in Washington, D.C., wrote an excellent book, “Freefall of the American University.” In it, he documents the clear biases pervading our public academic settings. Among that lopsidedness is the intentional training of students to disdain America, freely experiment sexually, forcefully defend issues like abortion and homosexuality, as well as become cultural advocates for political correctness, relativism, globalization, green agendas and tolerance for all.
One of the primary ways these educative platforms are spread is by recruiting and retaining faculty members who reflect and teach them.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Disappointment After David Cameron Says Christian Foster Care Ruling Was Right
The Christian Institute has criticised Prime Minister David Cameron over his support for a High Court judgement upholding a local council’s right to refuse orthodox Christians as foster carers on the basis of their attitudes towards sexual ethics.
Owen and Eunice Johns had applied to be foster carers but their application was put on hold by Derby City Council after the couple said they would not be able to promote the homosexual lifestyle.
In response to a request by both parties for clarification on the law, the High Court ruled last week that the Council was within its rights to refuse Christian foster carers on the basis of their attitudes towards human sexuality.
Asked by the Derby Telegraph what he made of the ruling, the Prime Minister expressed his support.
“This matter was decided by a court in the appropriate way and I think we should rest with the judgement that was made,” he said.
“I think Christians should be tolerant and welcoming and broadminded.”
The Christian Institute raised concerns about the message his comments sends out about Christians.
Mike Judge, head of communications at the Christian Institute, said: “The Prime Minister has waded in on one side of a deeply controversial case, and suggested that Christians who share the Johns’ beliefs are automatically intolerant, unwelcoming and narrow-minded.
“One can disagree with homosexual behaviour without harbouring any hostility to homosexual individuals. Disagreement is not hatred.
“The remark will disappoint millions of orthodox Christians who hold the same views as the Johns.
“They will be surprised that the Prime Minister has taken a swipe at them for believing that sex is only for marriage.”
| — Hat tip: Kitman | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Is This What You Want YOUR Five-Year-Old Learning About Sex? Explicit Materials Cleared for Schools
Explicit cartoons, films and books have been cleared for use to teach sex education to schoolchildren as young as five.
A disturbing dossier exposes a wide range of graphic resources recommended for primary school lessons.
The shocking material — promoted by local councils and even the BBC — teaches youngsters about adult language and sexual intercourse.
Among the books singled out in the report is How Did I Begin? by Mick Manning and Brita Granstrom which has a cartoon image of a couple in bed in an intimate embrace.
It is accompanied by an explanation — using frank and adult terminology — of the act of intercourse.
Another, called The Primary School Sex And Relationships Education Pack by HIT UK, includes material to allow children aged five to 11 to learn about different sexual positions and prostitution.
[…]
Furious family campaigners have described the material as ‘too much, too young’ and warn it will encourage sexualisation.
Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute, said: ‘The current approach to sex education demands ever more explicit sex education at ever younger ages.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Big Power Plays Emerging
By Victor Kotsev
TEL AVIV — The geostrategic status quo in Asia is morphing quickly, and the Arab rebellions have suddenly acquired a prominent role in it. Some analysts doubted from the start that the pro-democratic uprisings were ever detached from the great power play, and accused the United States of instigating them. Whether or not this is true, large-caliber realpolitik has now firmly set in.
The United States is still the only global superpower, but it is also a superpower in decline; its economy is in deep trouble, its debt is soaring, and its military might is sapped by two quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is challenged by an informal coalition of emerging powers known as BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa), which have frequently sought to portray themselves as champions of the Third World. It is not a very cohesive bloc, and most of what unites the countries that are part of it often appears to be their common current status as underdogs with respect to the West.
The American world order is also challenged by a number of “rogue states”, such as North Korea and Iran. These — specifically Iran, which is also of major interest with respect to the Arab uprisings — aspire to be regional superpowers, but they lack the kind of economic power that BRIC countries have, and they act independently, along a separate front against the United States.
All these international actors have metaphorically descended on the Arab uprisings, seeking to make the best out of a moment of instability that could result in major shifts in the status quo between them.
Firstly, we cannot simply ignore the hypothesis, circulated for over a month now by Russian and Chinese analysts, that the United States is behind the revolutions. “It’s the Americans who’re pulling the strings,” Anatoly Yegorin, the deputy director of the Institute for Oriental Studies at the Russian Academy of Science, plainly stated in an interview on February 4.
So far, there is only circumstantial evidence of American involvement in preparing the Arab uprisings. But circumstantial evidence there is. “In short, the attempt by Washington to portray that its Libya plans are molded by events does not add up,” writes M K Bhadrakumar in his story “Libya puts China in world stage spotlight (Asia Times Online, March 7). “Clearly, the US is defining a historical moment: if the Western world’s vital economic interests come under threat, it is only the US that can salvage them, even when the theater is Europe’s immediate neighborhood.”
In Egypt, there is even more specific circumstantial evidence. In January, for example, the Daily Telegraph published a leaked diplomatic cable, written in 2008 by the US Embassy in Cairo, according to which the embassy had helped an Egyptian dissident travel undetected to the United States for important meetings with officials and activists. The dissident told the US diplomats that “several opposition parties and movements have accepted an unwritten plan for democratic transition by 2011”.
The cable does reveal that the embassy did not take the dissident’s claim seriously; the American administration’s confused and contradictory early attempts to handle the crisis suggest that the government didn’t, either (see US caught napping, Asia Times Online February 7).
Still, the ideological DNA of the revolts, certainly of that in Egypt, is beyond doubt largely American. It came out of the theories of strategic non-violent activism for social change systematized by Gene Sharp and a group of political activists and theorists around him (who in turn see themselves as intellectual descendents of Dr Martin Luther King Jr and Mahatma Gandhi).
As Pulitzer-prize winning journalist Tina Rosenberg points out, the leadership of the Egyptian protest movement was trained in 2009 in Serbia by the same people who ousted former Yugoslav president Slobodan Milosevic in 2000. [1] In turn, the Milosevic opposition drew heavily on Western support and the ideas of Sharp and his cohort. “Popovic [one of the core organizers of the Serbian opposition ] was first introduced to Sharp’s ideas in the spring of 2000 by Robert Helvey, a former US Army colonel who had served as defense attache at the US Embassy in Burma [Myanmar],” writes Ms Rosenberg.
What is even more intriguing is that this is a strategy intimately familiar to President Barack Obama, who frequently quotes Mahatma Gandhi and Dr Martin Luther King Jr in his speeches. As a former community organizer, his strength is closely related to one of the most difficult aspects of managing non-violent movements for social change: building a broad base of support, as well as internal consensus, unity and discipline.
While none of this proves that the Obama administration started the rebellions — much less that it controls them — the US is certainly trying to make the best out of them. As Bhadrakumar observes, by now it seems to have some contingency plans ready, which it is trying to apply. And it might just reap some unusual benefits.
In his article To fly or not to fly?” (Asia Times Online March 4), Ian Williams writes that, when the Russians blocked American proposals for military action against Libya at the United Nations Security Council, they were “saving the US from itself”. He adds: “However, rather than the US, a threat of Turkish, or Egyptian intervention or interdiction of the Libyan military might overcome many of the legitimate actions, and indeed would encourage the rebels while stripping Gaddafi of the last of his crew so he could go down without taking the ship with him. “
Indeed, prestigious American think-tank Stratfor has already reported the presence of Egyptian special forces on Libyan territory. Meanwhile, a new framing of the situation in Egypt has started to emerge: that after Hosni Mubarak, Egypt will assume a leadership role among Arab nations. “Unlike Persian Gulf Arab states, whose power is derived from petrodollars, Egypt has real military might and regional intelligence networks with which to assert itself,” writes Stratfor.
This means that in the near future, the US may conceivably get a new source of manpower in the Middle East. For Egypt’s military rulers, this would also be a way to divert public attention from domestic problems and to demonstrate competent rule in one area where they are indeed expert: military intervention. In a sense, the uprising created the ideal conditions for expanding Egypt’s military role in the region. It weakened the political structure of the country while empowering the military.
Meanwhile, Egypt’s resurgence would threaten Turkey’s role as the leading democracy in the Muslim Middle East. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s government has already embarked on what many have seen as an expansionist foreign policy course, and it is quite conceivable that he might be drawn into competition with Egypt. Turkey and Egypt together could perhaps fill much of the power vacuum left by a scaling down of American presence in the region.
The United States, an argument goes, badly needs some time off. The economic crisis is simply refusing to go away. This has created increasing domestic pressure to cut down international involvement, and has brought about a sense of gloom in many parts of the country.
A prominent American journalist writes in a personal e-mail: “It makes a climate where we don’t have the mobility and job opportunities we take for granted. In fact, if you work for the government, there is a good chance you’ll lose your job … Meanwhile, we know we’re losing ground internationally. In Europe, people don’t care. They’ve already lost their status as the center of the universe. But for us it’s a national tragedy. And to lose our number one status to China, where civil liberties aren’t respected, is just a kick in the teeth. A humiliation.”
China — alongside other emerging powers from BRIC — is another reason the United States badly needs to scale back its involvement in the Middle East. In the past three years, all the BRIC countries have increased dramatically their military spending, sparking fears of a new arms race. Some statistics:
“Last week Moscow unveiled a $650 billion rearmament plan through 2020, which includes adding 20 submarines including eight nuclear submarines and more than 600 warplanes, 100 new ships and 1,000 additional helicopters,” writes M K Bhadrakumar in his article “Kurils: The great game in Asia-Pacific” (Asia Times Online, 4 March 2011). “The new strategy specifically aims at regaining naval capabilities of the Soviet era and creating next-generation anti-missile defenses to replace the S-300 system.”
Meanwhile, according to Defense News, “China has announced a 12.7% increase in its annual defense budget to a new high of $91.5 billion, up from $78.6 billion in 2010 … China’s defense budget rose from $27.9 billion in 2000 to $60.1 billion in 2008.” The Indian newspaper Business Standard reports that India has seen a similar increase in defense spending.
None of these military budgets match that of the United States, which for the fiscal year 2010 alone was over US$660 billion, but the trend is alarming. The United States is overstretched: during the past 10 years, it spent over $1,100 billion in Afghanistan and Iraq alone, and locked hundreds of thousands of troops in these two conflicts.
According to an analyst who prefers to stay anonymous, over the course of the next decade, the American economy might not be able to keep up, and an arms race might eventually break it in a similar way to how the arms race of the Cold War eventually brought down the Soviet Union.
The intense competition between BRIC and its allies, on the one hand, and the United States and the European powers, on the other, became particularly apparent in the diplomatic arena over Libya. Muammar Gaddafi, in fact, tried to play the two sides off of each other, for example by offering China attractive oil contracts in exchange for support.
Whether or not this specific offer was taken seriously by anybody, Russia and China have so far adamantly refused to authorize military intervention at the United Nation Security Council, even as the Obama administration has started to prepare contingency plans for such a scenario. A little over a week ago, Venezuela’s President Hugo Chavez tried to put a spoke in the mounting international pressure on Gaddafi by proposing his own peace initiative. [2]
Meanwhile, a related but separate confrontation is emerging in the Persian Gulf. According to Stratfor:
While the world’s attention is still on Libya because of the fighting over there, the slow-simmering situation in the Persian Gulf is far more important … There is the obvious repercussion for the world’s energy supply — some 40% of total global energy output via sea comes through the Persian Gulf — but it’s not just about oil. Each one of those states, from Oman all the way up to Kuwait, houses major American military installations. They are very vital for US military operations in this part of the world, particularly at a time when the United States is in the process of withdrawing its forces from Iraq…. In addition to just the general nature of American military operations in the region, unrest in the Persian Gulf complicates the US-Iranian dynamic. The United States is already withdrawing from Iraq, which allows Iran to flex its muscles, and if, in addition, we see unrest destabilizing the Persian Gulf states, that gives Iran further room to maneuver and project power, not just on its side of Persian Gulf but also across into the Arabian Peninsula.
Indeed, the claims by the king of Bahrain that the opposition was trained by Hezbollah may seem far-fetched, but many analysts see Iran’s hand behind the recent unrest in the Persian Gulf. The real threat of Iran, Stratfor has previously argued, is not so much its nuclear program as its ability to project influence in the region. This threat seems to be materializing for the United States and its allies…
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
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