Balkans: Bankers Cite Risk of Regional Recession
(ANSAmed) — BELGRADE, SEPTEMBER 12 — Within the global crisis, there is the risk of a recession for the entire Balkan region, announced the governors of the central banks of Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Macedonia and Albania in meeting today in Becici (Montenegro).
It was noted that in 2011 all the countries in the region will see positive growth rates, though the levels will be below forecasted ones, adn world problems have resulted in a slow down in foreign investment in the entire Balkan region. Prevention, improvement in the system for resisting extreme situations and crisis management are the three main pillars of defence against financial instability, said the Balkan governors, who meet twice a year: first before the spring summits and in autumn before the IMF and World Bank meetings.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: New School Year Starts Without Books
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, SEPTEMBER 12 -Today marks the start of the new school year for some 1.3 million children and 180,000 teachers in the Greek school system, as well as the launch of the education ministry’s ‘New School’ initiatives. For most parents, children and teachers, however — as ANA reports -, the new start will be overshadowed by the lack of the set school textbooks, which for the first time in many years will not be ready to be distributed to students beginning the new year.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Suicide Rate Rising, Experts Warn
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, SEPTEMBER 12 — Suicides rates have been rising in Greece since the start of the economic crisis, according to statements made by the head of “Climax Plus”, a suicide helpline operating under the auspices of the health and social solidarity ministry, on Saturday to Athens News Agency (ANA). September 10 has been established as ‘World Suicide Prevention Day’ by the WHO. Psychiatrist Kyriakos Katsadoros said that calls to the 24-hour 1018 helpline ‘Intervention for Suicide’ have more than doubled in 2011 compared to the previous year, with one in four callers reporting serious financial difficulties. He said this confirmed that the economic crisis was creating a vicious circle of problems and was one of the factors that had a negative impact on the mental health of individuals. Katsadoros said the helpline had received roughly 2,500 alls throughout 2010 while calls in the first eight months of 2011 had already exceeded 5,000. “The alarming factor is not just the huge increase in the number of calls but also the fact that the reasons why people seek help have changed. In 2008 and 2009, most callers suffered from pscyhological problems. Those who now call us have financial difficulties and are at a dead end,” he said. According to an announcement by the WHO, the economic crisis and the insecurity this causes could lead to an increase in suicides, which are more frequent among the unemployed than those in work. A person without work is two to three times more likely to kill themselves than someone in work, while an increase in unemployment by 3% is linked to a 4.5% increase in suicides in the general population. Greece traditionally ranks low in European rankings for suicide rates, with the Hellenic Statistical Authority recording 4,042 deaths due to suicide from 1999-2009. Of these, 3,288 were men and 754 were women. In recent years, however, the rate of suicide in the country has been tending to increase. For example, there were 391 suicides (333 men and 58 women) in 2009, up from 328 suicides (268 men and 60 women) in 2007. There are no statistics for non-fatal suicide attempts, which are estimated to be 10 to 20 times as many.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: ‘Unchanged’ Austerity Package to be Passed Wednesday Says PM
No more tinkering, Berlusconi vows
(ANSA) — Rome, September 12 — Italy’s 54-billion-euro austerity package to balance the budget by 2013 will be passed “unchanged” by the House on Wednesday, Premier Silvio Berlusconi said on Monday.
The package of spending cuts and tax hikes was altered several times in the Senate, raising jitters on the financial markets, before meeting approval there last week.
Italy was forced to bring its balanced-budget goal forward by one year in August in exchange for bond-buying by the European Central Bank to keep Rome’s debt crisis from spiralling out of control.
“The budget bill will be passed unchanged on Wednesday,” Berlusconi said on one of his television channels.
Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti said Sunday the package will be flanked by moves to rev up Italy’s near-stagnant economy, funding public works and other job-creating schemes with the revenue from the sale of fourth-generation mobile-phone licenses.
Italian President Giorgio Napolitano, who has been closely following the package’s passage, said last week Italy’s low-growth problem was “dramatic”.
Critics of the austerity package claim that, in itself, it does little to lift the economy.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Russia Says Euro-Crisis Could ‘Detonate’ In Neighbouring Countries
Russian finance minister Kudrin in St. Petersburg on Saturday urged the EU to help its default-prone members. “Perhaps the price is great, but if we don’t (save them) we will be faced with a greater crisis, which will detonate in other countries, including ours,” he said, according to Reuters.
| — Hat tip: Rembrandt | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Brussels Demands Region Deficit and Debt Control
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, SEPTEMBER 12 — The European Commission has asked Spain to monitor the deficit and debt of its regions and to take further steps to add to those already approved, if existing measures fail to reach pre-arranged targets. According to the Commission’s annual report on the sustainability of public finances in EU countries, which was quoted by the EFE agency, Brussels is “favourable” to the general direction taken by the Spain’s proposed package of cuts, but has made other suggestions, one of which is for the country “strictly to apply existing deficit and debt control mechanisms for regional governments”. Brussels also wants Spain “to adopt extra measures in case budget and economic development falls short of expectations”. The Commission is “favourable” to the Spanish stability programme for 2011 and 2012, in line with the targets of reducing deficit to below 3% of GDP in 2013 and to 2.1% in 2014.
In the structural budget, an average cut of 1.5% of GDP is predicted between 2010 and 2013 according to European recommendations and an extra 0.3% in 2014. Debt, meanwhile, is expected to go from 60.1% of GDP in 2010 to 69.3%, with a slight decrease in 2014. The report underlines the risk of the stability target not being reached on a regional scale. “Regions represent a large part of total public spending, and 9 out of the 17 autonomous communities exceeded their deficit targets for 2010,” the Commission says. It also points out that Spain, which has already strengthened its deficit control mechanisms, has committed itself to adopting further austerity measures if necessary. Brussels has called for the budged strategy identified for 2011 and 2012 to be implemented, and for deficit to be corrected in line with recommendations of the Council regarding excessive deficit. The necessary measures include maintaining public spending under the medium-term growth rate of GDP, through the introduction of an obligatory regulation on spending at all levels of public administration. Implementation of pension reform to put back the pensionable age has also been demanded, as has a review of the parameters for pension plans in line with life expectancy.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
9/11: The Day the World Changed
Out of a clear blue sky two planes crashed into the Twin Towers. On the tenth anniversary of those horrific events Sarah Joseph, Jeremy Henzell-Thomas, and Imam Zaid Shakir look back on a decade of violence, and reflect on ways to construct a different future.
September 11th, 2001 is a date etched into the hearts and minds of the global population. Almost 3,000 people died on that day — public deaths watched by millions, seared into the collective consciousness. It is no cliché to say the world changed that day, yet few would suggest it has changed for the better, or the responses to it have made us safer. Two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan costing $1.25trillion, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives; deadly drone attacks; the rapes and tortures at Abu Ghraib and Bagram; the legal black hole that is Guantanamo Bay; the degradation of domestic liberties; post-traumatic stress disorder of survivors, and much more are all directly linked to that day. The Madrid bombings; the London bombings; Prevent strategy in the UK; Homeland Security in the US; indefinite detention without trial; demonisation of Islamic terms and values, and the rapid rise of the Far-Right are all linked by association.
[…]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
America’s Religious Double Standard
In a recent Brookings Institute poll on the attitude of Americans towards freedom of faith and religious tolerance, nearly 90 percent of Americans agreed that America was built upon religious freedom and tolerance; 95 percent accept that books of faith must be given respect even by those who do not believe in them. However, when it comes to the attitude towards Muslim-Americans, an entirely different picture emerges. Despite supporting the freedom to exercise one’s faith, 48 percent of Americans say they are uncomfortable with Muslim women choosing to dress differently. As for the right to peacefully assemble, 46 percent of Americans are unwilling to have a mosque built near their homes. Moreover, 41 percent of Americans say that they are uncomfortable with Muslim elementary school teachers — a sign of deep suspicion in American society.
It is clear from the Quran that “there should be no compulsion in matters of faith,” and the Prophet Muhammad states, “faith is a restraint against all violence.” While the teachings of Islam conform to the ideals of freedom, of faith and of religious tolerance, attacks like Sept. 11 make most Americans think that a “conflict” exists between Islam and the American way of life. One can see why the American public has developed an attitude towards Islam that could be perceived as a double standard. As a practicing Muslim-American youth, it is clear to me from personal experiences that Islamophobia in America stems from a misunderstanding of Islam. But according to the survey, 6 in 10 young Americans are comfortable with expressions of Muslim religious practice. Such an attitude towards Islam among the youth is an encouraging sign of what is to come. In the future, I am confident that Americans — with the youth leading the way — can overcome Islamophobia and work together with the Muslim-American community in establishing a peaceful society.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Sen. Lieberman and Former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld on Failures to Recognize Islamic Terrorism After 9/11
[see URL for links and video]
This tenth anniversary of 9/11witnessed the further deracination of the term “Islamic” from the official lexicon of counterterrorism. Much of the mainstream media coverage and official commemorations steered clear of using the correct term “Islamic terrorism “. The blogosphere persists in using this appropriate term for identifying the 19 well educated, middle class Salafist Muslim young men from Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Yemen who perpetrated the 9/11 attacks on America that took 2,977 innocent lives. They were simply deemed ‘terrorists’ according to the media and commemoration presenters including former President Bush and President Obama. The coverage focused appropriately on the grief of the families who lost loved ones on 9/11, but nary a whisper about who were the perpetrators. All done for fear of being offensive to Muslims. This was misleading and foster denial evident in the comments made by David Beamer, father of Flight 93 victim, Todd Beamer in our NER interview.
Stephen Coughlin, castigated by Heshem Islam, former Muslim outreach aide to Bush Defense Undersecretary Gordon England as “a Christian zealot with a pen” was forced out as a consultant to the Joint Staff for his promulgation of the Threat Doctrine of Jihad. Coughlin drew attention to this deracination of the official government counterterrorism lexicon following the revelations of the 9/11 Commission Report. in the immediate aftermath of Maj. Nidal Hasan massacre at Fort Hood in November 2009 Coughlin noted this In an Iconoclast post,
In a brutal second briefing by Coughlin -see extracts here- the brief culminates in a devastating chart illustrating the depths of myopia our intelligence and counter terrorism agencies have sunk to in denying the threat and realities of Jihad.
Note how cleansed of Islamic Jihad the lexicons used by the FBI and the Intelligence community have become compared to the 9/11 Commission Report in 2004.
In another Iconoclast post, following a Florida security Council security briefing in West Palm Beach in January, 2010, a panel composed of Coughlin, counterterrorism investigative journalist Patrick Poole and former FBI agent John Guandolo drew attention to the ‘missing I word” from the initial Fort Hood massacre report issued by the Pentagon. We noted these comments from a Washington Timesreport by columnist Bill Gertz:
Patrick S. Poole, a counterterrorism consultant to government and law enforcement, said the Pentagon report did not address the problem of political correctness in the military “that allowed for Maj. Hasan’s continued rise despite his poor performance.” Mr. Poole said an “atmosphere of intimidation” exists in the military regarding Islamist threats that “prevented any substantive complaints to [Maj. Hasan’s] increasingly extremist statements.”
“Everyone along the way was content to give him a pass,” Mr. Poole said.
Former Army Secretary Togo D. West Jr., who co-led a Pentagon review of the shooting, dismissed concerns that Maj. Hasan’s religion was a factor in performance reviews during his career as an Army medical counselor.
When asked whether the immediate problem at Fort Hood, Texas, was Islamist radicalization, Mr. West declined to single out Islamists. “Our concern is not with the religion,” he told reporters at the Pentagon. “It is with the potential effect on our soldiers’ ability to do their job.”
Mr. West said “radicalization of any sort” is the issue and that “our concern is with actions and effects, not necessarily with motivations.”
Adm. Vernon E. Clark, a former chief of naval operations and the investigation’s other co-leader, declined to answer when asked whether political correctness led to the Army security failures. He suggested that the matter is addressed in a secret annex to the report that he and Mr. West helped produce.
The only two persons of note to draw attention to this airbrushing treatment of Islamic terrorism during the tenth anniversary of 9/11 were Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-CT), Chairman of the US Senate Homeland Security and Government Affairs Committee and former Bush Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, who was at the Pentagon when Islamic terrorists flew American Airlines Flight 77 into the building killing 54 passengers and 125 military and civilian personnel.
Lieberman commented on this phenomenon in a recent speech at the National Press Club in an article in The Hill, “Lieberman: Obama’s concern with offending Muslims is hurting the war effort”:
The Obama administration’s fear of offending Muslims will hurt the U.S. war against terrorism, Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) said Thursday in a speech blasting the president’s new counterterrorism strategy.
[. . .]
“The administration still refuses to call our enemy in this war by its proper name: violent Islamist extremism,” Lieberman said, speaking at a National Press Club event hosted by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START).
“To call our enemy ‘violent extremism’ is so general and vague that it ultimately has no meaning. The other term used sometimes is Al Qaeda and its allies. Now that’s better but it is still too narrow and focuses us on groups as opposed to what I would call an ideology, which is what we’re really fighting.”
[. . .]
“I assume the refusal of the administration to speak honestly about the enemy is based on its desire not to do anything that might feed into al Qaeda’s propaganda that we’re engaged in a cold war against Islam,” he said. “But that is so self-evidently a lie that we can and have refuted it and I think we’ve done so effectively.”
On Sunday’s Fareed Zakaria’s CNN program, Global Public Square, Rumsfeld excoriated both the Bush and Obama Administrations for not recognizing the 800 pound Gorilla of Islamic terrorists who perpetrated 9/11 and what followed in the asymmetrical wars we have fought in the Middle East and South Asia. As Rumsfeld emphasized this obsequious PCness has “gotten worse under President Obama.” All Zakaria could respond with was…”But Obama killed Bin Laden”. To which Rumsfeld responded, “of course”.
[Links and video at URL]
| [Return to headlines] |
September 11, 2001: In Memoriam
by Pechorin
Ten years ago our nation was attacked by Islamic terrorists. No words can alter the facts of that day. No ceremony can undo it. Only through our actions looking to the future can we change the significance of that day. As Lincoln said at Gettysburg, it is for us the living to be dedicated to the great task remaining before us.
In the circles of our elite it is social suicide to speak of Islam as a civilizational threat. It is true that rhetoric of clashes of civilizations can be overblown. It is true that Islam is not a strictly monolithic block. But it is wrong that these facts should forestall serious discussion of the leading political-civilizational struggle of our day.
Political correctness stifles discussion across society. Consider this graph from Google ngrams, measuring the frequency year by year of the usage of “Islamic threat” in a large collection of digitized books. Use of the phrase increases with the rise of Islamism, with the threats to Salman Rushdie, even with the first attack on the World Trade Center. Then, in the late 1990′s, a more organized and serious threat emerged, and attacked in turn the American embassies in Dar es Salaam and Nairobi, the USS Cole, and finally, ten years ago today, the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.
During these very same years, usage of the phrase “Islamic thread” stopped its rapid increase, and began to fall dramatically.
[See link for graph]
Not reacting blindly to threats is a virtue, one we could have used to avoid our misadventure in Iraq. Not reacting to threats is folly. Reacting to threats by stopping talking about them beggars description.
| — Hat tip: heroyalwhyness | [Return to headlines] |
56% of Canadians Think Divide Between West and Muslim World is ‘Irreconcilable’, Poll Finds
A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S. The survey of 1,500 Canadians, conducted over three days last week for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, showed 56% of respondents see Western and Muslim societies locked in an unending ideological struggle, while about 33% — just one-third of the population — held out hope that the conflict will eventually be overcome.
ACS executive director Jack Jedwab said the finding has “serious ramifications” for Canadian policies aimed at bridging divides between cultures, which are based on the premise that citizens believe significant progress in mending such religious and cultural conflicts is achievable. The dark view expressed in the survey “contradicts a fundamental idea in multicultural democracies like ours, that conflicts between societies can be resolved through dialogue and negotiation,” said Jedwab. “This is also a key element in multiculturalism, where Canada is often seen elsewhere in the world as a model in conflict resolution.” He adds: “If a majority of Canadians feel it is irreconcilable, what does this imply for the various projects and programs in place that aim to bridge gaps?”
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Divide Between West, Muslim Societies ‘Irreconcilable’: Poll
A majority of Canadians believes conflict between Western nations and the Muslim world is “irreconcilable,” according to a new national survey that revealed a strong strain of pessimism in the country leading up to Sunday’s 10th anniversary commemorations of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.
The survey of 1,500 Canadians, conducted over three days last week for the Montreal-based Association for Canadian Studies, showed 56 per cent of respondents see Western and Muslim societies locked in an unending ideological struggle, while about 33 per cent — just one-third of the population — held out hope that the conflict will eventually be overcome.
Another 11 per cent of those polled didn’t answer the question.
ACS executive director Jack Jedwab said the finding has “serious ramifications” for Canadian policies aimed at bridging divides between cultures, which are based on the premise that citizens believe significant progress in mending such religious and cultural conflicts is achievable.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Chirac Allegedly Given ‘Bags of Cash’ By African Leaders
African leaders gave former French President Chirac and his premier Villepin briefcases full of cash during election campaigns, Robert Burgi, a former aide, told Journal de Dimanche. Bourgi said he “took part in handing over several briefcases to Chirac in person.” Chirac is on trial for corruption. He denies charges.
| — Hat tip: Rembrandt | [Return to headlines] |
Explosion at Nuclear Plant in Southern France
PARIS (AP) — An explosion rocked the Marcoule nuclear plant in southern France on Monday, the country’s nuclear safety body and local authorities said.
It was not immediately clear how serious the accident was or whether there were any victims. The Marcoule site is located in Langedoc Roussillon, in southern France, near the Mediterranean Sea.
Evangelia Petit of the Agency for Nuclear Safety said Monday an explosion had taken place but declined to provide any further details. Officials in the Gard region confirmed Monday’s explosion but also would not elaborate.
The local Midi Libre newspaper, on its web site, said an oven exploded at the plant, killing one person and seriously injuring another. No radiation leak was reported, the report said, adding that no quarantine or evacuation orders were issued for neighboring towns.
Three other people have been hospitalized with lighter injuries in the explosion, the paper said.
The accident occurred at 11:45 a.m. (0945 GMT, 5:45 a.m. EDT) in a plant that treats nuclear waste operated by a subsidiary of France’s EDF electricity company, the report said.
In Vienna, an official at the IAEA, who asked for anonymity because he was not authorized to speak on record, said the agency was in contact with French authorities “trying to learn more about the nature of the explosion.”
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Greece to Build First Official Mega-Mosque in Athens
by Soeren Kern
The Greek Parliament has approved a controversial plan to build a taxpayer-funded mega-mosque in Athens.
The move comes amid thinly veiled threats of violence by thousands of Muslim residents of the city who have been pressuring the government to meet their demands for a mosque or face an uprising.
The September 7 vote to speed up construction of the first official mosque in Athens —- the only capital in the European Union without a state-funded mosque —- was supported by 198 out of 300 deputies from the left, right and center.
The mosque plan was included in an environment ministry bill regulating illegal construction. The plan calls for renovating an existing state building —- on a disused navy base- — in the industrial district of Votanikos near the center of Athens.
The plan commits the Greek government (by way of the Ministry of Education and Religious Affairs) to pay for the construction of a temporary mosque which will be built within the next six months. A larger 1,000 square meter (3,300 square feet) mosque with enough space for 500 worshippers at a time will be built in the same area by the end of 2012, at an estimated cost of around €16 million ($21 million).
The announcement comes as massively indebted Greece battles a growing recession that has left nearly one million Greeks out of work. Greece recently needed a €110 billion ($146 billion) three-year bail-out package to rescue the embattled economy from bankruptcy.
Officially, Greece has a Muslim population of around 500,000, mostly of Turkish origin. But in recent years, tens of thousands of Muslims have migrated to Greece from Africa, the Maghreb [North Africa], the Middle East and Central and Southeast Asia.
Many of the estimated 200,000 Muslims living in Athens are illegal immigrants from Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Egypt, Nigeria and Pakistan. It is now estimated that Greece — — which is the number one gateway for illegal immigration to Europe —- has an illegal immigrant population of around 2 million; this in a country where the total population is only 11 million.
Muslims in Greece pray in makeshift mosques in basement apartments, coffee shops, garages and old warehouses. In Athens alone, there are more than 100 unlicensed Muslim prayer sites in locations scattered across the city.
The Greek parliament’s decision to approve the mosque is the latest chapter in a long-running story that dates back to the 1930s and centers over the question of whether Greece —- which is predominantly (97%) Christian Orthodox —- should officially cater to followers of Islam.
Athens has not had an official mosque since 1833, when the Ottomans evacuated the city after nearly 400 years of Turkish rule. Today the Turkish-dominated Muslim enclave of Thrace in north-eastern Greece is the only place where the Greek government officially supports Islamic sites and shrines.
In the run-up to the 2004 Athens Olympic Games, the late King Fahd of Saudi Arabia offered to finance a mega-mosque in Paiania, a suburb about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of downtown Athens, near the international airport. But that plan was abandoned in the face of opposition from the Greek Orthodox Church.
In 2006, the government promised to spend €15 million ($20 million) for an Athens mosque by 2009. But that plan was also abandoned.
In 2007, Muslims took matters into their own hands. Using a donation of €2.5 million ($3.4 million) from a Saudi businessman, a small non-profit organization called the Greek-Arab Educational and Cultural Center transformed an old textile factory in Moschato, a southern suburb of Athens, into a 6,000 square meter (19,500 square foot) prayer site that can accommodate more than 2,000 worshippers at a time.
Nevertheless, plans for building a large state-sponsored mosque have been stalled as a result of bureaucratic wrangling as well as opposition from local politicians, especially those belonging to the center-right opposition party New Democracy and the populist LAOS (Popular Orthodox Rally).
In recent months, however, Greek Prime Minister George Papandreou and his allies in parliament decided to push ahead with the mosque project after the Muslim Union of Greece —- a group that claims to represent all Muslims in Greece (and is also linked to the Muslim Brotherhood) —- staged a series of provocative mass public prayer sessions across Athens aimed to pressure the government into building a mosque.
In November 2010, for example, Muslims held open-air prayers in 15 locations across Athens. In one instance, over 1,000 Muslims took over the square in front of the main building of the University of Athens and held public prayers inside the portico on the first day of the Muslim festival of Eid al-Adha. More than 7,000 police officers were needed to keep the peace.
In August 2011, the Greek government gave Muslims permission to celebrate the Islamic holy month of Ramadan at the Olympic Stadium of Athens. The initiative was aimed at averting the chances of large crowds of Muslims gathering in downtown city squares.
In September 2011, however, Muslims celebrated Eid al-Fitr, the end of Ramadan, by holding open-air prayers in public squares near the city center. The Muslims were harassed by local residents who threw eggs and yogurt at them. Members of Chrysi Avgi (Golden Dawn) a far-right nationalist group also threatened to physically remove the Muslims from the square; they were held back by riot police.
Analysts say the Papandreou government is pushing the mosque project out of fear that the Muslim rallies will become violent sooner rather than later.
Like many other European cities, Athens has experienced Muslim-related violence in recent years. In May 2009, for example, more than 1,000 Muslims clashed with police in downtown Athens after Muslims accused a police officer stepping on a Koran at a coffee shop during a police check.
Nearly 50 protesters were arrested during the uprising, while seven Muslim immigrants and seven policemen were hospitalized. More than 70 cars were torched and around a dozen businesses were destroyed in the clashes. A day earlier, an even larger crowd of around 1,500 Muslim immigrants rallied before the march degenerated into violence. Police used tear gas to disperse the crowds.
Since then, at least 15 makeshift mosques have been attacked by unknown arsonists. At one event, at least three people in Athens were hospitalized after arsonists set fire to a coffee shop used as a Muslim prayer center for immigrants. In May 2011, arsonists set fire to a makeshift mosque in the Kallithea district of Athens causing damage but no injuries.
Muslims say the violence proves they need an official mosque. But recent polls show that more than half of Greeks are opposed to the mosque plan and say their government should not be financing religious institutions.
| — Hat tip: Steen | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Prosecutor Charges Manslaughter in Erotic Game Death
(AGI) Rome — A young woman died during an erotic game and a man who took part in the incident has been arrested for manslaughter. The man was charged with the assault of a second, injured woman. The Rome Public Prosecutor’s Office has requested that the engineer arrested in the death of the 23 year old woman be remanded to jail. Monday, Preliminary Investigating Magistrate Marco Mancinetti will rule on the request based on the results of the questioning of the suspect in court to confirm the arrest.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Terror Suspects ‘Linked to Somalia’s Al-Shabab’
Gothenburg, 12 Sept. (AKI) — The four suspected terrorists arrested in Sweden over the weekend are linked to armed Somali Islamist group Al-Shabab, according to news reports on Monday.
Kulan Mohamud Abel, Mahamud Abdi Aziz, Mahmood Salar Sami, and Mohamud Abdi Weli were arrested on Saturday in Gothenburg on suspician of plotting a terrorist attack, Sweden’s Security Service said. Gothenburg is Sweden’s second-largest city.
Three of the suspects are of Somali origin and the fourth is Iraqi, CNN reported.
“Police suspect the men were about to carry out a terrorist attack with firearms and bombs,” Gothenburg regional daily GT reported on its website, without naming who gave it the information, “Police sources have told GT the suspects are linked to the terror network Al-Shabab.”
Al-Shabab has an alliance with Al-Qaeda and has not shied away from using terrorist tactics in its fight to control Somalia. In 2010 the group claimed responsibility for a suicide attack in Ugandan capital Kampala that killed around 75 people who gathered to watch the televised broadcast of the World Cup soccer finals.
Uganda leads a military coalition of African countries deployed in Somalia to keep the troubled country out of the hands of radical Islamic militants.
Authorities have not released specifics of the alleged plot but police on Saturday evacuated hundreds of people attending an art fair in Gothenburg.
GT said a controversial artist who has depicted Prophet Mohammed as a dog had planned to attend the fair.
Lars Vilks has received numerous death threats.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Travellers Face Slavery Charges as UK Police Raid Site at Dawn
FIVE IRISH Travellers, four men and a woman, were arrested in England yesterday by heavily-armed officers in a dawn raid, suspected of enslaving dozens of immigrants and homeless UK citizens for up to 15 years.
Twenty-four alleged victims, mostly eastern European, but including a number of British, were found held in appalling conditions in rundown caravans and a garden shed on the Travellers’ caravan site in Little Billington in Bedfordshire.
Last night, Bedfordshire and Hertfordshire Constabulary indicated charges against the five under the Slavery and Servitude Act will follow over the next two days, while they continue to search for three others suspected of involvement.
The alleged victims held at the Green Acres caravan park were allegedly brought there after being offered work laying tarmac or doing house maintenance, but were allegedly held captive, forced to seek work and hand over their earnings.
Some of the alleged victims had been recruited at welfare benefit offices, employment exchanges, charity soup kitchens, or at aid organisations helping those suffering from alcoholism or with drug addictions.
“They’re recruited and told if you come here we’ll pay you £80 a day, we’ll look after you, give you board and lodgings. But when they get here, their hair is cut off them, they’re kept, in some cases, in horseboxes, dog kennels and old caravans, made to work for no money, given very, very small amounts of food.
“Some are treated a little bit better, but they were told they could not leave and if they did they would be beaten up and attacked,” said Det Chief Insp Seán O’Neil of the constabulary’s major crimes unit.
Detectives have been investigating the slavery allegations for up to four years, he said, though the constabulary says it struggled to act until new anti-slavery legislation was passed in 2010 and witnesses were prepared to make formal statements.
Last night, the 24 were still receiving medical care, though a number are badly malnourished. One was fouled with excrement when discovered as they slept four to a caravan, while two were freed from a garden shed by police, who raided at 5.30am.
“The men we found at the site were in a poor state of physical health and the conditions they were living in were shockingly filthy and cramped. We believe some of them had been living and working there in a state of virtual slavery, some for just a few weeks and others for up to 15 years,” said Det Chief Insp O’Neil.
Yesterday’s raid followed an approach from a former victim, who alleged he had been held by a gang who repeatedly beat him and threatened him with even worse consequences if he tried to escape.
Privately, police believe that they have made a major breakthrough in an investigation into such activities.
The five arrested yesterday, in the operation that involved 200 officers, some heavily-armed, were still being questioned late last night at several police stations. Weapons and drugs are alleged to have been found.
| — Hat tip: McR | [Return to headlines] |
UK: 9/11 Anniversary Memorial: EDL and Muslim Groups Clash in London
Yesterday’s 9/11 memorial service in London was blighted by clashes between the English Defence League (EDL) and Muslims Against Crusades (MAC). Around 40 people were arrested and a man was stabbed. As crowds gathered to mourn those lost in the 9/11 terrorist attacks ten years ago, two groups of extremists scuffled and shouted slogans at each other. Militant Muslim group MAC burned the US flag during the minute’s silence being held outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square. The group chanted “USA terrorists” and held anti-American placards. Meanwhile the EDL held aloft anti-Muslim placards and shouted abuse.
EDL supporters swigged beer and threw glass bottles at the MAC protesters as police tried to disperse the groups to prevent a confrontation. Many EDL members resisted arrest and scuffles with police broke out. A smaller counter-demonstration was held nearby, with protesters holding signs reading “Muslims Against Extremism” and “If You Want Sharia, Move To Saudi.” Later in the evening two EDL members were stabbed by Muslim youths outside the JD Wetherspoon pub on Edgware Road, near Marble Arch,, according to reports. The condition of the two victims is unknown but the spokesman said they remained conscious following the incident. A man present at the Grosvenor Square memorial, whose cousin died in the 9/11 terror attacks, said: “They shouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s very disrespectful. It’s too loud. “They can say what they want but not with the loudspeaker. They shouldn’t obstruct the service.”
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: 9/11: The Dark Day That Brought Out the Worst in Britain
The tragic events of 9/11 were immediately followed by a grotesque and shameful fusillade of anti-Americanism, which still resonates today. I had already written my column that day. I still recall, although almost everything else from that morning is wiped from my memory, that the subject of it — this column that no one would ever see — was Tony Blair’s upcoming appearance at the TUC conference. Because I had been engrossed in producing my copy for the next day, September 12, 2001, I had not heard any news. In the early afternoon, I filed my piece and turned on the television. A few moments later, the telephone rang.
The then editor of The Daily Telegraph, Charles Moore, asked me to write the new column from the personal point of view of an expatriate American. In fact, it would have been quite impossible to do anything else. I would not have been capable — am still not capable — of writing about the event in a way that is not personal. What was it like to watch the country (and for me, as it happened, the city) in which you had grown up being attacked in the most monumental, catastrophic way — not just from a geographical distance, but from the semi-detachment of exile? I’ve spoken to many expatriates about this experience since, and most of them shared the same sense of irrational survivor’s guilt: I should have been there.
A few weeks later, the daughter of some close friends in New York came to London. Over lunch, we talked about that day and its aftermath. She told me about the posters that had appeared in the streets when there was still hope that victims might be found and identified — photographs of loved ones with heartbreaking messages (“Have you seen my daddy?), and about how she had spent the first night relighting candles that had blown out on the impromptu memorials. It was only when she reached across the table to take my hand that I realised that I was crying. “I’m sorry,” I said, “This is the first time I’ve spoken to another American since…” Another American? Only weeks before, I would not have said that. The United States was the country I chose to leave and to which I had felt only a vestigial tie for many, many years.
Indeed, since I had spent virtually my entire adult life here and taken British nationality, I generally referred to myself as an American-born Briton. (For complex personal reasons, I did not even visit the land of my birth for more than 30 years after leaving it.) September 11 made a bonfire of that little vanity. From that day, I became an American who lives in Britain. But it was not just the terrorist attack that had produced this resurgence of loyalty to the United States. It was the grotesque fusillade of anti-Americanism that burst immediately — and I mean immediately — onto the British scene in its wake.
Anyone who claims that the latest fashionable wave of political hatred for the US has been provoked by the Iraq war should look at the press coverage that sprang up in the first 48 to 72 hours after the attacks. When the invasion of Afghanistan — let alone Iraq — was only a possibility on the horizon, when the death toll was climbing into the thousands, and when people here were still desperately trying to contact American friends and family, sections of the British media were already engaged in a frenzy of vitriolic retribution.
The Guardian led the way, of course, with a now infamous series of comment pieces which reiterated the same vengeful theme: America had got what it deserved. Its pages were filled with callous triumphalism (“They can’t see why they are hated”, “A bully with a bloody nose is still a bully”) alternating with frank threats: until the US changes its policy on the Middle East, it will continue to suffer terrorist attacks — which turned out, thankfully, to be wrong. (Oddly, there were no claims that the Spanish had got what they deserved after the later Madrid bombings, even though that incident was related to the Islamist goal of re-establishing the caliphate.)
The then comment editor of The Guardian, Seamus Milne, wrote a column last week in which he defended his choice of articles at that time with a bizarre post hoc justification: since America had indeed become enmeshed in military invasions after the attacks, this proved that his contributors had been right all along. He and his comrades (I use the word advisedly) still seem incapable of grasping what was so profoundly offensive about this coverage: it was not a matter of politics, but of basic human decency. Would they accost a widow at her husband’s funeral to shout that the idiot got what was coming to him, because he had smoked two packs of cigarettes a day and never taken any exercise? What sort of people behave like this? What sort of country had I chosen to live in?
Then the BBC followed with an outrageous edition of Question Time, in which the audience shrieked abuse at anyone on the panel who uttered a word of sympathy for the US, and openly cheered the idea that the attacks were justified. Some of my New York friends were rung from London within days by people they had known for years to be told: “You know what everybody is saying here — that America got what it deserved.”
Well, not quite everybody. When I wrote about this vicious campaign in the following weeks, I was deluged with letters from readers (in those days, people still wrote letters to columnists rather than posting comments on a website) who were as appalled as I was, and deeply ashamed of the picture that was being created of British public opinion. Many of them had personal experiences of America — of studying or travelling there. Others recalled friendships and camaraderie with American servicemen stationed here during the Second World War. Here, at last, was the Britain I thought I knew.
But the other Britain — which can orchestrate an instant hate campaign against people who have just suffered a shocking bereavement — is, 10 years on, in full flood. Now the refrain is: America lost an opportunity to examine its role and question its assumptions. Why, in other words, couldn’t it have revelled in the kind of self-doubt and identity crisis that has become Europe’s chronic condition? I am willing to predict that America’s fundamental optimism is what will see it through, while Europe tears itself apart in moral confusion and historical guilt. The US is a country that (still) knows what it stands for and why it exists, and it will continue to offer that self-belief to the waves of immigrants who arrive, wanting to be free.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Archbishop of Canterbury to Retire Next Year
(AGI) London — The archbishop of Canterbury and primate of the Anglican Church, Rowan Williams, intends to retire next year.
He is retiring almost a decade ahead of schedule, without waiting for his seventieth birthday — the customary retirement date — to be celebrated on 14 June 2020. The 61 year old archbishop intends to dedicate the rest of his life to scholarly pursuits.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Dozens of Arrests Mar 9/11 Commemorations in London
Around 40 people were arrested by police following disorder sparked by protests that marred the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 terror attacks, Scotland Yard said. A crowd of 100 activists from radical Islamic groups including Muslims Against Crusades (MAC) congregated outside the US Embassy in Grosvenor Square yesterday, while members of the English Defence League (EDL) staged a counter-demonstration. Trouble later flared between the two groups and two men were stabbed outside a pub in an incident believed to be connected to the protests.
The radical Islamic supporters gathered in the central London square as families of British 9/11 victims prepared for a remembrance ceremony in the September 11 memorial garden.
Protesters set fire to a US flag during a minute’s silence held to mark the moment when the first hijacked plane hit the World Trade Centre, while others shouted slogans including “USA terrorists” and brandished anti-American placards. After two hours the MAC demonstration left the area, shortly before the start of the memorial service. But that resulted in chaotic scenes in central London as Islamic protesters and EDL supporters participated in an unplanned 90-minute march along Park Lane and Edgware Road to Regent’s Park Mosque. On several occasions police were forced to intervene to keep the two groups apart, while traffic was brought to a standstill.
A Met Police spokesman said: “Four people were arrested during the afternoon for alleged public order offences and were taken to south London police stations. “The (Islamic) demonstrators were subsequently escorted by police to the Central London Mosque. A number — believed to be four or five of this group — were arrested during this journey.”
He added that around 20 demonstrators opposed to the Islamic groups were arrested for breach of the peace in the Oxford Street area. Meanwhile, police said 11 people were arrested outside The Tyburn pub on Edgware Road, near Marble Arch, after two men were stabbed. The force spokesman said the men, who are both believed to be opponents of the Islamic groups, were injured in the incident at at 6pm, over two hours after the main protests had ended. The condition of the two victims is unknown but the spokesman said they remained conscious following the incident.
One of the Grosvenor Square memorial service attendees, who did not want to be named, said the protesters should have been stopped from standing just across the road from the embassy and using a loud speaker system. The man, whose cousin died in the terror attacks, said: “They shouldn’t be allowed to do it. It’s very disrespectful. It’s too loud.”
He added: “They can say what they want but not with the loudspeaker. They shouldn’t obstruct the service.” Tom Clarke, who lost his sister Suria, a 30-year-old PR executive, in the attacks on the World Trade Centre, said he would have preferred it if the protesters had not staged the demonstration. But he added: “I would much rather live in a country where people are allowed to do that than one where they aren’t. I would defend their right to protest and have the right to say what they want.”
A small group of Muslims staged a demonstration opposing the radicals, holding up placards reading “Muslims Against Extremism” and “If You Want Sharia, Move To Saudi”. Abdul Sallam, 41, travelled down to London from his home in Glasgow to show the strength of his feelings. He said: “I’m a Muslim. What they’re doing is bringing shame on all Muslims.
“This is not part of the teachings of Islam. “Islam is all about peace, but what they want to do is hate other people.”
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: MPs Who Repaid Expenses Got Money Back in Secret Deal
Dozens of MPs who repaid money amid public outrage at their expenses claims were quietly refunded under a secret deal with the Commons authorities, it has emerged.
They include Cheryl Gillan, the Welsh Secretary, who pocketed £4.47 which she had voluntarily returned after The Daily Telegraph disclosed that she had billed the public purse for dog food.
Sir John Butterfill, a former Conservative backbencher, received £15,000 back after previously announcing that he would return money which he had received to help run the servants’ quarters at his Surrey mansion.
The MPs were offered the expenses deals following the Legg audit of claims dating back to 2004 which was ordered in the wake of the expenses scandal.
Under the terms of the review’s remit — which was determined by the MPs themselves — the audit team could only ask for money back if claims were in breach of the notoriously lax rules at the time.
As many MPs had voluntarily repaid sums in excess of the amounts identified by Sir Thomas Legg, head of the audit, they were secretly offered the opportunity to claim the money back.
Figures released following a Freedom of Information request show that 26 MPs applied for the refunds.
Evidence of the issues comes after the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (Ipsa) announced it is “actively considering” giving MPs freer rein over budgets again, and checking their spending retrospectively.
The Commons authorities had previously only published partial details of the mass payback that ensued when abuses became public two years ago.
But they have now spelt out the sums returned by each politician, including travel and office expenses as well as notorious spending on second homes.
The material released shows that Liam Byrne, the shadow work and pensions secretary, also benefited from a rebate.
As the scandal broke he repaid £3,618.42. That included £1,757 claimed for a property purchase with his brother, and £500 for phone bills and excess rent.
He argued that MPs were “well paid” and had to take responsibility for errors by the Fees Office.
However, according to the Commons, the member for Birmingham Hodge Hill later asked for £1,349.41 back after Sir Thomas demanded just £111.84 for mobile telephone costs.
Other disclosure to come from today’s documents include the fact that Tony Blair returned £388 in unspecified second home expenses last March — his only repayment.
Mr Blair, who has made millions since leaving Downing Street, was criticised for claiming thousands of pounds for renovating his second home days before quitting as an MP.
Liberal Democrat Treasury Chief Secretary Danny Alexander repaid £1,933.29 in mortgage interest in the run-up to the general election.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
UK: The Hip Hop Cop Shop: Police Opened Fake Rap Music Store and Snared 30 Gangsters for Drugs and Gun Offences
Criminals and drug dealers were caught in an undercover sting after police officers posed as staff in a fake hip hop music shop.
A total of 37 armed criminals and drug dealers, including 30 gang members, have been jailed for a total of more than 400 years following the ‘sting’ operation in the shop, called Boombox, in Edmonton, north London.
Codenamed Operation Peyzac, the £500,000 operation involved undercover officers kitting out as a fully-operating rap and hip hop music store, with a private back room which was used to carry out deals with drug and gun sellers, and the store was wired with CCTV and recording equipment.
The ‘shop’ operated for more than 12 months and officers, who were trained in the sort of music they were selling, were able to film the trading of firearms, ammunition and drugs.
On one occasion they captured a man on CCTV selling undercover police four guns. He had travelled to the shop on a busy bus with the loaded weapons hidden in a plastic bag.
Another man was filmed handing over cocaine with a street value of £4,000.
In April 2010 652 officers carried out simultaneous raids on 35 addresses across north and east London and Leeds.
As well as guns and drugs, police also uncovered swords, knives, a stun gun and CS gas during the swoops, and one gun was found hidden in compost.
The pictured criminals, aged between 16 and 41, were charged with various offences including drug dealing, trafficking guns and money laundering. They were jailed, or given community sentences or fined.
Two of the criminals’ images were not released by police.
Further raids at other London addresses revealed a large number of weapons, including knives and swords, two air rifles and a samurai sword.
They also found large amounts of Class A drugs and cash. Due to the strength of the evidence gathered, those arrested were charged and then convicted at Wood Green Crown Court between August 2010 and last Friday.
In total 21 firearms were removed from the streets. The men were jailed for firearms offences and for dealing drugs including crack cocaine, heroin, crystal meth, ecstasy and cannabis.
The enterprising officers came up with the plan following a tip-off gangs were operating in the neighbourhood after five young men were murdered in nearby Enfield between January and July 2008, including four teenagers.
The shop is in Edmonton, the are where Colombian student Steven Grisales was knifed and killed, and where a 15-year-old boy was stabbed as he walked to Silver Street train station.
Superintendent Lucy D’Orsi said she was proud of the ‘out of the box thinking’ that led to opening the shop allowing cops to infiltrate gangs in the crime-ridden area.
She said that Boombox had turned a ‘negligible’ profit, but added: ‘Let’s just say I wouldn’t take it to Dragons’ Den.’
She continued: ‘We looked at the age profile of the people we wanted to get intelligence out of and came up with the shop because it reflected their interests.
‘Eventually people came in offering drugs for sale, firearms for sale or stolen property for sale — a whole raft of stuff basically.
‘The undercover officers did brilliantly in handling all the situations thrown at them, and in gaining the trust of individuals coming into the shop wanting to engage in criminal activity.
‘They were given training in the types of music the shop would offer, as well as the running of the shop.’
Detective Chief Inspector Paul Harwood, the senior investigator, said they were responding to the community who had pleaded with them to stop the cycle of violence and crime on their streets.
DCI Harwood said: ‘Operation Peyzac is seen as one of the most innovative and successful covert operations run by the Met and this is attributed to the bravery and dedication of the undercover officers which was recognized with Judges Commendations.
He said that because of the overwhelming evidence gathered in the shop, 34 of the subjects pleaded guilty at the earliest opportunity.’
James Jones, 27, of Tottenham, North London, was running a gun factory, and was also discovered with a ‘mobile conversion kit’ which he carried in a rucksack and which could be used to turn blank-firing pistols into full operative guns.
He was jailed for seven years after being convicted of manufacturing firearms and ammunition and possession of a firearm.
Others jailed included Junior Homer, 21, of Edmonton, who was sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in jail after being convicted of conspiracy to supply firearms, conspiracy to supply drugs, receiving stolen goods and passing counterfeit currency.
Kasheef Hardy, 25, of Green Lanes, north London, was jailed for 10 years for conspiracy to supply a firearm and ammunition.
Michael Ludia, 19, of Upper Holloway, north London,was punished with four years imprisonment for conspiracy to supply firearms consecutive to a five years and a six months sentence for five robbery offences.
DI Rob Murray, who ran the operation from day-to-day, said he didn’t know if any musical careers had been launched using the recording booths in the shop, but added: ‘I think a few potential careers have been put on hold for a while.’
The convictions are not part of one conspiracy, and instead cover a number of different criminal operations in Edmonton.
Cops found many of the criminals had links with three suburbs near the shop — Upper Edmonton, Edmonton Green and Lower Edmonton, and in the 12 months after mid-October 2009 the rates of highly violent crime in those areas fell by 6.9 per cent, 34.5 per cent and 45 per cent respectively.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Why I’m Sceptical About William Hague’s Eurosceptism
by Norman Tebbit
What are we to make of the sudden re-emergence of William Hague from his disengagement of recent times to a new bout of Euroscepticism? The more I read the text of his interview, the more puzzled I am that so much has been read into it. I can only surmise that the newspaper in question wanted a headline to sell more copies. Indeed, I bought one myself.
Of course it is good news that Hague has refound his zest for work, but to be comfortable in the Foreign Office, which these days acts like a branch office of the Brussels authorities, hardly seems compatible with holding the sort of views of the Eurosceptic wing of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, let alone those of most Conservative voters, many Labour voters and many of their former supporters who no longer vote at all or have defected to UKIP.
Of course Hague deserves credit for realising that “the idea that you can have a single currency without a closer fiscal union was always a great mistake”. He would have been more right had he said then, and repeated now, that the fiscal union has not got to be just “closer”, but as close as that in USA or the UK, and that requires political union too.The more interesting question is what should be our policy to minimise the damage to ourselves and of course if possible to our trading partners in the wreckage of the Eurozone. As I understand it, so far it amounts only to encouragement to pusue a policy to delay, but worsen, the final crash.
I am pleased too that the Foreign Secretary says we should pull away from Brussels, although that statement was in indirect speech, perhaps to avoid upsetting the Eurofanatic Lib Dems. His words were “we would like to see powers returned from the EU to the United KIngdom”, but he would not been drawn on which powers, leaving that to Tory back benchers. Sadly, I would be more impressed if the Government had not gone along with every EU demand that has been made upon us since May last year and got nothing in return, not even for giving consent to the botched bail-out of Greece. It is a great pity that there is a lot less in this outburst of Euroscepticism than the headline writer, and no doubt Mr Cameron would like us to believe.
[JP note: It’s a toss up whether the Foreign Office is a branch office of the Brussels authorities or the Muslim Brotherhood, but my money is on the Camel Corps.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Arab Nations to Get $58 Billion to Reward Reform
MARSEILLE, France (AP) — Wealthy countries and international lenders promised more money Saturday to encourage democratic reforms in Arab nations, promising at least $58 billion.
After Tunisia and Egypt ousted their authoritarian regimes earlier this year, eight of the world’s most developed economies along with rich Arab countries and a raft of development banks had pledged in May to give $40 billion in support to their nascent democracies and hopefully keep them on the path to open government.
Those uprisings set off a cascade of revolts across the Middle East, and the Group of Eight and others are now increasing their pledges and expanding the recipients to include Morocco and Jordan.
So far, at least $58 billion has been promised to the four countries — $38 billion from development banks through 2013 and more than $20 billion from the G-8 and the wealthy Arab countries.
Saturday’s meeting was notable for its inclusion of Libya, where rebel forces recently took control of most of the country and are working to create a government to replace Moammar Gadhafi’s brutal regime. Libya is not yet officially part of the program but could soon receive funding, according to Canadian Finance Minister Jim Flaherty.
Libya’s vast oil wealth means it is unlikely to need substantial aid over the long term, but its oil exports slowed to a trickle during recent fighting, and the country is still waiting for funds that were frozen under Gadhafi to be handed over to them. Flaherty indicated that the program could bridge the gap.
“We did not discuss quantum, but we discussed, yes, the reality that the Libyans may require some assistance in the short term,” Flaherty said.
Earlier in the day, British Treasury chief George Osborne said officials would also commit to lifting sanctions on Libya, unfreezing its assets, and also “significantly get oil production going as quickly as possible.”
Libya’s new ambassador to France Mansour Seyf al-Nasr called the meeting “a success.”
Tunisia’s finance minister, Jelloul Ayed, also praised the meeting.
“A very successful meeting. The financial commitment that we obtained today is a general commitment,” he said, noting that it would be determined later how much each of the Arab countries gets.
In another step for Libya’s Transitional National Council, it won recognition Saturday from the International Monetary Fund, according to the organization’s chief, Christine Lagarde. She said she would dispatch teams to Libya to help with technical assistance and policy advice as soon as it was safe.
The money is intended to help support “transparent, accountable government” and “sustainable and inclusive growth” in North Africa and the Middle East, according to a statement from the nine international and regional lenders who pledged the $38 billion.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Erdogan, Abbas Meet in Egypt Ahead of UN Bid
CAIRO — Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan Monday kicks off an ‘Arab Spring’ tour in Egypt, where a diplomatic flurry is underway ahead of a Palestinian push to win UN statehood and as Israel’s regional ties hit a new low. Palestinian president Mahmud Abbas is also visiting Cairo to attend an Arab League meeting later Monday and for talks with EU foreign policy chief Catherine Ashton, who will stop in Egypt on her way to Israel.
Erdogan will also visit Tunisia and Libya, where popular uprisings such as that in Egypt have toppled long-standing autocratic regimes, as he bids to forge stronger ties with Arab nations as Ankara’s relations with Israel sour. Turkey has expelled the Israeli ambassador and cut trade ties with the Jewish state over the storming by Israeli naval commandos last year of a convoy of ships trying to reach Gaza in defiance of the blockade, killing nine Turks.
Egypt’s relations with Israel have also worsened, with protesters ransacking the Jewish state’s embassy in Cairo forcing the ambassador to flee after the killing of six Egyptian policemen on their common border last month as Israel hunted militants after a deadly attack.
The Palestinians’ determination to push for UN membership has triggered wide concerns in Israel, where Defence Minister Ehud Barak on Sunday called for the 15-member inner security cabinet to convene for a debate on Israel’s complex regional relations.
A strong supporter of the Palestinian cause, Erdogan arrives late Monday in Cairo and the next day he will address a ministerial meeting of the Arab League and hold talks with top Egyptian officials aimed at boosting ties. Monday evening Abbas will attend a special Arab League committee meeting devoted to the Palestinian-Israeli crisis, just days before heading to New York to seek UN membership for Palestine. Abbas is expected to submit a formal request on September 20 for the United Nations to accept Palestine as its 194th member.
Washington said it would veto any bid to the Security Council, arguing that a Palestinian state should be set up only through negotiations. If that happens the Palestinians say they will turn to the General Assembly, where they expect to easily win votes to upgrade their representation from observer body to non-member state. “We will go to the United Nations to obtain an international recognition to the state of Palestine, despite the obstacles and dangers, including US threats to halt 470 million dollars in annual assistance,” Abbas told a Jordanian newspaper.
Ashton, meanwhile, will meet Abbas and Arab foreign ministers at the League’s Cairo headquarters, ahead of travelling to Israel, as the European Union remains divided over the Palestinian UN bid. He has already received indirect support from UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon who Friday said Palestinian statehood was “long overdue” but the European Union remains divided. At talks in Poland earlier this month EU foreign ministers urged both Israel and the Palestinians to return to direct peace talks while offering to take a lead role in hammering out a solution acceptable to all sides. “Our idea is to work to find the grounds for a resolution that would be acceptable to the different parties,” said French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe. “It is possible to find such a balance.”
Erdogan is much admired on the Arab street due to his strong challenge to the Jewish state and his government is a fervent supporter of the Palestinian UN bid. He renewed his criticism of Israel in an interview with the Egyptian newspaper Al-Shorouk published on Monday.
“Israel has become a spoiled child… Not only does it practice state terrorism against the Palestinians, but it also started to act irresponsibly,” he said. “Israel does not want to admit its mistakes or that the world around it has changed,” he added. Turkey and Egypt are due to sign a “declaration of strategic cooperation,” during Erdogan’s first visit to Cairo since the former president Hosni Mubarak was ousted by a popular uprising in February, the government daily Al-Ahram newspaper reported Monday, quoting Egypt’s envoy to Ankara.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Erdogan in Cairo, First Stage of “Arab Uprisings” Tour
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA — Turkey’s Prime Minister, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is on his way to Cairo for the first stage of a four-day tour that will also take him to Tunisia and Libya, three countries that have become synonymous with the revolutions ongoing in North Africa. Today’s Turkish newspapers state that Erdogan, the leader of the emerging regional power “model” based on a mix of economic growth, moderate Islam and democracy, wants to tighten relations with the new administrations, in order to play a key role in rewriting the new order of an area where old dictators have fallen by the wayside. Leading a delegation made up of six ministers and around 170 entrepreneurs, Erdogan will hold meetings today and tomorrow with figures including the head of Egypt’s Supreme Military Council, Hussein Tantawi, the country’s de facto head of state, to revive “strategic cooperation” between Turkey and Egypt in military, diplomatic and economic fields.
In order to avoid embarrassment for their Egyptian counterparts, a proposed deviation to take in Gaza through the border crossing at Rafah has been cancelled in the wake of the ongoing crisis with Israel, which has made Erdogan very popular in Arab countries. The Turkish Prime Minister, however, is due to speak tomorrow at the opening of a meeting of Arab League Foreign Ministers, in a speech that it is hoped will rival that made by the US President, Barack Obama, in 2009, in which he called on Egyptians not to fear democracy and secularity, two equally important factors in promoting freedom.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Gaddafi Loyalists Assault Refinery, Killing 15 Guards
(AGI) Ras Lanuf — Forces loyal to Col Gaddafi last night stormed a refinery about 20 km from the residential areas of Ras Lanuf. Eyewitnesses reported that the attack on the strategic coastal oil centre in eastern Tripolitania, killed at least fifteen guards deployed to protect the installation, wounding two others. The assailants managed to break into the installation and damage the buildings.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Gaddafi Forces Counterattack in Ras Lanuf and Bani Walid
(AGI) Benghazi — Muammar Gaddafi’s forces have mounted a counterattack in Ras Lanuf and in Bani Walid. The first was a surprise sortie near the Ras Lanuf refinery where at least 15 insurgents were killed, while the second attack came in Bani Walid, 150 kilometres from Tripoli, where insurgents are facing significant loyalist opposition after a 4 day battle .
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Italy to Unfreeze 2.5 Billion in Libyan Funds
(AGI) Tirana — Italy has been authorized by the United Nations to unfreeze 2.5 billion euro belonging to Muammar Gaddafi’s regime, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini announced. Frattini received the news before he flew from Tirana, Albania to Munich. The funds belong to the Central Bank of Libya, the Libyan Investment Authority, the Libyan Foreign Bank, the Libyan National Oil Corporation and the Libyan African Investment Company.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libyan Insurgents Find Resistance at Bani Walid
(AGI) Tripoli — The militia of the National Transitional Council are finding strong resistance by Gaddafi’s forces at Bani Walid. The city that the rebels have not yet succeeded to expunge, not even with the support of NATO forces, is located 150 km South-East of Tripoli. According to reports, growing ethnic and tribal divisions are behind the unexpected difficulties in conquering the Geddafi loyalist stronghold lying in the middle of the desert.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: Strong Loyalist Resistance in Bani Walid
(ANSAmed) — ROME, SEPTEMBER 12 — With Libya’s NTC forces advancing on Sirte, rebels are facing string resistance in Bani Walid from troops loyal to the former Libyan leader. Following yesterday’s clashes, dozens of civilians have fled the city, though local residents say that many are stranded because of a lack of petrol.
A military commander of the National Transitional Council, Abdallah Abu Ussara, said that fighters have not yet received orders to launch an offensive, while the lay-out of the city, with its numerous hills, makes a rapid advance difficult.
“Bani Walid is full of weapons, they are in every home. There are snipers everywhere stopping us from advancing,” said one of the fighters, Sami Saadi Abu Rueiss, who also reported episodes of “betrayal, by people pretending to be among the revolutionaries but who are in fact with Gaddafi”.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Libya: The War for Radical Islam, And a Defeat for the United States
by Guy Millière
This is the first time in history that Hamas, Hezbollah and the Muslim Brotherhood welcome what is supposed to be a “ victory “ for Western forces.
It is the presence of members of Islamic-terrorist movements among Libyan “ rebels “ — as well as the many atrocities committed by “ rebel “ forces against black Africans — that the mainstream media are now largely ignoring.
Winning the war took five months — not exactly a demonstration of strength and may instead appear as a demonstration of weakness: if the U.S. military combined with the French and British armies needed five months to defeat a Third World dictator who had agreed to disarm, how can they possibly dissuade better equipped dictators?
Winning the peace looks like an impossible task, especially as nobody is in charge of this mission. The commander of the Tripoli Military Council, Adbelhakim Belhadj, is the former head of the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, an al-Qaeda affiliate. The commander of the Benghazi Military Council, Ismail Al Salabi, is a former high level member of the same group.
Article 1 of the Draft Constitutional Charter for the Transitional Stage says : “ Islam is the Religion of the State, and the principal source of legislation is Islamic Jurisprudence (Sharia). “
Those who have guns in Libya today are people who have a jihadist past, and who, until recently, maintained close links with people against whom the U.S. military is now battling in Afghanistan.
Some members of the provisional government, the National Transitional Council (NTC), also belong to the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. The President of the NTC, Mustafa Abdul Jalil, was Minister of Justice under Gaddafi until the war began. He was President of the Tripoli appeals court when the Bulgarian nurses were sentenced to death, and he twice upheld the death sentences. He was a zealous servant of the regime until the last minute. When he was dispatched by Gaddafi to negotiate with the “ rebels “ at the beginning of war, he defected.
At best, Libya will become a country where an appearance of democracy will cover the reality of an authoritarian Islamic regime.
At worst, the country will slide into a prolonged civil war, and become a rear base for radical Islam.
When the war to topple Saddam Hussein began in 2003, and many in France were organizing protests, and chanting “ no war for oil, “ French political leaders, almost unanimously, began denouncing a “ unilateral action “ undertaken without the approval of the UN. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin gave moral lessons and proclaimed that “ no one can use force to install democracy “ — as if the only systems that can be installed by force are dictatorships.
At the time, France was a member of the so-called “ peace camp, “ along with Germany and Russia ;and France had a good reason to support “ peace “: French oil companies and the French government had signed lucrative contracts that, with the overthrow of Saddam, went up in smoke.
A few months later, although weapons of mass destruction could not be found, “ weapons of mass corruption “ were ; and led to well-stocked bank accounts, many of them French.
In mainstream European and American media, links between Saddam Hussein and various Islamic terrorists movements were largely ignored, and atrocities committed under Saddam Hussein were, too. When jihadi [holy war] terrorists started to hit U.S. troops and the population, they were described merely as “ insurgents. “
Even though many mistakes were committed, at the end of 2008, Iraq was a stable country : elections were held despite massive death threats to voters; a free press existed, and newspapers proliferated. Winning the war had taken three weeks. Winning the peace required five years, during which many American soldiers and many innocent Iraqis died and were added to the two million victims of the former regime who were found in mass graves.
°°°°
In 2011, a war was fought to overthrow Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, and it is not over yet. No one has mobilized : officially, it was, and still is, not a war but a “ humanitarian operation “ to “ protect civilians. “ Nevertheless, it was, and still is, a war ; and the protection of civilians was apparently a mere pretext. Nothing was done to protect civilians from the “ rebels “ or from Gaddafi’s forces. The new Libyan authorities, who have no incentive to boost the numbers, talk now of at least 50,000 dead.
If the war in Iraq was not a war for oil — and is it necessary to recall that U.S. oil companies have not been very well treated by the new Iraqi authorities ? — this time, in Libya, it is really a war for oil: as revealed by a document recently released by the French daily, Liberation, it is very specifically a war for French oil contracts.
No one has yet denounced “ unilateral action. “ Although the operations were supposed to be carried out on behalf of a motion from the United Nations Security Council, they have exceeded by far the text of that motion, and have reduced it to a scrap of paper.
Further, this time there have been no organized demonstrations by people with progressive leanings against the war in Libya, probably because the war in Libya is a war in which Western powers helped people who are basically similar to those whom they consider enemies of the West.
French leaders have denounced nothing because this time they were the prime instigators. They cannot even complain : even though most of the operations were conducted by the U.S. military, the U.S. government let France step forward and present the “ victory “ over Gaddafi as a “ French victory. “ What was denounced by French leaders as immoral in Iraq suddenly became moral to them : the goal in Libya was to install “ democracy “, and force had to be used.
France has good reasons for changing its moral standards and for being in the “ war camp “ this time, but these reasons are not the result of a change in policy: Sarkozy is not a “ pro-American “ President ; he follows the old cynical rules of the “ Arab policy of France “ in the new context resulting from the Arab revolts. The French Government has agreements with the new power in Tripoli, and hopes they will pay off.
No one knows yet whether there are networks of corruption, but extremely dangerous weapons, such as heat-seeking missiles, have left the arsenals of the former Libyan regime and may have ended up in the hands of groups linked to al-Qaeda in the Sinai, in Gaza, and in Sub-Saharan Africa.
Whatever his crimes were (and he committed horrible crimes), Muammar Gaddafi no longer had links with terrorist groups: he had agreements with American and European intelligence services, and, since 2003, when he agreed to give up weapons of mass destruction programs, cooperated with them in the fight against al Qaeda and international terrorism.
The fact that the war was won without ground troops, except special forces, means that the “ victors “ will have no way to stop factional fighting if it occurs ; and in a country as divided as Libya, the outbreak of factional fighting is highly probable.
With respect to France, if the war in Libya was a war for oil, it could also prove to have been a war for radical Islam.
August 21, Hamas praised the Libyan “ rebels’ “ victory. August 23, Hezbollah released an official statement hailing the “ great victory for the Libyan people. “ The Muslim Brotherhood sent its congratulations one day later, August 24.
Today, not only is Libya very far from being a stable country, but if it stabilizes quickly, it will be a miracle.
In a recent article about Libya, the military historian Victor Davis Hanson wrote that the only thing worse than starting a stupid war is losing it. The war in Libya was an extremely stupid war, launched against the will of the U.S. military and Defense Department. It ends with a “ victory “ that could easily become a defeat for the West and for the United States.
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IDF Wants Cameraman in Each Battalion
Ever since warfare began, the purpose of ambushes has been to surprise and kill enemy soldiers. The IDF has realized that in modern warfare against the Arabs claiming the Land of Israel, the purpose of an ambush is more often to make Israel look bad. A new term has thus been coined: “delegitimization ambush.”
The weapon of choice against the “delegitimization ambush,” the IDF thinks, should include cameras as well as Facebook and Tweeter accounts.
The IDF will therefore place combat photographers in its battalions as part of “the struggle over image and consciousness” being waged against the Arabs who claim the Land of Israel, IDF Spokesman Brig. Gen. Yoav Mordechai said.
He explained the new methodology of war in a lecture he delivered Sunday at the 11th international conference of International Institute for Counter-Terrorism (ICT) at the Interdisciplinary Center (IDC), Herzliya.
“Almost every event that takes place in Gaza or Judea and Samaria at any given time appears on the international stage, with the involvement of an international group and through the social networks,” he said. Besides damaging Israel’s image, these attacks hit its economy, erode the trust in its judicial system and hurt Israel academically and culturally. Therefore, the IDF understands that the [damage to] public consciousness is worse than the actual violence.
“The goal is to have a cameraman in every battalion who can document the events in real time, as fast as possible, in order to give us material that will help us tell the story from the Israeli perspective,” Mordechai said.
“These ambushes take place almost every Friday ay Bilin and Naalin,” he explained. An unnamed IDF officer recently said that the leftist-incited disturbances at Bilin and Naalin had abated over the summer because the anarchists behind the events were putting their efforts into the “tent protest” in Tel Aviv.
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Labour Party Voting on New Leader
(ANSAmed) — TEL AVIV, SEPTEMBER 12 — Nine months after the break-up led by Defence Minister Ehud Barak (who founded the new parliamentary list, with centrist tendencies) over 60,000 members of the Israeli Labour Party are today voting for a new party leader among four candidates. They are asked to choose between Member of Parliament Shelly Yehimovic (who leads in the polls, in part because she is in tune with the issues which emerged this summer in social protests); former union leader and Defence Minister Amir Peretz; former minister for social assistance Yitzhak Herzog and Amran Mitzna, a former general in the reserves well-known for his social commitments. The outcome of the voting will be announced tonight. If none of the candidates receive at least 40% of the votes, another vote will be held between the top two.
Over the past ten years, the press notes that at the head of the Labour Party have been seven different leaders. Gradually its party base has diminished and is now only the fifth party in the Knesset (with eight seats out of 120) after Likud, Kadima, Israel Beitenu and Shas. Today the newspaper Maariv reports that the decline in the Labour Party is shown by the decision for the first time not to hold a celebratory demonstration for Yitzhak Rabin in November, on the anniversary of his assassination (1995). The official explanation is that the Tel Aviv’s municipal square, where the attack occurred, is undergoing renovations.
However, the newspaper claims that in reality the organisers are concerned that public turnout would be significantly reduced.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Ankara Moves Three Frigates, Press
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, SEPTEMBER 12 — In the context of the crisis with Israel, Turkey is sending three warships to the eastern Mediterranean: the report was made by a Turkish daily that is well informed about government activities and which provided indications concerning the rules of engagement in the event of a potential clash with Israeli vessels. The newspaper, Sabah, specified that the vessels are frigates that have been mobilised in the context of an operation named “Freedom of the seas” to intervene in case Israel acts against ships 12 miles from its shores. The frigates — the newspaper added — will protect civilian ships that are bringing assistance to the Gaza Strip and will behave like Turkish fighter planes that tackle Greek ones in the skies of the Aegean. Sabah reported that should the Turkish warships meet an Israeli ship outside of Israel’s territorial waters (which, as mentioned, extend 12 miles), they will move up to 100 metres away from the vessel belonging to the Jewish State and will “disable its weapons systems”. This was added without providing further details other than the comparison with dog fights between jet planes. In highlighting the indiscretion, the English-speaking website of the Zaman newspaper noted that the foundations for a “potential naval clash” are being laid down between the two former allies.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Durban III Promises Wave of Islamophobia Whines
Scores of states are meeting at the United Nations later this month for a hatefest that promises to be so odious that a dozen Western countries, including the United States, have already announced that they will not attend. It’s called Durban III, the third iteration of a conference first held in South Africa 10 years ago that was intended to issue a clarion call against “racism, xenophobia and related intolerance.” Instead, the day turned into an anti-Western, anti-Semitic jamboree so execrable that several Western ambassadors stood up and stormed out. Some participants enthusiastically likened Israel to Nazi Germany.
So now the same crew is planning another of these encounters. It promises to be little different — except for one thing. This time a major agenda item promises to be angry screeds against Islamophobia. Think about it. Isn’t it a bit ironic, at best, that the Islamic states will bewail the inequities they perceive just a few days after the 10th anniversary of 9/11, a few miles from the site where the World Trade Center once stood?
Pakistan is usually the leader of these complaint campaigns — Pakistan, where dozens of young women are killed each year, often buried alive, for saying they want to choose their own husbands; where 36 people died a couple of weeks ago when a suicide bomber blew himself up in a mosque during midday prayers. Of course, Pakistan is hardly the only nation feeding Islamophobia. Not so long ago, the United Arab Emirates Supreme Court ruled that a man is free to beat up his wife and children — as long as he does not leave marks. Saudi Arabia asked a hospital to surgically mutilate a young man’s spinal cord as penalty for injuring another man in a fight. During the famine in Somalia this summer, Islamic militants forbade aid workers to bring food for thousands of Somalis who were literally starving to death.
Is it any wonder that many people look askance at Islam — and paint their disdain with a broad brush? Western nations, of course, suffer abhorrent violent acts of their own. In Oregon this summer, a father was accused of stabbing his wife and four young children to death before setting fire to their home. That was certainly not an isolated crime. But there’s an important difference. Those heinous acts in the Islamic world are almost always carried out in the name of the religion. That’s why so many people, right now, are calling for an Islamic Reformation.
I would argue that an Islamic Reformation is already under way, even though no one is calling it that. Those hundreds of thousands of young demonstrators — in Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Libya, Syria and elsewhere — have been demanding dignity, prosperity, freedom and democracy, more or less in that order. All of those characteristics are the mortal enemies of Islamic militancy. Did you hear even one of those demonstrators, in any of those states, calling for Islamic jihad? A sterling illustration of this principle is the nearly 3 million Muslims who live in the United States, prosperous and free. A new Pew Research Center study found that “Muslim Americans are overwhelmingly satisfied with the way things are going in their lives” and “rate their communities very positively as places to live.” What’s more, “just 1 percent say that suicide bombing and other forms of violence” are justifiable.
Those attitudes are not unique to American Muslims. Another Pew study found that the vast majority of Arabs polled opposed Islamic extremism. Among Palestinians, for example, 78 percent said they were concerned about it. American Muslims are not taking part in Durban III. For Pakistanis and others there to bleat about Islamophobia, the rest of us should simply shake our heads and realize that it’s a lame attempt to render themselves immune from criticism of their extremists’ venomous behavior. The Protestant reformation 500 years ago brought on more than a century of repression and war before settling out. Let’s hope this one moves faster.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Genel Energy Partners With UK Company to Dominate Oil Reserves
A new Anglo-Turkish partnership that emerged with the merger of UK company Vallares and Turkish businessman Mehmet Emin Karamehmet’s Genel Energy has revealed plans to dominate the vast reserves of oil in the Kurdish autonomous region of northern Iraq. The partnership, led by ex-BP CEO Tony Hayward, also plans to invest elsewhere in the Middle East, once the dust of the Arab Spring settles.
Responding to questions from the Hürriyet Daily News on the sidelines of a press meeting in Istanbul, Hayward said Vallares would deal with the regional Kurdish administration, not Baghdad. Eventually, the Kurdish region will have a “significant say” in what is going to be finally approved in Iraq’s expected hydrocarbons law, he said. Mehmet Sepil, the CEO of Genel Energy International, said the firm expected the law to be approved in Baghdad by the start of next year.
The complex partnership will be completed through an all-share reverse-takeover in which Vallares will issue new shares worth $2.1 billion to acquire 100 percent of Genel, giving Vallares and Genel’s current owners equal stakes in the combined business.
“The only approval we need is from the Kurdistan Regional Government, and we expect that approval to come before the end of September,” Hayward told the Daily News on Thursday. “All of the indications in Kurdistan show that things are only going to get better. I think this is a good time to invest in the region.”
Sepil said the new company would be listed on the London Stock Exchange in around four weeks and that it would offer 50 percent of its shares to the public. “In the end, the company will rank among the top 100 companies in the U.K.,” Sepil said.
Sepil said he would have a stake of 14 percent in the new company, down from his current 29 percent, while Karamehmet’s stake will fall from 56 percent to 28.
Pragmatic Realism in Region
Commenting on possible risks regarding stability in northern Iraq, Hayward spoke of a “pragmatic realism” that has emerged between the regional government and Baghdad. “This means [one] can invest,” he said. “[The two governments] have agreed to revenue-sharing mechanisms. Payments are being received and I think all indicators show that things are only going to get better. There will be some bumps in the road, but the train and its direction are clear.”
He also said when the oil law dispute is resolved the Kurdish administration “will have a significant say in what is finally approved.”
“[Kurds] have a significant standing both in the Iraqi Cabinet and in parliament,” he told the Daily News. “This law is important for all foreign investors in Iraq, not only for those who are investing in the region.”
Northern Iraq has attracted more than $10 billion in energy investments from more than 40 companies from 17 countries. Sepil said he expected similar consolidations in northern Iraq, adding that Genel, whose headquarters will be Ankara, aims to be among the few companies left in northern Iraq at the end of the next wave of consolidations.
Noting the seismic political shift in the Middle East, Sepil said Genel would like to invest in other locations, especially in North Africa, including Libya, after stability is established.
After the press meeting in Istanbul, Hayward and Sepil headed to Arbil in northern Iraq
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Iran Praises Sacking of Israeli Embassy in Cairo
Cairo, 12 Sept. (AKI) — The Iranian Parliament “gives its full support” to the “ransacking” of the Israeli embassy in Cairo that happened late Friday, said senior Iranian lawmaker Esmail Kowsari, state media reported.
Israel evacuated 86 diplomats and family members from the Egyptian capital after thousands of protesters on Friday demolished a security wall built around the embassy, allowing a small group to breach the building. Six Israeli embassy staff were under siege for some hours until Egyptian commandos freed them.
The deputy head of Iran’s Majlis Parliament Committee on National Security comments were carried by state-sponsored news organisations like Irna and PressTV.
In the wake of Iran’s Iranian Revolution, Iranian students seized the American embassy where they held 52 American members of the staff hostage for 444 days from November 4, 1979 to January 20, 1981.
Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the attack was a challenge to 32 years of peace between Israel and Egypt, and a “very near disaster” was averted. He told his government cabinet that the embassy is a symbol of “peace between us and Egypt.
“This peace is being challenged, and those who are challenging it are challenging not only the policy but also the state known as Israel,” he said.
Egypt became the first Arab country to recognize Israel when the countries signed a peace treaty in 1979.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Iran’s Dirty 9/11 Secrets
By Kenneth R. Timmerman
It has taken nearly ten years, but the real story of Iran’s direct, material involvement in the 9/11 conspiracy is finally coming to light. And it’s being revealed not by the U.S. government or by Congressional investigators but by private attorneys representing families of the 9/11 victims in U.S. District Court.
Just one week before the 9/11 Commission sent its final report to the printers in July 2004, diligent staffers discovered a six-page classified National Security Agency analysis summarizing what the U.S. intelligence community had learned about Iran’s assistance to the 9/11 hijackers.
They happened upon the document by chance. It had been tucked away at the bottom of the last box in the last stack of classified documents they were reviewing. But it was so explosive that several Commissioners pushed hard to make sure the information it contained was included in the final report, despite intense push back from the intelligence community.
The page and a half section that made the final cut (see pages 240-241) details repeated trips to Iran by 8-10 of the “muscle” hijackers between October 2000 and February 2001. Flying in from Saudi Arabia, Damascus, and Beirut, the future hijackers were accompanied by “senior Hezbollah operatives” who were in fact agents of the Iranian regime.
The information was so explosive that the CIA lobbied hard to get it expunged from the final report, in part because they had detected some of the movements as they were occurring but failed to appreciate their import. “They saw them as travel through Iran, not travel to Iran,” a senior 9/11 Commission staffer told me at the time.
By the time the staffers had read into the 75 source documents on a Sunday morning out at NSA headquarters at Fort Meade, MD, the Commission was pushing up against the end of its mandate and could not do any additional work. The information was so serious and had such clear geopolitical import that it “requires further investigation by the U.S. government,” they concluded. Many of the Commissions and senior staff who were aware of the document find assumed someone else would pick up the ball.
But as attorney Thomas Mellon, Jr. and his colleagues representing Fiona Havlish and other 9/11 widows and family members discovered, no such investigation was ever carried out. Not even the Congressional intelligence committees would go near the subject, despite direct appeals from the Havlish plaintiffs and a review of many of the original still-classified documents cited in the report.
I was engaged by the Havlish attorneys in 2004 to carry out the investigation the 9/11 Commission report called on the U.S. government to handle. We had no governmental authority, hardly any budget, and no access to classified intelligence or intelligence assets. But what we found and made public starting this May is enough to hang a fish. Put simply:
• The Islamic Republic of Iran helped design the 9/11 plot;
• provided intelligence support to identify and train the operatives who carried it out;
• allowed the future hijackers to evade U.S. and Pakistani surveillance on key trips to Afghanistan where they received the final order of mission from Osama bin Laden, by escorting them through Iranian borders without passport stamps;
• evacuated hundreds of top al Qaeda operatives from Afghanistan to Iran after the 9/11 just as U.S. forces launched their offensive;
• provided safe haven and continued financial support to al Qaeda cadres for years after 9/11;
• allowed al Qaeda to use Iran as an operational base for additional terror attacks, in particular the May 2003 bombings in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.
Key elements of our proofs are in bullet points at the end of this article. For those wishing a more detailed account, here is a partially-redacted affidavit I provided to the Court that traces the Islamic Republic of Iran’s relationship al Qaeda back to the early
| — Hat tip: Janet Levy | [Return to headlines] |
Iraq: Cleric Calls for Halt to Attacks on US Troops
More severe military operations will resume if American forces do not depart on time, he says
Baghdad: Iraq’s fiercely anti-American cleric Moqtada Al Sadr Sunday called on his followers to suspend attacks against US troops to ensure they leave Iraq by a year-end deadline. But the Shi’ite cleric, whose Mehdi Army militia fought US forces until 2008, warned that if they did not depart on time, military operations would resume and be “very severe”. “Because of my eagerness to accomplish the independence of Iraq and have the invader forces withdraw from our holy land, it has become imperative for me to stop military operations… until the invader forces complete their withdrawal,” Al Sadr said in a statement read out by his spokesman Salah Al Ubaidi.
“If not, the military operation will start again and with new approaches, and it will be very severe.” American troops are scheduled to withdraw fully by December 31, more than eight years after the 2003 invasion, but Iraq’s leaders are currently negotiating with the United States on whether to retain US military trainers beyond 2011.
Security agreement
Al Sadr warned last month that US military trainers who stayed in Iraq after the end of the year would be targets. About 43,000 remaining troops are due to leave Iraq under a security agreement between the two countries. While Al Sadr’s Mehdi Army has for the most part been demobilised, US officials say splinter groups have continued to attack US soldiers. “We shall soon see whether the Promised Day Brigade and others affiliated with Al Sadr’s organisation continue to conduct attacks against US forces and the Iraqi government, or if these are just words without the deeds to back them up,” US military spokesman Colonel Barry Johnson said in an emailed response to Al Sadr’s statement. Although violence in Iraq has dropped dramatically from the height of sectarian fighting in 2006-7, bombings and killings occur daily and Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia are still capable of carrying out lethal operations.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Israel’s Raid Last Year on an Aid Flotilla in the Eastern Mediterranean Sea Was “No Different” Under International Law Than What Somali Pirates Are Doing in the Aden Gulf, Turkish Transportation Minister Binali Yildirim Said Thursday.
“Israel’s act in these waters is no different than the pirates in the Aden Gulf,” Yildirim told the Hürriyet Daily News during a meeting in Istanbul, referring to the diplomatic feud between Israel and Turkey over Israeli commandos’ deadly raid May 31, 2010, on a Gaza-bound aid ship, killing nine Turks.
“Except for the 12-mile coastal shore, the waters are open to everyone’s use. No country has the right to prevent us from using our law-granted rights,” the minister added.
On Friday, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu said Turkey “will apply all necessary preventive measures in order to ensure its navigational freedom,” noting that the country has the longest coastline bordering on the East Mediterranean.
Yildirim on Thursday expressed agreement with Davutoglu’s earlier comment that Israel does not have the right to implement a 20-mile zone of territorial waters along its shores.
“No one has the right to take over these waters. If they do, they will get their response from us,” the transportation minister said.
Referring to Israel’s demand for 20 miles of territorial waters due to the sea blockade of Gaza, Yildirim said Israel has the right to only 12 nautical miles in the eastern Mediterranean.
“The way that Israel is acting by not obeying international law is sea banditry,” he said, adding that Turkey would not accept the unlawful implementation. “Stretching from Gibraltar Strait to the Gulf of Iskenderun, 23 nations have the right to travel freely in [these] international waters.”
Accusing Israel of violating international maritime laws, the minister said “there is nothing we will do about the current situation” as long as Israel refuses to apologize for the raid on the Mavi Marmara aid ship.
Israel “will not apologize to Turkey” and will not lift its blockade on Gaza, Israeli Transportation Minister Israel Katz, said on Israeli public radio Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reported.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said the Israeli Navy is “a strategic arm” of the state, adding, “this is a long and strong arm,” daily Hürriyet reported Thursday. His comments followed Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s statement Tuesday that Turkish Navy ships would “show up” more frequently in the eastern Mediterranean.
Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak played down the diplomatic crisis with Ankara on Thursday, saying the current dispute “will pass,” AFP reported. Describing the dispute over Gaza as “spilled milk,” Barak added, “We are the two countries that are most important to the West in the region.”
Turkey late last week downgraded its diplomatic relations with Israel to the second-secretary level and suspended all military contracts after a long-awaited UN report on Israel’s flotilla raid was leaked to U.S. media on Sept. 1.
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Medvedev Tells Cameron of Russia’s Support for Syria
(AGI) Moscow — The Russian president, Dmitry Medvedev, told British Prime Minister David Cameron of Russia’s support for the regime of Syrian strongman, Bashar al Assad and warned Cameron of the risks of new sanctions at the U.N. against Syria.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Saudi Government to be Sued Over 9/11 Attacks
A U.K.-based insurance syndicate is suing the Saudi government to recover more than $215 million it paid out to victims of the 9/11 attacks.
In a complaint filed Thursday in a Johnstown, Penn. district court, Lloyd’s Syndicate alleges that the government of Saudi Arabia provided direct operational and financial support to al-Qaida and its affiliates in the years leading up to the September 11 attacks.
“Absent the sponsorship of al Qaeda’s material sponsors and supporters, including the defendants named herein,” the suit claims, “al Qaeda would not have possessed the capacity to conceive, plan and execute the September 11 attacks.”
The complaint extensively quotes counter-terrorism officials affirming that financial resources are crucial to al-Qaida’s ability to launch attacks. It also gives specific examples linking the Saudi government to al-Qaida financing.
Saudi-funded charities, such as the Muslim World League (MWL), World Assembly of Muslim Youth (WAMY), International Islamic Relief Organization (IIRO) and the al Haramain Islamic Foundation, have allowed al-Qaida to sustain its global network, it says.
The complaint alleges the groups, in addition to providing funding, organized recruitment of al-Qaida fighters, training camps, and reconnaissance missions and weapons delivery.
Highlighting the Saudi government’s involvement, the complaint notes that the Saudis appointed Mohammed Jamal Khalifa to serve as director of MWL and IIRO’s offices in the Philippines and Indonesia.
Khalifa, bin Laden’s brother-in-law, met with Abu Sayyaf, a terrorist group aiming to establish an Islamic state in the Philippines, during its early years, providing it with important start-up financing and organizational support.
The lawsuit also expounds upon the Saudi government’s historical links to al-Qaida.
The Saudi regime was aware of Osama bin Laden’s jihadist efforts from the very beginning, it says. “More fundamentally, the jihadist worldview bin Laden was promoting was firmly grounded in Wahhabi ideology and the Western Cultural Attack narrative, as promoted by the Saudi regime itself over a period of many years.”
Filed on behalf of Lloyd’s Syndicate by Cozen O’Connor law firm, the suit is not the first to blame the Saudi government for aiding terrorists. A federal appeals court previously dismissed the Saudi government as a defendant in a similar case, but ruled that other organizations affiliated with the Saudi government could remain defendants.
In 2009, the Supreme Court chose not to hear the case. The government said that the Saudi government’s funding of the Islamic charities was not clearly linked to terrorist groups.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Syrian Activists Call for “Day of Rage” Against Russia
(AGI) Damascus — Syrian activists have dubbed tomorrow a “day of rage” against Russia, which they feel is too soft on the regime of Bashar al-Assad. “Do not support murderers. Do not kill Syrians with your positions” are written on the Facebook page of the “Syrian Revolution.” “We want to express our anger with Russia and its government,” the activists explained as they called for 24 hours of demonstrations throughout the country.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Syrian Sunni Cleric Who Signed Protest Statement Dies Mysteriously
by Irfan Al-Alawi
The death in a Syrian hospital of Dr. Ibrahim Al-Salqini, the 77-year old Sunni Mufti of Aleppo and dean of theology at Damascus University, and a widely respected Sufi, has provoked suspicion about his passing, as reported in Western media, including the Los Angeles Times of September 6.
Salqini suffered a stroke and entered the hospital for treatment after he was visited by state security agents, according to Syria’s opposition network, the Local Coordinating Committees. At the start of September, Salqini delivered a Friday sermon interpreted as a challenge to the Al-Assad dictatorship. While he was undergoing medical treatment, his family was prohibited from visiting him.
While Syrian state media claimed that the government’s high clerics participated in Salqini’s funeral, irregular thugs known as “shabiha” joined security personnel in assaulting the mourners when they reached the burial site.
Salqini was one of a group of Aleppo Sunni clerics who issued a protest declaration last month against the repressive actions of the Al-Assad government. The petition denounced the shedding of the blood of the innocent, and described the state authorities as “the stronger party,” with the greatest responsibility for the situation. The declaration called for “the rulers and others with the reins of power in their hands” to “stop the violence immediately,” to “open up space for freedom of opinion and expression,” to cease arbitrary arrests, release all prisoners of conscience, and speed up constitutional reform, especially the removal of Article VIII, which defines the Ba’ath party as the leader of the Syrian state and society.
Signatories to the Aleppo declaration had included Salqini, Dr. Muhammad Abu’l Fath, the mentor of Salqini, and other well-known religious authorities, including Dr. Mahmoud Akkam and the respected Sunni elders Muhammad Zakaria Al-Masud, Muhammad Nadeem Al-Shihabi, Abdullah Al-Masud, and Yusuf Al-Hindawi.
Sheikh ‘Abd Al-Fattah Al-Bayanuni, another prominent Syrian Sunni spiritual leader, sent a message to Dr. Abu’l Fath in which he praised the late sheikh for showing “patience in the face of the harm caused by oppression and ignorance,” and as one of the religious “scholars of the country, who, like stars in the sky, guide the believers through darkness on land and sea.” Al-Bayanuni warned that without such religious models, the Syrian Muslims would lose their way.
Another Syrian Sheikh, Muhammad Al-Yaqoubi, praised Salqini as “a man of the house of knowledge… who combined understanding of religious doctrine with piety, showed a good example in writing and in morals, and served all the people through his work. He offered mercy and love to those far from his presence.”
The official Syrian news agency SANA claimed on September 7 that Salqini had died of a stroke, and announced that the regime of Bashar Al-Assad had offered condolences to Salqini’s family, along with similar statements by the official Grand Mufti of the Republic, Ahmad Badreddin Hassoun, and the governor of Aleppo, Ibrahim Khallouf.
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Turkey Says NATO Radar Not Against Russia, Used for Defense
Turkey has said NATO’s pending deployment of an early warning radar system is only for defense and only against arms, referring to the possibility of missiles from non-state actors as well.
On Thursday, President Abdullah Gül told reporters, upon his return from Moscow, that Russia is a strategic partner and that NATO’s to-be-deployed radar system is only for defense purposes. He said he discussed these issues with his Russian counterpart, Dmitry Medvedev, stressing Russia’s increasingly cooperative and close role with the world’s largest military alliance.
Turkey has recently agreed to host an early warning radar system as part of NATO’s missile defense system aimed at countering ballistic missile threats from neighboring Iran. The Turkish and U.S. governments said last Friday that the radar system will help spot missile threats coming from outside Europe, including potentially from Iran. The system, provided by the United States, is to become operational later this year.
The Turkish president also said arms that pose a threat to NATO members could not only emanate from states, but from non-state organizations as well. “For this reason, this is totally for defense purposes. We are also closely discussing and consulting on this issue with the Russian side,” Gül added.
Muslim Turkey, with NATO’s second biggest military, has become a bigger player in the Middle East, emboldened by its booming economy and a more Islamic identity, seeking stronger ties with Muslim countries in the Middle East, like Iran. Turkey has also sought stronger ties with Russia, which has said a NATO missile defense system could threaten its security if it develops the capability to down Russian nuclear missiles. However, Russia’s NATO envoy said a radar system in Turkey would not threaten Russian security.
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Turkey Warships to Gaza a ‘Grave’ Threat, Israeli Minister Says
Israeli Intelligence Minister Dan Meridor on Friday described a threat by the Turkish prime minister to send warships to escort any aid vessels trying to reach the Gaza Strip as “grave and serious.”
“These remarks are grave and serious, but we have no wish to add to the polemic,” Meridor said on army radio. “It is better to stay quiet and wait. We have no interest in aggravating the situation by replying to such [verbal] attacks.”
Late on Thursday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said Turkish warships would escort any aid ships trying to reach Gaza in defiance of an Israeli naval blockade, in a bid to protect them from Israeli forces.
“Turkish warships will be tasked with protecting the Turkish boats bringing humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip,” Erdogan told Al Jazeera television, according to an Arab-language translation of his comments in Turkish.
“From now on, we will no longer allow these boats to be the targets of attacks by Israel, like the one on the Freedom Flotilla, because then Israel will have to deal with an appropriate response,” he warned.
Erdogan was referring to the clash on May 31 last year when Israeli commandos stormed a six-ship flotilla in international waters in a bid to stop it from breaching its naval blockade on Gaza.
During the ensuing confrontation, Israeli troops killed nine Turks on board a Turkish ferry, sparking a diplomatic row between the two countries that has strained relations to breaking point.
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Turkish PM Saw Gaza Raid as ‘Grounds for War’
(Reuters) — Turkish Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan saw “grounds for war” with Israel last year after a deadly raid on a Turkish ship headed for Gaza, according to a transcript of a recent interview. State news agency Anatolia released late on Sunday what it said was an original Turkish-language transcript of an interview Erdogan gave to Al Jazeera television last week. It included elements not broadcast as well as original wording for sensitive comments that had been transmitted only in Arabic translation. Among previously unpublished elements, Erdogan said Israel’s deadly raid last year on a Turkish ship headed for Gaza would have justified going to war: “The attack that took place in international waters did not comply with any international law. In fact, it was grounds for war. However, befitting Turkey’s greatness, we decided to act with patience,” he said.
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| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Turkish President Calls Israel Ungrateful, Burden to Its Allies
Israel is “ungrateful” and a burden to its allies, Turkish President Abdullah Gül said Thursday, calling on Tel Aviv to consider an “honorable peace” with its Arab neighbors.
“Look at the scene when [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu speaks in the U.S. Congress. It is impossible for him to receive that reaction in his own parliament,” Gül said, speaking while on his way to Yaroslavl, Russia, to attend an international conference on “The Modern State and Multiculturalism.”
In his comments, Gül also highlighted the favors he said were done by Turkey on Israel’s behalf.
“They [display] a certain ingratitude as if we have to do this, however. I mean, there is no reciprocity. [This is] a country that burdens even its allies. Let them do [all] the thinking from now on,” he said.
“They [Israel] came to us [about] an apology four times over, [and] this friend of ours [Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu] received our approval, but they backed down at the last moment,” Gül said, referring to Ankara’s demand that Israel apologize for its deadly raid last year on a Gaza-bound aid ship, an incident that killed nine Turks.
“Israel is like a small island in a region inhabited by several hundred million Arabs. When the Arabs were governed by undemocratic regimes, it was possible from Israel’s perspective to come to terms with those leaders,” the Turkish president said. “Take a look at when military cooperation [between Israel and Turkey] began to develop. Democracy is on the ascent, however, and no democratic country can follow a dishonorable policy by disregarding its own citizens’ wants and sensitivities. For that reason, Israel must think about an honorable peace.”
Speaking about the ongoing uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, Gül also recounted an initiative he undertook regarding the turmoil in Bahrain while taking King Hamad bin Isa al-Khalifa on a tour of Istanbul. The Turkish president said he spoke to al-Khalifa about the fate of 12 doctors who treated people injured in clashes in Bahrain and were involved in anti-government protests initiated by the country’s Shiite majority.
“I told the King of Bahrain that the initiative for dialogue would be strengthened if [he were to] release them [the doctors]. He made a promise to me, and we learned yesterday the doctors were freed. Of course, the Shiites who have their hopes vested in us are very satisfied,” he said.
Gül also called for Turkey to act with self-confidence and raise democratic standards in responding to the recent flare-up of the conflict with the outlawed Kurdistan Workers’ Party, or PKK. “[The PKK] have no interest either in the Kurdish issue or in the rights and the justice of citizens in eastern Anatolia,” he said.
In his comments, Gül also expressed his views about online social media, of which he is an avid user.
“In the old days, there were coffeehouses and gardens. People would sit down, talk and exchange ideas. Today, however, people do not even have the time to greet their neighbors,” he said. “That is why they use social media because the Turkish people are not as cold as people of some countries; they are warm-blooded and talkative.”
“I love children’s messages best because it is clear they write them themselves without the assistance of their elders. There are even those who call me ‘Uncle Abdullah,’“ the president said.
He also explained he had feared he would get negative reactions about a photograph he posted on the Web site Twitter of him with a Cadillac convertible.
“The great majority liked it, however. A citizen took our photograph with his cell phone just as I was making a U-turn while driving the car,” he said. “Truthfully, I kept wondering for days as I glanced at the newspapers which one would publish [the photograph].”
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Turkish Prime Minister Says Navy Will Escort Future Aid Ships to Gaza
Turkey’s prime minister has said Turkish warships will escort Turkish Gaza-bound aid ships in the future.
Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan told Al-Jazeera television that the navy will accompany the aid ships to protect them from raids like the one Israel launched on a flotilla trying to break the Gaza blockade last year, when nine pro-Palestinian activists were killed.
Erdogan’s comments to Al-Jazeera were carried by Turkey’s Anatolia news agency late Thursday.
Turkey has already announced it would increase patrols in the eastern Mediterranean in response to Israel’s refusal to apologize for the raid. But it was the first admission that Turkey intends to send warships to protect ships trying to break the blockade.
Israel has expressed regret for the loss of lives but insists its forces acted in self-defense
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Turkish Premier Speaks to Al-Jazeera
Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan has said that Turkish vessels carrying humanitarian aid would never be subject to any attack again.
In a televised interview with Al-Jazeera, Erdogan said about the freedom of the seas in the Mediterranean, “for the time being, Turkish vessels are obliged to protect their own ships. This is the first step. We are going to send humanitarian aid to the region. And Turkish vessels carrying humanitarian aid will never be subject to any attack again.”
“Turkey does not make the same mistakes with Israel in the international waters. Turkey’s state and military decency do not allow such mistakes. Our goal is to stand against atrocity in the world and support those who are desperate,” Erdogan said. “There are desperate people here. Israel bombed those desperate people for 15-16 days. Those people are trying to live in tents now. We want justice for them.
“There are 1.5 million people there and they cannot be ignored. Our historical, cultural and humanitarian ties with them entail us to make such a decision. We cannot remain silent against their living conditions,” Erdogan added.
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U.S. Offers the Taliban New Middle East Headquarters
Hoping to bring the 10-year Afghan conflict to a close, the U.S. endorsed Taliban plans to open political headquarters in Qatar by the end of 2011. According to The Times the move is intended to spur peace talks with the Taliban and bring the group formally to the negotiating table. This renewed commitment to peace comes after Saturday’s attack on American forces in Afghanistan where 77 servicemembers were injured.
The “office of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan” will be the first officially recognized office for the Taliban since being routed from power in 2001.Qatar volunteered to host the new location, when Washington insisted the ‘embassy’ be outside Pakistan’s area of influence.
“It will be an address where they have a political office,” said one Western diplomatic source, who declined to be named. “It will not be an embassy or a consulate but a residence where they can be treated like a political party.” The diplomat stressed that the Taliban would not be permitted use the office for fundraising or in support of their armed struggle in Afghanistan. The Times understands that the Taleban is seeking assurances that its representatives in Doha, the Qatari capital, would be free from the threat of harassment or arrest.
The agreement comes after more than a year of talks between Western diplomats from Britain, the U.S. and the Taliban.
[JP note: Commitment to dhimmitude not peace.]
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
US Backs Opening of Taliban Office in Qatar: Report
London: The United States has endorsed plans for the Taliban to open political headquarters in the Gulf state of Qatar by the end of the year, British newspaper The Times reported on Monday. The move is designed to allow the West to begin formal peace talks with the Taliban, Western diplomats told the paper. The office of the self-styled Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan would be the first internationally recognised representation for the Taliban since it was ousted from power by the US-led invasion of Afghanistan in 2001.
Western diplomats told The Times it was hoped that opening a Taliban office in Qatar would push forward the prospect of talks intended to reconcile insurgents with the Afghan government and bring an end to the decade-long war. Washington is believed to have insisted that the office be located “outside Pakistan’s sphere of influence”, the report said. “It will be an address where they have a political office,” one Western diplomatic source, who was not named, told The Times. “It will not be an embassy or a consulate but a residence where they can be treated like a political party.” The diplomat stressed that the Taliban would not be allowed to use the office in the Qatari capital, Doha, to raise funds.
The Times reported that the Taliban was seeking assurances that its representatives would be free from the threat of harassment or arrest. Britain, which has the second largest contingent of troops in Afghanistan, declined to say whether it supported the creation of a Taliban office in Qatar. “This is a matter for the United States,” a Foreign Office spokeswoman said. The US ambassador to Kabul said last week that the Taliban must feel “more pain” from increased military pressure before progress can be made in peace talks. “The Taliban needs to feel more pain before you get to a real readiness to reconcile,” Ryan Crocker said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
USA Authorizes Taliban ‘Embassy’ In Qatar
(AGI) London — Qatar is assuming an ever greater role in international diplomacy. After having served as a bridge builder between Arab countries and supporting the Libyan rebels, they have now obtained the go-ahead from the US for the opening of a representative office, a sort of embassy, for the Taliban in Doha by the end of the year. The objective is to launch direct peace negotiations between western nations and the Koranic students. The seat of the so-called “Emirates of Afghanistan” in Doha will be the first recognized international representative since 2001.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Gul: Norway Attack Reflects Threat Pose by Extreme Right Ideologies
Turkish President Abdullah Gül said Thursday that the July attack in Norway, which left dozens of people dead, showed that terrorism and extremism were not connected to any specific religion or geography.
Delivering a speech at the Global Policy Forum, taking place in Russian city of Yaroslavl, Gül said that the recent attack in Norway showed that extreme rightist ideologies posed a threat to security in the world.
Curing illnesses such as xenophobia in the West needs more efforts than dealing with the problems of the East associated with underdevelopment, Gül said.
Democracy is the strongest force that makes a country powerful and competent. The survival and international prestige of a state are assured when that state receives its power from its own people, Gül also said.
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Indonesia: Moluccas: Three Dead and 60 Wounded in Clashes Between Christians and Muslims
Accidental death of a Muslim taxi driver in Ambon sparks violence. The Islamic community spread the rumour that he had been attacked by Christians. Police intervention restores calm, but some stray bullets killed two people. Houses and properties of religious minority burned.
Jakarta (AsiaNews) — The toll from violent clashes yesterday between Christians and Muslims in Ambon, capital of the Moluccas, in the eastern Indonesian archipelago is three dead and about 60 wounded. The violence was triggered after the accidental death of a taxi driver who crashed his motorcycle. However, during the funeral a rumour was spread that Darkin Saimen — who lost control of the vehicle and crashed into a house — was attacked by a group of Christians. Riot police were called in to quell the reaction of the Islamic community. The officers fired shots, some stray bullets hit Djefry Siahaan (teacher in Ambon) in the stomach and Cliford Belegur (school student) in his left side, causing death.
Gen. Anton Bahrul Alam, national police spokesman, said that the autopsy confirmed the death of taxi driver in the crash. “The doctors found no sign of violence,” said the officer, who adds that in the subsequent clashes, there were injuries and damage to public buildings. Anton, also declined to specify the names of the two factions who fought each other, avoiding mention of the religious faith of each. “These groups are known for some time [for their mutual hostility] … — said the spokesman — We will not mention their names, but we assure you that [since 9 last night, ed] the situation is now come back under control.”
Local sources, on condition of anonymity, told AsiaNews that the Muslim mob set fire to several Christian houses, forcing the occupants to leave the buildings. Meanwhile in Jakarta top politicians have gathered in a meeting to find solutions to the crisis given the extreme delicacy of the situation, they refuse to talk about “confessional” violence, instead referring to clashes between people belonging to “factions”. Djoko Suyanto, a senior official for Legal Affairs, confirms that politicians and security officials “will be holding a summit this evening” to restore harmony in the theater of violence.
In the past there have been harsh conflicts in the Moluccas of a confessional nature between Christians and Muslims that have caused deaths and injuries. The arrival in 1999 in the area of thousands of Muslim settlers, coming from other parts of Indonesia, triggered the conflict, which continued until 2002 and caused at least 9 thousand deaths in repeated incidents. The signing of a peace treaty between the two sides in February 2002 — the Malino Peace Treaty, signed in South Sulawesi — put an end to the conflict.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Indonesia Sends in Police After Ambon Clash
Indonesia has deployed hundreds of security personnel to Ambon, a city with a history of major sectarian violence, after clashes left three people dead, a police spokesman said Monday.
The violence erupted in the Maluku provincial capital on Sunday after rumours spread through text message that a Muslim motorcycle taxi driver had been attacked and killed by Christians, according to reports.
Two groups, one believed to include the taxi driver’s family, reportedly clashed after his funeral armed with machetes and rocks.
Police said the violence, which also left dozens injured, had simmered down but deployed security forces to the area in case of further fighting.
“We’ve sent 200 paramilitary police members and 200 police officers from Makassar,” national police spokesman Anton Bachrul Alam said.
Officers were investigating the person responsible for spreading the texts, who had already been identified, he added.
“We urge the people in Ambon not to do any provocative acts through SMS (text message). It’s the source of the conflict as it’s misleading,” he said.
Ambon and other islands in the Maluku chain were the scene of a sectarian conflict that left a total of more than 5,000 Christians and Muslims dead between 1999 and 2002…
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: No Rights or Drinking Water for Residents in One of Islamabad’s Christian Ghettoes
Such is the fate of hundreds of residents of the France Colony, a walled area of some 600 dwellings, some of them one-room hovels for up to seven people, living in inhuman conditions and poor sanitation. Residents slam the authorities for their lack of concern about their fate and the government for its empty promises. An educational project by the Masihi Foundation could improve things.
Islamabad (AsiaNews) — Forced into a ghetto without basic human rights, Pakistani Christians often lack drinking water and decent sanitation, with up to seven people living in one-room hovels, children included. Many call the France Colony home, an area in central Islamabad that is isolated from the rest of the city by a wall. Despite complaints, nothing has changed. Now, there is a glimmer of hope after the Masihi Foundation set up a school for local children, providing them with books, bags and uniforms free of charge, a project activists hope to bring to the rest of the country.
With 1.6 per cent of the population and some 3 million believers, Pakistan’s Christian minority is the country’s second largest religious minority after Hindus. For a long time, it has been the victim of marginalisation and violence, made worse by the progressive Islamisation of the country launched by General Zia-ul-Haq in the mid-1980s.
Most Christians are rural migrants. When they arrive in the cities, they are forced to live in so-called colonies, virtual ghettoes, and take humble jobs as cleaners and sanitation workers with a status comparable to that of India’s untouchables.
The France Colony (pictured) is in the heart of Pakistan’s Federal Capital of Islamabad. It gets its name from the fact that the old French Embassy was located in the area. It has 600 dwellings, surrounded by a wall. Access is provided by one main entrance, plus three or four rarely used openings, on the other side of the compound.
Muhammad Saddique, a local Muslim, said that the wall was built after local “rich and noble Muslim families” called on city officials to protect them from the eyesore of the ‘Christian ghetto. However, this has forced Christians to use only the main gate.
Yaqoob Masih, a France Colony resident, blames the Capital Development Authority (CDA) for depriving “us of our basic rights,” such as “the right to clean drinking water” and “hygienic conditions”.
The irony is that “90 per cent per cent of the population in the France Colony works as cleaners for CDA and keeps the capital clean. Yet, their own colony has unhygienic conditions.”
The colony residents live in overcrowded spaces with no access to basic facilities,” Shahid Masih, another resident, said. “Residents have not been given ownership rights despite repeated promises by the federal government. I live in one room with a family of seven”.
Sheeba Sadiq also lives in France Colony. “Each incoming government makes populist claims about rights regularisations.” But “in the second decade of the 21st century, we are still living in subhuman conditions.”
Yet, amid the degradation, one initiative has brought some hope for a better life to the Christians of France Colony.
Earlier this year, the Masihi Foundation, a Pakistan humanitarian organisation, set up its own school in the area, providing free English medium quality education to the residents of France Colony.
It is the first programme of its kind for a Christian community living in the capital. Students get free books, bags, uniforms and other educational material.
Activists are hoping to replicate the initiative in other parts of the country.
“I am grateful to the Foundation for thinking about us,” colony resident Abid Masih said. “I want my children educated so that they can live a better life.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan’s Energy Crisis and U.S. Interests
John C.K.Daly
On 7 October 2001, the opening phase of “Operation Enduring Freedom” U.S. military campaign began, which quickly drove the Taliban and its al-Qaida affiliates from Kabul on 12 November.
Since then, 1,760 U.S. troops have been killed in Afghanistan along with 942 International Security Assistance Force soldiers, a total of 2,702 foreign military dead, with no end in sight.
In a March 2008 article Richard Holbrooke, then a foreign policy adviser in Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign, coined the term “Af-Pak” in an article to describe the broader regional context of military operations in Afghanistan, acknowledging that in order to win in Afghanistan, Pakistan to the east must be pacified as well.
Holbrooke’s neologism was a belated acknowledgement that U.S. military operations had in fact begun across the Durand Line, the Afghan-Pakistan border in 2004, which Pashtuns on both side of the border have regarded as an artificial construct since its unilateral declaration by British authorities in India in 1893. In 2004 the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency’s Special Activities Division undertook the attacks on targets in northwest Pakistan using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) drones, primarily in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) along northwest Pakistan’s Afghan border.
Carried out with the connivance of Pakistani President Asif Zadari, the UAV attacks have intensified, greatly increasing anger throughout FATA.
Now however, there are faint glimmers of new thinking in Washington that two new weapons for the “hearts and minds” of Pakistanis may have appeared — the light bulb, and potable water.
If all goes well, then the U.S. government is to sign off on providing Islamabad with $1 billion to complete its Diamer-Bhasha dam, with the offer reportedly being finalized during the upcoming Pakistan-U.S. strategic dialogue on energy later this month. If approved, the project will be the U.S. government’s largest foreign aid project to Pakistan.
The Diamer-Bhasha dam straddles the Indus River in Pakistan’s Gilgit-Baltistan region of occupied Kashmir. The Diamer-Bhasha dam when complete would both produce 4,500 megawatts of electricity as well as store 8.5 million acre feet of water that Pakistan could use for irrigation and drinking.
What is most extraordinary about Washington’s purported efforts is not only that it is willing to delve into the Pakistani energy cesspool, but it is willing to do so in an area that has been contested by Pakistan and India since 1947, the major source of Muslim guerrilla insurgency for the last 64 years.
Apparently there are elements in Washington’s bureaucracy realizing that Pakistan’s population’s increased access to reliable electricity and water sources are in fact useful corollaries to UAV strikes in wining “hearts and minds.”
It is not as if Pakistan’s energy woes are new — since 2006 Pakistani energy analysts have warned of an impending energy crisis. Pakistan’s government has implemented rolling blackouts across the country and earlier this year government officials announced that it will take at least seven years to build up electrical generation capacity to support the entire country. The black outs have taken a huge economic toll on Pakistan’s textile industry and have resulted in plant shutdowns and layoffs.
Any U.S. aid will doubtless have a fair percentage of its money “diverted” — President Zadari, when merely Prime Minister Bennazir Bhutto’s husband, was known as “Mr. Ten Percent’ for his alleged take on foreign projects.
That said, the issue remains one of “hearts and minds,” as the U.S., according to Holbrooke’s comments, now increasingly view the “Ak-Pak” theater of military operations as a unified one.
So, what can Islamabad offer its disaffected population to support the central authorities?
Electricity and access to water could go a long way towards convincing incipient jihadis that their government does indeed care, and that supporting it as opposed to tacking it could produce further benefits.
Consider — the Obama administration for fiscal year 2012 is requesting $120 billion for military operations in Afghanistan, a figure which pales into insignificance alongside the modest $1 billion allocated to complete Pakistan’s Diamer-Bhasha dam.
While doubtless a significant amount of this aid will disappear down Pakistani corruption ratholes (surprise), it would still seem on balance a bargain in every sense of the word, as jihadis could stay at home, read to their children after dark and cook their dinners, and electricity and water would seem to be more amenable elements in winning Pakistani “hearts and minds” than further Predator UAV strikes…
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US Predators Kill 4 ‘Militants’ In North Waziristan Strike
US Predators killed four “militants” in Pakistan’s Taliban-controlled tribal agency of North Waziristan today, ending a 19-day-long lull in attacks.
The unmanned, CIA-operated Predators or Reapers fired a pair of missiles at a vehicle and a compound in the village of Hisokhel in the Mir Ali area, Pakistani intelligence officials told AFP.
The target of the strike has not been disclosed. No senior Taliban or al Qaeda operatives were reported killed in today’s strike.
Mir Ali is a terrorist haven
The Mir Ali area is in the sphere of influence of Abu Kasha al Iraqi, an al Qaeda leader who serves as a key link to the Taliban and supports al Qaeda’s external operations network. Taliban leader Hafiz Gul Bahadar and the Haqqani Network also operate in the Mir Ali area. Moreover, Mir Ali is a known hub for al Qaeda’s military and external operations councils.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Japan’s Industry Minister Resigns for Calling Fukushima ‘Town of Death’
Japan”s industry minister, Yoshio Hachiro, has reportedly stepped down in the wake of the criticism he drew after he describing the nuclear no-go area surrounding the damaged Fukushima power plant as a “town of death”.
Hachiro, who was the new in charge of handling the country’s nuclear crisis, resigned right after eight days into the job, the Telegraph reports.
The politician caused further trouble when he joked with reporters about infecting people with radiation from his clothes following a tour of Fukushima.
The departed minister”s comments about a “town of death” apparently angered the displaced residents of the region as the government is unable to provide them with a firm timetable for their return.
According to the paper, his departure is thought to be a blow to the nation”s sixth new prime minister in five years, Yoshihiko Noda, who apologised for the minister”s “inappropriate” comments after he stepped down.
It marks a trembling start to Noda”s new tenure as he attempts to restore the morale of the nation and boost the momentum of the recovery process following the departure of his strongly criticised predecessor, the paper said.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
Pirates Kidnap British Wife, Husband Shot Dead in Raid on Luxury Kenyan Holiday Resort
Pirates have murdered a British tourist and kidnapped his wife from an exclusive Kenyan resort.
David and Judith Tebbutt were attacked at night by a gang carrying guns within hours of arriving in a beach cottage close to the border with lawless Somalia.
Armed bandits arrived at the private resort by speedboat at midnight on Saturday, stormed into the couple’s secluded hut, which had just a piece of cloth as the door, and demanded all their money.
It is thought Mr Tebbutt, 58, who is finance director of publishers Faber and Faber, tried to stop the gang but he died from a single gunshot wound to the chest.
The pirates then forced Mrs Tebbutt, 56, into the motorboat and locals reported that they sped off north in the direction of Somalia.
Despite helicopters, speed boats and a spotter plane deployed in the search, no sightings of her have been reported.
Last night, there were suggestions Mrs Tebbutt had been taken by an Islamist group Harakat al-Shabab al Mujahideen, an extremist group based in Somalia, The Times said.
The couple’s family were too upset to talk last night as they waited anxiously for further news.
If Somali pirates are to blame, it would be the first time they had moved on to land to capture western hostages in what, at sea, has become a lucrative multi-million pound business in ransom demands.
All the other hostages — including British couple Paul and Rachel Chandler — have been taken during raids on ships and yachts in the Indian Ocean.
The Foreign Office confirmed it has sent a team from Nairobi to work with Kenyan authorities to secure Mrs Tebbutt’s release.
Kenyan police commissioner Matthew Iteere, who revealed the identity of the couple, said: ‘So far we are treating it as a bandit attack. We’ve not received any hint pointing at a terror group.
‘The gunmen gained entry very easily because only a piece of cloth was used in the place of the door at their cottage. They may contact us demanding a ransom. Maybe they are from Somalia but we cannot be certain.’
The couple are believed to have travelled to the Kenyan coast for the second part of a two-leg trip which had earlier seen them enjoy a safari in the Masai Mara game reserve.
A local hotel owner said: ‘The attackers were a gang of armed Somali men who broke into the resort and killed the man. They then took the woman. We don’t know where she is.’
The couple, from Bishop’s Stortford, Hertfordshire, have a 25-year-old son. They had only checked into the Kiwayu Safari Village resort, near the island of Lamu, hours earlier at 4pm.
They were the only holidaymakers at the resort that boasts around-the-clock security with 21 guards who patrol alongside six police officers.
A total of 18 bungalows are spread out over a mile of beach. Couples are charged £600 a night in September — the off-season, but the cost is nearer to £900 a night during the December peak season. Mick Jagger, actress Imelda Staunton and artist Tracey Emin have stayed in the bungalows and it had been considered by the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge for their honeymoon.
Despite its setting near a national reserve, the resort is barely outside the safety zone from the Somali border recommended by the Foreign Office.
A statement posted on the Foreign Office travel advice website said: ‘We continue to advise against all but essential travel to within 30 kilometres of Kenya’s border with Somalia. There have been previous attacks by Somali militia into Kenya. Three aid workers were kidnapped in July 2009, and two western nuns in November 2008.’
Last night neighbours of the Tebbutts described them as a ‘delightful’ couple who loved travelling together after their son Oliver had left home.
Mother of two Fiona Jones said: ‘They go on holiday a lot. They are hugely friendly people. They’re always stopping and saying hello.
‘David used to be a very keen runner, and stopped because he had problems with his knees or hips. I can’t remember which, but he had an operation to replace both.
‘But he and Judith were still very active. They liked to walk to town, and were also very keen gardeners.
‘They have a beautiful garden, where they keep chickens.’
Another neighbour said: ‘They moved here in the early 80s. Oliver is a super boy. This will be absolutely terrible for him.’
Neighbours said he studied at Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design in London, and now makes bespoke wooden furniture in the West Country.
The kidnapping follows the ordeal that Paul and Rachel Chandler went through when they were held by Somali pirates for more than a year. Retired civil engineer Mr Chandler and his wife, now aged 60 and 57 respectively, had left their Kent home and were near the Seychelles when they were kidnapped from their 38ft yacht on October 23, 2009.
Describing their story later to the Daily Mail, they recalled their terror as gun-toting pirates stormed their yacht, their anger that a nearby Royal Navy ship failed to intervene and their brutal treatment at the hands of their captors.
They revealed how their family paid £280,000, only for the pirates to refuse to let them go, and how they were told they were going to be killed days before they were finally freed. They were released on November 14, 2010 — after 388 days — when a ransom of £625,000 was paid.
A Foreign Office spokesman said: ‘We can confirm two British nationals were attacked overnight at a beach resort north of Lamu, near the Kenya-Somalia border. One was killed and another kidnapped.
‘We have deployed a consular team from our High Commission in Nairobi and are offering all possible support to the family of those involved. Our thoughts are with them at this difficult time.
‘We are working to secure the safe and swift release of the British national who has been kidnapped and ask those involved to show compassion and release the individual immediately.’
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
Guatemala Presidential Elections, Forerunner Extreme Right
(AGI) Guatemala — The forerunner is retired General Otto Perez Molina, candidate of the opposition extreme-right Patriotic Party. After the tallying the first ballot of votes in the presidential elections held in Guatemala yesterday, Perez Molina is the at the lead with 37.16% of the votes in the first 5% of the votes counted. In any case, also the other two most voted candidates are right-wing.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
98 Tunisian Migrants Land in Lampedusa
(AGI) Lampedusa — New landing of migrants in Lampedusa. Ninety eight Tunisian, among them one woman, reached last night the Favaloro pier. They were preceded on Saturday by 577 others, women and children included, who arrived in Lampedusa on 9 unseaworthy vessels. At this point some 1200 migrants are guests of the Lampedusa reception center. Their transfer is in pending.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
How 2m East Europeans Signed to Get UK Benefit
FRESH evidence of how Labour “opened the floodgates” to workers from eastern Europe has emerged — with details showing how nearly two million signed up to one key “control” scheme.
Figures given to Parliament revealed that in total, two million applications were accepted for the Worker Registration Scheme from citizens of the A8 countries of eastern Europe, which joined the EU in 2004.
The scheme, which began in May 2004 and ended on April 30 this year, was designed to establish the incomers’ legal right to work in the UK and to claim certain benefits.
The figures, from Immigration Minister Damian Green, revealed the nationalities of applicants.
Poland was the biggest source of would-be workers at 1.2 million. It was followed by Lithuania, Slovakia, Latvia, Hungary, Czech Republic, Estonia and Slovenia, from which only 1,700 applications were received.
The table also revealed how rarely people were turned down, with 1.92 million approved and just 13,368, 0.7 per cent, refused.
Previous research has suggested how even the high figures on the scheme will significantly underestimate total immigration, as some, including the self-employed, were not required to register and an unknown number will simply not have done so.
The figures fuelled further criticism of Labour for giving the A8 citizens full working rights here when most other EU countries kept them out of their jobs markets for as long as possible. The numbers arriving vastly outstripped Labour’s predictions of just 13,000 a year.
| — Hat tip: An EDL buck | [Return to headlines] |
More Tunisians Land in Lampedusa During Night
(ANSAmed) — LAMPEDUSA (AGRIGENTO), SEPTEMBER 12 — More immigrants landed last night in Lampedusa: 98 Tunisians, including one woman, landed at 1:40 on the Favarolo pier after being rescued by a Guardia di Finanza patrol boat.
Saturday a total of 577 people from Maghreb landed on the island, while another 36 landed on Linosa, all of whom departed from Tunisia’s shores aboard 8 large boats. In the reception centre in Lampedusa, where several protests have been reported in recent days, at present there are 1,200 immigrants.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
9-11, Ten Years Later: Islam’s Unmitigated Success
Address at The Rockford Institute, September 8, 2011
by Srdja Trifkovic
On the morning of September 11, 2001, I thought that the Muslims had made a big blunder. At first I believed that they had scored an auto-goal: this was the sort of thing that would shake up the Western world, wake it up to the fact that the Islamic demographic deluge—a process that had been in full swing for some two decades prior to 2001—would now be subjected to some long-overdue critical scrutiny to which the politicians would have to respond. I hoped that the end-result might be the kind of formative, life-altering awakening that, particularly in the case of Western Europe, would prevent our further slide into self-destruction.
This pretty illusion lasted for about 48 hours. It disappeared as soon as I saw President George W. Bush go into the mosque in Washington D.C. later that same week, dutifully taking off his shoes before declaring that Islam was the religion of peace and tolerance, that the perpetrators of 9-11 did not really understand Islam and were distorting the message of the Prophet. When in addition I saw identically intoned editorials in Le Monde, The Guardian, Corriere della Sera, The Independent, or the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, it became clear to me that the Western elite class was behaving in 2001 exactly the way it did in 1937 and in 1981.
Why those particular years? Well, in 1937 the Moscow Trials were at their height. The trials of Comrades Kamenev, Zinoviev and others were followed by those of Marshal Tukhachevsky and a host of other Red Army officers. They were some of the most egregious misuses of the quasi-judicial process ever used in history. And yet, just as the Gulag machine was switching into high gear, the apologia of Stalin in the Western world was reaching a hysterical pitch. If you read Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon,” or—at the opposite end of the moral divide—Walter Duranty’s New York Times dispatches from Moscow, you’ll know what I am talking about. The lies, the inability or unwillingness to tell the truth about what was going on in Moscow in 1937 was a sure sign of a strange phenomenon: The more murderous, the more outrageously antihuman Communist behavior became, the more determined the Western elite class was to come to its defense, as subsequently witnessed by Mao, Tito, Che and Ho.
Fast-forward to 1981, when the AIDS epidemic was officially recognized as such. Its direct link with promiscuous homosexuality was soon established and remains undeniable. Lo and behold, that same instant the grandsons and granddaughters of Walter Duranty & Co. suddenly discovered that the Gay Lifestyle is one of the most valuable contributions to our multicultural civilization, worthy of praise and emulation. Any attempt to link that particular “lifestyle” and its idiosyncrasies—such as hundreds of partners, randomly encountered—with the grim harvest of death was banned. Contrary to evidence it was asserted that AIDS could happen to all of us at any moment. It became a metaphysical evil unconnected to any particular form of human behavior, just like “terrorism” was to become two decades later.
The aftermath of 9-11 proves that the spirit of celebrating death and depravity is alive and well all over the Western world. The events of that day triggered off an immediate and massive wave of officially sanctioned Islamophilia, akin to the elite class Sovietophilia at the height of the Purges and sodomophilia amidst the AIDS epidemic. It soon transpired that, far from committing a blunder, the Muslims scored an incredible coup on 9-11. They effectively tested the limits of “tolerance” of the Western elite class at an entirely new order of magnitude—and they found out that there are no limits! It became obvious to the Muslims that the more outrageous you are in your stated intentions—and nobody has been more frank in this respect than the founder of Islam, both in his alleged revelations and in the Hadith—the more determined your Western fellow travelers will be to assure their subjects that Muslim intentions are not like that at all.
The geopolitical harvest for the Jihadists has been rich and rewarding. The biggest prize of them all was Turkey. Not only was it the most populous of the ostensibly secularized Muslim societies but it was also once ruled by radical reformers most determined to break with the Islamic mindset and tradition and to turn Turkey into a modern European nation-state…
| — Hat tip: Srdja Trifkovic | [Return to headlines] |
9/11 Anniversary: The End of Islamic Extremism is Far From Nigh
by Michael Nazir-Ali, former Bishop of Rochester
It is often described as the day that changed the world but, in fact, 9/11 only brought home to the West what had been simmering, and sometimes breaking out violently, in different parts of the world for nearly half a century.
The effects on America and Europe were nothing short of traumatic. There was an immediate questioning of a growing “globalism” and the emergence of a siege mentality. Heightened security has eased people’s minds, but there still lurks a basic anxiety about when, and where, the next attack will be. Siren voices sometimes ask us to believe that 9/11 was caused by the pathological actions of a few, and that all Muslims should not be blamed for acts of terror. It is true that there are many moderate Muslims who condemn unequivocally what has been done in the name of their religion and assert that Islam had nothing to do with it. But we still need to ask how terrorism on such a vast scale was possible.
Apologists, both Western and Muslim, claim that Islamist extremism and terrorism have been bred by resentment of Western power. The military dominance of Israel, the roots of the Kashmir dispute, the megalomania of the Shah of Iran, and Suez are all seen to be examples of Western hubris and ill-will towards the Muslim world. We can acknowledge that these have contributed to anti-Western sentiment in the Muslim world, but it would be a serious mistake to believe this provides a complete account of the extremism and the terror that has resulted from it.
At the heart of extremism is an ideology, a world-view — and not just concerning the perceived wrong done to the Muslim Umma (or people). Such an ideology expects Islam to dominate rather than to accept a subservient place in world affairs. It promotes pan-Islam and the ultimate rejection of nation-states, even Muslim ones. It may be that some extremists chatter about an Islamic state, in this part of the world or that; however, its ultimate aim is a single Islamic political, social, economic and spiritual entity. For many, the restoration of the Caliphate is integral to this project and, given past history, we should not be sanguine that Western powers will not collude with it if they believe it promotes a temporary self-interest. Such a vision of pan-Islam is not restricted to the Muslim world as it is now but also includes lands “lost” to Islam whether that be India, Palestine, East Timor, South Sudan or the Iberian countries.
Since the death of bin Laden, there have been reports of the demise of Islamist extremism itself. Nothing could be further from the truth. It is true that al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan and Afghanistan has been weakened, but it has not been eliminated. If we think of al-Qaeda more as a franchise than a monolithic organisation, it is flourishing as Al-Shabaab in Somalia, AQ in the Arabian Peninsula, in Iraq and in Jordan. In addition, there are the murderous Lashkars in Pakistan, where the Taliban still operates with impunity; in Afghanistan, the Taliban still retain significant capacity.
This is not to mention Shi’a radicalism which, in the form of Hizbollah, is now present on the borders of Israel. The radical Shi’a crescent is waxing all over the Middle-East and it has enormous security implications for states in the area and beyond. The so-called Arab Spring is not a single event but a mosaic of different interests and people. An element of youthful idealism has been present and secular points of view have been represented, but well-organised Islamist programmes are at the fore. The re-emergence of politicised Salafism in Egypt, and the violence associated with it, has already given the Coptic Christian community cause for concern. In Libya, al-Qaeda and the Taliban-related fighters have been in the vanguard of the struggle to oust Gaddafi. People whom the West would bomb in other circumstances have been the beneficiaries of Western air cover in Libya.
So what should be done about the rise of this kind of Islamism? In the Muslim world, the answer is clear. Democracy is not enough in itself or it could simply become a tyranny of the radicalised. It must be accompanied by internationally backed guarantees of liberties for women, non-Muslims and even moderate Muslim opinion. There must be one law for all and the equality of all before the law. A common view of citizenship will prevent the re-appearance of the dhimma for non-Muslims, under which they are little better than subject peoples without equal rights.
In the West, too, citizenship is where to begin. This means the West will need, once again, to acknowledge the Judaeo-Christian tradition and aspects of the Enlightenment that have made it what it is. How can we expect others to integrate when we are suffering from amnesia about our own identity? The time for post-imperial hangovers is over. It will mean dismantling the structures of isolation that have been built up in the name of multiculturalism, and the encouragement of mobility and engagement across religious and communal divides. We need more integration in housing and schools; greater mobility in higher education and employment. We need a commitment to English as the lingua franca and the teaching of history that reveals the “golden thread” of a cohesive world-view.
We should be clear that integration does not necessarily imply assimilation. It is possible to be fully integrated as citizens but also to hold on to our culture, religion and language.
The chattering classes, who criticised the police for their absence during the recent riots, are now disparaging about their visible presence this weekend — but it is well-planned security that has deterred a repeat of 9/11. While being alert to the importance of personal liberties, and to the misuse of power, we will have to accept some curtailment of our preferences to live in even relative peace in the next 10 years.
* Michael Nazir-Ali is now President of OXTRAD, the Oxford Centre for Training, Research, Advocacy and Dialogue
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Frattini Addresses Rise in ‘Christianophobia’
(AGI) Munich — Speaking to religious leaders at the XXV International Meeting for Peace organized by the St Egidio Community in Munich, Germany, Foreign Minister Franco Frattini spoke today of the growing “Christianophobia” that is spreading in various parts of the world.”I am thinking,” said the minister, “of the rise in abuse and discrimination addressed at religious minorities.” .
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Looking Back on Sept. 11
The 10th anniversary of the World Trade Center terrorist attacks is a chance for all of us to reflect productively.
The 10th anniversary of the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11 is this Sunday. This anniversary should be an opportunity for us to take a step back, analyze what happened that day 10 years ago, consult our values and reset our course. In the aftermath of the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon, after mourning the victims, many Americans demanded retaliation against the terrorists. But those attacks showed us what happens when people resort to violence to achieve their objectives. Reflecting on the pain and suffering the violence of Sept. 11 caused should check our instinct to retaliate against it with violence of our own. We should be above the bloodlust of revenge; we should reject the doctrine of “an eye for an eye” precisely because we’ve seen its tragic consequences on our own soil.
As Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “The end of violence or the aftermath of violence is bitterness. The aftermath of nonviolence is reconciliation and the creation of a beloved community.” Violent and bitter reactions to the attacks are understandable, but they play directly into the terrorists’ game. Taking that bait has led to a cycle of violence that has only taken thousands more innocent American men and women from us, not to mention thousands of other innocents overseas. The last 10 years are a reminder that violence destroys, whether it is done in the name of a distortion of religion or in the name of liberty and democracy. If we want the cycle of violence and aggression to stop, we must be the ones to stop it. Instead of our reaction being anger and vengeful hatred toward the perpetrators of the attack when the video footage is inevitably played and replayed this weekend, we should take our cue from the reaction of the heroic first responders. We should challenge ourselves to react as they did — with compassion for their fellow men and women, with bravery and courage in the face of danger, and by setting aside their self-interest for the good of others. If we can react to events with these same qualities, rather than dwelling on the understandable immediate emotions of anger or hurt, we will have gained the moral high ground. Retaliating with anger and force cedes that ground.
Furthermore, we shouldn’t let others use the attacks to sell us the myth of “security.” When someone says they are selling security, what they are really selling is the fear of insecurity, and fear is what makes us retaliate with violence and anger. We should not settle for security; we should strive for peace. The two are not the same. Erecting walls, physical, social and otherwise, against others out of fear may give the illusion of security, but it is not a solution. It does not only lock “them” out; it locks “us” in. As Jean Jacques Rousseau wrote, “A tranquil life is also had in dungeons.” Rather than locking ourselves in a tighter and tighter cell, we should use the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 to remember those lost, reflect on that excruciating pain, and firmly reject anything that causes more of that pain and loss. Rather than coiling into a ball of fear and anger, we can show our moral character. We can defy the terrorists who attacked us that day and refuse to let them rule over us by rejecting fear and embracing love, by opening ourselves up instead of shutting ourselves off and by replacing desire for revenge with compassion for each other. Embracing that spirit of unity and togetherness is the way to truly honor those we lost on Sept. 11, 2001.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
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