The renowned “Swedish” poet Mohammed Omar has formed a new political party to fight “the dangers of Zionism”. The Social Democrats will presumably welcome Mr. Omar’s party into a coalition to stem the threat of the Sweden Democrats.In Greece, bomb attacks continue against police stations and other targets as the wave of terrorism intensifies.
Thanks to C. Cantoni, Esther, Fjordman, Gaia, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, JD, JP, Nilk, Sean O’Brian, TV, Zenster, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
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Ron Paul: Audit Fed ‘Gutted’ In Committee
Bank-connected congressman blamed for undermining bill
Rep. Ron Paul, R-Texas, has complained that the bill he sponsored calling for an audit of the Federal Reserve has been “gutted” by congressional committee, pointing specifically to a legislator whose campaign coffers have been boosted by the banking industry.
As WND reported, Paul sponsored H.R. 1207, a bill requiring the Federal Reserve — an organization that’s independent from the U.S. government but nonetheless oversees U.S. monetary policy — be opened to oversight by Congress. The plan compiled over 300 co-sponsors in the House before being sent to committee.
[…]
Paul blamed the chairman of the House Financial Service Committee’s panel on domestic monetary policy, Rep. Mel Watt, D-N.C., for eliminating “just about everything” in preparation for the bill’s consideration on the floor of the House.
Watt, is has also been revealed, has significant connections to the banking industry.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
An ‘Option’ We Can’t Refuse
Initially, the public option was to be mandatory for the reform package, but optional for individuals. However, for people who did not have “approved” insurance through their employer, the option was optional, but if they did not sign up they would be fined, so it was mandatory. It was optional for those who had “approved” plans, but it was mandatory that employers offer the option. So, it was optional for employees, but mandatory for employers. Additionally, if the health plans offered by an employer were not “approved” by the health commissioner, the public option was mandatory for employers and employees. So, it was mandatory, but in an optional way. Or, it was optionally mandatory.
Now, Mr. Reid proposes an increased level of “optionality.” It could be considered an additional degree of freedom, so to speak. The states will have the option of whether or not they want to participate. If particular states want the plan, then it will be optionally mandatory or mandatorily optional for the people of that state, as noted above. However, whether or not particular states want the option, they will have to pay for the option for all of the states that do want it. So, payment for the option is not optional. Therefore, all of the states will want it as they will have to pay for it anyway, as will their citizens through taxes. So, the new state option is mandatory insofar as payment and is therefore not optional.
The public option sounds a lot like “an offer we can’t refuse.” What does that say about the ruling party? This all sounds like an unending episode of the “Sopranos.” The public option is not an option. It is a mandate for a single-payer system, and we are the payers.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Census Count Diminishes Citizenship
A funny thing happened on the way to the 2010 census. A United States senator stood up and said the next census will be a fraud on the American people.
Louisiana Sen. David Vitter set off a firestorm recently when he introduced an amendment proposing that the upcoming census ask respondents if they are U.S. citizens, and if not, if they are here as Legal Permanent Residents. Under his amendment, the census would count all persons, but illegal aliens, tourists, foreign students or other temporary visitors would not be included for the purpose of the congressional apportionment or divvying up federal funds.
This seems like common sense to most Americans, but in fact, illegal aliens and millions of others here on a temporary basis have traditionally been included in the census count. This was not a big problem in past decades while those numbers were small, but today, we have over 30 million persons in the country who are neither citizens nor Legal Permanent Residents (“green card holders”).
Counting these millions of non-citizens as equal to citizens for all census purposes seriously distorts our nation’s politics and government. How so? States with high numbers of illegal aliens profit by gaining more congressional seats and more federal grant monies. This creates a perverse incentive for states to attract illegal aliens to increase their clout in Congress and their share of federal funds. By the same token, states with laws discouraging illegal aliens from taking up residence are penalized by losing representation in Congress.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Hate-Crimes Law = Fascism
“All violent crimes are hate crimes, and all crime victims deserve equal justice. This law [Hate Crimes Prevention Act] is a grave threat to the First Amendment because it provides special penalties based on what people think, feel, or believe.”
~ Eric Stanley, Alliance Defense Fund
Chelsea Schilling, my colleague at WorldNetDaily, I thought did an excellent job in her recent article on this administration’s latest act against America, “Obama signs ‘hate-crimes’ bill into law.”
Hate-crimes bill? How can this be? I thought the Constitution said that Congress shall make no law against religious freedom or the right to hold political opinions and express them.
The Democrats were Machiavellian enough to link this hate-crimes bill to their new $680 billion bill called the 2010 National Defense Authorization Act which many Republicans felt compelled to support to stand behind our troops fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Why the urgency for a hate-crimes bill?
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
How Might the U.S. Support a Relationship of Mutual Respect With Muslims Around the World?
As the great-grandson of the Liberal Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, and as a rising star in the Foreign Office, Britain’s ambassador to Cairo should be fluent in the carefully crafted language of negotiation and diplomacy.
But Dominic Asquith has caused upset among Muslims after comments he wrote in a blog in which he entered the hotly contested and sensitive debate over whether women should be allowed to wear the niqab in Egypt. Mr Asquith, 52, described the niqab — the full-face veil — as a “symbol” of Islam rather than central to the religion and insisted that not wearing it did not make women any less Islamic.
He also compared the wearing of the niqab to women beginning to attend Catholic churches without the head veil in the 1960s, adding that “change is always difficult”.
Muslims commenting on his blog accused him of representing a country with a “bloody history” and claiming that the “Catholic church is the last place to learn lessons from”.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
How to Save the Country
The United States is on the brink of signing a new climate-change treaty that many people believe will be the mechanism that ushers in global governance. Global governance has been under construction for many years. Every new treaty in which the United States participates requires the surrender of a little more sovereignty. International treaties have influenced domestic policy throughout the 20th century, forcing the federal government to impose restrictions on individual freedom — restrictions that are not authorized in the enumerated powers set forth in the U.S. Constitution.
For example, nothing in Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution empowers the federal government to restrict the use of private property. The Endangered Species Act, enacted to bring the United States into compliance with several international treaties, gives the federal government the power to dictate what a private land owner may and may not do on his own land. This is only one of the more obvious examples of how a treaty is used to extend the power of the federal government beyond the limitations set forth by the Constitution.
When the Constitution was written, senators were chosen by the legislature of each state. The power of the states was substantially diminished by the passage of the 17th Amendment in 1913, which called for senators to be elected by popular vote, rather than by the legislature. This loss of the state legislature’s power to influence the central government is especially pertinent to the ratification of treaties. The Constitution requires two-thirds of the senators present to vote in the affirmative to ratify a treaty.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Paganism, Just Another Religion for Military and Academia
If personal tradition holds, just before sundown Saturday, Michael York will stand before a colonial-style wooden cabinet in his bayside town house here and light a candle. As night falls, it will illuminate the surrounding objects: tarot cards, Tibetan silver bowls, a bell and statues or icons of deities like the Greek earth-mother, Gaia, and the Lithuanian thunder god, Perkunas.
[…]
Nothing did more to secure Paganism’s place in the religious mainstream, though, than a highly serious, indeed somber, court battle. Brought by Americans United for Separation of Church and State on behalf of Circle Sanctuary and several widows, the decade-long litigation sought permission from the federal Department of Veterans Affairs to have the gravestones of deceased Wiccan soldiers marked with the symbol of the pentacle.
Since winning that right as part of an out-of-court settlement two years ago, Wicca followers have marked more than a dozen military graves with the five-pointed star.
“This got us the most widespread support and had the most wide-ranging import,” Ms. Fox said. “Our symbol was literally being carved in stone and taking its place alongside the symbols of other religions. Our religion was at last getting equal treatment. It was one of those crossroads moments.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
State Dept Reaching Out to Muslims; UK Diplomat in Egypt Veil
Secretary Clinton travels to Pakistan October 27-30. She then travels to Morocco November 2-3 to participate in the 6th Forum for the Future. The Secretary recently stated, “….Our nation seeks a new beginning with Muslims around the world, a relationship based on mutual interest and mutual respect. It’s a relationship that requires us to listen, share ideas, and find areas of common ground in order to expand a peaceful, prosperous future.”
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
The Constitution? How Quaint!
A reporter finally — finally! — asked House Speaker Nancy Pelosi a version of this simple and logical question.
CNSNews.com: “Madam Speaker, where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?”
Pelosi: “Are you serious? Are you serious?”
CNSNews.com: “Yes, yes I am.”
Pelosi then shook her head before taking a question from another reporter. Her press spokesman, Nadeam Elshami, then told CNSNews.com that asking the speaker of the House where the Constitution authorized Congress to mandate that individual Americans buy health insurance was not a “serious question.”
“You can put this on the record,” said Elshami. “That is not a serious question.”
Yes, Madam Speaker, it is a serious question. In fact, it is probably the most serious question anyone could ever ask. The reason you’re flustered, Nancy dear, is because you know exactly what the answer is … namely, NONE. There is no authority in the Constitution to require people to buy health insurance.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Third Party Challenges Are Warning Sign
NEW YORK (Nov. 1) — Third party candidates could upend two major races in off-year elections Tuesday, and the success of those candidacies is a warning shot fired at both major parties by voters angry at government and disillusioned by politics as usual.
In the New Jersey governor’s race, independent Chris Daggett has gone from afterthought to player in a contest pitting the unpopular incumbent, Democrat Jon Corzine, against Republican Chris Christie.
In New York’s 23rd Congressional district, where longtime Republican Rep. John McHugh stepped down to be Army secretary, prominent national Republicans have snubbed GOP candidate Dede Scozzafava, a state assemblywoman who supports abortion rights and gay marriage, in favor of Conservative Party candidate Doug Hoffman.
Daggett is not expected to win the New Jersey contest, and the GOP split in upstate New York could throw the race to Democrat Bill Owens.
But the impact of those candidacies on the high-profile contests points to an anti-incumbent, anti-establishment sentiment that could be a prevailing theme in the 2010 congressional elections and beyond.
“What it says is the public is looking for less self-interested parties and candidates who can reflect the needs of a very frustrated public,” said Douglas Astolfi, a history professor at Florida’s St. Leo University. “We have two wars and we’re in a recession that neither party seems to address in any positive way. There’s a deep sense that government has abandoned the common man. People are frustrated and angry.”
Both parties ignore such sentiment at their peril in 2010 and perhaps into the 2012 presidential race.
In Senate contests from Florida and Kentucky to New Hampshire next year, conservatives furious at the Republican establishment are mounting primary challenges against more mainstream candidates favored by the national party.
On the other side, Democratic strategists worry that progressives, disgusted by the big money bank bailout and disillusioned with President Barack Obama’s lack of fight on issues such as a government-run health insurance plan, might keep some people from voting. That could cost Democrats seats up and down the ballot.
Political operatives are keeping an eye on independent voters — an important and growing group that often decides elections. Will these voters send a signal to politicians Tuesday as well or will they stay home and leave it to the more ideologically driven base voters in both parties?
That appears to be happening in the New York race, where strategists believe Scozzafava has faded and it’s now a contest between Hoffman and Owens.
Sensing opportunity, ambitious conservatives have jumped in to endorse Hoffman. The most prominent is Sarah Palin, the 2008 GOP vice presidential nominee and a potential high-profile contender for the White House in 2012.
Minnesota Gov. Tim Pawlenty, also looking at 2012, has announced his support for Hoffman. So has Chuck DeVore, a conservative California assemblyman hoping to run in a U.S. Senate primary against Carly Fiorina, the former Hewlett Packard executive backed by national Republicans to take on the Democratic incumbent, Barbara Boxer.
Former U.S. House Speaker Newt Gingrich has endorsed Scozzafava, drawing the enmity of conservative bloggers scoffing at the possibility of a Gingrich presidential run in 2012.
Hoffman’s rise has infuriated leaders of New York’s Republican Party, who insist Scozzafava is a good fit for the district. That district favored Obama last year, but is one of the few still held by Republicans in the Northeast.
“What risks being lost in the midst of all this is who will be the best candidate to represent the people of that district,” said the state party director, Tom Basile.
In New Jersey, Daggett, a businessman and former Environmental Protection Agency official, has appealed to voters who are turned off by both Corzine and Christie and fed up with the candidates’ campaign bloodbath. Daggett was widely believed to be the winner of a televised candidate debate and has been endorsed by The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J., the state’s largest newspaper.
John Weingart, associate director of Rutgers University’s Eagleton Institute of Politics, said Daggett’s candidacy had succeeded in giving disillusioned voters a competent and credible alternative to Corzine and Christie.
But Weingart said lack of money, the institutional obstacles to a third party candidacy and a growing awareness among voters of the ideological differences between Christie and Corzine would cause Daggett’s campaign to stall.
“To vote for an independent candidate, you have to believe either that the person can win or that there is no difference you care about between the Democratic and the Republican candidate,” Weingart said.
A Quinnipiac Poll released Wednesday found Corzine ahead of Christie by a 43-38 percent margin with 13 percent for Daggett and 5 percent undecided. But a majority of voters said they had an unfavorable view of both Corzine and Christie.
In the 1992 presidential race, money wasn’t an issue for billionaire businessman Ross Perot, whose rise was powered by the same kind of populist anger brewing today. Perot vastly altered the dynamic of that contest, running as an independent and winning 19 percent of the vote.
Democrat Bill Clinton was the beneficiary of that three-way contest, taking away the presidency from George H.W. Bush with just a plurality of the vote. Clinton did so in part by adding a populist flair to his message, drawing voters who had been attracted to Perot.
Detachment from the major parties some of the success of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, another billionaire who appealed to a city craving for competence in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks.,
Bloomberg, who ran as a Republican that year, announced in 2007 that he would switch parties and become and independent, leading to speculation he would run for president at some point. Bloomberg is expected to cruise to a third term on Election Day.
| — Hat tip: Zenster | [Return to headlines] |
Where Have All Our War Heroes Gone?
Let us stop venerating the appeasers and stop treating the Gandhis, Rabins, Kings, Chamberlains and Obamas as heroes
Today Barack Hussein Obama is a million times more famous than Jeremy Glick, Todd Beamer or any of the other Flight 93 passengers who rushed the cockpit and prevented the terrorists from using their plane as guide missile. He is more famous than any of the firefighters, NYPD and PAPD police officers, as well as civilians who tried to save lives during the attacks of 9/11. He is of course vastly more famous than any of the soldiers who have died over the last eight years fighting terrorism.
In Israel, the preparations are underway for the annual Rabin commemorations. The former Prime Minister is not being remembered for his shelling of a ship full of Jewish refugees and arms being brought in by Nationalist Zionists. He is not being remembered for his Six Day War heroism, which consisted him of having a nervous breakdown and then having a helmet plopped on his head for that famous Jerusalem photo, incidentally a photo that conservative general, Rehavam Ze’evi, who would later be murdered by the same terrorists that Rabin helped bring into Israel, is routinely cropped out of. No, Rabin is remembered signing the disastrous Oslo accords with Arafat, turning over a sizable portion of Israel to terrorists, and creating a disaster that has cost the lives of a great number of Israelis in the process. Naturally Rabin is remembered as a hero, and is vastly more famous than of the soldiers and civilians murdered because of his policies.
And that in sum total is the problem with the world today. Our cultural heroes are not the people who fight evil or save lives, but who pimp appeasement in the name of peace. Every insipid quote from them about non-violence is repeated and savored, treated as a great insight into how we should all live. It doesn’t matter whether their actual lives bore any resemblance to their fictional lives.
In real life Gandhi was a sadistic hypocrite who flirted with Nazi and Japanese occupations, viciously abused his wife and children, endorsed Apartheid so long as it excluded his fellow Indians and casually flipped from moralizing about extremes of non-violence, to endorsing even the most brutal butchery if it accomplished his political ends. That of course is not the Gandhi we know. The Gandhi we know is a saint of peace, an apostle of appeasement whose virtues are used as a model for urging us to never respond with force to the people who want to kill us.
Let us go back to America for a moment. Which American leader has an entire holiday dedicated in his name? Martin Luther King, who delivered the following speech…
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Windsor Police Arrest Pair Sought by FBI
Two Ontario men wanted in U.S. for alleged involvement in a radical Islamic group.
Two Ontario men wanted by the FBI for alleged involvement in a radical Islamic group were arrested Saturday in Windsor, Ont., days after the group’s alleged leader was killed in a shootout with the FBI.
Windsor police Staff Sergeant Dave Kigar said Mohammad Al-Sahli, 33, and Yassir Ali Khan, 30, both of Windsor, were arrested at homes in the city early Saturday morning.
“They used a tactical team due to the information as to what happened over in the arrest Dearborn (Michigan) and that resulted in a shootout,” Staff Sgt. Kigar said.
Tactical teams of RCMP and Windsor police surrounded two houses in the same area of the city and called out to people inside the homes.
Although police had concerns about violence after the Detroit shootout, the men were arrested without any trouble. Staff. Sgt. Kigar said it was not known how long they had been in Windsor or whether they owned homes there.
After the RCMP received information from the FBI the men might be in Windsor, police issued warrants for their arrests.
RCMP Sergeant Marc LaPorte said provisional warrants were issued Friday night for the two Canadians.
“We knew they were wanted in the States but we have to wait until a provisional warrant is issued in Canada,” he said. “I know their affiliated to the group in Detroit but I’m not too sure at what point they crossed into Canada if it was before the FBI takedown or after.”
They were wanted for conspiracy to commit federal crimes, Sgt. LaPorte added.
“We work continuously with U.S. authorities especially when we’re dealing with public safety concerns in regard to violent groups so we will continue to work with FBI,” Sgt. LaPorte said.
Staff Sgt. Kigar said the RCMP contacted Windsor police after receiving information from the FBI that the men were living at addresses in the Southwestern Ontario city that borders Detroit. Staff Sgt. Kigar said the men were arrested on immigration violation warrants, but added the underlying reason was the FBI investigation.
Mr. Al-Sahli and Mr. Khan are currently in custody and will appear before an Ontario Superior Court judge in Windsor on Monday to face extradition to the United States.
The arrests come just days after Mujahid Carswell, the son of an imam killed in a shootout with the FBI in Detroit Wednesday, was arrested in Windsor.
An FBI complaint, the result of a two-year-investigation, alleges all three men conspired to commit federal crimes.
The two were the last of 11 men sought in a federal criminal complaint that listed several charges, including conspiracy to sell stolen goods. However, the underlying thread is that the group espoused violence and sought to establish a Shariah-law state within the United States.
Also charged in the complaint was Luqman Ameen Abdullah, a leader of a Detroit mosque. Federal agents fatally shot him Wednesday after authorities say he resisted arrest and fired his weapon.
The FBI described Mr. Abdullah, a black Muslim, as the radical leader of a U.S. Sunni group in Detroit who expressed hatred for the government and endorsed violence.
Mr. Abdullah’s mosque says the FBI’s allegations are “utterly preposterous.”
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Business: Carrefour in Italy Focuses on Centre-North
(ANSAmed) — PARIS, OCTOBER 29 — The French large retail business, Carrefour, has decided to revise its positioning in Italy. After a drastic cost reduction policy in its Carrefour Italia branch, reports the Italian Trade Commission (ICE) office in Paris, the group is continuing its repositioning by concentrating on its business in the north and central regions, considered to be more profitable markets. The distributor has put 11 hypermarkets up for sale in the south, 4 of which have been acquired by the Coop group, and at the same time they have opened three Carrefour Express stores in Milan and two in Liguria, while another 20 sales points are expected to open by the end of 2009 along with about 40 GS supermarkets to be transformed into Carrefour Markets. Italy is the third market for the Carrefour group in terms of turnover after France and Spain. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Cambridge: Burkas Allowed in Graduation
Not that there are any students wearing a burka.
MUSLIM women will be allowed to don burkas under their mortar boards at Cambridge University graduation ceremonies.
The strict dress code for the end-ofterm events has been lifted by university dons, it emerged this week.
Muslim leaders have welcomed the rule change but BNP leader and Downing College law graduate Nick Griffin has criticised the move to allow the veil.
The university’s website outlines the hard-line dress code which is “strictly enforced at ceremonies, and if you do not observe it, you may not be permitted to graduate on a particular occasion”.
Ahsan Mohammed, a Newmarket Muslim leader, said: “I think it’s a very sensible decision by the university. I think it’s the right thing to do and I hope that others will follow.”
But Nick Griffin told the News: “It is no surprise. There are a disproportionate number of Muslim students in our colleges and universities already.
“In 20 years time it will become compulsory for all women students to wear the burka.”
The rules have been changed after Scottish students demanded they be allowed to wear kilts.
| — Hat tip: TV | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark: Planned Attack Against Secretary of Defense Weinberger in 1986
[From Islam in Europe]
Summarized from Danish: A new book “Bombeterror i København — Trusler og terror 1968-1990” (Bomb terrorism in Copenhagen — threats and terrorism 1968-1990) written by Bent Blüdnikow claims that there were terrorist attacks planned against US Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger during a May 1986 visit to Copenhagen.
Two indepdent Libyan inspired terrorist groups (one had 6 members the other 4) planned to commit various terror acts in Denmark starting May 18 and until Weinberger left the country — American banks or possibly an important American personality. One of the famous Middle Eastern terrorist organization had concrete plans to attack Caspar Weinberger.
In April 1986, Libya with the help of Palestinian groups attacked La Belle discotheque in Berlin. America bombed Libya in response and it was expected that Libya would respond.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Fishing: EU Court Charges Italy, No Controls on Swordfish Nets
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS — The European Union’s Court of Justice emitted a sentence today charging Italy with not implementing controls on avoiding the use of ‘unfixed nets’, so-called swordfish nets, as European regulations required, the court stated today. In particular, a note issued by the court goes on, “Italy did not implement controls, inspections or observe fishing practices” to the end of ensuring that these nets were not used are held on-board. Moreover, the EU judges observed, Italy did not provide for “the adoption of adequate measures towards those responsible for the infractions sufficiently” regarding the European regulations.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Germany: Platzeck Calls for Reconciliation With Former Eastern Communists
Brandenburg’s Minister President Matthias Platzeck has called for reconciliation with the former communists who ruled East Germany.
Platzeck made his plea writing in Der Spiegel magazine this weekend, he is about to form a new state government between his Social Democratic Party and the Left Party — and just before Germany celebrates the 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall.
He writes, “Two decades after the revolutionary upheaval in the GDR we in Germany have to finally start to seriously mean business with the overdue process of reconciliation.”
He said East Germans were still split within themselves over their roles during the communist regime, a situation which Platzeck called unhealthy. “Barriers were re-formed, splits have solidified,” he writes.
Platzeck even made reference to the gesture made by former SPD party leader Kurt Schumacher, who had been a concentration camp prisoner for nearly 10 years, but in 1951 said reconciliation even with surviving members of the Waffen SS was, “a human and civic necessity”.
The Brandenburg leader said reconciliation attempts had made better progress in united Germany since 1990 than in a comparable time after the end of World War Two in 1945. But he said it had not yet been possible to effect a comparable integration of the two former sides.
Talking of the Left Party as the successor to the East German Socialist Unity Party, SED, Platzeck said the weight of the past could still be felt.
“The power of the past is easy to explain. But it does not do East Germany any good, and it does not do the political culture in our republic, united since 1990, any good,” he writes.
And referring to his future governing coalition with the Left Party, Platzeck writes, “Whether we have learned the right lessons from history will be shown less by our ritualised processing of the past, as by our readiness to make an active new start.”
His essay will provide fuel to the debate being held within the SPD, about how to react to last month’s general election defeat, and the gains achieved by the Left Party, which includes many trade unionists and disaffected former SPD members.
Many SPD members, including some who have risen within the ranks since the election, want to take the party further left to gather support from the Left Party, and might even consider some kind of alliance.
Others feel the party must remain in the centre to avoid scaring middle-of-the-road voters by working with people described by some as leftist extremists.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Attack on Police, Explosion in Athens
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, OCTOBER 28 — A bomb went off this morning in Athens in front of an Olympiakos club in the Pangrati area, resulting in material damage but no injuries. The explosion occurred a few hours after a previous attack by anarchist-insurrectionary guerrilla forces against the police in which six police officers were injured (two critically), as well as one passer-by, by bullets shot from a Kalashnikov. Media sources report that the bomb this morning, of an unspecified force, was set off shortly after 4am local time (3am in Italy). A number of cars were also damaged. Minister for Public Order Michalis Chrisochoidis has said that “we are at war, and we will fight”. This morning’s explosion came almost as if in confirmation of the minister’s words. Yesterday’s attack was on a police station in the Agia Paraskevi district at the changing of shifts, resulting in more police officers present. A group of four, some of whom on motorcycles (three of which were later found) began shooting Kalashnikovs wildly and threw a smoke bomb in order to make their getaway. One of the police officers fired back and may have injured one of the attackers. The officer injured the most seriously, hit in the abdomen and chest with four bullets, has been operated on and is in critical but stable condition. Among those injured there is also a woman. No group has claimed responsibility for the attack but investigators believe that it must have been one of the most well-known groups, Revolutionary Struggle or the Sect of Revolutionaries. Chrisochoidis has been to see those injured and has ensured them that “Greece will not become a land of fear”, and that the response will be “rapid and decisive”. President Karolos Papoulias and all political groupings have condemned the “cowardly terrorist act”, which occurred only 12 hours after the Council for the Destruction of Order claimed responsibility for incendiary attacks in Thessaloniki against the offices of government representatives and the headquarters of the Italian-Greek Chamber of Commerce. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Terrorism, Guarding Officers Removed From Stations
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, OCTOBER 30 — Greek minister for public order, Michalis Chrisochoidis, has announced the removal of all the guard officers in front of the police stations after a recent attack by an armed group injured six officers, two of whom are in serious condition. Chrisochoidis explained his decision by the fact that the guard officers have become targets for attacks by armed groups. Additionally the two thousand police officers, often without adequate training, removed from guard duty could be more useful elsewhere. Chrisochoidis’ decision, which will go into effect in the next few days, was announced after one of the bloodiest attacks against a police station in Athens. Today an unknown group, the Proletariat Group for Public Self Defence (OPLA) took credit for the attack in a messaged to the Eleftherotypia newspaper, although police are suspicious about the claim. The announcement of the removal of the guard offices came a few hours before a new attack this morning against a building where the conservative ex-minister and EU MP Marietta lives in Athens. Also this morning, a gas bomb was also thrown at the Spanish consulate in Thessalonica. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece: Tax Evasion, The Rich Number Only 3,000
(ANSAmed) — ATHENS, OCTOBER 29 — In Greece, according to tax declarations, those who earn more than 200,000 euros per year number only 3,000 in a country of about 11 million, denounced the Finance Minister, Giorgio Papaconstantinou, quoted by the media. He described the figure as “impossible” and stressed the intention to conduct a serious effort against tax evasion. The fight against tax evasion, together with the redistribution of duties and the reduction of state spending, is a priority for the new socialist government to face a budget deficit which will rise to 12.5% of GDP by the end of the year and a public debt of which should reach 120% of GDP. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Hungary Wants Out After Slovakia Wants in on Czech Amendmant to Lisbon Treaty
[Political Pest]
An MTI piece earlier today stated how Hungarian Foreign Minister Péter Balázs wasn’t exactly ecstatic about Czech President Václav Klaus’s attempt to amend the Lisbon Treaty. What that piece was unclear about, however, was that Balázs’s opposition to the treaty stems from the possible mention of the Beneš Decrees in this amendment. According to the Slovak Spectator:
Slovakia must insist on the Treaty of Lisbon including Slovakia as well as the Czech Republic in connection with a possible exemption in terms of the provisions of the 1945 Beneš Decrees, said the Slovak Foreign Affairs Ministry on October 18, the TASR newswire wrote.
This was the reason why the Wall Street Journal reported:
Balazs Monday said he would not support Klaus’ proposal for exceptions to the Lisbon Treaty if the sought-after changes mention the Benes Decrees, laws enacted after World War II that resulted in mass expulsion of ethnic Germans and Hungarians from the then Czechoslovakia.
Relations between Hungary and Slovakia further cooled two years ago after the Slovak government reaffirmed the decrees. The possible inclusion of them within the treaty is why Hungary may become Klaus’s unlikely ally in opposing the treaty. Today, however, the Prague Daily Monitor added:
The “Benes decrees” will not be mentioned in the opt-out from the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights that Czech President Vaclav Klaus makes a condition for his signature under the Lisbon treaty, Czech European Affairs Minister Stefan Fuele said yesterday.
This would seem to undercut attempts by the Slovakians to be included in the Czech opt-out, as they’ve already signed the Lisbon Treaty and the process of “un-signing” it or raising objections now wouldn’t exactly go over well. So, a bunch of hoopla over nothing? Previous experience suggests all sides are just getting warmed up.
| — Hat tip: heroyalwhyness | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: University Reform Bill Launched
Plan aims to reward merit, stem brain drain
(ANSA) — Rome, October 28 — The Italian government on Wednesday launched a university reform bill aimed at rewarding merit, rooting out nepotism, lowering the average age of professors and stopping a brain drain of researchers.
Education Minister Mariastella Gelmini said the reform was “the fruit of talks with the entire Italian university system”.
She said the part of the reform that “is most close to my heart” are measures to give researchers permanent jobs, “ending years of part-time contracts”.
The plan, which is opposed by some university teachers and many students, sets up an ‘ethical code’ aimed at stopping the hiring of relatives.
It also sets a term limit of eight years for university deans; hands much decision-making previously made by tenured academics to executive boards; allows students to rate their teachers’ performance and makes it compulsory for lecturers to clock in and out; and halves the number of curricula from the current 370.
If the plan is approved by parliament, appointments will be made by a national commission including top foreign academics and the hiring of researchers will be compulsory if they have proved their worth after six years on the job.
According to the latest surveys, Italy’s brightest researchers are massively head-hunted by foreign universities and Italy’s brain drain is far higher than in comparable countries. Financial officers will be accountable to the Treasury and universities with crippling debts will be put under a government-appointed commissioner.
New grants will be set up for the best students, Gelmini added.
The association of university deans reacted to the plan by saying it was “credible” if it gets the required funding.
The financial solidity of the plan depends on the success of an ongoing amnesty aimed at luring back foreign-held assets, Gelmini and Economy Minister Giulio Tremonti said.
Student movements protested at the cuts in curricula and said the reforms were aimed at making universities “less democratic” while moving them closer to the private sector.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: ‘Berlusconi Wanted in Outlaw Book’
PM would join Robin Hood, Calamity Jane
(ANSA) — Paris, October 30 — An Italian publishing company wants to put Premier Silvio Berlusconi into the Italian version of a new French book on the world’s greatest-ever outlaws, a French weekly reported Friday.
The centre-right leader and media magnate would join the ranks of Robin Hood, Calamity Jane and French underworld icon Jacques Mesrine, l’Express said.
According to the report, the unidentified publisher is eager to make an Italian edition of Laurent Marechaux’s ‘Hors La Loi’ provided the author adds a chapter on Berlusconi.
“I’m ready to write this extra chapter,” Marechaux was quoted as saying.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: ‘Toxic Ship’ Is Passenger Vessel
Boat sank during World War I, says minister
(ANSA) — Rome, October 29 — A wreck at the centre of a media furore for weeks over fears it contained toxic waste is actually a passenger vessel from World War I, Environment Minister Stefania Prestigiacomo said Thursday. Discussing the results of an investigation into the site during a press conference, the minister said the wreck off the Calabrian coast was not the remains of a ship sunk deliberately in order to conceal radioactive waste, as alleged by a mafia turncoat. Ex-mafioso Francesco Fonti claimed the wreck, discovered in early September, was the remains of a Russian vessel, the Cunsky, which had been sunk by a criminal organization in 1992.
“This is not a ship with poison on board but was actually a passenger ship, the Catania, which sunk in 1917 during World War I,” said the minister.
Italy’s top mafia prosecutor Piero Grasso, who also appeared at the press conference, added that extensive testing of the area had revealed no signs of any radioactive contamination. He said tests had been carried out down to 300 metres’ depth and in a radius of seven kilometres around the wreck.
He acknowledged this might not be enough to allay concerns raised in recent weeks, saying Calabrian tourism had been “one undoubted victim” of the scare, but said tests would continue. “The case of this wreck is closed but investigations into pollution more generally in this area will continue,” he said, promising to push for a more comprehensive programme of interventions. Investigators discovered the boat 12 miles off the Cosenza coastline seven weeks ago, reportedly deducing the location from an account by Fonti, who claimed to have helped sink the vessel 17 years ago.
In his statement, the turncoat also claimed he had been personally involved in the sinking of two other ships and said he knew of at least 30 more vessels sunk by the mafia in Italian waters in order to dispose of toxic waste.
Fonti, who is under house arrest, alleged the waste came from Italian and European pharmaceutical companies and that the ‘Ndrangheta mafia was paid up to 15 million euros to sink the ships.
Prosecutors met with the turncoat on Wednesday to discuss his claims in depth but have not yet revealed details of their talks.
Commenting on Prestigiacomo’s announcement, the deputy chief of leading environmental organization Legambiente, Sebastiano Venneri, said Fonti had not been the only one to make claims of this kind. He pointed out another convict turned state’s evidence had made almost identical allegations in 2004 but “no action was taken to uncover the truth”. Venneri called on prosecutors to continue “investigating so-called ‘toxic ships’ and related issues of illegal trafficking in dangerous and radioactive waste”.
The Catania passenger ship, which belonged to a Genoese shipping company, was built in Palermo in 1906. It was sunk by a German submarine off the coast of Cosenza on March 16, 1917, on a journey from Bombay back to Naples.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Labour’s Secret Scheme to Build Multicultural Britain
Can the recent success of the British National party be explained by the misguided immigration policy of the government? That was the killer question from the floor during the notorious episode of Question Time 10 days ago. Four times it was put to Jack Straw, the justice secretary, and four times he avoided answering it. Until that evening I had thought Straw was a fairly decent sort of bloke, for a politician. No longer. In a man so central to the new Labour project, who has served in cabinet under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, who has been home secretary and foreign secretary, evasion on such an important subject is shocking.
In his first evasion Straw waffled about Enoch Powell’s recruitment of immigrants to work for the National Health Service. But that was more than 40 years ago and, as David Dimbleby pointed out, Labour has been in power for the past 12 years and Straw should answer the question. Again he waffled irrelevantly, this time about identity.
Dimbleby challenged him for a third time: “Are you saying there is no worry about the scale of immigration in this country? Is that the point you’re making? I can’t get out what you’re saying.” Straw responded by saying that new figures show a reduction in the rate of increase in migration and added something about the new points system, all of which was offensively irrelevant.
So, for a fourth time, Dimbleby pressed him to answer the question. Again Straw failed to do so, but concluded by saying: “I don’t believe it is.”
It was a farce. As Baroness Warsi, the Muslim peer, protested: “That answer is not an honest answer.” Watching Straw’s face, I was puzzled about what he was thinking. Was he knowingly dishonest or had he somehow blinded himself to all the facts about the mass immigration of the past 10 years and its consequences?
An answer emerged the next day in a London evening newspaper. I then learnt that giving Straw the benefit of this doubt had been naive: the explanation is much more sinister. In an astonishingly insouciant article Andrew Neather — a former adviser to Straw, Blair and David Blunkett — revealed that Labour ministers had a hidden agenda in allowing immigrants to flood into the country.
According to Neather, who was present at secret meetings during the summer of 2000, the government had “a driving political purpose” which was: “mass immigration was the way that the government was going to make the UK truly multicultural”.
What’s more, Neather said he came away “from some discussions with the clear sense that the policy was intended — even if this wasn’t its main purpose — to rub the right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date”.
Ministers longed for an immigration boom but wouldn’t talk about it, he wrote. “They probably realised the conservatism of their core voters: while ministers might have been passionately in favour of a more diverse society, it wasn’t necessarily a debate they wanted to have in working men’s clubs in Sheffield or Sunderland.”
The revelations get worse. “There was a reluctance … in government,” he wrote, “to discuss what increased immigration would mean, above all for Labour’s core white working-class vote.” The social outcomes that ministers cared about were those affecting the immigrants. This, Neather explains, shone out in a report published in 2001 after these confidential deliberations.
One must question whether this is true. Needless to say, Straw has denied all this and Neather has since tried to back-pedal. But I believe he meant what he said the first time, precisely because of where he was coming from as a true supporter of immigration, urging Brown to be more open about its great benefits. His were not the words of someone fearful of immigration or angry at the government’s open-door policy: Neather is the personification of the toxic supporter. As for Straw’s credibility, he lost it on Question Time.
Accepting Neather’s allegations, it is hard to decide which is the worst of these crimes against morality and democracy. To frame a radical social policy, with wide-reaching consequences, just to embarrass and marginalise the opposition party, is grotesquely immature and irresponsible; it is the behaviour of spiteful children mucking about with our destinies just to settle imaginary scores. That’s pretty bad, but it is just as bad for the Labour party to abandon and hoodwink its traditional supporters — the core white working-class vote, those on whose shoulders the Labour party was built — and to ignore their wishes and “social outcomes” in favour of a mass of strangers.
It is little wonder that sensing this abandonment, which we now know was deliberate, many white working-class Labour voters are tempted towards a party that does acknowledge their grievances. Knowingly to impose a transformative policy without truthfulness on the government’s side or informed consent on the people’s side was simple fascism — and to do so with silly propaganda about multiculturalism and unjust sneers about racism has made these injustices only more bitter.
Under these circumstances, Labour’s obvious gerrymandering by mass immigration — black and ethnic minority people are very likely to vote Labour — is perhaps the least of its crimes.
To accuse Labour of failures and worse in its immigration policy is not to exonerate the Conservatives. They have failed again and again to confront the real problems of immigration. They are to blame for abandoning the policy of counting everyone out of the country as well as in, which they did on grounds of cost in 1994. Of course it was expensive, particularly before the arrival of time-saving technology. But it is obvious that if you abandon any attempt to know whether a visitor has left, according to the rules of immigration, then you have given up control of your borders and what would also be a useful security measure.
That policy could and should be reinstated, as should the rule to crack down on marriages arranged to get British nationality; that is a clear abuse that could be restrained by bringing back the primary purpose rule, which Labour abandoned on coming to power.
There are lots of such practical things that could be done to ensure immigration is controlled in future. But the first thing to do is to expose the patronising lies, the seigneurial arrogance and the criminally foolish social engineering of the Blair-Brown regime; it does not deserve the name of Labour government.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Don’t Abolish Bullfighting in Catalonia, Socialists
(by Paola Del Vecchio) (ANSAmed) — MADRID, OCTOBER 30 — Catalan socialists are against the abolition of bullfighting, but socialist Premier Zapatero has been accused by some matadors of being more against bullfighting than any other Spaniard. There is a glimmer of hope for fans of the bullfight in Catalonia to stop the initiative of its abolition, which will be voted in parliament on November 4. The socialist PSC party has presented amendments to the law. Without amendments, procedures to enact the bill would start automatically without debate. Faced with the anti-bullfight proposal, the socialists have decided to defended the tradition and to let the choice to their MPs. The amendments, an initiative of the Prou! (Enough!) platform which has collected 180,000 signatures, will be presented early next week by the groups of the Catalan PP party and by Ciutadans, which have already announced to vote against the abolition. So far the Christian-Democratic CiU, the second biggest party with 48 seats in the Catalan Chamber, has not expressed its opinion on the issue. The 33 deputies of the ERC and the Eco-Comunist ICV party will back the abolition. They are looking for another 35 to get the necessary majority of 68 votes. The world of bullfighting has pushed José Tomas forward in an attempt to keep the Spanish tradition alive. The famous matador has fought many historic battles in the arenas. “We don’t rule out his presence in parliament, but nothing has been confirmed” said his agent Salvador Boix. The bullfight with which José Tomas closed the season on September 27 may have been the last, if the law is passed. A contradiction, supporters claim, in a city that early in the 20th century had three ‘plazas de Toros’: El Torin, built in 1834; Plaza de Las Arenas, in 1900; and El Sport, opened as Monumental in 1916 with the historic bullfight performed by matadors Joselito El Gallo, Francisco Posada and Saleri II. Meanwhile Fran Rivera Ordoñez, the oldest of a family of toreros, has called Premier José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero a “man against bullfights”. “Rodriguez Zapatero he is the main representative of the movement against bullfighting, and the most damaging one” said Ordoñez in a recent interview with El Mundo. “He has done nothing to support La Fiesta, he underestimates and despises it. And he has done all he can to keep the toreros out of the government building”. In fact the premier has never expressed an opinion against or in favour of bullfighting. But Zapatero’s original sin is, that he has never visit a plaza de toros during his two terms, unlike King Juan Carlos and the royal family, who have always shown great appreciation of the art of bullfighting. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Sweden: Radical Islamist Starts “Anti-Zionist” Party
A Swedish radical Muslim has started political cooperation with both right and left wing extremists to build up an anti-Semitic party. Poet and journalist Mohamed Omar intends to fight what he calls the “danger of Zionism” that poses a threat to the world. Even though Omar’s political movement is rather weak as of today, experts warn of the anti-Democratic potential of this development.
+ audio clip
[I’ll probably be posting about this, after I gather more information. He has opposition from both leftists and Muslims — Esther]
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Tony Blair in Talks With Tesco Over £1m Deal as Supermarket Eyes Middle East
Tony Blair has been in talks with Tesco about helping them open supermarkets in the Middle East — allegedly in return for up to £1million.
It is believed the discussions between the former Prime Minister, now a peace envoy to the region, and the supermarket chain, whose slogan is ‘Every little helps’, ended after the two sides failed to agree terms.
The disclosure could further damage Mr Blair’s hopes of becoming the first President of Europe, as critics will seize on it as evidence that he is as interested in making money as he is in reviving his career as a statesman..
According to one source, Mr Blair’s proposed role for Tesco would simply have been to act as a figurehead for their drive to break into the Middle East market.
The company, who have exported their hugely successful formula around the world, wanted Mr Blair to use his international political and diplomatic clout to ‘open doors’ for them. The Mail on Sunday understands Tesco were ‘deeply disappointed’ when they were unable to reach agreement with Mr Blair.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: A Civil Servant Who Has Praised the Mentor of Osama Bin Laden is Advising the Crown Prosecution Service on Islamic Extremism.
Azad Ali, who was suspended from his job at the Treasury over controversial comments he made on his internet blog, is now on a panel advising the CPS on incitement to racial and religious hatred.
Ali, a government IT worker, is acting as an unpaid member of a “community involvement panel” which is chaired by the CPS head of counter terrorism. He is representing the Muslim Safety Forum, a group of Muslim organisations that advise the Metropolitan Police.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Chaos in Leeds City Centre as Anti-Fascism Campaigners Storm Far-Right Protest
Minor scuffles broke out between police and protesters as around 400 Unite Against Fascism activists descended on Leeds to challenge a march by the English Defence League.
The English Defence League was protesting about a number of other marches organised by British Islamic extremists.
As the two sides gathered in Leeds hundreds of officers, including a mounted section, were drafted in to keep them apart.
A police helicopter circled above while activists from Unite Against Fascism shouted slogans.
Demonstrators carried placards and banners and shouted ‘Fascist scum off our streets’.
Scuffles broke out as police officers linked arms and moved rival groups of protesters away from each other.
There were minor flashpoints throughout the afternoon as the respective groups tried to break out from their restricted areas and confront each other, as early Christmas shoppers looked on.
At one point a missile was thrown and supporters spat at each other as they managed to get within a relatively short distance of each other.
A red flare lit by one of the protesters was grabbed by a police officer who managed to put it out.
One protester was grabbed by officers and dragged towards a nearby police van.
Several streets in the city were closed as the demonstrations took place.
Five people were arrested for public order offences.
Later, in nearby City Square around 300 supporters from the English Defence League gathered amid a large police presence.
Activists sang England songs and God Save The Queen in the Square which was cordoned off by barriers and police officers.
Meanwhile in London, a planned march organised by radical Islamic extremists calling for sharia law to be imposed in the UK was called off amid security fears.
Anjem Choudary, leader of the radical Islamic sect Al Muhajiroun, said organisers Islam4UK had been forced to cancel the planned march from the Houses of Parliament to Trafalgar Square because of security concerns.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Controversial Islamist Advises Crown Prosecution Service
A civil servant who has praised the mentor of Osama bin Laden is advising the Crown Prosecution Service on Islamic extremism.
Azad Ali, who was suspended from his job at the Treasury over controversial comments he made on his internet blog, is now on a panel advising the CPS on incitement to racial and religious hatred.
Ali, a government IT worker, is acting as an unpaid member of a “community involvement panel” which is chaired by the CPS head of counter terrorism. He is representing the Muslim Safety Forum, a group of Muslim organisations that advise the Metropolitan Police.
Ali was reinstated to his job earlier this year after a six month suspension when the Treasury said it had “dealt with the matter in accordance with our disciplinary procedures.”
On his blog, hosted by the Islamic Europe Forum, an organisation linked with East London Mosque, Ali , said he found ‘much truth’ in an interview with an Islamic militant who said: ‘If I saw an American or British an wearing a soldier’s uniform inside Iraq I would kill him because that is my obligation.”
He also wrote about the British government’s policy on Gaza under the heading “We are the resistance”, saying: “There is no respite from the terrorist slaughter machine of the Zionist state of Israel. America and our own government have given much fuel to this machine and in fact helped to build the killing machine.”
In another post on Gaza in January entitled “We are the resistance II”, Ali described some Muslim moderates as “nothing but self-serving vultures, feeding on the dead flesh of the Palestinians”.
He has also used his blog to praise Abdullah Azzam, regarded as a key spiritual mentor to Osama Bin Laden, saying Azzam was one of the “few Muslims who promote the understanding of the term jihad in its comprehensive glory” as both a doctrine of “self-purification” and of “warfare”.
Ali has also used his blog to deny that the Mumbai attacks last November, in which 173 people were killed, were an act of terrorism. He has also defended Hizb ut-Tahrir, an extremist group which opposes western democracy.
The Crown Prosecution Service said the panel on which Ali serves “discusses practices and policies in relation to the incitement to racial and religious hatred. It feeds into the CPS’s counterterrorism division and considers issues on a thematic basis. It does not discuss individual cases.”
Patrick Mercer, chairman of the Commons subcommittee on counterterrorism, said: “This is the sort of politically correct appointment which the government will make in haste but may regret at leisure.”
Ali has declined to comment.
| — Hat tip: TV | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Justice Ministry Had Illegal Staff as Civil Servants
The Ministry of Justice has been employing illegal foreign workers as civil servants despite previous warnings about its shambolic employment checks.
In February an employee at the ministry’s London headquarters was found to be working in Britain illegally. He was working in the same building as ministers despite not having a visa entitling him to work.
The official was an administrator in the Access to Justice department, which routinely handles sensitive data concerning legal aid funding. He was hired through an agency that should have carried out background checks.
The revelation will prove particularly embarrassing after the discovery earlier this year that Baroness Scotland, the attorney-general, had broken the law by employing an illegal immigrant as a housekeeper at her home. She, too, had used the services of an agency.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Libel Tourists Flock to ‘Easy’ UK Courts
An Icelandic professor has emerged as the latest victim of “libel tourism” in Britain after he was sued in the High Court by a wealthy compatriot for a posting on a website based in Iceland.
Hannes Gissurarson was initially bemused when a British diplomat, acting as an envoy of the court, turned up at his door in Reykjavik to serve him with a writ.
The professor of political science was told that judges in London would adjudicate on whether his comments on the University of Iceland’s website were defamatory. During the ensuing five-year legal battle, Gissurarson was forced to sell his home and faced legal costs of more than £150,000.
His case — which was revealed in a High Court judgment last month — confirms London’s role as the libel capital of the world and the readiness of its courts to rule on cases with scant connection to the UK. Plaintiffs need only prove that they have a reputation to defend in Britain and that the defamatory material was circulated here, even if only over the internet, to sue. They do not have to be resident here and the publication or individual they are suing need have only tenuous connections with the UK.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Psychic Computer Shows Your Thoughts on Screen
Scientists have discovered how to “read” minds by scanning brain activity and reproducing images of what people are seeing — or even remembering.
Researchers have been able to convert into crude video footage the brain activity stimulated by what a person is watching or recalling.
The breakthrough raises the prospect of significant benefits, such as allowing people who are unable to move or speak to communicate via visualisation of their thoughts; recording people’s dreams; or allowing police to identify criminals by recalling the memories of a witness.
However, it could also herald a new Big Brother era, similar to that envisaged in the Hollywood film Minority Report, in which an individual’s private thoughts can be readily accessed by the authorities.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Police Expand Search for Rapist
Police hunting a convicted rapist who escaped from immigration staff on Friday are liaising with officers in Derbyshire, where he last lived.
Imtiaz Hussain, 44, ran off from the Pakistan High Commission in Lowndes Square, central London, while being served with a deportation order.
He was serving a prison sentence in the north of England after being convicted of rape and false imprisonment.
The Metropolitan Police described him as “very dangerous”.
A spokeswoman for the force said Hussain escaped at around 1435 GMT on Friday and was seen running through nearby Sloane Square.
‘Numerous inquiries’
She said he was at the commission because he is due to be deported at the end of his sentence.
She added: “Officers are making numerous inquiries to trace Hussain and are in close liaison with their counterparts in Derbyshire — where he had resided prior to his imprisonment.”
Det Ch Insp Brent Lancaster said: “This individual is believed to very dangerous and we need to apprehend him as soon as possible.
“If anyone sees him, please don’t approach him, but call or alert police immediately.”
Hussain is described as around 5ft 5in (1.67m) tall, of medium to chubby build, with dark cropped hair. He was wearing a blue T-shirt, blue jeans and white trainers.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Random Attack by Thugs Every 30 Seconds as ‘Stranger Assaults’ Soar in Binge Britain
There were 1,057,000 violent attacks by strangers last year — the equivalent of 2,895 a day or 120 every hour.
Someone is attacked by a complete stranger every 30 seconds in Binge Britain, figures revealed last night.
When Labour came to power, only a third of violent crimes were carried out by an attacker the victim did not know.
That has now jumped to half as random violence — fuelled by alcohol and round the clock opening — has become commonplace.
There were 1,057,000 violent attacks by strangers last year — the equivalent of 2,895 a day or 120 every hour.
Opposition MPs said it was the latest proof the Government’s relaxation of licensing laws had failed.
Some 21 per cent of the assaults took place in pubs and a further 34 per cent in the street as town centres became increasingly scarred by alcohol-fuelled violence.
Many of the attacks were carried out by violent women ‘ladettes’.
Last month, the Daily Mail revealed that the Government’s own figures show the number of women being convicted for murders, vicious assaults and other attacks has rocketed by 81 per cent since 1998.
They are now being convicted at a rate of more than 200 every week.
The statistics, based on the British Crime Survey, also show that the proportion of all violent offences committed on the street was higher last year than at any other point in the past decade.
Meanwhile the detection rate for violent crime is at its lowest since records began. The current figure of 47 per cent compares to 77 per cent as recently as 1996.
| [Return to headlines] |
UK: the Slow-Motion New Labour Putsch That Swept Our Nation Away
Once again, one of the biggest stories of the week has been widely ignored by the official political reporters, who are not interested in politics.
This is the disclosure, by a New Labour apparatchik, Andrew Neather, of the real purpose of his party’s immigration policy.
The Blairites’ aim was to undermine and get rid of traditional conservative British culture. They really did want to turn Britain into a foreign land.
Mr Neather wrote an article praising immigration because it provided lots of cheap nannies and gardeners for funky Londoners like him.
Apparently thinking nobody would notice, he then revealed that there had been ‘a driving political purpose: that mass immigration was the way that the UK Government was going to make the UK truly multicultural’.
He recalled coming away from high-level discussions ‘with a clear sense that the policy was intended — even if this wasn’t its main purpose — to rub the Right’s nose in diversity and render their arguments out of date’.
I have to say I am not surprised. Nor am I so sure about the ‘main purpose’. In late 1996, an old friend of mine abandoned his long career as a distinguished journalist and went to work for New Labour.
This was one of those moments when a shiver really does run down the spine. Knowing the Labour leader to be a Blair of Very Little Brain, I had assumed he was no more than window-dressing for a standard-issue high-tax anti-British socialist government.
From then on, I began to suspect that something much bigger was afoot — a gigantic, irreversible cultural, social and sexual revolution, accompanied by huge constitutional change — a slow-motion putsch.
I think that suspicion was borne out. Mass immigration, so vast that Britain would have to adapt to the migrants rather than the other way round, would be very useful in attaining this.
You could smear your opposition as ‘racist’ if they dared to resist. And they would run away.
Anthony Blair’s hysterical speech ‘attacking the ‘forces of conservatism’ in September 1999 was a barely coded warning of what was to come. He all but blamed the Tories for murdering Martin Luther King and locking up Nelson Mandela. He specifically praised the curse of multiculturalism.
As my colleague Simon Walters points out, William Hague grasped what was happening, and in March 2001 he sought to oppose it with a bold speech. He warned that after two terms of Labour, Britain would be a ‘foreign land’. He was dead right.
I have searched out that speech and read it carefully. There isn’t a bigoted word in it. But Mr Hague was knifed in the back by liberal Tories and the power-worshipping Murdoch Press, and knifed in the front by Labour, all of whom accused him of somehow playing dirty, ‘playing the race card’ or ‘playing the nationalist card’.
A plot to replace him was openly leaked, months before a General Election. Rather than fight to the last, Mr Hague regrettably crumpled in the face of this onslaught.
And so perished the last attempt by any mainstream party to address this huge and dangerous issue honestly, or indeed to confront the revolutionary intentions of New Labour.
A few weeks later, Mr Blair told the Tories to accept his revolution. They did. And the British people are left without a legitimate voice at Westminster.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
UK: The High Price of Patriotism
By Nick Cohen
Derek Pasquill was a Foreign and Commonwealth Office man to his core. He was born to a diplomat father and service wife, weaned in its embassies, trained in its boarding schools and polished by its fine minds until he was ready to represent liberal Britain to a hostile world. The FCO was the only institution he really knew, and he took its benevolence for granted. His mother was German and his parents did not want to spend their days at drinks parties with cliquey expats who would not treat the overwhelming majority of their compatriots as their social equals, let alone foreigners. They toured his father’s postings instead. When he was on holiday from his English boarding schools, they took him to the Roman ruins at Baalbek in Lebanon and the palaces of Ctesiphon, Iraq. Pasquill had an isolated but privileged childhood and he looks back on it with gratitude. His whole life had been leading him towards a career in the diplomatic service. It was his natural home.
Today, the FCO views him as the most devastating whistleblower in its recent history. Between August 2005 and January 2006, he leaked 40 bundles of documents. So many papers poured out in brown envelopes and email attachments that his contact, my then colleague on the Observer Martin Bright (now the political editor of the Jewish Chronicle), begged him to slow down.
“Traitors,” “moles,” “double-agents”: we think we know how the story of an establishment renegade runs from the betrayals of the Cold War. Yet although the characters are the same — the Whitehall mandarins who cannot believe that one of their own would betray them, the public schoolboy who learns to despise his class — the story’s moral could not be more different.
The FCO was not and is not standing up to the totalitarian ideas of the Islamist extreme Right, as it stood up to the totalitarianism of the socialist extreme Left in the second half of the 20th century. On the contrary, the establishment has appeased political Islamism abroad and interfered in the domestic affairs of its own country by mounting a covert operation to aid and abet it at home.
Pasquill betrayed the institutions of liberal democracy by standing up for liberal democracy. He defended it from its enemies, who were not only in far-away countries but closeted in the Cabinet Room of 10 Downing Street and the offices of Whitehall. As striking a difference between Pasquill and the establishment renegades of the 20th century (indeed, from every other whistleblower I have known) is that he wanted to be caught. He wanted the police to take him to the cells and arraign him at the Old Bailey for breaking the Official Secrets Act. He did not regard jail as a punishment he hoped to avoid, but sought out the risk of imprisonment the better to highlight the scandal. When the police came to his Pimlico home, he admitted everything. In truth, they did not have a hard job finding him. By the end, he was sending documents from his work email to his home computer and the dullest copper in England could have collared him.
“The Observer and the New Statesman were printing my revelations,” he told me, “but they were not having an effect. I thought that being caught would be useful because the FCO would have to prosecute. That was part of my strategy, to get publicity in open court; to make people realise how bad it had got. What is so maddening about our attitude to radical Islam is that it is a classic example of group-think. Cognitive dissonance is stopping serious engagement. Leaking documents was my attempt to break the dissonance, my form of engagement.”
I am sure you can understand why he so frightens the FCO. The normal threats an employer can make against an employee — the loss of home, salary, position and, in Pasquill’s case, liberty — could not intimidate him. He was a man with the inner freedom the Stoics so valued. He had trained himself to be indifferent to the threats and blandishments of official society. Even though governments around the world read his revelations with varying degrees of horror, the FCO dropped the prosecution. Legally, its case was watertight. Pasquill had admitted leaking official secrets with pride. But Whitehall knew all too well that he would use the dock as a platform to appeal to the jury and the wider public.
Now Pasquill is bringing what to my unqualified eyes looks like a hopeless claim of unfair dismissal. On the face of it, a civil servant who passed a filing cabinet full of official secrets to the press cannot seriously claim that the state exceeded its powers by firing him. Yet if you look at his revelations, his claim makes more sense.
As his affidavit to the employment tribunal dryly remarks, “The documents that I disclosed showed that the FCO and other UK government departments were continuing to work with and assist organisations that promote extreme Islamist politics. My concern was that this policy would have the effect of legitimising and supporting groups with extreme Islamist politics and that such an effect was entirely contradictory to FCO and UK government policy of attempting to prevent the radicalisation of young British Muslims. Furthermore, I believe that the FCO and other government departments pursue a policy of portraying these organisations as mainstream and moderate.”
Who is the traitor and who the patriot in these circumstances: the dissident civil servant or the two-faced government? Who, to be blunt, is more deserving of summary dismissal?
Journalists covet whistleblowers for the mercenary reason that they fill our pages and make our names. Only after we have wrung them dry do we want to know why they risked their careers to reveal their employers’ crimes and follies. I thought that Pasquill could supply a lucid answer. He is an ascetic intellectual: a thin, quiet man, who thinks carefully before speaking and upholds the English intelligentsia’s customary disdain for smart clothes and dental hygiene. Yet my attempts to prod him into giving me a pat explanation got nowhere. He had studied the Holocaust, he told me, and learned the importance of documenting state crimes from Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews. The scene in Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah, when Hilberg holds up a timetable listing the trains that took Jews to extermination camps, stayed with him and taught him that you must get official papers on the public record at any cost. Yet when I asked him if it was the transfer of Tsarist and Nazi anti-Semitism from Europe to the clerical fascists of the Muslim world that moved him to take on the FCO, he looked blank. The thought never occurred to him.
He is too much of an intellectual to allow me to think that a neat, coherent motive explains his actions. Instead, he says without elaboration that he found the behaviour of Jack Straw and the wider liberal establishment he had served so loyally “shocking”.
The FCO seconded him to its “Engaging with the Islamic World” unit. From the moment he arrived, everything felt wrong. He was standing in for Mockbul Ali, an allegedly non-political civil servant. Yet, with official approval, Ali had taken time off to help Labour fight the 2005 general election campaign. Specifically, he was trying to persuade Muslim leaders to support Labour, when many of them were in no mood to do so after the second Iraq war. There has always been a Tammany Hall streak in Labour. Many an aspiring politician has found that buying off ethnic block votes by dropping a few principles is a small price to pay for his advancement in inner-city politics. A refusal to condemn the Ayatollah Khomeini’s death threat against Salman Rushdie, for instance, saved several cowards’ seats.
Pasquill found something more than ordinary compromises, however. Ali was hardly a loner. The entire FCO hierarchy from Jack Straw, then the Foreign Secretary, downwards was supporting a policy of encouraging the Muslim Brotherhood and its allies.
The usual gap between rhetoric and reality had become a dizzying gulf. On the one hand, Labour pretended that it was upholding the 1997 mission statement Robin Cook gave the FCO “to spread the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy which we demand for ourselves”. On the other, it was bending over backwards to appease movements which believed in the subjugation of women, the racist conspiracy theories of the Okhrana and the SS, the murder of homosexuals and apostates, the denial of democracy and the dismissal of human rights as an imperialist imposition on the godly.
Before moving into the unit, Pasquill decided to research the Muslim Brotherhood in the British Library. A small step, perhaps, but as he investigated its totalitarian ambitions it proved to be a decisive one, not because of what he found but because of how he found it. When he left the FCO for the library’s reading rooms, he left the received wisdom of his hierarchy behind and returned to work ready to think for himself.
As he went through the files Ali had left in his desk, he realised that the FCO under a left-of-centre government was classifying an organisation founded by the admirers of European fascism and sustained by the adherents of a brutish theocracy as “moderate”. The result was a policy at once sinister and naïve. The decayed autocracies of the Middle East were producing an Islamist rather than a liberal opposition, the FCO argued, which Britain must “engage” with at any price. The FCO did not ask how Arab liberals and democrats would feel if Britain embraced men who would happily kill them. Nor did it sigh and say with regret that religious reaction was a deplorable reality Britain had to learn to live with. Instead, it actively sought to promote and fund extremism. As an official argued, “Given that Islamist groups are often less corrupt than the generality of the societies in which they operate, consideration might be given to channelling aid resources through them, so long as sufficient transparency is achievable.” In its enthusiasm for appeasement, the FCO did not know or want to know that theocracy is inherently corrupt. By soaking society in piety, it can present its demands for money as the demands of God. As the examples of Saudi Arabia and Iran show, the more Islamist a country is, the more corrupt it becomes.
As his superiors betrayed the liberal Muslims of the Middle East, Mockbul Ali worked to marginalise their counterparts in Britain. Although the domestic affairs of our country are not any of the FCO’s business, it sponsored a road show, which purported to be representative of British Muslim voices but was in reality a Muslim Brotherhood front. Ali followed up by lobbying the Home Office to allow extremists into Britain. Eric Taylor, of the India-Pakistan
Relations Desk, was one of the few officials to protest. He pointed out that a gruesome Bangladeshi politician Ali was recommending had provoked riots on his last visit and, according to a report from a Bangladeshi human rights organisation, Drishtipat, had compared Bangladeshi Hindus to excrement, while appearing to defend attacks on the country’s persecuted Ahmadiyya Muslim community, regarded as apostates by the Islamists.
The more Pasquill read, the more driven he became. He roamed the FCO’s corridors picking up Ali’s files, first taking them to Soho to copy and post, then just emailing them home and printing them out. I won’t say that his leaks had no effect. The story went round the world. In Britain, Hazel Blears, Ruth Kelly and Jacqui Smith — all women, significantly, who were appalled by the official endorsement of misogyny — read Bright’s reports and tried to save what was left of the honour of the British Left by fighting back. But I cannot pretend that their stand was anything other than an isolated example. Pasquill’s revelations had no impact on a wider liberal society. It did not want to see how hypocritical it had become or to survey the damage it had wrought. The achievement of political Islam in Britain has been to suborn the liberal Left and cut off the most promising escape route for dissidents in the process. An abused woman, a young man fighting religious authoritarianism, an Iranian exile seeking to gain support for the campaign against the Archbishop of Canterbury’s and Lord Chief Justice’s endorsement of Sharia law or a British Bangladeshi trying to bring the Islamist criminals who massacred civilians in the war of independence to justice, would once have looked left for succour. If they do so now, they will find that progressives take their cue from the Muslim Brotherhood and Jamaat-e-Islami, rather than the best of the liberal Left’s traditions, and dismiss Muslims who fight for values they profess to hold as being at best irrelevances and at worst stool-pigeons for imperialism.
Do not make the mistake of believing that such attitudes are confined to the FCO. Only recently, the supposedly left-wing Institute for Public Policy Research was trumpeting “non-violent” Islamism as “the best organised and most popular opposition to existing authoritarian regimes in the Middle East”. What “non-violent” Islamists would do to Arab liberals when they achieved power was not a question that detained the British leftists of the IPPR for a second.
As his illusions about the benign nature of the FCO crumbled, Pasquill tried a thought experiment. He asked himself, “Is the Foreign Office a Muslim Brotherhood front organisation?” Obviously, it was not, he replied, although looked at in a certain light, it might as well have been. The light metaphor stayed with him until “one day I was looking at the ivy growing in my garden and it struck me that it was phototropic — growing in the direction of the sun. I realised that the FCO is Islamotropic: it grows towards Islamic extremism, always searching for reasons to excuse it.” At the age of 50, Derek Pasquill is now on the dole with no pension, no savings and no prospects. The FCO responded to his revelations by promoting Mockbul Ali. Like ivy on a wall, the liberal establishment still creeps towards the reactionary forces that despise it, entwining itself with its enemies and leaving its friends to wilt in the dark.
| — Hat tip: Gaia | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Vicious Attack in Savile Town…
A MAN has told how he was pulled over and viciously kicked in the head in an unprovoked attack as he walked home through Savile Town.
Robert Dyson, 45, of Ouzelwell Crescent, Thornhill Lees, was on his way home at 11pm last Friday when he was assaulted in Savile Road, near the playground.
Labourer Mr Dyson was set upon by two Asian youths, who were with another Asian man and two white girls.
Mr Dyson suffered nasty cuts to his nose and left ear which needed 27 stitches. He will be scarred for life.
The Press has previously reported how similar attacks have happened at the same spot.
In August three white boys, one aged 12 and the others 14, were attacked by Asians who demanded to know why they were walking through Savile Town.
And two weeks later Asian youths ambushed a bus, smashing windows on both sides, leaving one man bleeding.
When he got off the bus to chase the yobs, he was asked why he was going about shouting in ‘their area.’
Mr Dyson, who had had a couple of pints but wasn’t drunk, decided to walk home from Dewsbury.
As he approached the playground he saw the group, and one of the Asians shouted: “What are you looking at?”
“I replied: ‘There’s no problem, mate. I’m just walking home,’“ said Mr Dyson.
“One of them then hit me from the side and I was about to turn round when another grabbed my T-shirt and spun me round. I lost my balance and fell over.”
He was then kicked about the head as he lay on the ground. The attackers were stopped by the two girls who saw blood oozing from his ear.
“They said they thought my earring had gone through my ear. I touched my ear and my hand was covered in blood.”
Mr Dyson carried on home and when he saw the damage in the mirror called a taxi and went to Dewsbury District Hospital.
It was thought he may need plastic surgery and he was transferred to Pinderfields at Wakefield where his wounds were stitched.
Mr Dyson, who was off work for a few days, said: “It was completely unprovoked. If it hadn’t been for those girls I don’t know what they would have done.”
Mr Dyson’s mother Anne, 66, urged the girls to shop those responsible.
“There have been quite a few incidents like this and it has to be stopped,” she said. “There can’t be any no-go areas.”
Coun Khizar Iqbal (Ind, Dewsbury South) urged police to investigate the attacks and said: “If this accelerates it could seriously harm community relations.”
Insp Jenny Thompson, of Dewsbury police, described the attack on Mr Dyson as “nasty” and appealed for witnesses. She said she did not believe Savile Town was a ‘no-go’ area at night despite a number of unrelated incidents recently.
She said the bus was attacked by youths who left prayers during Ramadan.
This had been “dealt with by police working with community leaders” and Insp Thompson added: “There is no division in the community.” Anyone with information should call Crimestoppers in confidence on 0800 555 111.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
UN Troubled by Minaret Initiative
United Nations human rights specialists have expressed concerns over November’s anti-minaret vote and “discriminatory” poster campaign in Switzerland.
The comments by the Geneva-based UN Human Rights Committee were made in conclusions on Swiss progress in implementing the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which is monitored by the body of experts.
Switzerland should “strenuously ensure respect of freedom of religion and firmly combat incitement to discrimination, hostility and violence”, the committee declared.
Among other recommendations, they said the Federal Commission against Racism should be strengthened to investigate all cases of racial discrimination and incitement to national, racial or religious hatred. Otherwise, an independent mechanism able to initiate legal action should be set up.
The committee said it was also preoccupied by reports of police brutality against people arrested or detained, in particular against asylum-seekers and migrants.
It said all cantons should create an independent mechanism to investigate complaints against the police. Ethnic minorities should also be better represented in Swiss police forces, it added.
While recognising the Swiss authorities’ “sustained attention” to human rights and measures undertaken since the last progress report in 2001, the body urged Switzerland to lift its remaining reservations concerning the treaty, to ratify the Optional Protocol — which establishes complaint and inquiry mechanisms — and to create a national human rights institution.
Other specific recommendations focused on better protection and support for asylum seekers, firearms, assisted suicide, combating violence against women, and compensation or reparations for forcible castrations and sterilisations conducted between 1960 and 1987.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Young Swedes Doubt Al-Qaida 9/11 Guilt
Almost one in five Swedes aged under 30 think that George W Bush’s US government lay behind the attacks on September 11th 2001, according to a new survey by Novus Opinion.
The TV4 programme Kalla Fakta, which commissioned the survey, will on Sunday address the subject of the Truth Movement, an international group which espouses the conspiracy theory that the terror network al-Qaida was not behind the September 11th attacks.
The movement, also known as the “September 11th research community” argues that it was in fact the US government that staged the attacks, which claimed the lives of 3,000 people, in order to legitimize the war on terrorism.
The Novus poll indicates that a significant number of young Swedes are persuaded by the logic of the argument.
Of the 1,000 Swedes surveyed in an internet panel, 70 percent responded that al-Qaida were behind the attacks, while seven percent did not think so.
Among those under-30 only 58 percent believed responsibility lay with al-Qaida, while 15 percent did not.
When asked whether the US government orchestrated the attacks, eight percent supported the theory while 64 percent rejected it.
However among the under-30s there was once again more scepticism: 51 percent rejected the conspiracy theory while 18 percent believed that the US government, led at the time by President George W Bush, had a role in the attacks.
As many as 31 percent of the young people interviewed in the survey responded that they did not know what to believe.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Listen Up, Muslims — the West Fought for You
Radovan Karadzic’s defence against 11 charges of genocide did not get off to the best possible start at the Hague last week. The chief prosecutor at the international criminal tribunal for the former Yugoslavia opened proceedings by releasing transcripts of tapped telephone conversations of the Bosnian Serb leader from 1991, which record Karadzic saying: “There are 20,000 armed Serbs around Sarajevo … it will be a black cauldron where 300,000 Muslims will die. They will disappear. That people will disappear from the face of the earth.”
It’s true that these recordings do not mention Srebrenica, where 7,000 captured Bosnian Muslim men and youths were massacred; but as a clear indicator of genocidal intent they leave no room for doubt.
The release of the wiretaps is just a small part of the efforts made by what we used to call the West to bring about justice for the families of those massacred Muslims. A friend of mine who was involved in the location and disinterment of the victims’ hidden remains is just one of many Britons who have given years of their life to this grim cause: the International Commission on Missing Persons was established in 1996 specifically to piece together as many as possible of the victims of the Bosnian conflict.
The ICMP’s director-general is an American, Kathryne Bomberger; she designed its “super-mortuary”, the world’s largest storage facility for human remains, where parts of no fewer than 4,000 bodies are kept. This is exhibit A in the trial of Karadzic, as it was in the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, whose interminable trial at the Hague was abandoned after his death from a heart attack in 2006.
These trials cast an uncomfortable searchlight on the behaviour of European politicians during the earlier stages of the Bosnian conflict. The Conservative government of John Major was the most forceful advocate of an arms embargo that would almost certainly have doomed the Bosnian Muslims to suffer further acts of genocide, until in 1995 Bill Clinton browbeat the European Union into agreeing to airstrikes. These, backed by US-armed Bosnian and Croatian ground forces, forced the Serbs to abandon their plans to “ethnically cleanse” Bosnia and Croatia.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Egyptian Christians Fear More Muslim Violence
By Mary Abdelmassih
Egypt (AINA) — Egyptian security forces have intensified their presence in the Upper Egyptian town of Dairout, in anticipation of a recurrence of Muslim violence against Christians. Copts expressed their fear over leaflets entitled “These have to Die!” which are being distributed to all Muslims in Dairout and neighborhoods, enticing them to “burn, vandalize and clean the country of these evil immoral infidels.”
Reports from Dairout, 313 km south of Cairo, confirm that Christian Copts are afraid to leave their homes and have stayed indoors since violence against them erupted on October 24, 2009. This collective punishment of Copts was caused by an illicit sexual relationship between a Muslim girl, Hagger Hassouna, and the Christian Romany Farouk Attallah. It was rumored that he sent videos of them intimately together to cell phones in Dairout before fleeing. This prompted the Hassouna family to kill his father, Farouk Attallah, on October 19, 2009, in revenge. Four of the Hassouna killers were detained by prosecution, leading to Muslim riots against the Copts (AINA 10-27-2009) .
According to Wagih Yacoub of the Middle East Christian Assosiation (MECA), Muslim-owned businesses are now displaying stickers with ‘Allah Akbar’ (Allah is Great) to differentiate between them and Coptic-owned businesses, as a form of pre-planning for a forthcoming wave of Muslim violence.
Handwritten leaflets (Arabic) have been circulated among Muslims in Dairout for the last two days; they call on Muslims to unite to take revenge for their religion and honor, claiming that Hagger Hassouna is innocent and that she was forced into vice, and “all Jews and Christians should come to learn that Muslim honor is precious.” The fliers state that Muslims are the masters of the world since beginning of times until the present day, and entices them to “burn and vandalize and clean the country of the evil immoral infidels.”
It also calls on Muslims to take revenge for the “rings of prostitution” which are the churches and in particular the church in the village of Ezbet Hanna. Those specifically named to be killed are Reverend Pavlos of the Church of the Virgin Mary, Coptic lawyer Gamal Youssef, two brothers who own an optometry practice, and a Copt who owns a beauty saloon and photography shop.
Muslims are asked to die for their honor and they will be rewarded with eternal paradise. “Do not say it is a matter of just a girl, no, it is a public and a serious issue, it is the biggest issue, it is Islam’s issue.” A transcript of the the leaflet (in Arabic) is published on Copts United website.
A video that surfaced yesterday entitled “Revenge for Honor,” showing a half-naked girl, assumed to be a Copt, is being distributed all over Dairout on cell phones. Ezzat Aziz of Copts United reported on the contents of the video of the assumed Coptic girl by saying “Details of the video shows the fear experienced by the girl as four Muslim men were undressing her.” According to Aziz the video seemed to have been shot in a secluded house and the girl was threatened to get undressed and was begging her captors to let her go as she was tired. She was half-naked, but refused to take off the rest of her clothes. The men repeatedly asked her if she “knew the Dairout Girl.”
Comparing the videos, Aziz said that the first (of Hagger Hassouna) shows “a girl who knew what she was doing” while the second (of the assumed Coptic girl) was of “a girl forced to undress.” Aziz did not say whether the Coptic girl was named in the video, but he mentioned that the four men forcing her to undress proudly gave their full names.
Coptic websites have refused to publish the video of Hagger Hassouna, saying it would be incompatible with Christian ethics.
On Saturday, October, 31 the four Muslims accused of killing Farouk Attallah are expected appear in court again. A repeat of the Muslim mob violence which took place on October 24 is anticipated should prosecution extend their detainment once again.
| [Return to headlines] |
Egyptian Antique Back Home From US After 100-Year Absence
(ANSAmed) CAIRO, OCTOBER 30 — Egypt received on Thursday an archaeological piece from the United States after a 100-year absence. The relic, which dates back to the Middle Pharaonic State is the lost part of the Nawous base, a heavy stone sarcophagus with a light stone cover. It belongs to Amenemhat I, the founder of the 12th dynasty. The restoration is part of efforts exerted by the Supreme Council of Antiquities to bring home all stolen antiquities. The piece, which returned to Egypt from the Metropolitan Museum of Art, was stolen 100 years ago by a person from New York. Amenemhat I was the son of a priest named Senuseret (Sesostris) and a woman called Nefret and as such, was not related at all to the members of the royal family of the 11th Dynasty. His name shows allegiance to the god Amun, a hitherto unimportant god of unknown origin who appears to have established himself in the Theban area somewhere during the 11th Dynasty. (ANSAmed)
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Publishing: Algeria, ‘El Bendir’ Comics Magazine is Born
(ANSAmed) — ALGIERS, OCTOBER 30 — The new magazine ‘El Bendir’, completely dedicated to the world of comics, has been released in Algeria. Coming into existence during the second edition of the International Comics Festival in Algiers which took place on October 14-18, El Bendir (from the name of a traditional Maghreb tambourine) “wants to be the place of creation and expression for all lovers of comics”, explained Dalila Nedjamane, director of the event. The magazine, 94 pages in French and Arabic, unites the big Algerian artists like Slim, le Hic and Aider, but also young talents and foreign artists including ‘the Lebanese of Samandal’. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Zitouna Bank Created, Active in Islamic Finance
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS — Banque Zitouna, the new Islamic Tunisian bank created by businessman Mohamed Sakher El Materi, son-in-law of President Ben Ali, will be opened in the first quarter of 2010. The bank’s general assembly in Tunis has approved the articles of association and the appointment of directors. Banque Zitouna has a capital of 30 million dinar (around 15.5 million euros). So far, only a Saudi bank was active in the sector of Islamic finance in Tunisia. El Materi, the website Infotunisie reports, underlined that Banque Zitouna “was created at the right time, to make the orientation of President Ben Ali on the consolidation of the banking system more concrete, in support of business, as well as Tunisian and international investments”.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Tunisia: Koran for Visually Impaired to Ben Ali
(ANSAmed) — TUNIS, OCTOBER 30 — The first of the eight Korans for the visually handicapped, printed with the Braille system, was donated today to President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali by the president of the Tunisian Union for the Visually Handicapped, Imededdine Chaker. Ben Ali, the TAP press agency writes, “has ordered the publication” and has repeated his recommendations for the developments of programmes for the visually impaired. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Early Morning Muslim Prayer Call is a Rude Awakening for Many
While recent rioting in and around Jerusalem’s Old City has left religious tensions between the capital’s Muslims and Jews simmering, a new dispute — this time concerning the volume of prayers, more than the prayers themselves — is resonating in outlying neighborhoods.
Jewish residents of these areas, all of which are in close proximity to Arab neighborhoods in the capital’s east, have begun to complain that the adhan, or Islamic call to prayer, which is broadcast five times a day from loudspeakers inside local mosques, has become an intolerable nuisance, particularly when it blasts through their neighborhoods at 4 a.m. every day.
“It’s as if they took the speakers and put them inside my bedroom,” Yehudit Raz, a resident of the northeast Pisgat Ze’ev neighborhood, told The Jerusalem Post on Thursday. “And it’s not from one mosque or two mosques — we’re talking about tons of speakers going off, one after the other, every morning.”
According to Raz, many residents of Pisgat Ze’ev are fed up with the noise, which they say has only gotten louder of late. And the police and municipality, to which, Raz said, residents have complained a number of times, aren’t doing anything about it.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
‘Organs Libel’ Journalist in Israel for Dimona Gathering
(IsraelNN.com) Swedish journalist Donald Bostrom, who gained infamy in August for claiming that IDF soldiers harvested organs from Arab rioters, landed in Israel on Sunday for the Dimona Conference. Bostrom was greeted at the airport with boos and jeers by dozens of activists from the Beitar youth group.
A second Zionist group, Im Tirzu, had attempted to block Bostrom’s entrance to Israel altogether. The group filed an appeal to Interior Minister Eli Yishai, accusing Bostrom of “a modern blood libel that recalls the same form of anti-Semitism in Europe in the Middle Ages.”
Despite the appeal, Bostrom was allowed into Israel to attend the Dimona gathering. However, Minister of the Development of the Negev and the Galilee Silvan Shalom announced that while Bostrom would be allowed to participate in the event, the government would end its participation in the conference.
“I will not attend an event in which a participant slandered IDF soldiers and attempted to harm Israel’s image,” Minister Shalom said. Shalom’s ministry had committed to participate in funding the conference, but as part of his decision to withdraw, funding was cut off.
Mayor Cohen Defends Conference Dimona Mayor Meir Cohen told Arutz-7 that he respects Shalom’s decision, but laments the fact that the minister’s announcement was made just one day before the conference began. “It’s a shame that we’ve been planning this conference, along with Silvan’s office, for two months, and a shame that 24 hours before it opens, we get this announcement,” he said.
“Despite this, we will hold the conference as planned. We will get funding from a different source,” Cohen said.
Cohen denied allegations that Dimona is giving Bostrom a platform to spread anti-Israel hate. “He has been speaking around the Arab world for months, so he does not need us to give him a platform,” the mayor argued.
“We thought it was fitting to invite a man like [Bostrom] to a conference that deals with media issues, among them ethical norms. And I think the very fact that he responded to the invitation shows regret for what he said,” Cohen said.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Gas From Gaza, Mobile Phones in Palestine and a $1m Peace Prize …Tony Blair and the Middle Eastern Eldorado
July 25, 2003: In the middle of that blazing summer, Prime Minister Tony Blair sat at his desk in Downing Street to write to his counterpart in Israel, Ariel Sharon. Three months after invading Iraq, Blair and U.S. President George W. Bush were trying to temper their warlike image by pushing ahead with the ‘road map’, their Palestinian-Israeli peace plan.
‘Dear Ariel,’ Blair began, ‘it was a great pleasure to welcome you to London last week. I hope you will agree that the visit was very worthwhile and has marked a new stage in relations between our two countries.’ Yet the rest of his cordial letter said nothing about peace or politics. Instead, it was concerned solely with business — a plea to Sharon to let a British Gas-led consortium start work in a vast natural gas field off the coast of the Palestinian Gaza Strip, a deal worth at least £4billion.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Iranian Cleric Shuns Mecca
Iranian imam orders Shiite followers not to pray in Mecca’s direction as ‘infidels took over other states’
Shift your prayer rugs: An Iranian cleric called over the weekend for a radical change in Muslim prayer practices, urging followers to no longer pray in the direction of the holy city of Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
The cleric, Ahmed Alam al-Hadi, told worshipers that Muslim states such as Saudi Arabia and Iraq have been taken over by infidels, urging them to turn instead to the holy city of Mashhad, located in Iran.
“The Hijaz lands (Saudi Arabia) had fallen victim to the Wahhabis, Iraq is occupied by the infidels, and the city of Mashhad is holy, so it alone can serve as the prayer direction for Muslims,” he said.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Lebanon: New Political Dynasty With Hariri Family
(by Ziad Talhouk) (ANSAmed) — BEIRUT, OCTOBER 30 — With the rise of the Hariri Sunni family, the Lebanese firmament is being embellished with a new umpteenth political dynasty, so much that the only merit of the very young Ahmad Hariri has for being nominated to the leaders of the main Sunni Lebanese movement is that he is “one of the family”. The Beirut newspaper al Akhbar announced today that Ahmad Hariri (26 ), son of member of parliament Bahia Hariri, nephew of premier Rafik killed in 2005, will shortly be nominated as secretary general of al Mustaqbal (The Future), and his older cousin Saad (39), currently premier will maintain the role of president of the movement. An ad hoc committee led by young Ahmad will reorganized the party. Saad Hariri is convinced that The Future, founded about fifteen years ago by his father Rafik as a social and philanthropic organization, but after his martyrdom became of point of reference for Lebanese Sunnis, should now have an organized political role. The current premier is said to have asked his young cousin Ahmad, made the head of a commission of experts, to oversee the reorganisation. Married just one month ago, Ahmad Hariri graduated five years ago from the American University in Beirut. The heavy and bespectacled of the Hariri family, pictured wearing a beard similar to Saad’s, for the last two years has been the coordinator of the youth division of the family movement. His older brother Nader has been head of the office of their more famous cousin for some years. The family reunion induced the al Akhbar newspaper to invent a fake future headline: “Premier Saad Hariri, with his right hand Nader Hariri, had a meeting with MP Bahia Hariri who was accompanied by The Future secretary general Ahmad Hariri”. The Future is starting a process to become the youngest of the Lebanese parties, both Christian and Muslim, to have consecrated a political dynasty or created a new one. In the 1990s Rafik Hariri was the “new man” in the tradition of Lebanese prime ministers and his dramatic exit catapulted onto the political scene his then unknown son Saad. This was followed by the entry into politics of many other Hariri family members. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Petrochemical: Turkish Firm Signs MoU With Iranian Firm
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, OCTOBER 30 — A Turkish petrochemical company signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with an Iranian company on establishment of a plant and its facilities, the Turkish company said on Friday. The Petrochemical Holding Corp. (Petkim) of Turkey signed on October 28, 2009 a MoU with the NPC International Limited (NPCI) of Iran on establishment of suspension polyvinyl chloride (S-PVC) plant with a capacity of 300,000 tons a year and its facilities. Petkim, as Anatolia news agency notes, the leading petrochemical company of Turkey, was founded in 1965. Specializing in petrochemical manufacturing, the company produces ethylene, polyethylene, polyvinyl chloride, polypropylene and other chemical building blocks for use in the manufacture of plastics, textiles, and other consumer and industrial products. The company has 14 manufacturing plants supplying a significant portion of petrochemicals used in Turkey. The company also exports products to the United States, and countries in Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Riyadh’s First Female Only Spa to Open in 2010
(ANSAmed) — RIYADH, OCTOBER 29 — The first female-only hotel spa in the Saudi Arabian city of Riyadh has preliminary approval and is set to open in March next year, hotel chiefs have said. Al Faisaliah Hotel bosses say they are hoping to open their Sense Spa just ahead of the hotel’s 10th anniversary in May 2010, Arabian Business onlie reports. It comes with the opening of a brand new wing of 106 rooms that are currently under construction. It will be the first female-only hotel spa in the city, and only the second in the conservative Islamic country. Rival hotel chain Park Hyatt is planning to open separate male and female spas in the more progressive city of Jeddah at the end of the year. “There are certain religious and social issues that come into play about taking care of yourself like that,” said Peter Finamore, the hotel’s managing director. “Spas in Saudi Arabia have historically been more medical in their focus. We need to address the concern that our spa will be able to deal with medical needs, without it looking like a doctor’s surgery,” he said. The spa is a Rosewood-branded Sense Spa, so will be “what the international traveller would expect” and will have private treatment rooms and a fitness centre. Spas do exist in the kingdom, but there are scant and often underground, advertising as a different business in order to not attract attention of the kingdom’s religious police. “We are setting trends for the kingdom. It’s been a learning curve for everyone involved,” said Khaled Al Idrissi, director of sales and marketing. “Spas haven’t been part of the lifestyle of people in Saudi. Now that’s changing.” Al Idrissi said because many young Saudis have been educated abroad, in the US and UK, they have a much more contemporary outlook. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Swine Flu a Hoax by Business Interest, Saudi Religious Scholar Says
A member of the Senior Ulema Council claims pandemics is a hoax and that only “God decides in the matter”. He backs his argument by saying that during Ramadan, the number of funerals did not rise over the previous year, and that many of the people he knew did not get the disease despite not being vaccinated.
Riyadh (AsiaNews) — The world might be on alert for the new influenza, and Saudi authorities might be setting up preventive measures in preparation for Hajj to Makkah next November, but for Sheikh Saleh al-Luhaydan, a member of the Senior Ulema Council, it is useless because the swine flu is a huge hoax hatched by business interests. In such matters, “God decides”, the sheikh said.
Reported in Asharq Al-Awsat, the views of the Muslim religious leader were made public during a lecture at Al-Rajihi Mosque, in Riyadh.
Asked for a ruling on whether a person can pray in his house if he fears going to the mosque as a precaution against being infected by the swine flu, the sheikh said that it was not possible to “know how serious this epidemic is.”
He backed his claim by saying that during Ramadan, there was no rise in the number of funerals over last year. In addition, the Islamic scholar-cum-improvised virologist said he knew people who had not been vaccinated and who did not develop the disease.
“This is due to God’s care and protection of Kaaba’s visitors,” he explained.
Sheikh Saleh’s statements prompted Dr Khalid Abdul-Ghafar Al Abdul-Rahman, the dean of the College of Medicine at the Islamic Imam Muhammad Bin-Saud University, to respond and emphatically said that the “epidemic does exist and has been scientifically proven.”
All that can be said about the low number of cases during Ramadan is that it happened despite the huge influx of pilgrims to Makkah.
On one point, religious scholar and medical expert agree: in the end God’s hand helped the pilgrims avoid the contagion.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Syria-Lebanon: ‘Disappeared’ Prisoners, New Mixed Forum
(ANSAmed) — BEIRUT, OCTOBER 30 — The joint Syrian-Lebanese commission charged with discussion on the issue of the hundreds of ‘disappeared’ prisoners from the prisons of both countries, is to sit on November 7. According to a report in the Beirut press, the delegations from Syria and Lebanon are to meet at the frontier location of Jdeidet Yabus. Last January, the Beirut authorities presented their counterparts in Damascus with a list of Lebanese citizens who had “disappeared” in Syrian prisons. For its part, the Syrian delegation asked for information concerning 200 Syrians who had been “dispersed” in Lebanon since 2005, the year in which diplomatic relations between the two countries were brusquely cut off following the assassination of former Lebanese premier, Rafik Hariri. Syria has been accused of involvement in the crime from many sides, but Damascus has consistently rebuffed all accusations. The association of the families of Lebanese detainees in Syria (Solide) claims that in Damascus “there are currently around 600 political prisoners, who have been arrested over the 29 years of Syrian military hegemony in Lebanon”. After years of silence, in 2008, following the formal normalisation of diplomatic relations between the two countries, the Damascus authorities admitted to the presence of “100 criminals” from Lebanon in the country’s prisons.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey and Iraq to Set Up Industry Zone in Basra
(ANSAmed) — BASRA (IRAQ), OCTOBER 30 — Turkey and Iraq will collaborate to set up an organized industry zone in Iraq’s second largest city Basra, Turkish state minister for Foreign trade said on Friday as reported by Anatolia news agency. Zafer Caglayan and Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu are on a visit to Iraq for trade talks with a large group of Turkish businessmen. Turkey and Iraq have already been working on a project to establish such an industry zone in Nasiriyah, Zafer Caglayan told a joint press conference with Iraq’s Minister of Trade Safaa al-Deen al-Safi and Governor Abboud Cltag Mayah of the Iraqi city of Basra. “A similar one will soon be established here in Basra,” Caglayan said. Turkish and Iraqi officials met in Baghdad two weeks ago for the meeting of Turkey-Iraq High-Level Strategic Cooperation Council and signed 48 memoranda of understanding, Caglayan recalled. He said those agreements would play a “key” role in Iraq’s economic and commercial future. Caglayan also said that there were six large-scale industrial plants in Basra, which he described as Iraq’s commercial capital, and added that these plants had been partially operated especially in chemical industry. “We will also have talks with Iraqi officials to hand over these plants to Turkish businessmen to be fully operated,” he said. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
“What We Can Achieve in Afghanistan” By Robert Zoellick
Washington D.C., 30 October (By Robert B. Zoellick, Special to The Washington Post) — As governments reconsider strategies in Afghanistan, stories abound about why achieving progress in this “graveyard of empires” is so challenging: The country is racked by violence and opium production; confidence in the government is weak; its neighbors meddle; and fiercely independent tribes distrust any intruder — whether from Britain, the Soviet Union, NATO or Kabul.
The World Bank Group’s experience in Afghanistan reflects all these problems. This is one of the most difficult environments in which we work. Yet we have seen real, measurable progress: in the health sector, education, community development, microfinance and telecommunications. Since 2002, the World Bank has committed nearly $2 billion to these and other projects and manages, with partners, a $3.2 billion trust fund for 30 donor countries.
Here are some of the lessons we have learned:
First, we need to “secure development” — that is, create a strong link between security and development. Each reinforces the other, especially when we focus on communities and on resolving local-level conflict. A dysfunctional police force, justice and prison system feeds a lawlessness that breeds disillusionment with the government and sympathy for its opponents.
Second, corruption can be fought better through design than through calls for virtue or even a slew of investigations. Afghanistan’s drug trade risks the criminalization of the state. But there are steps one can take to make corruption harder and less likely.
Afghanistan’s reform-minded finance ministers have taken practical steps to simplify government processes and add transparency to reduce opportunities for corruption, already raising government revenue 75 percent in the first part of this year. Recently the government slashed the number of steps to register vehicles from some 55 to just a few, reducing opportunities for bribes and increasing revenue.
Third, locally led projects are the most effective. The National Solidarity Program, which the World Bank helped launch in 2003, empowers more than 22,000 elected, village-level councils to decide on their development priorities — from building a school to irrigation to electrification.
So far, the program has reached more than 19 million Afghans in 34 provinces, with grants averaging $33,000. Development owned by the community can survive amid conflict: When an NSP-funded school was attacked in August 2006, the villagers defended it. The community councils also help build cooperation among villages and with the government.
Fourth, while local progress matters, government responsibility and capacity must be built at the national level. Currently, two-thirds of aid to Afghanistan flows outside the government because donors lack confidence in its competence and transparency.
But this undermines those trying to build legitimate Afghan institutions. It can also grossly distort resource allocation: Some relatively secure areas are starved of money when they could be producing results.
We can work with Afghans to strengthen public financial management. That said, in the absence of strong institutions, and facing considerable corruption, good results have been dependent on one-by-one partnerships with honest, reformist ministers. The new Cabinet must include more such individuals.
Fifth, Afghans need to see measurable improvements to their lives, or they will not feel they owe anything to Kabul or local governments.
There are success stories: More than 12,000 miles of all-weather rural roads have been built, connecting communities to markets; today, 80 percent of Afghans have access to basic health services, compared with only 9 percent in 2003; 6 million children are enrolled in school, nearly 35 percent of whom are girls, compared with about 1 million students and no girls seven years ago; competitive telecommunications networks now serve about 10 million subscribers. But a lot remains to be done.
Stability in Afghanistan also depends on good leadership — especially in critical areas that have lagged behind, such as agriculture, energy, mining and private-sector development. The challenges of securing development so that it is self-sustaining are formidable.
But progress is possible if safety is strengthened, the Afghan government assumes ownership, its partners build development through the choices of the Afghan people, and Afghanistan’s neighbors decide they are better off with a successful state than with a perilous buffer zone that could send trouble back across their borders.
Zoellick is president of the World Bank Group.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Jordanian Princess vs. Halal; Islamist in Gov’t Service;
PRINCESS Alia bint al-Hussein of Jordan has appealed to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd to stop the ritual slaughter of conscious animals for halal meat in Australia.
She said its continuation would set back attempts to improve animal welfare in the Middle East.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Pet Dogs as Bad for Planet as Driving 4x4s, Book Claims
Owners should consider doing without, downsizing or even eating their pets to help save the planet, according to a new book.
It claims that the carbon footprint left by domesticated animals is out of proportion to the size of their paws.
A medium-sized dog has the same impact as a Toyota Land Cruiser driven 6,000 miles a year, while a cat is equivalent to a Volkswagen Golf.
But rabbits and chickens are eco-friendly because they provide meat for their owners while a canary or a goldfish has little effect on the environment.
At the same time a pair of hamsters do the same damage as running a plasma television, suggests the book Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living.
New Zealand-based authors Robert and Brenda Vale base their findings on the amount of land needed to grow food for pets ranging from budgerigars to cats and dogs.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Australia: PM Out of Loop on Tamil Asylum Seekers
Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has admitted he does not know the status of 78 Sri Lankan asylum seekers aboard an Australian customs vessel in Indonesian waters.
The ethnic Tamils, who are refusing to leave the Oceanic Viking, have reportedly been living in Indonesia for years.
Citing written messages thrown off the ship, Fairfax newspapers reported group members as saying they had been in Indonesia for up to five years, and had been accepted by Jakarta’s United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) office as genuine asylum seekers.
Mr Rudd said he knew nothing about the news.
“The UNHCR has got responsibility for processing the individuals on this particular vessel,” he told reporters in Canberra on Sunday.
“I am unaware of what the outcome of any … initial processing or initial discussions may be concerning their status — that is a matter for the UNHCR.”
Asked if Australian officials had interviewed those aboard the boat, Mr Rudd said: “I’m unaware of where all that is up to.”
Opposition Leader Malcolm Turnbull was also remaining non-committal, refusing to be drawn on whether a future coalition government would adopt previous prime minister John Howard’s tough stance on asylum seekers.
“When we come into government, after the next election, presumably a year from now, we will examine all of the options, including the policies that we had in place at the last election,” he told Network Ten.
He did say, however, that if the latest news on the Sri Lankans was true, it contradicted the government’s statements that push factors — such as war — were behind the recent increase in people seeking asylum in Australia.
“If these people had left Sri Lanka five years ago to Indonesia then that completely demolishes Kevin Rudd’s argument that his changes to our domestic policies … have had no influence on this surge,” he said.
Family First senator Steve Fielding said it was clear Labor’s border protection policies were responsible for the influx.
“People smugglers are using these laws to send more people our way,” he told Network Ten.
“That is a huge concern. Something needs to be done.”
The group was meant to be offloaded from the Oceanic Viking under a deal struck between Mr Rudd and Indonesian President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono, but they have not budged for a fortnight.
“This is our boat, it’s been hijacked by the refugees, and the Rudd government hasn’t got a clue what to do,” Senator Fielding said.
“The Rudd government has a band-aid solution. The Indonesian solution is an Indonesian fiasco and it’s clearly not working.”
Australian Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young said an Australian solution to the asylum seeker issue was required, one that was practical, long-term and humane.
“The prime minister, the leader of the opposition and all the other parties in the parliament — including the Greens — should be putting our heads together and coming up with a real solution,” she told ABC TV.
Senator Hanson-Young called on the government to accept the 78 Tamils, saying she feared they would be forcibly removed from the Oceanic Viking and put back into Indonesian detention centres otherwise.
| — Hat tip: Nilk | [Return to headlines] |
Riot After Africans Shot in Italy
Immigrants in a southern Italian town have rioted after six Africans were killed in a suspected mafia attack outside a shop.
People smashed windows and threw rocks in Castelvolturno, north-west of the city of Naples.
The six men from Ghana, Liberia and Togo were shot dead late on Thursday.
Police say the attack may be linked to a row between the Casalesi clan of the regional Camorra mafia and immigrants involved in drug-trafficking.
Two other men were injured in the shooting.
Television footage showed men wielding metal bars and forcing traffic to stop on Friday.
In a separate incident in Castelvolturno, a man, believed to be an Italian national, was gunned down near a local games hall.
Police are now investigating if the two shootings were linked.
They say the murders may be connected to drugs-trafficking in the town, where African immigrants have recently begun dealing autonomously, the Italian news agency Ansa says.
The Casalesi clan — one of the most feared groups in the Camorra — is believed to control drug-trafficking and prostitution in the region.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Abortion: Necessary to Inform Parents for 74% in Spain
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, OCTOBER 30 — For 73.4% of the people in Spain, it is “necessary” for 16 and 17-year-old minors intending to have an abortion to inform their parents, according to a survey by Publico newspaper on a proposed abortion reform currently being discussed in Congress. The survey had to do with the most debatable article in the reform, which would allow 16 and 17-year-olds to voluntarily terminate a pregnancy without parental consensus. The percentage of those who believe that it is necessary to inform parents of an abortion increased to 91% for PP voters and is 64% for PSOE voters. An opinion also shared by 72% of people between the ages of 18 and 29 who were interviewed. Thirty-four percent believe that the decision for a minor to have an abortion should be made by parents, while only 26.1% said that it is an issue to be decided only by the pregnant woman. The debate has divided Spanish society in two. Forty-one point six percent said that they are in agreement with the current abortion reform law in effect, which dates back to 1985. Ten percent said that they are neither for nor against the law, while 49.8% are against the draft law being examined by Congress. In any case, 71.4% of people in Spain believe that abortions must be guaranteed by the public health system. Today, 97.9% of voluntary abortions are carried out in private centres, according to data from 2007 provided by the Spanish Health Ministry. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Larry David Blasted for ‘Curb’ Episode Where He Urinates on Jesus Painting
Comedian Larry David pushed the mocking of religion over the edge in latest episode of his HBO show, critics say.
Comedian Larry David is under attack from critics who say he pushed the mocking of religion and Christian belief in miracles over the edge in the latest episode of his HBO series “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” which the cable network defended as “playful.”
On the show’s most recent installment, which aired Sunday, David urinates on a painting of Jesus Christ, causing a woman to believe the painting depicts Jesus crying.
Deal Hudson, author and publisher of InsideCatholic.com, said he doesn’t find any humor in the episode.
“I don’t think it’s funny,” Hudson told Foxnews.com. “Why is it that people are allowed to publicly show that level of disrespect for Christian symbols? If the same thing was done to a symbol of any other religions — Jewish or Muslim — there’d be a huge outcry. It’s simply not a level playing field.”
Hudson said an apology from the show’s producers and writing team should be issued.
“Somebody should [apologize],” Hudson said. “When is it going to stop? When is common sense going to dictate that people realize this willingness of artists to do to Christianity what they would never do to Judaism or Islam?”
In a statement to Foxnews.com, HBO downplayed the controversy.
“Anyone who follows Curb Your Enthusiasm knows that the show is full of parody and satire,” the statement read. “Larry David makes fun of everyone, most especially himself. The humor is always playful and certainly never malicious.”
Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, also criticized the episode, saying David should “quit while he’s ahead,” and that the show is proof that the comedian’s best years are behind him.
“Was Larry David always this crude? Would he think it’s comedic if someone urinated on a picture of his mother?” Donohue said in a statement. “This might be fun to watch, but since HBO only likes to dump on Catholics (it was just a couple of weeks ago that Sarah Silverman insulted Catholics on ‘Real Time with Bill Maher’) and David is Jewish, we’ll never know.”
During Sunday’s episode, David, who created, wrote and produced “Seinfeld,” visits a bathroom in his assistant’s home and splatters urine on a picture of Jesus. Instead of wiping it off, David leaves the restroom. Minutes later, David’s assistant enters the bathroom and concludes that Jesus is crying. She then summons her mother to the bathroom, where both women kneel in prayer.
“When David and Jerry Seinfeld (playing himself) are asked if they ever experienced a miracle, David answers, ‘every erection is a miracle,’ Donohue’s statement continued. “That’s what passes for creativity these days.”
The episode, “The Bare Midriff,” primarily revolves around David’s assistant and her belly-revealing attire. According to the show’s Web site, a “new pill” increased David’s urine flow, leading to the “misunderstanding about a miraculously weeping Jesus.”
HBO promoted the controversial scene on the show’s site, complete with a “squirm-o-meter” that ranked the urine incident ahead of David’s confronting his assistant about her exposed midriff.
| — Hat tip: TV | [Return to headlines] |
Has Anyone Read the Copenhagen Agreement?
We can only hope that world leaders will do nothing more than enjoy a pleasant bicycle ride around the charming streets of Copenhagen come December. For if they actually manage to wring out an agreement based on the current draft text of the Copenhagen climate-change treaty, the world is in for some nasty surprises. Draft text, you say? If you haven’t heard about it, that’s because none of our otherwise talkative political leaders have bothered to tell us what the drafters have already cobbled together for leaders to consider. And neither have the media.
Enter Lord Christopher Monckton. The former adviser to Margaret Thatcher gave an address at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month that made quite a splash. For the first time, the public heard about the 181 pages, dated Sept. 15, that comprise the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—a rough draft of what could be signed come December.
So far there have been more than a million hits on the YouTube post of his address. It deserves millions more because Lord Monckton warns that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty is to set up a transnational “government” on a scale the world has never before seen.
The “scheme for the new institutional arrangement under the Convention” that starts on page 18 contains the provision for a “government.” The aim is to give a new as yet unnamed U.N. body the power to directly intervene in the financial, economic, tax and environmental affairs of all the nations that sign the Copenhagen treaty.
The reason for the power grab is clear enough: Clause after complicated clause of the draft treaty requires developed countries to pay an “adaptation debt” to developing countries to supposedly support climate change mitigation. Clause 33 on page 39 says that “by 2020 the scale of financial flows to support adaptation in developing countries must be [at least $67 billion] or [in the range of $70 billion to $140 billion per year].”
And how will developed countries be slugged to provide for this financial flow to the developing world? The draft text sets out various alternatives, including option seven on page 135, which provides for “a [global] levy of 2 per cent on international financial market [monetary] transactions to Annex I Parties.” Annex 1 countries are industrialized countries, which include among others the U.S., Australia, Britain and Canada.
To be sure, countries that sign international treaties always cede powers to a U.N. body responsible for implementing treaty obligations. But the difference is that this treaty appears to have been subject to unusual attempts to conceal its convoluted contents. And apart from the difficulty of trying to decipher the U.N. verbiage, there are plenty of draft clauses described as “alternatives” and “options” that should raise the ire of free and democratic countries concerned about preserving their sovereignty.
Lord Monckton himself only became aware of the extraordinary powers to be vested in this new world government when a friend found an obscure U.N. Web site and searched through several layers of hyperlinks before discovering a document that isn’t even called the draft “treaty.” Instead, it’s labelled a “Note by the Secretariat.”
Interviewed by broadcaster Alan Jones on Sydney radio Monday, Lord Monckton said “this is the first time I’ve ever seen any transnational treaty referring to a new body to be set up under that treaty as a ‘government.’ But it’s the powers that are going to be given to this entirely unelected government that are so frightening.” He added: “The sheer ambition of this new world government is enormous right from the start—that’s even before it starts accreting powers to itself in the way that these entities inevitably always do.”
Critics have admonished Lord Monckton for his colorful language. He has certainly been vigorous. In his exposé of the draft Copenhagen treaty in St. Paul, he warned Americans that “in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy and your prosperity away forever.” Yet his critics fail to deal with the substance of what he says.
Ask yourself this question: Given that our political leaders spend hundreds of hours talking about climate change and the need for a global consensus in Copenhagen, why have none of them talked openly about the details of this draft climate-change treaty? After all, the final treaty will bind signatories for years to come. What exactly are they hiding? Thanks to Lord Monckton we now know something of their plans.
Janos Pasztor, director of the Secretary-General’s Climate Change Support Team, told reporters in New York Monday that with the U.S. Congress yet to pass a climate-change bill, a global climate-change treaty is now an unlikely outcome in Copenhagen. Let’s hope he is right. And thank you, America.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
1 comment:
[I just saw this internet item!]
JEWS WHO HATE CHRISTIANS
Jewish hate is as old as some ancient Hebrew prophets.
Speaking of anti-Semitism, it's Jerry Falwell and other fundy leaders who've gleefully predicted that in the future EVERY nation will be against Israel (an international first?) and that TWO-THIRDS of all Jews will be killed, right?
Wrong! It's the ancient Hebrew prophet Zechariah who predicted all this in the 13th and 14th chapters of his book! The last prophet, Malachi, explains the reason for this future Holocaust that'll outdo even Hitler's by stating that "Judah hath dealt treacherously" and "the Lord will cut off the man that doeth this" and asks "Why do we deal treacherously every man against his brother?"
Haven't evangelicals generally been the best friends of Israel and persons perceived to be Jewish? Then please explain the recent filthy, hate-filled, back-stabbing tirades by David Letterman (and Sandra Bernhard and Kathy Griffin and Larry David) against Sarah Palin and other Christians, and explain why most Jewish leaders have seemingly condoned the continuing "crucifixion" of Christians and even their Leader!
While David, Sandra, Kathy and Larry are tragically turning comedy into tragedy, they are also helping to speed up and fulfill the Final Holocaust a la Zechariah and Malachi, thus helping to make the Bible even more believable!
(For even more stunning information, visit MSN and type in "Separation of Raunch and State," "Michael the Narc-Angel," "Bible Verses Obama Avoids" and "The Earliest Hate Criminals" to learn even more about Jewish connections!)
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