The big news of the day concerns five D.C.-area terrorists who were arrested in Pakistan for jihad-related activities. President Obama has already advised Americans not to rush to judgment or think ill of their fellow citizens who happen to be Muslims, and who also have made such important contributions to American society.In other news, the first sharia law tribunal has been proposed for Wales.
Thanks to Barry Rubin, C. Cantoni, Diana West, Esther, Fjordman, heroyalwhyness, Insubria, JD, JP, KGS, LN, Lurker from Tulsa, Sean O’Brian, and all the other tipsters who sent these in. Headlines and articles are below the fold.
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Coburn, McCain Say Billions in Stimulus Dollars Wasted
WASHINGTON — Seven billion taxpayer dollars wasted, that is what Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn said he’s outlined in another list of 100 wasteful stimulus projects.
In fact, a couple of the projects on the senator’s list were first investigated by the Oklahoma Impact Team.
Oklahoma Senator Tom Coburn questioned the Obama administration’s use of stimulus money on specific projects.
Coburn and Senator McCain claimed the stimulus is doing little to create jobs or prioritize worthwhile projects.
The Oklahoma Impact Team delved into a list of continuing coverage following stimulus tax dollars.
From one to 100, it lists stimulus projects that are important to those receiving the money, but Senators Tom Coburn and John McCain said those people do not represent most Americans.
“The question is, is when we run $1.4 trillion deficits, the money we spend ought to be a high priority for the American people as a whole,” Coburn said.
Coburn said this list is full of projects that are not a priority and do not create jobs. Three Oklahoma projects are highlighted in the list.
Including a $90,000 grant for OU researchers to study how birds parent their offspring and compare that to human behavior.
The Oklahoma Impact Team was cited as the senators questioned the use of stimulus funds to study grandparents in Alaska. A story the Impact Team discussed months ago.
Coburn used it as an example to show the lack of federal priorities, trickling down to his own state.
“Most of the money’s going to be spent on travel back and forth between Stillwater and Alaska rather than giving that grant to somebody in Alaska or Washington state or somewhere else that are also qualified to do that which is not a priority right now,” Coburn said.
Also on the list, a story by the Impact Team discussed the Oklahoma River Cruises in Oklahoma City getting $1.8 million in transportation-related funding.
The senators called the project wasteful because the money came from the same stimulus budget that could have paid to repair Oklahoma’s deficient bridges.
“We didn’t list the projects when we passed the stimulus bill. We just passed it and gave them a blank check and that’s how you end up with this kind of stuff,” McCain said.
McCain’s state was no different, Arizona also made the list with two scientific studies totaling close to $1 million on ants.
“I had no idea that so much expertise concerning ants resided in the universities of my state. And I must say, I say that with an element of pride, but I’m not sure that it is deserving of these taxpayer dollars,” McCain said.
Finally, the senators cited Reuters research that claimed for every one job the stimulus has created, the government has spent an average of $246,000.
“I think it’s pretty clear that billions and billions and billions, as much as fifty already, have been spent on projects that don’t create jobs. That’s really really bad news for Americas taxpayers,” McCain said.
The Oklahoma Impact Team is continuing to follow stimulus dollars in Oklahoma.
| — Hat tip: Lurker from Tulsa | [Return to headlines] |
Faculty, Staff Cuts Likely for Tulsa Public Schools
TULSA, OK — Tulsa Public Schools report more budget cuts are inevitable, and they will affect the classroom.
The board of education approved three furlough days for all non-classroom employees Monday night. The move is expected to save the district $325,000, but school leaders say that is just the tip of the iceberg.
TPS has already lost millions in funding in 2009. It could lose millions more by the end of the school year and millions more next year.
Officials say they’re running out of options. TPS is cutting its budget left and right, but there is no end in sight.
TPS Superintendent Dr. Keith Ballard enacted a hiring freeze and eliminated paid substitute teachers. Monday night he announced furloughs for all non-classroom employees. He will also eliminate more than 100 non-teaching jobs.
Teachers and administrators are holding their breath.
“It is absolutely a relief to the classroom teacher and to the parents that the classroom is being protected right now,” Stacey Vernon, Edison Middle School Principal.
But for how long? Doctor Ballard’s struggling to cut $5 million and says he could have to cut millions more by next fall.
“For every 100 teaching positions we get about $4.5, $5 million. I think next year we will see an impact on the classroom, and it will be through classroom size. There will be an impact, and that’s what the impact will be,” Ballard said.
Eighty-five percent of TPS’s budget is for personnel, which means salaries.
“Within in a district where you have so much of its budget taken by salaries and compensation, it’s hard to find enough cuts that don’t affect that,” Vernon said.
Ballard says more furloughs will happen, but teachers are at risk.
“If we do have to reduce the teaching force next year, it is my hope, and my intention, that it will be through attrition. That we will not have an involuntary reduction in force,” Ballard said.
Ballard says when there is no money, there is no money and in the classroom, teachers are nervous about how education will be affected.
To eliminate positions through attrition, Dr. Ballard is offering a one-time, $5,000 bonus for teachers to retire and is working on a proposal that will pay teachers half a year’s salary if they retire.
| — Hat tip: Lurker from Tulsa | [Return to headlines] |
Neiman Marcus’ 1Q Profit Falls 34% as Luxury Demand Remains Weak
Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus says it hasn’t hit the bottom yet.
Its affluent core shopper is still buying, but less-heeled aspirational customers who depended on credit to move up into luxury brands remain largely absent from its stores.
As a result, the Dallas-based retailer reported a 34 percent decline in fiscal first-quarter profit Wednesday. Chief executive Burt Tansky said the customer is “very measured and deliberate in her purchasing.”
“Improvements are slow in coming,” Tansky said. “We’re seeing more enthusiasm from our customers in the month of November and early December than we certainly have all year.”
There are a few bright spots.
It’s asking some vendors of women’s shoes and contemporary apparel to ship more merchandise because it underestimated consumer demand, Tansky said.
Returning international tourists are helping boost business at its Bergdorf Goodman store in New York.
Neiman Marcus is also scoping out new ways to grow. The company is considering opening up its Web shopping to the world. Last month, Seattle-based Nordstrom introduced international shopping on its Web site, extending its reach to 30 countries.
And it’s evaluating how it can expand its Last Call clearance division.
Tom Lind, Last Call’s senior vice president and managing director, has been leading a team studying the outlet store business and evaluating ways to increase its share of the off-price market. It just opened its 28th Last Call store in Orange County, Calif.
While Neiman Marcus sees opportunities in Last Call stores and online, it’s slowing its full-line store expansions. It just opened its 41st Neiman Marcus store in the Seattle suburb of Bellevue, Wash. New stores in smaller markets such as Charlotte, N.C., have had a tougher time during the recession than mature stores.
It takes time for stores to develop in new markets, said Jim Skinner, chief financial officer.
Overall, first-quarter results came in better than analysts expected but were still weak, said Moody’s analyst Maggie Taylor.
“That aspirational customer was shopping on credit, and we don’t see those customers coming back,” Taylor said. “Their credit limits have been cut, and they aren’t feeling as good about life.”
Total sales declined 11.9 percent to $868.9 million from $985.8 million a year ago, when stores took huge markdowns to move merchandise.
Same-store sales dropped 13.7 percent in the quarter. Profit fell to $8.5 million in the period ended Oct. 31, down from $12.9 million last year. Sales per square foot declined to $454 from $605 a year ago. This fall, stores were also stocked with more merchandise in its middle price ranges.
While markdowns are much lower than last year’s 40 percent to 75 percent off, sales are expected to remain weak because shoppers still can’t afford most luxury brands, according to a report by Retail Eye Partners analysts Sapna Shah and Lisa Waters. Neiman Marcus stores have 20 percent less inventory to match up with the new realities.
At the company’s NorthPark Center store in Dallas, historically one of the top three in the chain, parking spaces were in big demand over the lunch hour Wednesday.
“I’ve cut down,” said Suzanne Moran of Dallas. When she couldn’t find something on sale, she headed to the cosmetics department, where she found a few gifts Wednesday.
Sandra Redmond of Dallas said she came in for her annual St. John knits fix.
“I got it for 60 percent off. That’s the only way I can afford it,” she said, adding that she paid full price for fur ear muffs at $125 and stockings at $26 each.
| — Hat tip: Lurker from Tulsa | [Return to headlines] |
Obama Still Hopes for Bipartisan Support on Jobs
WASHINGTON (AP) — Despite Republican opposition on Capitol Hill, President Barack Obama said Wednesday that he’s still hoping for bipartisan support for his efforts to use financial bailout money to help small businesses and bring down double-digit unemployment.
“I am absolutely committed to working with anybody who is willing to do the job to make sure we rebuild our economy,” Obama said after emerging from a White House meeting with a group of Republican and Democratic congressional leaders.
Obama repeated his proposals for more infrastructure spending, tax breaks for small businesses, and incentives for Americans to make their homes more energy efficient. He also wants to extend economic stimulus programs to keep unemployment insurance from expiring for millions of out-of-work Americans and to help laid-off workers keep their health insurance.
Obama hasn’t given a price tag for the new package but said he would work with Congress on deciding how to pay for it. Some lawmakers put the total cost of the new proposals at $200 billion or more.
Republican lawmakers have ridiculed both the president’s proposals and his parallel call for doing more to hold down government deficits. During Wednesday’s meeting, GOP leaders presented the president with their alternative “no-cost” jobs plan that calls for a freeze in federal spending and no tax increases until the unemployment rate comes down.
“We can’t keep spending money we don’t have,” Rep. Eric Cantor, the second-ranking House Republican, said after the meeting.
Despite the president’s call for bipartisanship, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said Wednesday’s discussion “was not without politics.”
A House Republican aide aware of details about the meeting said the president accused the GOP of rooting against a recovery because of next year’s midterm elections. The aide spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private meeting.
| — Hat tip: Lurker from Tulsa | [Return to headlines] |
U.S. Debt to Fall to Junk Bond Status?
Moody’s signals concern U.K. also could lose AAA rating
Is U.S. government debt about to be lowered to junk bond status?
While that risk is not imminent, the Obama administration is now officially on notice that downgrade of the U.S. sovereign credit rating is not out of the question.
On Tuesday, credit-rating agency Moody’s Investor Services warned the U.S. and Britain may lose their AAA sovereign credit ratings due to deteriorating finances, according to a report by Dow Jones Market Watch.
Moody’s has decided that for now the U.S. and Britain will retain AAA ratings, however, both nations are being moved to the “resilient” category.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Airport Manual Posted Online in Massive Security Breach
In an alarming security breach in the United States, an airport security manual has been posted on the internet.
The confidential airport passenger screening procedures offer insight into how to sidestep security.
The 90-page Transportation Security Administration (TSA) manual was marked “sensitive security information”.
It had been sitting on the internet since March but the blunder has only just been made public by a blogger.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Group Sues for Obama White House Visitor List
Secret Service has denied requests from Judicial Watch, msnbc.com
The nonprofit conservative group Judicial Watch has sued the U.S. Secret Service after the Obama administration again denied a request for copies of the list of visitors to the White House.
The records are being sought by journalists and public interest groups to help determine who is influencing White House policy on health care, the economy and a host of other issues.
Under the Obama policy, most of the names of visitors from Inauguration Day in January through the end of September will never be released. After the Secret Service and the White House denied a request for those records, Judicial Watch filed suit on Monday in federal court in Washington.
[…]
The White House has set up a Web page where members of the public can request the release of names of visitors, but that system gives results only for the names of visitors that the public can guess. If the public can’t guess who may have visited the White House between January and September, it can’t find out the names.
In addition, although the White House system requires requesters to submit their e-mail address, requests are not acknowledged by the White House, and no reply is sent to the requesters. The names sought, if they correspond to actual visitors, just show up in the next batch of names released by the White House. So far, each release of names by the White House has happened on the evening before a holiday, the classic Washington tactic for burying uncomfortable news.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Jimmy Carter’s Grandson Running for Office
Jason Carter Announces Campaign for Georgia State Senate
A grandson of Jimmy Carter is following the former president into politics with a run for the Georgia state Senate.
Democrat Jason Carter says he will run for an Atlanta-area seat that’s being vacated by President Barack Obama’s nominee to be U.S. ambassador to Singapore.
[…]
The 34-year-old said his grandfather, once the governor of Georgia, encouraged him to take the plunge. But he said he doesn’t feel much pressure to live up to his family’s famous last name.
“To the extent that there’s pressure, it is pressure to do the right thing, to maintain integrity that comes with the name,” he said.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Reid Plays the ‘Hate Card’
I find it suspiciously opportune that the political left has habituated Americans into the belief that one of the worst things one can be is a big, fat hater. As I see it, the methods by which they have accomplished this are identical to those they employed in creating hypersensitivity around racism and issues of race. This, of course, has proved invaluable to them in the area of securing capitulation on the part of their political opponents. In the case of Sen. Harry Reid, D-Nev., it is difficult for me to assess this man’s comportment over the last year without resorting to personal attack, so heady are the emotions his actions arouse. Then again, I honestly can’t think of anything worse to call him than what he already is. While “craven, purulent slime” and “desperate old whore” come to mind, these really don’t say anything definitive about his exploits or why one might appraise them as untoward or evil.
On Dec. 7, Reid likened congressional Republicans who oppose the current radically socialist health care “reform” proposals to those who opposed the abolition of slavery. His questionable stratagem highlighted another of the left’s key machinations, one which has proven eminently effective in securing their objectives: the implementation of a communist-inspired model for our educational system that is nothing more than a vehicle for indoctrination and social engineering. It has effectuated the existing level of ignorance on the part of Americans; consequently, millions have no idea whatsoever that it was Democrats who were in nearly unanimous support of slavery and later, segregation.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
TSA Hands Al-Qaeda Its Playbook
Terrorists were surely rejoicing when the Transportation Security Administration posted one of its most sensitive documents online.
Terrorists love details. Al-Qaeda’s U.S. embassy bombers knew the thickness of the embassy walls — a key detail in figuring out how much explosives were necessary to take the buildings down. The Mumbai terrorists had copies of the floor plans to the Taj Mahal Hotel before beginning their three-day siege. The 9/11 hijackers took no less than 33 test runs in the months leading up to America’s worst terrorist attack; they cased airports and watched how flight attendants did their jobs. Terrorists do homework. They conduct intense reconnaissance missions so as to maximize the death toll on the day of their actual attacks. Practice makes perfect, so the saying goes.
This week the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) — the agency tasked with keeping you and your family safe on airplanes — literally handed al-Qaeda its playbook. In a blunder of astonishingly poor judgment, the TSA allowed one of its most sensitive documents, the Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) manual, to be posted online. And then, instead of admitting the seriousness of its security breach, the TSA tried to take the position that the information wasn’t that important. Only after Congress got involved did TSA take any action. “Some” TSA employees were placed on administrative leave, Assistant Homeland Security Secretary David Heyman told senators on Wednesday.
One of the more troublesome exposures that must be addressed is the publication of undercover agents’ ID cards — including those for CIA officers and federal air marshals. The TSA claims the information is outdated, yet I confirmed with an air marshal and a CIA officer than their ID cards have not changed in the past 18 months. Sadly, I doubt anyone reading this is surprised. America long ago lost confidence in the TSA. Despite billions of taxpayer dollars, the agency consistently proves incapable of doing its job. And yet one question remains: will it take another terrorist attack using airplanes to reform the TSA?
The largest group of federal law enforcement officers in the country wants action, not backpedaling. John Adler, spokesman for the Federal Law Enforcement Officers Association (FLEOA), told the House Homeland Security Committee, “Both TSA’s posting of sensitive security information and their unwillingness to grasp the seriousness of this are unacceptable.” Adler asked for closed-door congressional investigations, including a “meaningful damage-control assessment.”
Senator Susan Collins, the ranking Republican member of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, also saw through the TSA’s attempt to downplay the incident. “On the day before the Senate Homeland Security Committee’s hearing on terrorist travel, it is alarming to learn that the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) inadvertently posted its own security manual on the Internet,” Collins said.
Here are a few highlights from the TSA’s SOP manual, which unfortunately reads like a how-to-breach-airport-security manual for terrorists…
| — Hat tip: heroyalwhyness | [Return to headlines] |
Architect of Swiss Minaret Ban is a Turk
(ANSAmed) — ANKARA, DECEMBER 9 — One of the architects of the controversial Swiss referendum that resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets has a Turkish heritage, daily Milliyet reported on Wednesday. Born in the Aegean province of Izmir to a Turkish father and a Swiss mother, Soli Pardos family moved to Switzerland when he was 5 years old, the daily said. Swiss voters overwhelmingly approved a constitutional ban on minarets on November 29, barring construction of the iconic mosque towers in a surprise vote that put Switzerland at the forefront of a European backlash against a growing Muslim population. Muslim groups in Switzerland and abroad condemned the vote as biased and anti-Islamic. The referendum by the nationalist Swiss People’s Party, or SVP, labeled minarets as symbols of rising Muslim political power that could one day transform Switzerland into an Islamic nation. Pardo also said minarets are used as symbols in Europe, but added: I do not have any reactions against Muslims, and I do not accept that there is Islamaphobia in Switzerland. Pardo, who is the leader of the Geneva Canton for the SVP, said his father was a small-scale industrialist and passed away in 1976 when Pardo was 21. Regarding the referendum, he said: We do not believe that the minarets are linked to worship because no calls to prayer are made from the minarets. We are not against building mosques but against 5- to 6-meter-tall minarets. The initiative was approved 57.5 to 42.5% by some 2.67 million voters. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Copenhagen Climate Summit: Carbon Trading Fraudsters in Europe Pocket €5bn
Carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn) mainly in Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland, according to Europol, the European law enforcement agency.
The revelation caused embarrassment for European Union negotiators at the Copenhagen climate change summit yesterday, where they have been pushing for an expansion of their system across the globe to penalise heavy emitters of carbon dioxide.
Rob Wainwright, the director of serious crime squad, said large-scale organised criminal activity had “endangered the credibility” of the current carbon trading system.
“We have been talking to Europol over the last weeks,” said one EU senior delegate, after she was asked whether the European Union-run scheme was still viable. “We are making some fixes.”
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Cyprus: Dozens of Gambling Grannies Arrested
(ANSAmed) — NICOSIA, NOVEMBER 25 — Fortytwo women aged between 75 and 85, including a 95-year-old from Limassol, were shocked on Sunday when police raided their card game and confiscated their 100 in betting money. The women, as the Cyprus Mail reports, were charged for illegal gambling after the police raid in an Ayios Ioannis house on Sunday evening. Officers found the 42 women at the club run by two women aged 79 and 70. The oldest person arrested was a 95-year-old. The raid took place on Sunday after a series of complaints by neighbours about noise in the evenings when the women were coming and going from the house. Officers found that one of the rooms in the house had been set up with several tables covered in green felt. The 42 women were caught seated around the tables playing poker and gin rummy for cash in a similar fashion to a gambling club. Playing cards for money is illegal in Cyprus and police regularly carry out raids around the island at betting shops, clubs and associations particularly coming up to Christmas, and through New Year, when more people go out to play cards and socialise over the holiday period. Following a search police confiscated 546 chips, 530 playing cards and approximately 100 euro in cash. All of the women were charged in writing at the police station and then released. The incident, however, does not appear to be and isolated one as card playing is the hobby of many elderly ladies in Cyprus. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Denmark: Most Churches Rebuff Climate Bells
Low support for collective church bell tolling to greet world leaders arriving in Copenhagen
Almost 70 percent of churches have decided not to participate in the collective clanging of church bells arranged by Grøn Kirke (Green Church), a climate group attached to the National Council of Churches in Denmark.
Grøn Kirke has encouraged the country’s churches to toll their bells 350 times on Sunday at their 3pm services in connection with the COP15 conference.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
EU: Bildt: Enlargement Continues After Croatia and Iceland
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, DECEMBER 9 — There is no tacit consensus between the EU member States over a break in the enlargement process after the entry of Croatia and Iceland, said Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt, current president of the Union, answering journalists questions today in Brussels during a conference of the western Balkans. This tacit agreement over a stop to EU enlargement does not exist, but time is needed, explained Bildt which is another matter. There are reform procedures to be carried out in various countries, which could be slower or quicker. The EU started with six members and now there are 27, it has not been a linear process, but it has gone ahead. Regarding European integration Turkey has made enormous progress, it is one of the most dynamic economies, although it must still work on other areas, while among the countries of the former Yugoslavia, Serbia is further ahead than others. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Ireland: Saudis to Establish School in Dublin
THE GOVERNMENT of Saudi Arabia is planning to establish a school with an Islamic ethos in Dublin.
The plans have been announced in Arabic on the website of the Saudi embassy in Dublin which opened in September.
According to the notice, the decision to set up a school was taken at a meeting in Dublin late last month. The meeting was attended by members of the education committee of the Saudi Shura Council, an unelected body whose members advise the Kingdom’s government, and Saudi Arabia’s ambassador to Ireland, Abdulaziz Aldriss.
“It was decided in the meeting to establish a Saudi school to teach the children of Saudi citizens and students residing in Ireland,” the website says.
The Saudi embassy insists the plans are at a very early stage, and a spokesperson yesterday declined to give further details. In a statement, the Department of Education said the Saudi government had not been in contact with the department regarding the matter.
Speculation has mounted within Ireland’s 40,000-strong Muslim community over how big the school might be, and whether it will cater for non-Saudi Muslims.
According to the embassy, less than 15 Saudi families live and work in Ireland, and more than 400 Saudi nationals study here, though the latter number is expected to rise in coming years following the Saudi ministry for education’s recognition of more Irish third-level institutions.
Ali Selim, a theologian based at the Islamic Cultural Centre in Clonskeagh, Dublin, welcomed the plans. Asked about speculation within the Muslim community that the school may incorporate secondary education, he said that if this proved correct it would “achieve a long cherished Muslim ambition” in Ireland.
The State already has a number of Muslim primary schools.
“I highly recommend them to establish such a progressive step on the basis of a thorough understanding of the Irish context and the profound experience gained by Muslims living in Ireland,” Mr Selim said.
The plans were also welcomed by the parents of Shekinah Egan, the teenage girl whose request to wear the hijab at her school in Gorey, Co Wexford, last year prompted the principal to call for official guidelines to be issued on the wearing of the hijab in State schools.
Ms Egan’s father, Liam, who lived with his family for several years in Saudi Arabia, praised what he described as the Kingdom’s “strong commitment” to education both domestically and overseas.”An Islamic secondary school is vital and should be a priority for the community,” he said.
Saudi government-funded schools in cities including London and Bonn, and in Virginia state in the US, have drawn controversy in recent years following complaints that textbooks and other curricular material sourced from the Saudi education ministry and used in the schools contained language intolerant of other religions as well as passages that could be construed as advocating violence.
The Islamic Saudi Academy in Virginia, which is funded by the Saudi embassy in nearby Washington DC, was forced to revise its curriculum last year after the US Commission on International Religious Freedom, a government agency, raised concerns about material it considered inflammatory.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Naples Pizza Gets EU Laurel
Accolade will protect it from inferior clones
(ANSA) — Brussels, December 9 — Real Naples-style pizza on Wednesday received a European Union quality seal protecting it from imitations.
The EU’s quality food board awarded a long-sought TSG (Traditional Speciality Guaranteed) label to Naples’ gift to food lovers.
“By protecting pizza we have safeguarded the history, culture and tradition of the Neapolitan people,” said Rosario Lopa, president of a committee that has lobbied for the laurel. “This is a historic result for the Naples economy,” Lopa added.
Antonio Pace, President of the Real Neapolitan Pizza Association, called the TSG laurel “a milestone and, above all, a way to stop stuff that isn’t really pizza being touted as such,” he said.
He stressed the importance of making sure that the accolade only covers ‘Pizza napoletana prodotta secondo la tradizione napoletana’ (Neapolitan Pizza Made According to Neapolitan Tradition).
“The produce that goes into it, the ways of making and baking it, the whole process of assembling the finished package must be rigorously verified,” he said.
“We’ll have to be very careful about that”.
The recognition will be valid in all EU countries and “anyone who claims to be producing real Neapolitan pizza will be subject to strict inspections,” he said.
“Too many people have been setting themselves up as pizzaiuoli (pizza-makers) without the proper training. That’s caused huge market problems,” Pace added.
Neapolitan pizza-makers have been fighting for 25 years to have their unique product put on the EU’s list of protected foods.
“Europe has finally rewarded the tenacity of the Naples producers,” said Italian Agriculture Minister Luca Zaia.
“It is a symbol of Neapolitan tradition that has, for far too long, been the subject of dreadful imitations”.
Italian farming association Coldiretti stressed the importance of the laurel in helping fight pizzas produced with “cheese from Eastern Europe instead of traditional mozzarella, Chinese tomatoes, Tunisian or Spanish olive oil and Canadian or Ukrainian flour”.
It noted that pizza was the best-known Italian word abroad followed by cappuccino, spaghetti and espresso. The pizza from the southern Italian city is universally recognised as the benchmark for pizza everywhere.
The leader of the Neapolitan association of pizzaiuoli, Sergio Miccu, said in the run-up to the award: “Ours is a job that takes a year or a year and a half to learn and only by sticking close to people who can hand down all the secrets of this art,” he said.
The lobbies and city authorities said there would be a “huge” pizza party to celebrate Wednesday’s long-awaited news.
Miccu said: “It’s going to be unforgettable”.
The campaign to give Neapolitan pizza a seal worthy of its renown began in 2000 with then farm minister Alfonso Pecoraro Scanio who set up a committee of experts to lay down what should go into the world-famous dish and how it should be made.
THE RIGHT STUFF.
True pizza, they concluded, must be made only of durum wheat flour, fresh yeast, water and sea salt, with a topping of olive oil, San Marzano tomatoes (in slices no thicker than 8mm) and mozzarella di bufala, the fresh cheese made of buffalo milk.
The tough specifications obviously rule out a vast array of foods that pass for pizza around the world.
Pizza is one of the few foods composed almost exclusively of the region’s three PDO (Protected Denomination of Origin) products as already recognized by the EU: San Marzano tomatoes, extra-virgin olive oil from Campania, and mozzarella di bufala.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Facebook Users Urge Mafia Boss to be an Informant
Palermo, 8 Dec. (AKI) — Users of the popular internet social networking site Facebook have urged Giovanni Nicchi, the Sicilian mafia fugitive boss captured at the weekend, to become an informant.
Since Nicchi was arrested in the southern city of Palermo on Saturday, more than 5,000 people have registered on the Facebook page of the Palermo police department’s elite squad that hunts down the most-wanted mafia suspects.
“Gianni Nicchi, you’re a mafia boss. But you’re still young and according to your criminal record you haven’t killed anyone. You have two small children and a young partner. You can give them and yourself a chance. You can still do good by renouncing evil,” wrote one user on the Facebook page.
“Teach everybody a lesson by turning your back on Cosa Nostra and collaborating with the Italian justice system. Your life will be easier. But above all that of your children and will be happier and more peaceful,” the user added.
Costra Nostra is the Italian name for the Sicilian mafia.
Police will on Wednesday hand to public prosecutors in Palermo items including a laptop computer and mobile phones seized during the raid on the small flat where 28-year-old Nicchi was arrested.
Nicchi was on the run for three years, and reportedly communicated via ‘pizzini’ — or messages written on scraps of paper hidden in cigarette packets.
He is now due to appear before prosecutors on Friday at Palermo’s appeals court where hearings are taking place in one of two trials in which he was sentenced in absentia to a total 18 years in jail for extortion and mafia links.
Prosecutors have sent a request to Italy’s national anti-mafia directorate to severely limit Nicchi’s contact with other prisoners and the outside world while he is in prison.
Palermo prosecutors in the northern Italian city of Milan on Wednesday will question another top suspected Sicilian mafia leader, Gaetano Fidanzati. The 74-year-old was arrested in Milan on Saturday.
Prosecutors will also question Alessandro Presiti , 19, and Giusy Amato, 27, who are both suspected of aiding and abetting Nicchi in Palermo.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Just Whose Idea Was Swiss Minaret Ban Anyhow?
[Pardo’s Father is a Turkish Citizen of Italian Ancestry]
The architect of the controversial Swiss referendum that resulted in a ban on the construction of minarets has a Turkish heritage, daily Milliyet reported on Wednesday.
Born in the Aegean province of Izmir to a Turkish father and a Swiss mother, Soli Pardo’s family moved to Switzerland when he was 5 years old, the daily said.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Netherlands: Necklace With Cross Banned for Amsterdam Tram-Drivers
THE HAGUE, 10/12/09 — Amsterdam’s municipal public transport company GVB is not allowing its drivers to wear a necklace with a cross, but it does allow its staff to wear headscarves, De Telegraaf reported yesterday.
Amsterdam tram conductor Ezzat Aziz has been suspended twice because as a Christian, he wore a necklace with a cross on top of his uniform. The GVB forbids the man to display his faith in this way, but does allow Islamic staff to wear a headscarf has symbol of their faith.
Aziz, who came to the Netherlands from Egypt in 1984, is seeking a summary injunction against GVB. “I am being discriminated against. “The GVB does allow female staff members to wear a headscarf as symbol of their faith. On top of this, I have only been forbidden to wear the cross visibly since the beginning of this year, even though I have already been doing this during my work since 1998.”
GVB spokesman Petra Faber defends the move: “The GVB has had a new uniform for a year. To ensure a professional image, jewellery may not be worn visibly over the uniform. This applies to all necklaces, regardless of what they look like, or what symbolism or religion they represent.”
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Norway: Obama Snubs the King
Finally some Europeans are angry with Obama—the very ones who are awarding him his Nobel. Katarina Andersson on the president’s decision to decline lunch with King Harald and skip his own Nobel exhibit.
A day before President Obama receives his Nobel Peace Prize in Oslo, the president’s treatment of his Norwegian hosts has become hot news across Scandinavia.
News outlets across the region are calling Obama arrogant for slashing some of the prize winners’ traditional duties from his schedule. “Everybody wants to visit the Peace Center except Obama,” sniped the Norwegian daily Aftenposten, amid reports the president would snub his own exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center. “A bit arrogant—a bit bad,” proclaimed another Aftenposten headline.
“It’s very sad,” said Nobel Peace Center Director Bente Erichsen of the news that Obama would skip the peace center exhibit. Prize winners traditionally open the exhibitions about their work that accompany the Nobel festivities. “I totally understand why the Norwegian public is upset. If I could get a few minutes with the president, I’d say, ‘To walk through the exhibition wouldn’t take long, and I’m sure you would love the show. You have no idea what you are missing.’“
Meanwhile, the Swedish daily Svenska Dagbladet is reporting that the president has declined an invitation to lunch with King Harald V, an event every prize winner from the Dalai Lama to Al Gore has attended. (The newspaper’s headline: “Obama disses lunch with King Harald.”)
Also among the dissed, according to news reports: a concert in Oslo on Friday that was arranged in his honor, and a group of Norwegian children who had planned to meet Obama in front of City Hall.
“The American president is acting like an elephant in a porcelain shop,” said Norwegian public-relations expert Rune Morck-Wergeland. “In Norwegian culture, it’s very important to keep an agreement. We’re religious about that, and Obama’s actions have been clumsy. You just don’t say no to an invitation from a European king. Maybe Obama’s advisers are not very educated about European culture, but he is coming off as rude, even if he doesn’t mean to.”
Indeed, judging by statements surrounding the president’s trip to Europe this week, it is beginning to appear as if the European love affair with Obama—which culminated in giving him the Nobel Prize—is over.
But some news outlets are cutting him a bit of slack, noting that he is dealing with two wars and soaring unemployment back home and a new war, and that his main focus this week should rightly be on the climate-change summit in Copenhagen. Taking part in all the activities surrounding his Nobel Prize could send the wrong message.
That may have something to do with Obama’s uncharacteristic shunning of the press. Whereas other prize winners have viewed the standard Nobel Peace Prize CNN interview as an opportunity to address the world for a full hour, Obama seems unwilling to answer any questions at all. There will be no press conference, just a statement from the president.
“It’s very strange that he is unwilling to meet the press,” said Marie Simonsen, political editor at Dagbladet, one of Norway’s biggest daily newspapers. “I’m very disappointed. You get the impression he is not proud of the prize.”
Obama is the second sitting American president to visit Norway. Ten years ago, President Clinton traveled to the country at the invitation of King Harald. “When Clinton was here he was walking into cafes in downtown Oslo, shaking hands with Norwegians on the street,” said Simonsen. “It doesn’t seem as if we are going to experience something similar with President Obama.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Portugal: Lack of Forests, Sawmills in Crisis
(ANSAmed) — LISBON, NOVEMBER 26 — According to the president of the national association of wood and furniture industries, Fernando Rolin, Portuguese forests are not able to supply pinewood and these industries are in danger of collapsing. Some 250 sawmills with a total of 4,500 workers are at risk. Over the last ten years, the sawmill industry has lost over 300 firms (6,200 jobs). And, considering that the sawmills are the departure point as they provide wooden panels to industries, carpenters and furniture makers, the risk is extremely great. The forest processing industry is responsible for 9% of national industrial employment, 14% of industrial GDP and 12% of national exports. Some 2.5 billion euros of annual turnover is involved, 1.3 billion of which obtained on overseas markets. These are the worrying conclusion of a Strategic Study for the Restructuring and Modernisation of the Industry of Wood Processing in Portugal. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Roma Ethnic Group: Strasbourg Condemns Spain Discrimination
(ANSAmed) — STRASBOURG, DECEMBER 8 — The Spanish authorities should have paid out the survivorship pension to M.D.’s widow, even if the couple was married only according to the traditional rites of the Roma ethnic group. The European Court of Human Rights established this today, with a decision that will become definitive in three months, save for an appeal to the Grand Chamber (European second instance) by the Spanish government or the plaintiff. Mrs. Maria Luisa Munoz Diaz was married in 1971 by the Roma ethnic community ceremony. She and her husband, both Spanish citizens, have six children that are all documented in the family register provided by Spanish authorities. In 1986 the couple also obtained recognition of “large family” status. The husband, a mason that had paid national insurance contributions for 19 years, passed away on December 24, 2000. Mrs. Munoz Diaz asked the National Insurance Institute for the survivorship pension, but was refused because the couple had not been married according to Spanish civil law. The woman brought her case as far as the Constitutional Court, but the verdict didn’t change. With the decision handed down today, the judges in Strasbourg have established that the Spanish authorities should give Mrs. Munoz Diaz 70,000 euros. The reasoning is that that they had violated her right to not be discriminated against, given that the Spanish government had recognized the couple as being married, through various documents over time. For example, they guaranteed “large family” status and the right to private property, which in this case includes the right to receive her husband’s survivorship pension.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Sarkozy Wades Into Swiss Minaret Ban Debate
Nicolas Sarkozy has deplored the “excessive” French media and political reaction to the Swiss minaret ban, in an opinion piece for Le Monde newspaper.
The French president said he was “stupefied” by the response and wrote that instead of condemning the Swiss for the vote outcome, it was important to understand “what it intended to express and what so many people in Europe feel, including the French”.
Sarkozy said he was convinced a yes or no response to such issues could only lead to “painful misunderstandings, a feeling of injustice” over a problem that could be resolved on a “case by case basis with respect for the convictions and beliefs of everyone”.
The yes vote was not a barrier to freedom of religion or conscience, he argued, while paying tribute to the Swiss system of direct democracy.
“No one — and no more so than Switzerland — would dream of questioning these fundamental freedoms,” wrote Sarkozy in the piece published on Tuesday.
He said he would not say no to minarets in France but cautioned that in such a secular country religious adherents should “refrain from all ostentation or provocation” of religious practices.
Muslims should recognise France’s Christian tradition, he said, adding that anything that resembled a challenge to this heritage “would condemn to failure the very necessary establishment of Islam in France”.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Gibraltar, EU Plan for Waters Unacceptable
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 7 — The joint Spanish-UK plan for the waters around Gibraltar has been judged “unacceptable, inappropriate and legally impossible” by the Rock’s leading minister, Peter Caruana in a communiqué issued by Caruana to Spanish media today. The waters around Gibraltar were declared a place of Spanish community interest, which would imply that Spain has management of them, especially as concerns ecological questions. The European Environment Commission last week proposed a joint management by Spain and the United Kingdom in line with community directives. But Caruana is insisting on the fact that the colony’s laws apply in the British territorial waters around Gibraltar, thus excluding any other member of the European Union. Caruana has warned that some of the Spanish statements give the impression that the waters are free of the Gibraltar’s authorities and the jurisdiction of its laws. On the contrary, Caruana stresses, non-observation of the Rock’s laws in Gibraltar’s waters will lead to the arrest and trial of those guilt of infringements, at the discretion of Gibraltar’s police and other authorities. In stirring up this eternal controversy with Spain over the management of the waters, Caruana stresses that Madrid did not seek to undermine the exclusive jurisdiction of Gibraltar, accepting the status quo, up until June this year, when Spanish authorities embarked on physical actions in British and Gibraltar’s territorial waters. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Brussels Looks at Public TV Financing
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 3 — The European Commission opened an investigation into the new financing system of public television (RTVE) to ascertain whether it is compliant with EU rules on networks and electronic communication systems or if it is an opening to unfair competition. The reform issued by the Zapatero government provides that private TV networks that broadcast without encryption contribute 3% of their yearly revenues (1.5% for pay-TVs) to finance RTVE which, in exchange, will no longer air commercials. Telecoms operators will also contribute to cover 24% of the cost of public TV by handing over 0.9% of their revenues, while another 20% will by covered by the tax on airwaves. EC Commissioner for competition Neelie Kroes explained that the Commission has no objection to the removal of commercials from public TV in a statement that was reported today by El Pais, but at the same time must assess the method through which to finance the reform. Consequently Brussels investigators will find out whether the tax system introduced by the reform represents excessive compensation, which alters competition, with the risk of allowing discrimination between operators. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: C02 Storage Plant With EU Funds
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 10 — The building of a plant for carbon dioxide (C02) capture and storage, presented by the Leon Community, is one of the 15 projects in the field of energy which will be financed with 15 billion euros from the European Commission. It is the only Spanish project included in the financing programme, according to reports in today’s El Pais. The 15 projects are for the building of windmills in the middle of the sea and six plants for the capture and storage of carbon dioxide. The Spanish project was planned by the public consortium Energy City (Ciuden) with the collaboration of Endesa in Ponferrada (Leon), and will receive 180 million euros. In the first phase of implementation, Ciuden will build a 30 megawatt pilot plant for C02 capture in Compostela (Leon), an underground storage depot in Ontomin (Burgos) and a 3-kilometre pipeline to develop the technology. The overall cost is 156 million, 70 of which will be covered by European funds. If the pilot project works, in the second phase Endesa will apply it on a large-scale in a 300 megawatt coal-fired thermal plant, which would be the first in Spain to store C02 and which would be kept in storage for centuries in order to mitigate global warming. The second phase will be financed with 110 million euros from the European Commission and the rest by Endesa. Carbon dioxide capture in Leon is a personal challenge for Premier José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, who is originally from the area and who has long held that support for energy from national coal is not incompatible with environmental protection. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Mediterranean Marine Algae Prairie in the Atlantic
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 7 — A marine algae native to the Mediterranean, the caulerpa prolifera, has been discovered in the Atlantic Ocean by researchers from the Andalusia Council’s department of the environment in the Cristina Island (Huelva) Marasma nature reserve. The finding, according to council sources, is a large prairie of more than two hectares of green caulerpa prolifera alga which has an important ecological function as it improves shore waters and encourages development of maritime flora and fauna. The discovery took place during an ongoing two year inspection of the Andalusian marine floor by the office of the councillor for the environment. This is the first time a Mediterranean algae has been found west of Algesiras in the Gulf of Cadiz on the Atlantic. The finding accounting to the environmental researchers testifies to the healthy state of the marine habitant in the Atlantic waters off the region’s coastline. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: 3 Women Out of 4 Have Job Problems Over Maternity
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 10 — In the egalitarian Spain of Prime Minister José Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, which issues a cheque of 2,500 euros for every child born or adopted, 3 out of 4 women have problems at work because of maternity. For this reason they are delaying the decision to have children until they have found a stable job, leading to an ageing population which risks compromising the countrys pension system. A study called Fertility and the working trajectory of women in Spain by the Upper Council for Scientific Research (Csic), and commissioned by the Womens Institute at the Equal Opportunities Ministry, was presented today in Madrid. According to the report, which was written in collaboration with the La Sapienza University in Rome and the Complutense in Madrid, Spain has one of the lowest birth rates in Europe, along with Italy: the figure of 2.8 children per woman of 1975 has fallen to 1.4 currently, not enough to ensure the replacement of the generation, and is contributing to an ageing population and an inversion in the demographic pyramid. According to research, based on a poll of 10,000 women between the ages of 15 and 75, carried out by the Centre for Sociological Research in 2006, over 75% of women between the age of 35 and 49 with a fixed job had their first child on average 3.7 years after the start of cohabitation, rising to 4.1 years among women who work in the public sector. The new generation reports problems reconciling working life with family life, rather than discrimination: 30% of women between 35 and 49 have had to reduce their working hours; 25% have had to leave work; 9% have suffered discrimination and 3.7% have had to give up their studies. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
UK: 1,700 Scientists Against Climategate
From French: More than 1,700 British scientists signed a declaration of support of human-made climate change.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
UK: 90ft Steel Tower Next to Mosque Going Up in Brick Lane
WORK begins this week on erecting a giant 90ft ‘iconic’ steel tower next to a mosque in the middle of the Brick Lane conservation area in London’s East End.
The structure which will resemble the shape of a minaret is being erected inches from the wall of the Jamme Masjid mosque, a converted former synagogue founded originally as an 18th century Huguenot church, after planning permission was given by Tower Hamlets council.
Council Leader Lutfur Rahman visited the site last week when the base was completed, where he met Muslim community leaders.
The steel structure will dominate the skyline of the Georgian conservation area around Spitalfields, the historic Huguenot weaving district, and is being billed by the Town Hall as “a new iconic East End landmark.”
The seven sections of the tower are being fitted together and erected during the week.
The local authority also intends to erect new arches along Brick Lane, all paid for by £8.6 million ‘planning gain’ cash from the nearby Bishops Square development on the ‘City Fringe’ near Liverpool Street station.
“It’s important developers give something back to the community,” said Cllr Rahman. “The council planning team makes sure their contributions offset the disruption and additional pressures their developments place on our services.”
The cash from Bishops Square, one of the largest single payments from a developer ever received by a local authority, is also paying for open spaces on the nearby Chicksand and Holland housing estates and a new building for Osmani youth centre.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
UK: An Inconvenient Truth: Andrew Roberts Addresses the Anglo-Israel Association’s Annual Dinner
My Lords, Ladies & Gentlemen,
It’s a great honour to be invited to address you, especially on this the 60th anniversary of AIA [Anglo-Israel Association], and I’d like to take the opportunity of this anniversary to look at the overall story of the relationship between Britain and Israel, and to try to strip away some of the myths.
Because it seems to me that for all the undoubted statesmanship implicit in Arthur Balfour’s Declaration of November 1917, promising ‘a National Home for the Jewish People’, it doesn’t mean that Britain has ever been much more than a fair-weather friend to Jewish national aspirations. The Declaration itself was at least in part conceived to keep Eastern European and Russian Jews supporting the Great War after the Bolshevik Revolution, and Chaim Weizmann’s preferred wording of ‘a Jewish State’ was turned down by the British Foreign Office. As David Ben-Gurion wrote at the time: ‘Britain has made a magnificent gesture … But only the Hebrew people can transform this right into tangible fact: only they, with body and soul, with their strength and capital, must build their National Home and bring about their national redemption.’
Sure enough, at the Versailles Conference and its ancillary meetings up to 1922, although Britain was given the League of Nations Mandate for Palestine, the Jewish National Home was not established. During the Mandate period there was an observable tension between the CO, which was responsible for administering Palestine and wanted to do so within the terms of the (admittedly self-contradictory) Balfour Declaration, and the FO, which feared that allowing the de facto creation of a Jewish State would alienate Arabs. In 1937 the Peel Commission recommended ending the Mandate and partitioning Palestine into Arab and Jewish states, with population transfers of 225,000 Arabs from Galilee, an outcome Ben-Gurion said [quote] ‘could give us something which we have never had, even when we stood on our own during the days of the First and Second Temples’. Nonetheless, both the Arabs and the 20th Zionist Congress rejected Peel’s recommendations, to the palpable relief of the Foreign Office, which concentrated its own opposition to it on the basis of its supposed impracticality.
Instead there was the notorious 1939 White Paper, which severely limited Jewish immigration into Palestine at precisely the period of their greatest need, during the Final Solution. A total upper limit of 75,000 Jewish immigrants was set for the fateful years 1940-44, a figure that was also intended to cover refugee emergencies. The White Paper was published on 9 November 1938 — the very same day as the Kristallnacht atrocities in Germany — and was approved by Parliament in May 1939, a full two months after Hitler’s occupation of the rump of Czechoslovakia. The Manchester Guardian described it as ‘a death sentence on tens of thousands of Central European Jews’, which in sheer numerical terms was probably an underestimation. Although the Labour Party Conference voted to repeal the White Paper in 1945, the Labour Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin — a bitter enemy of Israel — persisted in it, and it was not to be repealed until the day after the State of Israel was proclaimed.
In late April 1948, Bevin ordered that Arab positions in Jaffa needed to be protected from the Jews [quote] ‘at all costs’, and when Israeli independence came the next month, the departing British sometimes handed over vital military and strategic strongpoints to the five invading Arab armies, the most efficient of which, Transjordan’s Arab Legion, was actually commanded by a Briton, Sir John Glubb. And then on New Year’s Eve 1948 the British Government actually issued an ultimatum to Israel threatening war if Israel did not halt its counter-attacks on Egyptian forces in the Gaza Strip and Sinai. Britain was the only country in the UN that came to Egypt’s aid in this regard.
One can easily see, therefore, why when Brig-Gen Sir Wyndham Deedes set up the Anglo-Israeli Association only weeks after Israel was finally recognized by Britain in 1949 — months after America, Russia and several other states had already done so — it was much-needed. There was still massive resentment over the War of Independence; Israel was considered at best a headache by the FO; and worst of all, unlike her neighbours, she had no oil. Nor did the Suez Crisis much help matters seven years later: the way in which Israel fitted in neatly with British plans to crush Nasser ought to have endeared her to the Foreign Office, but of course it didn’t.
When in May 1967 Nasser announced the blockading of the Straits of Tiran, closing Israel’s commercial lifeline to the east, the guarantors of this international waterway — including Britain — failed to act quickly or decisively, and although Harold Wilson was proud of his pro-Israeli sentiments, his foreign secretary George Brown and the FO certainly did not reciprocate them. Britain compounded its generally lukewarm attitude during the Six Day War by sponsoring Resolution 242 at the end of it, which called on Israel to withdraw [quote] ‘from territories occupied’, in a resolution that was so badly worded by the FO that Arabs and Israelis have been able to argue over its proper meaning ever since.
The Yom Kippur War of October 1973 saw even worse bias by the FO in favour of the Arabs and against the Jews. Announcing an arms embargo ‘equally’ between the belligerents, the Heath Government effectively stopped Israel buying spare parts for the IDF’s Centurion tanks, whilst allowing them to be bought by Jordan, the only other country affected, because it was not (officially at least) a belligerent. Egyptian helicopter pilots continued to be trained in Britain, with the foreign secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home lamely telling the Israeli Ambassador that it was better for the pilots to be training in Britain than fighting at the front. Heath even refused to allow American cargo planes taking supplies to Israel to land and refuel at our bases on Cyprus. In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher seemed to offer a new warmth to Anglo-Israeli relations. She sat for Finchley, her Methodism chimed well with Jewish values, and she was the most philo-Semitic PM since Churchill, yet even she was stymied by the FO, especially over Intelligence cooperation with Mossad. It’s true that John Major sent a special SAS unit to seek and destroy Iraqi Scud missile batteries targeting Israel during the First Gulf War, but that was largely to remove the danger of Israel retaliating, and thereby perhaps destroying the Arab coalition against Saddam.
After 9/11 Tony Blair seemed to appreciate how Israel was in the very front line in the War against Terror, and he thus bravely refused to condemn Israel’s acts of self-defence in Lebanon, but since then Britain’s contribution to the EU’s strand of negotiating over Iran’s nuclear ambitions has been, frankly, pathetic.
One area of policy over which the FO has traditionally held great sway is in the question of Royal Visits. It is no therefore coincidence that although HMQ has made over 250 official overseas visits to 129 different countries during her reign, neither she nor one single member of the British royal family has ever been to Israel on an official visit. Even though Prince Philip’s mother, Princess Alice of Greece, who was recognized as “Righteous Among the Nations” for sheltering a Jewish family in her Athens home during the Holocaust, was buried on the Mount of Olives, the Duke of Edinburgh was not allowed by the FO to visit her grave until 1994, and then only on a private visit.
“Official visits are organized and taken on the advice of the Foreign and Commonwealth office,” a press officer for the royal family explained when Prince Edward visited Israel recently privately — and a spokesman for the Foreign Office replied that [quote] ‘Israel is not unique” in not having received an official royal visit, because [quote] ‘Many countries have not had an official visit.’ That might be true for Burkino Faso and Chad, but the FO has somehow managed to find the time over the years to send the Queen on State visits to Libya, Iran, Sudan, Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Jordan & Turkey. So it can’t have been that she wasn’t in the area.
Perhaps Her Majesty hasn’t been on the throne long enough, at 57 years, for the Foreign Office to get round to allowing her to visit one of the only democracies in the Middle East. At least she could be certain of a warm welcome in Israel, unlike in Morocco where she was kept waiting by the King for three hours in 90 degree heat, or at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Uganda the time before last, where they hadn’t even finished building her hotel.
The true reason of course, is that the Foreign Office has a ban on official Royal visits to Israel, which is even more powerful for its being unwritten and unacknowledged. As an act of delegitimization of Israel, this effective boycott is quite as serious as other similar acts, such as the academic boycott, and is the direct fault of the FO Arabists. Which brings us on to Mr Oliver Miles. One of the reasons I’m proud to be an historian is that there are scholars of the integrity and erudition of Prof Sir Martin Gilbert and Prof Sir Lawrence Freedman who also write history. If people as intelligent, wise and incorruptible as they choose to be historians, then it must be an honourable profession. Let me quote to you, therefore, word-for-word, what a former British Ambassador to Libya and Greece, Mr Oliver Miles, wrote in The Independent newspaper less than a fortnight ago, commenting on the composition of the present Chilcot Inquiry into the Iraq War:
‘Both Gilbert and Freedman are Jewish, and Gilbert at least has a record of active support for Zionism. Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream British and American media. … All five members have outstanding reputations and records, but it is a pity that, if and when the inquiry is accused of a whitewash, such handy ammunition will be available. Membership should not only be balanced; it should be seen to be balanced.’
Ladies and gentlemen, if that’s the way that FO Arabists are prepared to express themselves in public, can you imagine the way that they refer to such people as Professors Gilbert and Freedman in private? For the balance that Mr Miles is talking about here is clearly a racial balance, that only a certain quota of Jews should have been allowed on to the Inquiry.
Of course there’s a reason why ‘Such facts are not usually mentioned in the mainstream media’, of course, and that is because it is a disgraceful and disgusting concept even to notice the racial background of such distinguished public servants, and one that wouldn’t have even occurred to most people had not Mr Miles made such a point of it.
Because there are 22 ambassadors to Arab countries, and only one to Israel, it is perhaps natural that the FO should tend to be more pro-Arab than pro-Israeli. On occasion there are remarkably good British Ambassadors to Israel — your president, Sir Andrew Burns, was one such in the early 1990s — just as there are on occasion remarkably good Israeli Ambassadors to Britain, indeed we are fortunate to have one at the Embassy today in Ron Prosor. Overall, however, such men are swimming against the tide of an FO assumption that Britain’s relations with Israel ought constantly to be subordinated to her relations with other Middle Eastern states, especially the oil-rich ones, however badly those states behave in terms of human rights abuses, the persecution of Christians, the oppression of women, medieval practices of punishment, and so on.
It seems to me that there is an implicit racism going on here. Jews are expected to behave better, goes the FO thinking, because they are like us. Arabs must not be chastised because they are not. So in warfare, we constantly expect Israel to behave far better than her neighbours, and chastise her quite hypocritically when occasionally under the exigencies of national struggle, she cannot. The problem crosses political parties today, just as it always has. William Hague called for Israel to adopt a proportionate response in its struggle with Hezbollah in Lebanon in 2007, as though proportionate responses ever won any victories against fascists. In the Second World War, the Luftwaffe killed 50,000 Britons in the Blitz, and the Allied response was to kill 600,000 Germans — twelve times the number and hardly a proportionate response, but one that contributed mightily to victory. Who are we therefore to lecture the Israelis on how proportionate their responses should be?
Very often in Britain, especially when faced with the overwhelmingly anti-Israeli bias that is endemic in our liberal media and the BBC, we fail to ask ourselves what we would not do placed in the same position? The population of the United Kingdom of 63 millions is nine times that of Israel. In July 2006, to take one example entirely at random, Hezbollah crossed the border of Lebanon into Israel and killed 8 patrolmen and kidnapped 2 others, and that summer fired 4,000 Katyusha rockets into Israel which killed a further 43 civilians. Now, if we multiply those numbers by nine to get the British equivalent, just imagine what we would not do if a terrorist organization based as close as Calais were to fire 36,000 rockets into Sussex and Kent, killing 387 British civilians, after killing 72 British servicemen in an ambush and capturing a further eighteen? I put it to you that there is absolutely no lengths to which our Government would not go to protect British subjects under those circumstances, and quite right too. So why should Israel be expected to behave any differently?
There has hardly been a single year since Brigadier-General Deedes established AIA in 1949 when a speaker has not been able to say that Israel faced a crisis, and on some occasions — in 1956, 1967, 1973 and especially in the face of the present Iranian nuclear programme today — these were existential. At a time when Barrack Obama appears to be least pro-Israeli president since Eisenhower, the dangers are even more obvious. For there is simply no way that Obama will prevent Ahmadinejad, perhaps Jewry’s most viciously outspoken and dangerous foe since the death of Adolf Hitler, to acquire a nuclear Bomb.
None of us can pretend to know what lies ahead for Israel, but if she decides pre-emptively to strike against such a threat — in the same way that Nelson pre-emptively sank the Danish Fleet at Copenhagen and Churchill pre-emptively sank the Vichy Fleet at Oran — then she can expect nothing but condemnation from the British Foreign Office. She should ignore such criticism, because for all the fine work done by this Association over the past six decades — work that’s clearly needed as much now as ever before — Britain has only ever really been at best a fairweather friend to Israel.
Although History does not repeat itself, it’s cadences do occasionally rhyme, and if the witness of History is testament to anything it is testament to this:
That in her hopes of averting the threat of a Second Holocaust, only Israel can be relied upon to act decisively in the best interests of the Jews.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Al-Fox in Dar Al-Henhouse?
Behold Asim Hafeez, the new British Home Office official charged with identifying British jihadists and mobilzing them — no, sorry, diverting them — from the path to jihad. Or something.
According to Martin Bright, who reported on the appointment last month at the Jewish Chronicle, there is “serious concern among more moderate Muslim advisers across Whitehall” about their new colleague, whom one fellow advisor described as a “hardcore Salafi.”
Only among “more moderate Muslim advisors”? How about the suicidal non-Muslims who likely hired him? Of course, if they were concerned they wouldn’t have picked him in the first place. The Islamization of England continues apace.
A guest post at Harry’s Place quite instructively elaborates on Hafeez’s belief in an Islamic state…
| — Hat tip: Diana West | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Britain is Failing on Strokes, Dentistry and Hospital Beds… While Paying Gps More Than Any Other Developed Country
Family doctors in Britain are the most highly paid in the developed world even though this country languishes well below the average in international healthcare league tables.
GPs have an average salary of £106,000, earning 60 per cent more than those in France where the health system performs better than the NHS on most criteria.
Their high pay emerged in a second day of revelations from a damning report by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
[…]
A summary of its findings, reported by the Daily Mail yesterday, revealed that British healthcare is little better than that of former Communist countries such as the Czech Republic.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: British Taxpayers to Pay £1 Billion a Year to Help Poor Countries Fight Global Warming in New Deal Backed by Brown
British taxpayers will have to fork out at least £1 billion a year to help poor countries cope with global warming, under an international deal being backed by Gordon Brown.
The cash — raised from a slew of new taxes and higher fuel bills — will also help developing countries in Asia, South America and Africa build wind farms and solar power plants.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Christian Hoteliers Cleared in Muslim Woman Abuse Row
A devout Christian couple have been cleared of insulting a Muslim guest because of her faith.
Benjamin and Sharon Vogelenzang were accused of launching a tirade against Ericka Tazi at the Bounty House Hotel in Aintree, Liverpool, in March.
The couple had denied using threatening, abusive or insulting words which were religiously aggravated.
The Crown Prosecution System said it was satisfied there had been sufficient evidence for a successful prosecution.
District judge Richard Clancy dismissed the case at Liverpool Magistrates’ Court on Wednesday afternoon.
Mrs Tazi, who converted to Islam 18 months ago, spent a month at the hotel in Church Avenue while attending a course at Aintree Hospital.
Business affected
She claimed the couple became enraged when she wore a hijab on her last day and accused Mr Vogelenzang, 53, of asking her if she was a murderer and a terrorist.
She also told the court Mr Vogelenzang called the Prophet Muhammad a murderer and a warlord and likened him to Saddam Hussein and Hitler.
But the couple denied her version of events and claimed Mrs Tazi told them Jesus was a minor prophet and that the Bible was untrue.
Mr Vogelenzang admitted that his wife may have referred to the hijab as a form of bondage, but said he only listed historical figures such as Hitler, Nero and Mao to make light of the situation.
Earlier on Wednesday the court heard that takings at the couple’s hotel were down by 80% since they were prosecuted for the public order offence.
Speaking from the witness box, Mr Vogelenzang accused 60-year-old Mrs Tazi of “trying to ruin his business” during heated scenes…
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Wales: Sharia Law Tribunal is Proposed
Wales could get its first court based on Islamic law under proposals from a Muslim body, BBC Wales has learned.
A Sharia law tribunal in Cardiff will help community relations and give some Muslims services they want, supporters have told the Dragon’s Eye programme.
But some commentators, such the think-tank Civitas, say a Muslim arbitration tribunal undermines the concept of one law for UK citizens.
A women’s group said it was not needed and women may not be treated fairly.
A Tribunal has been proposed for the middle of next year, and its backers say it will bring the law and Muslim faith together.
There are already seven such tribunals in England when two parties facing marital, financial and other disputes come before experts in Islamic and UK law.
Both parties must agree to allow the tribunal to sit in judgement and the final decision is legally binding.
Shaykh Siddiqi, of the tribunal, said: “What we are trying to do is help the third or fourth generation British Muslims who are growing up to give them the services necessary to make Britain their homeland, rather than saying we actually want to ghettoise ourselves.”
‘Shoved to one side’
A recent report by Civitas was critical of Sharia courts, saying they were not in keeping with UK legal principles.
Denis MacEoin, of Civitas, said: “It is Sharia law that is given the prominent position and this effectively means that British law is shoved to one side.
“All citizens have the right to be judged under a single legal system, and that we didn’t bring in the legal system by the back door and that is effectively what is happening at the moment.”
Some fear that Muslim women may become isolated from their communities if they do not choose the tribunal system.
Marya Shabir, of the Welsh Women’s National Coalition, said: “It’s being advertised as this opt-in system when it actually isn’t.
“If a Muslim woman is given the option of using a Muslim Arbitration Tribunal over going through the courts system using the law of England and Wales; there’s no question as to which system she’s going to use.
“If she doesn’t go with the Muslim Arbitration Tribunal, she is going to face stigmatisation, she will be ostracised by her community, her peers, her family who believe she is turning her back on the community.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
EU: Balkan Membership Realistic Between 2010-2020, Djukanovic
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, DECEMBER 8 — The possibility of EU membership for the Balkan countries in the 2010-2010 decade is “realistic”, according to Montenegrin Prime Minister, Milo Djukanovic, speaking in Brussels at a conference on the Balkans organised by Friends of Europe. According to Djukanovic, “there are strong signs of commitment” in this direction by both sides. “Today, all of the countries in the region say that their future is in the EU,” added the prime minister, underlining the security issue, a two way street for Europe and the Western Balkans. For Djukanovic “the European Union is a guarantee of stability for the region” and vice versa. “If the security of the Balkans is threatened,” he said, “so is that of Europe.” Therefore, “if the EU wants to be competitive,” concluded Djukanovic, “it cannot do so if it is not stable and united,” including the Western Balkans. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Greece Blocks Macedonian Talks
EU delays a decision on opening membership talks with Macedonia after Greek objections.
The foreign ministers of the European Union’s 27 member states today delayed a decision on opening accession talks with Macedonia, which has been a candidate for membership since 2005.
Greece was the only EU state that did not want to set a date for the start of talks.
In October, the European Commission said that Macedonia had met all preconditions for opening membership negotiations, but they remain blocked because Greece objects to the country’s name, which it shares with a Greek province. The foreign ministers now decided to revisit the issue in the first half of next year.
Pierre Lellouche, France’s minister for Europe, said yesterday that France agreed with the Greek position, as a sign of support for a fellow EU member.
Greece and Macedonia, which was part of Yugoslavia until the early 1990s, have been negotiating with United Nations mediation on a possible compromise name for many years. Despite reported improvements in the atmosphere at the talks, no tangible progress has been made. A new, centre-left government in Greece has raised hopes that a solution might be within reach.
In the absence of an agreement, Macedonia is referred to as the “former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia”, or FYROM, in official EU and UN business.
Nikola Gruevski, Macedonia’s prime minister, told a conference in Brussels on Tuesday that Greece was “monopolising history” and that it wanted to “change our identity” by refusing it the use of the name ‘Macedonia’.
“We cannot delete ourselves as a nation,” he said.
“This attitude of Greece is not European,” Gruevski said, adding that it had caused “big political damage”.
Carl Bildt, foreign minister of Sweden, the current holder of the EU’s rotating presidency, told reporters today that the foreign ministers’ decision was balanced because it left both Greece and Macedonia somewhat unhappy.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Agriculture: Sicilian Grain and Legumes in Tunisia
(ANSAmed) — MAZARA DEL VALLO (TRAPANI), DECEMBER 4 — By midway through December, in Tunisia several experiments will be underway with a variety of Sicilian grains and legumes. The initiative is the result of a collaboration between the two countries, whose foundations were laid today in Mazara del Vallo in the province of Trapani as part of the 4th Fishing Forum, which included delegates from the Mediterranean region. “We have to use history as a point of departure,” said the President of the Sicily Grain District, Biagio Percorino, “to build relations between the two shores of the Mediterranean in the agricultural sector.” The President of the grain association of the Tunisian city of Beja, Baraket Youssef, took part in the conference. “Tunisia,” he said, “intends to increase its grain production to become a platform for other Mediterranean countries for grain exports. We are ready to development your grain varieties in our country.” (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Women Students Sue Over Niqab Ban
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, DECEMBER 9 — By now about a dozen women university students intend to sue Iman Al Azhar, Egypt’s Grand Mufti and the religious affairs minister over the ban on wearing the niqab, the veil that covers the face as well as hair, in school halls and ministerial offices. The initiative, similar to that announced recently by another student, comes after Ain Shams University, Cairo’s state university, yesterday stopped a group of women students wearing the niqab from entering the halls for exams. A legal case that “not based on religion or sharia”, the students told ANSA, “but on constitutional principals and statements on human rights”. The niqab, explained the students, is part of their constitutional rights which include the right to wear what they want. In the recent months Iman of Al Azhar, the main Sunni institution, banned the niqab in places where there were only women in all the teaching institutions linked to the university. The move was based on the fact that for sheik, Sayyed Tantawi, the niqab has no foundation in religion but only in tradition. A position supported as well by Religious Affairs Minister Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq the Mufti Ali Gomaa. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Luxor Like a Large Open Museum, New Governorate
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO, DECEMBER 8 — It will take 2.2 billion Egyptian lira, equal to about 273 million euros, to transform Luxor into a world renowned open museum. These resources were allocated for the city’s global development plan launched at the end of 2006 and whose management will be handled now by the new governorate of Luxor, announced by President Hosni Mubarak in a visit yesterday to the city. It will be the country’s 29th governorate, and will be equipped with a special statute. During his visit, the president inaugurated several projects while speaking to the local press, including a tourism movement, activating new investments, and creating jobs. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt: Niqab Ban From Classrooms to Court
(ANSAmed) — CAIRO — The ban on wearing the niqab, the veil that leaves only a woman’s eyes uncovered, supported by the leading Egyptian religious authorities — the Imam of Al Azhar Sayyed Al Tantawi, the Grand Mufti of Egypt Ali Gomaa and the minister for religious affairs Mahmoud Hamdi Zaqzouq — is moving from university lecture halls to the halls of justice. Announcing the legal case there are now a dozen women students at Ain Shams University, the second largest public university in Cairo, banned from entering the school to take their exams because they were wearing the niqab. The same happened at the University of Cairo and there was a protest demonstration and some girls, according to the local press, preferred giving up taking their exams. The question of the niqab exploded in October when the Imam of Al Azhar ordered a young woman student to remove her niqab because “it had nothing to do with religion”. Al Azhar students, repeated university’s high council based on an Egyptian law, must not wear the covering in courses held and attended by women, during exams — only when men are absent — and in the dormitories. The next step was taken by Education Minister Yustri El Gamal, citing a 1995 ministerial directive that prohibits the niqab in public schools. Grand Mufti Ali Gomaa said the niqab is not only not a religious obligations but also an outfit blatantly in contrast with the Prophet’s teaching, and can be banned in places of work like banks and hospitals. The minister for religious affairs banned it from ministerial offices and published a book called “Niqab: a tradition, not a religious act”. The legal initiative, explained lawyer Nizar Ghorab who is representing some of the students, is not based on religion but the principals of the Constitution and human rights. Wearing the niqab is a constitutional freedom said Ghorab, “becasue the woman who does not wear it has the right to wear what she wants while she who wears the niqab has no right”. Additionally, his intent is to show that Egypt “which pretends to be an Islamic state”, and whose laws are based on the principals of sharia, “does not apply Islamic law”. As to the ban at the Al Azhar schools which has to do with places where only women are present, Tantawi said in an interview, according to the lawyer, “that next year the niqub could be banned also in the presence of men”. “It has to be understood that Sheik of Al Azhar, who depends on the state is involved in a war against the niqab, he presents his offering to keep his position”, said the lawyer and that, “the mufti published a fatwa in 2006 before taking office, which said the niqab was a duty for all women”. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Egypt Starts Building Steel Wall on Gaza Strip Border
Egypt has begun constructing a huge metal wall along its border with the Gaza Strip as it attempts to cut smuggling tunnels, the BBC has learned.
When it is finished the wall will be 10-11km (6-7 miles) long and will extend 18 metres below the surface.
The Egyptians are being helped by American army engineers, who the BBC understands have designed the wall.
The plan has been shrouded in secrecy, with no comment or confirmation from the Egyptian government.
The wall will take 18 months to complete.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Gaza: Egypt Plans Steel Barrier Under Border
(ANSAmed) — TEL AVIV, DECEMBER 9 — To put an end to the continuous smuggling from the Sinai to the Gaza Strip, Egypt is planning to build a barrier under the border of heavy steel panels, according to a report in the Israeli newspaper Haaretz. The newspaper says the Egyptian decision is linked to energetic pressure from the United States to stop arms smuggling to the Hamas regime in Gaza. The project includes a nine kilometre barrier between the Egyptian sector of the city of Rafah in the north to the Kerem Shalom border crossing in the south along the so-called Philadelphia Axis that runs along the border. The newspaper reports that work has already started around Rafah and a 20 to 30 metre trench is being dug for the giant steel panels. According to Israeli estimates there are hundreds of smuggling tunnels between the Gaza Strip and Egypt and the project, once completed, will only be able to reduce the phenomena in part. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Morocco: Haidar is Incoherent, She Denied Her Nationality, Minister
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, DECEMBER 7 — Morocco does not intend to allow the human rights activist on behalf of the Saharawi people, Amanatou Haidar, back into the country because it was herself who denied her Moroccan nationality and handed back her passport. Haidar has been on hunger strike in Lanzarote Airport since November 16. The position expressed by Morocco’s Minister for Foreign Affairs and Cooperation, Tayeb Fassi Fihri, comes after days of diplomatic tension between Madrid and Rabat and a meeting of the EU-Moroccan Council of Association in Brussels. According to Fassi Fihri, Haidar had stated that she was not Moroccan like her parents and handed back her passport. For the Foreign Minister, “Haidar was rejected in line with the norms of international law. Morocco’s position has not changed: we cannot receive in the country somebody who says they want admission without recognising their nationality and documentation at the same time”. In this particular case “the pact of civil and political rights extends to all of Morocco’s citizens, but not to those who sometimes say that they are Moroccan and sometimes say that they are not”, the foreign minister said. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Haidar: Audiencia Nacional Declines Jurisdiction
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 4 — Spain’s Audiencia Nacional has recognised that crime against humanity has been committed against the Saharawi human rights activist, Amanatou Haidar, who has been on hunger strike for the past 19 days, but has declared the crime lies outside its jurisdiction. The judgement comes in light of Spain’s recent criminal procedure reforms affecting universal law. This is the nub of the act, cited in today’s edition of El Pais, with which Judge Eloy Velasco stated that he was not able to pronounce in cognizance of the accusations levelled by Haidar against the Moroccan authorities regarding her enforce expulsion from El Aaiun. The reported crimes had been referred to the Madrid court by the Arrecife district court in Lanzarote precisely because the alleged events occurred abroad. The judge reasoned that recent reforms to universal jurisprudence prevented the prosecution by a Spanish court, its jurisdiction limited only to accused parties present in Spain, in cases where the petitioners are Spanish citizens, or if there is a connection linking the affair to Spain. According to Velasco, none of these preconditions is fulfilled in the Haidar case. She accused Morocco of illegally expelling her from El Aaiun, the capital of Western Sahara on November 14, accusing Spain along with the captain and crew of the aircraft which took her to Lanzarote, of kidnapping and mistreatment. And while tensions increase between Madrid and Rabat following the refusal of the Moroccan government to grant the activist permission to return to El Aaiun, Spain’s deputy premier Maria Teresa de la Vega today reaffirmed that the government is doing all in its power to persuade Morocco to return Haidar her passport. During the press conference following today’s cabinet meeting, de la Vega assured reporters that Spain was committed to finding a solution within the United Nations that would recognise the Western Sahara’s right to self-determination. We shall never close relationships with a country in order to find a solution, the deputy premier said, appealing to Aminatou Haidar to call off her hunger strike. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Begin: ‘US Administration Not Even Like Carter’s’
US President Barack Obama’s views on the issue of West Bank settlements are more challenging for Israel than those of former president Jimmy Carter, Minister-without-Portfolio Bennie Begin said in a meeting with Likud activists from Judea and Samaria at the Knesset Tuesday. Likud minister Bennie Begin.
Begin, whose father, former prime minister Menachem Begin, made peace with Egypt during Carter’s presidency, made the comments just two weeks after Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu censured Culture and Sport Minister Limor Livnat for calling the Obama administration “horrible.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Big Brother Prevails Over Shalit Case on TV
(ANSAmed) — JERUSALEM, DECEMBER 8 — The Shalit case has no hold on the television viewing public: the local version of reality show ‘Big Brother’ continues to reign supreme in the ratings. This was confirmed by the most recent audience data provided today by the media, according to whom the latest episode of the reality show — aired on Channel 2 (one of the major Israeli networks) — showed a ratings share of over 26%, beating the touching documentary dedicated to Ghilad Shalit, the soldier held prisoner in the Gaza Strip by Hamas Radical Islamic Palestinians for over three years, which aired exclusively on rival network, Channel 10. The documentary covering the odyssey of Shalit and his family (called ‘A Family in Captivity’ and aired at a possible turning point in the case) ended up with 10% of the ratings, says the online issue of Haaretz. The network executives still consider this a significant result (“double what we may have feared”, they said) though it remains far from the heights of ‘Big Brother’. For Channel 10, challenging the most popular reality show on the small screen, even at the cost of losing a few ratings points, seems to have been a well thought out choice, writes Haaretz. They also mentioned that the network has recently tried to differentiate itself from concurrent Channel 2 programming, with more documentaries and investigations in a schedule that also counts various entertainment shows among its biggest ratings successes. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
EU Ministers Agree on Compromise Proposal on Jerusalem
(ANSAmed) — BRUSSELS, DECEMBER 8 — European Union foreign ministers meeting in Brussels have found a “balanced” compromise proposal for the long-standing dispute over the status of Jerusalem, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Tuesday. The ministers said negotiations were needed to find a way of making Jerusalem the capital of Israel and a future Palestinian state “if there is to be a genuine peace”. The issue is one of the thorniest in the stalled Middle East peace negotiations. Frattini said he would discuss the EU proposal during talks in Tel Aviv on Wednesday with Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu and Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman. Afterwards, he will head to Ramallah to review the issue with the Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority Salam Fayyad. Frattini said he had been tasked with conveying the EU’s support for Fayyad’s economic policies to relaunch the West Bank “which seem to be working quite well”. Israel captured Arab East Jerusalem in the 1967 Middle East war and annexed it in a move not recognised internationally. It has insisted that Jerusalem be its undivided capital and is totally opposed to the idea of an international mandate or an international status for the city. The Palestinians, meanwhile, want East Jerusalem as their future capital. Jerusalem is a holy city to three religions: Christianity, Judaism and Islam. Earlier this year, the Vatican reiterated a request that the city be given a “special status” so that all the faithful of the three main monotheistic religions would have access to their holy sites. Frattini said the EU ministers’ proposal was reached “after lengthy and complex discussion on the Middle East” and “took account of the stances of countries, including Italy, which were concerned about European interference on (peace) talks which we hope will resume soon”. “Deciding here in Brussels on the status of Jerusalem would frustrate the aim of the negotiations,” he added. Frattini said the EU statement stressed that “the European Union will not recognise any changes to the pre-1967 borders including with regard to Jerusalem, other than those agreed by the parties”.(ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Frattini in Israel and Territories, But Peace Far Off
(ANSAmed) — ROME, DECEMBER 8 — Italian Foreign Minister, Franco Frattini, enters into a very tense environment dominated by reciprocal mistrust and serious objections when he arrives to Israel and the Palestinian Territories tomorrow, for a quick visit of just a few hours, during which he will meeting in Ramallah with Palestinian Prime Minister, Salam Fayyad, and then in Jerusalem with Israeli Premier, Benyamin Netanyahu, and head of diplomacy Avigdor Lieberman. Frattini, said the ministry, will try to encourage both sides to resume negotiations, stalled for months due to the issue of new Israeli settlements in the West Bank and East Jerusalem. However, his visit is coming the day after a stance was taken by the EU foreign ministers on the status of Jerusalem (it should be negotiated as capital of both states, urged Brussels today, citing the 1967 borders), which made neither side happy. Too weak a position according to Palestinians, who hoped that the Swedish draft in which East Jerusalem was explicitly mentioned as “the capital of the future Palestinian state” was included. Too strong for Israel, which considers the eastern part of the city (occupied in 1967 and formally annexed in 1981 despite international protests) part of its “eternal and indivisible capital”. Italy, together with a group of European countries closer to Israel’s needs, worked to undermine the draft presented by the Swedish presidency, which angered Israel, reaching what Frattini called a “balanced” compromise, avoiding inopportune “European interference” on the outcome of negotiations: “Deciding here in Brussels what the status of East Jerusalem should be would spoil the purpose of negotiations,” commented the head of Italian diplomacy. However, the margins for Europe’s mediation (and that of other countries) in the region are meagre to the point that the U.S. State Department is waiting for more favourable conditions for a new mission to the area by U.S. special envoy to the region, George Mitchell. The openings left by the previous government of Ehud Olmert on East Jerusalem have been closed by the new Netanyahu administration, taking a rigid position on key topics such as borders, the settlements, and water resources. The recent announcement of a 10month moratorium on the development of settlements in the West Bank (which excludes settlements in East Jerusalem, natural growth, and public buildings) was greeted by some as a step forward, but, according to the Italian Foreign Ministry, it does not seem to set forth sufficient conditions to return to the negotiating table. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Frattini: Palestinian State ‘A Moral Duty’
(ANSAmed) — RAMALLAH, DECEMBER 9 — The European Union and the United States have a moral duty to try to set up a Palestinian state, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said Wednesday. Addressing a press conference with Palestinian National Authority Premier Salam Fayyad, Frattini urged Israelis and Palestinians to return to the negotiating table “as soon as possible”. He called a US proposal for forming a Palestinian state in two years “ambitious” but said “we have the moral duty to work towards this goal”. Frattini also urged Israeli Premier Benjamin Netanyahu to hold out against protests from settlers angry at his decision to freeze new settlements on the West Bank for ten months. “I hope the new positions taken by the European Union yesterday will help Netanyahu resist then pressure from the settlers,” he said. After his talks with Fayyad in Ramallah, Frattini will see Netanyahu later Wednesday in Jerusalem. Frattini is the first European Union diplomatic chief to visit Israel and the West Bank since EU foreign ministers on Tuesday issued a fresh call for Israel to withdraw from occupied territories as part of a “balanced” solution that would see Jerusalem becoming the capital of both states. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Hillary’s Bombshell: Obama Administration Subtly Launches Dramatic Policy Change on Peace Process
by Barry Rubin
In a one-paragraph statement welcoming Israel’s ten-month-long freeze on building apartments in existing West Bank settlements, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made a major statement. The dramatic new U.S. stance on Israel-Palestinian Authority peace agreement is camouflaged by brevity and subtle wording. But make no mistake: this is one of the most important foreign policy steps the Obama Administration has taken.
Here is the statement in full:
“Today’s announcement by the Government of Israel helps move forward toward resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. We believe that through good-faith negotiations the parties can mutually agree on an outcome which ends the conflict and reconciles the Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps, and the Israeli goal of a Jewish state with secure and recognized borders that reflect subsequent developments and meet Israeli security requirements.”
Clearly, this approach builds on the 2000 Camp David meeting and the December 2000 plan of President Bill Clinton. Ironically, the latter is called the Clinton plan, so the name need not change since now it is renewed and extended by another Clinton.
These 77 words are worth analyzing in great detail. First, there is what the United States is offering the Palestinian side:
“The Palestinian goal of an independent and viable state based on the 1967 lines, with agreed swaps…”
One should first ask, which Palestinians? Hamas and Islamic Jihad don’t favor this approach and Hamas still runs the Gaza Strip. To pretend that Israel can or should make a peace treaty with the Fatah-dominated Palestinian Authority (PA) which has no authority over the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip is ludicrous. Whatever deal Israel makes with the PA, it could—indeed, probably would—be attacked by Palestinians from Gaza the next day. The conflict cannot be ended by anything the PA does by itself. Without a real commitment to overthrow Hamas the United States can never make peace…
| — Hat tip: Barry Rubin | [Return to headlines] |
Man Arrested With Daughter for Allegedly Praying on Temple Mount
Police on Wednesday detained an Israeli man and his daughter for a few hours after they ascended the Temple Mount and began to pray at the contested holy site, the Jerusalem police spokesperson reported.
David Kirschenbaum told The Jerusalem Post he went up to the mount with his daughter on the day before her wedding, in order to take in the holiest site in Judaism.
Kirschenbaum denied he prayed at the site, but said that he was pointing at sites on the horizon and police mistook his daughter’s nodding for Jewish prayer. Kirschenbaum said he was then led away from the Mount by police and taken for an investigation at a Jerusalem police station. He said police told them he was being provocative and when he disputed the arrest, they told him they “don’t want to get into a discussion over politics.”
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Netanyahu: State Funds for Settlement
(ANSAmed) — JERUSALEM — Israeli premier Benyamin Netanyahu intends to submit to the government’s approval a plan for state allocation of funds which includes a number of isolated settlements in the West Bank (with an overall population of 110,000 settlers) among the national priorities of the state, along with other areas inside Israel. According to reports, the settlements are not found in colony clusters in the West Bank which Israel has said it would not give up. The news, reported in the paper Haaretz, has been confirmed in its overall content by the premier’s spokesman Mark Regev, who said that the plan is a list drawn up along with the Defence Ministry which takes into account most especially the threats to the security of the settlements included on the list. The settlements will benefit from 28 million dollars in state funds to improve the school system, infrastructure, and transport, as well as housing aid. Regev said that the choices made did not have anything to do with the government’s recent decision of a 10-month freeze on new constructions for housing reasons in West Bank settlements, which excludes those already being built and public building projects. According to the Israeli movement Peace Now, the 3,492 housing units that will continue to be built as an exception to the freeze are more than those under construction in Israel. About 1,167 units will be added for every 100,000 settlers in the West Bank (overall about 300,000), while in Israel there will be an additional 836 units for every 100,000 inhabitants. According to Regev the plan provides state funds to improve the lives of two million Israelis, 40% of whom belong to the Arab minority group (20% of the population) in several areas in Israel. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Obama Administration ‘Assures Jewish Evacuation’
PA official says U.S. won’t counter proposal giving Temple Mount to Palestinians
JERUSALEM — Members of the Obama administration recently assured the Palestinian Authority that most Jewish communities in the strategic West Bank will be evacuated, a top PA official told WND yesterday.
The official also said Obama will soon offer the Palestinians a public pledge that a Palestinian state will encompass most of the West Bank and eastern Jerusalem with the exception of what is known as the three main settlement blocs — Ariel, Gush Etzion and Maale Adumim. The pledge will likely be oral and not in the form of a letter, said the PA official.
Further, both the PA official and a source in Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office told WND the Obama administration refused to counter a European Union draft document that supports the division of Jerusalem, with the Temple Mount going to the Palestinians.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
On Israel’s Construction Freeze: U.S. Fails to Deliver: Instead of Praising, Europe Demands More
by Barry Rubin
Israel acceded to a U.S. request to freeze construction on existing Jewish settlements; the Palestinian Authority (PA) refuses even to negotiate or to give anything in exchange for this concession. Who did Europe reward and was the United States able to mobilize praise for the former or criticism for the latter?
Need you ask?
It is now confirmed that my analysis of the State Department statement on the construction freeze was correct. It was intended as a statement supporting key Israeli demands — recognition of Israel as a Jewish state and changes in the 1967 borders-while also meeting major Palestinian demands, an independent state based on those borders.
Equally unnoticed, however, is the fact that the United States did not even get its European allies to endorse its new position. Once again, despite all the Obama Administration’s apologies, flattery, and concessions, it could not even obtain the smallest things in exchange from those given such rewards.
The main U.S. effort was to get the Quartet of mediators (U.S., Europe Union, Russia, and UN) to endorse the new U.S. stance. The proposed statement would have urged resumed negotiations without preconditions to seek an agreement which…
| — Hat tip: Barry Rubin | [Return to headlines] |
Video and Photos: Tens of Thousands Protested Against Freeze
Tens of thousands of people participated Wednesday evening in a demonstration in a large and lively Jerusalem organized by the Yesha Council (the local government councils of Judea and Samaria). The head of the Yesha Council, Danny Dayan, told the gathered crowd: “We have not come to ask for a crooked compromise. We have come to demand a full thawing of the construction in Judea and Samaria.”
[…]
MK Danny Danon, Head of the World Likud, read out the telephone number of the White House and told the audience to call the number “and tell Obama: ‘take your hands off the Land of Israel!’“
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Cyprus Adds Obstacles to Turkish EU Accession Path
The Greek Cypriot-led government of Cyprus yesterday placed new obstacles in the way of Turkey’s efforts to join the European Union, declaring that it would not permit the start of accession talks in five policy areas unless Turkey changed its stance on the Cyprus dispute.
Although no other EU country supported them, the Greek Cypriots exercised their right under EU rules to announce that they would block talks over free movement of workers; the judiciary and fundamental rights; justice, freedom and security; education and culture; and foreign, security and defence policy.
Markos Kyprianou, foreign minister of Cyprus, described the measures as a “targeted response, not a complete freeze” to Turkey’s membership talks.
However, Turkey warned last week that its accession process could suffer irreparable damage if EU leaders introduced fresh sanctions in retaliation for Ankara’s refusal to open Turkish ports and airports to Greek Cypriot traffic.
After a two-day meeting that ended yesterday, EU foreign ministers decided against such sanctions after a majority concluded that discussions on a settlement among Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot leaders were at a delicate stage.
The foreign ministers said they would maintain a freeze on negotiations in eight of the 35 policy areas that Turkey, an official candidate for EU membership since 2004, must complete before it can join the bloc.
Cyprus’s announcement went further, because the policy areas it listed are in addition to the eight where all EU countries agree talks should not proceed.
Turkey opened EU accession talks in 2005 in return for a promise to permit direct transport links with the Greek Cypriots. Turkey has refused to honour the accord, saying the EU has failed to fulfil its commitment to end the isolation of Turkish Cypriot-controlled northern Cyprus.
Suat Kiniklioglu, deputy chair of foreign relations of Turkey’s ruling AK party, said that if Cypriot threats were true, it would indicate “that the Greek Cypriot government’s position is continuing to poison Turkey’s relations with the European Union”.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Diplomat, Scientist Among 11 Iranians ‘Held by US’
TEHRAN — Iranian media published a list on Wednesday of 11 Iranians, including a truck driver, a former diplomat and a nuclear scientist, who it claims are being held in the United States or other countries.
The Mehr news agency said the foreign ministry is “vigorously” pursuing diplomatic means to obtain the release of the Iranians, three of whom have allegedly been detained in countries outside the United States on Washington’s request.
Among those mentioned in the report are nuclear scientist Shahram Amiri and Alireza Asgari, a former deputy defence minister who disappeared in Turkey three years ago and has been transferred to the United States, according to Mehr, which cited unspecified documentary evidence.
The report came out on the same day Saudi Arabia strongly rebuffed claims it was involved in the disappearance of Amiri, who the Iranians claim was kidnapped in June while on pilgrimage to Mecca, and is now being held in the United States.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Explaining Russian and Chinese Policy: From Communists to Super-Capitalist Merchants
by Barry Rubin
China is very much motivated toward development rather than ideology or geopolitical ambition. It wants to get along with everyone as much as possible and make lots of money. (Quite a change from the days of the Little Red Book and the Cultural Revolution!). So they are ready to sell arms to everyone. They are all over Africa especially doing deals with anyone who can pay.
To get cash, the Chinese will do anything. For example, they have allowed secret flights from North Korea to Iran carrying weapons and nuclear technology. When U.S. forces arrived in Iraq, they found that China had sold Saddam advanced anti-aircraft guns.
They believe they have two big vulnerabilities. One is fear of being isolated, as happened during much of the Cold War. Whenever anyone speaks of sanctions and pressures, the Chinese think: What if this would be used against us some day. So they tend to be against such things everywhere (Yugoslavia, Iran). Since they want to make money selling to these countries that’s another reason to reject sanctions (and cheat when possible on them).
The even bigger vulnerability is China’s vast need for oil and gas. They don’ want to alienate any of the suppliers and they don’t like the idea of a crisis disrupting the supply. So they like trading with Israel because it has useful hi-tech and other such products and with the Arabs to buy oil and gas, and sell items to them.
Finally, they are very much against all the climate control proposals because these would hurt them and slow down their development. (And they can, after all, say: you in the West became rich through pollution and now you want to force us to give up advancing as fast as we can?)
Russia is quite different in political terms but also is desperate for money…
| — Hat tip: Barry Rubin | [Return to headlines] |
Iraq Bombers Backed by Foreign Groups: Police
The attackers who carried out a series of co-ordinated bombings in Baghdad that killed 127 people were backed by groups based in Syria or Saudi Arabia, a senior Iraqi policeman said on Wednesday.
“This material could not have been manufactured in Baghdad, it came from abroad,” Major General Jihad al-Jaabiri, the head of Iraq’s explosives unit, told reporters.
“Neighbouring countries helped them. The operation required lots of funding, which came from Syria or Saudi Arabia.”
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Jordan: School: No More Canteen for Schoolchildren
(ANSAmed) — AMMAN, 8 DIC — Thousands of school children could be left without canteen service next year, beacause the government decided to cut the state budget, an official said today. The Ministry of Education’s funds, providing the meals for nearly half a million of schoolchildren, will undergo cuts for an overall USD 70 millions in 2010, thus following the government guidelines. Walid Maani, Minister of Education and Scientific Research, explained today that “we must cut down the number of schoolchildren taking advantage of the canteen service” Jordan is suffering from growing poverty and a lot of children come to school precisely because of the canteen. Last year, the service has been provided for about 460.000 pupils, at a cost of USD 35 millions. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Lebanon-Spain: General Asarta Nominated UNIFIL Commander
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 10 — Spanish General Alberto Asarta, 58 years old, was yesterday designated head of United Nations Forces in Lebanon (UNIFIL) by UN secretary general Ban Ki-Moon, and will be taking the place of Italian general Claudio Graziano on December 28. Asarta, according to official sources quoted by the media, will be meeting with Spanish president Zapatero and Defence Minister Carme Chacon today at the Moncloa Palace. UNIFIL includes a contingent of 12,000 UN soldiers, to which Italy contributes with 2,500, followed by France with 1,480 and Spain with 1,100. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Syria: Damascus, Orient Trade Tower to Rise by 2010
(ANSAmed) — DAMASCUS, DECEMBER 10 — An 11-storey tower with offices and commercial spaces to be built south of Damascus by the Syrian group Abou Arab Haidar Group will be called the Orient Trade Tower. Located on a highway leading to Daraa on the edge of the capital, the new construction will occupy a surface area of 22,500 square metres. According to the Italian Institute for Foreign Trade (ICE) office in Damascus, the first four storeys will include a shopping centre for furniture and items for homes while the other 7 will be for offices. The works will be completed by the end of 2010. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Turkey Warns IAF Against Using Airspace
If Israel were to violate Turkish airspace in order to conduct reconnaissance operations on Iran, Ankara’s reaction would resemble an “earthquake,” Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan said in an interview with Egyptian journalist Fahmi Huwaidi published Thursday morning.
Responding to a question concerning rumors that Israel had entered Turkey’s airspace for espionage purposes, Erdogan said that such a thing had never happened, but that the consequences would be dire if it did.
“[Israel] will receive a response equal to that of an earthquake,” he cautioned, urging Israel’s leaders to refrain from “using the relationship they have with [Turkey] as a card to wage aggression on a third party.”
Ankara would not be a neutral party and stand aside with its arms folded, he said.
Erdogan also alluded during the interview to last winter’s Operation Cast Lead, saying that Israel could not reasonably have expected to participate in a joint military drill with Turkey after “sweeping” the people of Gaza.
He stressed that the Turkish government’s policy on Israel was both derived from and backed by the country’s voting public.
“We cannot challenge the feelings of the Turkish people, who were greatly affected by what happened during the aggression on Gaza,” he said.
| — Hat tip: KGS | [Return to headlines] |
When it Comes to Iran, President Obama Won’t Hear “No” For an Answer
by Barry Rubin
Question: What does Iran have to do to get across the fact that it isn’t making a deal on its nuclear program?
Secretary of State Hilary Clinton says she doesn’t consider the Iranian foreign minister’s statement that they aren’t making the deal to be “the final word.” The Obama Administration will give Tehran a few more chances—and probably a few more months—to stall in order to race ahead in their atom bomb program and to build up ways of overcoming any sanctions that are some day applied.
Indeed, the United States and five other powers are holding still another meeting to, in the words of EU foreign policy chief Javier Solana’s spokeswoman “review the latest developments on the Iran nuclear issue.” But since no one is concluding Iran is saying no, they won’t take one step toward higher sanctions.
Higher sanctions, you might remember, were supposed to come about in September 2009 under the Obama Administration’s own original time table. You know when the deadline was for the multi-year European negotiations with Iran was? September 2007.
Now at the earliest sanctions probably wouldn’t come before, what, March 2010? Victory for the Iran regime.
Another great power statement says that Iran has “not responded positively” to the plan, “We are disappointed by the lack of follow-up,” and “Iran has not engaged in an intensified dialogue and in particular has not accepted to have a new meeting.”
I think Iran is trying to tell you something, guys. But since it isn’t in writing yet, well, they claim they can’t do anything. And of course the Iranian regime will—with U.S. government cooperation—draw this out as long as possible.
Memo to world leaders: Do you think they might be stalling for time?…
| — Hat tip: Barry Rubin | [Return to headlines] |
Investigative Journalist in Belarus Faces Threats
An investigative journalist in Belarus says she has received anonymous threats linked to her publication.
Irina Khalip says she has received the threats by e-mail, telephone and in a telegram. She said Wednesday that the believes the security agency still going under its Soviet name KGB was involved in the threats.
The agency refused to comment on her claim.
Khalip said the threats were related to her article in the Russian newspaper Novaya Gazeta about the disputed legacy of late Georgian billionaire Badri Patarkatsishvili.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
16 Missing After Bangladesh Pirate Attack
COX’S BAZAR, Bangladesh — Sixteen fishermen remained missing Tuesday off Bangladesh’s southern coast after pirates attacked their vessel last week, survivors and the boat’s owner said.
Eighteen fishermen were assaulted in the Bay of Bengal by a band of 25-30 pirates Friday, said fishermen Shahidullah and Abdur Rahim. Shahidullah like many Bangladeshis uses only one name.
The survivors said the pirates severely beat them and slashed some of the fishermen with knives before throwing them all overboard.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Breaking News: Pakistan Reportedly Detains Five D.C.-Area Muslims on Suspicion of Terror
A Pakistani newspaper reports the arrest of five foreign nationals after a raid in a town called Sargodha. The raid took place at the home of a member of the Jaish-e-Muhammad, a Pakistani movement designated as a terrorist group by the U.S. Treasury Department in 2001.
According to the report, “The DPO told that these people had been living in Sargodha since Nov 30 and it was quite a possibility that they were engaged in acts of terrorism.” It names the five as Ahmed Abdullah, Waqar Hassan Khan, Eman Hassan, Yasir and Rami Zamzam and describes them as two Yemenis, an Egyptian, a Swede and a U.S.-born Pakistani.
December 8: Federal investigators are searching for a Howard University dental student and four other missing Muslim men reported missing from the Washington, D.C. area, the Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) has learned. There is concern they may have been sent abroad to train for jihad. The five were last seen November 29.
The identities of two of the missing men, Howard student Ramy Zamzam and Waqar Khan, have been mentioned in online postings, including a Facebook page that was set up Monday for friends to offer their support. Some of those pages, however, appear restricted to friends and associates.
It is not clear where the men are believed to have gone, but an informed source told the IPT that at least one left behind a farewell video.
According to the Facebook and Twitter postings, Zamzam is among the missing. He has been active in the Muslim Students Association, serving as president of the MSA DC Council. A Howard University spokeswoman has not responded to questions from the IPT.
The disappearance comes as U.S. officials are increasingly concerned about the threat of homegrown Islamist extremism. This concern is prompted by a spike in attacks like the Fort Hood massacre, and conspiracies broken up by law enforcement before any attacks took place.
President Obama noted the increase during his speech last week at West Point explaining the Afghanistan surge…
| — Hat tip: LN | [Return to headlines] |
Erick Stakelbeck: Thoughts on the 5 American Muslims Arrested in Pakistan
One thing to consider here: what if these men would have returned to their Washington, D.C. home base as battle-hardened jihadists after a few months of tutelage from the terror masters in Pakistan? With the White House, Capitol Hill and Pentagon in striking distance? From the cases I’ve studied of homegrowns who have trained overseas, that hunger for jihad never leaves. It’s not like you can just go from killing infidels on the battlefield to settling into a quiet life as a short order cook in Virginia. Witness the case of alleged North Carolina terror cell leader Daniel Boyd, who trained in Afghanistan in 1989 as a 19 year old, then was indicted on terrorism charges 20 years later.
But perhaps these five Americans planned to never return.. A source with knowledge of the investigation told me today that one of them made a “martyrdom tape” that featured graphic footage of Coalition forces being killed by the Taliban in Afghanistan, as well as vicious anti-Semitic rhetoric. No surprise on either count. In literally every single homegrown case I have covered, the two common themes are hatred of Jews and Israel and hatred of the U.S. military, which the jihadists see as the symbol of “imperialist, Crusader aggression” against the Muslim world.
Also noteworthy is that one of the men arrested is a middle-class, dental student at Howard University. Yet another example that Islamic ideology, not poverty or lack of opportunities (as some have suggested), fuels Islamic terrorism.
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India to Split Andhra Pradesh After Protests
India’s southern IT hub Hyderabad, paralysed by a week of violent protests, looks set for a major battle over its future after New Delhi agreed to split the southern state of Andhra Pradesh into two separate states, leaving the fate of the state capital uncertain.
P. Chidambaram, the interior minister, said on Thursday that New Delhi would begin the process of forming the new state of Telangana, after the virtual shutdown of Hyderabad, a base for multinational companies such as Google, Microsoft and Mahindra Satyam.
“People in the region feel they have been neglected — despite speaking the same language by the governments that have ruled that stated for many years,” Mr Chidambaram said, defending the move.
New Delhi’s capitulation — which follows an 11-day fast by a leader of the movement for the creation of separate state of Telangana — is likely to fuel agitation by several other Indian ethnic and regional groups for their own separate states, including demands by Gorkhas for a new state in the tea-growing mountain region of Darjeeling.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Indian Hotels, Eateries Serving Halal Without Mentioning Fact
CHANDIGARH: In a scathing expose and a revelation that will shock ordinary Sikhs, the Sikh organisations and anyone connected with sensitivities involved in the domain of religion, scores of hotels, restaurants and eateries in India have been found to be serving halal meat and poultry to patrons without informing them about the fact.
Sections of the Indian media have brought to the fore how five star hotels and mid-level restaurants have admitted that they have bene serving halal meat all these years as few ask before digging into the food at an eatery about the way in which chicken or mutton served there was slaughtered?
Hotels and restaurants are also aware that customers don’t always try to know if the non-vegetarian food there is of the halal or jhatka variety..
While this may be a non-issue for those who may proudly call themselves “liberal minded”, for people who are stricter about their religious beliefs, the distinction is a matter of faith and its violation amounts to sacrilege.
The Times of India in Chandigarh quoted a Sikh girl who asked the staff at a Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC) outlet about the variety of non-vegetarian food there. She was shocked to hear that it was halal. She said, “I don’t want a ban on halal. But why don?t they tell customers about what they are serving?”
An official spokesperson at KFC admitted, “Yes, we serve halal because that is our global mandate.”
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Indonesia to Erect Statue of President Obama as a Boy
A six-and-a-half foot statue of President Obama as a 10-year-old boy has been commissioned in Jakarta, Xinhua reports.
The president spent some of his formative years there as a boy, where he was educated at a school that was decidedly not a madrassa, despite some false reports pushed by conservative news outlets two years ago.
A group called “Friends of Obama” made the announcement today, saying the statue will be inaugurated on December 10 in a playground in the Jakarta suburb Menteng Dalam, where Obama lived from 1967 until 1971 with his mother and stepfather.
“The statue is designed to inspire Indonesian children that they can be anyone they want to be,” said Friends of Obama chairman Ron Muller
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Indonesia: Obama Statue
A bronze statue depicting a ten-year-old Barack Obama clad in shorts and a t-shirt has been erected in a park in Jakarta, Indonesia.
Mr. Obama lived in Indonesia from 1967 to 1971, when he was a boy. He lived and attended elementary school not far from where the statue now stands.
The statue, at left, shows the child version of the president smiling as he looks at a butterfly poised on his thumb.
It was erected with the goal of inspiring Indonesian children.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Italy: Frattini Reports on Afghan Mission
Stabilization needs political solution, foreign minister says
(ANSA) — Rome, December 10 — The planned military surge in Afghanistan will not be enough to stabilise that country because what is needed there is a political solution, Italian Foreign Minister Franco Frattini said on Thursday.
Speaking before a joint session of the lower house foreign and defense committees, Frattini added that the final aim of the allied effort in Afghanistan “is to hand over to the Afghan people the control and destiny of their own country”.
The increase in forces decided last month by the United States, NATO and other countries present in Afghanistan, the foreign minister observed, “is not an end in itself. There is no such thing as a military solution for stabilization. the only solution possible there is a political one”.
According to Frattini, a political solution may will involve dialogue and accords with the Taliban “but only those who are not linked with al Qaeda and who are ready to renounce violence and accept the new Afghan constitution”.
Italy, the foreign minister said, “fully supports any political initiative which leads to full national reconciliation in Afghanistan”.
In order for such an initiative to have success, he added, “the insurgents must be guaranteed employment in return for returning to the rule of law”.
Frattini confirmed that allied forces in Afghanistan will initiate their disengagement in July 2011, a date set by US President Barack Obama, but added that “what we need now a clear road map with a timetable and benchmarks which must achieved”. Aside from participating in the military surge, Italy also intends to bolster its civil commitments in Afghanistan “which will continue even after the military effort is over,” the foreign minister told the MPs.
These include aid and assistance to agriculture, in order to offer Afghan farmers an alternative to opium production, and training programs run by Italy’s Finance Guard for Afghan border and customs police.
DEFENSE MINISTER LA RUSSA PUTS 4,000-MAN CEILING ON CONTINGENT. Also appearing before the committee joint session on Thursday was Defense Minister Ignazio La Russa who said that Italy’s increased military presence in Afghanistan will never be more than 4,000 men and should average out at 3,700 soldiers by the second half of next year.
Last month Italy agreed to boost its troop strength in Afghanistan by some 1,000 soldiers plus 200 members of the Carabinieri police corps, from its current level of 2,795.
According to the defense minister, NATO had initially asked Italy to send an additional 1,600 men to Afghanistan.
La Russa confirmed that the additional forces will be found by reducing Italy’s role in international missions in Lebanon and Kosovo. By October of next year, the defense minister told the MPs, Italy will cut its presence in Kosovo by some 1,300 men while 200 soldiers will be withdrawn from Lebanon.
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Pakistan: Obama Declines to Comment on Terror Arrests
Oslo, 10 Dec. (AKI) — United States president Barack Obama on Thursday declined to comment on the arrests of five Americans in Pakistan over possible terrorism links. Addressing journalists in the Norwegian capital Oslo where he received the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama said the “twisted ideologies” of terrorists could affect young people in the US.
But he said it was “remarkable” how the United States had reaffirmed the “extraordinary contributions” of the Muslim community in the country since the 9/11 attacks.
Obama was speaking after the five men were arrested in Pakistan after being reported missing from the north east American state of Virginia. Police have alleged they were planning terrorist acts.
Pakistani police told The New York Times the men were on their way to the Taliban’s strongholds in the country’s tribal areas with the intention of training to fight against American troops in Afghanistan.
It is alleged that the men, aged in their late teens and their 20s came from the suburbs around Washington, and had been in contact through YouTube with a militant with links to Al-Qaeda before arriving in Pakistan on 30 November.
After arriving in Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, the men tried to join an Islamist school near Karachi and approached another banned Islamist charity Jamaat-ud-Dawa, in the eastern city of Lahore.
They include two Pakistani-Americans, two Yemeni-Americans and an Egyptian-American.
Earlier on Thursday Obama said he expected “a series of investigations” following the arrests.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Swede Held in Pakistan on Terror Suspicions
A Swedish national is reportedly among five terror suspects arrested in Pakistan on suspicions of plotting a militant attack, Pakistani authorities said on Wednesday.
The five were arrested in Sargodha, south of Islamabad, at the home of a member of the banned militant group Jaish-e-Mohammad, Pakistani district police chief Usman Anwar told AFP Wednesday.
Pakistani officials said the men were two Yemenis, one Egyptian, one Swede and a Pakistani-American. Muslim leaders in Washington said the men had been living in northern Virginia, close to the US capital, with their families until they disappeared last month.
An official at the Pakistani embassy in Washington said they are “all of US origin,” but Federal Bureau of Investigations officials gave no confirmation of their nationalities.
The Swedish foreign ministry had no information about the arrests as of Wednesday night.
“The embassy is working to check out the information to see if it’s true,” foreign ministry spokesperson André Mkandawire told the TT news agency.
Nor did Swedish security service Säpo have any details about the Swede’s reported arrest.
“We’re trying to figure out if it’s true and what it could be about,” Säpo spokesperson Patrik Peter said to TT.
Sweden’s ambassador in Islamabad, Ulrika Sundberg, told TT shortly after midnight local time that she also planned to investigate the matter.
The FBI said it was probing the case, in which one of the suspects made an extremist-style “farewell” video before leaving his home in the United States.
Officials from Washington, DC-based the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR) told reporters that the men’s families contacted the organization after they went missing.
Nihad Awad, CAIR’s executive director, did not give the men’s names, ages or nationalities, but said he met on December 1 with their relatives.
Awad said the families brought along a video showing one of the five men delivering a “final statement,” and which included war images and Koranic verses.
“It’s like a farewell,” he said of the 11-minute, English-language video that one of the families reportedly found in their home.
After viewing the video, CAIR contacted the FBI and turned over the footage and information about the missing men.
“The circumstances were so suspicious that we felt we had to bring it to the attention of the FBI,” said Ibrahim Hooper, CAIR’s national communications director.
That tip appears to be the first time authorities had been alerted to the men’s activities, he added.
The FBI said it was working with families and local law enforcement to investigate the missing students.
“We are working with Pakistan authorities to determine their identities and the nature of their business there, if indeed these are the students who had gone missing,” said Lindsey Godwin, an FBI spokeswoman.
Godwin said she could give no further details because “this is an ongoing investigation.”
The official at the Pakistani embassy told AFP that the men entered the country through the southern city of Karachi on November 30 and went within days to the central province of Punjab.
They first went to the Punjabi capital, Lahore, before heading to Sargodha.
“We are still investigating the exact details,” the official said on condition of anonymity.
US embassy spokesman Richard Snelsire said in Islamabad that he was aware of reports of the arrests, but had not received any information from Pakistani officials.
State Department spokesman Ian Kelly said he was unable to provide more details on any American connection in the arrests.
Asked more broadly about domestic radicalization, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton told CNN: “It’s always been a concern.”
“We have been well aware of the threats that we continue to face, along with friends and allies around the world. We know that much of the training and the direction for the terrorists comes from Pakistan and the border area with Afghanistan,” Clinton added.
CAIR’s Awad said the video referred to wars between the West and various Muslim nations.
“There were… images of conflict,” he added, describing the video as “similar to videos we see on the Internet.”
“It was generic, but you can draw your own conclusions.”
The arrests came as a Pakistani-American, David Coleman Headley, pleaded not guilty Wednesday in a Chicago court to helping plan the deadly 2008 Mumbai attacks.
Headley, who changed his name from Daood Gilani in 2006, is accused of making trips to Mumbai over almost two years, even taking boat tours around the city’s harbor to scope out landing sites for the attackers, who killed 166 people including six Americans.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Philippines: Massacre in Maguindanao: The Ampatuan Clan Suspected of 200 More Murders
Reported by the National Commission on Human Rights. The bodies were buried in mass graves scattered in different areas of the province. Witnesses have not reported crimes for “fear of retaliation.” Those arrested will have to respond to charges of rebellion and murder.
Manila (AsiaNews / Agencies) — The Muslim clan accused of the massacre of 23 November in the province of Maguindanao in the southern Philippines, are believed to be responsible for 200 other homicides. This according to the National Commission for Human Rights, which has denounced that the discovery of several mass graves in areas controlled by Ampatuan.
Leila de Lima, President of the Commission confirms “at least 200” politically motivated assassinations linked to the Ampatuan clan, a political ally of Philippine President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo and power in the province since 2001.
The bodies are buried in several mass graves, scattered in the province of Maguindanao. The cases have emerged only now, following the arrest of Andalo Ampatuan Jr. — son of the powerful local governor — because witnesses did not report them “for fear of retaliation.”
Among the 57 civilians killed in the attack on 23 November were relatives and supporters of Ishmael “Toto” Mangudadatu, vice-mayor of Buluan and candidate for governor of Maguindanao, of which 26 are women and 32 journalists. The police reports that “161 people are suspected of having taken part in the massacre.
Under the martial law in force in the province, the police have arrested 62 people, including clan leader Andalo Ampatuan Sr. Those arrested will have to answer to charges of rebellion and murder.
The Ampatuan family, with the government approval, set up its own army and ruled unchallenged for years in the province. It was a decision made by Manila in an attempt to contain the rebellions of Muslim separatists.
Following the massacre, Arroyo has removed all agreement with the clan: the Maguindanao province is under martial law and the Ampatuan face charges of rebellion.
| — Hat tip: C. Cantoni | [Return to headlines] |
Australia Denies North Korean Artists Visas
The Australian government has been accused of censoring five artists from North Korea by refusing them visas.
But the government says the art is a product of the North Korean propaganda machine and so is not welcome.
Promoters of the art show have argued the visa denial means an opportunity to help one of the world’s most closed societies has been lost.
North Korea’s Stalinist regime bans access to the internet, outside phone networks, radio, TV, and most travel.
The US special envoy Stephen Bosworth is currently visiting Pyongyang, trying to bring the North back to the negotiating table over ending its nuclear programme.
Art arguments
Some countries have pursued cultural links as a type of “soft diplomacy” — such as the visit by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra to North Korea last year.
The art show in Australia features five artists from the Mansudae Art Studio, who were invited to participate in the Asia Pacific Triennial of Contemporary Art in Queensland.
But Australian Foreign Minister Stephen Smith rejected the artists’ bid for an exception to the long-stranding ban on visas for people from North Korea, which is part of United Nations sanctions imposed on the North for its defiance of efforts to end its nuclear programmes.
“The studio reportedly produces almost all of the official artworks in North Korea, including works that clearly constitute propaganda aimed at glorifying and supporting the North Korean regime,” the foreign ministry’s statement said.
Nick Bonner, a Beijing-based British businessman and art dealer who helped curate the exhibition, said all art studios in North Korea — like most other things in the hard-line state — were government organisations, but that did not mean every work was political.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Australia Hands Back Sacred Land to Aborigines
The government of Australia’s Northern Territory has handed back sacred land to a local Aborigine tribe.
The Emily and Jessie Gaps Nature Park, near Alice Springs, is significant for the Eastern Arrernte people as they have a strong attachment to the land.
The park contains totems of a race of ancient giant caterpillars, to which the people traces its origins.
The park will still be open to the public. The authorities have reached over 30 similar land use deals.
The BBC’s Phil Mercer in Sydney says the park has great spiritual and cultural significance because it tells the story of how the caterpillars once shaped the land.
There are economic benefits to the handover too, our correspondent says.
Under a joint management plan, the land will be leased back to the authorities and will continue to be a nature park.
The park is already a popular tourist site and some Aborigines work there as tour guides or rangers.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Police Illegally Execute Hundreds in Nigeria: Amnesty
Police in Nigeria carry out hundreds of extra-judicial killings every year and only those who can afford to pay bribes can guarantee their safety from execution or torture, Amnesty International said Wednesday.
“The Nigeria Police Force is responsible for hundreds of extrajudicial executions, other unlawful killings and enforced disappearances every year,” the London-based rights group said in a damning report.
“The majority of cases go uninvestigated and unpunished,” it said.
The national police service rejected the findings.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
Somalia Suicide Bomber ‘Was From Denmark’
A suicide bomber who killed at least 22 people at a graduation in Somalia was brought up in Denmark, officials say.
Somali Information Minister Dahir Gelle told the BBC that the bomber’s parents, who live in Copenhagen, identified their son’s body from photographs.
Reports say he left Somalia when he was a child and spent 20 years in Denmark, before returning to Somalia last year.
He reportedly joined the hard-line Islamist group al-Shabab — although they have previously denied the attack.
Al-Shabab and other radical Islamist groups control much of the country.
The Danish Security and Intelligence Service (PET) also says the bomber was from Denmark, according to local media.
The Copenhagen Post quoted PET as saying the man was in his 20s and was “a Somali citizen who had residence in Denmark”.
“As PET has indicated numerous times in the past, there are people with ties to Denmark who have gone through militant Islamic training and radicalisation and who are involved in terror-related activities in several countries, including in Somalia,” a PET statement said, according to the newspaper.
The bombing took place at a graduation for medical students on 3 December in one of the few parts of the capital, Mogadishu, which is controlled by the government.
The students had been graduating from Benadir University, which was set up in 2002 to train doctors to replace those who had fled overseas or been killed in the civil war.
Three ministers were among the dead.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
England: Immigrant Workers Found ‘Living in Sheds’ Across Slough
More than 1,000 migrant workers across Slough are thought to be living in sheds in people’s back gardens.
Slough Borough Council believes the problem has become so great, it is working with the UK Border Agency and police to ensure tenants’ well-being.
Many of the shed-dwellers are living in an estimated 1,000 sheds, especially in Upton, Baylis, Central and Chalvey.
The council said it was clamping down on landlords and reminding them of the planning rules for outhouses.
Many of the buildings are legal and within the size permitted for the gardens they are within, however the majority should not be inhabited.
Housing standards manager, Keith Ford, said the council would fine or prosecute landlords breaking the law.
He said his team would try to re-home the immigrants, many of whom were living in the sheds without proper sanitation and were “being exploited”.
“Although in many cases, Slough Borough Council doesn’t have a statutory obligation to re-house these people — but we do have a moral obligation,” he said.
“We will make temporary housing available for those who aren’t eligible for re-housing.
“Ultimately though, it is the responsibility of the landlords themselves to find these people alternative accommodation.”
He added the situation was also having a negative impact on the area.
“It causes problems with anti-social behaviour, it obviously puts a strain on the services provided by Slough Borough Council, and it just doesn’t look very nice,” Mr Ford said.
Slough has a large immigrant population, and at the time of the 2001 census the borough was the most ethnically diverse outside of London.
Christine Hulme, from the Action4Chalvey residents’ group, said the problem was causing overcrowding.
She said extra rubbish was becoming an environmental health issue “because of rats”.
“There’s also congestion in terms of sheer space that people have got, things like parking, traffic,” said Ms Hulme.
“And it must also have a burden in terms of local services.”
Thames Valley Police said the force dealt regularly with incidents involving the outbuildings, and was “well aware” of people living in them.
“There was a fire in a shed the other day that had someone living in it,” a spokeswoman said.
“Luckily, they were pulled to safety.
“It’s a council housing issue really, we only deal with such incidents.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Greece to Open Screening Center for Immigrants
(AP) — ATHENS, Greece — Greece says it will open a screening center for illegal migrants to review asylum claims, as part of an overhaul of human rights procedures promised by the country’s new Socialist government.
Spyros Vougias, a deputy minister in charge of public order, says the new center will open on the island of Lesvos next year. He made the comments Thursday.
The new site will replace a detention facility that the government admits subjected illegal immigrants to “inhumane conditions.” The United Nations refugee agency has repeatedly criticized Greece for ignoring legitimate asylum claims.
About half of the European Union’s illegal immigrants are detected at Greece’s frontiers, according to the EU border protection agency Frontex.
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Libya Says ‘No Exceptions’ In Migrant Expulsions
Libya will make no exceptions in its drive to expel illegal immigrants and any recruitment of foreign labour in future must be done through legal channels, an official said on Sunday.
The oil-rich North African country said on Wednesday it had started deporting illegal immigrants, a community of up to two million, mostly men from poor African states who are trying to reach Europe.
Tripoli is under pressure at home to tackle the problem of illegal immigrants whom officials and locals blame for spreading crime and taking jobs from unemployed young Libyans.
Mohamed El-Lamoushi, head of the Information Department at the prime minister’s office, told Reuters the move was an internal Libyan matter, adding that future recruitment of foreign workers would be carried out under accords Libya had recently signed with labour-exporting countries.
“All the procedures [of expulsion] must be finished in one month and there will be no exceptions. Foreigners who want to enter Libya must have legal papers and documents,” he said.
Lamoushi said the Ministry of Manpower was ready to supply different economic sectors in Libya with needed labour. “The ministry has signed agreements with African, Arab and Asian countries to make the labour available on demand,” he said.
Homes to be destroyed Libya welcomed people from across Africa in the 1990s as it sought cheap labour to help repair an economy hit by sanctions.
Some have menial jobs such as washing cars while many work in construction, a sector booming because of a big programme of public works fuelled by high oil revenues.
Libya has instructed housing authorities to destroy migrants’ makeshift homes on the outskirts of Tripoli and other coastal cities.
Human rights group Amnesty International said Libya’s plan was forbidden under international law and some of those expelled risked torture and abuse back home.
But Lamoushi said expulsions were being carried out “in a civilised way”. He added: “Only 60 000 of them are here with legal papers and work permission.”
“The decision to deport the illegal immigrants is an internal issue and is in line with Libya’s intention to organise its internal affairs.
“Libya faces problems of health, crimes related to drugs and alcohol and economic problems. Therefore the decision is not against any country or people. It is intended only to organise the entry and exit of the foreigners.” — Reuters
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
UK: Immigration Officers Detain 12 in Last Month in Bradford
Immigration officers have arrested a dozen illegal workers in the last month alone in raids across Bradford, the Home Secretary said yesterday.
In total, 31 foreign nationals have been detained following raids in West Yorkshire, with employers facing fines of more than £300,000.
The figures were revealed yesterday by Home Secretary, Alan Johnson, as he announced three new immigration teams would be unveiled in Yorkshire early next year in a bid to crack down on illegal workers.
Mr Johnson said: “Their work will continue to focus on illegal working and removing those with no right to be in the UK, as well as tackling more organised immigration crime.”
Arrests by the UK Border Agency in Bradford have included a man who immigration officers detained in a swoop last month in Manningham.
In July, officials arrested seven brides and grooms from Nigeria and Eastern Europe, who were on their way to churches in Scholes and Cleckheaton in a marriage scam.
Since April, more than 338 people who were in Britain illegally have been removed from West Yorkshire back home.
Entry for non-EU low-skilled workers is now suspended and the Prime Minister has announced a review of student visas to toughen up entry rules, the Home Secretary said.
Electronic border controls count people in and out of the country, and visas and ID cards for foreign nationals, which contain fingerprint data, have also been introduced to cut the risk of identity fraud.
Shipley MP Philip Davies said: “I think the UK Border Agency would be much better trying to deal with a huge backlog of immigration cases and less time blowing their own trumpets when they’ve not got much of a tune.
“It strikes me that the first thing they should be doing is getting some proper controls on our borders.
“Only when they have done that should they think about employing more people to remove illegal immigrants from the country.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Ireland’s Abortion Law Challenged in European Court
The Irish Republic’s strict abortion law is being challenged in the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg.
The legal action has been brought by three Irish women who say the effective ban on abortion in Ireland violates the European Convention on Human Rights.
All three have travelled to Britain to have abortions.
The Irish government has engaged two leading lawyers to argue its case that the country has a sovereign right to protect the life of the unborn.
The three Irish women will be identified only as A, B, and C during the Strasbourg court hearings.
They argue that being forced to travel abroad for abortions endangered their “health and well-being” as safeguarded by the European Convention on Human Rights.
The two constitutional lawyers representing the government of Ireland argue that the convention’s safeguards cannot be interpreted as endorsing the right to abortion.
‘Draconian’
Abortion is illegal in Ireland, a deeply Catholic country, unless the life of the woman is in danger.
The Irish constitution was amended in 1983 to include the “Pro-Life Amendment”, which asserted that the unborn child had an explicit right to life from conception.
The case is the first challenge to Ireland’s abortion laws in more than 15 years, the BBC’s Europe correspondent Jonny Dymond says.
Almost 140,000 Irish women have travelled to Britain over the past 30 years to have abortions, our correspondent adds.
The Irish Family Planning Association welcomed the challenge to the laws, which it described as “draconian”.
It said they violated international human rights norms “because they inflict such grievous harm to women’s health and well-being”.
But Johanna Higgins, co-founder of the Association of Catholic Lawyers of Ireland, told the BBC’s World Today programme that a ruling against Ireland would be an infringement of its ability to decide its own laws.
“Whatever the human rights aspects are of this, abortion is illegal in Ireland because it is a criminal offence,” she said.
“If I were in any country and this were to go against Ireland, I would be very concerned that the Europeans feel they can step into domestic law.”
| — Hat tip: Sean O’Brian | [Return to headlines] |
Ireland’s Abortion Ban Faces EU Fight, As Three Women Take Case to Court of Human Rights
Three women filed a lawsuit today challenging Ireland’s abortion ban, claiming that it violates their human rights.
They told the European Court of Human Rights that the policy forces women to travel abroad for abortions and denies them appropriate medical care at home.
If they win, the women could force Ireland — one of only a few European countries that outlaws abortion — to liberalise a system that leads to 7,000 Irish women travelling abroad each year for terminations.
The Irish government denied that they could not receive proper medical care in Ireland.
[…]
The significance of the case has been highlighted by a decision to hear it before a 17-judge ‘Grand Chamber’ of the Human Rights court, instead of the usual seven-judge hearing.
Abortion was outlawed in Ireland by a 1861 rule which still sets life imprisonment as an option for women convicted of ‘unlawfully procuring a miscarriage’.
Ireland’s constitution ‘acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right.’
The ban was reinforced by public backing in a 1983 referendum.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Planned Parenthood Advises: ‘That’s Not a Baby’
Undercover video shows workers ‘giving misinformation to women’
A team of activists whose undercover videos revealed Planned Parenthood employees advising patients to lie to a judge and ignoring apparent cases of statutory rape has launched a project to uncover lies told to the patients.
The new Rosa Acuna Project led by Lila Rose at Live Action.org unveiled today its first undercover video revealing counselors and an abortionist in Wisconsin apparently misleading a potential patient.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Spain: Agreement Requires Minors to Inform Parents About Abortion
(ANSAmed) — MADRID, DECEMBER 10 — The parliamentary PNV (Basque Nationalist Party) group will support the abortion reform, which according to the text would require those under seventeen years of age to inform at least one parent, legal guardian, or holder of parental rights, as agreed upon by the PNV and the PSOE (Spanish Socialist Workers Party). PNV sources gave the news today. The two parties further agreed to include an exception in the text of the law, in the case of minors for whom voluntary termination of pregnancy may result in family violence, threats, coercion, abuse, or could lead to a situation of abandonment. Yesterday the PSOE agreed with parliamentary groups for the United Left and the Republican Left of Catalonia on limiting conscientious objection to only the medical personnel directly involved in the termination of pregnancy, and creating a register where objection will be on an individual basis, in writing and justified. The three left parties also agreed on instituting sex education in all state-recognized public schools, and the inclusion of practical training for performing the termination procedure in university courses for doctors and nurses. All amendments to the abortion reform will be approved today by the Equality Commission, and next week in the plenary session of Congress. The PNV vote isnt necessary for majority approval of the law, but the government has repeatedly reiterated a desire to reach a large consensus to reform the 1985 law that is currently in force. The opposing Peoples Party presented amendments to the entire reform, which were rejected by the majority in Congress. (ANSAmed).
| — Hat tip: Insubria | [Return to headlines] |
Teachers Forced to ‘Hide in Closets’ To Pray
School employees ordered to stop others from ‘communicating with a deity’
Florida school teachers say they are being forced to hide in closets to pray after a controversial court ruling.
Under an order crafted by the ACLU, school employees in Santa Rosa School District must act in an “official capacity” whenever they are at a “school event” — including breaks, after-school events on or off campus and private events held on campus.
Liberty Counsel, a nonprofit law firm, alongside Christian Educators Association International, is seeking to overturn the court order, which has resulted in three school officials being charged with contempt.
According to the group, school officials are strictly prohibited from showing agreement with anyone “communicating with a deity,” such as “bowing the head” or “folding hands.” “School officials” must also prohibit “third-parties” from praying, Liberty Counsel said.
During testimony that ended last week, Christian employees said the order has literally driven them to hide in closets to pray to avoid contempt charges.
[…]
Denise Gibson, an elementary teacher for 20 years, testified that the order requires her to inform parents that she cannot respond if they mention church or their faith. She said she is prohibited from replying to e-mails from parents if they contain Bible verses or even “God bless you.” Instead, she said, the district has instructed her to open a separate e-mail to answer the parents rather than hit “reply.” The district calls for the action to eliminate any trace of religious language in school communication.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Three Women Challenge Ireland’s Ban on Abortion at European Court
Three women living in the Irish Republic challenged the country’s strict abortion law at the European Court of Human Rights yesterday, claiming that their rights had been violated.
The three — two Irish nationals and a Lithuanian — all left their homes in Ireland to have abortions in Britain. Identified only by the letters A, B and C because of the risk of imprisonment in Ireland, they are supported in their case by the British Pregnancy Advisory Service and the Irish Family Planning Association. Ireland’s abortion law dates from 1861, and bans the procedure except where there is a risk to the life of the mother, including that of suicide. An estimated 140,000 women have crossed the Irish Sea for abortions in the past 30 years, with the number presently running at an average of 6,000 a year.
| — Hat tip: Esther | [Return to headlines] |
UK: PC Controller Gets Steamed Up Over Thomas ‘The Sexist’ Tank Engine
If you thought the television tales about Thomas the Tank Engine were merely light-hearted fun, think again.
In fact, they portray a world blighted by a ‘conservative political ideology’ and a rigid class system which stifles self-expression. And they are sexist.
That, at least, is the view of a female academic who took the trouble to analyse 23 episodes of the programme inspired by the books of the Rev W V Awdry.
[…]
Laura Midgley, of the Campaign Against Political Correctness, described the research as ‘ unbelievable nonsense’.
She said: ‘I cannot believe anyone has the time and energy to do such a study. I’m surprised she hasn’t singled out the Fat Controller as an example of fattism too.
‘Children should just be left to enjoy the innocent fun of Thomas without the politically- correct brigade stoking the fires and ruining their enjoyment.’
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
AP Global Warming Fauxtography?
Is the Associated Press distributing a doctored photo that news organizations are now running in their Copenhagen coverage?
Founding Bloggers’ very own, Allan Sluis, is calling attention to an image that just might be the latest example of what has come to be know as “Fauxtography” — or — passing doctored images off as good faith representations of reality.
[…]
Oh those poor geese flying right through those rust colored smoke plumes! They might start dropping out of the sky at any moment!
But what if the truth is not as apocalyptic as the AP image appears to depict?
A number of things about this image look unusual to Allan, who is a professional photo retoucher and graphic illustrator with nearly 20 years experience pushing pixels.
[…]
C1, C2 & C3: These three arrows surround an area of sloppy retouching where the color tint was painted in too intense and abrupt to be convincing. Note how this color area pops substantially and quite suspiciously. This is also direct evidence that the retoucher is likely deliberately trying to blur the distinction between the actual smoke rising from the smokestack and the BACKGROUND CLOUDS deceptively conveying the impression that the entire area is choked with nasty orange pollution. This deceptive color continues right across the top of the smokestack and to the right going right over the background clouds.
| — Hat tip: JD | [Return to headlines] |
Global Warming — or Global Stealth Socialism?
SPIEGEL ONLINE: So industrialized nations would have to pay massive sums of money?
Schellnhuber: Yes. Up to €100 billion ($142 billion) annually. If the richest sixth of the world’s population were to pay this amount, each person would have to pay €100 per year. The West would give back part of the wealth it has taken from the South in the past centuries and be indebted to countries that are now amongst the poorest in the world. It would, however, have to be ensured that the poorer nations use the money for the proposes it is intended — namely to help them to develop a greener economy. This would help them to adapt to the more eco-conscious world of the future and would also save the industrialized nations from running into even bigger problems.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
Has War Really Changed?
War always involves “a military solution.”
By Victor Davis Hanson
Has war been reinvented in Iraq and Afghanistan?
Sometimes it seems so, with the confusion that has come with the instant communication offered by the Internet, YouTube, and satellite television — along with the new arts of precision destruction via high-tech weapons like drones and GPS-guided weapons.
In Afghanistan and Iraq, soldiers don’t quite disappear into distant theaters abroad. Instead, they can e-mail or call their spouses from halfway across the world — often minutes before and after battle.
A phony Internet rumor, like the supposed flushing of a Koran at Guantanamo Bay, can incite thousands in mere minutes.
As those in the West become ever more affluent and leisured, it is harder for us to ask our children to risk the good life in often distant, controversial wars. Who wants to leave our comfy suburbs to fight in godforsaken places like the Hindu Kush or Fallujah — against those for whom violence and poverty are accustomed experiences?
The West still has the technological edge in warfare. But thanks to globalization, the Internet, and billions of petrodollars, terrorists can get their hands on weapons (or the instructions on how to build them) that often prove as lethal as those used by American or NATO troops.
That Osama bin Laden did not have anything like the aircraft carrier U.S.S. Nimitz did not prevent him from taking down the World Trade Center.
Nonetheless, many of the old rules still apply amid the modern fog of war. Human nature, after all, does not change. And since the beginning of civilization the point of war has always been for one side through the use of force to make the other accept its political will.
We should remember that and get back to basics in Afghanistan. Our leaders must remind us that war always offers only two choices — bad and worse.
We certainly could leave Afghanistan. That would allow the Taliban to return to power and host more radical Islamic terrorists.
Or we can persist in a dirty business of trying to stabilize a consensual government that will fight terrorism. Both are dangerous enterprises: Withdrawal has long-term risks; staying may become hellish in the short-term.
We should also carefully define the enemy. Who exactly are we ultimately fighting in Afghanistan? Afghans? Arabs? Radical Muslims? Terrorists? Most of the public is still unsure after eight years of war.
There are certainly plenty of horrific thugs like those in the Taliban throughout the world whom we often ignore. But what made radical Afghans of vital interest to the United States was their willingness to help radical Arab Muslims kill Americans on a wide scale.
What unites al-Qaeda and the Taliban is a shared murderous radical Islamic ideology, one antithetical to our own. Americans should hear that without politically correct euphemisms.
The president must explain what victory in Afghanistan means. Are we there until we destroy the viability of the Taliban and their terrorist allies — by fostering an elected government that will eventually secure the country? If so, we need to hear exactly that.
If not, the president can instead talk of deadlines, troop withdrawals, cruise-missile attacks, and Predator-drone bombings — all efforts to now and then bother, but not end, the Taliban and al-Qaeda.
War typically concludes when one side cannot fulfill its political objectives. Sometimes both sides quit, as in the Korean War. But usually, as in Vietnam or the Balkans, violence ceases when one side is tired of losing more than it hopes to gain — and admits defeat.
If our leaders today could consult great generals like the Roman Scipio Africanus or William Tecumseh Sherman — who won what were once near-hopeless wars — they might receive the following advice:
Prepare the public to shoulder human and financial costs.
Be candid about why enduring the horrors of war now is preferable to risking even costlier violence later.
Talk always of winning, never leaving or quitting a war.
Have no apologies for crushing the enemy. The quicker the enemy loses, the fewer get killed on both sides.
Inform the public of the other side’s losses just as you do your own.
And be magnanimous to the defeated — after the war, not during the fighting.
Nation building may be fine and even necessary. But war always involves “a military solution.” How can there be economic prosperity or political stability if civilians are afraid of getting killed by enemy terrorists?
President Obama talked of many things in his recent Afghanistan speech. But he never once mentioned the words “victory” and “win.” All that may seem like an out-of-date idea to postmodern Americans. But it is still a very real one to the premodern Taliban, who seem to understand the ageless nature of war far better than we do.
| — Hat tip: JP | [Return to headlines] |
Obama’s Jekyll and Hyde Nobel Speech
In his speech Obama wavered between a peaceful Dr. Jekyll and a rapacious Mr. Hyde: He called for “international standards” for the use of force but in the same sentence cancelled that out with a “unilateral right” for a country to defend herself.
Just prior to President Obama’s arrival in Oslo to accept the Nobel Prize, millions of Norwegians were captivated by an unexplained spiraling halo in the sky. While the president’s most fanatical supporters will herald the light as a messianic celestial event comparable to the star of Bethlehem, his detractors will be equally sure that it is the beginning of the apocalyptic black hole the next three years of Obama’s presidency are sure to bring.
Some scientists are beginning to assure us that the light was generated by a wayward Russian missile — as if wayward Russian missiles are reassuring.
President Obama did not have time for sky-watching. As a wartime President receiving a Peace Prize, The president had, as Ricky used to say to Lucy, “some ‘splainin’ to do.”
He began his speech by admitting his award was not for any achievement toward peace, but his “aspiration” to obtain peace. Upon hearing that, my 12-year-old asked me if he could receive an A on his math test not because he passed it, but because he aspired to pass it.
Having better sense than a Nobel committee member, I told him no.
The Peace Prize winner then launched into a commercial for war, albeit a “just war.” He wavered between a peaceful Dr. Jekyll and a rapacious Mr. Hyde: He called for “international standards” for the use of force but in the same sentence cancelled that out with a “unilateral right” for a country to defend herself.
It has been noted by some that over the last decade the Peace Prize is lately been given to people for “not being George Bush” (see Carter, Gore and El-Baradei). Yet on the issue of war, the Nobel Committee was hoping for “Bush minus” not “Bush squared.”
Obama has proved to be “Bush on steroids” when it comes to war. Since winning the Peace Prize he has not created any peace but he’s tripled the amount of troops in Afghanistan that Bush left him with. In his speech today Obama noted that those soldiers will both “kill and be killed.” One has to wonder if Gandhi, mentioned by Obama in his speech (who never won the Peace Prize himself) would disagree about killing being in any way “peaceful.”
Obama then went all in as Mr. Hyde, and adopted “The Bush Doctrine” in his speech. He noted that sometimes “the purpose of military action extends beyond self defense.” The president sees it as moral to protect people from their own governments, even if America is not at risk (as in the Balkans). That thinking creates a moral groundwork to rescue the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein, weapons of mass destruction or no.
It appeared Obama was just about to praise military men like or Patton or MacArthur, but then he slipped back into Dr. Jekyll mode and honored Dr. King.
That this award can even be given to a man who thus far has created no peace but governs two wars confirms that the Nobel Peace Prize is now nothing more than the “Norwegian People’s Choice Award” and carries the same gravitas as having a Hollywood Star in front of Mann’s Chinese Theater.
| — Hat tip: Fjordman | [Return to headlines] |
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