An Afghan court on Sunday dismissed a case against a man who converted from Islam to Christianity because of a lack of evidence and he will be released soon, officials said.
"Hot potato! Hot potato!"
The announcement came as U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai faced mounting foreign pressure to free Abdul Rahman, a move that risked angering Muslim clerics who have called for him to be killed.
Not being allowed to kill him will cause a great weeping and gnashing of teeth among the adherents of the Religion of Blood...
An official closely involved with the case told The Associated Press that it had been returned to the prosecutors for more investigation, but that in the meantime, Rahman would be released.
"This is a test. You are being released for the moment, until they can build a better case. This is a bus ticket to Europe. If you don't use it, you're crazy. Think about it."
"The court dismissed today the case against Abdul Rahman for a lack of information and a lot of legal gaps in the case," the official said Sunday. "The decision about his release will be taken possibly tomorrow," the official added. "They don't have to keep him in jail while the attorney general is looking into the case."
"We need a day or so to get the bus gassed up and to put new tires on it."
Abdul Wakil Omeri, a spokesman for the Supreme Court, confirmed that the case had been dismissed because of "problems with the prosecutors' evidence." He said several family members of Rahman have testified that he has mental problems. "It is the job of the attorney general's office to decide if he is mentally fit to stand trial," he told AP. A Western diplomat, also declining to be identified because of the sensitivity of the case, said questions were being raised as to whether Rahman would stay in Afghanistan or go into exile in a foreign country.
Yeah. It's a test to see if he really is crazy.
Rahman was being prosecuted under Afghanistan's Islamic laws for converting 16 years ago while working as a medical aid worker for an international Christian group helping Afghan refugees in Pakistan.
You're simply not allowed to do that in Islam. The penalty is death, which is why no Islamic country can allow freedom of thought.
Some Islamic holy men clerics had said Rahman would face danger from his countrymen if he were released. Earlier Sunday he was moved to a notorious maximum-security prison outside Kabul that is also home to hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaida militants. The move to Policharki Prison came after detainees threatened his life at an overcrowded police holding facility in central Kabul, a court official.
And the difference between the holy men and the crooks and thugs in jail is...? Right. The holy men aren't behind bars.
Gen. Shahmir Amirpur, who is in charge of Policharki, confirmed the move and said Rahman had also been begging his guards to provide him with a Bible.
I'm guessing the one he had was taken away from him and desecrated. I'm starting to seethe, here...
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice phoned Karzai last Thursday and asked for a "favorable resolution" to the case. Karzai also heard from Pope Benedict XVI, who urged Rahman's release out of respect for religious freedom.
In a Muslim country? Right. And I'm going on a tour that includes a stop at the Basilica of St. Abdullah in Mecca.
The pope used the case Sunday to talk about Christians around the world who are persecuted for their beliefs. "My thoughts turn, in particular, to those communities who live in countries where there is a lack of religious freedom, or where despite claims on paper, they in truth are subjected to many restrictions," the pontiff said as he delivered his traditional Sunday blessing from the window of his studio overlooking St. Peter's Square. "I send them my warmest encouragement to persevere in the patience and charity of Christ," Benedict added.
#1
They want him to leave the country but with the case against him open so that they can imprison and execute him if he ever returns to try to retrieve his kids.
#2
Some Islamic clerics had said Rahman would face danger from his countrymen if he were released.
Very simple solution. Make public that in case something happens to him or even if he disappearsn for more than 24 hours then every imam in a radius of ten miles will face a very unpleasant death.
#3
I believe Rahman had previously tried to get refugee status in Germany. I wonder where he will now end up.
I hope many Americans have been paying attention (though I doubt it) and learned that not everyone has values that are in any way compatible with ours.
Posted by: ed ||
03/26/2006 9:35 Comments ||
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#4
Gen. Shahmir Amirpur, who is in charge of Policharki, confirmed the move and said Rahman had also been begging his guards to provide him with a Bible.
That'll take care of the problem. He'll be dead within 24 hours. Either a prisoner or a guard will take care of the problem and Karzai will have clean hands.
"Lack of evidence" - so Converts will be killed according to law rather than acknowlege that the Constitution does have a clause guaranteeing religious freedom.
The problem remains, Karzai, and it's still a topic. He dies - at anyone's hand - we hold you responsible.
#5
TW: The problem remains, Karzai, and it's still a topic. He dies - at anyone's hand - we hold you responsible.
Karzai is our guy. But the Afghan population doesn't dance on his strings. Karzai can't even protect himself - our boys do that for him. He certainly can't protect Abdul Rahman. Heck - NGO's with resources to hire bodyguards can't protect themselves. How is a lone individual going to stay alive? Ideally, we should hand this guy a green card and ship him stateside. Maybe even sedate him and tie him up if necessary. I'm sure church groups will be happy to help him adjust (and maybe help him start a new family). Besides, he spent years in Europe. He should do just fine. Outside Afghanistan.
#6
Zhang, I know he'll do just fine outside Afghanistan. The Mad Mullahs cannot let him leave alive. It would prove an escape from islam is possible. Local reports have the fundo truly annoyed that he might be whisked out safely. It's their nightmare.
And it is Karzai's responsibility to ensure that that Sharia does not trump democracy and Article 18. Else it's not democracy and becomes the very thing from which we have fought so hard to free them
We cannot support a government - however fledgling it may profess to be - (Fledglings follow the basic rules in the nest.) that embraces a law of intolerance, violence and hatred.
And whether Karzai can, or will, or understands that acting in the name of human rights is within his realm. As a good muslim, he should cherish the chance at martrydom. It's him or Rahman.
#7
TS: We cannot support a government - however fledgling it may profess to be - (Fledglings follow the basic rules in the nest.) that embraces a law of intolerance, violence and hatred.
Say there's a general rising in Afghanistan. How many men are we prepared to lose enforcing a right to apostasy? A hundred? A thousand? I think we're about to find out just how much Afghans (and the Muslim world) value the right to kill apostates. And how much we value liberal democracy. Afghanistan has a representative democracy - it's just not a liberal democracy, meaning minority rights aren't guaranteed.
Still, I'm not totally pessimistic - I think our persistence in Iraq has shown the Muslim world that Uncle Sam will give them a run for their money - that it isn't easy to outlast us. The response to 9/11 showed that Uncle Sam will hit back hard if struck at home. It's quite possible that the natives will be quiescent in response to our insistence upon religious freedom. One can only hope.
#8
The Mad Mullahs cannot let him leave alive. It would prove an escape from islam is possible.
The "mental problems" story is precisely a way for them to save face here.
If I could wave a magic wand, I would modernize Afghanistan overnight. Its people would be prosperous, employed, educated, connected happily to the outside world. And in such a state I doubt very many would care about Rahman's religious convictions.
But at the moment, that's a ways off. What IS nearby is the need to pressure Iran from the east and Pakistan from the west. Our presence in Afghanistan is a key move in dismantling the Islamacist nuclear threat and Karzai is a key player in supporting that.
One step at a time, folks. This is, as Condi Rice keeps reminding us, a generational war. There will be plenty of time to demand a full change of heart re: fundamentalism in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Right now we need to deal with the immediate threat and set some bounds, as with the Rahman case, the publication of the cartoons etc.
#9
Thinemp, source on the mullahs' nightmare being that someone whisks Rahman out to the US safely?
Posted by: Edward Yee ||
03/26/2006 13:16 Comments ||
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#10
My own take is that Karzai and many want just that, in order to save this guy's life without taking on an impossible fight.
On the other hand, the Taliban would LOVE for this to be framed as the West versus the inherent demands of Islam. It plays right into their hands, because your average dirt poor, uneducated Afghan is not about to appreciate the secular arguments for religious freedom, when Islam is the one thing he has that he can hold to proudly.
*IF* we are both wise as serpents and patient as ... well, more patient than Americans tend to be, anyway ... then we have a chance to see that country evolve in ways that will cause the Taliban to wither away at the roots. But it will not happen overnight.
As to why our troops should support the mission there anyway, I could quote Condi Rice on remembering that it took us more than a year or two to evolve into non-discrimination against blacks - a fact that she gently suggests is an opportunity for us to be a little humble when looking at the progress of Iraq and Afghanistan.
But I don't have to. Our military presence in Afghanistan is for our own needs in dealing with Iran, Pakistan etc. It also supports the creation of a moderate, democratic country there over time, which will be to our benefit eventually as well.
But first and foremost it's a flanking move to shape the battlefield with the Islmacists. This is not the time to abandon Afghanistan into their hands, giving up the position we worked hard for and undercutting Karzai in the process.
The Taliban-aligned prosecutor who brought these charges against Rahman wants just that outcome. I for one do not want to give it to him.
#11
Edward It was a Yahoo AP item in the news - just in the body of the early stories as the charges broke. Searched but can't find to give you a link. The statemant surprised me, actually - along the lines I stated, I wish I could find.
lotp I'm not advocating leaving at all. Same reasons. And more determined, but feel a real punch for the 1 step forward, 2 steps back hit.
#12
The CBS radio report about this case alleged that "Christian groups" were "close to the Bush administration" and that is why we put pressure on the Afghans...
President Hamid Karzai has personally intervened in the case of an Afghan man facing execution for converting to Christianity, a top official said Saturday, amid fierce criticism in the West.
Not that we've burned any embassies down, of course. We're not Islamic.
Karzai was consulting with various government organisations to resolve the matter as soon as possible, the senior government official said on condition of anonymity. The president is personally working to resolve it peacefully. There is a way out of it, he said. I believe itll take one or two days.
"Our country already looks stoopid enough. He's trying to limit the damage."
Rahman was arrested under Islamic Sharia law about two weeks ago after his parents went to the authorities, reportedly following a family dispute. Sharia law, on which the Afghan constitution is partly based, rules that a Muslim who converts from Islam should be put to death.
... which pretty well negates the concept of freedom of religion.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
I sure hope it's not Karzai's head in exchange for this apostate. Afghanistan is a really poor country - you've got to figure that for many of them, the highlight of their week is a visit to the mosque on Friday. If Afghans as a whole start to think we're trying to subvert their religion, we might need a few more divisions in-country.
#2
ZF: Where are you going to get the divisions to make the US troops that get rotated through Afghanistan re-enlist in the future if the government they're supporting is killing people for sharing the religion of most of them?
Posted by: Phil ||
03/26/2006 0:51 Comments ||
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#3
Karzai may realize that if a judiciary can kill someone for becoming Christian, it is only a small step to killing someone for going from Shia to Sunni or from Sunni salafist to sunni sufi or for having a koran with an image or for all kinds of things.
On the other hand the 'death to apostates' is, essentially the Berlin Wall of Islam that keeps muslims trapped. If this wall goes down, Islam becomes a shadow.
#4
Globe and Mail article: Almost always, perched on the rocks and mounds just outside the gate, is a clutch of Afghan men, squatting comfortably for hours on end in the hot sun, and a gaggle of shy youngsters -- watching as the soldiers in the observation posts watch them. Visible not far away at any given time are farmers working the dry soil with bare hands or primitive instruments and lone figures slowly leading donkeys or goats through the fields.
And as is common in rural Afghanistan, and this is a country where 80 per cent of the people live not in towns but on the land, burqa-clad women are almost never to be seen. They scurry away, hands pulling voluminous cloth even tighter, if there's a Western man within miles. The mice back at the Green Beans café are bolder.
Before the Gombad base was overrun with soldiers for the big Sola Kowal operation, the place belonged utterly to the men of 1 Platoon. Cpl. Sinclair remembers those quiet early days with fondness, particularly the pleasure of hearing, just before dawn, the muezzin making the first of five daily calls to prayer for the faithful.
First, Cpl. Sinclair said, there was the distinct click of the muezzin -- like many now, he uses a loudspeaker -- flipping on the power switch. Then came the raspy cough as he flicked a finger once or twice on his microphone, to see that it was working. And then the sound of the muezzin's sing-song voice, echoing as the sun rose in pinks and yellows over the Gombad Valley.
Most Afghans don't have much. They eke out a living on marginal land. But they have their faith. If you tell them that they cannot practice their faith as they see fit in their own land - that they cannot kill a native apostate when (in David Warren's words) Islam holds it is wrong not to kill him, there could be trouble. I hope I am wrong. But if trouble breaks out, and the body count starts piling up, we will see that this case was closer to the Sepoy Revolt than Sir Napier's banning of widow-burning. Note that Afghanistan, unlike the British Raj, is a nation of riflemen. It was a nation of riflemen when Afghan troops mauled the British and when Afghan irregulars mauled the Soviets and it is a nation of riflemen today. It is also a landlocked nation surrounded by Muslim countries (and China) whose airspace we must pass through to resupply our people.
#5
ZF, I think you're zoomed in way to tightly. The issue is whether Islam can be allowed to exist in the world. If they want to execute this guy, a lot of people in the west are going to conclude that it's them or us. And they aren't going to win that one in the end. Thin of this as the cartoons with a life at stake. They're cruisin' for a bruisin'.
#6
"The issue is whether Islam can be allowed to exist in the world." If this issue is forced in Afghanistan, what little has been gained there will be lost for many years to come. Has anyone reading Rantburg also read "Kara Kush"?
sadly we are in a two megafront war -- one against the military jihadi (call them islamofascists) and one against the islamic outreach and apologist (call it islamo subversion).
We are killing lots of jihadi in Iraq (many killed by Iraqi, some by other jihadi) and in Afghanistan and in other nations, it works in many different ways.
However, the war of subversion needs to be fought also. We have great allies in the apostates (ibn warraq, ali sina, wafa sultan, etc.) and we have great allies in some of the kafr scholars (Spenser, Bostom, etc.).
The key battleground is for the 'enlightened' western moslem mind (the rural afghans can keep their piety for several generations -- it doesn't matter that much). When the moderate muslims give up trying to reform Islam and publically repudiate it, it will hit the Islamic body like a strong right hook. Another path is if the Iranians overthrow the mularky and a huge part of the population renounces Islam. This would be more of a puch in the gut.
Sudan on Saturday rejected the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Darfur until a peace deal is reached with rebels in the violence-ravaged western region. The Sudanese government categorically rejects foreign presence or interference in any form. Sudan is a sovereign state and any decision to allow foreign troops into the country has to be approved by the government, Sudanese Minister of Information and Telecommunications Al Zahawi Ibrahim Malik told reporters at a preparatory meeting of his Arab counterparts ahead of the Arab summit.
"We reject the presence of any force of even minimal competence. As a sovreign state, Sudan rejects any attempt to control its violent impulses. Oppression and slaughter of Sudanese citizens is an internal matter, not subject to review by the civilized world."
The UN Security Council on Friday asked Secretary General Kofi Annan to report back within a month with options for a possible UN deployment to relieve a 7,000-strong underfunded and underequipped African Union (AU) force currently monitoring a widely ignored ceasefire in Darfur. Officials said Sudan did not reject a UN force outright, but had to decide when or if it was necessary for UN troops to take over from the Africans already deployed. They added that time could be after a peace deal was agreed in the Nigerian capital Abuja, where faltering talks continue. Rebels have demanded UN troops be deployed in Darfur and the government feels the UN takeover would encourage intransigence from the armed groups.
In earlier statements Sudanese President Omar Bashir blamed the Darfur crisis on foreign intervention. Speaking to a gathering of Arab finance ministers ahead of the Tuesday Arab summit in Khartoum, Bashir said his government could resolve the three-year conflict in Darfur if foreign intervention ceases and Darfur rebels end their intransigence.
Arab League Secretary General Amr Musa backed Sudan's decision, saying foreign troops should not be sent to Darfur without the Sudanese government's consent. Darfur is a very important and sensitive case that should be dealt with in full coordination with the African Union, Musa said.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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one moment, please, while I try to stop laughing ....
The Prince of Wales urged Saudi Arabia - the world's greatest oil producer - to place less prominence on the car. He used his visit to the Middle East to air his environmental views and also to deliver a message on religious tolerance. Charles highlighted the cause of the pedestrian as his wife the Duchess of Cornwall saw the hidden side of life in the deeply conservative Islamic country.
because I mean, everything's so close to everything else in the Kingdom, just think of the health benefits of a good brisk walk in the Highlands the desert ... you can take your favorite dog or two, a good stout walking stick, put on a good tweed kilt robe ... it's just the thing, ol' boy
Behind closed doors, Camilla met some of the Kingdom's many Princesses and local women, minus their black Abayas, on a solo engagement.
On her first trip to Saudi, the Duchess was given a beautiful hand embroidered thaub dress of deep purple and pink velvet, which would have cost £3,500 to buy, as a present as she toured a charity set up to empower and support women within the teachings of Islamic Shariaa.
As he received an award in Riyadh for his lifetime commitment for his work with architectural heritage, Charles stressed the importance of "looking at the predominance of the car".
"What I've been trying to do for 20 years is just gently place the pedestrian at the centre of the design process rather than the car to automatically create more liveable communities," he said.
And in a small, compact country like the Saudis', that just makes so much SENSE, Charles. Amazing, the insight you bring.
Plus, think of the many benefits of weaning the Saudi economy off of petroleum dependency! (snort)
Saudi has no public transport system
gosh, I can't IMAGINE why not!
and is heavily dependent on its vehicles. Women are forbidden from driving and often face harassment when they walk in the streets.
By coincidence, the Saudi Gazette newspaper highlighted a campaign to get them to walk more to keep fit, suggesting they could "fire the maid and do more house work"
now, I just KNOW that will start a trend. Charles, how do you DO it??
or "walk up and down the stairs" if they could not find somewhere safe to do so.
Earlier the heir to the throne delivered an unprecedented speech at Saudi Arabia's most senior Islamic University - seen as being at the heart of the country's religious conservatism.
March 26, 2006: Britain has had an increase in desertions since 2003. In that year, 135 troops walked away from their military service. That's from a force of about 187,000 troops. In 2004, there were 230 desertions, and 383 last year. The less serious AWOL (Absent Without Leave) cases amounted to about 2,600 a year, and has not changed much. About 110 British troops have been killed in Iraq so far. There are currently about 8,000 British troops in Iraq, with a much smaller force in Afghanistan. Normally, desertions are caused by personal problems having little to do with the military. But the recent increase indicated that between one and two percent of the troops ordered to Iraq, decide to desert instead. Britain has an all-volunteer force, but the government is trying to make the penalty for those who desert, after being ordered to a foreign posting, life in prison. Currently, deserters risk, at most, a few years imprisonment. While some deserters are making a political statement, most are just unhappy with the frequent overseas deployments British troops have been subject to since the war on terror began.
Posted by: ed ||
03/26/2006 18:01 ||
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#1
They musta missed the "kill 'em there so they don't boom here" memo, no?
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/26/2006 20:59 Comments ||
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Middle Eastern terrorist groups rely on criminal organizations in Latin America to acquire false passports and raise funds, although there is no evidence they operate directly in the region, a U.S. State Department anti-terrorism official said Thursday.
''We are not aware of any operational cells in this hemisphere by al Qaeda, Hezbollah or Hamas,'' said Harry Crumpton, antiterrorism coordinator at the U.S. State Department. ``But we do have information that these organizations raise money in the hemisphere and are tied in to transnational criminal networks.''
The U.S. official was in Bogotá for a three-day meeting of the Inter-American Committee Against Terrorism, or CICTE for its initials in Spanish, a gathering of antiterrorism officials from 34 nations sponsored by the Organization of American States.
In the wake of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the United States has boosted efforts to identify and arrest terrorists before they reach American shores.
While most of the attention has focused on the Middle East, lax border controls and widespread corruption is believed to make Latin America vulnerable to infiltration by terrorist groups seeking recruits and money to plan future attacks.
To enhance the region's security, the United States was pledging an additional $2.25 million to strengthen and expand port, airport, land border and document security activities, as well as training for Customs officials, Crumpton said.
The contribution -- the equivalent of about $65,000 for each nation in the hemisphere -- barely registers in the overall war on terror. But it's the United State's biggest contribution yet to the multilateral antiterror effort, a $400,000 increase over last year's commitment, representing 80 percent of the funds raised by CICTE, Crumpton said.
Although Crumpton said terrorist groups had no tactical base in Latin America, he also said links with transnational criminal organizations for the purpose of fundraising were increasing and ''posed a great threat'' to regional security.
U.S. officials suspect the lawless, porous border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay is a haven for fundraising for Islamic militant groups.
In Colombia, officials in January arrested four Jordanians and a Palestinian belonging to a false passport ring that they said may have had links to al Qaeda.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
03/26/2006 03:05 ||
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In working-class Parisian suburbs like this one, heavily populated by North African immigrants, the word "Jew" is now a standard epithet. It appears in graffiti on middle school walls and neighborhood playgrounds and on the tongues of the young.
"It's blacks and Arabs on one side and Jews on the other," said Sebastian Daranal, a young black man standing in the parking lot of a government-subsidized housing project with two friends.
Eight men beat the son of a rabbi here in March. Another Jew was attacked the next day.
In the wake of the torture and killing in February of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old Jew, attention has focused on an undeniable problem: anti-Semitism among France's second-generation immigrant youth, whose high jobless rate the government is trying to address with a law drawing widespread protests across the country.
The law, intended to increase employment, especially among the young, has drawn opposition because of a provision that allows companies to hire people 25 or younger for a two-year trial period, during which they can be fired without cause.
Schools are the battleground over anti-Semitism, and teachers complain that the government has done little, despite many proposals.
"The minister of education has done nothing," said Jean-Pierre Obin, an inspector general of education in France, who wrote a report in 2004 that called anti-Semitism "ubiquitous" in the 61 schools surveyed. "He prefers not to talk about it."
Mr. Obin wrote in the report of "a stupefying and cruel reality: in France, Jewish children and they are alone in this case can no longer be educated in just any school."
Ianis Roder, 34, a history teacher in a middle school northeast of Paris, said he was stunned by what he witnessed after Sept. 11, 2001. The next day, someone spray-painted in a stairwell of the school the image of an airplane crashing into the World Trade Center beside the words "Death to the U.S., Death to Jews."
When he told his class months later that Hitler had killed millions of million Jews, one boy blurted out, "He would have made a good Muslim!" Mr. Roder told of a Muslim teacher who dismissed her class after a shouting match over Nazi propaganda. The students said the offensive images accurately depicted Jews.
Even today, he said, there is widespread belief that the Sept. 11 attacks were a Jewish plot and that Jews were notified beforehand.
Barbara Lefèbvre, a history teacher who has taught in several of the working-class suburbs, said many people minimize the anti-Semitism among France's youth.
"They say, 'That's the way the kids talk they don't mean it in the same way that you or I would,' " she said. Ms. Lefèbvre, who is Jewish, said she had to argue with the principal of her school several years ago to get an investigation when a student wrote "dirty Jew" on a notebook used by her class. The student, a French-Arab boy, was ultimately given just two hours of detention.
Some teachers simply gloss over subjects likely to elicit anti-Semitic responses. Ms. Lefèbvre said she knows teachers who even show fictional films, like Roberto Benigni's "Life Is Beautiful," instead of treating the Holocaust directly.
France was the first European country to offer Jews full citizenship and has done as much as any to exorcise the ghosts of Nazi collaboration. But the postwar climate for Jews has steadily soured as attention has focused on the Palestinian cause and Muslims have moved here in large numbers.
With the outbreak of the second Palestinian Intifada against Israel in 2000, anti-Semitic attacks in France skyrocketed. While the number of reported incidents has fallen since peaking in 2004, anti-Semitism is now entrenched in many of the country's working-class housing projects.
The Arab communities of North Africa had no postwar sense of Holocaust guilt. If anything, distress over the creation of Israel in 1948 reinforced anger at Jews to the point that successive waves of anti-Jewish riots drove most of North Africa's Jews to Israel and Europe primarily France in the 1950's and 1960's.
Some people say that many of the North African Arabs who subsequently moved to France carried anti-Jewish prejudices with them and passed them to a second-generation, where they have been reinforced by support for the Palestinian cause. And French guilt over colonialism has made such prejudices harder to counter.
"As long as anti-Semitism came from the extreme right there was a reaction," said Ms. Lefèbvre, who has written about anti-Semitism and sexism in the schools. "But when it came from that part of the population that itself was a victim of racism, no one wanted to see it."
Sitting in a room hung with posters deploring racism at a youth center in La Courneuve, a suburb on the outskirts of Paris, Yannis, the 16-year-old son of a French father and Algerian mother, said racist talk was common. "We've become used to it, hearing it day after day, so we've all started to speak like that," he said, adding that even 7-year-olds say, "Don't eat like a Jew," if someone is being stingy with food.
Fahima, 14, with long black hair and limpid eyes, doing her homework beside him, spoke of a confrontation she had with a Jewish teacher two years ago.
"He said, 'You blacks and Arabs will never get apartments in Paris,' " she said, explaining that he meant the students would never manage to move out of the poor suburbs. Fahima, who is French-Algerian, said she retorted, "You Jews only have apartments there because you were picked on during the war."
"I was mean," she said, playing with a shiny cellphone. "But I'm not anti-Semitic."
The girls with her complained about the teacher, saying he talked often about his family's suffering in the Holocaust. "He cries whenever he mentions his grandmother," one girl said with exasperation.
Some schools have tried to defuse the problem without addressing it directly. After a Jewish girl was harassed in Saint-Ouen two years ago, the administration of her school decided to show "Night and Fog," a haunting 1955 documentary film that includes graphic footage of Nazi death camps.
Initially, teachers feared that showing the movie risked inciting confusing comparisons between the Holocaust and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but then relented.
At the film's end, one boy not a Muslim asked how Jews who had known such suffering could treat Palestinians "the same way."
No one responded, though Carole Diamant, a philosophy teacher, said she spoke to him privately later about why he was wrong. "I felt like we were on a wire," she said, describing the tension. Since then, the school has included the Holocaust in a broader program on genocide.
Anti-Semitism is felt most acutely in communities like Sarcelles, where many North Africans settled in the 1950's and 1960's. Sarcelles is home to one of the most concentrated Jewish communities in France, surrounded by an unsightly sprawl of apartment blocks that house the North African and sub-Saharan immigrants who arrived later.
France has a well-established Jewish community with European roots, many of whose members occupy the upper echelons of French society. Hundreds of thousands of poorer North African Jews have more recently swelled the Jewish community to about 600,000, making it the largest in Europe. Those North African Jews and their children bear the brunt of the anti-Semitism in the working-class neighborhoods.
Each time anti-Semitic attacks make news, the Interior Ministry promises more security around Jewish institutions. But "more police aren't the answer because it remains in the spirit of the people," said Dr. Marc Djebali, a spokesman for the Jewish community in Sarcelles.
Laurent Berros, the synagogue's rabbi, said local imams had evaded his suggestion that Jewish and Muslim leaders go together into troubled neighborhoods. "They say that bringing a rabbi into these neighborhoods isn't easy," he said. "There is a fear that they'll be seen as collaborators."
The deteriorating climate has led thousands of French Jews to move to Israel in the past five years, including about 3,300 last year, a 35-year high.
Murielle Brami, 42, whose parents immigrated to France to escape anti-Jewish riots in Tunisia, has the sinking feeling that history is repeating itself. "All the Jews in France want one thing, to leave for Israel or the United States," she said. That is hyperbole, but it is a sign of the anxiety percolating through France's Jewish community. "When our parents came, it was paradise here," said Ms. Brami, who remembers staying out late without worrying about her safety.
Now she avoids certain neighborhoods even in the day and no longer allows her son to wear a yarmulke in the street after some youths put a knife to his throat last year.
#2
History repeats itself, but this time it's not the Germans demanding the death of Jews, it's the Muslims. And France answers with the same silence. Not understanding that this time, it only starts with the Jews. Everyone else is next.
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/26/2006 12:29 Comments ||
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#4
For the French, it's not a problem as long as it's only Jews being persecuted.I'd accuse the French of losing their moral bearings, but you can't lose something that you've never had.
#6
True. But it's also the case that the young adults in Frnace have been put in a box by their greeder elders. The elders have the jobs, have job security and are promised huge pensions, all of which the kids have to pay for, but for which they have no secure jobs themselves.
I would have respected de Villepin more if he had cut to the root of things and proposed to allow firing of ANYONE for non-performance. Of course, that would bring down the government overnight.
#7
Disagree. The French economy is in the tank. The system is sucking air with no hope in sight. It's not a generational issue, but a matter of survival.
Now, back to the issue of anti-semitism, anyone of Jewish decent remaining in France needs to get out. The French government is defenseless and incapable (assuming they sincerely wanted to) of defending innocent Jews. France is simply a corrupt and inept country.
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/26/2006 15:28 Comments ||
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#8
Yes, the Obin rapport was quite clear, some territories of the french Republic, incluidng many schools, are judenfrei...
French are not an antisemite Nation, IIRC surveys find numbers of admitedlly antisemite people lower than in the USA (needs confirmation, not sure); during WWII, as JFM pointed with more accuracy (he knows History, I'm just a dork), the french jews had the highest survival rate in all occupied Europe, circa 50%; even the collaborationnist Vichy gvt had the foreign jews deported rather than french jews, and many run-of-the-mill french guys helped jews as they could.
Anyway, traditionnal french antisemitism was "maurassian", catholic and anti-modernist, certainly not racial à la nazi, though this doens't change much.
Result is, the french ideology (Msm, Enlightened Elites, academia, leftists,...) is rabidly antizionist and pro-paleo. The Al Durah blood libel comes to mind, here. This was the protocols ofd the elders of Zion of the 21st century, and it was made possible by gvt-owned tv, either in passive complicty, or in full knowledge, in a propaganda war directed against Israel.
So, the cultural and religious antisemitism of the "youths", compounded by the racial antisemitism imported from the West, is given a favorable terrain by ALL of the msm's messages, which tell over and over the israelis are oprressing the paleo-victims.
This is a poison, even more so than it meets what Mr. Taguieff (a french scholar) calls "the new judeophbia", IE the new-look antisemitism coming from the left (jews = zionists = racists = nazis, paleos = WWII jews), which allows purely antisemite figurehead like the sinister black stand up comedia Dieudonné ("I wipe my *ss with the french flag and the israeli flag") to go scot-free 17 times in a row when sued for racist libel... hey, he's a leftist, rules don't apply to him...
PRIME Minister John Howard says he is pressuring Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai to intervene in the possible execution of an Afghani citizen who has converted to Christianity.
Mr Howard has today said he found it deeply concerning Australian troops were fighting to assist a country that would take such action.
"I am filled with disgust about the possibility that somebody could be executed because of their religion," he said.
"It breaks every rule of tolerance.
"I will not drop off this issue, I will not just be content to write a letter and leave it at that.
"I will continue to press very, very strongly. I do feel very deeply about this, particularly because there are Australian soldiers risking their lives to fight the Taliban and we're not fighting the Taliban to allow something like this to happen."
Mr Howard said he had written to President Karzai about the matter.
He told reporters he would raise the matter again today when he met with British Prime Minister Tony Blair.
Australia, the United States and NATO allies Germany and Italy, all of whom have troops in Afghanistan, have expressed concern at the trial of 41-year-old Abdul Rahman.
Rahman is believed to be the first Christian convert accused in Afghanistan under the strict Islamic Sharia law for refusing to return to Islam.
The case is being seen as a test of democracy and freedom for Afghanistan, where religion retains a tight grip on society four years after the toppling of the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban regime.
#5
BUT the case is being kept open. In other words, escape now and never come back, but we won't change our laws and if you do return you're dead meat.
#6
Good to hear. Some of the old ways will take years, generations, to overcome. The objective is to turn the culture, and that take generations. This is a good step. Thanks 4 the update Mous.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/26/2006 9:43 Comments ||
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#7
This is a good step.
How is "we'll ignore it, for now" a "good step"?
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
03/26/2006 12:02 Comments ||
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#8
I think the issue should be pushed. First of all, it is a win-win issue for the Talibs; it forces the debate to be on their arguments.
So the only way to argue it is with intolerance. That is, not allowing a grey area or half-measures, based on an enemy advantage. Give them no advantage. Force through a harsh ban on any religious discrimination. Put them on the deep defensive.
Of course, they might see it as an opportunity, *but* it is an opportunity that they *must* take immediately, no matter their current strength or preparation. So if the government is prepared, it could round up all sorts of stinkers, agents, provacateurs, and traitors all at once.
The trick is for the Afghan government to be prepared in all sorts of ways, not just militarily. They should have a propaganda campaign ready to go, have a bunch of moderate mullahs ready to preach, *and* not only be able to break up any demonstration in a hurry, but to round up any instigators.
Most importantly, they should turn hatred and oppression against other faiths into a disastrous, embarassing, and humiliating defeat for the Talibs and anyone else who supports it. They should just cringe and change the subject when it is mentioned.
#9
How is "we'll ignore it, for now" a "good step"?
Well how else do you think we're going to stop the practice? We stopped this one. We'll stop the next one. Pretty soon they'll figure out they aren't going to do this any more. Sort of the way the Indians stopped practicing suttee.
What's your alternative? Should they take a trip to Damascus so they can be blinded by the light?
#10
Agreed, NS. This is not an issue that will be forced once and for all. It's an issue of gradual change. As the Afghans see political stability and economic improvement, they will care more about their kids getting good jobs and getting into schools than about killing apostates. But force it now as a matter of principle, when they have little besides their religion, and Karzai loses, we lose, the Taliban win.
#12
No leader can legitimately excuse themselves from knowing that execution for abandonment of Islam, is integral to that vulgar cult. USC has been posting the Bukhari Hadith - source of the extermination doctrine - since 1998. It might seem crude to force feed Western leaders objective information on the Arab murder cult, but we can't afford to be led by ignoramuses.
Who knows why Muslim men are permitted 4 wives? The military-historical context of the permission, is: Mohammad's Murder squad was killing so many husbands and fathers - mostly as prisoners of war - that there were surplus unmarried women. Captive women were deemed war booty. There is even a Hadith that permits rape of sex booty, and forbids contraception of rape-semen.
Anyone who wants to export freedom of conscience to a Muslim country, might as well try selling sand to Saudi Arabia. If they knew the real cause of their primitivism and stagnation, there would be a cleric hanging from every lamppost in those countries.
Well how else do you think we're going to stop the practice? We stopped this one. We'll stop the next one. Pretty soon they'll figure out they aren't going to do this any more. Sort of the way the Indians stopped practicing suttee.
What's your alternative? Should they take a trip to Damascus so they can be blinded by the light?
Using your own example -- treat this as murder. Treat it as a crime against humanity. Punish the people and societies that make a practice of it.
Honestly, I'm sick of the barbarians. If we tolerate their barbarism, if we even wink at it like we have here, we're surrendering our own principles. Yeah, we'll probably lose some "moderate" allies -- but how fucking moderate is someone who wants to murder converts?
Posted by: Robert Crawford ||
03/26/2006 14:30 Comments ||
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#14
Robert, if they don't kill the guy, where's the crime?
I'm sick of them too. But they are like children. It's going to take a lot of patient, repetitive, boring, unrewarded work to get them to grow up. Look at the shit we have to put up with from the Europeans.
But what are the alternatives? Let them win or genocide. I'll take the work.
#15
Again, I say that half-measures and gradualism can only be done when both sides are acting from a position of reasonableness. Otherwise, you are allowing axioms of crap like murdering people to be one side of the argument. See how stupid that looks when the west tries to compromise over things like beheading cartoonists? "Well, what if you agree to only behead them halfway? That might be acceptable to our side."
Who the hell thinks it is reasonable to "compromise" between the 21st Century and the 11th Century by agreeing to act like we're living in the 16th Century? Hey, it's compromise, right?
No, you demand that the 11th Century people behave themselves like anybody else should who lives in the 21st Century. Barbarism is not a reasonable point from which to debate, and barbarians have no right to expect civilized people to either stoop to their level or tolerate them continuing to do so on their own.
Afghanistan has a 21th Century-type government, at least theoretically. Their people have voted in a democratic manner, again a 21st Century thing to do. Certainly if *some* of them wish to keep the unimportant trappings of the olden days, they should be at liberty to do so. But *not* when those primitive traditions threaten the well-being of others.
*No* beheadings for *anything* is reasonable. Most of the civilized world is against execution of any kind for any reason, much less for violating some bullshit religious taboo. If the Afghans want to be a modern nation, they have to act it.
Afghans are not simple children, either. Many women in Afghanistan know better, and are terrified that some ignorant rural Imam is going to torture or kill them because they have a Bachelor's degree.
All that has to be done is to admit the truth: if you want to remain a primitive bastard, you are a Taliban, and on their side, and we will kill you. Otherwise, you have to act like a civilized person.
#17
No doubt you are a "instant gratification" generation guy there Bizarre. Lts look at American history and itegration of the blacks into the ican mainstream. 30 years ago we were just getting past the bigots of hate. It has taken us 30 years to get to where we are, some say 100, but none the less the bigots and hate still exists. Take a culture that makes our bigots look like amatures and any reasonable person will understand it will take generations to turn the hate and ignorance around.
Don't get me wrong, I would like to see this over right now, I have fought in this war and I see my kids fighting in it which is frightening, but it aint gonna be over any time soon. We are going to have to fight it out for the next 50 years and bring them into the 21st century or kill them all.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/26/2006 17:45 Comments ||
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#18
Boy did I screw that up. Please excuse my spelling on this one.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/26/2006 17:46 Comments ||
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#19
No doubt you didn't understand sarcasm, 49 Pan.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/26/2006 17:54 Comments ||
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#21
Redacted by moderator. Comments may be redacted for trolling, violation of standards of good manners, or plain stupidity. Please correct the condition that applies and try again. Contents may be viewed in the sinktrap. Further violations may result in
banning.
#24
AS, perhaps not ALL, but a very large number of them may die before this is over. It is no longer technically difficult to do if one is not concerned about bein indiscriminant. I believe we'll get there, but not for years.
#25
hey bizarre, please don't be calling 49 pan a bigot. Someone who has fought in this war and is worried about it continuing on for generations, has a point that needs to be heard.
Comparing our history with what's going on with this backwards culture is right on.
Posted by: Jan ||
03/26/2006 18:19 Comments ||
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#26
AS, your right on that one. Means to me we will be in this fight for a while. This is extreemly disapointing because I would hate to see my sons fight in a war "my" generation did not finish.
As for being a bigot there Bizarre, grow up.
Posted by: 49 Pan ||
03/26/2006 18:21 Comments ||
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#27
Go easy, 49, I think Bizarre's suffering from burger-flipper elbow... and parent's-couch stiff neck syndrome... and Grape Kool Aid purple tongue.
Last Saturday morning, needing help to move several heavy cartons of books from my apartment in central Paris to a storage room, I hired two movers and a van from the want ads. Students were in the streets protesting the Contrat de Premier Embauche (CPE) -- a law proposed to combat unemployment by giving employers more flexibility to fire young employees -- and the barricades and traffic diversions made our four-block drive into a half-hour ordeal. As we turned down one obstructed street after another, the movers -- both Arab immigrants -- became more and more incensed."They're idiots," said the driver, gesturing toward the ecstatic protesters. "Puppets for the socialists and the communists." He pantomimed pulling the strings of a marionette.
"It's us they hurt," added the second man. By this he meant immigrants and their children, particularly the residents of France's suburban ghettos, where unemployment runs as high as 50 percent. And, of course, he was right, as everyone with even a rudimentary grasp of economics appreciates: If employers are unable to fire workers, they will be less likely to hire them. It is now almost impossible to fire an employee in France, a circumstance that disproportionately penalizes groups seen by employers as risky: minorities, inexperienced workers and those without elite educations, like the outraged man sitting beside me.
This is the second time in four months that France has been seized with violent protests. And in an important sense, these are counter-riots, since the goals of the privileged students conflict with those of the suburban rioters who took to the streets last November. The message of the suburban rioters: Things must change. The message of the students: Things must stay the same. In other words: Screw the immigrants.
The issue at stake is not, of course, the CPE, which in addition to being unknown in its effects would apply only to a two-year trial period, after which employees would still, effectively, be guaranteed jobs for life. The issue is fear of a real overhaul of France's economically stifling labor laws. While some of the suburban hoodlums have joined in these protests -- after all, a riot is a riot -- it is clear that unless this overhaul proceeds, the immigrants are doomed. If so, last year's violence will seem a lark compared with what is coming.
France is still in the grip of precisely the political mentality that has prevailed here since the Middle Ages. As the protesters themselves cheerfully declare: It's the street that rules. Today's mobs, like their predecessors, are notable for their poor grasp of economic principles and their hostility to the free market. Only wardrobe distinguishes these demonstrations from those that led to the invasion of the national convention in 1795, when first the mob protested that commodity prices were too high; when the government responded with price controls, it protested with equal vigor that goods had disappeared and black market prices had risen. Similarly, the students on the streets today espouse economic views entirely unpolluted by reality. If the CPE is enacted, said one young woman, "You'll get a job knowing that you've got to do every single thing they ask you to do because otherwise you may get sacked."
Imagine that.
As a legacy of this long tradition, the choice in France now is between popular legislation -- that is, useless legislation -- and the street. Thus the paradox at the heart of the protests: Those who want power exploit the mobs to maneuver themselves into position, but having gained power cannot use it to achieve anything worthwhile, lest the same tactics be used against them. The fear of the mob has created a cadre of politicians in France who are unable to speak the truth and thereby prepare French citizens for the inevitable. No one in France -- not one single politician, nor anyone in the media -- is willing to say it: France's labor laws are an absurdity, and if they are not reformed at once, France will go under. "What do they think?" said my driver, who was not, he told me, a mover by trade but an unemployed radio journalist forced to moonlight. "Do they think that jobs just fall from the sky?"
Apparently, they think just that.
In this regard, France, like every European country, remains blackmailed by its history. French rulers, seemingly unable to appeal to the legitimacy they possess as elected leaders, instead behave as popular kings, or as leaders of some faction -- like a king's ministers. They cannot seem to forget what happens when a king loses his popularity. There are thus two choices for the French ruling elite, as they see it: toady or go under.
When Margaret Thatcher took power in 1979, an urgent question hung in the air: In Britain, who rules? It was a question to which Britain's powerful unions had a ready answer: We do. Men such as Arthur Scargill, the head of the miner's union, were convinced that although they would never lead Britain, it was within their power to run it and to run it for their benefit through labor laws that anyone beyond the union halls could see would destroy the nation as a competitive economic power. Thatcher so thoroughly crushed both Scargill and his union that neither recovered. For a brief moment, power politics stood revealed. The unions had made a bid for power. They lost.
The same question is now being raised in France: Who rules? This is the second time in 11 years that a popularly elected government here faces dismissal not from the voters, but from the streets. If this does not represent a direct challenge to the government's power, it is hard to know what would. Should the government fall, the question will have been answered.
#1
"I'm entitled to my entitlements." It's becoming a far too familiar cry in Canada too. When labour rules, nothing gets done. Labour supports the weakest link in the chain and encourages striving for the least effort for highest pay and lifetime guarantees. France the model.
Italian officials have known for some time that their country was exporting Islamic militants and that the city of Milan is the center for these potential terrorists. Now the officials worry that militants may return from fighting in Iraq to carry out bombings in Europe, according to the BBC
Considered the center for radical Islam in Europe, Muslims have arrived in Milan more recently and relatively few have acquired citizenship.
Prosecutors in Milan and Rome ordered dozens of raids in the aftermath of the London bombings last July, resulting in almost 200 arrests. Four expulsions of suspected Muslim extremists followed -- including an imam, a vice-president of an Islamic institute in Como, and a suspected member of an armed Algerian fundamentalist group, according to the Brookings Institution, a Washington, DC think-tank.
"It's a community without integration," says Magdi Allam, well-known Egyptian-born columnist at the Corriere della Sera newspaper.
"The majority of Muslims in Italy don't speak Italian in a proper way, don't know the culture or the religion of the Italian people, and don't share the values of Italian society," he said.
He is deeply suspicious of mosques which have fallen under the sway of radical imams, according to the BBC. Sometimes these radical clerics resort to violence or threats of violence to push out more moderate Islamic clerics from their mosques.
Jihadist networks span Europe from Poland to Portugal, thanks to the spread of radical Islam among the descendants of guest workers once recruited to shore up Europe's postwar economic miracle, according to Robert Leiken of the Council on Foreign Relations.
In European cities such as Milan, Madrid and Marseilles, immigrants or their descendants are volunteering for jihad against the West. It was a Dutch Muslim of Moroccan descent, born and socialized in Europe, who murdered the filmmaker Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam last November.
Leiken notes a Nixon Center study of 373 mujahideen in western Europe and North America between 1993 and 2004 found more than twice as many Frenchmen as Saudis and more Britons than Sudanese, Yemenites, Emiratis, Lebanese, or Libyans. Fully a quarter of the jihadists it listed were western European nationals -- eligible to travel visa-free to the United States.
The emergence of homegrown mujahideen in Europe threatens the United States as well as Europe. Yet it was the dog that never barked at last winter's Euro-American rapprochement meeting. Neither President George W. Bush nor Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice drew attention to this mutual peril, even though it should focus minds and could buttress solidarity in the West, according to Leiken.
Radical Islam is spreading across Europe among descendants of Muslim immigrants. Disenfranchised and disillusioned by the failure of integration, some European Muslims have taken up jihad against the West. They are dangerous and committed -- and can enter the United States without a visa.
According to Dr. Daniel Pipes, a leading expert on radical Islam and terrorism, Muslim life in Western Europe and North America is strikingly different. European cities such as Milan have seen the emergence of a culturally alienated, socially marginalized, and economically unemployed Muslim second generation whose pathologies have led to "a surge of gang rapes, anti-Semitic attacks and anti-American violence," not to mention the raging radical ideologies and terrorism.
North American Muslims are not as alienated, marginalized, and economically stressed.
They show less inclination to anti-social behavior, including Islamist violence. Those of them supporting jihad usually fund terrorism rather than personally engage in it. Therefore, most jihadist violence in North America is carried out by hit squads from abroad, as were the 9-11 attackers.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
03/26/2006 03:01 ||
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#1
"It's a community without integration,"
Thus less collateral damage should the Italians ever decide to fight back.
#2
Hamburg is the center of Radical Islam in Europe. That's where the 9/11 bombers trained. The only reason the Muzzies want to stay in Milan is that they cannot be as easily identified by their smell.
Muslims immigrate to Europe and refuse to integrate. The isolation and humiliation this refusal to integrate causes them to teach their children to refuse to integrate. And the isolation and humiliation at not being able to join others at school, to bring home new ideas or even try to learn about others.
The anger and humiliation at knowing your own beliefs are what stand in the way are what make you want to destroy what you are not allowed to have. And your jealous fury at what is denied you - because you are muslim and the laws prohibit it - lead you to destroy it.
#4
I live in Milan. There is certainly a problem with some mosques which have witnessed considerable radical activity, but I rule out that the majority of the Muslims living here are potential terrorists or jihad supporters.
Magdi Allam (the columnist mentioned in the article) is well-known for earning a living from being a cheap Islamophobe and for his analyses and predictions, all turned to be wrong. Choose another testimonial if you want to be credible.
As for the charge of "a surge of gang rapes, anti-Semitic attacks and anti-American violence," [by second-generation Muslims] it is simply lacking of any statistical evidence. Crap, in other words.
Gerd, by the way... I don't think you smell any better than me. Quite the other way round. At least, the "muzzies" know which hand they should wipe their ass with. You're not even at that stage.
Posted by: Inter Milan ||
03/26/2006 17:45 Comments ||
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#5
Milan -
Why do I get the distinct impression that you are yourself a malcontented Muslim in Milan?
While Canadians rejoiced at the news that two of their citizens were rescued from captivity in Iraq, some were surprised to learn Canadian special forces were involved in the mission and curious as to how many troops are on the ground.
Prime Minister Stephen Harper told reporters Thursday that a handful of Canadian troops have been stationed in Iraq since the beginning of the U.S.-led invasion and occupation, which is still widely unpopular at home.
But he insisted the special forces who helped rescue Canadians James Loney and Harmeet Singh Sooden, along with Briton Norman Kember, were in Iraq only temporarily with the express goal of obtaining the hostages' release.
The former Liberal Party government declined in 2003 to join the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq unless it came under the U.N. umbrella, and many Canadians have been critical of U.S. methods in Washington's war on terror.
Foreign Affairs Minister Peter MacKay said about 20 Canadian troops and other personnel were in Iraq working quietly since shortly after the kidnappings of the Christian Peacemaker Teams workers on Nov. 26.
"We were there with our very best," he told The Globe and Mail for Friday editions. "We had everyone fully engaged in this operation from day one." The Royal Canadian Mounted Police, intelligence officers and diplomats were also involved, he said.
"Canada should not (be) and is not passive when it comes to its own citizens and the protection of their lives," MacKay said.
It is believed that members of Canada's elite and secretive Joint Task Force 2 were also involved, but the government would neither confirm nor deny this.
Harper did confirm Thursday, shortly after the men were rescued, that an unspecified number of Canadians have been embedded with coalition forces since the beginning of the war.
"I'm not free to say anything more than that because this involves national security," he said. He denied Canadian troops were involved in the war, however, saying: "Any involvement that Canada has had on the ground in this particular matter was obviously targeted simply at the issue of Canadian hostages."
Canadian Defense spokeswoman Lt. Morgan Bailey told The Associated Press on Friday that only a handful of Canadian troops were on the ground in Iraq. She said one soldier is serving with a U.N. assistance team helping to draft a new constitution and coordinate humanitarian operations; three other Canadian soldiers are on an exchange with British forces.
"They do their normal job, only with the British unit," she said. "If their job is to be an engineer, they would do that job with the British."
But she declined to say whether there were special forces in Iraq.
"It's our policy not to speak about special operations abroad," she said.
In March 2003, when Parliament was debating whether to send troops to Iraq - some Conservatives believed it was imperative to help the Bush administration remove Saddam Hussein from power - several MPs said special forces had secretly been on the ground in Afghanistan, though Prime Minister Jean Chretien's government denied it.
Some Canadians were also surprised to learn that a dozen troops had been embedded with British and U.S. troops during the invasion of Iraq, in what are known as training exchanges.
Eric Walton, foreign affairs critic for the Green Party of Canada, said he didn't think most Canadians would oppose Canadian Forces in Iraq to help their own.
"My feeling is, you don't need permission for a rescue mission, if it's in and out," Walton said. "But the issue I have a problem with is the way the invasion occurred, against international law, and I think Canada should have taken a stand and pulled its troops out of those exchanges."
John Pike, a defense analyst and director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military policy think tank in Alexandria, Va., asked: What's the big deal?
"It would seem to me that the scandal would have been if they hadn't been there," Pike said. "The lives of Canadian nationals were at stake. If there had been no Canadians involved in this and it had come to grief, then the outrage would have been: `You allowed trigger-happy American cowboys to kill our people.'"
He said it is common for countries to send their special forces quietly to train in live combat situations, as the experience is invaluable.
"I certainly have the sense that there is a much larger special operations presence in Iraq than is widely understood," Pike said. "This type of combat experience is precious."
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
03/26/2006 02:54 ||
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#1
"If there had been no Canadians involved in this and it had come to grief, then the outrage would have been: `You allowed trigger-happy American cowboys to kill our people."
But if the civilian Canucks had gotten their heads lopped off by the jihadinuts, that would have been just ducky. At least, that way, no trigger-happy American cowboys were involved.
#2
Actually Slarong, Pike meant that in a good way. He didn't want the usual anti US vomit that spews. It's anew group at the helm now and the relations are closer. the Lib minority still has a big voice. But for the moment, saner thoughts prevail.
For statement to Canadians - this was a good one. Not bad - it meant to deflect your point exactly.
Seized by U.S. forces in Afghanistan and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Osama bin Laden's former chauffeur is now seeking victory over President Bush in a new arena: the Supreme Court.
In oral arguments Tuesday, an attorney for Salim Ahmed Hamdan will ask the justices to declare unconstitutional the U.S. military commission that plans to try him for conspiring with his former boss to carry out terrorist attacks.
Significant as that demand is, its potential impact is much wider, making Hamdan's case one of the most important of Bush's presidency. It is a challenge to the broad vision of presidential power that Bush has asserted since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
In blunt terms, Hamdan's brief calls on the court to stop "this unprecedented arrogation of power." Just as urgently, the administration's brief urges the court not to second-guess the decisions of the commander in chief while "the armed conflict against al Qaeda remains ongoing."
The case may not produce a frontal clash between the judiciary and the executive -- if the court decides that a recently enacted federal law on military commissions deprives it of jurisdiction to rule on Hamdan's case. Yet another possibility is that the court could reach an inconclusive 4 to 4 tie because Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr. had ruled on the case while he was on a federal appeals court and must sit out now.
But if the court fears to tread on such difficult ground, it has given no sign of that. It has refused the administration's invitation to dismiss the case for lack of jurisdiction before hearing arguments, and, perhaps more important, it has already refused to defer completely to the president in two previous terrorism-related cases.
"There are so many issues in the case -- whether the president was authorized by the Constitution, or a statute, to set up the commissions -- right down to exactly how to fit this kind of a war into the existing laws of war," said Richard Lazarus, a law professor at Georgetown University who specializes in Supreme Court litigation. "Most cases have two or three or four issues. This one has 10 or 12, which makes it very hard to handicap."
Whether designating an American citizen as an "enemy combatant" subject to military confinement, denying coverage under the Geneva Conventions to detainees at Guantanamo Bay, or using the National Security Agency to eavesdrop on domestic communications, Bush has said that the Constitution and a broadly worded congressional resolution passed three days after Sept. 11, 2001, empower him to wage war against terrorists all but unencumbered by judicial review, congressional oversight or international law.
Those assertions emerged in Bush's Military Order No. 1 of Nov. 13, 2001, which established the commissions and set off one of the first political debates in the United States over terrorism after two months of relative unity after the attacks.
The administration wanted a tough-minded alternative to the civilian court system that the Clinton administration had used against terrorists. Yet the swift and certain punishment that supporters of the commissions expected has not materialized. Though 10 of the 490 terrorism suspects currently held at the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay have been designated for trial, not a single case has been decided.
From the outset, the commissions have been plagued by questions about their fairness and workability. Critics argued that the commissions were flawed because, as Hamdan's brief, written by Georgetown University law professor Neal K. Katyal, puts it, they would try suspects "for crimes defined by the President alone, under procedures lacking basic protections, before 'judges' who are his chosen subordinates."
After lengthy internal debates, the administration modified the commissions, requiring that trials be public and that defendants be presumed innocent until proved guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
But that did not persuade critics who pointed out that the executive branch would still be the only one deciding who is an "unlawful enemy combatant" eligible for trial in the first place.
Critics also argue that the Geneva Conventions require that each detainee should be given an individual hearing, with access to the federal courts through habeas corpus.
Historically, the courts have been reluctant to take on presidents during wartime. As a result, Lazarus said, Hamdan's supporters "need to make it clear there is a reason not to trust" Bush with unchecked power. That reason, Lazarus noted, may come from the allegations of torture at Guantanamo Bay and at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, which surfaced in 2004 and are discussed extensively in briefs on Hamdan's side.
Several members of the court are especially sensitive to international opinion, which has generally seen Guantanamo as a symbol of U.S. excesses in the war against al-Qaeda. The court has been bombarded by friend-of-the-court briefs urging it to think about the impact of the Hamdan case on the image of the United States abroad.
Two years ago, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 that federal law gave U.S. courts the power to hear the prisoners' challenges to their detention at Guantanamo Bay. In a separate case involving an American citizen held there, a plurality of justices noted that the court would not give the president "a blank check" on national security matters.
That triggered a flood of habeas corpus petitions, including Hamdan's, from lawyers representing hundreds of Guantanamo Bay prisoners.
Hamdan's attorneys say that neither the broadly worded Sept. 14, 2001, House-Senate resolution that endorsed the use of force against al-Qaeda nor older statutes give Bush the clear legislative approval he needs to set up the commissions. They also contend that the commissions violate the Geneva Conventions, which, they say, are enforceable by U.S. courts and entitle Hamdan to the same kind of trial a U.S. soldier would get from a court-martial.
The rules of the tribunals, which allow evidence that "would . . . have probative value to a reasonable person," provide no guarantee against the use of evidence gathered through torture, Hamdan's supporters say.
In response, the Bush administration notes that military commissions have a long history in war and were contemplated by the Sept. 14, 2001, resolution.
But the administration's brief, written by Solicitor General Paul D. Clement, also says that "even if Congress's support for the President's Military Order were not so clear, the President has the inherent authority to convene military commissions to try and punish captured enemy combatants in wartime -- even in the absence of any statutory authorization."
As for the Geneva Conventions, they are not enforceable by U.S. courts and do not apply to Hamdan because al-Qaeda is a terrorist network that has not signed the conventions and regularly violates them, the administration says.
So far, the administration has prevailed. Last year, a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, one of whose members was Roberts, upheld the administration's position, overruling a decision in Hamdan's favor by the U.S. District Court in Washington.
After the Supreme Court agreed to hear Hamdan's appeal of the D.C. Circuit's ruling, Congress stepped in.
The Detainee Treatment Act (DTA), enacted in December, reinforces the president's authority under the Sept. 14 resolution, the administration says. By modifying the rules related to the commissions, the measure implicitly accepts their legitimacy, the administration says.
The DTA stripped federal courts of jurisdiction over habeas corpus petitions from the Guantanamo Bay detainees "pending on or after" the date of its enactment -- and it provides an alternative military process for reviewing their enemy combatant status, to be followed by appeals to the D.C. Circuit court. Under the law, that court is the exclusive venue for appeals of military commission verdicts.
On Jan. 12, the administration asked the Supreme Court to dismiss the Hamdan case, arguing that it is covered by the "pending on or after" phrase. The proper time for his constitutional challenge is after his trial, the administration argued.
But Hamdan's attorneys contend that the DTA was a compromise intended to apply only to new cases, not to those that had already been filed. At a minimum, it does not provide a clear enough statement of congressional intent to deny Hamdan and others a day in court, they say.
The case is Hamdan v. Rumsfeld , No. 05-184. A decision is expected by July.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
03/26/2006 02:41 ||
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I'm tired of this crap. Take them all back to where they were apprehended and dump them. Preferably from 30,000 feet.
A Muslim couple in Jalpaiguri district have been ordered by local religious leaders to separate as the husband allegedly uttered talaq three times in his sleep.
While the couple, who have three children, refused to obey the order since there was no discord between them, the community leaders are adamant that they must separate or face a "social boycott".
Aftab Ansari and Sohela have been married for the past 11 years. However, on the night of December 20 last year, Aftab allegedly uttered talaq three times in his sleep after a tiff with his wife.
The matter came to light when Sohela discussed it with her close friends and soon it reached the ears of the Muslim leaders.
The leaders, quoting the Shariyat, ruled that the talaq has to be implemented and if it is not acceptable, the only alternative was temporary separation for 100 days during which the wife will live at her father's house and spend a night with another man.
She can remarry her husband only after the man has given her talaq.
As the couple was unwilling to accept the verdict, the matter went to the family counselling centre at Falakata police station in Jalpaiguri district.
The counselling centre, attended by judges of the Alipurduar sub-divisional court, discussed the problem in detail on Saturday, but failed to find a solution.
The additional district session judge (second track), Muhammad Abdul Jalil, has directed the general secretary of the Anjuman Committee, Muhammad Abul, to settle the issue, sources in the counselling centre said.
Posted by: john ||
03/26/2006 14:20 ||
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What's this "spend a night with another man" nonsense? Someone pls explain.
her mistake is telling the girls what hubby says when he sleeps, as a joke and thinking it's cute. the religions mistake is adhereing to well - the religion. I thind that muslims are fed up with this too - it's why the riots. They hate to be shown there is another way of living.
#2
TW, it's for real. She's supposed to be married to another man and have the marriage consummated before she can remarry her previous owner husband. Thats if hubby #2 will go along with the playbook.
Yasin Malik, chief of Jammu and Kashmir Liberation Front (JKLF) said on Saturday that Muslims were equally responsible for cruelty meted out against them because a majority of them do not believe in democracy.
Be careful starting your car for the next few years, Yasin. And watch for bearded men riding motorcycles...
When democracy heralds upon a Muslim country, the opposition tends to launch a movement to dislodge it, Malik said while speaking at a gathering during the World Social Forum proceedings on Saturday.
Democracies bring the promise though not always the realization of freedom. Freedom includes freedom of thought, which encompasses freedom of religion. Islam is doctrinally against freedom of religion; you can be killed for leaving its bloodstained embrace. Without freedom of thought there is no other freedom.
He pointed out that talks were going on between India and Pakistan over the Kashmir dispute and they also believed in the process. He said that if the talks failed, it wouldnt affect the ongoing struggle for the freedom of Kashmir. He declared that the people of India and Pakistan would force the governments of both countries to resolve the conflict through negotiations. Better relations between the two countries are possible only through the resolution of the Kashmir dispute, he said.
It's been 60 years, and the people of India and Pakland haven't gotten around to forcing the governments of both countries to resolve the problem. In Pakistan it's an end all and be all, the first difficult step in a grandiose plan that's supposed to result in the dismemberment of India and Pakistan's aggrandizement.
Malik claimed that Kashmiriat was purely a spiritual thing. He said 15,000 pundits were living in Indian-held Kashmir and he urged them to return to the valley.
They don't want to. They're not happy with the idea of gunfire.
Malik claimed that as many as 85 percent of Kashmiris wanted freedom while only 15 percent wanted to live with Pakistan. Our history is full of struggle and it will continue till we achieve full freedom, he said.
Yeah, yeah. Whoopdy doo. Without Armed Struggle you got nuttin'. There's no purpose to your life. You'll dry up and blow away, and it'll be like you've never been. You and your like are such tiresome little men.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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Anybody recommend a good insurance broker for this lad?
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/26/2006 0:23 Comments ||
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NWFP Governor Khalilur Rehman has neither denied nor confirmed a claim by the family of missing tribal journalist Hayatullah Khan that he has been given into US custody for his alleged links with Al Qaeda, the Tribal Union of Journalists president said on Saturday. During our meeting, we asked the governor to comment on Khans familys allegation that he has been handed over to the US. The governor neither denied nor did he confirm the allegation. He just said that he had checked with all security agencies and Hayatullah is not with the government, TUJ President Sailab Mehsud said, referring to a meeting between the governor and a TUJ delegation in Peshawar on March 22.
Khan has been missing since December 5 when five masked men kidnapped him outside Mir Ali town in North Waziristan days after he contradicted the government version about the killing of an Al Qaeda leader on December 1. Military spokesman Maj Gen Shaukat Sultan said he didnt know Khans whereabouts. If he is in the US custody, the Interior Ministry may know it, he told Daily Times.
Brig (r) Javed Iqbal Cheema, the director general of the Interior Ministrys Crisis Management Cell, also denied the report that Pakistan had handed over Hayatullah to the US. Neither we have handed over any Pakistani into US custody nor it is our policy to hand over our nationals to the US. We have never handed over any Pakistani to the US, he said. Some intelligence officials told us that Hayatullah is no more in Pakistan, his brother Ehsanullah Khan told Daily Times. Ehsanullah said that the intelligence sources said Hayatullah was last seen in Pakistan on January 17 when he was shifted from Islamabad to somewhere else.
Mehsud said the familys allegation could be true. It is possible that Hayatullah has been handed over to the US, the TUJ president told Daily Times by phone from Dera Ismail Khan. Ehsanullah said intelligence sources had earlier told him that Hayatullah was fine and the family should not worry about him. And now the same intelligence people are saying that he is no more with them.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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Up to 450 relatives of the 16 Pakistani tribesmen killed by Afghan security forces held a protest rally outside the Afghan Consulate in Quetta on Saturday, police said. Condemning the killings and demanding that those responsible be punished, the protestors threw stones at the Consulate and tore down and burned a picture of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, displayed at the gate of the building. The crowd chanted "Down with Karzai and Death to Afghanistan", before being baton-charged by police, according to witnesses.
Local area police chief Zahid Afaq said that no one had been injured during the protest. Islamabad has already registered a complaint with Kabul over last Tuesday's killings. Pakistan rejected claims made last week by Afghan army Abdul Razzak that the group were Taliban members, insisting that the men had been on their way to celebrate the Afghan New Year.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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Death to (insert something that has upset you a little today) , praise be to allah !
For Example ..
Death to the clocks for being put forward, when the country switches to British Summer Time ! Praise be to allah !
SHABQADAR (Rantburg News Service): Interior Minister Aftab Ahmed Khan Sherpao on Saturday denied the presence of Taliban in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA), as four Khasadar force personnel were wounded in an ambush. There are no Taliban in the tribal areas. Really. It is only propaganda. Trust me on this, he told reporters at Shabqadar Fort in Charsadda district, after inaugurating the Frontier Constabulary Foundation School.
But he conceded that whatever was happening in the tribal areas was due to the involvement of external hands who wanted to disturb peace along Pakistans western border. Foreign elements are involved, he said. "We have had reports of large men, wearing lava-lavas, running around our beloved countryside, terrorizing honest tribesmen. We suspect there is a conspiracy afoot, and we have summoned the Samoan ambassador for an explanation."
The interior minister also said that the Pakistan Army was not playing a direct role in the ongoing operation against terrorists. The army is just assisting the paramilitary and Khasadar force and there is no proposal to deploy regular soldiers in the tribal region, he said. "All is well. There is nothing to see here. Move along. We are committed to flushing out foreign terrorists from the tribal areas and the government will not hesitate from any action to meet that goal. But neither do we want any trouble... Yes. Those are my lips. May I have them back, please?"
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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At least 1,500 people of the Raija, Kalpar and Masuri Bugti clans reached Dera Bugti Area amid strict security on Saturday. Around 4,000 people had left the area after tribal feuds erupted in 1997. Mir Hamdan Bugti, the former chairman of Marri Bugti Zila Council, led the convoy from Dera Ghazi Khan Police Lines. The convoy consisted of wagons, buses and trucks with the government taking strict security measures to protect the convoy.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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He said the party took the action because the expelled members didnt vote for their partys candidates in the Senate election. He said another Muttahida Majlis-e-Amal provincial leader, Mufti Kifaitullah, was also suspended for three years on his irresponsible behaviour in the Senate election. The NWFP Assembly speaker has accepted the resignations and issued a notification in this regard.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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I tried to resign when I was MPA. It didn't work.
Posted by: Former O-Ganger ||
03/26/2006 22:46 Comments ||
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March 26, 2006: Deaths from revenge killings now exceed those from terrorist or anti-government activity. Al Qaeda is beaten, and running for cover. The Sunni Arab groups that financed thousands of attacks against the government and coalition groups, are now battling each other, al Qaeda, and Shia death squads. It's not civil war, for there are no battles or grand strategies at play. It's not ethnic cleansing, yet, although many Sunni Arabs are, and have, fled the country. What's happening here is payback. Outsiders tend to forget that, for over three decades, a brutal Sunni Arab dictatorship killed hundreds of thousands of Kurds and Shia Arabs. The surviving victims, and the families of those who did not survive, want revenge. They want payback. And even those Kurds Shia Arabs who don't personally want revenge, are inclined to tolerate some payback. Since the Sunni Arabs comprise only about 20 percent of the population, and no longer control the police or military, they are in a vulnerable position.
After Saddam's government was ousted three years ago, the Sunni Arabs still had lots of cash, weapons, and terrorist skills. Running a police state is basically all about terrorizing people into accepting your rule. For the last three years, the Sunni Arabs thought they could terrorize their way back into power. Didn't work. Now the Kurds and Shia Arabs are not only too strong to defeat, but are coming into Sunni Arab neighborhoods and killing. Sometimes the victims are men who actually took part in Saddam era atrocities. But often the victims are just some Sunni Arabs who were in the wrong place, at the wrong time.
The government doesn't want all these payback killings, most of them carried out by men working for extremist Shia Arab political parties. In particular, the Badr and Sadr militias, both backed by Iran, have the most blood on their hands, although other Shia Arab groups, and even some Kurds, have joined in. The government has avoided cracking down on the Iran supported militias so far. Militarily, the government has had its hand full with the Islamic terrorists and Sunni Arab gangs. Taking on the pro-Iran Shia Arab gangs would produce political fallout as well, because these militias belonged to Shia Arab political parties. While the Shia Arabs are 60 percent of the population, if they split into too many mutually hostile factions, they could lose control of the government to a coalition containing Kurds and Sunni Arabs.
The Shia Arab death squads are basically terrorists, and if there's one thing all Iraqis can agree on, it's the need to stamp out the terrorist activity. This is providing the government with an opening against the Iran sponsored militias. Iraqis, even Shia Arab Iraqis, have always been fearful, and suspicious, of Iran. Iraqi Shia Arabs fought against Iran during the 1980s war, not because they loved Saddam, but because they feared Iranian domination. The Sadr and Badr groups are vulnerable in this area, and the government is apparently going to exploit it.
March 24, 2006: Back on March 7th Muhammed Hilah Hammad al Ubaydi, better known as Abu Ayman, was arrested by Iraqi and Coalition security forces. He was the principal terrorist leader in the southern part of Baghdad Province and northern Babil. When Saddam was in power, Abu Ayman was a senior aide to the Chief of Staff of Intelligence. The leadership of the Sunni Arab terrorism against the post-Saddam government has been men like Abu Ayman. Several hundred of these guys, all former commanders in Saddams force of professional terrorists, have been running a bloody, clever, although unsuccessful, campaign against the new government. In particular, the Sunni Arabs have worked the Arab and Western media effectively. Careful observers will note that a disproportionate number of the Iraqis interviewed by the Western media are Sunni Arabs. The clueless Western journalists often let their subjects admit that they, or someone in their family worked for Saddam military or secret police. Naturally, these interviewees are not happy with the new government and all those American troops. That's what the foreign journalists want to hear, and fellows like Abu Ayman, who were in charge of playing the foreign media when Saddam was in charge, are still there to help arrange those interviews.
Posted by: ed ||
03/26/2006 17:45 ||
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Heh.
What's Arabic for "what goes around comes around"?
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/26/2006 18:00 Comments ||
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Insh'Allah, Barbara, Insh'Allah. Translated into Russian: Tough Schitskis. Cannot help but be cynical.
Posted by: Alaska Paul ||
03/26/2006 18:57 Comments ||
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The difference between Shiites and Sunnis is sometimes explained simply as a disagreement over who should have become the leader of the Muslim community after the Prophet Muhammad died nearly 1,400 years ago.
But in Iraq, the divide goes beyond that, partly because of geography and partly because of history. With sectarian tensions rising, Iraqis are paying more attention to the little things that signal whether someone is Shiite or Sunni. None of the indicators are foolproof. But a name, an accent and even the color of a head scarf can provide clues.
Complicating all of this is the reality that many Iraqis have intermarried and that for much of Iraq's history, the two communities have coexisted peacefully. Very rarely has sectarian identity been a life or death matter, the way it is now on some of Baghdad's streets.
Shiites split off from Sunnis after the Prophet Muhammad died in the seventh century. That created a crisis over who would succeed him as leader of the Muslim community. One group of Muslims chose Muhammad's friend, Abu Bakr. They would become the Sunnis, a vast majority of the world's Muslims.
A smaller group believed the rightful successor was Ali, the prophet's son-in-law and cousin. They would become the Shiites, who today are concentrated in India, Pakistan and Persian Gulf countries. Abu Bakr won out, though after he died Ali eventually became caliph. He was assassinated, and the Muslim community began to splinter. Ali's son Hussein led a rebellion but he, too, was cut down, in a battle in Karbala, Iraq. Hussein's death was the beginning of Shiism and it started a culture of martyrdom, evident each year during a festival in Karbala when Shiites whip and cut themselves to symbolize Hussein's pain.
Over the years, the rivalry between the partisans of Ali and those who supported Abu Bakr evolved into two schools of theology. For example, when it comes time to pray, Shiites believe a person's arms should be straight; most Sunnis say they should be bent. Shiites allow temporary marriage; Sunnis say it is forbidden. In some cases, Shiite inheritance law is more generous to women than is Sunni inheritance law.
Shiites follow ayatollahs, or supreme jurists, who some believe have divine powers. Sunni Islam is more decentralized among local imams.
Southern Iraq is essentially the center of Shiite Islam, with holy shrines in Karbala, Kufa and Najaf. The Sunni Arabs are concentrated in the west, especially in Anbar Province, the heartland of Iraqi tribal culture. In Baghdad and eastern cities like Baquba, the populations are mixed, while in the north, Sunni Kurds predominate.
In Iraq, tribal identity is also important, and many people use tribal names as last names. Because certain tribes are rooted in certain areas, a last name like Saidi, Maliki or Kinani may be typically Shiite, while names like Zobi, Tikriti and Hamdani are typically Sunni.
Certain first names may also reveal sect: Omar and Othman are Sunni names; Haidar and Karrar are Shiite ones.
Dress, too, can be a sign, but again not because it has religious significance. In western Iraq, the favored headdress is white and red; in the south it is white and black.
Historians say Shiites and Sunnis in Iraq have had periods of peace and conflict. Saddam Hussein exacerbated the rivalry, most notably after 1991, when Shiites in the south revolted and he used predominantly Sunni tribes to crush them.
Nearly 60 percent of Iraq's population of some 25 million are Shiite, with Sunni Arabs and Sunni Kurds making up roughly 40 percent.
Posted by: Dan Darling ||
03/26/2006 03:20 ||
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Russia's foreign spy agency yesterday denied that Moscow gave Saddam Hussein information on U.S. troop movements and plans during the invasion of Iraq in 2003.
Nope, not us, say Boris Jerkinoff
A Pentagon report Friday cited two seized Iraqi documents as saying Russia obtained information from sources "inside the American Central Command" in Qatar and passed battlefield intelligence to Saddam through the former Russian ambassador in Baghdad, Vladimir Titorenko.
The Russian Foreign Intelligence Service dismissed the claims. "Similar, baseless accusations concerning Russia's intelligence have been made more than once," agency spokesman Boris Labusov said. "We don't consider it necessary to comment on such fabrications."
Ah, the good ole Cold war denials. Such memories
Yevgenia Albats, a Moscow-based journalist who specializes in intelligence matters, said she suspected there was "at least a certain truth reflected in the Pentagon report," considering Russia's close relationship with the ousted Iraqi leader.
But she cautioned that didn't necessarily mean the Kremlin
was involved.
"It is sometimes difficult to figure out whether certain steps were undertaken with the knowledge of top Russian authorities or whether those were steps undertaken by certain intelligence officers on their own," Miss Albats told the Associated Press.
Sergei Oznobishchev, head of the Institute of Strategic Evaluations and Analysis, suggested that the public release of the report reflected increasing U.S. distrust for Russia.
"They are irritated by Russia's strengthening position in the international arena and its foreign policy course," Mr. Oznobishchev was quoted as saying by the RIA Novosti news agency.
Suffering from a spat of penis envy Mr. Oznobishchev?
The Iraqi documents also left unknown who may have been the sources at Central Command's war-fighting headquarters, which is at Camp As Sayliyah just outside Doha, the capital of Qatar. No Russians were authorized to be at the closely guarded base.
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/26/2006 01:04 ||
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No Russians were authorized to be at the closely guarded base.
US ambassador urged Iraq's divided leaders to rein in militias on Saturday as political blocs failed again to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that they hope can avert civil war. Zalmay Khalilzad, who is pressing hard for a government more than three months after elections, issued a tough warning about the militias, many of which have ties to powerful Shiite leaders and are entrenched in Iraqi security forces and police. "More Iraqis are dying from the militia violence than from the terrorists," he told reporters during a visit to a Baghdad youth centre newly renovated with US funds. "The militias need to be under control." Iraq's Shiite, Kurdish and Sunni leaders held another round of talks aimed at resolving differences holding up formation of post-war Iraq's first full-term government. But there was no sign of a breakthrough.
Sunni politician Tareq Hashemi said talks focused on ways of building a solid political foundation for the new government. The destruction of a Shiite shrine a month ago sparked a wave of reprisals that raised the prospect of pro-government Shiite militias pushing Iraq into civil war. The crisis has increased pressure to form a Cabinet that can avert an all-out sectarian conflict.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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A new study from the Joint Forces Command in Norfolk, Virginia, paints quite a different picture. According to captured documents cited in the study and first reported in THE WEEKLY STANDARD in January, the former Iraqi regime was training non-Iraqi Arabs in terrorist techniques.
Beginning in 1994, the Fedayeen Saddam opened its own paramilitary training camps for volunteers, graduating more than 7,200 "good men racing full with courage and enthusiasm" in the first year. Beginning in 1998, these camps began hosting "Arab volunteers from Egypt, Palestine, Jordan, 'the Gulf,' and Syria." It is not clear from available evidence where all of these non-Iraqi volunteers who were "sacrificing for the cause" went to ply their newfound skills. Before the summer of 2002, most volunteers went home upon the completion of training.
But these camps were humming with frenzied activity in the months immediately prior to the war. As late as January 2003, the volunteers participated in a special training event called the "Heroes Attack." This training event was designed in part to prepare regional Fedayeen Saddam commands to "obstruct the enemy from achieving his goal and to support keeping peace and stability in the province."
Some of this training came under the auspices of the Iraqi Intelligence Service's "Division 27," which, according to the study, "supplied the Fedayeen Saddam with silencers, equipment for booby-trapping vehicles, [and] special training on the use of certain explosive timers. The only apparent use for all of this Division 27 equipment was to conduct commando or terrorist operations."
The publication of the Joint Forces Command study, called the "Iraqi Perspectives Project," coincides with the release by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence of several hundred documents captured in postwar Iraq. There are many more to come. Some of the documents used to complete the study have been made public as part of the ODNI effort; others have not.
More at link
Posted by: Captain America ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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The Palestinian Authority will tell an Arab summit it needs at least $130 million a month to cover Suha Arafat's shopping sprees its budget if the West cuts off aid when the Islamist group Hamas takes office, Economy Minister Mazen Sonnoqrot said. But Algerian Minister of State Abdelaziz Belkhadem said the Arabs had not yet agreed to go above their previous commitment to give the Palestinian Authority $50 million a month. "There's no increase now but we are hearing about the situation in Palestine," he told Reuters on Friday night.
Arab foreign ministers, who start a two-day meeting in the Sudanese capital Khartoum on Saturday, will discuss a draft resolution confirming their old commitment, he added. "We're eager to make sure that there is at least the minimum (of Arab aid) but there's no increase," Belkhadem said. In practice many Arab governments have not met their commitments to the Palestinians and donors such as the European Union have covered most of the budget shortfall.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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DMFD - Don't forget the kittens and fluffy baby ducks. ;-p
Posted by: Barbara Skolaut ||
03/26/2006 0:54 Comments ||
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Guess, The world pays every stupid palistanians about 1000 US dollers per Year. Folks in India dont make evnen 500 dollers per year and are conributing to the World ecdonomy. In a very simple terms, all it means that the west is paying a ransom to the palistanians. Stop paying the ransom to the Palistanions and they will learn the economy and proper behavier.
On my flight to New York a Jew must have been in the bathroom the entire time because a sign on the door said, "occupied."
What do you say to a Muslim woman with two black eyes? Nothing! You told her twice already!
How many Palestinians does it take to change a light bulb? None! They sit in the dark forever and blame the Jews for it!
Did you hear about the Broadway play, "The Palestinians"? It bombed!
What do you call a first-time offender in Saudi Arabia? Lefty!
Did you hear about the Muslim strip club? It features full facial nudity!
That's it; give me a hand. And I mean: GIVE ME A HAND. But if I made just one person happy...it wasn't worth it because the Muttawa will use my head for football. Put on a surly face, because a happy jihadi is a dead kaffir. Think about it. And a parting thought: never give a dhimmi an even break (apologies to WC Fields).
Posted by: john ||
03/26/2006 9:42 Comments ||
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Oh, boy! Looks like a bidding war! As of 2 hours ago the inflation rate must've really kicked in...
Hamas seeks $170 million per month from Arabs
KUWAIT CITY (AFP) - Hamas has asked Arab countries to donate 170 million dollars per month to the cash-strapped Palestinian Authority in order to counter Western threats to slash aid.
"The needed monthly spending is 170 million dollars, including 115 million dollars for wages," Hamas' political supremo Khaled Meshaal told a press conference on Sunday.
The extra forty must be for "administrative costs"... The amount is three times the 55 million dollars pledged at last year's Arab summit in Algeria and is practically double the 100 million dollars demanded by a Palestinian delegation at a preparatory meeting for Tuesday's Arab summit in Khartoum.
Meshaal has been on a regional tour hoping to raise funds to fill the gap left by an anticipated cutting of funds from the United States and the European Union, once the Hamas-led government takes office.
"We hope that our Arab brothers will take the initiative to provide this aid as soon as possible... because the February salaries of many employees have not been paid yet," Meshaal said.
Ah, yes. Our "arab brothers". Let's scam them for awhile...
#9
OK... You guys need 130 million.... I have this cashier's check for 225 million. How about I sign it over to you, and you give me the 95 million difference. Mail it to my address in Nigeria. Oh, and I'll need your bank account and pin numbers...
Posted by: Mark E. ||
03/26/2006 14:55 Comments ||
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#10
@ LTd : the site boss and owner had a very funny take on this muslim stand up comedian thingie quite a while back (2003?) in a comment, and it was a riot! Yours is pretty darn good too... cheers!
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is prepared to bring down Hamas' incoming government if its militant policies harm Palestinian interests, a senior aide hinted on Saturday. In a letter to Hamas' designated prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, Abbas said that if the new government, which is to be sworn in Thursday, "adopts positions that would be detrimental to Palestinian interests, then the president will use his authority according to the Basic Law," the aide, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, told reporters.
Abdel Rahim did not elaborate, but the Basic Law, which is the Palestinians' de facto constitution, empowers the president to disband the government.
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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Ten thousand quatloos on Fatah at the end of round six.
Hot weather. Crowded communities. Weak public health systems. The vulnerability of much of Southeast Asia to infectious diseases such as SARS and bird flu suggests that a bioterror attack could be devastating, experts say.
While the likelihood of an attack is considered low, the alleged interest of some regional Islamic militants in acquiring disease-causing agents or toxins means it cannot be ruled out. Any nation allied with the US is a potential target, intelligence analysts believe.
This coming week, Interpol hosts a workshop in Singapore on the threat of bioterrorism for senior police and government officials from 37 countries around Asia. A similar conference was held in South Africa in November, and another is to be held in Chile later this year.
Starting on Monday, the delegates in Singapore will discuss lab security, forensic work and laws designed to prevent bioterrorism, as well assess how to respond to a simulated bioterrorist attack.
The US, which adopted a Bioterrorism Act in 2002 after anthrax sent through the mail killed five people, wants Asian nations to craft similar laws that mandate tighter controls on access to biological agents and toxins.
So far, militants in Southeast Asia have used conventional terror weapons. Jemaah Islamiyah, a group linked to al-Qaeda, is accused of deadly bombings, including blasts on the Indonesian resort island of Bali in 2002 and 2005.
The Abu Sayyaf group also carries out bomb attacks and kidnappings in the Philippines.
But detained suspects include Yazid Sufaat, a former Malaysian army captain and a US-trained biochemist linked to al-Qaeda's attempts to produce chemical and biological arms. Yazid was arrested in late 2001 as he returned to Malaysia from Afghanistan.
A Jemaah Islamiyah manual discovered in the Philippines in 2003 indicates interest in acquiring chemical and biological agents for use in a terrorist attack, said Rohan Gunaratna, a terrorism expert based in Singapore.
"It demonstrates serious intent, but not capability," Gunaratna said.
Terrorists need expertise to acquire pathogens from nature, and transform them into a potent weapon. Japan's Aum Shinrikyo group, whose homemade sarin chemical agent killed 12 people in 1995, was unable to isolate a virulent strain of anthrax.
But more Asian countries are pursuing biomedical research, which can lead to new treatments, and concern is growing that laboratory materials could fall into the wrong hands.
"The central problem of preventing bioterrorism is, how do police do what they have to do without getting in the way of legitimate bioscience? If somebody's working with anthrax, are they a good guy or a bad guy?" said Barry Kellman, a weapons control expert at the DePaul University College of Law in Chicago.
Kellman said Thailand, Malaysia and Vietnam are among countries that need to reinforce laws to cope with the threat of bioterrorism.
A weak regulatory environment in China has raised US concerns about proliferation of technologies that could be used to make biological weapons. Washington says North Korea has a biological weapons program, though concern about proliferation by the communist country has focused on nuclear activities.
Southeast Asia would be vulnerable to an attack because many countries are prone to the fast spread of infections and epidemics, according to health officials. Anthrax is not contagious, but smallpox is. Agents can be spread by food contamination, or by infected mosquitoes and rats.
Singapore, a close US ally, views its 2003 fight against SARS, or severe acute respiratory syndrome, as preparation for a bioterrorist attack. Experts used computers to track people who might have had contact with patients of the disease, which spread from Asia across the world, killing nearly 800 people.
Last year, Singapore passed a law that imposes life in prison on anyone who uses biological agents and toxins for a "non-peaceful purpose."
But placing controls on "dual use" technology makes it hard to prevent terrorists from seeking equipment to make biological weapons, said Manjunath K.S. of the Institute of Peace and Conflict Studies in New Delhi, India. For example, he said, a machine that ferments molasses to produce beer could also be used to make deadly toxins.
"You can have industries that unintentionally give it out to customers, who may have other designs," he said.
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03/26/2006 02:39 ||
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Iran has significantly increased funding to a Palestinian insurgency group.
Officials said Iran has bolstered allocations to Islamic Jihad, regarded as the most active group in the Palestinian war against Israel. They said Iran intends to provide Jihad with millions of dollars in 2006.
Israeli Defense Minister Shaul Mofaz said Iran relayed $1.8 million to Jihad in February 2006. In an interview with the Israeli daily Yediot Aharonot on March 21, Mofaz said this was the largest one-time Iranian transfer to Jihad in years.
Officials said Jihad has been working with Iran and Hizbullah to carry out a spate of attacks before the Israeli elections, scheduled on March 28. They said two suicide attacks were foiled in Israel in as many days.
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03/26/2006 03:00 ||
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Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa told reporters Thursday that Syrian authorities "had never pretended" that the occupied Shebaa Farms belonged to Syria, following a meeting with Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak at the Red Sea resort of Sharm al-Sheikh. Lebanon has repeatedly asked Syria to provide the UN with written evidence to Lebanon's sovereignty over the Farms presently occupied by Israel.
Sharaa also denied his country was trying to impede the Lebanese dialogue, which he described as "a Lebanese matter," and reiterated that Syria had already implemented the relevant clauses of UN Security Council Resolution 1559.
Asked whether there would be meetings on the sidelines of the Arab Summit between Syria and Lebanon, Sharaa said: "It would depend on who will head Lebanon's delegation since the Syrian president only meets with a president." In his meeting with the Egyptian president, Sharaa handed Mubarak a letter from Syrian President Bashar Assad "regarding the latest developments in the region." The meeting was "completely not linked to Siniora's talks with the Egyptian president," the official Syrian news agency reported. Sharaa was expected to travel on to Riyadh for talks with Saudi officials.
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03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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A few days before the resumption of the national dialogue in Parliament, politicians seemed to agree on the need to resolve the presidential crisis, but tension mounted in discussions about the president's successor.
So the question's no longer what's going to happen to Emile, but who's going to replace him...
Well-placed sources said the success of the dialogue is "strongly linked to the outcome of the discussions taking place in Egypt and Saudi Arabia."
Meaning they need approval of their Arab puppet masters...
Another issue, the identity of Shebaa Farms, was also the center of political talks in the local arena, following the statements made by Syrian Vice President Farouk al-Sharaa in Egypt, where he reiterated his country's affirmation that the farms were Lebanese. Several Lebanese politicians said such a declaration was not enough and asked Syria to submit official documents to the UN.
I wouldn't just take them at their word, either.
Meanwhile, March 14 politicians continued to call for the resignation of President Emile Lahoud and expressed their concerns about his participation in the Arab Summit. The president of the Lebanese Forces executive committee, Samir Geagea, said President Emile Lahoud "should not remain in office and fulfill the interests of Syria," noting that the presidency crisis was "behind the participants in the national dialogue."
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03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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#1
Assrag Hizbullah's Al-Manar vowed with a shrug
"so what! so what so youse froze what! it dont mean nothin! it dont mean shit, dont change nothin, and we gonna broadcast anywhere like we standing on our head, so up yours America"
Senior Shiite cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah advised the government not to wait for "some signal from foreign countries trying to reorganize Lebanon's domestic affairs in a way that serves the interests of the Zionist enemy and its U.S. ally."
During Friday's sermon from the Imamein Hassanein Mosque in Haret Hreik, Fadlallah said Lebanon is still facing Israeli threats through regular land, water and air violations. "This is at a time when some of the country's leaders are discussing the arms of the resistance and Hizbullah's disarmament as demanded by Resolution 1559, which everyone knows is an Israeli-U.S. resolution imposed on the Security Council to serve the enemy's interests."
Posted by: Fred ||
03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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This bearded blood sucker is an Iranian beast of burden. So much for "non-lebanese" solutions.
The key witness in the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri, Syrian Mohammed Zuheir Siddiq, said on Thursday that he "never retracted his testimony," which he delivered before the international investigation committee looking into the crime. In a statement issued by his attorney in France, Siddiq said: "I didn't go back on my testimony at any time and any information that contradicts my statement is false or stems from bad intentions." He also said he is "at the disposal of the international investigation committee to contribute to the uncovering of the complete truth."
The statement was issued following rumors spread since Tuesday that Siddiq had crucial information to deliver to the media. Between Tuesday and Thursday, a man declaring that he was Siddiq made several phone calls to French journalists, asking them to meet him in a Lebanese restaurant in the fifth arrondissement in Paris. He never showed up. However, Siddiq's attorney told the Lebanese daily L'Orient Le Jour that his client "has nothing to do with this unknown man." Commenting on Siddiq's statements, former Minister Naji Boustani said: "We know that Siddiq is accused of giving false statements and participating in actions linked to the crime."
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03/26/2006 00:00 ||
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A multi-volume chronology and reference guide set detailing three years of the Mexican Drug War between 2010 and 2012.
Rantburg.com and borderlandbeat.com correspondent and author Chris Covert presents his first non-fiction work detailing
the drug and gang related violence in Mexico.
Chris gives us Mexican press dispatches of drug and gang war violence
over three years, presented in a multi volume set intended to chronicle the death, violence and mayhem which has
dominated Mexico for six years.
Rantburg was assembled from recycled algorithms in the United States of America. No
trees were destroyed in the production of this weblog. We did hurt some, though. Sorry.
The announcement came as U.S.-backed President Hamid Karzai faced mounting foreign pressure to free Abdul Rahman, a move that risked angering Muslim clerics who have called for him to be killed.
President Hamid Karzai has personally intervened in the case of an Afghan man facing execution for converting to Christianity, a top official said Saturday, amid fierce criticism in the West. 
Sudan on Saturday rejected the deployment of UN peacekeepers in Darfur until a peace deal is reached with rebels in the violence-ravaged western region. The Sudanese government categorically rejects foreign presence or interference in any form. Sudan is a sovereign state and any decision to allow foreign troops into the country has to be approved by the government, Sudanese Minister of Information and Telecommunications 
NWFP Governor Khalilur Rehman has neither denied nor confirmed a claim by the family of missing tribal journalist Hayatullah Khan that he has been given into US custody for his alleged links with Al Qaeda, the Tribal Union of Journalists president said on Saturday. During our meeting, we asked the governor to comment on Khans familys allegation that he has been handed over to the US. The governor neither denied nor did he confirm the allegation. He just said that he had checked with all security agencies and Hayatullah is not with the government, TUJ President Sailab Mehsud said, referring to a meeting between the governor and a TUJ delegation in Peshawar on March 22.
Up to 450 relatives of the 16 Pakistani tribesmen killed by Afghan security forces held a protest rally outside the Afghan Consulate in Quetta on Saturday, police said. Condemning the killings and demanding that those responsible be punished, the protestors threw stones at the Consulate and tore down and burned a picture of Afghan President Hamid Karzai, displayed at the gate of the building. The crowd chanted "Down with Karzai and Death to Afghanistan", before being baton-charged by police, according to witnesses. 
Interior Minister 
At least 1,500 people of the Raija, Kalpar and Masuri Bugti clans reached Dera Bugti Area amid strict security on Saturday. Around 4,000 people had left the area after tribal feuds erupted in 1997. Mir Hamdan Bugti, the former chairman of Marri Bugti Zila Council, led the convoy from Dera Ghazi Khan Police Lines. The convoy consisted of wagons, buses and trucks with the government taking strict security measures to protect the convoy.
Four members of the 
US ambassador urged Iraq's divided leaders to rein in militias on Saturday as political blocs failed again to break a deadlock on forming a unity government that they hope can avert civil war. 
The Palestinian Authority will tell an Arab summit it needs at least $130 million a month to cover 
Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas is prepared to bring down Hamas' incoming government if its militant policies harm Palestinian interests, a senior aide hinted on Saturday. In a letter to Hamas' designated prime minister, Ismail Haniyeh, Abbas said that if the new government, which is to be sworn in Thursday, "adopts positions that would be detrimental to Palestinian interests, then the president will use his authority according to the Basic Law," the aide, Tayeb Abdel Rahim, told reporters. 
Syrian Vice President 
A few days before the resumption of the national dialogue in Parliament, politicians seemed to agree on the need to resolve the presidential crisis, but tension mounted in discussions about the president's successor.
Senior Shiite cleric Sayyed Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah advised the government not to wait for "some signal from foreign countries trying to reorganize Lebanon's domestic affairs in a way that serves the interests of the Zionist enemy and its U.S. ally."
