BNP and Far-Right Demonstrate

The Rochdale grooming of minors for sexual exploitation case has devolved into an opportunity for some to Islam-bash.

Islam and the issue of exploiting minors

by Osman Mirghani (Al-Arabiyya)

Over the past few days, Britain has been preoccupied with the prosecution and imprisonment of nine Muslim men (eight Pakistanis and one Afghani) on charges of being part of a child sex exploitation ring. Much has been said about the religious and ethnic background of the defendants, not to mention their victims, who were all white minors suffering from social problems, to the point that all issues became tangled up and intertwined; criminal considerations, religious and ethnic backgrounds and racial sensitivities. The result was heated discussions that mostly inclined towards unfair generalization, the promotion of a stereotyped image of Islam and false accusations against it.

Islam is a religion that is embraced by over 1.5 billion Muslims around the globe, approximately 2.8 million of whom live in Britain. Islam is Britain’s second largest religion, and Muslims make up nearly 5 percent of the country’s population. Of course, there were some rational and balanced discussions of this case; however this all went out the window amidst the clamorous voices that highlighted the religious and racial features of a purely criminal case in which the defendants are a small handful of people who represent only themselves and their own deviant behavior.

This climate served as the perfect opportunity for racists to exploit, and so some movements staged anti-Muslim and anti-immigration demonstrations in which they raised slogans like ‘No to Islam’, ‘Protect our Children…Expel the Rapists’ and ‘Our Children are not Halal Meat’, in a reference to the sale of halal meat to Muslims. Such movements are now active in numerous Western states, and they are exploiting the financial and economic crises as well as the widespread negative image of Islam since the 9/11 attacks and the subsequent terrorist operations, including – of course – the 7 July, 2005 tube bombings in London. This image has contributed to feeding the negative climate which has produced laws banning the niqab and hijab, as well as the construction of minarets in some Western capitals, provoking extremist violence as was the case with the crimes of Anders Behring Breivik in Norway.

The grave problem is that this climate is being strengthened by the statements that are issued by some politicians or so-called specialists, not to mention the superficial articles which promote stereotypical, mistaken, ignorant or sometimes malicious images of Islam and Muslims. In addition to this, there are also some press reports that intend to provoke public opinion or controversy by publishing some defamatory images. For example, a television report screened during the trial session of the nine defendants who were prosecuted on charges of rape, sexual assault and trafficking for the purpose of sexual exploitation, amongst other crimes, showed the defendants standing in front of a mosque.

This represents a dangerous suggestion linking these terrible crimes with Islam, particularly as these defendants were not religious and their crimes were committed in Asian restaurants or empty houses and apartments, nowhere in the vicinity of a mosque! The comparison is truly scandalous when compared with the manner in which crimes involving the sexual abuse of children inside churches at the hands of priests are dealt with, for despite the noise and controversy surrounding such scandals, we have never heard anybody linking this to Christianity as a religion or to the priests’ ethnic background. It is true that there were discussions about deviations within the church, and there were calls for the Catholic Church and others to put an end this phenomenon and uncover its perpetrators, yet no one saw this as something implicating Christianity as a whole or as something that raises moral or ethical questions about all Christians.

The crime of sexual assaulting children deserves the strongest condemnation, regardless of the identity of the perpetrators, their ethnic background or religious affiliation, and this is something that is not confined to individuals of Pakistani or Muslim descent. Statistics and reports prepared by specialists stress that with the exception of Pakistani men being oversubscribed in such crimes, most sexual crimes against minors are committed by ‘white men’. This is how the majority of media outlets used this term in their reports, rather than saying ‘White Christians’, for example, in the same manner that the Pakistanis were described as ‘Asian Muslims.’

One of the striking examples of intentionally linking Islam with the issue of sexual exploitation of children can be seen in an article published by the British Times newspaper last Thursday entitled ‘Let’s be honest. There’s a clear link with Islam’. The title clearly demonstrates that there is an intention to target Islam, distort its image and use the crimes and deviation of a tiny minority to put forward a negative image of all Muslims.

Read the Rest…

Above, members of Raza Academy protest the US military courses which taught that the US is at war with Islam.

They believe there is a “conspiracy” to bomb Mecca and Medina. Whatever could have given them that idea, I wonder? Oh yeah, maybe the fact that the courses advocated “Hiroshima” measures to “defeat Islam.” Or slides like this in the courses presentation:

Hateful US military course instigates protest in Mumbai

By Rehan Ansari, TwoCircles.net,

Mumbai: Although the US has withdrawn the Military course that was instigating anti-Islamic sentiments among military officers, anger among Muslims over the issue is growing in India. Raza Academy, an organization of Barelivi Muslims, conducted a protest demonstration against the US for the idea of bombing Mecca and Madina, the holy cities of Muslim world. The protestors also expressed concern at the silence of Saudi Government over the issue.

Raza Acadmey staged protest on Friday in Azad Maidan, Mumbai. Condemning the US military syllabus, Syed Moinuddin Ashraf, presiding the demonstration said, “We believe that this is total in disregard of the Geneva Convention of 1949. It’s worse than Abu Garib. What they are talking about is essentially the Genocide of Muslims.”

Demanding serious actions against the guilty officers, members of Raza Academy said, “It’s imperative to take actions against the culprit officers and to study the impact of this course on 800 Military officers who were taught this syllabus.”

While talking to TwoCircles.net Saeed Noorie, Secretary of Raza Academy quoted from famous Obama speech to the Muslim World where he had said, “So long as our relationship is defined by our differences, we will empower those who sow hatred rather than peace, and who promote conflict rather than the cooperation that can help all of our people achieve justice and prosperity. This cycle of suspicion and discord must end.”

Noorie demanded that the people promoting conflict must be brought to justice because they will create cycle of suspicion between America and the Muslim World.

Through a course, US military officers were being taught that America’s enemy is Islam in general, not just terrorists, and suggesting that the country might ultimately have to obliterate the Islamic holy cities of Mecca and Medina without regard for civilian deaths, following World War-II precedents of the nuclear attack on Hiroshima or the allied firebombing of Dresden.

Following the outcry over the hateful course, the Pentagon has suspended the course in late April when a student-military officer objected to the material.

Their faces have been plastered all over US media: Brian Church, 20, of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Jared Chase, 27, of Keene, N.H.; and Brent Betterly, 24, of Oakland Park, Fla. They are being charged with conspiracy to commit terrorism and material support of terrorism. These are charges that are generally, as Carol Rose noted, reserved for Muslims, it seems now, however, that this is being applied more broadly.

The hypocrisy and double standards still linger, the US government, including prominent politicians have engaged in the text-book definition of “material support of terrorism.”

Three former, top ranking US officials are supposedly being “investigated” by the US Treasury for “material support of terrorism,” though very quietly, and not with the media hype that we are encountering for instance with the arrest of these “anarchists.” Many other prominent officials have so far escaped investigation or scrutiny.

Prosecutors: Undercover work showed 3 men planned to hit police, mayor’s house, Obama HQ

(Chicago Tribune)

Police surrounded the three men — now known as the NATO 3 — outside a Bridgeport drugstore last week and peppered them with questions as officers searched their car.

The two sides traded barbs about the Occupy movement and the 1968 Democratic National Convention when Chicago police infamously subdued protesters with force. After making jokes about bashing skulls with billy clubs, the officers promised to find the trio during the upcoming NATO summit.

“We’ll come look for you, each and every one of you,” an officer can be heard saying on a video posted onYouTube.

Turns out it was more than just an idle threat. It was already a fact.

Newly filed court documents show the men had been under surveillance for more than a week, suspected of planning a multi-staged attack against high-profile targets including President Barack Obama‘s campaign headquarters, Mayor Rahm Emanuel‘s house and several police stations. Chicago police had begun investigating the men as early as May 1, using information purportedly supplied by two informants whom the suspects believed were fellow Occupy backers named Moe and Nadia.

Prosecutors late Friday charged Brian Church, 20, of Ft. Lauderdale, Fla.; Jared Chase, 27, of Keene, N.H.; and Brent Betterly, 24, of Oakland Park, Fla., with conspiracy to commit terrorism, providing material support for terrorism and possession of an explosive or incendiary device. Six other people with them in a late-night raid Wednesday were released without charges, authorities said.

The charges mark the first time anyone has been prosecuted in Illinois under the state’s anti-terrorism laws, which were enacted after the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Perhaps more problematic for police trying to control crowds amid the summit, the trio’s arrest has provided oft-splintered factions of the Occupy movement with a shared rallying point this weekend.

Several hundred protesters took to the streets downtown Saturday evening, marching from the city’s financial district to Daley Center Plaza, where they conducted a 10-minute sit-down in sympathy for the men, dubbed the NATO 3 by their supporters.

The men’s attorney, Michael Deutsch, accused authorities of entrapment and suggested police targeted the men because of their anti-establishment views. The edited YouTube video of last week’s police stop has also prompted complaints about unfair treatment, though Chicago police Superintendent Garry McCarthy said the patrol officers in the video were unaware of the ongoing undercover investigation.

“What we believe is that this is a way to stir up prejudice against people exercising their First Amendment rights,” Deutsch told a throng of reporters after the three suspects were ordered held on $1.5 million bail each.

Settlers from Yitzhar torched a car in Einabus village in the Nablus district.

Fanatical religious settlers who believe God gave them the land have been attacking Palestinians who they hope to intimidate into moving away.

Settlers Torch Car in Nablus

NABLUS (Ma’an) — A group of settlers on Thursday set fire to a car in Nablus, a PA official said.

Three settlers from Yitzhar settlement set fire to the car in Einabus village, PA official Ghassan Daghlas told Ma’an.

The owner, Zain Mustafa Allan, said the car was parked outside his home when the attack took place.

Earlier, settlers threw rocks at Palestinian cars driving near Yitzhar settlement, Daghlas said.

The Nablus district experienced the majority of settler violence in 2011, The Palestine Center says.

In 2011, the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported that settler attacks had increased by 50 percent on the previous year.

Settler violence against local Palestinian communities is widespread, but figures compiled by Israeli rights group Yesh Din have repeatedly shown that nine out of 10 police investigations about settler crimes fail to lead to a prosecution.

The Golden Dawn sure are making a name for themselves and I bet the Islamophobes love their antics. (h/t:HSMoghul)

The parliament that was elected on May 6 also convened for a brief session on Thursday, when lawmakers from the far-right Golden Dawn party marched into parliament for the first time.

Deputies from the party, whose members give Nazi-style salutes, refused to stand when three Muslim lawmakers were sworn in on the Koran during the oath ceremony.

You will recall that there was similar outrage in the US, mainly from Right-wingers when Keith Ellison was sworn into Congress with his hand on the Quran. Recall that one of the leading hate-mongers, Robert Spencer remarked,

“I hope there will be some who have the courage to point out that no American official should be taking an oath on the Qur’an.”

Polls Show Greece Electing Pro-Bailout Government

ATHENS (Reuters) – Greek voters are returning to the establishment parties that negotiated its bailout, a poll showed on Thursday, offering potential salvation for European leaders who say a snap Greek election next month will decide whether it must quit the euro.

The poll, the first conducted since talks to form a governmentcollapsed and a new election was called for June 17, showed the conservative New Democracy party in first place, several points ahead of the radical leftist SYRIZA which has pledged to tear up the bailout.

EU leaders say that without the bailout, Greece would be headed for certain bankruptcy and ejection from the common currency, which would sow financial destruction across the continent. The prospect SYRIZA would win the election has sent the euro and markets across the continent plummeting this week.

The poll predicted New Democracy would win 26.1 percent of the vote compared to 23.7 percent for SYRIZA.

Crucially, it showed that along with the Socialist PASOK party, New Democracy would have enough seats to form a pro-bailout government, which it failed to win in an election on May 6, forcing a new vote and prompting a political crisis that has put the future of the euro in doubt.

Polls last week had showed SYRIZA well in front, with anti-bailout voters rallying behind its charismatic 37-year-old leader Alexis Tsipras. First place comes with a bonus of 50 extra seats in the 300-seat parliament, so even a tiny edge would be pivotal in determining who forms the next government.

The election is still a month away, and Greek voters have been fickle. Experts warned against drawing any strong conclusions from a single poll. Nevertheless, a trend that had shown SYRIZA surging ahead appears to have turned.

“It seems people vented their anger in the election and then they got scared. They disliked that there was no government and they got worried about a possible exit from the euro,” political analyst John Loulis said of the surprise poll result.

“Still, voters are far from enthusiastic with New Democracy. Things are still volatile. The outcome of the elections will depend on who will make the fewest mistakes.”

Rating agency Fitch underscored the high stakes, downgrading Greece’s debt a further notch below investment grade to CCC.

“In the event that the new general elections scheduled for 17 June fail to produce a government with a mandate to continue with the EU-IMF program of fiscal austerity and structural reform, an exit of Greece from (the euro) would be probable,” the ratings agency said in a statement.

Earlier on Thursday Tsipras predicted his party would sweep next month’s election and refused to give up his demand for an end to “barbaric” austerity policies he said were bankrupting the nation.

“They are trying to terrorize the people to make SYRIZA cave in. We will never compromise,” the ex-Communist student leader told his party’s lawmakers, often addressing them as “comrades”.

“We will never participate in a government to rescue the bailout,” he said. “The Greek people voted for an end to the bailout and barbaric austerity. They ignored the threats and the cheap propaganda. And we are certain they will do the same now.”

“HUMILIATING EXIT”

An emergency government led by a judge and made up of mainly professors, technocrats and a few politicians was sworn in on Thursday in a ceremony presided over by the Archbishop Ieronimos of Athens.

The government has been tasked solely with taking the country to the next election and will not be permitted to take political decisions, meaning Greece will fall further behind on the reforms it has pledged to carry out to receive rescue loans.

At his first cabinet meeting, caretaker Prime Minister Panagiotis Pikrammenos told ministers they would receive no salary and urged them to dispense with frills like limousines or business trips.

The parliament that was elected on May 6 also convened for a brief session on Thursday, when lawmakers from the far-right Golden Dawn party marched into parliament for the first time.

Deputies from the party, whose members give Nazi-style salutes, refused to stand when three Muslim lawmakers were sworn in on the Koran during the oath ceremony.

The parliament is expected to be dissolved later this week ahead of the election in June.

Read the rest here…

Turns out EDL leader Tommy Robinson likes to abuse young 15 year old Muslim on Twitter. What a hypocritical scumbag:

EDL Leader Tommy Robinson outed as child sex pest

(EDL News)

With the current obsession with paedophiles which seems to occupy the EDL’s every waking minute, you would think that English Defence League leader and deputy leader of the British Freedom Party, Tommy Robinson would try and avoid Tweeting fifteen year old girls and telling them they are ‘pretty fit for a Muslim’.

After realising that he had made a ‘mistake’ you would have thought that Tommy would apologise immediately instead of attacking the schoolgirl by calling her scum and setting his vile followers, the EDL casuals including EDL Twitter attack dog, Becky Marsh, on her.

Did Tommy’s need to make racist mysogynistic remarks to a Muslim cloud his judgement or is there something he is not telling us?

Maybe all that time spent with Richard Price has rubbed off on him but we at EDL News feel Tommy has some explaining to do to CEOPs.

What we can guarantee is EDL members will be extremely quiet about this and a stark contrast to how they would foam if a Muslim had Tweeted that.

We await a demo outside Tommy’s house but will not be holding our breath, because the average EDL member have proven time and time again that they have little interest in white paedophiles.

(We have obfuscated the girl’s name, photo and Twitter address because of her age)

Clearly panicking Robinson went on to claim the schoolgirl was not 15, even though her date of birth was on her profile. Robinson then went on to delete the Tweet.

Not content with shaming himself enough on one day and despite knowing her age, Robinson goes on to accuse the schoolgirl of flirting with him.  Being a ballsy young Asian women who is not going to put up with sex pests, she went on to kick him from one end of Twitter to the other and the #tommyisapaedo hashtag started trending.

Tommy’s response got more and more vile:

As did the response from many of his supporters including Becki Marsh, cheerleader for the EDL’s football hooligan division, The casuals.

These would be the people who would be calling for the hanging of Muslims if they make sexual advances towards a schoolgirl on Twitter.

Read the rest…

It’s not rocket science, if you are going to employ tactics in which you kill 10s or 100s of more civilians for each terrorist then you are not going to be liked.

Reuters seems to have figured this out:

But many say U.S. drone attacks, which have often killed civilians and are deeply resented by Yemenis, may do more harm than good, potentially discrediting Hadi as a lackey of Washington and turning the wider population against him.

Now if we could only get the policy-makers and military strategists to realize this.

Golden Dawn

The Greek neo-Nazi party, The Golden Dawn has won 7% of the vote in Greece. According to Neni Panourgia, members of the Golden Dawn were also a part of the massacres in Srebrenica, Bosnia (h.t: HSMoghul),

Golden Dawn gained notoriety after 1991, when it started attacking the first Albanian immigrants and after some of its members participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The organisation registered as a political party in 1993 and first won political representation in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens City Council.

Neni describes the Golden Dawn as a “European problem”:

Greece’s neo-Nazi Golden Dawn is a European problem

by Neni Panourgia (AlJazeera English)

New York, New York - By now, nearly everybody has been exposed to the phenomenon of Golden Dawn (Chrysi Avgi in Greek), the neo-Nazi organisation that received almost 7 per cent of the vote in the Greek elections of May 6.

After the initial shock, the question “How is this possible?” was followed by the legitimate worry: “Are Greeks becoming fascists?” Some commentators on various blogs (many of them from northern and western Europe) even left messages urging the Greek electorate to feel shame, the deeper the better, for this unsightly and frightening development.

But let’s set a few things straight. First of all, Golden Dawn, despite its recent claims, is indeed a neo-Nazi party. Their ideology, which they describe on their website as “Popular and Social Nationalism”, gives their precise coordinates within Nazi ideology.

So do the origins of their party, which was founded by Nikolaos Michaloliakos in 1985 under a direct order from the imprisoned leader of the Greek junta, George Papadopoulos. And so do their self-representation, language and tactics. The official publication of Golden Dawn runs articles praising the Nazis and often places photographs of Hitler, Himmler, and Nazi gatherings on its front cover. The members of the organisation have the same uneducated, invented, and highly idiosyncratic understanding of ancient Greece as the Nazis did.

And their tactics are virtually indistinguishable from Nazi terrorist tactics: they terrorise immigrants, leftists, and journalists; they beat and maul teachers and students; they have infiltrated athletic clubs and have introduced hooliganism to the Greek landscape; and they have assumed the role of vigilantes and protectors of the general public. Some of those attacks have been documented, and the Golden Dawn-affiliated perpetrators have gone on trial and been imprisoned.

The history of the organisation is inextricably connected to the history of Michaloliakos, whose first public intervention in 1976 was an attack on journalists who were covering the funeral of the junta torturer Evangelos Mallios, who had been executed by the urban guerrilla organisation 17 November. Arrested and briefly detained, Michaloliakos met the leaders of the military junta in jail. Two years after his release he engaged in a series of bombings of public places in Athens, for which he was indicted. Golden Dawn gained notoriety after 1991, when it started attacking the first Albanian immigrants and after some of its members participated in the Srebrenica massacre. The organisation registered as a political party in 1993 and first won political representation in 2010, when Michaloliakos was elected to the Athens City Council.

It is doubtful, however, whether the 21 Golden Dawn deputies will ever enter the Greek parliament (legally, that is). We now know that no coalition government can be formed (without a gross violation of the Constitution), which means that new elections will be held, probably on June 17. Yesterday’s polls showed that 76 per cent of the Greek electorate expects Golden Dawn to lose most of its vote, with a large number of those polled expressing doubts that it would even win the 3 per cent needed to enter parliament.

Two questions remain, however, regardless of whether Golden Dawn ever enters parliament. The first one is a question of democracy: namely, what sorts of legitimate steps are available to democratic polities when they face the development of a totalitarian, racist, exclusionary formulation that actively engages in violent acts that severely restrict the civil and human rights of others? I argue that when a state is faced not simply with ideas but with themateriality of actions, then the state is obligated to outlaw them and the media are obligated to report on them. In Greece this is a multiply complex issue, since what I suggest was used from the beginning of the 20th century as the groundwork upon which the elimination of the left took place, based on fabricated accusations.

A second question remains: Why would Greeks, who fought against totalitarianism in massive numbers and paid one of the heaviest tolls in Europe for their participation in the resistance against Nazi Germany, vote for this despicable, emetic, and deeply anti-political formation, even as a protest?

What we need to keep in mind is that this tolerance of violence in the public sphere, especially violence that is directed towards the unarmed and the unprotected, is the result of the state’s long-term suppression of dissent and the collaboration of the police forces with right-wing extremists whose violent tactics the police have used. This tolerance is evident even in mundane instances, such as when, in 1999, the ludicrous Gerasimos Yakoumatos, a deputy and member of the centre-right New Democracy party, wanting to show the Minister of Public Order that he “meant business”, walked into Parliament brandishing his (legally obtained) revolver as protest for his house having been burglarised by immigrants the previous evening. Not only was this tolerated, but he was not arrested and was not in any way reprimanded.

The Greek polity has always found itself in a tug-of-war. On one end, there is a wide, democratic, proceduralist, but largely powerless (and ultimately apathetic) body politic. On the other end, there is a small but powerful authoritarian class that constitutes the core of state structures. Decades of brutal suppression of dissent has relied upon various para-state and paramilitary organisations. Police brutality, hooliganism, and the deep-seated intimacy between fragments of the police force and Golden Dawn have made the organisation’s temporary surge possible.

There is no right, centre, or left distinction in this, if by left one means the nominally socialist PASOK party. All post-junta Greek governments have availed themselves of this intimate relationship, as all Greek governments, at least from the early years of the 20th century, have invested more energy and resources into producing a polity that relies on snitches and turncoats than in producing responsible, accountable, and democratically minded citizens. For example, in the summer of 2002, as the dismantling of 17 November was taking place, the Greek prime minister – clearly at the behest of the British and the American antiterrorist secret services – asked the citizens to report anyone who appeared to be suspicious and dangerous.

A month ago I wrote in the Anthropology Newsletter about the claim that under the current circumstances in Europe, in which the social welfare state is being eviscerated and the destitute are pitted against the poor, the distinction between right and left is no longer useful. I argue, however, that it is precisely now that the elision of such a distinction is pregnant with dangers that the world has faced before.

The neo-cons, the neo-fascists, and the neo-Nazis have been selectively appropriating leftist discourses and practices in order to obscure and obfuscate the distinctions between left and right. Michaloliakos, the coddled child of the junta, uses the term “junta” pejoratively (to indicate the totally inept but democratically elected Greek government, the press, and the memorandum), calls the actions of Golden Dawn “national resistance” when he instigates violence against immigrants and politicians, and has warned about an “uprising of the masses”.

Europe stands on the head of a needle, steeped in a crisis that threatens the foundational premises of democracy, self-determination, and autonomy. Golden Dawn is a European problem, not a limited and containable Greek one. It is a European problem because its ideology developed and flourished in Germany and Italy of the early 20th century. It is not a “natural”, essential, ontological property of Greece, and it is intractably connected to the moralistic and punitive positions that have organised the actions of the troika that put the bailout packages together.

When people are pushed to the brink, ugly things happen, and the troika (and particularly Merkel) ought never to forget the warning of George Santayana: “Those who forget history are condemned to repeat it”.

Suffice to say many Islamophobes deny the Genocide against Bosnian Muslims, chief amongst them are Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller.

Ratko Mladic goes on trial for genocide

(AlJazeera English)

The trial of General Ratko Mladic, the former Bosnian Serb army chief accused of orchestrating war crimes and a campaign of genocide, has begun at a special UN court at The Hague in the Netherlands.

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia made their opening statements against Mladic on Wednesday almost a year after his arrest in Serbia and subsequent deportation after years on the run.

Mladic is accused of 11 counts of war crimes and crimes against humanity, including orchestrating the week-long massacre of over 7,000 Muslim boys and men at Srebrenica in 1995 during the Bosnian war.

Prosecutor Dermot Groome said the prosecution would present evidence showing “beyond a reasonable doubt the hand of Mr. Mladic in each of these crimes”.

“The world watched in disbelief that in neighborhoods and villages within Europe a genocide appeared to be in progress,” said Groome, describing the beginning of the war in 1992.

“By the time Mladic and his troops murdered thousands in Srebrenica … they were well-rehearsed in the craft of murder,” Groome told the court.

Older but defiant

Dressed in a dark grey suit and dark tie, Mladic, now 70, flashed a thumbs-up and clapped his hands as he entered the courtroom in The Hague.

In the packed public seating area, a mother of one of the Srebrenica victims whispered “vulture” several times as prosecutors opened their case.

Later, Mladic made eye contact with one of the Muslim women in the audience, running a hand across his throat, in a gesture that led Presiding judge Alphons Orie to hold a brief recess and order an end to “inappropriate interactions.”

“Ratko Mladic is clearly not the stocky, physically imposing, bullish man that we remember from images of the early ’90s,” Al Jazeera’s Barnaby Phillips reported from The Hague.

Phillips added, however, that even with his age, the general remained as defiant as ever.

“You could really sense his contempt for this court, which he calls the ‘NATO’ court,” he said.

Axel Hagedorn, a lawyer for many of the mothers of those killed in Srebrenica, said that many of his clients had travelled to The Hague, where they were relieved to finally see Mladic stand trial.

“I think he looks much more healthy than last year, when he appeared, that is good for us, because we hope that he can survive this trial and face imprisonment,” he said.

The Mladic trial would also help build a separate case by the Srebrenica families against the United Nations, he said.

In April, the Dutch Supreme Courht ruled that the UN could not be prosecuted in the Netherlands for failing to prevent genocide in Srebrenica, but the families’ lawyers plan to appeal to the European Court of Human Rights.

“This case is very linked to our case, on the failure of the United Nations to protect the people of Srebrenica,” Hagedorn said.

There are concerns that Mladic’s trial could be disrupted by the defendant’s poor health. He is believed to have suffered at least one stroke while in hiding and was admitted to hospital for pneumonia last October.

Slobodan Milosevic, the former Serbian leader, died of a heart attack in detention in 2006 before a verdict in his trial could be reached.

‘Biggest butcher’

Outside, protesters held up placards including one that said “we want justice for the victims of Srebrenica”.

Mladic, who was arrested in a village in northern Serbia last May, is also charged over the 44-month siege of Sarajevo during which more than 10,000 people died.

Mladic has refused to enter a plea and rejected the charges against him as “monstrous” and “obnoxious” in a preliminary hearing last June. He says he was defending his country and his people as leader of the Bosnian Serb army. The court entered a ‘not guilty’ plea on his behalf.

He is the last of the main protagonists involved in the 1990s wars in the former Yugoslavia to go on trial in front of the special court established by the United Nations to prosecute crimes committed during the conflicts.

“This is the biggest butcher of the Balkans and the world,” Munira Subasic, 65, told the AFP news agency. She lost 22 relatives to Bosnian Serb military forces when Srebrenica was overrun in July 1995.

“I’ll look into his eyes and ask him if he repents,” said Subasic, who said she would watch the trial’s opening from the public gallery at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia.

The case has stirred up deep emotions in the Balkans and Wednesday’s proceedings were broadcast live on big screens in Sarajevo, where thousands died between 1992 and 1995.

“I hope that many of those who are disillusioned and believe that Mladic is a Serb hero will change their minds, and that the trial will demonstrate that he was just a criminal and a coward,” Fikret Grabovica, president of the association of parents and children killed in the siege of Sarajevo, said.

“Even if Mladic lives until the verdict, it will bring only mild satisfaction for the victims of Srebrenica and hundreds of other places in the Serb Republic,” Grabovica added, referring to the entity that rules Serb majority areas of Bosnia.

‘Not satisfied’

Since the end of the war, Bosnia-Herzegovina has been divided into a federation of Bosnian Muslims and Croats, and the Serb Republic.

Mladic’s lawyers last week attempted to have the trial pushed back as the court pondered their request to have presiding judge Alphons Orie removed from the bench. They had argued that Orie would be biased against Mladic because he had already condemned several of his former subordinates.

But Theodor Meron, the president of the court, denied the request.

“I am not satisfied that Mladic has demonstrated that a reasonable observer … would reasonably apprehend bias. I accordingly find Mladic’s request for Judge Orie’s disqualification to be unmeritorious,” he said in a statement.

Mladic is being held in the same prison as his former political leader Radovan Karadzic, who was arrested in 2008 and is now about halfway through his trial on similar charges to Mladic.

Mladic’s lawyers on Monday night filed another request to have the trial adjourned for six months, saying they had not had enough time to prepare, due to “errors” by the prosecution in disclosing documents.

Groome said on Wednesday he would not oppose a “reasonable adjournment”.

George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney and their legal advisers have been convicted of war crimes by a tribunal in Malaysia. (h/t: Al)

(via. Information Clearing House):

In what is the first ever conviction of its kind anywhere in the world, the former US President and seven key members of his administration were today (Friday) found guilty of war crimes.

Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and their legal advisers Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, William Haynes, Jay Bybee and John Yoo were tried in absentia in Malaysia.

The trial held in Kuala Lumpur heard harrowing witness accounts from victims of torture who suffered at the hands of US soldiers and contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

They included testimony from British man Moazzam Begg, an ex-Guantanamo detainee and Iraqi woman Jameelah Abbas Hameedi who was tortured in the notorious Abu Ghraib prison.

At the end of the week-long hearing, the five-panel tribunal unanimously delivered guilty verdicts against Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and their key legal advisors who were all convicted as war criminals for torture and cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment.

Full transcripts of the charges, witness statements and other relevant material will now be sent to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

The Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission is also asking that the names of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Gonzales, Yoo, Bybee, Addington and Haynes be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals for public record.

This verdict does not currently have any sort of enforcement power behind it but the hope is that it will be taken up by the International Court,

War crimes expert and lawyer Francis Boyle, professor of international law at the University of Illinois College of Law in America, was part of the prosecution team.

After the case he said: “This is the first conviction of these people anywhere in the world.”

While the hearing is regarded by some as being purely symbolic, human rights activist Boyle said he was hopeful that Bush and Co could soon find themselves facing similar trials elsewhere in the world.

“We tried three times to get Bush in Canada but were thwarted by the Canadian Government, then we scared Bush out of going to Switzerland. The Spanish attempt failed because of the government there and the same happened in Germany.”

Boyle then referenced the Nuremberg Charter which was used as the format for the tribunal when asked about the credibility of the initiative in Malaysia. He quoted: “Leaders, organizers, instigators and accomplices participating in the formulation or execution of a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes are responsible for all acts performed by any person in execution of such a plan.”

The US is subject to customary international law and to the Principles of the Nuremberg Charter said Boyle who also believes the week-long trial was “almost certainly” being monitored closely by both Pentagon and White House officials.

Professor Gurdial Singh Nijar, who headed the prosecution said: “The tribunal was very careful to adhere scrupulously to the regulations drawn up by the Nuremberg courts and the International Criminal Courts”.

He added that he was optimistic the tribunal would be followed up elsewhere in the world where “countries have a duty to try war criminals” and he cited the case of the former Chilean dictator Augustine Pinochet who was arrested in Britain to be extradited to Spain on charges of war crimes.

“Pinochet was only eight years out of his presidency when that happened.”

The Pinochet case was the first time that several European judges applied the principle of universal jurisdiction, declaring themselves competent to judge crimes committed by former heads of state, despite local amnesty laws.

Throughout the week the tribunal was packed with legal experts and law students as witnesses gave testimony and then cross examination by the defence led by lawyer Jason Kay Kit Leon.

The court heard how
· Abbas Abid, a 48-year-old engineer from Fallujah in Iraq had his fingernails removed by pliers.
· Ali Shalal was attached with bare electrical wires and electrocuted and hung from a wall.
· Moazzam Begg was beaten, hooded and put in solitary confinement.
· Jameelah was stripped and humiliated, and was used as a human shield whilst being transported by helicopter.

The witnesses also detailed how they have residual injuries till today.

Moazzam Begg, now working as a director for the London-based human rights group Cageprisoners said he was delighted with the verdict, but added: “When people talk about Nuremberg you have to remember those tried were all prosecuted after the war.

“Right now Guantanamo is still open, people are still being held there and are still being tortured there.”

In response to questions about the difference between the Bush and Obama Administrations, he added: “If President Bush was the President of extra-judicial torture then US President Barak Obama is the President of extra judicial killing through drone strikes. Our work has only just begun.”

The prosecution case rested on proving how the decision-makers at the highest level President Bush, Vice-President Cheney, Secretary of Defence Rumsfeld, aided and abetted by the lawyers and the other commanders and CIA officials – all acted in concert. Torture was systematically applied and became an accepted norm.

According to the prosecution, the testimony of all the witnesses exposed a sustained perpetration of brutal, barbaric, cruel and dehumanising course of conduct against them.
These acts of crimes were applied cumulatively to inflict the worst possible pain and suffering, said lawyers.

The president of the tribunal Tan Sri Dato Lamin bin Haji Mohd Yunus Lamin, found that the prosecution had established beyond a “reasonable doubt that the accused persons, former President George Bush and his co-conspirators engaged in a web of instructions, memos, directives, legal advice and action that established a common plan and purpose, joint enterprise and/or conspiracy to commit the crimes of Torture and War Crimes, including and not limited to a common plan and purpose to commit the following crimes in relation to the “War on Terror” and the wars launched by the U.S. and others in Afghanistan and Iraq.”

President Lamin told a packed courtroom: “As a tribunal of conscience, the Tribunal is fully aware that its verdict is merely declaratory in nature. The tribunal has no power of enforcement, no power to impose any custodial sentence on any one or more of the 8 convicted persons. What we can do, under Article 31 of Chapter VI of Part 2 of the Charter is to recommend to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission to submit this finding of conviction by the Tribunal, together with a record of these proceedings, to the Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court, as well as the United Nations and the Security Council.

“The Tribunal also recommends to the Kuala Lumpur War Crimes Commission that the names of all the 8 convicted persons be entered and included in the Commission’s Register of War Criminals and be publicised accordingly.

“The Tribunal recommends to the War Crimes Commission to give the widest international publicity to this conviction and grant of reparations, as these are universal crimes for which there is a responsibility upon nations to institute prosecutions if any of these Accused persons may enter their jurisdictions”.

Sheree Sabater

The two women who beat a Muslim woman walking with her children in Niagara Falls have been sentenced:

2 women sentenced in hate crime

(BuffaloNews)

LOCKPORT — Two women from Niagara Falls were sentenced to weekend jail terms Friday for their hate crime assault on a Pakistani woman last summer.

Niagara County Judge Sara Sheldon Farkas ordered Sheree A. Sabater, 39, to four months of weekends in the County Jail and three years’ probation. Antoinette S. Ivey, 32, drew two months of weekends in jail and five years’ probation.

The 26-year-old Muslim victim, who was walking with her two children July 14 near the Tops Market on Portage Road in Niagara Falls, was wearing a head scarf at the time, police said.

“This woman and her two children were just minding their own business,” Farkas said. “These two drunk, high, out-of-control women, and I use that term loosely, pummeled her to the ground in front of her children.”

The victim said in a later Buffalo News interview that she heard one of the attackers say, “She’s Pakistani and I want to kill her.”

The nationality was just a lucky guess, Assistant District Attorney Cheryl L. Nichols said.

“I didn’t know who she was,” Ivey said in court.

Sabater said, “I feel foolish.”

Read the rest…

AlJazeera uncovered another “anti-Islam” class in the US military. The class seems to have been lifted directly from the talking points of extremists such as Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer:

US Military Under Fire for ‘Anti-Islam Class’

(AlJazeera)

The United States military has called for a review of all its training classes after receiving criticism for a course taught to senior officers that allegedly encouraged war against Islam.

The controversial class presented slides that accused dozens of Islamic groups, many widely recognised as mainstream advocacy groups, of infiltrating the US media, education system, government and military.

One slide titled “The Muslim Brotherhood and Violence” showed a photo of an al-Qaeda beheading, erroneously conflating the two groups.

Through the slides and other presentations, the course created a picture of a US government co-opted by subversive Muslim elements.

Al Jazeera’s Josh Rushing reports from Washington.

What kind of man rips a veil off a woman’s face (via. Islamophobia-Watch):

Man arrested for attack on Muslim woman in Solihull

A Shirley man has been summoned to appear at Solihull Magistrates Court after he allegedly ripped a veil from a Muslim woman’s face in Touchwood.

Police reported that Ian Brazier, 26, had grabbed the victim, also 26, by her head and removed her face covering as she walked past the Disney store, on March 3. It’s alleged that he then threw the veil to the floor and left the shopping centre. A Solihull Police spokesman said the woman had not been physically harmed but was left severely shaken by the incident.

Officers tracked down Brazier following a CCTV image appeal. He will now appear at Solihull Magistrates on June 13.

Chief Inspector Kevin Doyle, from Solihull Police Station, said previously: “Reports of crimes like this are exceptionally rare both in Solihull and the wider West Midlands. We are treating this incident as a hate crime as we believe the woman was deliberately targeted because of her faith symbolised by her attire.”

Solihull News, 9 May 2012

Via ENGAGE

A slide from Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley's training materials

It’s one thing when loony bloggers and their fans suggest we “NUKE MECCA,” and quite another when similar suggestions are featured in training materials once used by the US military. (h/t: Just Stopping By)

U.S. Military Taught Officers: Use ‘Hiroshima’ Tactics for ‘Total War’ on Islam

By Noah Shachtman and Spencer Ackerman, Wired

The U.S. military taught its future leaders that a “total war” against the world’s 1.4 billion Muslims would be necessary to protect America from Islamic[sic] terrorists, according to documents obtained by Danger Room. Among the options considered for that conflict: using the lessons of “Hiroshima” to wipe out whole cities at once, targeting the “civilian population wherever necessary.”

The course, first reported by Danger Room last month and held at the Defense Department’s Joint Forces Staff College, has since been canceled by the Pentagon brass. It’s only now, however, that the details of the class have come to light. Danger Room received hundreds of pages of course material and reference documents from a source familiar with the contents of the class.

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff recently ordered the entire U.S. military to scour its training material to make sure it doesn’t contain similarly hateful material, a process that is still ongoing. But the officer who delivered the lectures, Army Lt. Col. Matthew A. Dooley, still maintains his position at the Norfolk, Virginia college, pending an investigation. The commanders, lieutenant colonels, captains and colonels who sat in Dooley’s classroom, listening to the inflammatory material week after week, have now moved into higher-level assignments throughout the U.S. military.

For the better part of the last decade, a small cabal of self-anointed counterterrorism experts has been working its way through the U.S. military, intelligence and law enforcement communities, trying to convince whoever it could that America’s real terrorist enemy wasn’t al-Qaida — but the Islamic faith itself. In his course, Dooley brought in these anti-Muslim demagogues as guest lecturers. And he took their argument to its final, ugly conclusion.

“We have now come to understand that there is no such thing as ‘moderate Islam,’” Dooley noted in a July 2011 presentation (.pdf), which concluded with a suggested manifesto to America’s enemies. “It is therefore time for the United States to make our true intentions clear. This barbaric ideology will no longer be tolerated. Islam must change or we will facilitate its self-destruction.”

Dooley could not be reached for comment. Joint Forces Staff College spokesman Steven Williams declined to discuss Dooley’s presentation or his status at the school. But when asked if Dooley was responsible for the course material, he responded, “I don’t know if I would classify him [Dooley] as responsible. That would be the commandant” of the school, Maj. Gen. Joseph Ward.

That makes the two-star general culpable for rather shocking material. In the same presentation, Dooley lays out a possible four-phase war plan to carry out a forced transformation of the Islam religion. Phase three includes possible outcomes like “Islam reduced to a cult status” and “Saudi Arabia threatened with starvation.” (It’s an especially ironic suggestion, in light of today’s news that Saudi intelligence broke up the most recent al-Qaida bombing plot.)

International laws protecting civilians in wartime are “no longer relevant,” Dooley continues. And that opens the possibility of applying “the historical precedents of Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki” to Islam’s holiest cities, and bringing about “Mecca and Medina['s] destruction.”

Dooley’s ideological allies have repeatedly stated that “mainstream” Muslims are dangerous, because they’re “violent” by nature. Yet only a few of al-Qaida’s most twisted fanatics were ever caught musing about wiping out entire cities.

“Some of these actions offered for consideration here will not be seen as ‘political correct’ in the eyes of many,” Dooley adds. “Ultimately, we can do very little in the West to decide this matter, short of waging total war.”

Dooley, who has worked at the Joint Forces Staff College since August 2010, began his eight-week class with a straightforward, two-part history of Islam. It was delivered by David Fatua, a former West Point history professor. “Unfortunately, if we left it at that, you wouldn’t have the proper balance of points of view, nor would you have an accurate view of how Islam defines itself,” Dooley told his students. Over the next few weeks, he invited in a trio of guest lecturers famous for their incendiary views of Islam.

Shireen Burki declared during the 2008 election that “Obama is bin Laden’s dream candidate.” In her Joint Forces Staff College lecture, she told students that “Islam is an Imperialist/Conquering Religion.” (.pdf)

Stephen Coughlin claimed in his 2007 master’s thesis that then-president George W. Bush’s declaration of friendship with the vast majority of the world’s Muslims had “a chilling effect on those tasked to define the enemy’s doctrine.” (.pdf)  Coughlin was subsequently let go from his consulting position to the military’s Joint Staff, but he continued to lecture at the Naval War College and at the FBI’s Washington Field Office. In his talk to Dooley’s class (.pdf), Coughlin suggested that al-Qaida helped drive the overthrow of Egyptian strongman Hosni Mubarak and Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi. It was part of a scheme by Islamists to conquer the world, he added. And Coughlin mocked those who didn’t see this plot as clearly as he did, accusing them of “complexification.”

Coughlin titled his talk: “Imposing Islamic Law – or – These Aren’t the Droids Your Looking For!”

Former FBI employee John Guandolo told the conspiratorial World Net Daily website last year that Obama was only the latest president to fall under the influence of Islamic extremists. “The level of penetration in the last three administrations is deep,” Guandolo alleged. In his reference material for the Joint Forces Staff College class, Guandolo not only spoke of today’s Muslims as enemies of the West. He even justified the Crusades, writing that they “were initiated after hundreds of years of Muslim incursion into Western lands.”

Guandolo’s paper, titled “Usual Responses from the Enemy When Presented With the Truth” (.pdf), was one of hundreds of presentations, documents, videos and web links electronically distributed to the Joint Forces Staff College students. Included in that trove: a paper alleging that “it is a permanent command in Islam for Muslims to hate and despise Jews and Christians” (.pdf). So was a video lecture from Serge Trifkovic, a former professor who appeared as a defense witness in several trials of Bosnian Serb leaders convicted of war crimes, including the genocide of Muslims. A web link, titled “Watch Before This Is Pulled,” supposedly shows President Obama — the commander-in-chief of the senior officers attending the course — admitting that he’s a Muslim.

Dooley added the caveats that his views are “not the Official Policy of the United States Government” and are intended “to generate dynamic discussion and thought.” But he taught his fellow military officers that Obama’s alleged admission could well make the commander in chief some sort of traitor. “By conservative estimates,” 10 percent of the world’s Muslims, “a staggering 140 million people … hate everything you stand for and will never coexist with you, unless you submit” to Islam. He added, “Your oath as a professional soldier forces you to pick a side here.” It is unclear if Dooley’s “total war” on Muslims also applied to his “Muslim” commander in chief.

After the Pentagon brass learned of Dooley’s presentation, the country’s top military officer, Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey, issued an order to every military chief and senior commander to get rid of any similar anti-Islam instructional material. Dempsey issued the order because the White House had already instructed the entire security apparatus of the federal government — military and civilian — to revamp its counterterrorism training after learning of FBI material that demonized Islam.

By then, Dooley had already presented his apocalyptic vision for a global religious war. Flynn has ordered a senior officer, Army Maj. Gen. Frederick Rudesheim, to investigate how precisely Dooley managed to get away with that extended presentation in an official Defense Department-sanctioned course. The results of that review are due May 24.

Ironically, Dooley and his guest lecturers paint a dire picture of the forward march of Islamic extremism right as its foremost practitioner feared its implosion. Documents recently declassified by the U.S. government revealed Osama bin Laden fretting about al-Qaida’s brutal methods and damaged brand alienating the vast majority of Muslims from choosing to wage holy war. Little could he have known that U.S. military officers were thinking of ways to ignite one.

We didn’t hear much about this in the news media. Not only that we don’t even know the names of these children because their lives aren’t as valuable as “Western lives.” Let the “Greater Islamophobia” march on: (h/t: Saladin)

US attack kills 5 Afghan kids

The way in which the U.S. media ignores such events speaks volumes about how we perceive them

BY GLENN GREENWALD, Salon.com

(updated below – Update II)

Yesterday, I noted several reports from Afghanistan that as many as 20 civilians were killed by two NATO airstrikes, including a mother and her five children. Today, the U.S. confirmed at least some of those claims, acknowledging and apologizing for its responsibility for the death of that family:

The American military claimed responsibility and expressed regret for an airstrike that mistakenly killed six members of a family in southwestern Afghanistan, Afghan and American military officials confirmed Monday.

The attack, which took place Friday night, was first revealed by the governor of Helmand Province, Muhammad Gulab Mangal, on Monday. His spokesman, Dawoud Ahmadi, said that after an investigation they had determined that a family home in the Sangin district had been attacked by mistake in the American airstrike, which was called in to respond to a Taliban attack. . . . The victims were the family’s mother and five of her children, three girls and two boys, according to Afghan officials.

This happens over and over and over again, and there are several points worth making here beyond the obvious horror:

(1) To the extent these type of incidents are discussed at all — and in American establishment media venues, they are most typically ignored — there are certain unbending rules that must be observed in order to retain Seriousness credentials. No matter how many times the U.S. kills innocent people in the world, it never reflects on our national character or that of our leaders. Indeed, none of these incidents convey any meaning at all. They are mere accidents, quasi-acts of nature which contain no moral information (in fact, the NYT article on these civilian deaths, out of nowhere, weirdly mentioned that “in northern Afghanistan, 23 members of a wedding celebration drowned in severe flash flooding” — as though that’s comparable to the U.S.’s dropping bombs on innocent people). We’ve all been trained, like good little soldiers, that the phrase “collateral damage” cleanses and justifies this and washes it all way: yes, it’s quite terrible, but innocent people die in wars; that’s just how it is. It’s all grounded in America’s central religious belief that the country has the right to commit violence anywhere in the world, at any time, for any cause.

At some point — and more than a decade would certainly qualify — the act of continuously killing innocent people, countless children, in the Muslim world most certainly does reflect upon, and even alters, the moral character of a country, especially its leaders. You can’t just spend year after year piling up the corpses of children and credibly insist that it has no bearing on who you are. That’s particularly true when, as is the case in Afghanistan, the cause of the war is so vague as to be virtually unknowable. It’s woefully inadequate to reflexively dismiss every one of these incidents as the regrettable but meaningless by-product of our national prerogative. But to maintain mainstream credibility, that is exactly how one must speak of our national actions even in these most egregious cases. To suggest any moral culpability, or to argue that continuously killing children in a country we’re occupying is morally indefensible, is a self-marginalizing act, whereby one reveals oneself to be a shrill and unSerious critic, probably even a pacifist. Serious commentators, by definition, recognize and accept that this is merely the inevitable outcome of America’s supreme imperial right, note (at most) some passing regret, and then move on.

(2) Yesterday — a week after it leaked that it was escalating its drone strikes in Yemen — the Obama administration claimed that the CIA last month disrupted a scary plot originating in Yemen to explode an American civilian jet “using a more sophisticated version of the underwear bomb deployed unsuccessfully in 2009.” American media outlets — especially its cable news networks — erupted with their predictable mix of obsessive hysteria, excitement and moral outrage. CNN’s Wolf Blitzer last night devoted the bulk of his show to this plot, parading the standard cast of characters — former Bush Homeland Security adviser (and terrorist advocate) Fran Townsend and its “national security analyst” Peter Bergen — to put on their Serious and Concerned faces, recite from the U.S. Government script, and analyze all the profound implications. CNN even hauled out Rep. Peter King to warn that this shows a “new level” of Terror threats from Yemen. CNN’s fixation on this plot continued into this morning.

Needless to say, the fact that the U.S. has spent years and years killing innocent adults and children in that part of the world — including repeatedly in Yemen — was never once mentioned, even though it obviously is a major factor for why at least some people in that country support these kinds of plots. Those facts are not permitted to be heard. Discussions of causation — why would someone want to attack a U.S. airliner? – is an absolute taboo, beyond noting that the people responsible are primitive and hateful religious fanatics. Instead, it is a simple morality play reinforced over and over: Americans are innocently minding their own business — trying to enjoy our Freedoms — and are being disgustingly targeted with horrific violence by these heinous Muslim Terrorists whom we must crush (naturally, the solution to the problem that there is significant anti-American animosity in Yemen is to drop even more bombs on them, which will certainly fix this problem).

Indeed, on the very same day that CNN and the other cable news networks devoted so much coverage to a failed, un-serious attempt to bring violence to the U.S. — one that never moved beyond the early planning stages and “never posed a threat to public safety” — it was revealed that the U.S. just killed multiple civilians, including a family of 5 children, in Afghanistan. But that got no mention. That event simply does not exist in the world of CNN and its viewers (I’d be shocked if it has been mentioned on MSNBC or Fox either). Nascent, failed non-threats directed at the U.S. merit all-hands-on-deck, five-alarm media coverage, but the actual extinguishing of the lives of children by the U.S. is steadfastly ignored (even though the latter is so causally related to the former).

This is the message sent over and over by the U.S. media: we are the victims of heinous, frightening violence; our government must do more, must bomb more, must surveil more, to Keep Us Safe; we do nothing similar to this kind of violence because we are Good and Civilized. This is how our Objective, Viewpoint-Free journalistic outlets continuously propagandize: by fixating on the violence done by others while justifying — or, more often, ignoring — the more far-reaching and substantial violence perpetrated by the U.S.

(3) If one of the relatives of the children just killed in Afghanistan decided to attack the U.S. — or if one of the people involved in this Yemen-originating plot were a relative of one of the dozens of civilians killed by Obama’s 2009 cluster bomb strike — what would they be called by the U.S. media? Terrorists. Primitive, irrational, religious fanatics beyond human decency.

* * * * *

This point cannot be emphasized enough.

UPDATE: From the comments:

I was just sitting here thinking “I love reading GG, but I think he is being quite harsh here, it was only 5 kids that died, and that happens in war – its hardly as if it was some really major tragedy”.

And this is despite the fact that I would describe myself as a staunch anti-Imperialist who shuns the MSM – yet still I seem to be getting conditioned that the killing of these 5 kids is “normal”. Scary. Very scary.

We’re all subject to that conditioning, which is why it’s so necessary to pause every now and then to realize what a “really major tragedy” it actually is: one that could be easily avoided with different choices.

UPDATE II: It is now confirmed that the would-be bomber of the civilian jet was, in fact, a double agent working for the CIA and Saudi intelligence. So just as virtually every “domestic Terror plot” is one conceived, directed, funded and controlled by the FBI, this new Al Qaeda plot from Yemen was directed by some combination of the CIA and its Saudi partners. So this wasn’t merely a failed, nascent plot which is causing this fear-mongering media orgy: it was one controlled at all times by the U.S. and Saudi Governments.

Uprooted trees

This is a recurring thing, in which extremist settlers, who believe that God gave them the land attempt to intimidate and terrorize Palestinian landowners in the hope that they will leave and then the settlers can annex the land. (h/t: Musa)

NABLUS (Ma’an) — Israeli settlers on Wednesday set fire to hundreds of trees in Nablus in the northern West Bank, a Fatah official said.

Ghassan Doughlas said residents of Tappuah settlement chopped down and torched around 250 olive trees in Jammain village. The settlement is built on land belonging to the village.

Settlers also chopped down 17 trees in nearby village Burin and forced shepherds off their pastures in Aqraba and Yanun, also in Nablus, Doughlas said.

I’am not sure if the following is a report of the same incident, but it was reported a week ago, and reports that the settlers came from Etamar rather than Tappuah (via. Occupied-Palestine):

NABLUS, (PIC)– Jewish settlers uprooted 200 olive trees near Aqraba village, Nablus, on Wednesday morning, local sources said.

Hamza Deiriya, a member of the committee for the defense of Aqraba land, said that the settlers came from Etamar settlement and chopped off the trees planted in an area of six dunums.

He noted that the settlers were attacking this same area for the sixth time, recalling that olive trees and water wells in it were destroyed at their hands.

He charged that the Jewish settlers want to terrorize the Palestinian landowners and to annex their land.

Amiens: two elderly Muslims attacked by far right thugs on way to mosque

By France-Soir News / Service Miscellaneous Facts (with AFP)

En route to the mosque, the two old men were beaten by two men claiming the extreme right.

Yonas Fikre accused the FBI of involvement in his torture in the UAE after he refused to become an informant for the FBI.

US Charges Yonas Fikre, American Who Claimed Torture, With Conspiracy

by Nick Baumann (Mother Jones)

Last month, Mother Jones broke the story of Yonas Fikre. An American Muslim now living in Sweden, Fikre claims he was tortured in the United Arab Emirates at the US government’s request after refusing to become an informant for the FBI. On Tuesday, less than three weeks after Fikre’s allegations were made public, the Justice Department charged Fikre, his brother Dawit Woldehawariat, and a third man, Abrehaile Haile, with conspiring to hide $75,000 worth of money transfers to the UAE and Sudan from the government, all in violation of federal reporting requirements for large international financial transactions. Woldehawariat, Fikre’s brother, was also charged with failing to file a tax return in 2009 and 2010.

There are no allegations of terrorism associated with the charges.

Gadeir Abbas, a lawyer with the Council on American-Islamic Relations who has been working with Fikre, told Mother Jones on Wednesday that the federal charges were retaliation for Fikre’s refusal to cooperate with the FBI. “It is disappointing but not surprising that the FBI is retaliating against Yonas by filing specious charges against him after they promised to make his life difficult after he refused to become their informant,” Abbas wrote in an email. “While FBI agents lied to Yonas about many things, in this case, it seems that they have kept their word.”

Thomas Nelson, Fikre’s Portland, Oregon-based lawyer, told the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on Tuesday that he was unaware of the charges against his client. But Abbas said he’s been in touch with Nelson since then and the two are working together to decide what to do next.

Here’s the charging document:

A bit of a long read, but well worth it (h/t: BA):

The Obama Team Just Doesn’t Get It: US Violence and Occupation Spark Terrorism

(Alternet.org)

John Brennan, President Obama’s chief adviser on counter-terrorism, has again put on public display two unfortunate facts: (1) that the White House has no clue as to how to counter terrorism; and (2) (in Brennan’s words) “the unfortunate fact that to save many innocent lives we are sometimes obliged to take lives.”

In a speech on April 30, Brennan did share one profound insight: “Countries typically don’t want foreign soldiers in their cities and towns.” His answer to that? “The precision of targeted [drone] strikes.” Does he really mean to suggest that local populations are more accepting of unmanned drones buzzing overhead and firing missiles on the push of a button by a “pilot” halfway around the world?

Beneath Brennan’s Orwellian rhetoric lies the reality that he remains unable (or unwilling) to deal with, the $64 question former White House correspondent Helen Thomas asked him repeatedly on Jan. 8, 2010, about why terrorists do the things they do:

Brennan: “Al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

Is it possible he still has no clue? To demonstrate how little progress Brennan has made in the way of understanding the challenge of “terrorism,” let’s look back at my commentary in early 2010 about Brennan’s vacuous non-answers to Helen Thomas. At the time, I wrote:

Thank God for Helen Thomas, the only person to show any courage at the White House press briefing after President Barack Obama gave a flaccid account of the intelligence screw-up that almost downed an airliner on Christmas Day 2009.

After Obama briefly addressed L’Affaire Abdulmutallab and wrote “must do better” on the report cards of the national security schoolboys responsible for the near catastrophe, the President turned the stage over to counter-terrorism guru John Brennan and Department of Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano.

It took 89-year old veteran correspondent Helen Thomas (now 91) to break through the vapid remarks about rechanneling “intelligence streams,” fixing “no-fly” lists, deploying “behavior detection officers,” and buying more body-imaging scanners.

Thomas recognized the John & Janet filibuster for what it was, as her catatonic press colleagues took their customary dictation and asked their predictable questions. Instead, Thomas posed an adult query that spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more high-tech gizmos and more intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling public.

She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did. Thomas: “And what is the motivation? We never hear what you find out on why.”

Brennan: “Al Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton slaughter of innocents. … They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort of drive. Unfortunately, al Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But al Qaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”

Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”

Brennan: “I’m saying it’s because of an al Qaeda organization that used the banner of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”

Thomas: “Why?”

Brennan: “I think this is a — long issue, but al Qaeda is just determined to carry out attacks here against the homeland.”

Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”

Neither did President Obama, nor anyone else in the U.S. political/media hierarchy. All the American public gets is the boilerplate about how al Qaeda evildoers are perverting a religion and exploiting impressionable young men. There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently and even resort to suicide attacks.

Obama’s Non-Answer

I had been hoping Obama would say something intelligent about what drove Abdulmutallab to do what he did, but the President uttered a few vacuous comments before sending in the clowns. This is what he said before he walked away from the podium:

“It is clear that al Qaeda increasingly seeks to recruit individuals without known terrorist affiliations … to do their bidding. … And that’s why we must communicate clearly to Muslims around the world that al Qaeda offers nothing except a bankrupt vision of misery and death … while the United States stands with those who seek justice and progress. … That’s the vision that is far more powerful than the hatred of these violent extremists.”

But why it is so hard for Muslims to “get” that message? Why can’t they end their preoccupation with dodging U.S. missiles in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen and Gaza long enough to reflect on how we are only trying to save them from terrorists while simultaneously demonstrating our commitment to “justice and progress”?

Does a smart fellow like Obama expect us to believe that all we need to do is “communicate clearly to Muslims” that it is al Qaeda, not the U.S. and its allies, that brings “misery and death”? Does any informed person not know that the unprovoked U.S.-led invasion of Iraq killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and displaced 4.5 million from their homes? How is that for “misery and death”?

Rather than a failure to communicate, U.S. officials are trying to rewrite recent history, which seems to be much easier to accomplish with the Washington press corps and large segments of the American population than with the Muslim world. But why isn’t there a frank discussion by America’s leaders and media about the real motivation of Muslim anger toward the United States? Why was Helen Thomas the only journalist to raise the touchy but central question of motive?

Peeking Behind the Screen

We witnessed a similar phenomenon when the 9/11 Commission Report tiptoed into a cautious discussion of possible motives behind the 9/11 attacks. To their credit, the drafters of that report apparently went as far as their masters would allow, in gingerly introducing a major elephant into the room: “America’s policy choices have consequences. Right or wrong, it is simply a fact that American policy regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and American actions in Iraq are dominant staples of popular commentary across the Arab and Muslim world.” (p. 376)

When asked later about the flabby way that last sentence ended, former Rep. Lee Hamilton, Vice-Chair of the 9/11 Commission, explained that there had been a Donnybrook over whether that paragraph could be included at all.

The drafters also squeezed in the reason given by Khalid Sheikh Mohammed as to why he “masterminded” the attacks on 9/11: “By his own account, KSM’s animus toward the United States stemmed … from his violent disagreement with U.S. foreign policy favoring Israel.”

Would you believe that former Vice President Dick Cheney has also pointed to U.S. support for Israel as one of the “true sources of resentment”? This unique piece of honesty crept into his speech to the American Enterprise Institute on May 21, 2009.

Sure, he also trotted out the bromide that the terrorists hate “all the things that make us a force for good in the world.” But the Israel factor slipped into the speech, perhaps an inadvertent acknowledgement of the Israeli albatross adorning the neck of U.S. policy in the Middle East. Very few pundits and academicians are willing to allude to this reality, presumably out of fear for their future career prospects.

Former senior CIA officer Paul R. Pillar, now a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the few willing to refer, in his typically understated way, to “all the other things … including policies and practices that affect the likelihood that people … will be radicalized, and will try to act out the anger against us.” One has to fill in the blanks regarding what those “other things” are.

But no worries. Secretary Napolitano has a fix for this unmentionable conundrum. It’s called “counter-radicalization,” which she describes thusly: “How do we identify someone before they become radicalized to the point where they’re ready to blow themselves up with others on a plane? And how do we communicate better American values and so forth … around the globe?”

Better communication. That’s the ticket.

Hypocrisy and Double Talk

But Napolitano doesn’t acknowledge the underlying problem, which is that many Muslims have watched Washington’s behavior closely for many years and view U.S. declarations about peace, justice, democracy and human rights as infuriating examples of hypocrisy and double talk. So, Washington’s sanitized discussion about motives for terrorism seems more intended for the U.S. domestic audience than the Muslim world.

After all, people in the Middle East already know how Palestinians have been mistreated for decades; how Washington has propped up Arab dictatorships; how Muslims have been locked away at Guantanamo without charges; how the U.S. military has killed civilians in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere; how U.S. mercenaries have escaped punishment for slaughtering innocents.

The purpose of U.S. “public diplomacy” appears more designed to shield Americans from this unpleasant reality, offering instead feel-good palliatives about the beneficence of U.S. actions. Most American journalists and politicians go along with the charade out of fear that otherwise they would be accused of lacking patriotism or sympathizing with “the enemy.”

Commentators who are neither naïve nor afraid are simply shut out of the Fawning Corporate Media (FCM). Salon.com’s Glenn Greenwald, for example, has complained loudly about “how our blind, endless enabling of Israeli actions fuels terrorism directed at the U.S.,” and how it is taboo to point this out.

Greenwald recently called attention to a little-noticed Associated Press report on the possible motives of the 23-year-old Nigerian Abdulmutallab. The report quoted his Yemeni friends to the effect that the he was “not overtly extremist.” But they noted that he was open about his sympathies toward the Palestinians and his anger over Israel’s actions in Gaza. (Emphasis added)

Former CIA specialist on al Qaeda, Michael Scheuer, has been still more outspoken on what he sees as Israel’s tying down the American Gulliver in the Middle East. Speaking Monday on C-SPAN, he complained bitterly that any debate on the issue of American support for Israel and its effects is normally squelched. Scheuer added that the Israel Lobby had just succeeded in getting him removed from his job at the Jamestown Foundation think tank for saying that Obama was “doing what I call the Tel Aviv Two Step.”

More to the point, Scheuer asserted: “For anyone to say that our support for Israel doesn’t hurt us in the Muslim world … is to just defy reality.”

Beyond loss of work, those who speak out can expect ugly accusations. The Israeli media network Arutz Sheva, which is considered the voice of the settler movement, weighed in strongly, citing Scheuer’s C-SPAN remarks and branding them “blatantly anti-Semitic.”

Read the rest here…

The uptick in attempted bombings in Northern Ireland is causing concern that there will be a return to heightened sectarian conflict.

Another bomb has been discovered, this time in the grounds of a Presbyterian Church in North Belfast. (H/T: JD)

Can one imagine if Muslims had been behind this? It would be all over international media, and you can bet the anti-Islam haters would lump it in as one more attempted “Islamic terrorist” attack, but they would never call it “Christian terrorism”:

(u.TV News)

A suspect object discovered at a church in north Belfast has been declared a viable device, police have confirmed.

The pipe bomb was found in the grounds of the Ballysillan Presbyterian Church on the Crumlin Road area on Wednesday morning.

Evacuated residents have been allowed to return to their homes and the road has re-opened to traffic.

Chief Inspector Andrew Freeburn, North Belfast Area Commander, said the device was capable of causing injury or death to anyone in the vicinity.

“The people who carried this out have shown a callous disregard for everyone in our community, not least those local residents who have been inconvenienced through being evacuated.

“This incident will be fully investigated with view to bringing criminal charges against those responsible.”

SDLP Oldpark Councillor Nichola Mallon said the object was discovered during the cutting of grass on the grounds of the church.

She continued: “The people of North Belfast have seriously suffered through the years as a result of the brutality of the Troubles. They don’t want or need to live under the renewed threat and fear of disruption and attack as they have been increasingly forced to do in recent days.”

Widely (un)reported terrorist bomb attack, would have killed many,

“To put it in perspective – anyone within 50 metres of this device would have been killed and anyone within 100 metres, seriously injured,” District Commander Chief Superintendent Alasdair Robinson told a news conference.

“This was a very significant device. If this had exploded it would have caused devastation.”

Bomb defused in Northern Ireland would have caused devastation

(news.yahoo.com)

BELFAST (Reuters) – Two bombs planted by militant Irish nationalists, including one packed with enough explosives to have killed anyone within a 50-metre (yard) radius, were defused in Northern Ireland on Saturday, police said.

The 600-pound (270-kg) bomb, roughly the same size as one used to kill 29 people in the town of Omagh in the single deadliest attack of Northern Ireland’s three decades of violence in 1998, was left in an abandoned vehicle in the town of Newry.

Police blamed nationalist groups opposed to a 1998 peace deal that largely ended violence in the British-controlled province, and said the device was fully primed to cause devastation.

“To put it in perspective – anyone within 50 metres of this device would have been killed and anyone within 100 metres, seriously injured,” District Commander Chief Superintendent Alasdair Robinson told a news conference.

“This was a very significant device. If this had exploded it would have caused devastation.”

Army bomb disposal experts defused a similarly sized bomb in the border town of Newry this time last year. Another bomb was also found near the main Dublin-to-Belfast motorway earlier this month that police said had the potential to kill.

The other bomb also made safe by the army on Saturday was discovered under a parked car in Belfast where 80 people were moved from their homes for five hours overnight. There was no confirmation yet of its size.

Police investigating dissident activity also found guns and ammunition in the mainly Catholic Ardoyne area of Belfast.

The 1998 peace agreement called a halt to more than three decades of violence between mainly Catholic Irish nationalists opposed to British rule of Northern Ireland and predominantly Protestant unionists who wanted it to continue.

But dissidents, many of them belonging to splinter groups that have broken away from the IRA, fight on with mostly unsuccessful and sporadic gun and bomb attacks.

(Reporting by Ivan Little; Editing by Padraic Halpin/Maria Golovnina)

Federal agents have arrested five people who were plotting to blow up a bridge near Cleveland, Ohio, an incident not connected to the anniversary of former al-Qaida chief Osama bin Laden’s death, officials say.

Douglas L. Wright, 26, Brandon L. Baxter, 20, and Anthony Hayne, 35, were arrested by members of the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Force on April 30 on charges of conspiracy and attempted use of explosive materials to damage physical property affecting interstate commerce. Also arrested were Connor C. Stevens, 20, and Joshua S. Stafford, 23. Charges are pending against them.

The five were “controlled by an undercover FBI employee,” and agents had them under extensive surveillance for a long period of time. The explosives they allegedly purchased were inoperable.

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“There was never any danger,” one federal official said.

Court documents say the FBI became aware of the men in October. A confidential source told the FBI that they were acting suspiciously at a protest event, wearing masks, talking on radios, and saying they didn’t believe in peaceful protest. They carried flags associated with anarchist groups.

From that point on, the informant was in constant touch with the group members. Their goal, one of them said, was to destroy private property “to send a message to corporations.” Last November, they discussed setting off smoke grenades on Veterans Memorial Bridge in Cleveland as a diversion while they would be knocking bank signs off the tops of tall buildings downtown.

Federal officials say Wright, Baxter and Hayne describe themselves as anarchists who considered a series of evolving plots over several months.

As Stevens and Stafford came into the plot, they started talking about using explosives.

The informant brought in two people he said could help them get explosives. These people were actually FBI undercover agents. The group members agreed to buy tear gas and gas masks. Two weeks later, they said they wanted to buy plastic explosives.

In late April, they settled on trying to blow up the Route 82 Brecksville-Northfield High Level Bridge. This bridge crosses from Brecksville, Ohio to Sagamore Hills, Ohio over the Cuyahoga Valley National Park.

On April 29, they met with the undercover agents and bought what they thought were two homemade bombs for $450. They planned to place them on April 30 but were arrested by the FBI.

The members of this group had a strong desire to commit acts of violence but no idea how to do it. At one point, a member of the group says what they needed was “mainly bleach,” because, he said, that’s what land mines and hand grenades were made with during World War II.

“The complaint in this case alleges that the defendants took specific and defined actions to further a terrorist plot,” said U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of Ohio Steven Dettelbach. “The defendants stand charged based not upon any words or beliefs they might espouse, but based upon their own plans and actions.”

A Muslim section in a Carre cemetery was desecrated

This is a report from the French website, Al-Kanz which does a good job in covering anti-Islam and anti-Muslim trends and attacks, they also alerted us to this story. Here is an approximate translation via. Google:

Desecrated Muslim section near Nice

Hatred of the living led some to attack the dead. The Muslim section of a cemetery in Carros, near Nice, has been desecrated, as reported by France Soir .

The brave Snatchers drew swastikas in reverse and inscribed “Vive Le Pen” and “Arab dehor” outside without s. The UMP proposed a few days ago to reform the spelling. Utility is measured. Like drawing classes with swastikas in place?

Here is the original in French:

La haine des vivants conduit certains à s’en prendre aux morts. Le carré musulman d’un cimetière à Carros, près de Nice, a été profané, comme le rapporte France Soir.

Les courageux profanateurs ont dessiné des croix gammées à l’envers et inscrit « Vive Le Pen » et « Arabe dehor », dehors sans s. L’UMP proposait il y a quelques jours de réformer l’orthographe. On mesure l’utilité. Tout comme des cours de dessin de croix gammées à l’endroit ?

Alan Lake and Roberta Moore have a difference of opinion over killing their political opponents

Richard Bartholomew points out that the 4 Freedoms Community website run by former English Defence League financier and ideologist Alan Ayling (“Alan Lake”) has updated its Code of Conduct.

Under the heading “Unlawful Killing” this now includes the following: “You must not endorse or encourage people to perform criminal executions. However, you can endorse enforcement of execution by the state (capital punishment) after application of due judicial process.”

The latter qualification is to cover Ayling himself, who has in the past advocated the execution of political opponents like Rowan Williams, David Cameron and Nick Clegg. Still, as long Ayling states that their killing should take place after “application of due judicial process” nobody could reasonably object to that, could they? Well, Ayling’s employers, the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, evidently did. At the end of last year they suspended him from his job after his identity was revealed.

The ban on endorsing or encouraging “criminal executions”, as distinct from the sort of executions Ayling himself advocates, was imposed after he was contacted by the Norwegian paper Dagbladetin connection with a comment posted on the 4 Freedoms site by Roberta Moore, the former leader of the EDL Jewish division who now heads the Jewish Defence League UK.

Expressing her regret that Anders Breivik had failed to kill Eskil Pedersen, the leader of the Norwegian Labour Party’s youth section who escaped from Utøya by boat, Moore wrote: “It seems Breivik missed one. This is precisely the coward that should have been killed. Cowards can run but eventually they meet their fate. May KARMA play its part now.”

Five years ago four Muslim extremists were jailed for four to six years after being convicted of soliciting to murder because they chanted slogans such as “bomb, bomb, Denmark”, “bomb, bomb the UK”, “7/7 on its way” and “Europe, you will pay with your blood” at a protest in London against the Jyllands-Posten anti-Islam cartoons.

The Director of Public Prosecutions said at the time: “Terrorism attacks our way of life and incitement can make a very real contribution to it. We shall continue to take incitement very seriously and prosecute it robustly where there is enough evidence for us to do so.”

Why, then, has Roberta Moore not been charged with the same offence?

Moore is not the only member of the Jewish Defence League UK to advocate terrorist violence against their political opponents. Another is Rob Sims, who posted the following comment on the EDL’s official Facebook page in response to Breivik’s trial:

“We should be supporting this guy, The lot he killed where a bunch of Anti-Semite scum, These left wing idiots and muslims are making europe resemble Germany under NSDAP rule, Whats it gonna take for people to realise that we need more people like Breivik who are willing to actually fight for what he believes in.”

So far as we know no action has been taken against Sims either, even though Durham Constabulary has been notified.

If the police and Crown Prosecution Service can find the time and resources to prosecute a Muslim teenager for posting offensive online comments about British troops, why aren’t the likes of Moore and Sims in court too?

It might surprise many to learn the Qur’an never commands “stoning,” though death by stoning is specified as a punishment numerous times in the Bible:

For taking ”accursed things”

Achan … took of the accursed thing. … And all Israel stoned him with stones, and burned them with fire, after they had stoned them with stones. … So the LORD turned from the fierceness of his anger. Joshua 7:1-26

For cursing or blaspheming

And he that blasphemeth the name of the LORD, he shall surely be put to death, and all the congregation shall certainly stone him. Leviticus 24:16

For adultery

If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city. Deuteronomy 22:23-24

For animals

“If a bull gores a man or woman to death, the bull is to be stoned to death, and its meat must not be eaten. But the owner of the bull will not be held responsible. Exodus 21:28

For a woman who is not a virgin on her wedding night

If any man take a wife, and go in unto her, and hate her … and say, I took this woman, and when I came to her, I found her not a maid: Then shall the father of the damsel, and her mother, take and bring forth the tokens of the damsel’s virginity unto the elders of the city in the gate: And the damsel’s father shall say … these are the tokens of my daughter’s virginity. And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. … But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel: Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die. Deuteronomy 22:13-21

For worshipping other gods

If there be found among you … that … hath gone and served other gods, and worshipped them … Then shalt thou … stone them with stones, till they die. Deuteronomy 17:2-5

If thy brother, the son of thy mother, or thy son, or thy daughter, or the wife of thy bosom, or thy friend, which is as thine own soul, entice thee secretly, saying, Let us go and serve other gods, which thou hast not known, thou, nor thy fathers … thou shalt stone him with stones, that he die. Deuteronomy 13:5-10

For disobeying parents

If a man have a stubborn and rebellious son, which will not obey the voice of his father, or the voice of his mother … Then shall his father and his mother lay hold on him, and bring him out unto the elders of his city … And they shall say unto the elders of his city, This our son is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey our voice; he is a glutton, and a drunkard. And all the men of his city shall stone him with stones, that he die. Deuteronomy 21:18-21

For witches and wizards

A man also or woman that hath a familiar spirit, or that is a wizard, shall surely be put to death: they shall stone them with stones: their blood shall be upon them. Leviticus 20:27

For giving your children to Molech

Whosoever … giveth any of his seed unto Molech; he shall surely be put to death: the people of the land shall stone him with stones. Leviticus 20:2

For breaking the Sabbath

They found a man that gathered sticks upon the sabbath day. … And the LORD said unto Moses, the man shall be surely put to death: all the congregation shall stone him with stones…. And all the congregation brought him without the camp, and stoned him with stones, and he died; as the LORD commanded Moses. Numbers 15:32-56

For cursing the king

Thou didst blaspheme God and the king. And then carry him out, and stone him, that he may die. 1 Kings 21:10

In the modern world, it’s Muslim-majority countries, including Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Afghanistan, that have become infamous for brutal punishments, including stoning. Ignoring dozens of Muslim-majority countries that don’t engage in such practices, anti-Muslim bigots constantly shine a spotlight on the most regressive regimes, leaving the public with the impression harsh punishments are an inevitable feature of Islamic Law.

Yet Iran has recently passed a law abolishing stoning as a punishment for adultery. As fixated as the major media usually are on that country, the story has attracted relatively scant coverage–and predictably, it’s been completely ignored by hate sites devoted to demonizing Muslims and generating hysteria about “creeping sharia.”

A lesson from Iran: Islamic Sharia is flexible after all

by Salah Al-Nasrawi, Ahram (Egypt)

A new law by the Islamic Republic of Iran to abolish stoning to death for adulterers passed last month has been received with a lot of skepticism in the West and little attention in the Arab and Islamic world.

But the ruling could have a significant bearing on the debate about the role of Islamic Sharia as Islamic groups gain power throughout the Middle East with many of them aspire to see Islamic jurisdiction as the law of the land.

Iran’s Guardian Council and Iranian parliament have approved an amendment to the country’s penal code by removing all executions by stoning which will come into effect once signed by the country’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Under Iran’s old penal code, stoning to death was one of the sentences applied for adultery. Iranian activists who campaigned against the practice said at least 99 men and women have been executed by stoning over the last 30 years.

The stoning sentence against Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, a 45-year-old Iranian woman, on charges of adultery and murder in 2006 has turned the spotlight on Iran as one of very few countries which adopts Sharia, or Islamic law.

The concept was equated in the West and among Muslim secularists with a variety of retributions including stoning of adulterers, chopping of limbs of thieves, death in blasphemy cases and restrictions on rights of women and minorities.

Ashtiani’s was convicted of having an “illicit relationship” with two men after the murder of her husband and was sentenced to 99 lashes. The verdict led to an international condemnation which has made Tehran delay carrying out the sentence.

While Ashtiani’s case points to a larger divide between the West and Iran, the punishment of the mother of two has highlighted how the contentious issue is a practice that has largely survived through centuries’ long cultural heritage.

The sentence, and now its abolishment, renewed a theological controversy in Islam on whether the harsh punishment is God’s commands, or a man-made effort to interpret Islamic Sharia, or Islamic law.

The case has spilled over into larger and even more complex issues within Islamic discourse, such as what consist Sharia, and if it is compatible with modern day human rights standards.

Most of Iran’s legal code was based on the constitution enacted under guidance of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, after the 1979 Islamic revolution that toppled secular regime of Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi.

The document declared Iran as a Muslim nation whose laws are derived from Islamic Sharia, which it defines as God’s “exclusive sovereignty and the right to legislate”, based on God’s commands in Quran and Sunnah, which is Prophet’s Mohammad’s teachings.

Sharia is still wide open for judgment under Islamic principle of Ijtihad. The term means an endeavor of a Muslim scholar to derive a rule of divine law from the Quran and Prophet Mohammad’s heritage.

Since the Islamic revolution some Iranian clerics have said stoning should be stopped because it may harm the reputation of Islam or the Islamic nation.

Others believed stoning is a divine punishment.

Some Muslim scholars believe stoning to death was never contemplated by Islam as a punishment for the act of adultery since the Quran does not even mention the word “stoning” or ‘death by stoning in any of its verses.

According to the Holy book of Islam all sexual intercourse outside the marital bond is considered sinful. Some scholars say Quran makes no distinction between adultery and fornication; in both cases the punishment is flogging to those found guilty.

In Quran verse “The Light (24:2) says: “The adulteress and the adulterer shall each be given a hundred lashes. Let no pity for them to cause you to disobey Allah.”

On the other hand, many Islamic legal scholars and judges agree that the Quranic text does not refer to executions by stoning but state they are part of the Sunnah.  They say there is no necessity that all orders of Sharia to be mentioned in Quran, one by one.

Other clerics say that even if stoning was practiced by Prophet Mohammad and his immediate followers it cannot be enforced nowadays. They believe stoning is a part of Islamic law but only the Prophet and his immediate successors are authorized or qualified to order and implement it.

In theory, stoning to death is still enacted in laws of countries which apply Islamic Sharia, such as Saudi Arabia, and Sudan. It has been also carried out in the previous Taliban-ruled Afghanistan and some parts of Nigeria.

Iran’s amendment of the penal code is believed to have been adopted in response to international criticism of its violations of human rights. It also coincides with mounting tension with the West over its nuclear program and increasing fear of a military conflict.

Critics, however, say the new code still considers adultery for married persons as a crime, although it doesn’t designate any specific punishment for it, leaving that for the judge to rely on a fatwa by a reliable cleric. Human rights organizations argued that such measures were inadequate and insisted that real change in the law is necessary.

Whether Iran wants to improve its human rights record or it is trying to ward off increasing Western pressure, the revision of its Islamic law now remains highly significant from both political and theological standpoints.

As Islamic groups gain power throughout the Middle East, the role of Sharia is coming under increased focus. Modernist forces in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia were shocked by the remarkable collective rise to power of these parties and the sudden transformation of their civil states into states with budding theocratic inclinations.

While fundamentalist movements, such Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, Tunisia’s Enhhada Party and the Justice and Development Party in Morocco speak about a broadly defined application of Sharia as “a main source” for legislation, other ultra-orthodox groups want a full-fledged Islamic legal code.

Yet there are increasing signs that show Islamic groups in these countries want more religion than previously admitted. Multiple reports and research works are suggesting that these countries are evolving towards more conservative rules and an Islamisation of social life.

There have already been calls from some Islamists to close down the tourist sites and to impose Islamic dress codes on the costal resorts. Women are also worried that political Islam might impose new restrictions on them such as forcing them to wear the Hijab (veil) and restrict their personal freedom.

Christians, a religious minority in the countries recently taken over by Islamists, complain of more intolerance and say they fear for their safety after increased cases of sectarian violence and discrimination.

Many secularists and liberals in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and other countries now want to see their next constitutions to have solid guarantees of democratic and civic commitments.

Here comes the Iranian experiment of abolishing a deep rooted Islamic concept of retribution and the lesson to be drawn from that by newly empowered Islamic groups in these three Arab countries and perhaps in others that will soon follow.

In Egypt, where the debate will open soon on drafting a new constitution, focus will increase on the role of Sharia in the country’s political and social life, especially in balancing Islam with democracy, personal freedom and modernity.

Although it is generally agreed among mainstream political groups that Sharia is the point of reference in legislation, the challenge will remain about how to distinguish what directly comes from the Quran and Sunnah from man-made interpretation of God’s revelations and the Prophet’s teachings.

Article 2 of Iran’s constitution provides such a room for maneuverability by combining both Ijtihad by qualified Faqih, or scholar(s) and the resort to “sciences, arts and the most advanced results of human experience” with Quran and Sunnah in legislation.

Under such overwhelming circumstances, the most liberal, secularists and reform minded Egyptian Muslims can argue for is that any stipulation of Islamic Sharia in the new constitution should provide flexibility, so that Islamic laws should be viewed and amended in light of time and changing circumstances.

Anders Behring Breivik’s destructive actions will not define a nation’s response and the lesson’s learned: (h/t: Roger via. Islamophobia Today)

In Norway’s Tragedy and a Nation’s Response Lies a Lesson For Us All

International media has been gripped by the trial of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik. A self-declared ‘Knights Templar Crusader’ who believed he was acting in ‘defense’ of Norway by killing a future generation of aspiring Leftist leaders he accused of abetting the ‘Islamization’ of Europe.

During the initial reporting of the rampage the speculation of who or what could be behind the attack was rife, most media outlets zeroed in on Muslims with many (mis)attributing the attacks to ‘Islam.’

“AlQaeda”… “the Muslims, who else,” many thought and were told. The rush to judgement was swift.

When the culprit was captured, Breivik’s Scandanavian features and anti-Islam manifesto belied the narratives swirling in the media, shell shocking a media-world expecting the arrest of a “disgruntled, unintegrated, bearded ‘brown’ emigre” from a Muslim majority nation.

Breivik’s ideology was formed in the far recesses of the internet, within the chambers of the blogosphere, where anti-Islam rhetoric coupled with conspiracies about the pending decline of the West created a toxic lethal cocktail of xenophobia and violent bigotry.

Ironically, Breivik claimed to be acting in the name of “Christianity,” claiming to be a scion and reviver of the medieval “Knights Templar” order of Crusaders, defending Europe from Islam while preserving its “Christian” culture and identity.

In the swift “rush to judgement” and the resultant revelation that the actual perpetrator of the atrocities in Oslo and Utoya was a man claiming to act in the interests of “Christianity” lies a lesson for us all.

It is well known that Christianity is a religion that promotes peace. The overwhelming majority of Christians in the world are averse to violence against innocents and view murder in the name of “Christ” as both illegitimate and unchristian. Just as we must recognize that the great religion of Christianity cannot be besmirched by the actions of a lone man, we must also ask the opinion-makers to be consistent and declare that Islam should not be essentialized as a “religion of violence” because of the actions of a lunatic fringe.

There is also another lesson that we can take away from the violence in Norway, and it relates to the response of the Norwegian people to the attacks.

Anger, a natural fiery fuel with the potential to engulf was present early on, but its tide ebbed because of the response of a nation. They were resolved, resolute that their disposition was not going to suffer a paradigm shift because of the actions of one man.

Quickly, the Prime Minister of Norway, Jens Stoltenberg who suffered his own personal loss in the attacks said, “we will respond to hate with our values.” A nation mourned, Christians and Muslims held joint services, healing songs were sung, and flowers left by citizens covered the destroyed, mangled concrete at the scene of the attacks.

This photo released, Dec. 8, 2011, by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, claims to show US RQ-170 Sentinel drone which Tehran says its forces downed. (AP Photo)

Drone warfare has made killing people from afar easy and virtually risk free.

Now the Iranians claim that they’ve reverse engineered a captured US drone and cracked its secrets. This claim was met with skepticism, but even if it’s true and the technology proves useful, can anyone imagine Iranian drones in the skies over Western countries? Of course not!

In the real world, we kill and they die, not the other way around. If that sacred rule is broken, they are clearly engaging in “terrorism,” which merely gives us an excuse to unleash even more death and destruction. If the Iranians don’t grasp the rules, they can expect to be obliterated.

US drones prowl the skies of a growing list of countries, killing suspected terrorists and innocent civilians with mindless efficiency. Heavy with sarcasm, Hamilton Nolan describes new, relaxed (and frightening) rules that will allow the US to expand drone warfare, in Yemen and beyond.

Whodathunkit? Only the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and the NYPD. So why not the US Military as well:

Military Halts Class Teaching Anti-Islam Material

(HuffingtonPost)

WASHINGTON — The Pentagon has suspended a course for military officers that officials say contained inflammatory material about Islam.

Defense Department spokesman Capt. John Kirby said Wednesday that among problems with the course taught at Norfolk, Va., was a presentation that asserted the United States is at war with Islam. Kirby noted that officials across two American administrations have stressed that the U.S. is at war with terrorists who have a distorted view of the religion.

Kirby declined to detail what he said were other problems with the course, called “Perspectives on Islam and Islamic Radicalism.”

Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has ordered all service branches to review their training to ensure other courses don’t use anti-Islamic material.

The director of the Islamic Center of Charlotte holds up an anti-Muslim letter it received.

No religious community should have to endure this.

The article notes that this letter was sent to not only one Islamic center but a few:

Hough says he contacted authorities about the letter on Friday and the FBI was already investigating because of letters sent to other Islamic centers across the state.

Threat letter to Islamic Center: We have no problem killing Muslims

CHARLOTTE, NC (WBTV) – The head of the Islamic Center of Charlotte is speaking out after the center received a letter threatening physical violence against Muslims.

According to the center’s director Jibril Hough, the letter was just one of several sent to Islamic centers around North Carolina.

Hough called the letter a “pretty detailed threat” and said the threat was serious enough that Charlotte police and the Federal Bureau of Investigations are now investigating the letter.

The letter, according to Hough, came from a person who claimed to be “part of a large network of folks from the business community, from the public services community, from the public school community that is seeking to make life harder on the public square for Muslims.”

Hough says he contacted authorities about the letter on Friday and the FBI was already investigating because of letters sent to other Islamic centers across the state.  Hough says he knows the center in Raleigh received the same letter and hopes it will get the same attention as if it was any other house of worship.

“We all need the same protection, under the law, as citizens. We all need that,” he told WBTV. “We deserved the same attention as anyone would receive.  We’re not trying to make more out of this than it deserves, but we’re also concerned that it gets the attention it truly deserves.”

Hough says it isn’t unusual for the center to get, what he calls, “minor threats” based on current events, but this letter appears to be more serious.

“It goes on to give some very derogatory and racial epitaphs, using the ‘N’ word a couple of times in different phrases, Hough says. “And then it ends with the threat that if we decide for any kind of retaliation based on this letter – that they have no problem killing Muslims legally, if we tried anything, so consider yourselves advised.”

The letter ends, in part, “We are prepared for the Muslim war that is going on overseas to begin in the streets right here.”

It was signed, but Hough says he doesn’t know if the name on the letter is actually the person who wrote it.

“We have to remain vigilant and we have to give this the attention that it deserves,” Hough says. “Not sweep it under the rug or ignore it, because who knows? It could more than just a lonely guy in the middle of the night typing up a letter just to let off some steam. It could be much more than that.”

Hough says so far it’s not clear what the motivation behind the letter is, but he is hoping that authorities will find out as a part of their investigation. He also hopes the letter writer will be prosecuted.

“We think that putting an extra eye on something like this – sometimes it helps. A lot of times these types of things go unnoticed and unheard of and you only maybe hear about something after the fact,” he said.

“We don’t want to wait until after the fact that something has actually taken place  – something much more harmful than this letter.”

<em>Copyright 2012 <a href=”http://www.wbtv.com/” target=”_blank”>WBTV</a>. All rights reserved.</em>

On Friday, April, 20 Buddhists protesters threatened violence if a mosque was not removed from the Dambulla region. A fire bomb was also lobbed at the mosque over night. On Sunday Sri Lankan authorities ordered the mosque’s relocation. (h/t: msmrishan)

Read the report from friday: Sri Lanka Buddhists Disrupt Mosques Prayers.

Sri Lanka orders relocation of mosque

(AlJazeera English)

The Sri Lankan government has ordered a mosque be relocated after Buddhist monks threatened to demolish it because they said the 50-year-old structure had been built illegally in an area sacred to Buddhists.

The order came on Sunday, two days after an estimated 2,000 monks in the island nation’s central town of Dambulla protested against the mosque, forcing it to abandon Friday prayers, and threatened violence if it was not removed.

The monks have also asked that a Hindu temple in the area be removed.

“Following a discussion with the relevant parties, the prime minister has ordered the disputed mosque moved to a suitable location as soon as possible,” Sisira Wijesinghe, media secretary to Prime Minister DM Jayaratne, told the Reuters news agency on Sunday.

He said several Muslim ministers took part in the discussion, a claim rejected by Muslim political leaders.

“It is a false statement and there was no discussion on this and we don’t agree with the mosque relocation,” AHM Fowzie, a senior Muslim cabinet minister, told Reuters.

Buddhist majority

The mosque has reportedly existed since 1962 and regular prayers have been conducted there for the past three decades.

Buddhist monks said the government mistakenly had allowed the mosque to be expanded recently, despite a 1982 state regulation declaring the area sacred for Buddhism.

The chief of the mosque said, however, that the construction was legal and the building was simply being refurbished.

Buddhism is the main religion in Sri Lanka, ahead of Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. Buddhists make up around 70 per cent of the population.

Hardline, right-wing Hindus have rioted over a ‘Beef festival’ put together by Dalit students at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India.(h/t: JD)

Shall we now blame all of Hinduism for their violent response, and remark that Hinduism is innately, uniquely incapable of dealing with ‘offense’ to their religion? Of course not, it is not Hinduism, but the interpretation of a specific group of Hindus with a specific approach to their religious texts that has caused this:

Osmania University Beef Festival Leads To Violence

(WhatIfTheyWereMuslim.com)

A beef festival organized by Dalit students at Osmania University in Hyderabad, India on April 15th erupted into violence, the BBC reports. About 100 members of the Hindu right wing Akhil Bharatiya Vidyarti Parishad(ABVP) protested the festival, leading to five injuries according to The Hindureport.

ABVP protested the beef festival on the ground that consumption of beef is against Hindu culture. Ramkrishna, senior ABVP leader told BBC, “Today they are asking for beef, tomorrow they will want alcohol.”

The purpose of the festival was to oppose “food fascism” in university hostels, reports NDTV. The festival organizers demanded beef be included in the university canteen menu as it is part of their “cultural identity.”

“The festival was intended to make the point that upper caste diktats over food habits need to be resisted, however another group of students opposed the idea on the grounds that it is against Indian culture,” a police official said in a quote reported by the NDTV.

More than 1500 students attended the beef festival and consumed various dishes made of beef according to the BBC report.

The beef festival was organized by the Telangana Students Association, Progressive Democratic Student Union, Student Federation of India and student groups from English and Foreign Languages University.

S. Satyanarayana, Osmania University vice-chancellor announced yesterday that there would be no change in the hostel menu, reports NewsWala.

Despite the violence, the organizers of the beef festival were generally pleased with the large turnout and aim to make this an annual event, reportsDeccan Chronicle.

Justin Norman/Flickr

We are no longer shocked at crimes and excesses committed by those in authority, we have become complacent and either accept such things as a daily part of life, an aberration or even something praiseworthy.

Below we have another US Muslim alleging that the FBI had a hand in his torture:

American Muslim Alleges FBI Had a Hand in His Torture (Updated with Video)

MOTHER JONES EXCLUSIVE: Yonas Fikre believes the US government played a role in his hellish three-month detention in the United Arab Emirates.

By Nick Baumann

UPDATE: Fikre’s lawyers have written a letter to the Justice Department about his allegations and released a video of him talking about his ordeal.

Last June, while Yonas Fikre was visiting the United Arab Emirates, the Muslim American from Portland, Oregon was suddenly arrested and detained by Emirati security forces. For the next three months, Fikre claims, he was repeatedly interrogated and tortured. Fikre says he was beaten on the soles of his feet, kicked and punched, and held in stress positions while interrogators demanded he “cooperate” and barked questions that were eerily similar to those posed to him not long before by FBI agents and other American officials who had requested a meeting with him.

Fikre had been visiting family in Khartoum, Sudan, when, in April 2010, the officials got in touch with him. He agreed to meet with them, but ultimately balked at cooperating with FBI questioning without a lawyer present and he rebuffed a request to become an informant. Pressing him to cooperate, the agents told him he was on the no-fly list and could not return home unless he aided the bureau, Fikre says. The following week he received an email from one of the US officials; it arrived from a State Department address: “Thanks for meeting with us last week in Sudan. While we hope to get your side of the issues we keep hearing about, the choice is yours to make. The time to help yourself is now.”

“When Yonas [first] asked whether the FBI was behind his detention, he was beaten for asking the question,” says his lawyer. “Toward the end, the interrogator indicated that indeed the FBI had been involved.”

Fikre made his way to the UAE the following year, where, he and his lawyer allege, he was detained at the request of the US government. They say his treatment is part of a pattern of “proxy” detentions of US Muslims orchestrated by the the US government. Now, Fikre’s Portland-based lawyer, Thomas Nelson, plans to file suit against the Obama administration for its alleged complicity in Fikre’s torture.

“There was explicit cooperation; we certainly will allege that in the complaint,” says Nelson, a well known terrorism defense attorney. “When Yonas [first] asked whether the FBI was behind his detention, he was beaten for asking the question. Toward the end, the interrogator indicated that indeed the FBI had been involved. Yonas understood this as indicating that the FBI continued to [want] him to work for/with them.” Nelson, the American Civil Liberties Union, and the Council on American Islamic Relations are assembling a high-powered legal team to handle Fikre’s case in the United States.

Fikre’s story echoes those of Naji Hamdan, Amir Meshal, Sharif Mobley, Gulet Mohamed, and Yusuf and Yahya Wehelie. All are American Muslim men who, while traveling abroad, claim they were detained, interrogated, and (in some cases) abused by local security forces; the men claim they were arrested at the behest of federal law enforcement authorities, alleging the US government used this process to circumvent their legal rights as American citizens.

As Mother Jones reported in its September/October 2011 issue, the FBI has acknowledged that it tips off local security forces on the names of Americans traveling overseas that the bureau suspects of involvement in terrorism, and that these individuals are sometimes detained and questioned. The FBI also admits that its agents sometimes “interview or witness an interview” of Americans detained by foreign governments in terrorism cases. And as several FBI officials told me on condition of anonymity, the bureau has for years used its elite cadre of international agents (known as legal attachés, or legats) to coordinate the overseas detention and interrogation by foreign security services of American terrorism suspects. Sometimes, that entails cooperating with local security forces that are accustomed to abusing prisoners. (FBI officials have told Mother Jones that foreign security forces are asked to refrain from abusing American detainees.)

It’s difficult to confirm US involvement in the detentions of Fikre or other alleged proxy detainees—indeed, plausible deniability is part of the appeal of the program. But what’s clear is that Fikre was on the FBI’s radar well before his detention in the UAE. (The FBI declined to comment on his case, as did the State Department.) Fikre, whose only previous brush with the legal system came when he sued a restaurant for having ham in its clam chowder, may have drawn the FBI’s interest because of his association with Portland’s Masjed-as-Saber mosque, where he was a youth basketball coach.

The mosque has been a focus of FBI scrutiny ever since the October 2002 case of the “Portland Seven,” in which seven Muslims from the Portland area were charged with trying to go to Afghanistan to fight with the Taliban in the wake of 9/11. (Six are now in jail; the seventh was killed in Pakistan.) Masjed-as-Saber was in the news again in 2010 when Mohamed Osman Mohamud, a 19-year-old Somali American who sometimes worshipped there, was charged with trying to detonate a fake car bomb provided by an undercover FBI agent.

More recently, three other men who attended Fikre’s mosque—Mustafa Elogbi, Michael Migliore, and Jamal Tarhuni—have found themselves on the no-fly list after traveling abroad. (The government’s use of the no-fly list to prevent American terrorist suspects from returning home after traveling overseas is currently the subject of a major ACLU lawsuit.)

Fikre’s case “really does make a mockery of the FBI’s use of watchlisting as a means of protecting the US,” says Gadeir Abbas, a staff attorney with the Council on American-Islamic Relations. ”It’s not a means of protecting America—it’s a tool the FBI uses to put people in vulnerable positions.”

Fikre, who is currently living in Sweden and believes that it would be unsafe for him to return to the United States, has given a series of videotaped interviews detailing his ordeal. His presence in Sweden beyond the three-month window allowed for tourist visas suggests that he has applied for permanent status there, and local media have so far refrained from reporting on the story for fear of affecting his case to stay in the country.

In the interviews, Fikre describes a series of events that are similar to the 2008 case of Naji Hamdan, a Lebanese American auto-parts dealer from Los Angeles who was then living in the UAE. Like Hamdan, Fikre claims he was detained in the UAE, tortured (including with stress positions and beatings on the soles of his feet, so as to not show marks), and asked about his activities in the United States. Like Hamdan, Fikre believed a western interrogator was present in the room at some points during his detention, because when he could peek out under his blindfold (“after being kicked/punched and falling over,” Nelson says) he occasionally saw western slacks and shoes. “In those occasions there was a fair amount of whispering,” Nelson added.

The similarities between the two cases were so striking that Michael Kaufman and Laboni Hoq, lawyers who are representing Hamdan in his separate case against the government, initially thought that Fikre had simply parroted Hamdan’s story. But once they heard more, they decided “the backstory of why the government was interested in him was reasonable and something that didn’t sound fabricated,” Kaufman said. “It seemed like a long way to go for a lie,” Hoq added.

A key difference between Hamdan’s and Fikre’s stories is that Hamdan eventually confessed—under torture, he now emphasizes—to being a member of several terrorist groups, including Al Qaeda. He ultimately spent 11 months in UAE custody before being deported to Lebanon, where he now runs a children’s clothing store. Despite an extensive FBI investigation, he was never charged in the United States.

Fikre, his lawyer says, “never confessed to anything”—”thankfully.”

“The FBI does this stuff because they can get away with it,” Nelson says. “But the bureau has totally destroyed any relationship it had with the Muslim community in Portland.”

Nick Baumann covers national politics and civil liberties issues for Mother Jones’ DC Bureau. For more of his stories, click here.

UPDATE, Wednesday, 1:00 p.m. EST: Fikre’s lawyers have released a video of him talking about his ordeal (they’ve also written a letter to the Justice Department). You can watch the video here:

Shaul Spitzer

What if he were Muslim? Spitzer firebombed his neighbor for disagreeing with a Rabbi’s religious opinion. Should Judaism be blamed for this now? Of course not.

Spitzer’s sentence was reduced because of concern about how he will fair in prison life. Hopefully some Muslim prisoners can protect Spitzer while he is in prison, he will certainly need help (h/t: JD):

NY teen gets prison in religious-dispute firebomb

WHITE PLAINS, N.Y. (AP) — A Hasidic teenager was sentenced Tuesday to seven years in prison for the firebomb attack that badly burned a neighbor during a religious dispute in an insular Jewish enclave.

A defense attorney said the sentence was fair but worried about prison life for an 18-year-old who has “never seen TV, never been on the Internet, doesn’t know who Babe Ruth and Derek Jeter are.”

Shaul Spitzer of New Square had been charged with attempted murder but pleaded guilty to assault as potential jurors gathered for his trial in February. A trial would have brought unwanted attention to New Square, a New York village where nearly every one of the 7,000 residents is a member of the Skver Hasidic sect.

Spitzer admitted that he attacked Aron Rottenberg, a plumber, outside Rottenberg’s home in May. He said he did it because Rottenberg defied New Square’s grand rabbi by worshiping with nursing home residents rather than at New Square’s main synagogue.

Rottenberg, a plumber, claimed in a lawsuit that Spitzer was acting at the direction of the rabbi, David Twersky. The rabbi denied involvement and was not charged. The lawsuit was settled for $2.3 million.

Rottenberg had asked Rockland County Court Judge William Kelly to be lenient with Spitzer, who was also burned, and the judge came down from the 10-year cap he had promised after the plea deal.

Defense attorney Kenneth Gribetz said the sentence was “fair and compassionate.” But he said he fears for Spitzer, who he said will be the rare inmate who has had “no exposure to the outside world.”

“His whole life has been the rabbi and the synagogue and now he’s going to state prison,” Gribetz said. “This is a very severe sentence for a boy from New Square. I hope he can be safeguarded.”

New Square is about 30 miles north of Manhattan. The sect and the village are named for the Ukrainian village of Skver, where sect members were killed during the Holocaust.

Imagine if a Muslim were corresponding with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, expressing support for his terroristic actions, wouldn’t he be locked up for material support of terrorism?

Kevin Forts is not the only US Breivik admirer out there:

Breivik’s US admirer

The young man has black hair and a piercing gaze, and poses with his arms behind his back. He wants to appear decisive and courageous for the photographer. His parents and friends have tried to dissuade him from taking this step, says Kevin Forts from Worcester in the US state of Massachusetts. “But I want to, so that I can represent the views of Anders Breivik that have otherwise been demonized by the mass media,” the 23-year-old told reporters from the Norwegian tabloid VG, the country’s most-read newspaper.

In a major story the newspaper reveals that Forts shares the views of mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik. “I represent a nationalist alternative, just like Breivik,” he says. Forts writes letters to the assassin and exchanges ideas with him. As proof he shows off one letter the mass murderer wrote him from his prison cell.

Breivik praises the somewhat haggard looking American. VG quotes from the letter Breivik reportedly sent to Forts, in which he writes: “I have received letters from supporters in 20 countries, but you appear to be someone who can write well. Yes, I am absolutely interested in discussing ideological issues with you and am thinking about how we can work together.”

It could be a craving for attention that is now pushing the young American into the public eye. Since the attacks of July 22, 2011, the right-wing, anti-Islam scene has largely retreated from the digital public sphere. Its protagonists, who until then had used the Internet for regular exchanges, have rushed to distance themselves from Breivik’s acts. Chief among them is Fjordman, a Norwegian blogger, who until the killings had regularly exchanged ideas with Breivik and is considered to be a kind of ideological mentor to him. “It should be painfully obvious by now that Breivik does not care for anything greater than himself,” the anti-Islam author wrote in his blog of the ongoing trial this week.

Most are distancing themselves from Breivik, but not Kevin Forts. In a video of the interview posted on the VG website on Wednesday in which he explained why he is defending the murders, Forts said: “I believe it demonstrates a sense of nationalism and a moral conscience. He’s fighting against cultural Marxism and the Islamization of Norway and he found that the most rational way to accomplish that was through terrorist actions on Utøya and in Oslo.”

When asked how one could defend the murder of innocent children, Forts added: “Because I believe that he used it as an unprecedented attack. I don’t believe that it should occur again, but I do believe that it was atrocious but necessary in that it has raised awareness for it and Breivik did that with the executions.”

Forts says he believes Breivik is a “nationalist and a patriot and not the terrorist neo-Nazi that the media portrays him to be.” He continues by saying, “Now, all you see is the shock and the gore on Utøya and in Oslo, but you do not see the actual political ramifications that will come true in the future. I believe that, at that point, it will be impossible to hate Breivik, and you will see that he was actually acting in a matter of preemptive war.”

Spiegel Online, 18 April 2012

An update on the Llanelli mosque:

Attacks on Llanelli’s mosque prompts security rise

SECURITY measures have been taken at Llanelli’s mosque following claims of attacks on the building.

Metal bars have been fitted over the Station Road mosque’s front window after reports were made that the glass was smashed while someone was praying inside.

The incident came just months after the door was kicked through and a group of elderly women were followed in.

And police are now conducting high visibility patrols in the area to calm the concerns of people using the mosque.

Press officer for Llanelli’s Ethnic Minority Help Association Anne Stevens-Bevan said she was working hard to ensure people feel safe when they go to pray.

“I met with the police last week and I am negotiating with them and the Muslim Council for Great Britain to see what advice they can give,” she said.

“There have been problems with things thrown at the window and people being chased and abused physically and mentally.

“The trouble has been on-going for 14 years, but I have made a promise that it won’t happen again because it’s just not fair.”

Mrs Stevens-Bevan said she was “sickened to the stomach” to hear that the window was smashed while someone was praying.

“It should be a world of calmness,” she said.

“Having to put bars over the window takes away from that — it takes away from the sense of peace.”

She added that while lighting would soon be installed near the mosque, efforts were still being made to have CCTV cameras installed.

“The mosque is well used — and by some very elderly people — and they should feel safe,” she said.

“They get mouthy people passing, and these words can build up and rob them of their self-esteem.

“People don’t forget things like that, and for the women who were followed into the mosque it must be in their minds all the time.

“The mosque is a sacred place, like our churches and chapels, and we will not give up until people feel safe to go there.”

PC Dylan Davies said: “When they reported the criminal damage to me I did advise them to think about taking some security measures, which they did by adding the grill to the window.

“Having said that, this is a one-off instance. I am aware of concerns the people using the mosque have, and I am keeping an eye on the building and making sure that there are regular high visibility patrols in and around the area.”

alana.lewis@swwmedia.co.uk

The anti-Muslim/anti-left terrorist known as Anders Breivik has shown no remorse, saying he would commit his evil actions once again. He also said the youth he murdered on Utoya Island were not “innocent” and akin to the “Hitler youth.”

‘Hitler Youth’ is a term that Geller used to describe the youth on the island.

Breivik boasts he’d do it all again

(UKPA)

Anders Breivik has tried to defend his massacre of 77 people, insisting he would do it again and calling his rampage the most “spectacular” attack by a nationalist militant since the Second World War.

Reading a prepared statement in court, the anti-Muslim extremist lashed out at Norwegian and European governments for embracing immigration and multiculturalism.

He claimed to be speaking as a commander of an “anti-communist” resistance movement and an anti-Islam militant group he called the Knights Templar. There is no evidence the group exists. Maintaining he acted out of “goodness, not evil” to prevent a wider civil war, Breivik said: “I would have done it again.”

Breivik has five days to explain why he set off a bomb in Oslo’s government district last July, killing eight people, and then gunned down 69 others at a Labor Party youth camp outside the Norwegian capital. He denies criminal guilt, saying he was acting in self-defence.

“The attacks on July 22 were a preventive strike. I acted in self-defence on behalf of my people, my city, my country,” he said as he finished his statement, in essence a summary of the 1,500-page manifesto he posted online before the attacks. “I therefore demand to be found innocent of the present charges.”

If found mentally sane – the key issue to be decided in the trial – Breivik could face a maximum 21-year prison sentence or an alternate custody arrangement that would keep him locked up as long as he is considered a menace to society.

Judge Wenche Elisabeth Arntzen repeatedly interrupted Breivik, asking him to keep his statement short. “It is critically important that I can explain the reason and the motive” for the massacre, Breivik replied.

Mette Yvonne Larsen, a lawyer representing victims’ families, also interrupted Breivik, saying some were concerned that he was turning the trial into a platform to profess his extremist views. Her remarks prompted the judge to again urge Breivik to wrap it up.

Breivik rejected suggestions that he has a personality disorder. He said: “July 22, wasn’t about me. July 22 was a suicide attack. I wasn’t expecting to survive that day,” he said. “A narcissist would never have given his life for anyone or anything.”

Asked why he started crying in court on Monday, when prosecutors showed an anti-Muslim film that Breivik posted on YouTube before the attacks, he said: “I was thinking about Norway and Europe, which are ruled by politicians and journalists killing our country. I was thinking that my country is dying.”

People charged in connection of setting a building on fire weep inside a police vehicle as they are taken to a prison after their hearing in a court at Mehsana, about 60 km (37 miles) north from the western Indian city of Ahmedabad. (File Photo - November 9, 2011)

23 Convicted for Deadly 2002 Anti-Muslim Violence in India’s Gujarat

In India, a court has convicted 23 people in connection with the killing of 23 Muslims during deadly religious riots that swept through Gujarat state in 2002. The massacre was investigated by a special team after allegations that the probe by state police was not impartial.

A special court Monday found the 23 people guilty of setting fire to a house in Gujarat’s Ode village where a group of Muslims had taken shelter to protect themselves from rioting mobs.

Twenty-three others were acquitted for lack of evidence. Most of those who stood trial are Hindus.

The massacre took place a decade ago, when towns and villages in Gujarat were convulsed with riots that targeted Muslims homes and neighborhoods. The violence erupted after a train fire, blamed on Muslims, killed 60 Hindu pilgrims and prompted retaliation by Hindu mobs.
The prosecutor, P.N. Parmar, called it a historic judgment in the mass killings in Ode village.

“Nine children, nine women and five men burnt alive in this heinous crime,” he said.

The sentences will be announced later. Defense lawyers say they will appeal the verdict.
The massacre in Ode village is one of nine incidents into which the Supreme Court has ordered a special investigation, following allegations that the Gujarat police were not impartial in their probe into the deadly riots. About 1,000 Muslims died in the violence.
This is the third judgment to be handed down in connection with the riots. In two separate judgments last year, 31 people were sentenced for burning 39 Muslims to death, while 31 Muslims were found guilty for setting fire to the train that killed the Hindu pilgrims.

Gujarat is ruled by the Hindu Nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. The state’s chief minister, Narendra Modi, has often been accused of not doing enough to stop the riots or bring the perpetrators to justice.

After Monday’s verdict, senior BJP leader Balbir Punj said justice has been handed to the riot victims.

“It is a victory for the people of Gujarat and it is a slap on the face of those people that [say] justice cannot be done in Gujarat,” said Punj.

Although the 2002 violence tarnished Narendra Modi’s image, the controversial leader remains one of BJP’s top leaders. He has won state elections in Gujarat twice since the riots and hopes to play a larger role in national politics.

Corsica: Racist Arson Attack on Muslim Prayer Room 

France’s interior ministry says an arsonist has partially destroyed a Muslim prayer room in the Mediterranean island of Corsica’s capital city.

A ministry statement said racist inscriptions were found Monday on the front of the building housing the prayer room in Ajaccio after it was damaged in the early morning fire.

French Muslim leaders have voiced fear of renewed stigmatization following March attacks that killed seven people in southern France that were attributed to an Islamist who claimed al-Qaida links. Mohamed Merah was shot dead by police.

Rivals of conservative President Nicolas Sarkozy in presidential elections starting April 22 claim a recent sweep of terror suspects is an electoral ploy.

AFP, 9 April 2012

Berlin’s largest mosque targeted in hate crime attack

Berlin’s largest mosque has been targeted in an Islamophobic attack in the German capital’s predominantly migrant district of Neukölln.

Unknown assailants threw several paint bombs at the Sehitlik mosque Saturday night. They also placed an insulting anti-Islam picture at the entrance to the building.

Berlin police said that a threatening letter had been sent to the mosque recently.

The Sehitlik mosque has been the target of four arson attacks over the past three years. Berlin mosques have been the scene of at least seven fire bombings since June 2010.

German Muslim leaders have time and again called for stepped up security measures for the country’s mosques and Islamic centers.

They also accuse the center-right government of Chancellor Angela Merkel of trying to downplay the danger of anti-Muslim crimes caused by the wave of Islamophobia in Germany.

Press TV, 9 April 2012

Anders Behring Breivik, a right-wing extremist who confessed to a bombing and mass shooting that killed 77 people on July 22, 2011, arrives for a detention hearing at a court in Oslo, Norway, Monday, Feb. 6, 2012. About 100 survivors and relatives of the victims of the July 22 massacre attended the hearing in Oslo's district court - expected to decide to keep Breivik in jail until his trial begins in April. (AP Photo/Heiko Junge, Scanpix Norway) NORWAY OUT

This may get Breivik less years, but terrorist-inspirers will have a harder time trying to deflect the influence their writings had on Breivik:

Norway’s mass killer Breivik declared sane

(BBC News)

A second psychiatric evaluation of Norwegian mass killer Anders Behring Breivik has found him sane enough to face trial and a jail term.

The findings contradict a previous evaluation, published in November, that found him legally insane.

Breivik is due to stand trial on Monday over a bomb attack and shooting spree last July that killed 77 people.

The 33-year-old, who insists he is mentally stable, was “pleased” with the new assessment, his lawyer said.

Geir Lippestad told reporters his client would defend his actions during his 10-week trial, adding, “he will also regret that he didn’t go further”.

Both reports will be considered by the court when it decides, at the end of the trial, whether he should be sent to a psychiatric ward or jail.

If Breivik is deemed to have been sane at the time of the killings then he could face 21 years in prison with the potential for indefinite extensions to his term as long as he is considered a danger to the public.

‘Crusade’

Continue reading the main story

“Start Quote

His first reaction was that he was pleased with the conclusion”

Geir LippestadBreivik’s lawyer

• Breivik: Psychiatrists at odds

The second evaluation was approved by a court in January following widespread criticism of last year’s assessment that concluded he was psychotic at the time of the attacks and diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic – meaning he would most likely be detained in psychiatric care.

Many of his surviving victims believed he was sane, and that the only proper punishment would be a prison sentence.

“Our conclusion is that he is not psychotic at the time of the actions of terrorism and he is not psychotic now,” psychiatrist Terje Toerrissen, who carried out the second assessment with fellow psychiatrist Agnar Aspaas, told the Associated Press.

The full report is confidential, and the two psychiatrists will give their reasons for arriving at a different conclusion to the first team of experts when they testify during the trial, AP reports.

Breivik was charged with terror offences last month.

Prosecutors said at the time they were prepared to accept that he was criminally insane and would therefore seek compulsory psychiatric care, but they reserved the right to alter that view if new elements emerged about his mental health.

Update: (H/T: Jai)

Source: http://news.sky.com/home/world-news/article/16205754

Extract:

“Anders Behring Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway last year, plans to tell his trial he regrets “not going further”.

The 33-year-old is accused of committing the terrorist attacks on July 22, 2011, and will face court in Oslo on Monday.

“This will be extremely difficult, an enormous challenge to listen to his explanations,” his lawyer Geir Lippestad told reporters. “He will not only defend (his actions) but will also lament, I think, not going further.””

Further attack on Llanelli mosque

Last September the mosque in the Welsh town of Llanelli was attacked. Thugs racially abused a group of elderly women who were entering the mosque and kicked the door in. As a result, extra CCTV cameras were installed.

We are told that there was a second attack on the mosque in February, when the windows were smashed while someone was praying inside. As you can see from the photo, the building has now been fitted with a window grille in addition to the existing steel gate in front of the door (cf. earlier photo here).

The Llanelli Star did, rather belatedly, get round to covering the September attack, but the February incident was apparently not considered important enough to merit a report in the local press.

The EMRC study Islamophobia and Anti-Muslim Hate Crime: UK Case Studies found that Muslims and their mosques face a higher level of violence and intimidation in UK market towns and suburbs than in big cities. See also the Al Jazeera report here.

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer‘s thugish friend exposed as violent anti-Muslim hate-mongering psychopath, freely admits to targeting, beating, cutting and stabbing Muslims.

Rodan Exposed: The Shocking Audio

by Gus (Little Green Footballs)

CONTENT WARNING: Listener discretion is advised. The following video (audio) contains explicit language, hate speech, racial slurs, and violent rhetoric including descriptions of past incidents of violent crimes as described by the subject.

ADDITIONAL WARNING: Rodan also drops the N-Word towards the end of the audio.

The following is an audio recording of Rodan (real name: Rick Martinez) as described in the captioned text below the audio. The subject is Rodan (aka Trajan 75, Emporer Palpatine, et al). Rodan began as webmaster for Think Progress Watch and is currently the webmaster and primary functionary at The Blogmocracy and The Diary of Daedalus.

The Diary of Daedalus is a site dedicated to the tracking and harassment of Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs and members of Little Green Footballs. It has been previously cited in blogs or on Twitter by Andrew Breitbart; Dan Riehl of Riehlworldview; Donald Douglas of American Power; R.S. McCain of The Other McCain; Robert Spencer of Jihadwatch; and others.

Please note that I am not the creator of said video nor am I affiliated with the uploader of said video on Youtube. This is not an endorsement of his or her beliefs whatever they may be. Also note that this is all public information and this video/audio has been present on Youtube since 2009. The purpose of this information herein is to reveal the true nature and background of the creator and webmaster for The Blogmocracy and The Diary of Daedalus most commonly known as Rodan.

The Diary of Daedalus most commonly known as Rodan. (Click here to view the video)

This description is from the original post at YouTube; Rodan and his followers reported the video for “hate speech” and got it pulled from YouTube. (Yes, they reported their own founder for hate speech.) It’s now hosted at LGF so they can’t make it disappear.

Rodan a.k.a. Emporer Palpatine shares his thoughts on Muslims, and gives anecdotes in regards to the Muslims he “sliced and diced” in the early 90’s.

The recording you are about to hear was recorded on the morning of June 6th, 2009 at approximately 3:40 AM.

It was recorded in “Wine Drinkers kick ass”; the room of Emporer Palpatinea.k.a. Rodan.

The following rant given by Rodan is recorded as it was, with the exception of a pause to insert Marlen2008’s text.

This, although heard by a select few, is being released after 6 months. We feel that it is time for this recording to be made public.

The subject matter may be shocking. Listener discretion is advised.

As Glenn Greenwald noted in his book “With Liberty and Justice for Some,” equality before the law is an illusion in the United States. If you are wealthy and have political clout you are most likely to get away with breaking the law and committing crimes, such as “material support” of terrorism.

We reported in July of last year that many politicians from both parties were working with and receiving money from a US State Department designated terrorist organization, the MEK. A group Islamophobes are also quite fond of at the moment.

It was then revealed that the US and Israel have been supporting the MEK to carry out terrorist missions in Iran. Now it has been revealed by the trailblazing investigative journalist, Seymour Hersh that the Pentagon has been training the MEK in Nevada for years, starting in 2005:

US Pentagon Trained Iranian terrorists in Nevada: Hersh

Posted on 04/07/2012 by Juan Cole

The intrepid Seymour Hersh reports at the New Yorker that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) of the US military gave members of the Mojahedin-e Khalq (MEK or People’s Holy Jihadis) training in signals intelligence at a facility in Nevada during the Bush era. The MEK was then and is now on the US State Department’s terrorism watch list, so the Pentagon’s deployment of this group was quite illegal.

The MEK was given a base in eastern Iraq by Saddam Hussein, who used the some 4,000 guerrillas who gathered there to harass the Islamic Republic of Iran. The MEK had its origins in an Islamic-Marxist guerrilla group of the 1970s that fought the forces of the Shah. It joined in the revolution against the Shah in 1978-79 but broke with the Khomeini regime and turned to a massive campaign of bombing and sniping against it. In return, the regime killed some 10,000 suspected MEK members, many of whom it just shot down in the street. The group evolved into a political cult, with insistence on glaze-eyed absolute obedience to the leader, Maryam Rajavi, and cult-like practices such as forced marriages and divorces (not to mention the long history of violence inside Iran).

When the US occupied Iraq, some in the Pentagon adopted the MEK at Camp Ashraf near the Iranian border for use against Iran. The MEK has bought a lot of big American politicians and seems to have promised the Israelis it would recognize Israel if it ever came to power in Iran; figures connected to the Israel lobbies have hypocritically campaigned to have the MEK delisted as a terrorist organization, despite it long and bloody record of attacks on civilians. As recently as this year, NBC quoted unnamed US government officials alleging that the MEK has been assassinating Iranian scientists in Iran.

Hersh reveals a trail of blatant hypocrisy on the part of the US government. “Our” terrorists are not terrorists even if they have blown up non-combatants, but national liberation groups such as Hizbullah in Lebanon are designated terrorists. Government officials have even brandished the word “terrorism” to describe perfectly peaceful protesters and dissidents inside the US, while JSOC was flying dyed-in-the-wool terrorists to Nevada for training.

The USG Open Source Center translated a report in the MEK newspaper regarding the hobnobbing of Rudy Giuliani, John Bolton and others with the MEK leadership in Paris recently:

“– On 24 March, the NCRI secretariat website published a report on an international conference held in Paris to address MEK concerns and issues, which was attended by NCRI President-elect Maryam Rajavi as well as former high ranking officials from the United States and Europe including Rudy Giuliani, Tom Ridge, John Bolton, Patrick Kennedy, and Colonel Wesley Martin.. According to the report, the issues raised included the adoption of a “decisive policy” against Iran’s regime, protection of the rights of Camp Ashraf and Liberty residents, and the elimination of MEK’s “terrorist label.” Rajavi said that “the only way to prevent an Iranian atomic bomb or the occurrence of an unprecedented conflict” was “regime change” by the Iranian people and resistance. On the issue of Camp Liberty, Rudy Giuliani said: “Let us go there. Let us see it with our own eyes.” He added: “Currently the enemy of stopping Iran becoming nuclear is appeasement. This wrong perception has made Iran more determined in becoming nuclear. Let us stop appeasement. Let us stop the efforts for negotiations. Stop writing letters to the ayatollahs. Let us rise up and say as Americans that we are for regime change in Iran and we will take every step necessary to stop Iran becoming nuclear” (National Council of Resistance of Iran in Persian — Website of an exiled political umbrella coalition of Marxist and Islamist organizations — Mojahedin-e Khalq Organization (MEK or MKO), National Liberation Army of Iran (NLA), People’s Mojahedin of Iran (PMOI), National Council of Resistance of Iran (NCRI), and Muslim Iranian Students Society (MISS); on US State Department’s list of terrorist groups since 1997; URL: http://www.iranncr.org/).”

As Sheila Musaji points out, lots of American Muslims are in jail for ‘material support of terrorism,’ but American politicians and pundits get a free pass for actively supporting the MEK– which, remember, is definitively on the terrorism watch list.

Note to the US government and the Neocons: George Orwell’s 1984 was a dark political satire, not a blueprint for how you should do things.

Eric Prince, Modern-Day Crusader and founder of Xe, formerly known as Blackwater

by Ilisha

“I’ll See Your Jihad, and Raise You One Crusade” is a popular refrain among loons convinced they’re modern-day crusaders locked in an epic battle with Islam. Unfortunately, their apocalyptic visions are not confined to the lunatic fringe. Eric Prince, the reclusive co-founder of Blackwater “private military company” used to outsource US wars fancies himself a modern-day crusader, and he’s not alone.

Blackwater is infamous for its brutality, belligerence, and reckless disregard for the lives of Iraqi and Afghan civilians. This month, Harper’s Magazine featured an exposé, “The Warrior Class”: The Blackwater Videos, by Charles Glass on the rise of private “security contractors” in the years since 9/11. Video clips featured in the article are reminiscent of scenes  from George Miller’s 1979 dystopian action film, Mad Max, but for Iraqis, this was real life–and all too often, death.

In one of the most disturbing clips, a Blackwater vehicle struck down a veiled pedestrian and never bothered to stop, or even to pause. Subsequent vehicles in the convoy also barreled past with total disregard for the victim, apart from making the effort to capture the monstrous crime on video:  (H/T: Saladin)

Video of Blackwater Contractors Driving Over Iraqi Woman

In 2007, Blackwater mercenaries massacred 17 innocent Iraqi civilians in Nisour Square, including 9-year-old Ali Kinani. In January of this year, the “private military contractor” reached a wrongful death “settlement” with the victim’s families and survivors, though criminal charges were dropped, allowing the perpetrators to escape accountability.

9-year old Ali Kinani

In 2009, Blackwater re-branded itself as Xe (pronounced “Zee”), apparently to escape its well-deserved image as a gang of ruthless thugs or hire.

What’s missing from the Harper’s Magazine article, and much of the coverage surrounding Xe, is that Erik Prince is a fundamentalist Christian who built his military empire around the notion of Christian Dominionism. An exclusive video featured on Democracy Now revealed previously undisclosed details regarding the companies methods and motives.

The Economist provided more shocking details in an article entitled, “Erik Prince and the last crusade,” : (H/T: MasterQ)

In an affidavit lodged with a court in Virginia, one of the witnesses said that Mr Prince “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe.” The statement continues:

To that end, Mr. Prince intentionally deployed to Iraq certain men who shared his vision of Christian supremacy, knowing and wanting these men to take every available opportunity to murder Iraqis. Many of these men used call signs based on the Knights of the Templar, the warriors who fought the Crusades.

Mr. Prince operated his companies in a manner that encouraged and rewarded the destruction of Iraqi life. For example, Mr. Prince’s executives would openly speak about going over to Iraq to “lay Hajiis out on cardboard.” Going to Iraq to shoot and kill Iraqis was viewed as a sport or game. Mr. Prince’s employees openly and consistently used racist and derogatory terms for Iraqis and other Arabs, such as “ragheads” or “hajiis.”

Mr Prince is further accused of trying to cover up Blackwater’s misdeeds, which allegedly include profiteering and arms smuggling, by killing employees who tried to blow the whistle on the company….

…Sending Christian crusaders to a Muslim country where you’re trying to restore peace is what I would call a very bad idea. Perhaps that wasn’t the case, but sending freelance soldiers into a country unbound by any laws is still a terrible strategy. It breeds a shoot first, ask questions later mentality. And for Blackwater, at times, it was more like shoot first, drive on. The latest allegations are shocking, but much of the story is not surprising at all.”

No, modern-day crusader themes and utter contempt for the lives of innocent Iraqis shouldn’t be surprising at all, and it isn’t confined to private “security” contractors like Xe. Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik also fancied himself as a modern-day crusader who sought to restore the medieval Knights Templar, though he certainly wasn’t alone in this peculiar brand of madness.

It seems Christian-themed holy wars have captured the imaginations of prominent US politicians, journalists, and military leaders. In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then President George Bush  referred to the so-called “War on Terror” as a “crusade,” sparking widespread criticism in the Islamic world, and even in Europe. Four years later, the BBC reported that Bush told Palestinian ministers that God had told him to invade Afghanistan and Iraq:

“President Bush said to all of us: ‘I’m driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, “George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.” And I did, and then God would tell me, “George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq .” And I did.”

A “born again” dry drunk, Bush appealed to millions of conservative Christians, some of the biggest backers of the Iraq war and endless conflict in the Middle East to fulfill their apocalyptic visions:

This is the dark side to their religious world view. Their fantasy is often sung to uplifting gospel music of a soon-to-come Paradise. Its concomitant message (not openly discussed) is that God will then (brutally) kill the entire human race except for Christians (for many meaning “born again” Christians). The Left Behind book series dwells on how God will eviscerate, torture and kill all non-Christians. Why so many of them dwell on this is not clear.  Perhaps it gives meaning to their lives.  Or instilling fear is a way to keep them in line under their preachers’ domination. In any case they are cleverly used by the Israeli lobby, imperial neoconservatives and (more profitably) by the military industrial complex.

The Book of Revelation is the integral passion of their foreign policy, their belief that the founding of Israel foretells the imminent Second Coming, conversion or death for Jews and eternal happiness for themselves in Heaven. In their view America, as God’s instrument, should encourage wars and chaos in the Middle East in order to “hurry up” God and His agenda. One of their leaders is John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel. Senator Liebermanis a friend and favored speaker at his events. I have described The Strangest Alliance in History about how each side thinks it is using the other for its own ends.

Also in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, “conservative” journalist  Anne “All Terrorists Look Alike” Coulter said in her “battle cry”  for Washington:

“We should invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity.”

Her sentiment was echoed in subsequent statements by prominent Christian war monger Ellis Washington, in an article featured in the far right WorldNetDaily. Such statements weren’t merely confined to the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, and in fact, persist into the present day, according to an article in the Huffington Post, Newt and the Loony Religious Fringe That Now Runs the Republican Party:

America needlessly went to war in Iraq because neoconservative war mongers — who laugh at the “those rubes,” as they think of earnest Evangelical Christian Zionists, and whose own sons and daughters seem notably absent from our armed services — used the religious passion and dedication of conservative Evangelicals to provide political means and cover for the neoconservatives’ commitment to America’s military dominance of the world. In other words the Evangelicals provided the votes to put foolish warmongers like George W Bush in power. And now Gingrich wants their votes.”

Gingrich shares a crowded stage with other prominent Republicans who also court the religious right, including Rick Santorum, Michelle Bachman, and Herman Cain.

Not surprisingly, the US military also is also plagued with Blackwater-like perversity and religious extremism. Gen. Tommy Franks, who directed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, callously dismissed concerns over the number of innocent civilians killed in Iraq saying, “We don’t do body counts.” Not to be outdone, Democracy Now has revealed the Pentagon refers to the victims as “Bugsplat,” the name of a computer program that estimates how many civilians will be killed in US-led bombing raids.

Adding perhaps the most infamous religious twist to this madness is Lt. Gen. William G. “Jerry” Boykin. An outspoken Evangelical Christian, Boykin claimed Muslims hate America, ”because we’re a Christian nation, because our foundation and our roots are Judeo-Christian … and the enemy is a guy named Satan.”

Referring to a battle in Somalia, Boykin also said, ”I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol,” and later he said, “We in the army of God, in the house of God, kingdom of God have been raised for such a time as this.” Boykin also claimed God put George Bush in office, and continued to frame the so-called “War on Terror” as a religious conflict, even as George Bush tried to assure the world the US was not at war with Islam.

Should these remarks be dismissed as the rantings of a lone loon?

Last January, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist  Seymour Hersh said key branches of the US military are being run by “crusaders,” According to a Huffington Post article:

“What I’m really talking about is how eight or nine neoconservative, radicals if you will, overthrew the American government. Took it over,” Hersh said.

He said that the attitude that “pervades” a large portion of the Joint Special Operations Command, which is part of the military’s special forces branch and which has carried out secret missions to kill American targets, is one that supports “[changing] mosques into cathedrals.”

Hersh also said that Stanley McChrystal, who headed JSOC before his tenure as the top general in Afghanistan, as well as his successor and many other JSOC members, “are all members of, or at least supporters of, Knights of Malta.” Blake Hounsell, the reporter for Foreign Policy, speculated that Hersh may have been referring to the Sovereign Order of Malta, a Catholic organization.

“Many of them are members of Opus Dei,” Hersh said. “They do see what they’re doing…it’s a crusade, literally. They see themselves as the protectors of the Christians. They’re protecting them from the Muslims [as in] the 13th century. And this is their function.“

While the world focused myopically on “Islamic” terrorists, it seems the crusader mentality that germinated in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks has flourished and permeated not only the lunatic fringe, but high-ranking officials within the US establishment. Apparently extremists on both sides of the so-called Clash of Civilizations are inspired to play their respective roles, equally hellbent on hurtling the rest of humanity ever closer to Armageddon.

In France a young Muslim woman was threatened, beaten and had her hijab ripped from her head. (via. Al-Kanz)

The below is a rough google translation and video of the victim speaking about the violent experience. The original is in French:

The CCIF (suit against Islamophobia in France) met S., a young woman struck and insulted, her veil ripped off in Juvisy-sur-Orge, near Paris. Treated as a terrorist and threatened by an armed individual, S. relates in the video below the story of the Islamophobic aggression.

Below is a copy of the complaint:

Feel free to contact the CCIF at the slightest Islamophobic aggression. The work done by the watch group since 2003 has, despite a strong desire to hide the reality, created awareness to many that Islamophobia is real.

Visit the CCIF: www.islamophobie.net

Rep Abdul-Samad talks about letter: Rep Abdul-Samad talks about letter/powder after all clear is called at Iowa Statehouse.

(Via Islamophobiatoday.com)

Iowa State Representative, Ako Abdul-Samad recieves threatening letter containing mysterious powder

A threatening letter containing a mysterious powder sent the Iowa Capitol into lockdown and delayed action in the House for several hours on Tuesday.

Ultimately, a hazardous materials team found the substance not to be dangerous and released a crowd of perhaps 300 lawmakers, staffers and observers who had been sequestered in the House chamber and elsewhere at the Statehouse.

The letter was received by Rep. Ako Abdul-Samad, D-Des Moines, late Tuesday afternoon and was opened on the House floor in the midst of debate.

Abdul-Samad told reporters Tuesday evening that the letter contained “very threatening” language but declined to describe it in detail, citing an investigation now under way by state police.

“I cannot talk about what was in the letter at this point, because it’s turned over now to the State Patrol and also to DCI, but it was a threatening letter,” he said, referring to the state Division of Criminal Investigation. “This has now become a very serious legal matter.”

Abdul-Samad’s clerk, Drake Law School student Michael McRae, opened the letter after retrieving it from the lawmaker’s mailbox in the Capitol rotunda. The powder billowed out, he said, covering the area around Abdul-Samad’s desk, McRae’s clothing and hands, and even being inhaled by Abdul-Samad.

Rep. Kevin Koester, R-Ankeny, who said he was sitting near Abdul-Samad after the letter was opened and saw a white powder spill from an envelope, said the substance looked like flour or powdered sugar. Others described it as resembling a powdered detergent.

Abdul-Samad and Iowa State Patrol Capt. Mark Logsdon declined to identify the substance.

The letter apparently was hand-delivered to the Capitol, Logsdon said.

House leaders paused the debate that was then under way at about 3:45 p.m. and directed Abdul-Samad and McRae to the vestibule separating the House chambers from the Capitol’s second-floor rotunda.

They remained there throughout the afternoon and early evening. The entire building was locked down shortly before 5 p.m.

A hazardous materials team — wearing bright yellow plastic suits with orange boots and breathing apparatus — arrived around 5:30, and appeared to collect samples both inside the vestibule with Abdul-Samad and McRae and at the lawmaker’s desk on the House floor.

The two-man team’s fluorescent safety garb and Darth Vader-like exhalations contrasted sharply with the crowd of lawmakers and staff, who milled about on the floor in shirt-sleeves. Some even stood within an arm’s reach of Abdul-Samad’s desk, snapping photos as the hazmat workers conducted their work.

At around 6 p.m., House Speaker Kraig Paulsen, R-Hiawatha, reported that preliminary testing indicated the substance was not hazardous. Officials with the 71st Civil Service Team, an inter-agency cooperative responsible for dealing with potentially hazardous situations like this, completed further testing, finally giving an all-clear at 7:50 p.m.

“With the sensitivity of government, it’s a realistic threat,” said Brian O’Keefe with the Des Moines Fire Department. “That’s why we’re going to this level of security and testing.”

Lawmakers resumed considering legislation before the all-clear, and even before Abdul-Samad returned to the chamber, wrapping up debate and holding a final vote on a bill to bar cities from using traffic cameras. The decision to get back to business didn’t sit well with everyone in the chamber.

“Continuation of this debate tonight is dumb, disrespectful and in poor taste,” Rep. Nathan Willems, D-Lisbon said, addressing Paulsen from the floor.

Others criticized the manner in which the incident itself was handled.

The initial response was uncontrolled and overly dismissive, potentially exposing an unknown number of Iowans to highly lethal agents like anthrax, said Sen. Bill Dotzler, a Waterloo Democrat who is trained in toxic threats.

More than an hour after the powder was discovered, state representatives and others were moving freely out of the House chambers to other areas of the Capitol and outside the building. Some senators even joked that their House peers should be banned from the Senate chambers.

But Dotzler, who was a volunteer with the John Deere Fire Brigade and fully trained with the Waterloo hazmat team, said the situation was no laughing matter.

House members should have been immediately isolated and even removed from the chambers to an isolated area to avoid further possible exposure, he said, rather than allowed to move freely inside and outside the building.

“In the world we live in you have to take every case seriously,” he said. “People said, ‘Well, it smelled like soap.’ Well, you can mix toxic biological agents in with soap and it could be something that’s pretty bad.”

Law enforcement and Abdul-Samad himself, however, defended the way the situation played out.

“Everything was handled properly, and I’m really happy with how things were handled,” Abdul-Samad said.

Logsdon, the state patrol captain, said it was easier to second-guess the response than to manage a potentially dangerous situation in a crowded and public place.

“It’s easy to question and armchair quarterback people, but the fact of the matter is once the letter was open and the substance was airborne, then it literally contaminated everyone in there,” he said.

House Majority Leader Linda Upmeyer said the situation was unprecedented for most, if not all, of the lawmakers now serving.

She said the response will be reviewed to determine if additional procedures are necessary for dealing with such situations.

“We’ll do a look back and make sure we have the systems in place that we need and the processes that make sure everyone gets here safe,” Upmeyer said.

Among the first people out of the Capitol were Michael Mericle and his grandparents, who had been visiting the building.

Mericle, who was visiting Des Moines from Omaha, said the ordeal wasn’t what he expected for his first visit to the Capitol.

“It was long,” he said. “We were walking out, and they told us to go back in. It was boring, but everyone is OK.”

Mericle passed the time by playing with his smartphone and sending text messages to friends, he said. He said he wasn’t nervous, and others in the Capitol didn’t seem to be either.

“But his mom was,” put in Julie Almquist, Mericle’s mother, who had been waiting outside the building for her son.

Almquist, who said she had interned at the Capitol while growing up in Des Moines, said she initially didn’t think the incident was a big deal, until the hours began dragging on.

They missed their dinner reservation at Splash, she said, but once they left the Capitol, they headed there anyway to try to get a table.

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

Infidels threaten George Galloway

Via Expose, here is the response of the South Yorkshire Infidels, a breakaway faction from the EDL, to George Galloway’s by-election victory in Bradford West.

Given that West Yorkshire Police recently arrested and charged a young Muslim over an offensive Facebook comment about British soldiers in Afghanisatan, will their colleagues in South Yorkshire be taking any action over this Facebook post?

The above protesters believe abortion is terrorism

It’s only terrorism when Muslims do it, right? Even though data from both the US and Europe shows otherwise, and you have more of a chance of being killed by peanuts or lightning than you do a “Muslamic terrorist!”

Is it safe to presume in this case that those individuals targeting Planned Parenthood are likely Right-Wing extremists and likely Christian? There are a couple of reasons for me to think this is the case: 1.) All or at least most previous attacks on abortion clinics and women health center’s, such as Planned Parenthood have been carried out by Right-wingers, 2.) There are many militant Christian organizations whose ideologies are violently opposed to abortion.

Muslims aren’t involved because a.) abortion is not a particularly too controversial issue within the Muslim community, and b.) Planned Parenthood is not occupying or invading Muslim countries.

Such events seem to be quite under reported in the media. You can bet that if a Muslim was suspected of such bombings the Islamophobesphere would be going buck-wild about our nation being under attack and the creeping “Islamization” of society, etc.

As of now they are mostly unconcerned and silent as the string of bombings continue:

Homemade bomb detonates at Wisconsin Planned Parenthood clinic

By Stephen C. Webster (RawStory)

A homemade explosive device detonated outside a Planned Parenthood clinic in Grand Chute, Wisconsin on Sunday night.

Police are still looking for whoever left the device, which exploded around 7:30 p.m. and caused little damage to the building. Nobody was injured.

The attack is one of a string across the U.S. in recent months.

Amid a heated debate over funding for Planned Parenthood last month, the Fort Worth offices of Texas State Senator Wendy Davis (D) — a strong supporter of the female health program — were attacked with two firebombs. Another clinic in the Dallas area was attacked in a similar manner by a separate person last July.

This video is from NBC 26 in Grand Chute, Wisconsin, broadcast Sunday, April 1, 2012. (Click link to view video)

I wonder if these bombings will make it into the FBI’s compilation of terrorist attacks?

There is also a propensity for Right-wingers and their acolytes to shift blame, as this individual below does, calling liberals “Islamic jihad ass-kissers.” That’s essentially what Anders Breivik was calling the kids he mowed down in Utoya during his horrific terror splurge:

Luton mosque fire

Another mosque fire in the UK:

Luton: police probe mosque fire

An investigation is underway after an arson attack at a mosque in Bury Park in the early hours of this morning (April 2).

Fire crews were called to the Bury Park Jamia Masjid in Bury Park Road at 4.30am, after two large metal bins were pushed up against a door and set alight. The scene has been cordoned off by police while a fire investigation takes place.

Det Con Colin Knight, investigating the incident, said: “We’re keeping an open mind and appealing for witnesses. We don’t know at this stage what the motive was.”

Anwar Hussain, the mosque’s cultural secretary, said its leaders were angry about what had happened. “People are going to be very upset when they come for prayers,” he said. “But we will tell them to remain calm. The investigation is ongoing but my opinion is that it was deliberate. The police response has been very good, they will be checking CCTV footage from the cameras in the street, and we hope they will catch the culprits.”

Luton Today, 2 April 2012

The neo-Nazi group, which has been dubbed the Zwickau cell, operated for more than 10 years

Neo-Nazism in Germany is on the rise. Interestingly, the Islamophobes ignore the terror threat from such groups:

Germany’s new breed of neo-Nazis pose a threat

By Katya Adler, BBC Newsnight, Germany

The security services in Germany are scrambling to track down and arrest far-right fugitives and Germany’s federal and state interior ministers have announced they are taking concrete steps towards banning the country’s far right National Democratic Party, the NPD.

This comes after a public outcry following revelations in November that a neo-Nazi cell had apparently been able to go on a nationwide spree of racially motivated murders over several years, under the noses of the German intelligence services.

The group of three are being held responsible for the deaths of eight Turkish and one Greek immigrant between 2000 and 2006, as well as a German policewoman in 2007.

Yet the existence of the group, dubbed the Zwickau cell after the name of the town where they spent most of their time in hiding, only came to light in November when two of its members died in an apparent joint suicide or murder-suicide and the third handed herself in to the authorities.

The NPD has been linked to the group, though the allegations have yet to be accepted in a court of law.

The trio had made a DVD in which they boasted of the killings and said they had acted to serve the German nation and its people, describing themselves as the National Socialist Underground – echoing the national socialism (Nazism) of Hitler’s Germany.

Alawadi's daughter

Background on El Cajon, CA in light of the tragic murder and possible hate crime against Shaima AlAwadi:

Killing of Iraqi Woman Leaves Immigrant Community Shaken

By IAN LOVETT and WILL CARLESS (NYTimes)

Published: March 27, 2012

EL CAJON, Calif. — Shaima Alawadi’s family says they found the first note taped to the front door of their house on a quiet suburban street here. It said: “This is my country. Go back to yours, terrorist,” according to her 15-year-old son Mohammed.

Like many others in the neighborhood, Ms. Alawadi and her husband, Kassim Alhimidi, are immigrants from Iraq. Mr. Alhimidi says he wanted to call the police. But his wife said no, insisting the note was only a child’s prank. In 17 years in the United States, they had been called terrorists before, he said.

But last Wednesday, her 17-year-old daughter found Ms. Alawadi in their dining room, lying unconscious in a puddle of blood with a severe head wound. Nearby lay another threatening note, similar to the one the family found a week earlier.

Ms. Alawadi, 32, died three days later, and the police say they are still trying to determine whether she was, indeed, targeted because of her religion or ethnicity, calling that just one possibility.

“At this point, we are not calling it a hate crime,” said Lt. Mark Coit of the El Cajon police department. “We haven’t made that determination. We are calling it an isolated incident, because we don’t have any evidence of anything similar going on at this point.”

Isolated or not, the crime has shattered the sense of security for Iraqi immigrants in El Cajon, exposing cultural tensions and distrust that have often simmered just below the surface since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Hanif Mohebi, director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said that many Muslim women in the area were worried that Ms. Alawadi had been targeted because she wore a headscarf in public, as many observant Muslim women do.

“The majority of the community that wears scarves are concerned,” Mr. Mohebi said. He cautioned against a rush to judgment before the police had finished investigating. Still, he added, “the community has gone through some hate crimes before, and the assumption the people have is that they’re going through one now.”

Just two decades ago, El Cajon, just northeast of San Diego, was largely white and English-speaking. But as wars in their homelands pushed more and more Iraqis and other people to emigrate, the Middle Eastern population here has exploded. El Cajon now houses one of the largest Iraqi communities in the country. Middle Eastern groceries and restaurants dot both sides of Main Street, while on the sidewalks, many families stroll by speaking only in Arabic.

Ms. Alawadi and her family moved to the United States from Saudi Arabia in 1995, after fleeing Iraq during the first Gulf War. They have five children, and, for the most part, Mr. Alhimidi said, the neighbors made them feel welcome.

Still, even before this month, he was already familiar with the kind of language he says was on the notes left at his house.

“Some neighbors, I say ‘hi’ to them, and they just turn away,” Mr. Alhimidi said in Arabic, with his son Mohammed translating. “More than 95 percent of the time, I feel welcome. But once in a while, people shout at you. They shout ‘terrorist,’ or ‘go back to your country.’ ”

Most people in town lamented Ms. Alawadi’s killing as a tragedy. Janet Ilko, a middle school teacher, said the news had come as a shock to students.

“It was upsetting to everyone,” Ms. Ilko, 47, said. “Our community is very close-knit. Our students get along very well. People have been here a long time.”

But tension between the newcomers from the Middle East and some of the town’s other residents was also readily apparent on Main Street, even this week. One woman, 30, who was at a park with her children and refused to give her name, called the city’s Iraqi residents “territorial,” adding, “maybe because we are at war with them.” She said her own background was Mexican, though she had grown up in Southern California.

That tension extends to non-Muslims as well.

“I’ve lived here for 32 years, and I’ve been told many times to go back to my country,” said Sascha Atta, an immigrant from Afghanistan. “Here in El Cajon, most of the Iraqis are not even Muslim, they are Christian, but people don’t know the difference.”

One of those Iraqi Christians is Lara Yalda, 18, who fled the country with her family in 2004, living in Syria for six years before coming to El Cajon, where she is now in high school. She said that last year one teacher told all of the Iraqi students to go back to their country, complaining that they took welfare and other money from the United States. That teacher does not teach Iraqi students any more but still works at the school, she said.

Ms. Yalda said Ms. Alawadi’s death frightened her.

“Yeah, I’m scared,” Ms. Yalda said. “I feel sad, because here it is a free country, and there is no reason to kill her. She has a family. So why they kill her? ”

The killing does not make sense to Ms. Alawadi’s son Mohammed either.

“There’s only three people that know what happened,” he said. “God, my mom and the guy who did it.”

Hmmm, wonder if this young man was motivated by ISLAMOPHOBIA? Oh, but it doesn’t exist, right?

Man pleads guilty to hanging camel with noose on Muslim’s apartment door in Cleveland

CLEVELAND – A Middleburg Heights man pleaded guilty to putting a plastic camel with a noose around its neck on the apartment door of a Muslim person.

Christopher M. Sanford, 25, entered a guilty plea to interfering with housing rights of another based on the victim’s race, religion or national origin.

The U.S. Department of Justice said that on the morning of Dec. 1, 2009, Sanford took a plastic camel and a noose, and hung them on the door of the victim, identified only as A.F.A. The victim is a native of Jordan, who is Arab and Muslim, and lived in the Stonebridge Apartments in downtown Cleveland.

“The freedom of all Americans to live where they wish, without fear or threats based on their religion or race, is central to our way of life as Americans and Ohioans. This conduct violates those core values, values that we will continue to uphold through appropriate federal prosecutions,” said. U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach.

Sanford said he used the plastic camel because of the victim’s race and religion, Dettelbach said.

Sanford will be sentenced on June 18. He faces up to one year in prison and a $25,000 fine.

Read more: http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/news/local_news/cleveland_metro/man-pleads-guilty-to-hanging-camel-with-noose-on-muslims-apartment-door-in-cleveland#ixzz1qH0nTgxF

The second time that this mosque, Masjid Aisha has been targeted. Mosque vandalisms seem to be on the increase:

Sacramento: Mosque Attack

(Sacremento Bee)

SACRAMENTO, Calif., March 24, 2012 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ – The Sacramento Valley office of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-SV) today called on the FBI and local law enforcement authorities to investigate a possible bias motive for vandalism targeting a West Sacramento mosque.

Vandals reportedly threw three rocks through a window of the almost-completed Masjid Aisha (formerly the West Sacramento Islamic Community Center) last night as two worshippers prayed inside.

“Whenever a house of worship is targeted in this manner, the possibility of a bias motive must be considered,” said CAIR-SV Executive Director Basim Elkarra.

In 2009, vandals broke into the back door of the previous mosque on the site and damaged religious wall hangings and a bookshelf that held Qurans. The vandals also stole items from the mosque.

CAIR: Sacramento Mosque Vandalized http://tinyurl.com/89mhcnf CAIR Video: Sacramento Mosque Vandalized http://tinyurl.com/7wn5hxm

Earlier this year, a man was sentenced in federal court for vandalizing a Madera, Calif., mosque in 2010. He placed a sign in front of the mosque that read “No temple for the god of terrorism at ground zero.” The man also threw a brick at the front of the mosque and damaged its facade.

According to Islamophobes, this taxi driver probably deserved his beating:

Racists convicted of attack on Muslim taxi driver

A taxi driver today told how he feared for his life after a group of passengers launched a racist attack on him before threatening to “take him down a side street and kill him”.

During the terrifying incident, father-of-five Muhammed Hussain, from Holme Slack, Preston, was spat at, punched in the face, grabbed around the neck and called racist names. His attackers even threatened to cut off his beard.

The Millers taxi driver, who has been in the trade for 10 years, gave evidence in Urdu via an interpreter at the trial of his attackers, Shaun Burns, 19, of Mayfield Avenue, Ingol, and Callum Tennant, 20, who lives with his grandparents on Marshall Grove, Ingol.

Preston Magistrates Court found both men guilty of racially aggravated assault and criminal damage to the taxi, which was kicked and dented when Mr Hussain pulled over to let them out at Lane Ends pub in Ashton.

Burns’ girlfriend Bryanne-Serrita Langham, 22, of Sylvancroft, Ingol, pleaded guilty to criminal damage to a taxi and making off without paying the £4.50 fare.

Today Mr Hussain, 36, told the Evening Post: “I thought they were going to kill me. This is the first time someone has been so violent towards me. It is out of order particularly being spat on – that was an insult. I believe it was because I am a Muslim. I was scared for my life.”

Lancashire Evening Post, 23 March 2012

Shaima AlAwadi

A hijab wearing Iraqi woman has been severely beaten and is not expected to recover from a violent attack on her inside of her home near San Diego.

Apparently this was a premeditated attack. A similar note to the one found by Shaima Alawadi’s body was found by the Alawadi family earlier this month, but the family dismissed it as a “prank.”

USAToday reports:

A family friend, Sura Alzaidy, told the newspaper UT San Diego that the attack apparently occurred after the father took the younger children to school.

Was someone scoping the house out before the attack, waiting for an opportune moment to strike?

A woman’s life has most likely been taken as she is not expected to survive the gruesome attack. What motivated this individual to do something so grisly? If what Alzaidy told the newspaper is true, and we see no reason why it wouldn’t be, clearly we are witnessing an attack motivated by hatred and bigotry.

Islamophobes will try and claim another Muslim did this, but how then do they explain the note?

*I want to point out that we cannot conclude anything at this point, some facts have been presented, such as the note but we will have to wait for the police investigation to relay more information on this crime.

California: Muslim woman’s attacker left note reading ‘Go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist’

A 32-year-old woman was critically injured and not expected to survive after an assault in her El Cajon home on Wednesday, police said Friday, and a threatening note telling the mother of five to go back to her home country was found near her, a family friend said.

The woman’s 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious in the dining room of the house on Skyview Street off Lemon Avenue about 11:15 a.m. Wednesday, said El Cajon police Lt. Steve Shakowski. Police identified her as Shaima Alawadi.

“Based on the type of injuries Alawadi sustained, and other evidence retrieved at the scene, this case is being investigated as a homicide,” Shakowski said.

Police did not disclose the contents of the note. Sura Alzaidy, a family friend, said it told the family to “go back to your own country. You’re a terrorist.” The family is from Iraq, and Alawadi is a “respectful modest muhajiba,” meaning she wears the traditional hijab, a head scarf, Alzaidy said.

El Cajon police Lt. Mark Coit said the family stated they had found a similar note earlier this month, however did not report it to authorities.

The daughter who found her mother told KUSI Channel 9/51 on Friday night that her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron. She said her mother had dismissed the previous note, found outside the house, thinking it was a child’s prank.

**********************************

Update I: Shaima Alawadi has succumbed to her injuries according to this youtube user who uploaded video of Alawadi’s daughter being interviewed:

Update II:  EL CAJON, Calif. (AP) — A 32-year-old woman from Iraq who was found severely beaten next to a threatening note saying “go back to your country” died on Saturday.

Hanif Mohebi, the director of the San Diego chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, said he met with Shaima Alawadi’s family members in the morning and was told that she was taken off life support around 3 p.m.

“The family is in shock at the moment. They’re still trying to deal with what happened,” Mohebi said.

Alawadi, a mother of five, had been hospitalized since her 17-year-old daughter found her unconscious Wednesday in the family’s house in El Cajon, police Lt. Steve Shakowski said.

The daughter, Fatima Al Himidi, told KUSI-TV her mother had been beaten on the head repeatedly with a tire iron, and that the note said “go back to your country, you terrorist.”

Addressing the camera, the tearful daughter asked: “You took my mother away from me. You took my best friend away from me. Why? Why did you do it?”

Police said the family had found a similar note earlier this month but did not report it to authorities.

Al Himidi told KGTV-TV her mother dismissed the first note, found outside the home, as a child’s prank.

A family friend, Sura Alzaidy, told UT San Diego (http://bit.ly/GYbfB7) that the attack apparently occurred after the father took the younger children to school. Alzaidy told the newspaper the family is from Iraq, and that Alawadi is a “respectful modest muhajiba,” meaning she wears the traditional hijab, a head scarf.

Investigators said they believe the assault is an isolated incident.

“A hate crime is one of the possibilities, and we will be looking at that,” Lt. Mark Coit said. “We don’t want to focus on only one issue and miss something else.”

The family had lived in the house in San Diego County for only a few weeks, after moving from Michigan, Alzaidy said. Alzaidy told the newspaper her father and Alawadi’s husband had previously worked together in San Diego as private contractors for the U.S. Army, serving as cultural advisers to train soldiers who were going to be deployed to the Middle East.

Mohebi said the family had been in the United States since the mid-1990s.

He said it was unfortunate that the family didn’t report the initial threatening note.

“Our community does face a lot of discriminatory, hate incidents and don’t always report them,” Mohebi said. “They should take these threats seriously and definitely call local law enforcement.”

El Cajon, northeast of downtown San Diego, is home to some 40,000 Iraqi immigrants, the second largest such community in the U.S. after Detroit.

Update III:  Reporting from San Diego— El Cajon police are asking for the public’s help in its investigation into the fatal beating of an Iraqi immigrant and have not ruled out the possibility that Shaima Alawadi was the victim of a hate crime.

“We’re investigating all aspects of this crime,” Lt. Mark Coit said Sunday. “The minute you rule out a possible motive, you start to get tunnel vision. As of now, we have not ruled out any of the motives for why people kill people.”

Near the body of the 32-year-old Alawadi, police found what has been described as a threatening note. Police have declined to release the text, but relatives and friends say the handwritten note warned Alawadi to “go back to your own country” and labeled her a terrorist.

The family told police they had received a similarly threatening note several days earlier but considered it a prank by teenagers.

Alawadi was found unconscious Wednesday morning in the dining room of the family’s home by her 17-year-old daughter. She was taken to a hospital, where she was diagnosed as brain-dead. Her family decided on Saturday to discontinue life support.

Police said that whatever the motive, the attack appears to be “an isolated event,” not part of an overall pattern of violence toward immigrants.

Coit said police are unsure about the murder weapon but that Alawadi was beaten with a large object.

Alawadi’s husband had reportedly left earlier to take the couple’s younger children to school.

Alawadi and her husband had moved to El Cajon from a Detroit suburb several weeks ago. The two areas are considered the most popular destinations for Iraqi immigrants to the United States.

(H/T: JD) How should one even discuss the ethical implications of the “death penalty” when such a consideration is absurd in light of the USA’s abysmal record in prosecuting war crimes committed by its soldiers and leaders.

Usually those involved in massacres are treated with sympathy, given a slap on the wrist and or exonerated in one form or another:

Robert Bales, Afghanistan Shootings Suspect, Not Likely To Face Death Penalty

(HuffingtonPost)

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Leon Panetta says the death penalty is possible if a U.S. military court finds an Army staff sergeant guilty of gunning down Afghan children and family members. But it isn’t likely.

History shows that the U.S. military system is slow to convict Americans, particularly service members, of alleged war crimes. And when a punishment is imposed, it can range anywhere from life in prison all the way down to house arrest. Other factors can seem to play more of a role than the crime itself.

In the case of Army Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, the suspect in the March 11 Kandahar shootings, legal experts say the 38-year-old married father of two young children could face a lengthy prison sentence if convicted of the crime, which has threatened U.S.-Afghan relations. But on his fourth combat tour and with a head injury on his record – the sergeant remembers little about that night, Bales’ lawyer says – he might well be shown some leniency by the military jury, even if convicted.

“Political pressure is going to drive the push for the death penalty. Doesn’t mean they’re going to get it,” said Charles Gittins, a Virginia-based defense attorney who represents service members and has handled capital cases.

Of the long list of alleged U.S. atrocities – from prison massacres in World War II to the slaughter of civilians at My Lai in Vietnam – relatively few high-profile war crimes believed to involve Americans in the past century have resulted in convictions, let alone the death penalty.

In the case of My Lai, President Richard Nixon reduced the only prison sentence given to three years of house arrest. In the 2005 Haditha shooting of Iraqi civilians, eight Marines were charged but plea deals and promises of immunity in exchange for testimony meant no prison sentences.

Prosecution against Blackwater employees in the 2007 shootings in Baghdad’s Nisoor Square similarly floundered as civilian prosecutors tried to assemble the case. Charges eventually were thrown out on the grounds that prosecutors mishandled evidence, although a federal appeals court last year resurrected the case.

Legal experts say a big part of the challenge is assembling forensic evidence and eyewitness testimony from remote, often dangerous parts of the battlefield thousands of miles away from the United States. And there’s an emotional component, too, in prosecuting U.S. citizens who have risked their lives in combat.

“Terms like `fog of war’ mean nothing legally,” said Eugene Fidell, who teaches military law at Yale University. “But there’s a reluctance to invoke the full moral sanction of criminal justice in these cases.”

The military hasn’t executed a service member since 1961. And like that case in 1961, in which an Army ammunition handler was hanged for raping an 11-year-old girl in Austria, none of the six men on death row at Fort Leavenworth, Kan., today were convicted for atrocities against foreign civilians. All of their crimes involved the killing of U.S. civilians or fellow service members.

The military doesn’t even have the equipment necessary to carry out an execution. If a service member were to be put to death, the military would rely on the federal penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind.

Of note is that U.S. service members – as well as contractors supporting them in war zones – are subject to a different set of rules than civilians when it comes to capital punishment. Unlike in the civilian world, the president must personally agree to the death sentence of a service member.

Gittins estimates that since 1961, more than half of the death penalty cases involving U.S. service members have been overturned by military appeals courts. He attributes that high percentage in part to the lack of experience that military judges and prosecutors have in pursuing capital cases. Inexperience means making mistakes, he says, which higher courts use to knock down rulings.

“If someone does two (military death penalty cases) in their entire career, that would be miraculous,” he said. The question Panetta and others will have to ask, Gittins says, is whether pursuing the death penalty for Bales is worthwhile, given the likelihood such a punishment wouldn’t stick anyway.

Human Rights Watch in Washington, which opposes the death penalty, says it’s not clear the U.S. has the political stomach to follow through with the prosecution of war crimes involving its own citizens.

Andrea Prasow, the organization’s senior counterterrorism counsel, said there was only one word to describe America’s track record for punishing war crimes: “abysmal.”

She says she is most troubled by a lack of accountability in suspected abuse of detainees, including the Abu Ghraib prison scandal in Iraq and secret interrogations led by the CIA.

“Every time a case is not prosecuted, it contributes to a culture of impunity,” Prasow said.

Much of U.S. policy in recent years has focused on protecting troops from prosecution by foreign states. In the 1990s, the U.S. objected to the creation of an international court to prosecute war crimes, in part because of the potential that such a court might try to claim jurisdiction over American troops fighting abroad.

And while Congress in 1996 agreed that the standards for treating prisoners of war as outlined by the Geneva Conventions should be put into law, lawmakers revised the rules 10 years later under pressure by the Bush administration out of concern that U.S. interrogators could be prosecuted for alleged war crimes.

The U.S. also has insisted on maintaining immunity from local prosecution for its troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, signing specific agreements with those countries that preserve the military’s legal jurisdiction in all cases involving service members.

While the U.S. track record for prosecuting alleged war crimes is spotty, some say the tide is changing.

In one 2006 case, four soldiers were given substantial prison sentences for raping a 14-year-old Iraqi girl and killing her and her family. Steven Dale Green, a former 101st Airborne soldier, is serving five life terms after jurors couldn’t agree on whether to impose the death penalty.

Stephen Carter, a Yale law professor who writes frequently about the ethics of war, notes that many of the cases that are prosecuted are aided by other service members tipping off authorities.

“Nearly all of our military forces serve with enormous honor and courage. It bears mention that at Abu Ghraib, just as at My Lai, it was fellow soldiers who blew the whistle on the perpetrators,” Carter wrote in a Newsweek Magazine editorial.

We must start connecting the dots, racism, which is alive and well in the US is very much related to Islamophobia. The tragic slaying of Trayvon Martin exemplifies the point that the USA’s original sin of “racism” is still alive and well:

Trayvon Martin: The myth of US post-racialism

(AlJazeera English) by Linda Sarsour and Khalid and Khaled Beydoun

Washington, DC - Trayvon Martin was just beginning his life. Trayvon Martin was a son. He was a high school junior, with college to look forward to, a career and perhaps a family of his own.

Trayvon Martin was many things, but for George Zimmerman, he was just Black.

The teenager’s race was enough to raise “suspicion” and trigger the neighbourhood watchman – who possessed no training or authority, except for his racist prerogatives – to murder an unarmed and frightened teenager running for his life.

On November 28, 2011, no other colour but his Blackness mattered – and his rush for safe haven was intercepted by Zimmerman, and the structurally entrenched demonisation of Black men codified in our laws, perpetuated by our police forces and subscribed to by our friends and colleagues, classmates and family members.

Trayvon Martin is not, as many writers and pundits commented following his death, “a reminder of American racism”. For Africans Americans and most people of colour, racism, xenophobia and religious animus are common, if not expected, parts of their daily lives.

In the case of Trayvon Martin, a twin set of correlated racisms prematurely ended his life: Zimmerman’s view that a young Black male must be engaged in criminal or thuggish activity by virtue of his race alone; and the neighbourhood watchmen and police alike who execute the structural racism embedded in police departments and penal systems nationwide in the name of the law.

The myth of the Obama era

The election of President Barack Obama, for white America, signalled the shift away from America’s racially charged past. After 2008, white Americans have contended that the United States is experiencing the embryonic stages of a post-racial moment; Martin’s murder is a reminder of the fatal consequences of racism that makes the headlines. Yet, the intermediary steps – the institutional racism and empowering of people like Zimmerman – to police our communities either formally or informally are not deemed newsworthy.

Racism, generally understood as a conscious perspective, action or decision, is a salient core of the US’ history and present. American racism is interwoven into the country’s narrative, codified in its law and entrenched in its institutions. Its authors and gatekeepers were, and are, still largely white.

Whites seldom experience racism, either in its fatal, frequent, or latent form. This constructs the political ideology that the rest of the US has entered this racism-free utopia. Citizenship to this colour-blind state, however, is denied to African Americans, Muslim Americans and Latinos by virtue of a triumvirate of suspicions: crime, terrorism and illegal immigration.

However, whites are not the only culprits of racism. On March 10, an Arab American gas station clerk on the Westside of Detroit gunned down and killed a 24-year-old African American customer after a dispute over the high-price of condoms. Racially charged crimes and murders between Latinos and Blacks are all too frequent, and the sometimes-explosive tension between Asian American and Arab American storeowners is well documented.

Institutional and structural racism is still robust in the US. This is evidenced by the disparate incarceration rates of brown and Black Americans, the decimation of affirmative action and race-conscious legislation in the US, the crumbling public education systems in minority-populated communities and the all too common cold blooded murders of people of colour – both in the US and beyond its boundaries, whether by policemen, neighbourhood patrolmen or soldiers.

The ‘worst of a national psychosis‘

Kumar Rao, a defence lawyer for the Bronx Defenders in New York City, stated that: “Martin’s killing reflects the absolute worst of a national psychosis: The view that Black males – young and old alike – are inherently threatening and unworthy of personal security; and that the state’s commitment to enduring that belief is perpetuated and institutionalised.”

Trayvon Martin’s murder was avoidable, but yet perversely justified through the cold silence of the state.

Zimmerman was a neighbourhood patrolman – not a police officer – but the distinction is thin in this instance. Some police officers, from Miami to Oakland, exhibit the same reckless and cavalier behaviour as Zimmerman. What is more troubling is that police officers and entire departments routinely cover up racially charged arrests, the roughing up of individuals under custody and operate with impunity under the cover of the law.

Yet, for Zimmerman, he had no such cover. This makes this case more absurd and baffling, particularly because he was given police orders to “discontinue his chase of Martin”, as revealed by 9/11 tapes released on March 19. If Zimmerman, a neighbourhood watchman – a volunteer with no training – had obeyed the policeman’s order, Martin would still be alive today.

Zimmerman ignored those order, and took the law into his own hands; he has still not been arrested.

The importance of Trayvon Martin’s is also based on the urgency of the current socio-political moment. The New York Police Department makes every Muslim in the City, whether Black or Arab, South Asian or Latino, targets of illegal spying or worse – unjust convictions of terrorism based solely on their religion and ethnicity. The fact that the NYPD so far as to label Black American Muslims as an “ancestry of interest” shows how far law enforcement would go to justify religious and ethnic profiling.

Connecting the dots

Arab and Muslim Americans in New York are connecting the dots – whether it is the stopping and frisking of young Black and Latino men or the illegal spying on the everyday aspects of Muslims, people of colour are being targeted by the largest police force in the country. In order to defeat the institutionalised racism of the NYPD and set a precedent for the rest of the country, we must build coalitions, connect our struggles and in unison demand accountability for our communities. None of us will win alone.

In June 2009, a Miami policeman shot and killed Husein Shehada, a 29-year-old Arab American, after an evening club-hopping with his brother and girlfriend. Shehada, like Martin, was unarmed and posed no threat. Yet, the white policeman, Adam Tavss, believed that Shehada’s ethnicity substantiated the suspicion to shoot and kill.

The value of Arab life – whether nameless Palestinian children bombed by American-funded fighter jets or American youth profiled, questioned and incarcerated for frequenting a particular mosque – is spiralling downwards rapidly in the US and at a more accelerated rate in the Arab World.

Trayvon Martin is not a martyr or a symbol of racial injustice. Amadou Diallo, Sean Bell, Malice Green or Ramaley Graham, are all other young African American men shot down and killed because of the colour of their skin and countless others that remain unnamed. Most recently, Troy Davis shook the nation as another victim of a broken justice system that continues to fail people of colour not one person at a time but through mass incarceration and mass conviction rates.

Trayvon Martin was his own person and an archetype of our brothers, our sons, our nephews, grandsons. Trayvon is Mohammed walking down Atlantic Avenue, vulnerable to patrolmen wary of his beard. Trayvon is Carlos, donning Dodger Blue in Pico Rivera, mistaken by the LAPD Gang Squad as a gangbanger because of the colour of his skin.

Linda Sarsour is Palestinian Muslim American, non-profit leader, public speaker and community organiser.

Follow her on Twitter: @Lsarsour

Khaled A Beydoun is a Washington, DC-based attorney and author.

Follow him on Twitter: @Legyptian

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

Appeal: Damage and assault in Heckmondwike and Dewsbury following EDL demo in Cleckheaton

Police in Kirklees are appealing for information from the public after a series of incidents in Cleckheaton, Heckmondwike and Dewsbury that followed an English Defence League (EDL) demonstration on Saturday in Cleckheaton.

At 1pm on Saturday around 60 members of the EDL took part in a peaceful, pre-planned demonstration in Cleckheaton Town centre. The demonstration, something that the police had been fully notified about, ended without incident at 3pm and the group dispersed.

Shortly afterwards the police responded to reports that the window of the Co-Op in Heckmondwike had been smashed. Two men from Bradford, a 32-year old and a 20-year old were arrested at the time and are currently on bail pending further enquiries.

At 4pm the police received reports of disorder in Dewsbury Town centre. A group of men in Corporation Street, near to Pizza Go-Go, had abused and assaulted a 35-year old Asian man, knocking him the floor and leaving him with a black eye and bruising to his ribs. The suspects then moved onto Northgate and Westgate. The 35-year old was taken to hospital and released the next day.

As the investigation into both incidents continues, Superintendent David Lunn of Kirklees police said: “We know that following the demonstration in Cleckheaton a number of men, purporting to be members of the EDL turned up at various location across Kirklees, displaying posters and flags and shouting abuse at members of the public. We have had a shop front damaged in Heckmondwike and the serious incident of the assault on the 35-year old man in Dewsbury Town centre.

“These incidents cause fear and concern for innocent members of the public caught up in them and the Police simply will not tolerate such behaviour. Whilst arrests were made for the damage offence, I am appealing for anyone with any information that could help us identify further suspects for the assault and disorder in Dewsbury to contact us.

“If people have mobile phone footage of racist chanting, damage, or assaults taking place anywhere in Kirklees on Saturday, I would appeal for those people to contact us as the information they have could help us greatly with our enquiries.”

Anyone who thinks that they can help with this investigation is asked to contact Dewsbury CID via 101 or Crimestoppers, anonymously, on 0800 555 111.

West Yorkshire Police news report, 21 March 2012

The chief suspect in the murders of three French soldiers (2 North Africans, 1 Caribbean), and four Jews, including three children, is a 23 year old man named Mohammed Merah we are being told. The French interior minister, Claude Gueant alleges that the motive behind the attack was to,

“take revenge for Palestinian children” killed in the Middle East, and [he] was angry at the French military for its operations abroad.

The explanation of a motive will give little comfort to the bereaved families. How can Merah purport to be acting in the cause of Palestine when he TARGETED innocents? What demented, twisting acrobatics enabled him to let go of the innate morals within his humanity and kill children? Did he not realize he was betraying Islam, its core principles and the causes he claimed to be fighting for when he went on this killing spree?

The sort of callousness and cold precision with which he operated reveals the mind of a sickening sociopath.

Islamophobes in their haste had pinned their hopes on this murderer being a Muslim, so that they could once again smear and condemn Islam and Muslims. They attempt to minimize and cover for the role that occupation, war, invasion and murder plays in producing anger and…terrorists.

The double standards from them are expected, when an Anders Behring Breivik exterminates 60+ children he is, according to them, a “lone gunman,” a “nutter.” No discussion about the ideology, the anti-Muslim Islamophobic extremism that inspired Breivik’s terrorist Crusade, and which they propagate daily, is mentioned. When a US soldier goes on a rampage and eliminates 16+ civilians as they sleep, including 9 children we do not even learn their names and the soldier is treated with sympathy in the media and PRAISE amongst the Muslim haters.

If the allegations against Mohammed Merah are true, and they likely are, he should face the full brunt of the law for his crimes, but lets hope that the anti-Muslims do not attempt to use these horrific incidents to shift the focus from the true enemy, radical violent extremism whether Islamist (AlQaeda) or Radical Right (Anders Breivik, EDL, etc.). Life in Europe and particularly France, which is already seeing a campaign feeding off of right-wing populism and anti-Muslim rhetoric, will most likely get more difficult now.

What will be missing from all this is the fact that as long as wars of occupation, daily bombing and hate-mongering persist against Muslim majority nations you can rest assured that you will create more Mohammed Merah’s.

*Update I: If it’s not abundantly clear from the above, let me say it, Merah and the AlQaedah ideology is responsible for this crime, no one else, he stands completely condemned by Loonwatch as he does by nearly every honest and humane person. There is no apology above or blame shifting, just stating the facts. Merah himself claims to be acting out in revenge due to the killing of Palestinians and Afghans, I didn’t say this, the French Interior Minister did. Many seem to think we can’t even discuss the motives of these attacks?

Update II (via B-Boy Blue): Having tracked live updates on various online news outlets all day the contraditory information being released is painting a confusing picture of Merah’s background & history.

It was stated with some authority that he has been to Afghanistan & Pakistan to fight for the Mujehadeen. It was claimed that he’d actually been arrested, jailed & then escaped from prison in a Taliban jailbreak. Here are some excerpts:

“Reuters report that the suspect had been serving a three year sentence when he escaped from jail, quoting the director of Kandahar prison.”

“According to Reuters news agency, the head of Kandahar prison in Afghanistan, says the suspect Mohammed Merah, escaped from the prison in a mass Taliban jailbreak.”

“Details of the suspect’s time in Afghanistan are still sketchy, but Le Monde is reporting that he went twice to Pakistan, once in 2010 and again 2011, to speak with groups of fighters based in the tribal regions near the border with Afghanistan. The paper claims that he trained in the camps there alongside the Pakistani Taliban, foreign jihadis and members of the Haqqani network — and that he even crossed the border into Afghanistan as part of groups sent to fight Nato troops.

It says he is understood to have stopped off in Waziristan before heading to Kandahar and Zabul in the south of Afghanistan. Interestingly, it also says that he was stopped by police on the outskirts of Kandahar city. Although he was not arrested, his presence in the region as a foreign national was unusual enough for the police to report him to the Afghan intelligence services, who reportedly then passed on the information to western intelligence services.”

Jawed Faisal, a spokesman for the Kandahar provincial government, said:

I can’t confirm it was the same person but there was someone in Kandahar prison with the name Mohammed Merah, who was famous as ‘the French guy’. His father and grandfather had Afghan names, and he could pass as an Afghan. His father’s name was Mohammad Seddiq, grandfather was Mohammad Shah.

“His crime was that he was captured laying IEDs, and he was sentenced to three years in jail, but only served five months of it when the prison break happened and he escaped.

“We don’t know which part of Kandahar province he was caught in.”
Faisal added that he didn’t know how long Merah had been in Afghanistan or how long he stayed after prison break.

Lt Col Jimmie Cummings, a spokesman for the Nato-led coalition, said he was aware of reports that Merah had been held in an Afghan prison, but refered all questions to Afghan officials.”

This is all extremely detailed & seemingly conclusive. If it wasn’t for the fact the official twitter account of the Kandahar Governor’s Media office refuted the claim that he had been imprisoned there.

https://twitter.com/#!/KandaharMediaOf

@KandaharMediaOf
Security Forces in Kandahar have never detained a French citizen named Mohammad Merah.

@KandaharMediaOf
@SkyNewsBreak He wasn’t the 1 responsible for the school shooting, but another 1 responsible for bomb blasts in Kandahar. 2 separate cases.

@KandaharMediaOf
@MaryFitzgerldIT Toulouse gunman wasn’t arrested in Kandahar, he is not the one that escaped from Kandahar prison, perhaps names r the same.

It appears that a man with the same name was but not a French national. This fact calls into question many of the previous assertions & casts doubt on much of the official narrative up until this point.

Some other pertinent quotes to consider.

“As for political or religious beliefs, he was very discreet. He never said anything that might lead one to believe he had these views.”

“He didn’t have a dad. This has absolutely nothing to do with Islam, or with us, and I really hope that all the young people of our type of neighbourhood won’t be sullied by this.”

“He wasn’t into having fun, he became harder. He didn’t really go to the mosque, he seemed more likely to meet people in obscure flats.”

“The North African community is doubly hit, first by the grief for the victims and what happened, and also that we’re from the Magreb and people will be pointing fingers at us. I appeal to the French, don’t mix up the whole community with what has happened. Never never has Islam said to kill people.”

A group of four 24-year-old men who said they were friends of Merah tried to go to his apartment block on Wednesday to persuade him to surrender but were stopped at a police roadblock.

“All told a Reuters reporter he had never talked to them about religion and they had no idea he had been to Afghanistan.”

“He never spoke about Islam but he did pray. But we all pray five times a day. There’s nothing strange about that.”

Another friend of Moroccan origin said Merah had tried to enlist in the French army but had been rejected. He said he had seen Merah in a city centre nightclub just last week.

Merah did not drink “but I don’t think he is any more religious than I am. I think he has just lost the plot,” Danny Dem said.

A third contemporary, who declined to give his name, said he went to primary school with Merah and they had remained friends.

“He likes football and motor-bikes like any other guy his age,” said the man, dressed in a blue French national soccer shirt. “I didn’t even know he prayed.”

The head of the French Muslim Council, Mohammed Moussaoui, says: “These acts are in total contradiction with the foundations of this religion”. In remarks quoted by AFP he added: “France’s Muslims are offended by this claim of belonging to this religion.”

A little more background via AFP on the suspected gunman’s attempts to join the French military. The news agency reports that Merah “twice tried and failed to join the French army”.

It quotes the country’s defence ministry saying that Merah first tried to enlist at the age of 19 in the northern city of Lille in January 2008.

The French prosecutor, Francois Molins, has been giving more information on Merah. He told a press conference the suspect in the shooting attacks had been to Afghanistan twice and trained in Pakistan’s Waziristan, a militant stronghold. He said Merah’s brother had been implicated in a network that sent militant fighters to Iraq.

The French interior minister, Claude Gueant, said Merah had told police he belonged to al-Qaida and wanted to take revenge for the deaths of Palestinian children. Gueant said Merah was also angry against French military intervention overseas.

“The mystery here is that he was found to have quite a good arsenal of weapons, war weapons, and given that he was under surveillance it’s not clear how this could have escaped the attention of the authorities.” – Pierre Haski

Was he ever in Afghanistan or Pakistan? If not, why the claims of being under surveillance since returning? Who’s lying? The Government official or Kandahar Media Dept? With his Mother & siblings in precautionary custody surely they can establish his whereabouts during this period.

He has a history of petty theft & thuggery and no overt signs of religious or political militancy. Between 2007 and 2012 he attempted to join the French army twice & visited Pakistan & Afghanistan twice. He supposedly served 5 months in a Kandahar jail yet found his way back to France and was allowed to settle back into society whilst stockpiling weapons under surveillance. Despite being under suspicion for the murder of the soldiers, he was able to carry out the atrocity at the Jewish school.

As I write the siege is still in progress. If Merah doesn’t survive we’ll probably never find out exactly what is fact or fiction, which will no doubt fuel conspiracy talk. The web is already awash with speculation about false flag operations, inside jobs etc allowing Sarkozy to play the hero running up to the election.

What is certain, is that the only people who will suffer due to the actions of Merah and any repercussions are more innocents.

My thoughts are with the victims and their families.

Tell us something we don’t know:

Pro-Israel Hawks Steering Debate on Iran

By ERIC LICHTBLAU and MARK LANDLER (NYTimes)

WASHINGTON — Even before President Obama declared this month that “I have Israel’s back” in its escalating confrontation with Iran, pro-Israel figures like the evangelical Christian leader Gary L. Bauer and the conservative commentator William Kristol were pushing for more.

In a slickly produced, 30-minute video, the group that the two men lead, the Emergency Committee for Israel, mocked Mr. Obama’s “unshakable commitment to Israel’s security” and attacked his record on Iran as weak. “I’ll be brutally honest: I don’t trust the president on Israel,” Mr. Bauer, who unsuccessfully sought the Republican presidential nomination in 2000, said in an interview. “I think his record on Israel is abysmal.”

With Israeli leaders warning of an existential threat from Iran and openly discussing the possibility of attacking its nuclear facilities, pro-Israel groups on all sides have mobilized to make their views known to the Obama administration and to Congress. But it is the most hawkish voices, like the Emergency Committee’s, that have dominated the debate, and, in the view of some critics, pushed the United States closer to taking military action against Iran and another war in the Middle East.

“It’s not about Israel,” said Representative Eric Cantor, Republican of Virginia, the House majority leader and a key Congressional ally of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel.

“It’s about the U.S.,” Mr. Cantor said in an interview. “It’s about our interests in the region. There have been a lot of conflicting messages coming out of the White House.”

Among those advocating a more aggressive approach toward Iran are prominent Republicans in Congress, like Mr. Cantor and Senator John McCain of Arizona; the party’s presidential candidates; groups like the Emergency Committee and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, or Aipac; the so-called “neocons” from the George W. Bush administration who were strong proponents of the war in Iraq; pro-Israel evangelical Christians like Mr. Bauer, who is also active in the group Christians United for Israel; and many Democrats.

Urging diplomacy are liberal groups like J Street, which is helped by $500,000 a year in contributions from the liberal philanthropist George Soros, and Tikkun, a Jewish journal that has begun running newspaper advertisements here and abroad that urge, “NO War on Iran and NO First Strike!” Tikkun, based in Berkeley, Calif., is hoping to link its antiwar message with the Occupy protests.

“A lot of people talk about the ‘Israel lobby’ as if it’s a monolithic thing,” said Dylan Williams, head of government affairs for J Street. “It’s a myth. There is a deep division between those who support military action at this point and those who support diplomacy.”

Clear fissures have developed among pro-Israel groups — not only between hawks and doves over whether to use military force against Iran, but among hard-liners themselves over just how aggressively to confront it.

Sheldon Adelson, a billionaire casino owner who is a staunch supporter of Israel, was once a major donor to Aipac. But because of Aipac’s support for American aid to the Palestinian Authority, he has broken from the group. This year, Mr. Adelson has given at least $10 million, along with his wife, to support Newt Gingrich’s presidential campaign.

Like Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum, Mr. Gingrich has pushed for stronger support of Israel and attacked Mr. Obama’s policies on the Iranian issue as weak. He also described the Palestinians as an “invented people.”

The disagreements over what to do about Iran reflect the divisions among Jews themselves. In a survey of American Jews last September by the American Jewish Committee, an advocacy group, 56 percent of those polled said they would support American military action against Iran if diplomacy and sanctions failed, while 38 percent opposed it. Support was down slightly from a year earlier.

Rabbi Michael Lerner, a leader of Tikkun and an affiliated antiwar coalition of religious groups, said backers of diplomacy want to slow what they have seen as a “drumbeat to war” in recent weeks. Rabbi Lerner and other opponents of military action say the debate over Iran echoes the political climate in 2002 before the United States-led invasion in Iraq.

Representative Keith Ellison, a Minnesota Democrat who opposes military action against Iran, said, “The rhetoric is overblown.”

Those advocating military intervention “whip up fear and whip up doomsday scenarios,” Mr. Ellison said in an interview. “It has an effect. If nothing else, they’re making Obama talk about military options with regard to Iran.”

But Mr. Ellison is in the minority on Capitol Hill, where the debate over Israel and Iran was largely settled long ago.

Murder victim Abel Chennouf (left) was due to become a father with his partner (right)

A killer on the loose on a “powerful moped?” That’s kind of comical but the results have been tragic, as this murderer is going around targeting people of ethnic and religious minorities. (H/T: Zakariya Ali Sher) 

*Ahmed makes some good points:

This could be a “Muslim”. That the three French troops happened to be ethnic minorities might just be a coincidence. So it could be possible that this is a Muslim extremist who is targeting French troops and Jews.

Of course, the sensible thing is for people not to speculate until more evidence comes through. I did notice at Fox News Forums this morning however that they were all going mental over this, saying it is the fault of the French for letting all those Muslims in and having gun control. So if it ends up not being a Muslim, they should be thoroughly ashamed of themselves for politicising a horrendous spate of killings.

Lets not jump to conclusions.

Shootings in Toulouse and Montauban: What we know

(BBC)

Three gun attacks which left seven people dead and two wounded have sparked a security alert in south-western France, with fears that the same killer could be at work.

In each case the attacker is said to have been a gunman on a moped, using a weapon of the same calibre, striking in broad daylight.

All of the attacks took place within a radius of about 50km (30 miles), between the city of Toulouse and town of Montauban.

The first two shootings saw soldiers targeted but the third took place at a school.

What the victims have in common is that they belong to, or are associated with, ethnic or religious minorities – North African, Caribbean and Jewish.

That they were singled out is suggested by reports that, in at least one attack, the killer pushed aside a bystander to get to his victims.

A manhunt is under way and France has placed its national judicial police in charge of the investigation, with anti-terrorist investigators and specialists in serial crimes at its disposal.

While little has been reported about the identity or motivation of, in the words of Le Figaro newspaper, the “most wanted man in France”, some of the strongest clues may have been left by the first attack.

Cyber trail

Investigators believe it is “highly plausible” that the same .45 calibre gun was used in the first two shootings, a judicial source told France’s AFP news agency several days before the third.

On Sunday 11 March, Imad Ibn-Ziaten, a 30-year-old staff sergeant in the 1st Airborne Transportation Regiment, was shot dead around 16:00 (15:00 GMT) behind a school in a quiet district of Toulouse.

According to Le Figaro, Sgt Ibn-Ziaten, who was not in uniform, was unwittingly waiting for his own killer.

He had posted a small ad on a website to sell a Suzuki Bandit motorcycle, and the suspected gunman had arranged a meeting to see it.

The sergeant was found shot in the head, his motorcycle beside him.

French cyber police are working to extract clues from the two men’s internet exchanges, Le Figaro says.

Sgt Ibn-Ziaten had a clean service record, prosecutors stressed, rejecting suggestions that there could have been a gangland element to his murder.

‘Tattoo’

In the second attack, in Montauban on Thursday 15 March, 46 surveillance cameras picked up the gunman on his scooter, according to Le Figaro.

They showed “a man in dark clothing wearing a black helmet and riding a powerful moped”.

The shameless Israeli ambassador to the US, Michael Oren, attempted to manipulate Christian reality to score points in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Some well informed commenters responded to Oren with facts:

Israel Really Isn’t All That Friendly to Its Christians

(Wall Street Journal)

Regarding Israeli Ambassador Michael Oren’s “Israel and the Plight of Mideast Christians” (op-ed, March 9): No doubt, his piece will be compelling for many readers. Christians in North America are generally sympathetic to Christians who suffer elsewhere. More negatively, many respond well when blame for that suffering is placed on Muslims. The biggest problem with Mr. Oren’s analysis, however, is that it stands in sharp disagreement with the perspectives shared by those he presumably wants to protect. Mr. Oren seeks to speak for Palestinian Christians before he has spoken with them.

Palestinian Christians have produced major studies of Palestinian Christian demographic trends. Difficulties created by Israeli occupation policies far outweigh pressure from Muslim neighbors as reasons for Christian migration from the West Bank. According to a study by the Bethlehem-based Diyar Consortium, “most of those who choose to emigrate” are “aggravated by the lack of freedom and security.” At “the bottom of the scale,” they found, “are family reunification, fleeing religious extremism and finding a spouse.”

It is irresponsible for Amb. Oren to make political points among some segments of the U.S. population by intentionally disregarding factors contributing to Palestinian Christian migration away from their homeland. By blaming their condition on Muslims alone, while ignoring the negative effects of Israeli occupation policies, including the debilitating economic effects of the separation barrier, Mr. Oren is using anti-Muslim sentiments among some Americans to hide the effects of Israeli policy. This cynical political rhetoric fuels extremism and does not promote peace.

The Rev. Robert O. Smith

Chicago

I am a Palestinian Christian, and the numbers and facts given by Mr. Oren are erroneous and misleading. With the creation of the state of Israel, 80% of Palestinian Christians were forced into exile. The number of Christians in Jerusalem dropped dramatically since the occupation of the city in 1967, and Palestinian Christians are denied access to Jerusalem. To pretend that their numbers greatly increased contradicts all statistics, including Israeli statistics. Allowing “holiday access to Jerusalem’s churches to Christians from both the West Bank and Gaza” is denying free access, and those permits are given selectively, in small numbers and revoked often with the “closure” of the occupied territories. Pretending to defend the interests of the Christians contradicts facts on the ground, where Christians suffer the same consequences of military occupation as all Palestinians. Most of the land belonging to Christians in Bethlehem is being confiscated with the building of the separation wall. Is that the “respect and appreciation” the Christian community receives from the Jewish state?

Fr. Jamal Khader, D.D.

Dean of the Faculty of Arts

Bethlehem University

Bethlehem

I am one of those Palestinian Christians that Mr. Oren refers to, who live inside Israel. At no time in my life have I ever felt the “respect and appreciation” by the Jewish state which Mr. Oren so glowingly refers to in his last paragraph. Israel’s Christian minority is marginalized in much the same manner as its Muslim one, or at best, quietly tolerated. We suffer the same discrimination when we try to find a job, when we go to hospitals, when we apply for bank loans and when we get on the bus. In my daily dealings with the state, all I have felt is rudeness and overt contempt.

Fida Jiryis

Fassuta, Israel

Amb. Michael Oren presents a distorted and inaccurate account of Christians in Palestine. He conveniently omits gross Israeli violations against the Palestinian Christian community, such as Israel’s revocation of residency rights to many whose birthplace was Jerusalem, or the fact that it restricts their right to worship in their holy sites by imposing an onerous permit system to access the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem or the baptism site on the River Jordan. Even family visitations between Gaza, the West Bank and Jerusalem are heavily restricted.

It doesn’t stop at that. Recently there has been a spate of attacks by Jewish extremists vandalizing Christian properties and spray-painting slogans denouncing Jesus and Mary and attacking Christianity.

Finally, Palestinian Christians are a vibrant component of Palestine’s social, cultural and religious fabric. Many of our most prominent figures in politics, academia and the arts are Christian. This is the case precisely because of a long history and deeply rooted culture of tolerance and integration in Palestine.

Ambassador Maen Rashid Areikat

General Delegation
of the PLO to the U.S.

Washington

Mother Saly Chowdhury and her daughter Ousha outside the shop where they were attacked

No Islamophobia to see here, no racism. These racist thugs must have appeared out of no where.

It’s also interesting that the Daily Mail chose to highlight the fact that the victim of the racist attack, store owner Saly Chowdhury “refuses to sell alcohol in her store.” Why is that important:

Racist thugs spat on four-year-old girl and beat up her mother in a sickening attack in her corner shop

by Leon Watson (Daily Mail)

Racist thugs spat on a four-year-old girl and brutally beat her mother in a 
sickening attack.

Saly Chowdhury was left with a black eye and facial injuries after two men and a woman tried to steal two boxes of crisps from her shop, the Hendon Valley Stores in Sunderland.

The incident took place on last Friday at 4.40pm when the mother-of-four ran out of the shop after the thieves and accidentally locked herself outside.

When the trio started hurling racist abuse at her, she fled to her home nearby. 

But they caught up with her and spat on her four-year-old daughter Ousha, shoved her seven-year-old daughter against the wall and thumped her 13-year-old daughter in the face.

The gang then turned their attentions to Saly, 31, punching her in the face, tearing out chunks of her hair and choking her with her scarf.

Saly, who also has a nine-year-old daughter, managed to free herself and get herself and her children inside to safety. 

And just 12 hours later the mum-of-four was back behind the shop counter, determined not to let the vicious thugs get the better of her. 

Saly, who refuses to sell alcohol in her store, said: ‘I had to close my shop 
on Friday and I lost business.

‘I’m not letting them do that to me again. It was scary and it’s worrying going back to work but there is no need for this behaviour.

‘I have many great customers who know me and I know them. If this is all about stealing, then please speak to me first and we can see if something can be sorted out.

‘The problem of people coming in here and stealing things is getting worse and worse.’

Northumbria Police yesterday said the incident ‘simply won’t be tolerated’.

An investigation into the attack has been launched and is being treated as
racially aggravated.

Sergeant Tom Connor, who covers the area, said: ‘This type of behaviour is despicable.’

Pepe Escobar tears apart US Empirical hegemony worldwide, specifically its immorality, hypocrisy and deadly consequences in Afghanistan:

The horror, the horror

“We must kill them. We must incinerate them. Pig after pig… cow after cow… village after village… army after army…”  – Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now

Hong Kong - It started way before a lone killer, a US Army sergeant, married with two children, walked into villagesin Panjwayi, southwest of Kandahar city, and “allegedly” went on a shooting spree, leaving at least 16 civilians dead.

This was Afghanistan’s Haditha moment – as in Iraq; or My Lai – as in Vietnam.

It had been building up via the serial drone-with-Hellfire bombings of tribal wedding parties; the serial secret US Special Forces’ “night raids”; the serial “kill team” murders in 2010; the ritual urination onto dead Afghans by “our men in uniform”; and last but not least, the Quran burnings in Bagram. Mission … accomplished?

According to the latest Post-ABC News poll - conducted even before the Kandahar massacre – 55 per cent of Americans want the end of the Afghan war.

US President Barack Obama once again stressed that 10 years into a war that has cost at least $400bn, the “combat role” of NATO troops will end in 2014. According to Obama, Washington only wants to make sure “that al-Qaeda is not operating there, and that there is sufficient stability that it does not end up being a free-for-all”.

Al-Qaeda “is not operating there” for a long time; there are only a bunch of instructors “not there” but in the Waziristans, in the Pakistani tribal areas.

And forget about “stability”. The “Afghan security forces” that will be theoretically in charge by 2014, or even before, are doomed. Their illiteracy rate is a staggering 80 per cent. At least 25 per cent become deserters. Child rape is endemic. Over 50 per cent are permanently stoned on hashish, on steroids.

The level of mistrust between Afghans and Americans is cosmic. According to a 2011 study that became classified by the Pentagon after it was leaked to the Wall Street Journal - the American military essentially view Afghans as corrupt cowards while Afghans see the American military as coward bullies.

Get a Saigon 1975 moment now or in 2014, the facts on the ground will remain the same: Hindu Kush-rocking instability.

Toss the COIN and I win

Afghanistan was always a tragedy trespassed by farce. Think about NATO’s original 83 restrictions on the rules of engagement, which led, for example, to a rash of French soldiers killed in 2008 because France, pressed by the US, stopped paying protection money to the Taliban; or think about Berlin calling it not a war, but a “humanitarian mission”.

Internal battles – unlike Vietnam – became legend. Such as the COINdinistas – the counter-insurgency gang, supported by then Pentagon chief Bob Gates – invested in a “new mission” and a “new military leadership”, winning against Vice-President Joe Biden’s CT PLUS strategy, as in less soldiers on the ground doing counter-terrorism.

The winner, as everyone remembers, was rockstar General Stanley McChrystal, who insisted that the Biden plan would lead to “Chaosistan”, which happened to be the name of a classified CIA analysis.

Stanley McChrystal – a Pentagon spokesperson during the March 2003 invasion of Iraq – badly wanted to change the culture of NATO and the US Army in Afghanistan. He wanted to destroy the culture of shoot-first-and-blow-shit-up and go towards “protecting the civilian population”. In his own words, he stressed that “air-to-ground munitions” and “indirect fires” against Afghan homes were “only authorised under very limited and prescribed conditions”.

He prevailed – shielded by his rockstar status – only for a brief moment.

Meanwhile, even if on one side the State Department, the DEA and the FBI would be warning about nasty drug smugglers and assorted criminals, on the other side the CIA and the Pentagon, praising them for good intel, would always win.

And everything was fully justified by an array of reluctant warriors/liberal hawks in places such as the Center for a New American Security – crammed with “respectable” journalists.

Hamid Karzai won the Afghan elections by outright fraud. His half-brother Ahmed Wali Karzai – then provincial council chief in Kandahar – was free to keep running his massive drug business while dismissing elections (“the people in this region don’t understand it”).

Who cared if the Afghan government in Kabul was/is in fact a crime syndicate? “Loyal” local commanders – “our bastards” – increasingly got funding and even dedicated Special Forces as personal advisors to themselves and their death squads.

McChrystal, to his credit, admitted that the Soviets in the 1980s did many things right (for instance, building roads, promoting central government, education for boys and girls alike, modernising the country).

But they also did a lot of things terribly wrong, such as carpet-bombing and killing 1.5 million Afghans. If only Pentagon planners had the presence of mind to read Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1970-89 (Profile Books), by former British ambassador Rodric Braithwaite, drawing on a wealth of Russian sources from the KGB to the Gorbachev Foundation; from the internet to a spectacular book by the late General Alexander Lyakhovsky.

You have the right to be misinformed

The Pentagon will never accept the withdrawal date of 2014: it goes full-frontal against its own Full Spectrum Dominance doctrine, which counts on scores of US bases in Afghanistan to monitor/control/harass strategic competitors – Russia and China.

The way out will be a ruse. The Pentagon will transfer its special operations to the CIA; they will become “spies”, not “troops on the ground”.

This will mean, essentially, an extension ad infinitum of the Phoenix Program in Vietnam, which carried out the targeted killing of over 20,000 “suspected” Vietcong supporters.

And that leads us to the current CIA director, media-savvy General David Petraeus and his baby – COIN field manual FM 3-24, the Pentagon’s answer to William Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell as the marriage of counter-insurgency with the war on terror. And this, even after a 2008 RAND study titled How Terrorist Groups End stressed that the only way to defeat them was through a good old law enforcement operation.

Petraeus couldn’t care less. After all, his “information operations” – as in all-out media manipulation, coupled with the massive distribution of the proverbial suitcase full of US dollars – had won “his” and George W Bush’s surge in Iraq.

Proud Pashtuns were a much tougher nut to crack than Sunni sheikhs in the desert. They went so low-tech – fabricating tens of thousands of IEDs with fertiliser, wood and old munitions – that they in fact froze US technology dead in its tracks, leading to endless Pentagon newspeak reports on “vast increase in IED activity”.

Since Obama’s inauguration, the Pentagon had been playing extra-dirty to extract the exact war they wanted to carry out in Afghanistan.

They got it. Petraeus went on non-stop spin mode on “progress”. Local populations were “becoming more receptive” to US troops, even as a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) – the cumulative knowledge of 17 US intelligence agencies – remained grim.

Petraeus did what he does best: he remixed the NIE. He never admitted that the war would be over by 2014.  He cranked up airstrikes, unleashed Apache and Kiowa attack helicopters, tripled the number of night raids by Special Forces, authorised a mini-Shock and Awe, totally levelling the town of Tarok Kolache in southern Afghanistan.

After yet another US massacre in February 2011 in Kunar Province, with 64 dead civilians, Petraeus even had the gall of accusing Afghans of burning their own children to make it look like collateral damage. Good for him. At the time, his relationship with Obama was even improving.

The Obama administration is, in fact, convinced that Obama’s surge, led by Petraeus and scheduled to finish by September, has left Afghanistan “stable”, at least in the region known as “regional command east”; that’s what Petraeus dubs “Afghan good enough”.

Most of the country is in fact “Talib good enough”, but who cares? As for burning babies, cynics might qualify it as a feature of American exceptionalism. One just has to remember the Amiriya Shelter in Baghdad on February 13, 1991, when no fewer than 408 children and their mothers were burned to death by the US.

I’ll never look into your eyes… again

How not to remember the inimitable Dennis Hopper as the psychedelic photojournalist in Apocalypse Now, talking about Colonel Kurtz/Marlon Brando: “He’s a poet-warrior in the classic sense…”

“Poet-warrior” McChrystal was convinced Afghanistan was not Vietnam; in Vietnam the US was fighting a “popular insurgency”, unlike Afghanistan (wrong: the many strands bundled under the moniker “Taliban” have become more popular in direct proportion to Karzai’s disaster, not to mention that in Vietnam the official Pentagon spin was that the Vietcong were never popular).

Generals, anyway, don’t go on Kurtz-style killing sprees. Petraeus was promoted to unleash Shadow War Inc at the CIA. After he was sacked following a profile in Rolling Stone magazine – how rockstar is that? – McChrystal ended up rehabilitated by the White House.

He taught at Yale, went into consulting, is making a fortune on the conference circuit – distilling wisdom about “leadership” and the Greater Middle East – and was made an unpaid adviser to military families by Obama.

McChrystal sees Afghanistan as stuck in “some kind of post-apocalyptic nightmare”. Conrad’s “the horror… the horror…” is perennial. The Pentagon’s key lesson from Vietnam was how to seal off the horror, how to put it in boxes, and how to, voluptuously, embrace it.

So it’s no wonder McChrystal could not possibly see that he was starring as the remixed Colonel Kurtz – while Petraeus was a more methodical, but no less deadly Captain Willard. Unlike Vietnam, though, this time there won’t be a Coppola to win the war for Hollywood. But there will be plenty of Hollow Men left at the Pentagon.

Pepe Escobar is the roving correspondent for Asia Times. His latest book is named Obama Does Globalistan(Nimble Books, 2009).

(via. Islamophobia-watch)

EDL fail to disrupt opening of new Islamic centre

The presence of the English Defence League failed to disrupt the opening of a new Islamic centre in Luton yesterday.

The Discover Islam Public Information Centre, based in Upper George Street, is a community project which aims to provide a neutral environment for people to ask questions about Islam or Muslims that they would feel too embarrassed or intimidated to talk about otherwise.

But outside, surrounded by police, EDL leader Tommy Robinson and around 20 of his followers handed out leaflets which stated that the centre promoted “Luton In Harm-enemy“. The protest was responding to the views expressed on a blog by the centre’s manager, Yusuf Bonner, which Mr Robinson claims are “extremist”. Mr Bonner was not present at the event.

Inside, those running the centre attempted to ignore the EDL and instead focus on what the new building would bring to the town.

Discover Islam representative, Sufian Sadiq said: “Outside is an act of intimidation. I actually wanted to sit down and have a cup of tea with them, but they refused. I think the only problem is they haven’t had the opportunity to mix in with people like ourselves.”

Speaking about the centre, he said: “We conducted a survey and asked over 500 people, who are predominately non-Muslim, about their views on co-existing. The responses included, ‘I don’t know enough about Islam … I don’t know enough about religious practices … and I feel scared going into Bury Park and intimidated going into a Mosque’. We need to sit down as a community and combat this. We will come out and show that Islam is not intimidating.”

However, Tommy Robinson said: “We’re here to let the residents of Luton know what this centre is really about. We don’t need this form of Islam in our town and it is unbelievable that they are doing it under a banner of peace. We will be stepping up a campaign over the next three months, and we will close this place down.”

Luton council leader, Hazel Simmons attended the launch to show her support for the centre. She said: “A few weeks ago we had another challenge to Luton in the form of two television programmes. They gave an image that doesn’t represent us or the town that we live in or work in. Unfortunately that is the message that has gone out nationally and we’ve got to fight back against it. This is a groundbreaking initiative and a great opportunity for the town.”

A spokesman for Luton in Harmony said: “From what I’ve heard today, this centre is something the town needs, and something the non-Muslim community have said that they wanted. This is a lovely example of the Muslim community engaging, because they recognise they need to come out and dispel the myths and propaganda coming from people who don’t know anything about what Muslims are really about.”

Luton & Dunstable Express, 14 March 2012

Via ENGAGE

Update:  See “Luton Borough Council takes action against EDL over logo use”, BBC News, 15 March 2012

Update 2:  Via Exposing the English Defence League here is a comment posted in response to the Luton Today report of the council’s legal action against the EDL:

Stephen Yaxly, lennon, tommy robison, whatever his name is now days – its un like him to break the law!! really?!?!?! considering he was a very well known drug dealer in the Wigmore area a few years back, driving around in his pimped corsa that had what can only be described as the worst paint job in the world. this guy would not think twice about stamping on your face regardless of of skin colour or background. how can somebody claim to be defending england when its people like him that give it a bad name?!?! some things the EDL say make sence but this is not the person that they should have fronting them!! i saw him on news night telling us about muslims taking girls and getting them addicted to drugs………..who the hell is he to comment when he made his living from selling drugs to anybody who would take them…….I am proud to be english but i am not proud to have StephenTommyfool speaking on behalf of the ‘english’. he is just a drug dealing thug! he is not defending england! he is giving the working class english man a bad name. On your bike Stephen!!! go back to what you do best and sell drugs to low-lives like yourself!

Israeli settlers attack Palestinians daily

Something tells me the below numbers are very conservative:

Israel Fails To Rein In Jewish Extremists: Report

by JTA (Forward)

Israel is not doing enough to stop the large increase in attacks on Palestinians by Jewish extremists, according to an internal European Union report.

The report by the 22 heads of mission of EU countries’ ambassadors in Ramallah said there were 411 assaults in 2011, compared to 266 in 2010 and 132 in 2009, according to Euobserver.com, which saw the report. The Netherlands was the lone country that refused to endorse the report.

The attacks ranged from throwing stones to gunfire, and uprooting olive trees to burning mosques. Three Palestinians were reported dead and 183 injured by the attacks.

Eight Jewish settlers, including five members of the Fogel family, were killed and 37 injured.

The report said that a small “hard-core” group of Jewish settlers carried out the attacks, according to Euobserver. But the diplomats also called the settler attacks part of a broader Israeli campaign to get rid of the Palestinians, saying they “effectively force a withdrawal of the Palestinian population away from the vicinity of settlements, thereby increasing the scope for settlement expansion.”

The EU report said that more than 90 percent of complaints filed by Palestinians ended with no indictment.

Israel has set up a police task force to stop settler attacks and Israeli leaders have roundly condemned such attacks, an Israeli official told Euobserver. The EU report also acknowledged that Israeli soldiers helped prevent attacks during the Palestinian olive harvest last year.

(Via. Islamophobia-watch)

Shepherdsville business said to be target of hate crime will close

LOUISVILLE, KY. (WDRB) – The Iraqi-owned business that police say was the target of a hate crime will not reopen.  The business manager for Jacob’s Smoke Shop says he filed paperwork with the secretary of state to officially close the business.

Vandals broke in and ripped apart the Shepherdsville store last month, spray painting “Hate Arab” and “Go Home” on the floors and walls.  Community members have now posted words of encouragement on the front of the business.

Owner Ali Alboodi told them he feared for his life and was returning to Iraq.  The FBI is investigating.

Moro Crater Massacre Victims

History has a horrifically persistent way of repeating itself, almost 106 years ago to the date US soldiers massacred more than 600 mostly unarmed Muslim Moro villagers in the Phillipines. Today we hear news of the bloody massacre carried out by an Army Staff Sergeant in Afghanistan, killing 16 civilians, mostly women and children as they slept in their homes.

I provide a Wiki article below about the Moro Massacre, it might not be the best citation but the article below is accurate:

Moro Crater massacre

(Wikipilipinas)

The Moro Crater massacre is a name given to the final phase of the First Battle of Bud Dajo, a military engagement of the Philippine-American War which took place March 10, 1906], on the isle of Jolo in the southern Philippines. Forces of the U.S. Army under the command of Major General Leonard Wood, a naval detachment comprising 540 soldiers, along with a detachment of native constabulary, armed with artillery and small firearms, attacked a village hidden in the crater of the dormant volcano Bud Dajo. No American soldiers were killed, though sixteen were wounded; more than 600 mostly unarmedMuslim Moro villagers were killed, but none wounded.

Mark Twain’s indignation

The Filipinos were not yet defeated on July 4 1902, when Theodore_Roosevelt|President Roosevelt declared that the war was over. The Muslim Filipinos, or Muslim Filipino|Moros, in the Southern Philippines were as tenacious in opposing U.S. colonization, as they were in resisting Spanish rule during the preceding three centuries. But those whose slaughter is described below were not a military group.

Mark Twain must have felt strongly compelled to comment on the massacre. It provided another opportunity to condemn the brutality of the U.S troops, and Leonard Wood, already the subject of his scorn, was the commanding officer involved. In all of his writings about Wood, Mark Twain emphasized the irony that he was a medical Physician|doctor whose profession, as a soldier, was to kill people. This theme was developed here with references to the “doctor” who led the massacre, the “heroes” who performed it, and the “savages” who suffered it. The savagery was performed by the “heroes,” not the sympathetically-presented Moros, whose slaughtered children represented “our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness.”

The Anti-Imperialist League quickly published two leaflets about the massacre. A photograph [1] of the carnage that it distributed to the press in 1907 was later described as “the most hideous Philippine Picture . . . published in the United States during the subjugation of the islands.”

Mark Twain, however, thought that his own comments were too controversial to publish. They are from his autobiography, which was planned for publication after his death, so he could discuss his contemporaries without restraint. Later in 1906, while choosing sections of the autobiography for publication in the North American Review, he marked these dictations as “not usable yet”.

 Part 1: Monday, March 12, 1906

This incident burst upon the world last Friday in an official cablegram from the commander of our forces in the Philippines to our Government at Washington. The substance of it was as follows: A tribe of Moros, dark-skinned savages, had fortified themselves in the bowl of an extinct crater not many miles from Jolo; and as they were hostiles, and bitter against us because we have been trying for eight years to take their liberties away from them, their presence in that position was a menace. Our commander, Gen. Leonard Wood, ordered a reconnaissance. It was found that the Moros numbered six hundred, counting women and children; that their crater bowl was in the summit of a peak or mountain twenty-two hundred feet above sea level, and very difficult of access for Christian troops and artillery. Then General Wood ordered a surprise, and went along himself to see the order carried out. Our troops climbed the heights by devious and difficult trails, and even took some artillery with them. The kind of artillery is not specified, but in one place it was hoisted up a sharp acclivity by tackle a distance of some three hundred feet. Arrived at the rim of the crater, the battle began. Our soldiers numbered five hundred and forty. They were assisted by auxiliaries consisting of a detachment of native constabulary in our pay — their numbers not given — and by a naval detachment, whose numbers are not stated. But apparently the contending parties were about equal as to number — six hundred men on our side, on the edge of the bowl; six hundred men, women and children in the bottom of the bowl. Depth of the bowl, 50 feet.

Gen. Wood’s order was, “Kill or capture the six hundred.”

The battle began-it is officially called by that name-our forces firing down into the crater with their artillery and their deadly small arms of precision; the savages furiously returning the fire, probably with brickbats-though this is merely a surmise of mine, as the weapons used by the savages are not nominated in the cablegram. Heretofore the Moros have used knives and clubs mainly; also ineffectual trade-muskets when they had any. [page 172]

The official report stated that the battle was fought with prodigious energy on both sides during a day and a half, and that it ended with a complete victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory for the American arms. The completeness of the victory is established by this fact: that of the six hundred Moros not one was left alive. The brilliancy of the victory is established by this other fact, to wit: that of our six hundred heroes only fifteen lost their lives.

General Wood was present and looking on. His order had been. “Kill or capture those savages.” Apparently our little army considered that the “or” left them authorized to kill or capture according to taste, and that their taste had remained what it has been for eight years, in our army out there – the taste of Christian butchers.

The official report quite properly extolled and magnified the “heroism” and “gallantry” of our troops; lamented the loss of the fifteen who perished, and elaborated the wounds of thirty-two of our men who suffered injury, and even minutely and faithfully described the nature of the wounds, in the interest of future historians of the United States. It mentioned that a private had one of his elbows scraped by a missile, and the private’s name was mentioned. Another private had the end of his nose scraped by a missile. His name was also mentioned – by cable, at one dollar and fifty cents a word.

Next day’s news confirmed the previous day’s report and named our fifteen killed and thirty-two wounded again, and once more described the wounds and gilded them with the right adjectives.

Let us now consider two or three details of our military history. In one of the great battles of the Civil War ten per cent. Of the forces engaged on the two sides were killed and wounded. At Waterloo, where four hundred thousand men were present on the two sides, fifty thousand fell, killed and wounded, in five hours, leaving three hundred and fifty thousand sound and all right for further adventures. Eight years ago, when the pathetic comedy called the Cuban War was played, we summoned two hundred and fifty thousand men. We fought a number of showy battles, and when the war was over we had lost two hundred and sixty-eight men out of our two hundred and fifty thousand, in killed and wounded in the field, and just fourteen times as many by the gallantry of the army doctors in the hospitals and camps. We did not exterminate the Spaniards — far from it. In each engagement we left an average of two per cent. of the enemy killed or crippled on the field.

Contrast these things with the great statistics which have arrived from [page 172] that Moro crater! There, with six hundred engaged on each side, we lost fifteen men killed outright, and we had thirty-two wounded-counting that nose and that elbow. The enemy numbered six hundred — including women and children — and we abolished them utterly, leaving not even a baby alive to cry for its dead mother. This is incomparably the greatest victory that was ever achieved by the Christian soldiers of the United States.

Now then, how has it been received? The splendid news appeared with splendid display-heads in every newspaper in this city of four million and thirteen thousand inhabitants, on Friday morning. But there was not a single reference to it in the editorial columns of any one of those newspapers. The news appeared again in all the evening papers of Friday, and again those papers were editorially silent upon our vast achievement. Next day’s additional statistics and particulars appeared in all the morning papers, and still without a line of editorial rejoicing or a mention of the matter in any way. These additions appeared in the evening papers of that same day (Saturday) and again without a word of comment. In the columns devoted to correspondence, in the morning and evening papers of Friday and Saturday, nobody said a word about the “battle.” Ordinarily those columns are teeming with the passions of the citizen; he lets no incident go by, whether it be large or small, without pouring out his praise or blame, his joy or his indignation about the matter in the correspondence column. But, as I have said, during those two days he was as silent as the editors themselves. So far as I can find out, there was only one person among our eighty millions who allowed himself the privilege of a public remark on this great occasion — that was the President of the United States. All day Friday he was as studiously silent as the rest. But on Saturday he recognized that his duty required him to say something, and he took his pen and performed that duty. If I know President Roosevelt — and I am sure I do — this utterance cost him more pain and shame than any other that ever issued from his pen or his mouth. I am far from blaming him. If I had been in his place my official duty would have compelled me to say what he said. It was a convention, an old tradition, and he had to be loyal to it. There was no help for it. This is what he said:

Washington, March 10. Wood, Manila:- I congratulate you and the officers and men of your command upon the [page 173] brilliant feat of arms wherein you and they so well upheld the honor of the American flag. (Signed) Theodore Roosevelt.

His whole utterance is merely a convention. Not a word of what he said came out of his heart. He knew perfectly well that to pen six hundred helpless and weaponless savages in a hole like rats in a trap and massacre them in detail during a stretch of a day and a half, from a safe position on the heights above, was no brilliant feat of arms – and would not have been a brilliant feat of arms even if Christian America, represented by its salaried soldiers, had shot them down with Bibles and the Golden Rule instead of bullets. He knew perfectly well that our uniformed assassins had not upheld the honor of the American flag, but had done as they have been doing continuously for eight years in the Philippines – that is to say, they had dishonored it.

The next day, Sunday, — which was yesterday — the cable brought us additional news – still more splendid news — still more honor for the flag. The first display-head shouts this information at us in the stentorian capitals: “WOMEN SLAIN MORO SLAUGHTER.”

“Slaughter” is a good word. Certainly there is not a better one in the Unabridged Dictionary for this occasion.

The next display line says:

“With Children They Mixed in Mob in Crater, and All Died Together.”

They were mere naked savages, and yet there is a sort of pathos about it when that word children falls under your eye, for it always brings before us our perfectest symbol of innocence and helplessness; and by help of its deathless eloquence color, creed and nationality vanish away and we see only that they are children — merely children. And if they are frightened and crying and in trouble, our pity goes out to them by natural impulse. We see a picture. We see the small forms. We see the terrified faces. We see the tears. We see the small hands clinging in supplication to the mother; but we do not see those children that we are speaking about. We see in their places the little creatures whom we know and love.

The next heading blazes with American and Christian glory like to the sun in the zenith:

Death List is Now 900.”

I was never so enthusiastically proud of the flag till now! [page 174]

The next heading explains how safely our daring soldiers were located. It says:

“Impossible to Tell Sexes Apart in Fierce Battle on Top of Mount Dajo.”

The naked savages were so far away, down in the bottom of that trap, that our soldiers could not tell the breasts of a woman from the rudimentary paps of a man — so far away that they couldn’t tell a toddling little child from a black six-footer. This was by all odds the least dangerous battle that Christian soldiers of any nationality were ever engaged in.

The next heading says:

“Fighting for Four Days.”

So our men were at it four days instead of a day and a half. It was a long and happy picnic with nothing to do but sit in comfort and fire the Golden Rule into those people down there and imagine letters to write home to the admiring families, and pile glory upon glory. Those savages fighting for their liberties had the four days too, but it must have been a sorrowful time for them. Every day they saw two hundred and twenty- five of their number slain, and this provided them grief and mourning for the night — and doubtless without even the relief and consolation of knowing that in the meantime they had slain four of their enemies and wounded some more on the elbow and the nose.

The closing heading says:

“Lieutenant Johnson Blown from Parapet by Exploding Artillery Gallantly Leading Charge.”

Lieutenant Johnson has pervaded the cablegrams from the first. He and his wound have sparkled around through them like the serpentine thread of fire that goes excursioning through the black crisp fabric of a fragment of burnt paper. It reminds one of Gillette’s comedy farce of a few years ago, “Too Much Johnson.” Apparently Johnson was the only wounded man on our side whose wound was worth anything as an advertisement. It has made a great deal more noise in the world than has any similarly colossal event since “Humpty Dumpty” fell off the wall and got injured. The official dispatches do not know which to admire most, Johnson’s adorable wound or the nine hundred murders. The ecstasies flowing from Army Headquarters on the other side of the globe to the White House, at a dollar and a half a word, have set fire to similar ecstasies in the President’s breast. It appears that the immortally wounded was a Rough Rider under Lieutenant Colonel Roosevelt at San [page 175] Juan Hill — that extinguisher of Waterloo — when the Colonel of the regiment, the present Major General Dr. Leonard Wood, went to the rear to bring up the pills and missed the fight. The President has a warm place in his heart for anybody who was present at that bloody Collision of military solar systems, and so he lost no time in cabling to the wounded hero, “How are you?” And got a cable answer, “Fine, thanks.” This is historical. This will go down to posterity.

Johnson was wounded in the shoulder with a Slug. The slug was in a shell — for the account says the damage was caused by an exploding shell which blew Johnson off the rim. The people down in the hole had no artillery; therefore it was our artillery that blew Johnson off the rim. And so it is now a matter of historical record that the only officer of ours who acquired a wound of advertising dimensions got it at our hands, not the enemy’s. It seems more than probable that if we had placed our soldiers out of the way of our own weapons, we should have come out of the most extraordinary battle in all history without a scratch.

Part 2: Wednesday, March 14, 1906

The ominous paralysis continues. There has been a slight sprinkle — an exceedingly slight sprinkle — in the correspondence columns, of angry rebukes of the President for calling this cowardly massacre a “brilliant feat of arms,” and for praising our butchers for “holding up the honor of the flag” in that singular way; but there is hardly a ghost of a whisper about the feat of arms in the editorial columns of the papers.

I hope that this silence will continue. It is about as eloquent and as damaging and effective as the most indignant words could be, I think. When a man is sleeping in a noise, his sleep goes placidly on; but if the noise stops, the stillness wakes him. This silence has continued five days now. Surely it must be waking the drowsy nation. Surely the nation must be wondering what it means. A five-day silence following a world-astonishing event has not happened on this planet since the daily newspaper was invented.

At a luncheon party of men convened yesterday to God-speed George Harvey, who is leaving to-day for a vacation in Europe, all the talk was about the brilliant feat of arms; and no one had anything to say about it that either the President or Major General Dr. Wood, or the damaged Johnson, would regard as complimentary, or as proper comment to put into our histories. Harvey said he believed that the shock and shame of [page 176] this episode would eat down deeper and deeper into the hearts of the nation and fester there and produce results. He believed it would destroy the Republican party and President Roosevelt. I cannot believe that the prediction will come true, for the reason that prophecies which promise valuable things, desirable things, good things, worthy things, never come true. Prophecies of this kind are like wars fought in a good cause — they are so rare that they don’t count.

Day before yesterday the cable-note from the happy General Dr. Wood was still all glorious. There was still proud mention and elaboration of what was called the “desperate hand-to-hand fight.” — Doctor Wood not seeming to suspect that he was giving himself away, as the phrase goes — since if there was any very desperate hand-to-hand fighting it would necessarily happen that nine hundred hand-to-hand fighters, if really desperate, would surely be able to kill more than fifteen of our men before their last man and woman and child perished.

Very well, there was a new note in the dispatches yesterday afternoon — just a faint suggestion that Dr. Wood was getting ready to lower his tone and begin to apologize and explain. He announces that he assumes full responsibility for the fight. It indicates that he is aware that there is a lurking disposition here amidst all this silence to blame somebody. He says there was “no wanton destruction of women and children in the fight, though many of them were killed by force of necessity because the Moros used them as shields in the hand-to-hand fighting.”

This explanation is better than none; indeed it is considerably better than none. Yet if there was so much hand-to-hand fighting there must have arrived a time, toward the end of the four days’ butchery, when only one native was left alive. We had six hundred men present; we had lost only fifteen; why did the six hundred kill that remaining man — or woman, or child?

Dr. Wood will find that explaining things is not in his line. He will find that where a man has the proper spirit in him and the proper force at his command, it is easier to massacre nine hundred unarmed animals than it is to explain why he made it so remorselessly complete. Next he furnishes us this sudden burst of unconscious humor, which shows that he ought to edit his reports before he cables them:

“Many of the Moros feigned death and butchered the American hospital men who were relieving the wounded.”

We have the curious spectacle of hospital men going around trying to [page 177] relieve the wounded savages — for what reason? The savages were all massacred. The plain intention was to massacre them all and leave none alive. Then where was the use in furnishing mere temporary relief to a person who was presently to be exterminated? The dispatches call this battue a “battle.” In what way was it a battle? It has no resemblance to a battle. In a battle there are always as many as five wounded men to one killed outright. When this so-called battle was over, there were certainly not fewer than two hundred wounded savages lying on the field. What became of them? Since not one savage was left alive!

The inference seems plain. We cleaned up our four days’ work and made it complete by butchering those helpless people.

The President’s joy over the splendid achievement of his fragrant pet, General Wood, brings to mind an earlier presidential ecstasy. When the news came, in 1901, that Colonel Funston had penetrated to the refuge of the patriot, Aguinaldo, in the mountains, and had captured him by the use of these arts, to wit: by forgery, by lies, by disguising his military marauders in the uniform of the enemy, by pretending to be friends of Aguinaldo’s and by disarming suspicion by cordially shaking hands with Aguinaldo’s officers and in that moment shooting them down — when the cablegram announcing this “brilliant feat of arms” reached the White House, the newspapers said that that meekest and mildest and gentlest and least masculine of men, President McKinley, could not control his joy and gratitude, but was obliged to express it in motions resembling a dance. Also President McKinley expressed his admiration in another way. He instantly shot that militia Colonel aloft over the heads of a hundred clean and honorable veteran officers of the army and made him a Brigadier General in the regular service, and clothed him in the honorable uniform of that rank, thus disgracing the uniform, the flag, the nation, and himself.

Wood was an army surgeon, during several years, out West among the Indian hostiles. Roosevelt got acquainted with him and fell in love with him. When Roosevelt was offered the colonelcy of a regiment in the iniquitous Cuban-Spanish war, he took the place of Lieutenant Colonel and used his influence to get the higher place for Wood. After the war Wood became our Governor General in Cuba and proceeded to make a mephitic record for himself. Under President Roosevelt, this doctor has been pushed and crowded along higher and higher in the military service — always over the heads of a number of better men — [page 178] and at last when Roosevelt wanted to make him a Major General in the regular army (with only five other Major Generals between him and the supreme command) and knew, or believed, that the Senate would not confirm Wood’s nomination to that great place, he accomplished Wood’s appointment by a very unworthy device. He could appoint Wood himself, and make the appointment good, between sessions of Congress. There was no such opportunity, but he invented one. A special session was closing at noon. When the gavel fell extinguishing the special session, a regular session began instantly. Roosevelt claimed that there was an interval there determinable as the twentieth of a second by a stop-watch, and that during that interval no Congress was in session. By this subterfuge he foisted this discredited doctor upon the army and the nation, and the Senate hadn’t spirit enough to repudiate it.

What motivated this young mother, only 23 to have a violent reaction to a woman wearing the hijab:

Woman beaten and taunted as she wore hijab

A young Muslim student was punched in the face and racially taunted as she walked down a Dublin street wearing a head scarf.

A Dublin mother (23) has been convicted for assaulting the young Libyan, who was rescued by a passing motorist who stopped and helped her home.

Helen Doran’s victim was wearing a traditional Muslim hijab or head scarf. Doran followed her across a road after assaulting her and continued to shout racist insults at her.

Doran, of Castlecurragh Vale in Mulhuddart, admitted before Blanchardstown District Court to assaulting a 20-year-old Libyan student on November 2 last year.

Judge Anthony Halpin sentenced Doran to three months in prison, suspended for one year.

Garda Sergeant Maria Callaghan said the victim was walking along Castlecurragh Road when two men and a woman approached her.

The victim had just attended a FAS course and was putting credit into her mobile phone.

The sergeant said the woman was wearing a traditional Muslim head scarf, and Doran and her accomplices started taunting her.

The court heard one of the men grabbed the woman’s mobile phone and Doran punched her in the face.

Sgt Callaghan said Doran repeatedly shouted racist slurs at the woman, who crossed the road to get away from her attacker.

However, Doran followed her across the road and continued to shout racist insults at her.

Sgt Callaghan said a motorist stopped and helped the victim, who later reported the matter to gardai.

Ashamed

Defence solicitor John O’Doherty said Doran, a married mum of one, had been drinking heavily and was on tablets.

Mr O’Doherty said Doran was completely ashamed of her behaviour and had never been in this kind of trouble before. He said she was under the influence of one of her accomplices at the time, and he is also before the courts.

Judge Halpin said Doran frightened the young woman and made her feel like a lesser person. He gave her a three- month suspended sentence.

hnews@herald.ie

- Eimear Cotter

Original post: Woman beaten and taunted as she wore hijab

We are told that in Afghanistan they only get upset when the occupying forces “burn Korans.” The protests, we are told, have nothing to do with the bombing and murdering of innocent civilians, you know the Greater Islamophobia.

Now we have one more instance of a soldier liquidating the lives of innocent Muslim civilians in a clearly premeditated fashion. How much do you want to bet he gets off scott free or with a suspended sentence like the last guy?

Afghans killed in rampage by US soldier

(AlJazeera English)

Sixteen Afghan civilains including three women and nine children have been shot dead in their homes by a rogue US soldier in a pre-dawn rampage.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the slaughter on Sunday as “unforgivable” and furiously demanded an explanation from Washington.

“When Afghan people are killed deliberately by US forces this action is murder and terror and an unforgivable action,” Karzai said in statement.

Senior US officials were scrambling to determine what caused the soldier to go on a shooting spree after leaving his base in southern Afghanistan, apparently heavily-armed and carrying night-vision equipment.

Officials confirmed that the soldier was being detained in Kandahar and that the military was treating at least five wounded.

One US official said the soldier, an Army staff sergeant, was believed to have acted alone and that initial reports indicated he returned to the base after the shooting and turned himself in.

Gen. John Allen, the top US commander in Afghanistan, issued a statement pledging a “rapid and thorough investigation” into the shooting spree, and said the soldier will remain in US custody.

The US embassy in Kabul sent out an alert to its citizens in Afghanistan warning that as a result of the shooting “there is a risk of anti-American feelings and protests in coming days”.

An AFP news agency reporter at the scene of the killings counted the bodies of 16 people. In one house, an elderly woman screamed: “May God kill the only son of Karzai, so he feels what we feel.”

The shootings come at a particularly sensitive and critical time for the US, just as violence over the burning of Muslim holy books at a US base was starting to calm down. At least 41 people were killed in the violence.

Al Jazeera’s Bernard Smith, reporting from Herat, said the soldier entered three houses near the base and opened fire on civilians.

“We are now being told by the police sources that the US soldier left his base at three o clock this morning. It would have been pitch-black wherever he walked,” he said.

“The soldier went through three separate houses, shooting at people as they slept in their beds. After the soldier shot these people, he turned himself in.”

“It is frankly disastrous. It is not just a disaster for the people who were murdered and killed in their houses, it is disaster for the country I suspect,” our correspondent said.

Najeeb Azizi, a Kabul-based Afghan analyst, said the shooting will have deep repercussions on the already tenuous relations with the US.

“It is a very tragic incident in particular because the Afghan and US governments are trying to sign a strategic agreement for a long term,” he said.

“A very bad message the Afghan people are getting – that if US military remains in Afghanistan beyond 2014 and their attitude and behaviour remains the same – of killing innocent civilians- what will be the consequences, and how will the Afghan people respond to it.”

A lot of Anders Behring Breivik’s not only in the UK but across Europe:

Far right hardcore ‘willing to prepare for armed conflict’, new study finds

(Guardian)

A hardcore of far-right supporters in the UK appears to believe violent conflict between different ethnic, racial and religious groups is inevitable, and that it is legitimate to prepare even for armed conflict, according to a new report.

The study, From Voting to Violence? Rightwing Extremists in Modern Britain, by Matthew Goodwin, of the University of Nottingham, and Jocelyn Evans, of Salford University, was launched at Chatham House on Thursday. The report questioned more than 2,000 supporters of “radical-right” and “far-right” groups and found that many endorsed violence, with a “hostile inner core” apparently willing to plan for and prepare for attacks.

“What we have got here is a group of people who self-identify as supporters of the far right and who are, to quite a large extent, backing ideas about preparing for violence and appear to view violence as a justifiable political strategy,” said Goodwin, who is a specialist in far-right politics.

The findings come ahead of the trial next month of Anders Behring Breivik, the far-right extremist who has confessed to the murder of 77 people in Norway in July. Breivik said he had contact with far-right groups in the UK and that he carried out the attacks on Utoya Island and Oslo to help protect Europe from a “Muslim takeover”.

Goodwin said his report’s findings should also be seen in light of the 17 people affiliated to the far right who have been imprisoned in the UK in recent years for terrorism offences.

“When you go through the transcripts of those cases what they often emphasise is this notion of impending race war, the impending clash of civilisations that meant they needed to stockpile explosives and plan attacks to defend their group from a perceived threat. It is that apocalyptic, almost survivalist notion that goes with far right ideology that we have begun to explore through these exploratory questions.”

The study was based on a survey, carried out by YouGov, of 2,152 people who self identify as supporters of either the British National Party, the UK Independence Party and a smaller sample of English Defence League supporters.

The authors found that almost half of the BNP supporters in their sample thought “preparing for conflict between different groups is always or sometimes justifiable” and two-fifths considered armed conflict to be “always or sometimes” justifiable.

The report states: “The responses point towards a tranche of BNP supporters who endorse the view that both preparing for and engaging in inter-group conflict are always justifiable actions…. the BNP members in our sample appear to view themselves as a core vanguard who are preparing for a forthcoming conflict in a way that the party’s more passive supporters are not.”

In line with previous studies, the respondents to the survey were largely men who had not been to university, were generally dissatisfied with their lives and were mostly concerned about immigration, the economy and a perceived threat from Muslims and Islam. Twenty per cent of BNP supporters and 25% of UKIP supporters who responded said they had served in the armed forces.

Goodwin said the study’s findings should be seen as a preliminary first step towards addressing that shortcoming and warned that the far right in the UK was now at a “fork in the road”.

“On one side, we have a far-right party [the BNP] disintegrating at elections and closing down any chance of a ballot box strategy. On the other we have a more combative and confrontational form of street politics in the EDL. Then for the first time in recent history we have somebody in Breivik who has essentially offered a brand to would-be perpetrators of far right violence.

“Our findings would appear to suggest that within this wider climate and amidst continuing public anxiety over immigration, Islam and economic hardship there is a significant section within the far right who believe violence and armed conflict is a legitimate option should they feel their wider group is under threat.”

Guardian, 9 March 2012

A former Catholic altar boy from northern Uganda, Joseph Kony has waged war in central Africa for more than two decades.

A video campaign launched by San Diego-based nonprofit, Invisible Children Inc., attempts to harness the power of the Internet–and especially social media, including Twitter, YouTube and Facebook — to stop Joseph Kony, head of the Lord’s Resistance Army. The Uganda-based militia is infamous for killings, kidnappings, mutilations and torture in several African nations.

A 30-minute viral video exposes Kony’s enslavement and abuse of 30,000 children in Uganda, and has received over 10 million views since Monday. The documentary has garnered support from major celebrities, including Oprah Winfrey, Rihanna and Justin Beiber.

Kony attempts to justify his crimes in the name of Christianity, which is clearly a reflection of his own madness rather than a divinely inspired religion. However, the story begs the question: What if he were Muslim? 

Joseph Kony: Profile of the LRA leader

From the BBC

He claims that his Lord’s Resistance Army movement has been fighting to install a government in Uganda based on the Biblical 10 Commandments.

But his rebels now terrorise large swathes of the Democratic Republic of Congo, South Sudan and the Central African Republic, and he is wanted for war crimes by the International Criminal Court (ICC).

Regional armies are trying to hunt them down with the help of 100 US soldiers.

Mr Kony was due to sign a peace deal with the Ugandan government in 2008, but peace talks fell apart because the LRA leader wanted assurances that he and his allies would not be prosecuted.

Born in the early 1960s in Odek, a village east of Gulu, Mr Kony is remembered as an amiable boy.

“He played football and was a brilliant dancer,” one of his former classmates said, recalling the rebel leader’s days at Odek primary.

The LRA’s aims were heavily influence by the Holy Spirit Movement, a 1980s group that represented the Acholi people of northern Uganda.

This teenager had her lips, nose and ears cut off by the LRA

The movement was formed by Alice Lakwena, a former prostitute who was believed to be Mr Kony’s cousin.

They felt excluded from power after northern leader Milton Obote was overthrown in a military rebellion, and eventually replaced by current President Yoweri Museveni in 1986.

Ms Lakwena promised her followers immunity from the bullets of the Ugandan army, but Mr Museveni’s troops defeated her movement in 1988 and she fled to Kenya.

After this defeat, Mr Kony founded his own rebel group which over the next 20 years has gone on to abduct thousands of children to become fighters or sex slaves.

Mr Kony himself is thought to have at least 60 wives, as he and his senior commanders take the pick of the girls they capture.

He sees himself as a spirit medium.

“They will tell us what is going to happen. They say ‘you, Mr Joseph, tell your people that the enemy is planning to come and attack’,” he has explained.

Young abductees who have escaped from the LRA say Mr Kony would tell them he got his instructions from the Holy Spirit and would often preach in tongues.

“I will communicate with Museveni through the holy spirits and not through the telephone,” he once said.

He has created an aura of fear and mysticism around himself and his rebels follow strict rules and rituals.

“When you go to fight you make the sign of the cross first. If you fail to do this, you will be killed,” one young fighter who escaped from the LRA told US-based Human Rights Watch.

“You must also take oil and draw a cross on your chest, your forehead, and each shoulder, and you must make a cross in oil on your gun. They say that the oil is the power of the Holy Spirit.”

Mr Kony appears to believe that his role is to cleanse the Acholi people.

He uses biblical references to explain why it is necessary to kill his own people, since they have, in his view, failed to support his cause.

“If the Acholi don’t support us, they must be finished,” he told one abductee.

Christmas massacre

Six years ago, Mr Kony broke his silence and was interviewed on camera in his jungle base at the time in north-eastern DR Congo.

He was surrounded by some of what he estimated were his 3,000 heavily armed fighters, and insisted he was not the monster he was portrayed to be.

“Let me tell you clearly what happened in Uganda. Museveni went into the villages and cut off the ears of the people, telling the people that it was the work of the LRA. I cannot cut the ear of my brother; I cannot kill the eye of my brother.”

He gave the interview at the start of delicate peace process brokered by the authorities South Sudan.

But the negotiations saw splits in LRA ranks and Mr Kony’s deputy, Vincent Otti, who played a key role in the talks, died in mysterious circumstances.

It is believed he may have been murdered on the orders of Mr Kony, who refused to sign the deal.

The LRA later went on a major offensive, carrying out a massacre on Christmas Day 2008.

On that day and over the following three weeks, the LRA beat to death more than 800 people in north-eastern DR Congo and South Sudan, and abducted hundreds more.

****************

Israeli settlers attack Palestinians daily

Revenge of the settlers

Nour Samaha (AlJazeera English)

Fadi Quran is little different from any other Palestinian living in the West Bank, where violence from Israeli settlers is part of daily life. Hailing from the town of Al-Bireh, less than one kilometre from the settlement of Psagot, the 23-year-old Master’s degree student has been forced to deal with attacks and harassment for years.

“Settler violence is a daily occurrence,” he told Al Jazeera. On one occasion, he was playing football with friends when they came under fire from settlers with machine guns. In another altercation, settlers threw stones at him while he was driving. Their guns discouraged him from stopping. “I’m telling you my story, but there are literally hundreds of thousands of other cases that are much worse.”

Last week, Quran was arrested after attending a non-violent protest in Hebron which demanded the re-opening of a street in the centre of the city. The Israeli army had made it a settler-only road 11 years previously, despite the presence of Palestinian families still living there.

Following a verbal dispute, Israeli soldiers pepper-sprayed him, beat him, arrested him, blindfolded him and took him to an interrogation centre at a nearby settlement. Once there, he discovered the arresting soldiers were actually from one of the area’s settlements.

“I asked where they were from and they told me: ‘Kiryat Arba’,” he said. “One of them then asked me if I knew Baruch Goldstein [an Israeli settler who, in 1994, opened fire inside a mosque in the West Bank, killing 29 and wounding over 125 others]. They said he was a hero and they would do the same thing.”

Quran was charged with attacking ten soldiers. In court a few days later, the judge stated there was no proof that Quran did not attack them. The hearing was postponed until the following day, by which point a video capturing the events leading up to Quran’s arrest had gone viral. After the video was presented to the judge (which clearly showed Quran had not attacked troops), he was released on bail.

Settler violence has been forcing people to significantly change their lives, Quran said: “There are communities who don’t use main roads because they are afraid they will be murdered. Many farmers can’t farm anymore because their lands are being burned or vandalised, so they have to find another job.”

A report published in January by the Washington-based Palestine Center revealed a 39 per cent increase in the number of settler attacks – from stone-throwing to arson and shootings – between 2010 and 2011.

Furthermore, in the five-year period between 2007 and 2011, the occupied West Bank has witnessed a 315 per cent increase in settler attacks – while, over the same period, there has been a 95 per cent decrease in Palestinian violence against Israeli settlements and settlers.

The report found ”over 90 per cent of all the Palestinian villages which have experienced multiple instances of Israeli settler violence are in areas which fall under Israeli security jurisdiction”.

The report revealed a geographical shift in violent acts; previously settler violence was concentrated in the southern West Bank city of Hebron and its environs. Over the past few years, the Nablus governorate, in the northern West Bank, has also been on the receiving end of a large proportion of the documented settler violence.

This shift to the north, “where rural villages are predominantly targets, suggested that settlers are exploiting unfettered access to isolated Palestinian villages to perpetrate violence more than ever before”.

‘Open hunting season’

“What we have here is a complete failure to enforce the law and uphold the obligations to protect Palestinians,” Yousef Mounayer, director of the Palestine Center, told Al Jazeera.

“The Israelis really need to uphold their own obligations, otherwise we will continue to see violence and it will be open hunting season for settlers to attack Palestinians.”

International law states that occupying powers have a duty to protect local populations, while maintaining security and ensuring public order.

Issa Amro, a Palestinian from Hebron who heads the Youth Against Settlements activist movement, was forced with his family to leave his home – now designated a “closed military area” – after years of attacks from settlers.

“Every time settlers attack a Palestinian house, they are escorted by the army who protect them,” he explained. “I have filed dozens of cases and complaints, and not one time has anyone gone to court.”

According to the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), more than 90 per cent of monitored complaints filed by Palestinians have been closed without indictment.

“I have death threats against me, and I’ve been attacked many times by settlers,” said Amro. “[The settlers] say to me ‘I hope God erases your name’, and they say this to me in front of the army and the police, who stand by and do nothing.”

‘They are there to protect the settlers’

Ezra Nawi, an Israeli activist who has been working with Palestinians against settler violence for the past decade, said the Israeli military in the West Bank was complicit through inaction.

“Settlers attack Palestinians, but the army has orders preventing them from arresting or stopping them,” he said. “They are simply there to protect the settlers.”

Nawi is no stranger to settler violence, with his work frequently making him a target. He said the attacks “serve the state’s interests”.

“The violence scares the Palestinians into not moving around or using their land for farming and agriculture,” he said.

Further OCHA statistics also state approximately 10,000 Palestinian-owned trees were damaged or destroyed by settlers in 2011, while 139 Palestinians were displaced due to settler attacks.

The UN group also found that “80 communities with a combined population of nearly 250,000 Palestinians are vulnerable to settler violence, including 76,000 who are at high-risk”.

“Every day there are attacks by settlers,” said Amro. “What is new is that they have started burning mosques.”

Sarit Michaeli, spokesperson for B’Tselem, an Israeli group which documents violence in the West Bank, told Al Jazeera that increasing violence was a result of a lack of law enforcement.

“The Israeli authorities have an obligation under international law to protect both settlers and Palestinians,” she said. “While they fulfill their obligation to protect the settlers, with the Palestinians, we see a systematic failure to protect them from attacks.”

“It is worth noting that Palestinians who are arrested by the Israeli army are prosecuted and charged through the military court system, which is very low in terms of protection of their rights, while settlers, if they get arrested, are held and tried in the civilian court system, which offers greater protection of their rights,” she added.

‘It’s actually calmer now’

Yet not everyone agrees with the assertions made. David Ha’ivri, spokesperson for the settlement council covering the northern West Bank region, told Al Jazeera he felt the area “is over-exposed in the media in comparison to other areas in the world”.

“I’ve lived here for many years and we have experienced violence, but that is not the situation currently,” he said. “It is strange that someone is saying that there is an increase, while we’ve experienced a decrease in the violence. It’s actually calmer now than in the past.”

Dani Dayan, chairman of the Yesha Council, reiterated Ha’ivri’s assertion, saying the levels of violence had decreased in the past two years, and that media had a tendency to “inflate and exaggerate things like the price-tag attacks“.

“Life in Judea and Samaria [the Biblical term for the West Bank] is normal,” he told Al Jazeera. “I don’t think violence during the last year has been a crucial problem, not for Jews and not for Arabs.

“Let’s not forget that the numbers provided are actually the other way around,” he added. “There have been at least 12 settlers who were murdered by Arabs in the last 24 months.”

According to B’Tselem statistics 13 Israelis have been killed by Palestinians in the West Bank over the past two years, while four Palestinians were killed by Israeli civilians, and a further 22 Palestinians were killed by the Israeli army. In Gaza, 173 Palestinians have been killed by the Israeli military during the past two years.

Both Ha’ivri and Dayan state the Israeli authorities were doing what was required of them in terms of protecting civilians and arresting perpetrators.

“I don’t think there is less accountability, the state and the police are very serious about enforcing the law on both sides,” said Ha’ivri. “For example, there are individuals in some communities in Samaria who have been arrested, or banished from living in this area.”

“If the Arabs feel there is less accountability then they are not aware of the facts.”

While Dayan agreed the authorities were performing their duties, he acknowledged flaws in the judicial system.

“There are very few indictments, if at all, presented to the courts,” he said. “I do not have an explanation as to why there are so few indictments, and it is not my place to provide an explanation, but it does create problems, leading some to believe one side has a sense of immunity and can get off without punishment.”

“I do know the government and police have a high interest in the public opinion, so I don’t think they lack the motivation,” said Dayan. “It’s not a question of leniency, but maybe one of capability.”

‘They want Palestine’

The analysis of the Palestine Center’s Mounayer focused on causes of settler violence and whether it was responsorial (a reaction to either Palestinian violence and/or Israeli government actions), or structural (a product of demographics and security arrangements).

“What we found actually is that instances of Palestinian violence trigger a decrease in settler violence,” said Mounayer. “Palestinian violence tends to receive an official response from the Israeli army, so in these instances the settlers don’t intervene.

“We also found that some of it is motivated by Israeli government actions, but … it doesn’t necessarily have to be provoked by anything. As settlers can get away with it at any given time, they will continue.

“The message the settlers are receiving is that ‘this is okay, and the state is not going to stop them’.”

B’Tselem’s Michaeli, however, was keen to emphasise that violence was not something the majority of the settler community participated in. “The mainstream leaders in settler politics have denounced these attacks,” she said, adding that settler violence and clashes with local Palestinians dated back to the 1970s.

“Having said that, the settlement community as a whole in an occupied area is violent,” she said, referring to the illegal nature of the expanding settlements in the West Bank, frequently condemned by the international community.

Ha’ivri said that in most cases, when there is violence, it happens as a response to attacks on settlers. “I don’t think it happens on a daily basis. All acts of violence that have occurred are isolated on both sides,” he said. “I don’t think either side is going out and actively looking for targets.”

For Israeli activist Nawi, the motivations of settlers are much more straightforward.

“Most of the settlers are motivated by religious ideas; that the Arabs are unwelcome people and they need to leave,” he said. “It is not an argument you can reason with.”

“They want Palestine.”

Follow Nour Samaha on Twitter: @samahanour

Deadly drones come to the Muslims of the Philippines

by Akbar Ahmed and Frankie Martin (AlJazeera English)

Washington, DC - Early last month, Tausug villagers on the Southern Philippine island of Jolo heard a buzzing sound not heard before. It is a sound familiar to the people of Waziristan who live along Pakistan’s border with Afghanistan, where the United States fights the Taliban. It was the dreaded drone, which arrives from distant and unknown destinations to cause death and destruction. Within minutes, 15 people lay dead and a community plunged into despair, fear and mourning.

The US drone strike, targeting accused leaders in the Abu Sayyaf and Jemaah Islamiyah organisations, marked the first time the weapon has been used in Southeast Asia. The drone has so far been used against Muslim groups and the Tausug are the latest on the list.

Just as in Pakistan and other theatres of the “war on terror”, the strike has provoked controversy, with a Filipino lawmaker condemning the attack as a violation of national sovereignty. This controversy could increase with the recent American announcement that it plans to boost its drone fleet in the Philippines by 30 per cent. The US already has hundreds of troops stationed on Jolo Island, but until now, the Americans have maintained a non-combat “advisory” role.

The expansion of US’ drone war has the potential to further enflame a volatile conflict involving the southern Muslim areas and Manila, which has killed around 120,000 people over the past four decades. To understand what is happening in the Philippines and the US’ role in the conflict, we need to look at the Tausug, among the most populous and dominant of the 13 groups of Muslims in the South Philippines known as “Moro”, a pejorative name given by Spanish colonisers centuries ago.

Sulu Sultanate

For hundreds of years, the Tausug had their own independent kingdom, the Sulu Sultanate, which was established in 1457 and centered in Jolo. The Sultanate became the largest and most influential political power in the Philippines with highly developed trade links across the region. From this base among the Tausug, Islam took root in neighbouring Mindanao Island among the Maguindanao and other groups.

The antagonistic relationship between the Moro periphery and the centre in Manila developed during the Spanish colonial era. The Spanish had arrived not long after expelling the Muslims from Spain and, intoxicated by that historical victory, were determined to exterminate Islam in the region and unite the Philippines under Christian rule.

In the instructions given by the Spanish governor on the eve of the first campaign against the southern Muslims in 1578, he ordered that “there be not among them anymore preachers of the doctrines of Mahoma since it is evil and false” and called for all mosques to be destroyed. The governor’s instructions set the tone for centuries of continuous warfare. The idea of a predatory central authority is deeply embedded in Tausug mythology and psychology.

Of all the Moro groups, the Tausug has been considered the most independent and difficult to conquer, with not a single generation of Tausug experiencing life without war over the past 450 years.

As any anthropologist will testify, the Tausug have survived half a millennium of persecution and attempts at conversion because of their highly developed code and clan structure. It is the classic tribe: egalitarian and feuding clans that unite in the face of the outside enemy and a code which emphasizes honor, revenge, loyalty and hospitality.

It was only in the late 19th century that Spain succeeded in incorporating the Sulu Sultanate as a protectorate and established a military presence on Jolo. The Spanish were followed by American colonisers who could be as brutal as their predecessors. In a 1906 battle, US troops killed as many as 1,000 Tausug men, women and children, and between 500 and 2,000 in a 1913 engagement.

Despite the Moro resistance to US colonial rule, they advocated for either continued American administration or their own country, rather than be incorporated into an independent Philippines, which they believed would continue the policies of the Spanish against their religion and culture. The request, however, was rejected.

‘Special provinces’

Following independence in 1946, the Muslim regions were ruled as “special provinces” with most of the important government posts reserved for Christian Filipinos. Despite being granted electoral representation in the 1950s, the majority of Moro had little interest in dealing with the central government. Manila, for its part, largely neglected the region.

The Tausug areas remained impoverished and, in the absence of jobs, young men turned to looting and piracy. In response, Manila opted for heavy-handed military tactics and based its largest command of security forces in the nation among the Tausug.

Central government actions to subdue the Tausug areas in the 1950s resulted in the deaths of almost all fighting age men in certain regions. The society was torn apart, with the young generation growing up without traditional leadership.

The current conflict began in 1968 with what became known as the Jabidah Massacre, when around 60 mainly Tausug recruits in the Philippine Army were summarily executed after they refused a mission to attack the Malaysian region of Sabah, where a population of Tausug also resides.

In 1971, the Moro, incensed by Jabidah and accusing the central government of conducting “genocide”, began an open war against the state. A Tausug-dominated independence movement soon developed called the Moro National Liberation Front (MNLF).  In 1976, the government reached an agreement with the MNLF to grant the Moro areas autonomy, which was further developed in a 1996 treaty that is still being negotiated.

For many Moro living on Mindanao, however, the deal was unsatisfactory because of the presence of so many Christian settlers, who they complained were taking more and more of their land under what seemed like government policy.

Indeed, the population had dramatically changed from 76 per cent Muslim in 1903 to 72.5 per cent Christian by 2000. The government was arming Christian settlers to attack Muslims. In 1971, the most notorious Christian militia, the Ilaga, killed 70 Moro in a mosque. Muslim militias lashed back, leading to a cycle of violence.

A new group, the Moro Islamic Liberation Front (MILF), based in Mindanao’s Maguindanao ethnic group, soon split from the MNLF and vowed to push for secession.

‘Abu Sayyaf’ label

Following the 9/11 attacks, the United States became involved in the region in pursuit of the elusive Abu Sayyaf, which it accused of having links with al-Qaeda. The group was formed by a charismatic Tausug preacher in the late 1980s, whose speeches attracted angry young men from a community rife with orphans due to the previous decades of war.

Abu Sayyaf has been blamed for kidnappings, bombings and beheadings, gripping the Philippines with sensational media reports. Manila has been accused of applying the “Abu Sayyaf” label to any conflict in the region, including those involving small armed Tausug groups, many of them kinship based, which have existed for centuries.

Aid workers kidnapped in 2009, for example, reported that their “Abu Sayyaf” captor told them “I can be ASG (Abu Sayyaf Group), I can be MILF, I can be [MILF or MNLF breakaway group] Lost Command”.

Manila was discovering, like many other nations after 9/11, that by associating its restless communities on the periphery with al-Qaeda, it could garner easy American support.

To resolve the conflict between the Moro and Manila, President Benigno Aquino must demonstrate that the centuries of conflict and forced assimilation into a monolithic Filipino culture are over. The government needs to promote pluralism and build trust with the periphery.

With the recent declarations by President Aquino’s government that the state is fully invested in implementing the 1996 autonomy agreement with the MNLF and hopes to have a peace treaty in place with the MILF by 2013, the various parties have a unique opportunity to work for a longstanding solution.

Development projects to help the suffering Tausug must be conducted urgently as the situation for ordinary people is dire. Amidst the frequent barrages of artillery and bombs and the displacement of hundreds of thousands over the past decade, a 2005 study found that 92 per cent of water sources in Sulu Province, where the majority of Tausug live, were contaminated, while the malnutrition rate for children under five is 50 per cent. Education and employment are constant challenges.

The sad state of affairs does not only result from a lack of funds, as the Philippines government, the United States and others have poured millions into the region, but rather how funds are spent. The association of development with the military among the population has been an impediment to implementing necessary projects.

Mediation needed

Between inefficient aid funding and the ongoing military campaigns, Manila has been drained of desperately needed resources and diverted from fulfilling its ambitions to become an economic powerhouse.

Development solutions can only work if they have the full support of the clans that decide local politics, which is no easy task, considering the tenacity with which clans can fight over resources. Yet with a holistic plan of engagement in the context of true autonomy, it is possible to bring them together.

Mediation, involving local religious leaders and international bodies like the Organisation of Islamic Co-operation, which has taken the lead in peace talks between the Moro factions and the government, can play a key role in this regard.

Major General Reuben Rafael, the Philippine commander formerly in charge of military operations in Sulu Province, gave us an example of how to proceed. In 2007, he staged a public apology for transgressions against the population. The assembled people began to cry, including the Tausug mayor of the town, who stated that never in the history of Sulu had a military general apologized to them in such a manner. This is the way to the heart of the Tausug, and we salute the general for showing us the path to peace.

By unleashing the drones, the US has pushed the conflict between centre and periphery in the Philippines in a dangerous direction. If there is one lesson we can learn from half a millennium of history it is this: weapons destroy flesh and blood, but cannot break the spirit of a people motivated by ideas of honour and justice.

Instead, the US and Manila should work with the Muslims of the Philippines to ensure full rights of identity, development, dignity, human rights and self-determination. Only then will the security situation improve and the Moro permitted to live the prosperous and secure lives they have been denied for so long; and only then will the Philippines be able to become the Asian Tiger it aspires to be.

Professor Akbar Ahmed is Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC and the former Pakistani High Commissioner to the United Kingdom.

Frankie Martin is an Ibn Khaldun Chair Research Fellow at American University’s School of International Service and is assisting Professor Ahmed on Ahmed’s forthcoming study, Journey into Tribal Islam: America and the Conflict between Center and Periphery in the Muslim World, to be published by Brookings Press.

This February 25, 2011 video image shows the image of an African American man behind a Ku Klux Klan (KKK) robe on exibit as part of the 'American I AM: The African Imprint' at the National Geographic in Washington, DC.

One of America’s oldest terrorist organization’s, the KKK is boasting about their increasing numbers. Whenever there is mention about such groups the Islamophobes and their supporters like to claim that they are insignificant and extinct.

Facts prove otherwise:

Increase Of Ku Klux Klan Membership In Colorado Tracks National Rise Of Hate Crimes

The KKK says their membership is “booming” in Colorado, with 12 white supremacist groups active in the state, according to a report by The Durango Herald.

Herald staff writer Chase Olivarius-McAllister reported earlier this week that Cole Thornton, Imperial Grand Wizard of Colorado’s United Northern and Southern Knights Ku Klux Klan group, claims that membership has grown steadily in the past few years.

“I’m really pleased with the kind of people we’re getting in – college-educated, professionals, teachers – even a couple congressmen. People would be amazed to know who I’ve talked with at midnight in isolated areas – it’s almost comical,” Thornton said to the Durango Herald.

A study by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a nonprofit civil rights organization based in Montgomery, found that the number of “radical right groups” in America — including hate groups, “Patriot” groups and nativist groups — increased in 2010 for the second year in a row.

In Durango, Colorado, racially motivated hate crimes rose from just three crimes between the years of 2006 and 2009, to four in 2010, and 19 in 2011, according to the Herald’s report. According to FBI data, hate crimes fell 30 percent between 2009 and 2010 in the state of Colorado.

Thornton attributed the KKK’s growing membership in Colorado in part to “whites’ low birthrate” in the country.

“We’re losing them to white homosexual relationships – they don’t reproduce – and interracial marriage – and to abortions on demand. Plus, immigration’s astronomical with Hispanics,” Thornton said in an interview with the Durango Herald.

According to U.S. Census data, Colorado’s Latino population grew by more than 40 percent between 2000 and 2010. And Denver, the state’s largest city, is now more than 30 percent Latino.

As the Latino population surged nationally in recent years, so did anti-Latino hate crimes.

The preliminary findings by the National Institute of Justice suggests that anti-Latino hate crimes rose disproportionally to other hate crimes between 2004 and 2008. Data collected by the FBI also indicates a steady rise in anti-Latino hate crimes across the country from 2003 to 2007.

The English Defense League (EDL) is a far-right anti-immigration, anti-Muslim organization comprised overwhelmingly of young white men deeply pessimistic about the future.

Since its founding in 2009, the group has held a series of street demonstrations deliberately targeting neighborhoods with significant Muslim populations. The protests have often been marred by violence, racism, virulant Islamophobia, and frequest arrests.

Outreach is increasingly sophisticated, and their mission is global in scope. Next month’s meeting in Denmark may usher in a dangerous new phase in their quest for a fascist, worldwide “counter-jihad.”

by Kevin Rawlinson & Paul Cahalan, The Independent

They achieve notoriety through a mix of combustible characters and often ugly protests, yet are kept on the political margins due to infighting and ill thought-out policies. But, next month, at a meeting in Denmark, some of Europe’s most notorious right-wing groups will meet for the European Counter-Jihad Meeting.

Those attending could witness the birth of a right-wing movement, the European Defence League – and the beginning of a dangerous new phase in extremist politics.

Representatives from defence leagues in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the USA, Italy, Poland and Finland are due to attend, along with the anti-Muslim groups Stop Islamisation of Europe, Stop Islamisation of the World and the far-right European Freedom Initiative. It is feared the new umbrella organisation could co-ordinate right-wing activities across Europe while politicising and unifying disparate groups. The idea, which is being championed by the English Defence League (EDL), could be modelled on the European Union – with delegates from participating countries meeting regularly.

Weyman Bennett, spokesman for pressure group Unite Against Fascism, said the meeting in Denmark’s second city, Aarhus, was the first meaningful meeting of such groups – which were looking at the EDL model and to mimic successful right-wing political parties in Eastern Europe, some of which have made it to government. He said:

The Euro-leagues are a new danger. We should not forget that it was the Norwegian Defence League that gave us Anders Breivik. The growth of a Euro-league in a time of economic crisis threatens to resurrect fascist street armies such as those that destroyed European democracies in the 1930s. The development of this network allows fascists and right-wing populists to share ideas, finance and experience in a way that should worry us all.

Mr Bennett added the groups would be using the euro crisis as a way to pull in new members, particularly from the middle classes.

He added: “We used to have a number of disparate groups. Now we are moving to a stage where we have fewer groups but they are more organised and sophisticated.”

Some 50 EDL leaders – whose members have been involved in violent clashes with anti-fascist groups in the past – will travel to the meeting. “This is the first proper European Defence League meet. We have been building bridges for the last two years and this is going to be the launch pad,” said Stephen Yaxley-Lennon, the leader of the EDL, who is also known as Tommy Robinson.

He added the leader of each national defence league would sit on a panel and would meet “every three to four months”. He said: “We will discuss tactics. Each country’s delegates will get time to describe the problems they have. We will try to pool resources. For example, if another defence league wants to run a demonstration in their own country, they are unlikely to get as much media interest as if we were involved, so we would go over there and lend some support.”

Dr Matthew Goodwin, an expert on the far-right at Nottingham University, said a Continent-wide far-right alliance would help extremist groups organise demonstrations, which carry the possibility of violence and provide access to better-resourced and organised groups in eastern and central Europe.

He said:

The strategy is to organise large marches for the media attention and to provoke anti-fascist and Muslim groups, as well as the local population. Wherever these movements go, there is a possibility of violent clashes. With the EDL, there are question marks over where the movement is heading, if not towards elections. This would be an indication of where it sees itself going.

Dr Goodwin added that, historically, the far-right has often tried to build alliances on the Continent. “If there is anything the Breivik experience taught us, it is that the European-level movements, which share ideas and resources, are very dangerous.”

Farooq Murad, secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain (MCB) said the move was “worrying”. He added the MCB was trying to bring together Muslim groups to counter an increase in Islamophobia.

Last year, Mr Yaxley-Lennon announced that negotiations to set up a political wing of the EDL were at an advanced stage. An alliance with the far-right British Freedom Party was discussed and Mr Yaxley-Lennon said he hoped to stand candidates in the next round of local elections. That deal has not yet been concluded and it is thought that it has met with some resistance among the EDL’s grassroots.

Yesterday, about 600 people travelled to Hyde, Greater Manchester, to take part in an EDL protest against an alleged attack by Asian youths on two white teenagers in the town. Eleven were arrested for minor public order offences.

Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer‘s favorite UK anti-Muslim organization:

Thug Banned from Mosques after EDL Attack in Dagenham

(London2)

A thug who attacked two men at a rally against a Muslim place of worship has been banned from going near London mosques for five years.

John McAndrew, 29, was jailed for 14 months after throwing large stones onto a busy road and then the following month assaulting two men at an English Defence League demo against a mosque and cultural centre in Green Lane, Dagenham.

Last week, McAndrew was given an Asbo stopping him from going near Muslim schools and places of worship until 2017 and taking part in any EDL demos in England for life.

In a statement released by the Met Police last week, Barking and Dagenham Pc Mark Gellard said: “John McAndrew is an individual whose often violent behaviour is linked with his attendance at demonstrations and protests, particularly surrounding the English Defence League.

“This behaviour affects those who live, work and frequent the areas where some of these demonstrations have taken place.”

McAndrew, of Grange Road, Plaistow, was given a conviction related Asbo at Woolwich Crown Court on February 20.

The Asbo will stop him from attending Islamic festivals for five years and from publicising and attending any rally run by, or in conjunction with, the EDL in England and Wales for the rest of his life.

McAndrew was jailed at Woolwich Crown Court on December 7. He was given four months after admitting common assault against the two men at an EDL rally in Dagenham on June 18, 2011.

He received another four months for affray after admitting throwing large stones onto the A4 dual carriageway during rush hour traffic at another EDL protest at the Hammersmith Flyover on May 11, 2011, police added.

McAndrew was given six months for breaching a suspended sentence for affray at a Poundmart store in Woolwich on September 10, 2009.

He was also sentenced to four weeks, to run concurrently, for two counts of failing to surrender to police.

Looks like they found one of the men who attacked the mosque in Newcastle:

Australia: man arrested over mosque attack

Newcastle police say a two-month long investigation combined with information from the community has led to a 25-year-old man being charged over an attack on a local mosque.

Early last month several men tried to kick in the door of the Wallsend mosque after childrens’ scripture classes. A Maryland man will face court in April after being charged with intimidation, causing malicious damage and entering enclosed lands.

Newcastle Crime Manager, Detective Chief Inspector Wayne Humphrey says the investigation is ongoing. “It’s just another example of the public doing the right thing and giving the information to police. The actions of the person are now subject to Court so I can’t comment on those but a lot of crimes are solved by the information from the public being accurate and timely, and in this case it’s been very successful.”

Detective Chief Inspector Humphrey says the incident was caught on CCTV and police used the footage as well information from the public to make an arrest.

“There’ve been enquiries ongoing and as a result of some good information from the public at least one of the persons has been identified and spoken to by police and he’s been issued future court attendance notices,” he said. “We anticipate that another gentleman who could assist us with our inquiries will be spoken to in the coming weeks when he returns from interstate.”

ABC Online, 28 February 2012

The attacks on visible images of Muslim presence continues in France (H/T: AlKanz)

Mosque Escaudain: Nazi inscriptions on the facade

(AL-Kanz via. Google Translate)

Escaudain Mosque, in northern France, was desecrated. Children have found Nazi symbols, a swastika and a sticker on Islamophobic that read “Stop Islamisation”.

The information was mailed in early evening on what appears to be the Facebook account of a faithful Escaudain Mosque , accompanied by the following message:

“The mosque was tagged with Nazi symbols and a sticker” Stop Islamisation “was plastered on the front.
Islamophobic discourse of our policies has allowed this kind of cowardice and weakness subservient to the CFCM system does not allow us to count on them to defend ourselves. ”

For more see: Fascist Grafitti and ‘Stop Islamisation’ Sticker on French Mosque

Hatemonger for hire Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American anti-Muslim, anti-Arab “activist” of the “ex-Muslim” variety. She claims to be a champion of human rights, but her real mission is to peddle outrage, fear and hatred:

Islam is a poison to a society. It’s divisive. It’s hateful. Look what Islam is doing on our college campuses. It’s full of anti-Semitism. It’s going to turn us against one another. It’s going to produce chaos in society. Because Islam should be feared, and should be fought, and should be conquered, and defeated, and annihilated, and it’s going to happen. Ladies and gentlemen, Islam is going to be brought down. . .Because Islam is based on lies and it’s not based on the truth. I have no doubt whatsoever that Islam is going to be destroyed. ~ Nonie Darwish, at a Stop the Islamization of America (SIOA)Rally

Her outrageous statements have generated widespread controversy, and not surprisingly, her public appearances often draw protests. This time, peaceful protesters were met with aggression.

Video: Protesters are attacked at an ‘Israel Alliance’ event at U of New Mexico

by Danya Mustafa, Mondweiss

Violence broke out at the University of New Mexico campus during a peaceful protest on February 23rd of a lecture by Nonie Darwish, sponsored by UNM Israel Alliance, an affiliate of StandWithUs.

As you can see, members of the audience assaulted a number of UNM students when they began their ‘mic-checking’ action.

The public lecture, “The Arab Spring: Why it’s Failing and How Israel is Involved,” began at 7PM in the Anthropology lecture hall. UNM students protested against the Islamophobic rhetoric put forward by Darwish, an author and founder of Arabs For Israel. When the students raised their voices, a number of audience members got out of their seats and used force against the students.

Jordan Whelchel, a UNM student:

The response to this non-violent protest was a violent assault by parts of the crowd. The mic-check was shouted down by a few of the pro-Israel audience members who began physically forcing the protestors out of the auditorium. One of the pro-Palestine activists, a young woman who studies at UNM, had her face scratched and her hair pulled. A young man was forcibly pulled over a row of seats. One was nearly punched in the face, though another protestor intervened to stop the assailant by putting himself in the way. A phone was destroyed, and a camera only narrowly avoided the same fate.

This reaction came as a shock to the protestors. They desired to use words to shake people out of their comfort and complacency , they anticipated words in return, but were met with fists and shoulders. The only people who protected protestors from physical assault were other protestors. In the hallway, the ones who used a protest tactic widely endorsed by Arab Spring activists were called anti-democratic, pro-terrorist, and so on.

A student caught much of the event on film before another audience member pushed down her camera. The students were then forced out of the auditorium and called the UNM police, who arrived and filed a report on the incident.

These students were assaulted on UNM campus for simply trying to make their voices heard. It is a shock that a non-violent action was met with such aggression.

**********

UNM Students being attacked at an Israel Alliance event on campus

In this video, Note the man lunge into the protesters at 17 seconds:

It’s going to be interesting to compare what happens here to what happened with the Irvine 11.

A neo Nazi carrying a German imperial flag. (AP)

According to the German intelligence services, up to 30,000 Germans are believed to hold far-right beliefs — and among those, one-third are bent on violence. Critics claim authorities preoccupied with Muslim extremists have overlooked this growing problem.

Germany holds state ceremony for Muslims murdered by neo-Nazis

BERLIN // Germany held a state ceremony and observed a nationwide minute of silence yesterday in honour of the 10 people, most of them Muslim shopkeepers, who were shot dead by neo-Nazis during a seven-year killing spree.

Angela Merkel, the chancellor, said the murders, uncovered by chance last November, had brought shame on the nation. She apologised to the families for police errors that critics have blamed on institutional racism.

“The murders were an assault on our country. They are a disgrace to our country,” she told a memorial service in Berlin attended by 1,200 people, including relatives of the victims.

The shootings started in 2000 and continued until 2007, targeting small businessmen including a flower seller, a grocer, a kiosk owner and two doner kebab shop managers.

They happened in cities across Germany, from Munich in the south to Rostock on the north coast, and the same handgun was used each time. A German policewoman was also killed.

Police failed to investigate a possible racist motive, instead suspecting that the families might be involved or that the victims had been caught up in illegal activities.

Authorities found out by accident last November that the murders were committed by a terrorist group calling itself the National Socialist Underground and made up of three neo-Nazis who had been on the run for more than a decade.

Two of them, Uwe Mundlos and Uwe Böhnhardt, committed suicide after a botched bank robbery. A DVD claiming responsibility for all the killings was found in an apartment they had used with the third member, Beate Zschäpe, who was arrested.

The discovery of the trio was a major embarrassment for German security authorities. It exposed them to accusations of having been blind to the threat of far-right violence and preoccupied with Islamist militants since the September 11 attacks.

A parliamentary inquiry has been set up and steps are underway to improve coordination among national and regional intelligence authorities. But critics say deeper change is needed, not only in the organisation of the security services but in the mindset of the police.

“Some of the relatives were themselves under suspicion for years. That is terrible. I ask your forgiveness for that,” said Mrs Merkel. “These years must have been a never-ending nightmare for you,” she said.

For years, the murders were dismissively referred to by the media and the police as the “Doner Killings” because of the stereotype of Turks running kebab shops. The relatives were given little attention.

“Indifference has a creeping but disastrous effect,” said Mrs Merkel. “It drives rifts into our society.”

Turkish immigrants and their descendants make up most of Germany’s almost four million Muslims. Even though the community dates back more than half a century, they are still labelled as “foreigners” by many Germans, and live in parallel communities.

For some, the memorial ceremony was overshadowed by criticism from immigrant groups that the government is not doing enough to fight racism, and by warnings from police that there are further potential terrorists in the country’s far-right, which contains 10,000 people categorised by law enforcement as potentially violent.

“The danger of racism shouldn’t be seen as a peripheral problem or just being linked to neo-Nazi violence,” said Aiman Mazyek, the chairman of the Council of Muslims in Germany.

“Racism, anti-Semitism and hostility to Islam can keep on advancing into the centre of society if we don’t resist that more decisively with all democratic means at our disposal.”

by Ilisha

Ever since Eric Allen Bell launched his smear campaign against Loonwatch, he’s become a poster child for far right anti-Muslim bigots impressed by his sad, sad tale of woe. Portrayed as a leftist-turned-”Islamorealist” martyr, he’s been making rounds all across the looniverse.

Bell’s been featured several times on David Horowitz‘s Frontpage Magazine and his interviews have appeared on The Jamie Glazov Show.  He’s also been palling around with Robert Spencer, and has  updated his Facebook page with photos of  loon luminaries such as Aayan Hirsi Ali, Geert Wilders, and the late Pim Fortuyn.

Just for good measure, he included the infamous “cartoon” of the Prophet Muhammad in a bomb-studded turban.

As a newly minted zealot, he’s vowed to continue his crusade against Loonwatch, and he imagines Loonwatch is equally fervent in opposing him. In fact, we don’t really care. He wrote a few articles smearing us, and we wrote a few articles refuting him here, here, and here.

End of story. Or at least it should have been.

The ever paranoid haters are keeping the ball rolling, this time by spreading a completely baseless, sensational rumor:

Ex-Daily Kos writer Eric Allen Bell had written a piece on a 53,000 square foot mosque in the Bible Belt. In response, the Daily Kos banned Bell. Another liberal site, LoonWatch.com, posted Bell’s photograph and information on Islamic websites all over the world.

Are they serious? All over the world!?! Evidence, please!

In a refreshing display of rational skepticism, someone in the Islamophobesphere actually bothered to do a fact check:

Sandcrawler PSA: I’ve Removed the Eric Allen Bell Post

Because I’ve requested some sort of links to the posts that allegedly were given by Loonwatch to Islamist boards.

I’ve also searched Loonwatch and found that Eric uses his Facebook profile in comments there?

So until that is cleared up, I’m just going with the Kos fired/banned him for having an opinion of Islam that did not sit well with the Kossacks. That seems to be true to me.

If anyone has info showing the original “personal information” posts on Loonwatch and the subsequent post on any Islamist board, by golly I’ll be first in line to post that. Until then I can’t report anything other than Eric being banned from Kos for speaking his mind.

I just feel that incitement to murder is a fairly strong charge to make without supporting images and links. [emphasis mine]

Yes, “incitement to murder” is a fairly strong charge, and the reason there’s no evidence is because it never happened.

Apparently unconcerned with facts, anti-Muslim hate site Weasel Zippers published the rumor, prompting a volley hateful–and sometimes threatening–comments from visitors:

a former dem says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:17 pm

LOL

they’re just getting rid of anyone now who even has a shred of sanity.

Ahhh, yes…vee haf our vays:

Pendog says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:18 pm

Shine up them jackboots facists, and don’t you dare get out of step and tell the truth, vee haf our vays of punishink you.

This is news to us:

Some of his new friends aren’t very forgiving. Once a leftist-Muzlamic shill, always a leftist-Muzlamic shill?

buzzsawmonkey says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:22 pm

The guy is confessing there that he was a knowing shill for radical Islam, trying to make the Muslims out to be a put-upon minority, even though he shows that he is well aware of what happens, or could happen, if one should dare to express a non-laudatory view of Islam.

He was banned from Daily Kos, not for refusing to be a shill for radical Islam, but for attempting to balance his shill behavior so that it appeared to be somewhat objective.

Loonwatch has apparently pioneered the cowardly fatwa-by-proxy. Bell, by the way, was never “our own.”

Sniffy Pop Tuna Scented Popcorn says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:25 pm

This is a very vindictive group of people. This is their way of discreetly issuing a Fatwah and not getting your hands dirty.

They know that 99% of the people who view their information and home addresses will never do one ounce of research on who these people are.

Just another enemy in their minds.

To eat their own.

My personal favorite:

cabrerski says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:36 pm

Better yet, if any harm falls to Mr. Bell…any…take the people who do Loonwatch.com and shoot them…no questions asked.

Like in the Dirty Harry movie, “The Dead Pool” the head mobster started to protect Harry Calahan so they would not be killed inside the prision.

Make the punishment fit the crime. [emphasis mine]

Are we leftist liberal pinko commies or are we “Moslems”?

JoeThePimpernel says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:37 pm

Islam is a religion of peace, and Moslems reserve the right to kill anyone who says otherwise.

LOL is right:

Ed says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:42 pm

The Loon Watch site seems REALLY obsessed with this guy. LoL

Is he referring to cabrerski’s suggestion to shoot us?

JB says:

February 20, 2012 at 1:43 pm

Isn’t that conspiracy to commit murder?

Some more analysis of the ongoing “price tag” attacks against Muslims and Christians in Israel:

Jerusalem Christians are latest targets in recent spate of ‘price tag’ attacks

“Price tag” graffiti was spray-painted in Jerusalem again Sunday night, with vandals this time targeting a downtown church.

The attack on the Narkis Street Baptist Congregation marks the latest in a series of price tag attacks that have targeted Muslim, Christian and leftist institutions in the capital over the last two months. But police believe most of the vandalism is not the work of an organized group; rather, they say, the spray-painted slogans are largely copycat actions carried out by lone individuals.

The original price tag attacks, in contrast, were thought to be the work of a group of settlers seeking to set a “price tag” on house demolitions in the settlements via retaliatory attacks on Palestinians and/or Israeli soldiers.

The attacks during the past two months have included the torching of cars belonging to Arab residents of Jerusalem’s Kiryat Moshe neighborhood; spray-painting slogans on a Christian cemetery on Mount Zion; spray-painting slogans on Peace Now’s office in the capital, as well as the house of Peace Now activist Hagit Ofran; threats against Peace Now secretary general Yariv Oppenheimer; and an arson attack on an ancient mosque in the city’s Geula neighborhood. Over the last week alone, a bilingual school and two churches have been vandalized, including the Baptist church vandalized Sunday.

In both church attacks, the vandals spray-painted slogans denouncing Christianity, Jesus and Mary, such as “Jesus is dead,” “Death to Christianity” and “Mary was a prostitute.” They also included the by-now customary “price tag” slogan.

The Jerusalem police said they have arrested several suspects in this spate of attacks, including one for the attacks on Peace Now and one for the vandalism of the bilingual school. The latter suspect, arrested last week, said he vandalized the school to avenge the Beitar Jerusalem soccer team’s loss to two Arab teams two weeks ago, according to police. Police believe that many of the other attacks are similarly motivated by ordinary hooliganism, rather than ideology.

“It’s intolerably easy,” one senior Jerusalem police officer said. “Any child can take a spray can and spray it, and people know it will be broadcast. Not every case is really nationalistic.”

But to victims, the motive is irrelevant. Jerusalem’s Christian community increasingly feels under assault, and that is especially true for Christians living in Jewish neighborhoods. Priests in the Old City, especially Armenian priests who must often transit the Jewish Quarter, say they are spat on almost daily.

“It’s almost impossible to pass through Jaffa Gate without this happening,” said a senior priest at one Jerusalem church.

The spitting has become so prevalent that some priests have simply stopped going to certain parts of the Old City.

The Baptist church has been attacked twice before: It was torched in 1982 and again in 2007. “We mainly feel sad” about the attacks, said the church’s pastor, Charles Kopp. “It hurts us that anyone could even think we deserve such treatment. They don’t know us, but they apparently oppose anyone who doesn’t identity with them. I wish them well; I have no desire for revenge.”

Baptist priests don’t normally walk around in priestly garb, but Kopp said he would be afraid to walk through the Old City if he did.

Jacob Avrahami, the mayor’s advisor on the Christian community, visited the Baptist church on Monday to condemn the attacks. “They feel besieged; you can see it on them,” he said.

Dr. Gadi Gevaryahu, whose Banish the Darkness organization works to combat racism, said his big fear is that “one day, they’ll attack a mosque or a church with people inside and there will be a terrible conflagration here.”

“Over the last two years, 10 mosques have been torched here, and today it’s clear that it’s not just aimed at Palestinians or Muslims, but at foreigners in general,” he said.

Gevaryahu also offered a practical suggestion: Security cameras, he said, should be installed on every sensitive building in the city.

What if they were Muslim?

Jerusalem Church Vandalised with Graffiti Inciting Hatred Against Christians

(IMEMC)

Racist graffiti has been sprayed on a church in Jerusalem on Monday in the third such incident in the past month in the city.

The graffiti included “Death to Christians” and the phrase “price tag” was found on the walls of the Baptist Narkis Street Congregation according to reports from Ma’an News Agency.

Furthermore residents of the area found their car tyres slashed.

This attack follows a similar such incidents, occurring on the same day in early February, where the bilingual school Hand In Hand and the Monastery of the Cross where vandalised, also promoting violence against Christians.

Attacks under this monicker of price tag refer to actions by Israel’s settler population who respond to moves by the State of Israel against illegal outposts in the occupied West Bank.

Despite the dismantling of outposts that Israel deems illegal being carried out by the state, price tag attacks are almost universally against Palestinians, including numerous acts of arson against mosques in the West Bank.

Under the 4th Geneva Conventions, which Israel is a signatory, all construction of civilian property and the transfer of a civilian population by an occupying power is illegal, as is the displacement of the local population. Despite this, Israel distinguishes between it’s settlement activity, with the majority of settlements gaining construction approval by the state, who also provide funding for construction and subsidised loans for Israelis moving to settlements.

In addition to pre-approved settlement construction, many outposts that are constructed in violation of Israeli national law are given retroactive planning permission.

Mosque in Belgium targeted for second time

(World Bulletin)

A mosque in Belgium affiliated with Turkey’s Directorate of Religious Affairs has been the target of a racially-motivated attack for the second time in the past year.

Last July, an image of a pig attached to a wooden cross was left in the grounds of the Alaaddin Mosque in the Marchienne-au-Pont neighborhood of Charleroi and the Turkish flag outside the building was torn.

Now, less than a year later, a similar attack has taken place at the same mosque, where a number of racial and İslamophobic slurs, including “Go home foreigners,” have been sprayed on the walls of the building and grounds. Those involved in the attack have not been identified.

A spokesman for the mosque said the local Muslim community felt deeply aggrieved by the attack and the slurs directed towards them and their religion. Further, disappointment was expressed by the DİB that authorities made no effort to follow up on the last attack or bring the perpetrators to account for their actions.

The incident is part of a growing trend of Islamophobic attacks, which have become increasingly common in Belgium over the past decade.

Cihan

Dearborn: Mosque Vandalized

Police Investigating Vandalism of Dearborn Mosque

By Jessica Carreras

The Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations is urging houses of worship in metro Detroit to take extra precautions following several cases of vandalism.

Dearborn police are investigating several incidents of possible anti-Muslim vandalism in the city, according to a press release sent out Tuesday by the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations.

According to CAIR-MI Executive Director Dawud Walid, the American Moslem Bekaa Center, located on Chase Road north of Ford Road, was targeted in the spray-painting, as well as a building nearby on Chase that is soon to be opened as a restaurant.

Both buildings were tagged with the words “Chaldean Mob” or “MB.”

Walid said the names are related to the Chaldean Mafia, a group that was notorious for drug trafficking in the Detroit area in the 1980s and ’90s. However, any specific ties to that group have not been established in this case.

Also still undetermined is whether the vandalism was motivated by ethnic or racial bias. However, said Walid, “It should be investigated with the potential to be a hate crime.”

The incidents in Dearborn follow a case of vandalism of a Sikh house of worship earlier this month in Sterling Heights.

Though there’s no indication that the cases are related, Walid said it’s enough to cause worry.

“We’re asking all mosques to take extra security precautions,” he said. “It’s a sad commentary on our society that there are (people) who would desecrate houses of worship. It seems that nothing is sacred these days.”

CAIR-MI put out a request to community members to call police with any information on the incidents.

“There’s a lot of traffic in that area, so someone must’ve seen something. I’m hoping that if someone saw any individuals they would immediately call the Dearborn police.”

Walid said that he had spoken with Dearborn Chief of Police Ronald Haddad, who confirmed that the department is investigating the vandalism.

Chief Haddad was not immediately available for comment on the case.

Anyone with information on the vandalism is asked to contact the Dearborn Police Tip Line at 313-943-3030.

These 8 civilians were herding sheep until their life ended by a misled report that they were armed and ready to attack the government.

Informer Misled NATO in Airstrike That Killed 8 Civilians, Afghans Say

By ALISSA J. RUBIN and JAWAD SUKHANYAR

KABUL, Afghanistan — Afghan government officials who traveled to the snowbound village where seven children and a young adult reportedly were killed in a NATO airstrike this week said that the bombing was based on incorrect information.

The officials said that after talking to local residents and seeing the area, they concluded that an informer had misled the French troops who control the area.

The airstrike took place on Wednesday in the village of Geyaba in the eastern Afghan province of Kapisa. Seven boys under 14 and an 18-year-old were killed in the attack, according to Abdul Mubin Safi, the administrative director of Kapisa Province. They were herding sheep less than half a mile from their homes when the bombing happened.

NATO representatives and Afghan officials traveled to the area by helicopter to investigate and returned Friday, said Maj. Jason Waggoner, a NATO spokesman. He said there was no word yet from NATO officials on the findings of the joint Afghan-NATO team.

One member of the team, Mohammad Hussain Khan Sanjani, the chairman of the provincial council who was reached by telephone in Kapisa, said that after talking with people in the village, it seemed that misinformation had been passed to NATO forces.

“These people are involved in animal husbandry, they own sheep and goats, and their children went out to feed the animals behind their village under some oak trees,” Mr. Sanjani said.

“The French troops had a secret report from one of their agents who told them that in that area there were armed men preparing to attack the government and the French soldiers in Kapisa,” he said. “We talked to locals and found that the intelligence was wrong and they targeted civilians.”

The French soldiers, who are largely responsible for Kapisa Province, have faced stiff resistance from the insurgents there and in the Sarobi district of neighboring Kabul Province. Eighty-two French soldiers have been killed in combat since 2001, mostly in those two areas.

France’s military high command did not respond to requests for comment on the airstrike in Kapisa.

The province is divided ethnically, with some areas heavily Tajik and others Pashtun. The Pashtun areas have had a strong insurgent presence that includes both Taliban fighters and fighters loyal to Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, an insurgent leader.

The Najrab district, where the airstrike occurred, is mixed with Tajiks, Pashtuns and Pashai, and while local officials said it was not held by insurgents, their presence could not be ruled out since Najrab is adjacent to less stable districts.

“The area is not influenced by the Taliban, but there was some sort of illegal weapon smuggling,” said Abdul Saboor Wafa, the Kapisa governor’s chief of staff.

Civilian casualties have caused serious tensions between the United States-led military coalition and the Afghan government. Civilian deaths caused by NATO and Afghan forces dropped last year, although the number of civilians killed by airstrikes that were intended to hit insurgents rose, to 187, the United Nations has reported.

President Hamid Karzai condemned the loss of life in Kapisa and blamed a NATO airstrike in a statement on Thursday.

Anti Muslim graffiti insulting Allah scrawled on Kensington insurance shop.

Anti Muslim graffiti insulting Allah scrawled on Kensington insurance shop

By Simone Weichselbaum / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

Bangladeshis in Kensington said they are living in fear after Muslim hate graffiti was found on a storefront in the neighborhood’s bustling shopping strip.

The manager of TDS Insurance on Beverly Road near McDonald Avenue, came to work Monday and spotted a nauseating sight:

“It was written on the outside – ‘Allah is s–t,’” said Abu Chowdhury, 51, who immediately called the cops.

“I have no enemies,” he said. “We are not a religious business.”

Although the hateful message was erased hours later, Bangladeshis said the sight left them emotionally scarred.

“It is just shocking,” said Mamnunul Haq, a Bangladeshi community leader. “No one wants to see anything like that.”

“We are a very peaceful people,” Haq added.

Kensington is one of the most diverse areas in the city – home to a Muslim stronghold mainly comprised of Bangladeshis and Pakistanis, living among Mexican families and Orthodox Jews.

Bangladeshis joined their Hasidic neighbors in July during the search for Leiby Kletzky, the 8-year-old boy who went missing in Borough Park and was later found dead.

They also blasted the vandal or vandals who painted a half dozen swastikas around Midwood last month.

“It happened in the Jewish community. And now it is happening in ours,” Haq said.

Hoping to quell the growing anxiety, Councilman Brad Lander (D-Kensington) held a meeting Wednesday night with Bangladeshi, Jewish, and Latino residents discussing ideas about how to prevent future hate crimes in their hood.

Lander wants to put a set of trees and benches in front of TDS Insurance, calling it “Kensington Plaza,” serving as a mixed race meeting spot.

“In the face of hatred, this community is coming together,” Lander said. “When these things happen, you have to stand up.”

simonew@nydailynews.com

Inscription 'Muhammad is a pig' painted on a Jerusalem mosque, Dec. 14, 2011.

These attacks continue. When will it come to an end?

IDF soldier linked to ‘price tag’ attack in West Bank Palestinian village 

An Israel Defense Forces soldier is suspected of perpetrating a so-called “price tag” attack in a Palestinian West Bank village, Haaretz learned on Friday, following recently intercepted security camera footage.

The Golani Brigade soldier and resident of the Itamar settlement was arrested along with two young women after footage indicated the three vandalizing the Palestinian village of Luban al-Sharqiya near Nablus.

According to a preliminary investigation, the three are suspected of entering the West Bank village on 1:30 A.M. Tuesday, where they sprayed the caption “Muhammad is a pig” on one of the walls and sabotaged a construction materials shop.

Security camera footage provided by Israeli NGO B’Tselem shows one of the young women stabbing sacks of building material piled up near the shop.

Later, a confrontation ensued between the three and local residents who woke up following the ruckus, during which the IDF soldier threatened the Palestinians with his rifle, causing them to flee the scene.

Suspects linked to the case were arrested on Thursday, with their arrest remanded until Monday.

The solder admitted to the act and is scheduled to be detained until Monday.

In addition, Orien Nizri from Jerusalem, known for her West Bank activism, and Sarah Goldberg from the settlement of Tapuach were arrested over suspicion that they were the young women in the car.

The young women are to be detained until Tuesday following a remand hearing in a Jerusalem magistrate’s court.

Haaretz, 10 February 2012

Shaul Spitzer

What if he were Muslim?

Shaul Spitzer, Hasidic Man Admits Burning Neighbor In New York Religious Dispute

NEW CITY, NY, Feb 7 (Reuters) – A Hasidic Jewish man from New York state pleaded guilty to assault on Tuesday for setting a neighbor on fire because he wasn’t praying with the rest of the community, leaving the man badly burned.

Shaul Spitzer, 18, of New Square, New York, admitted to lighting Aron Rottenberg ablaze after learning that he had disobeyed a prayer order by the Grand Rebbe of the Hasidic enclave about 35 miles north of New York City.

He pleaded guilty to assault in a New York court and faces up to 10 years in prison, although Judge William Kelly said he would likely receive a 5-year sentence.

Spitzer, who worked for Grand Rebbe David Twersky, admitted in court that he used a heavy duty propane lighter to set Rottenberg on fire in May 2011.

He lit him on fire when Rottenberg confronted him after Spitzer had stuffed gasoline-soaked shirts into a bag, lit it on fire and threw it onto the porch of Rottenberg’s home, he admitted. The family was sleeping inside, court documents said.

Prosecutor Stephen Moore said Rottenberg spent more than a month in the hospital for severe burns.

Under the plea deal, charges of attempted murder and arson were dismissed. Spitzer could have faced a 25-year prison sentence for those charges. Outside court, Spitzer’s attorney Kenneth Gribetz said his client had been trying to cause mischief, not to kill anyone.

“This is a young boy who has no criminal intent,” he said. “He’s not a criminal … He should be given a chance to get back on the right track.”

Spitzer, who will be sentenced in April, entered his plea on the day jury selection was set to begin in the case. Rottenberg was in court and told the judge he consented to the plea deal.

Court documents said Rottenberg’s family had received several threats and had their property vandalized for not praying in the community’s main synagogue.

Rottenburg has a pending civil lawsuit against Spitzer and Twersky stemming from the incident. Gribetz said in court a settlement in the $2 million range was under discussion. (Editing By Ellen Wulfhorst and Cynthia Johnston

James Lafferty

(H/T: JD, Perceiver)

At Geller-Spencer’s CPAC Panel, Anti-Muslim Activist Says He’s Proud of Attacks on Mosques

by Charles Johnson (Little Green Footballs)

Speaking today at the unofficial CPAC panel “Islamic Law in America: How the Obama Justice Department Is Selling Us Out,” sponsored by Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, James Lafferty of the Virginia Anti-Sharia Task Force was “proud to say” that most of the mosques attacked in the US were in the South: CPAC: Anti-Muslim Activist James Lafferty Says He’s ‘Proud’ of Attacks Against Mosques.

Well with what the gentleman was saying about the Justice Department, I went to the briefing, the hate crimes summit, and I went there and it was all Muslim officials speaking and they had all these pictures of some mosque somewhere, and it was usually in the South I’m proud to say where a guy would drive a pickup truck right into the mosque. They had I bet 20—it looked like the same picture after a while because they just kept showing these same pictures, and each Muslim speaker got up, and remember this is a Justice Department meeting, and really ragged on two groups: the FBI and the NYPD. So whatever they’re doing they’re doing something good.

This is far from the first example; Geller and Spencer are usually too cunning to express this kind of open support for anti-Muslim violence, but their associates … not so much: Pamela Geller Associate John Jay Openly Calls for Mass Murder.

Meanwhile, after ranting earlier this week that no one reads LGF or takes me seriously, and that I was a “boil on the ass of the blogosphere,” Geller blocked me on Twitter, then proceeded to tweet the following to me today — even though, since she blocked me, I was unlikely to even see it. (I only saw it because one of her followers retweeted it.)

Pamela Geller@Atlasshrugs
Breitbart, Geller, Spencer – we’re coming to get you, Chuckie! twitpic.com/8i1kz8 @AndrewBreitbart @jihadwatchRS @Lizardoid
10 Feb 12 ReplyRetweetFavorite

This is the picture Geller posted:

It’s nice to know that Pamela Geller, Robert Spencer, and Andrew Breitbart all have a little internalized version of me living inside their heads, making them miserable.

Iranian scientists car blown up by MEK terrorist

This past July I wrote a piece on the collaboration between, and support for the MEK (Mujahideen-e-Khalq) from US congressmen, as well as the intense effort to delist the group from the US State Department’s “designated terrorist” list.

Congressmen (including Democrats) and former government officials have met with the Mujahedin-e Khalq (MEK), an organization that was designated a terrorist group in 1997 when the list was first compiled, and is STILL ON THE LIST–for now.

MEK has a very aggressive and organized lobby effort in Washington D.C. According to one House staffer, the MEK is “the most mobilized grassroots advocacy effort in the country — AIPAC included.” Their mission is to be delisted as a foreign terrorist organization (FTO), push the USA to foment war with Iran, i.e. “regime change,” and have themselves installed into power. Sound familiar?

This exposed several issues which I touched upon in my July article:

1.) It is a felony to provide a designated terrorist organization with “material support,” which many elected officials it can be argued have been doing!

2.) “Numerous Muslims inside the U.S. have been prosecuted for providing ‘material support for Terrorism’ for doing far less than these American politicians are publicly doing on behalf of a designated Terrorist group.” Read Glenn Greenwald’s piece for a far from comprehensive list of Muslims who have been charged for doing far less than what these politicians did! (H/T: Believing Atheist)

Danios has written several pieces on the “Greater Islamophobia,” i.e. “bombing, invading, and occupying Muslim lands.” His and Glenn Greenwald’s analysis of the uptick in war propaganda, covert operations by both the USA and Israel are must reads. It is clear that we are reaching a crucial point from which we will be unable to return: are the wheels turning irreversibly towards war?

According to the Iranian American Islamic scholar Reza Aslan, the fact that there is so much public discussion of “war” against Iran is indicative of a private aversion to confrontation, he told us:

Nobody is going to war with Iran, neither the United States or Israel. I can tell you for a fact that Israel is not going to war with Iran because Israel keeps talking about it. If anybody who has studied Israeli politics at all can tell you anything is if Israel talks about bombing Iran then that means it has no intentions of doing it. When the Israelis want you dead you just die, OK.

Reza’s logic is pretty sound and lets hope he continues to be right, but sometimes, even when no one wants war you get war. History is replete with such a fact.

In the meantime we have the Israeli effort at sabotaging the Iranian nuclear program by targeting and killing Iranian scientists. It has been a not-so-well-hidden-secret that Israel has been using the MEK as a proxy in this war, a claim leveled by Iran for quite some time.

Now we have US officials confirming this fact. Of course, if true, this is nothing less than government sponsored terrorism!

All of these mysteries received substantial clarity from an NBC News report by Richard Engel and Robert Windrem yesterday. Citing two anonymous “senior U.S. officials,” that report makes two amazing claims: (1) that it was MEK which perpetrated the string of assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists and (2) the Terrorist group “is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service.” These senior officials also admitted that “the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign” but claims it “has no direct involvement.” Iran has long insisted the Israel and the U.S. are using MEK to carry out Terrorist attacks on its soil, including the murder of its scientists, and NBC notes that these acknowledgments “confirm charges leveled by Iran’s leaders” (MEK issued a statement denying the report).

The ramifications for this are disturbing to say the least. The hypocrisy and double standards it exposes once again are evident. Greenwald summarizes the questions and conclusions reached from the NBC report far more eloquently than I could, so I repeat them:

If these senior U.S. officials are telling the truth, there are a number of vital questions and conclusions raised by this. First, it would mean that the assurances by MEK’s paid American shills such as Howard Dean that “they are unarmed” are totally false: whoever murdered these scientists is obviously well-armed. Second, this should completely gut the effort to remove MEK from the list of designated Terrorist groups; after all, murdering Iran’s scientists through the use of bombs and guns is a defining act of a Terror group, at least as U.S. law attempts to define the term. Third, this should forever resolve the debate in which I was involved last month about whether the attack on these Iranian scientists constitutes Terrorism; as Daniel Larson put it yesterday: “If true, the murders of Iranian nuclear scientists with bombs have been committed by a recognized terrorist group. Can everyone acknowledge at this point that these attacks were acts of terrorism?”

Fourth, and most important: if this report is true, is this not definitive proof that Israel is, by definition, a so-called state sponsor of Terrorism? Leaving everything else aside, if Israel, as NBC reports, has “financed, trained and armed” a group officially designated by the U.S. Government as a Terrorist organization, isn’t that the definitive act of how one becomes an official “state sponsor of Terrorism”? Amazingly, as Daniel Larison notes, one of the people who most vocally attacked me for labeling the murder of Iranian scientists as “Terrorism” and for generally arguing that Terrorism is a meaningless, cynically applied term — Commentary‘s Jonathan Tobin — yesterday issued a justification for why Israel should be working with Terrorist groups like MEK. As Larison wrote about Tobin’s article:

In other words, Israeli state sponsorship of a terrorist group is acceptable because it’s in a good cause. . . . Because Israel is overreacting to a perceived threat from Iran, Tobin believes it is entirely defensible for Israel to partner with a recognized terrorist group. In other words, Tobin believes that terrorism is “entirely defensible” so long as it is committed by the right people and directed at the right targets. It’s as if he is going out of his way to vindicate Glenn Greenwald.

Of course, as I documented in my last book, those who are politically and financially well-connected are free to commit even the most egregious crimes; for that reason, the very idea of prosecuting Giuliani, Rendell, Ridge, Townsend, Dean and friends for their paid labor on behalf of a Terrorist group is unthinkable, a suggestion not fit for decent company, even though powerless Muslims have been viciously prosecuted for far less egregious connections to such groups. But this incident also underscores the specific point that the term Terrorism is so completely meaningless, manipulated and mischievous: it’s just a cynical term designed to delegitimize violence and even political acts undertaken by America’s enemies while shielding from criticism the actual Terrorism undertaken by itself and its allies. The spectacle whereby a designated Terrorist group can pay top American politicians to advocate for them even as they engage in violent Terrorist acts, all while being trained, funded and aided by America’s top client state, should forever end the controversy over that glaringly obvious proposition.

Here is the original NBC Report:

By Richard Engel and Robert Windrem (NBC NEWS)

Deadly attacks on Iranian nuclear scientists are being carried out by an Iranian dissident group that is financed, trained and armed by Israel’s secret service, U.S. officials tell NBC News, confirming charges leveled by Iran’s leaders.

The group, the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, has long been designated as a terrorist group by the United States, accused of killing American servicemen and contractors in the 1970s and supporting the takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran before breaking with the Iranian mullahs in 1980.

The attacks, which have killed five Iranian nuclear scientists since 2007 and may have destroyed a missile research and development site, have been carried out in dramatic fashion, with motorcycle-borne assailants often attaching small magnetic bombs to the exterior of the victims’ cars.

U.S. officials, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the Obama administration is aware of the assassination campaign but has no direct involvement.

The Iranians have no doubt who is responsible – Israel and the People’s Mujahedin of Iran, known by various acronyms, including MEK, MKO and PMI.

“The relation is very intricate and close,” said Mohammad Javad Larijani, a senior aide to Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, speaking of the MEK and Israel.  “They (Israelis) are paying … the Mujahedin. Some of their (MEK) agents … (are) providing Israel with information.  And they recruit and also manage logistical support.”

Moreover, he said, the Mossad, the Israeli secret service, is training MEK members in Israel on the use of motorcycles and small bombs.  In one case, he said, Mossad agents built a replica of the home of an Iranian nuclear scientist so that the assassins could familiarize themselves with the layout prior to the attack.

Much of what the Iranian government knows of the attacks and the links between Israel and MEK  comes from interrogation of an assassin who failed to carry out an attack in late 2010 and the materials found on him, Larijani said. (Click here to see a video report of the interrogation shown on Iranian televsion.)

The U.S.-educated Larijani, whose two younger brothers run the legislative and judicial branches of the Iranian government, said the Israelis’ rationale is simple. “Israel does not have direct access to our society. Mujahedin, being Iranian and being part of Iranian society, they have … a good number of … places to get into the touch with people. So I think they are working hand-to-hand very close.  And we do have very concrete documents.”

Two senior U.S. officials confirmed for NBC News  the MEK’s role in the assassinations, with one senior official saying, “All your inclinations are correct.” A third official would not confirm or deny the relationship, saying only, “It hasn’t been clearly confirmed yet.”  All the officials denied any U.S. involvement in the assassinations.

As it has in the past, Israel’s Foreign Ministry declined comment. Said a spokesman, “As long as we can’t see all the evidence being claimed by NBC, the Foreign Ministry won’t react to every gossip and report being published worldwide.”

For its part, the MEK pointed to a statement calling the allegations “absolutely false.”

Ali Safavi, a long-time representative of the MEK, underscored the denial after publication of this article,

“There has never been and there is no MEK member in Israel, period,” he said. “The MEK has categorically denied any involvement. The idea that Israel is training MEK members on its soil borders on perversity. It is absolutely and completely false.”

The sophistication of the attacks supports the Iranian claims that an experienced intelligence service is involved, experts say.

In the most recent attack, on Jan. 11, 2012, Mostafa Ahamdi Roshan died in a blast in Tehran moments after two assailants on a motorcycle placed a small magnetic bomb on his vehicle. Roshan was a deputy director at the Natanz uranium enrichment facility and was reportedly involved in procurement for the nuclear program, which Iran insists is not a weapons program.

Previous attacks include the assassination of Massoud Ali-Mohammadi, killed by a bomb outside his Tehran home in January 2010, and an explosion in November of that year that took the life of Majid Shahriari and wounded Fereydoun Abbasi-Davani, who is now the head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization.

In the case of Roshan, the bomb appears to have been a shaped charge that directed all the explosive power inside the vehicle, killing him and his bodyguard driver but leaving nearby traffic unaffected.

Although Roshan was directly involved in the nuclear program, working at the huge centrifuge facility between Tehran and Qom, Iran’s religious center, at least one other scientist who was killed wasn’t linked to the Iranian nuclear program, according to Larijani.

Speaking of bombing victim Ali-Mohammadi, whom he described as a friend, Larijani told NBC News, “In fact this guy who was assassinated was not involved in the nitty-gritty of the situation.  He was a scientist, a physicist, working on the theoretically parts of nuclear energy, which you can teach it in every university. You can find it in every text.”

“This is an Israeli plot.  A dirty plot,” Larijani added angrily. He also claimed the assassinations are not having an effect on the program and have only made scientists more resolute in carrying out their mission.

Not so, said Ronen Bergman, an Israeli commentator and author of “Israel’s Secret War with Iran” and an upcoming book tentatively titled, “Mossad and the Art of Assassination. (Read the rest)

************************************************************************

I will end by saying that this hypocrisy and double standards are nothing new to us. We reported back in July on the collaboration between US politicians and the material support they were clearly lending to a “designated terrorist organization.” Muslims and Islamic groups who have far less power than these hypocritical politicians are tarnished with the “unindicted terrorist” label and hence marginalized while the politicians roam free and actually put money into their pocket books from these terror groups.

Israel’s lies, distortions and terror are also well known to us. This is not the first time Israel has delved into “government sponsored terror” and it likely won’t be the last! On a daily basis Israel is terrorizing the Palestinians, a point many seem to miss! The question is when will we wake up and hold our political class to account for the hypocrisy, the double standards, the erosion of our civil liberties or are we willing to give it away for the false mirage of “security?”

Marines pose with the "SS" flag in Afghanistan

To these Marines all Afghans are probably “Sand N*****s” and so they have no issue with posing with a Nazi symbol.

The story below highlights that many Jewish organizations and others are outraged by the photo and are demanding an investigation. My question is how are the above soldiers going to be investigated or held accountable when you have soldiers who have clearly committed war crimes and perpetrated massacres getting off for free or a slap of the wrist?

Groups outraged by Marines posing with logo resembling Nazi SS want new probe, troops punished

(Washinton Post)

I don’t think this hooligan should have been jailed for burning the Koran, though in his case he probably meant to send the same message that the KKK sends when “burning crosses.” Either way his actions since being released confirm that he is an unhinged and violent character.

Bob Pitt at Islamophobia-Watch writes:

EDL member who burned Qur’an part of racist gang that threatened and abused Turkish takeaway workers

(Islamophobia-Watch)

A former Carlisle soldier just released from jail for publicly burning the Koran was among nearly a dozen people who racially abused two takeaway workers.

The city’s crown court heard that Andrew Ryan, 33, and his brother Matthew Ryan, 27, were part of a group who threatened and racially abused two Turkish men at Manhattan Pizza in Botchergate last year.

The Ryan brothers, along with three other men and four women, pleaded guilty to two charges of using racially aggravated threatening behaviour. All admitted that their abuse of the two takeaway workers had been inspired by their mistaken belief that the men were Pakistani.

Before the group are sentenced on Thursday, Judge Paul Batty QC will be shown a video of the ugly incident in which they were involved on May 20 last year.

The CCTV shows the group massing in a threatening manner outside the takeaway shop shortly before 8pm. They are seen angrily remonstrating with the two Turkish workers, some of the group ranting and repeatedly jabbing their fingers as they spill into the shop.

One of the men in the group flicked a lighted cigarette into the shop, and a drinks can is also tossed inside. At one stage, the video shows one of the defendants striding into the shop and throwing a chair.

The terrifying incident came shortly after Andrew Ryan was released from a 70-day jail term for burning the Koran in Carlisle city centre. He claimed he committed that offence with the aim of causing offence to only Islamic extremists.

News & Star, 7 February 2012

After he was convicted of burning the Qur’an in April last year Andrew Ryan was treated as a hero by the EDL, who organised a demonstration in solidarity with him before he was sentenced. As the News & Star reported:

“He arrived at the city magistrates’ court flanked by men waving the St George’s Cross and shouting nationalist chants. The English Defence League Carlisle Division had put out a call for members to support Ryan. A group gathered to parade through the city centre with him, carrying a flag with ‘EDL’ written on it. It also bore the scrawled message: ‘It’s our country, we are taking it back’.”

Images of the vandalism at the Sterling Heights Sikh temple

Sikh Temple Vandalized–but were Muslims the Intended Target?

By Sarah Cwiek

Vandals targeted a Sikh house of worship in suburban Detroit this week. But there are signs they intended to target Muslims.

According to the Sikh Society of Michigan, the Sikh temple (known as a Gurdwara) in Sterling Heights has been under construction for several years, without any incidents or controversy.

That changed when someone vandalized the building sometime on Sunday night.

The vandals spray painted “don’t builed” [sic] on an outside wall. They also left images of a cross, a gun, and a misspelled version of the name “Mohammed.”

Muslims revere Mohammed as a prophet, but it has nothing to do with the Sikh religion. The word leads many to believe to believe the vandals thought they were targeting Muslims.

Dawud Walid, executive director for the Michigan chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), calls the vandalism a hate crime.

“We joined the Sikh community in calling for local and federal law enforcement to use their full resources to investigate this recent hate crime,” Walid said.

The US Justice Department in Detroit says the incident is on their radar. They’ve met with members of the Sikh community about it.

But a DOJ spokeswoman says it’s yet how they’ll be involved in the investigation, or any potential prosecution. Anyone with information about the incident should contact Sterling Heights Police.

Walid also suggests the incident could stem from politicians’ “fanning the flames” of xenophobia and anti-Muslim sentiment in an election year.

“We hope that they will be a little more responsible,” Walid said. “They should understand that their statements and ads may push people over the edge, and they do have consequences.”

The US Sikh community has fallen victim to anti-Muslim sentiment before. A Sikh man was murdered in Arizona soon after the September 11th attacks. The killer thought he was Arab or Muslim.

Jewish Extremists deface monastery

Recently, Ayaan Hirsi Ali published an article in the Daily Beast titled, Global War on Christians in the Muslim World. I wonder if she will be brave enough to take on the Jewish extremists below who have been targeting Muslims and Christians.

If they were Muslim you can rest assure that the attack would be considered part and parcel of Islamic teaching.

(H/T: Z. Ahmad)

‘Death to Christians’: Suspected Jewish extremists deface monastery

JERUSALEM — A Jerusalem monastery, built on the spot where tradition holds the tree from which Jesus’ cross was made, was defaced with graffiti bearing the hallmarks of militant Jewish settlers, police said on Tuesday.

“Death to Christians” was daubed in Hebrew on the outer walls of the Monastery of the Cross, an 11th-century fortress-like holy site situated in a valley overlooked by Israel’s parliament.

Army Radio reported that “Maccabees of Migron” was painted on the monastery, too, The Associated Press reported. Maccabees were ancient Jewish heroes, and Migron is an unauthorized settlement facing a court-ordered evacuation. 

Such acts originally targeted West Bank mosques but have recently expanded to include a mosque inside Israel, Israeli military bases, and now, a Christian holy site.

Police spokesman Micky Rosenfeld said the words “Price Tag” were also painted overnight by the vandals, who damaged two cars parked outside the monastery in the attack, according to Reuters.

The slogan, used by Jewish settlers in vandalism attacks on mosques and Palestinian homes in the occupied West Bank, refers to the retribution they say they will exact for any attempt by the Israeli government to curb settlement in the territory.

Israeli settlement building up 20 percent, watchdog says

“I am a priest and I forgive,” Father Claudio of the monastery, which is administered by the Greek Orthodox church, told Reuters.

Rosenfeld said police had opened an investigation.

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

The mosque that was attacked

It wasn’t too long ago that Robert Spencer went on a speaking tour in Australia. Did he inspire the Aussie “gentleman” below? What we do know is that this guy is a creep who hates Islam and Muslims and is willing to use violence to make his point, including intimidating elderly women. Of course, in the feverish minds of the Islamophobes this man was just practicing “free speech.”(H/T: Nasser AlK):

Bosnian Mosque in Melbourne under attack, 04.02.2012

(TalkBosnia.net)

VIC Melbourne, 04.02.2012: The Bosnian mosque in Deer Park has been attacked, a man went on a rampage ripping the Qur’ans (around 50) and flushing them down the toilet.

Jessica Mokdad "loved Islam" according to her parents.

Shameless Pamela Geller is stooping to the lowest of the low. Using the name of Jessica Mokdad, a girl murdered by her “obsessed” and “monstrous” stepfather to line her pocket book and further the mass hysterical drive against Islam and Muslims.

This article while doing an O.K. job of reporting on the story gives Geller a free pass on her lunacy. What the hell is wrong with news outlets? Can’t they do a basic Google search? This woman, Geller, is a moonbat whose positions are consistently against human rights and basic freedoms, why is she not being called out for it below?

Geller also has a track record of inventing and attributing unrelated crimes to Islam and Muslims! You would think that FACT would make it into the story.

Listen Fox News Detroit: Just because someone declares themselves to be a defender of human rights does not make them one. Investigate their BACKGROUND!! Quit amplifying the voices of loons and bigots who have done nothing to help the cause of human rights and instead work only to add insult to injury by demeaning grieving families.

Enough of my rant, here is the article:

Slain Woman’s Name on anti-Muslim Conference Upsets Her Family

(Fox News Detroit)

SOUTHFIELD, Mich. (WJBK) — It’s been almost ten months since Jessica Mokdad’s murder. She was just 20 years old.

“It’s like still in disbelief,” said Mohammed Mokdad, her father.

Jessica’s murder made international headlines. She left Minnesota to escape an allegedly physically and mentally abusive stepfather, but in April of 2011, her stepfather, Rahim Alfatlawi, drove from Minnesota to her grandmother’s Warren home and shot her in the head.

Her family calls it an awful tragedy, but others are calling it an honor killing.

“We know that this is a practice under Islamic law. The honor killing is the final act. People know very little of the terror … that these girls live under,” said Pamela Geller.

She is the head of Stop the Islamization of America. Geller is hosting a conference on the anniversary of Jessica’s death in Dearborn. It’s called the Jessica Mokdad Human Rights Conference.

“We cannot sanction this gendercide. We cannot sanction the diminishment and dehumanization of women. We must speak up,” Geller said.

We asked Jessica’s stepmother, Cassandra Mokdad, whether her murder was an honor killing.

“Absolutely it was not,” she said.

She told us this disgusting act had nothing to do with Islam, a religion she said Jessica practiced proudly.

“It was nothing about religion or anything. It was just about a sick human being,” Mohammed Mokdad said.

“He wanted to have a relationship with Jessica as more than her stepfather. He wanted to have a more romantic relationship with her,” Cassandra Mokdad explained.

Even the Macomb County Prosecutor on the case said Alfatlawi murdered Jessica because he was obsessed with her, not the religion, and Jessica’s family wants her name taken off the conference.

“She’s using Jessica as her poster child for anti-Islam,” said Cassandra Mokdad.

“What gulls me is that there is this prohibition on discussing it and the ideology that inspires honor killings,” Geller explained.

She said this conference will happen and the name won’t be changed.

“We’re definitely going to have this conference and it will not be stopped. Their directing their barbs at me. I didn’t kill Jessica. I’m trying to save the next girl. They should be helping me save the next girl,” said Geller.

“Absolutely I’ll go. I won’t let her sit there and misuse Jessica’s name, and I will let her know exactly how I feel,” Cassandra Mokdad told us.

The conference will be held at the Hyatt in Dearborn at the end of April.

The hate continues in France:

Two more French mosques daubed with racist graffiti

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

“It seems that not a week goes by without a new mosque desecration”, the Collectif Contre l’Islamophobie en France observes.

Yesterday a mosque in the Glonnières district of Le Mans was found covered with graffiti reading “Islam out of Europe”, ”No Islam” and “France for the French”.

On Saturday a mosque in Miramas was also daubed with Islamophobic slogans along with the name of Front National presidential candidate Marine Le Pen. It was the second time in four months that the mosque had experienced such an attack.

Last month we reported that fascist graffiti were painted on the wall of a mosque that is under construction in Montigny-en-Ostrevent, and two pig’s heads were left at the site where another mosque is being built in Nanterre.

Update:  Cf. “Anti-Muslim attacks rose 34% in France in 2011″, LoonWatch, 1 February 2012

Anti-Muslim Attacks Increased by 34% in France in 2011

These numbers are very conservative, however they are still quite alarming. If anyone has a better translation please forward it to us, this is my quick translation via. Google:

Anti-Muslim Attacks Rose 34% in France in 2011

(Le Monde)

On Wednesday, the 1st of February, the National Observatory against Islamophobia said that Anti-Muslim acts and threats listed on French soil in 2011 increased 34% over the previous year.

According to Abdallah Zekri, president of the observatory attached to the French Muslim Council, these figures are from Statistics compiled by the Sub-Directorate of General Information (SDIG), reported the AFP.

“The actions and threats that have been the subject of formal complaints to the police and gendarmerie have increased from 116 in 2010 to 155 in 2011, an increase of 33.9%,” says Zekri. Only for actions, SDIG statistics for 2011, concerning in particular the violence and assault, fire and damage, the number increased from 22 to 38 a year to the next.

“I wish that President Sarkozy, to whom I sent a letter in December, make a statement. It denounces these unspeakable acts. In short, he seeks to allay the concerns of Muslims who are citizens just as Christians or Jews, “said Mr. Zekri.

The original French:

Les actes anti-musulmans ont augmenté de 34 % en 2011

(Le Monde)

Les actes et menaces anti-musulmans répertoriés sur le territoire français en 2011 ont augmenté de 34 % par rapport à l’année précédente, a annoncé mercredi 1er février l’Observatoire national contre l’islamophobie.

Selon Abdallah Zekri, président de cet observatoire rattaché au Conseil français du culte musulman, ces chiffres proviennent de statistiques de la sous-direction de l’information générale (SDIG), communiquées à l’AFP.

“Les actions et les menaces qui ont fait l’objet de plaintes déposées officiellement auprès des services de police et de gendarmerie sont passées de 116 en 2010 à 155 en 2011, soit une augmentation de 33,9 %”, précise M. Zekri. Pour les seules actions, les statistiques de la SDIG pour 2011, qui concernent notamment les violences et voies de faits, les incendies et les dégradations, leur nombre passe de 22 à 38 d’une année sur l’autre.

“J’aurais aimé que le président Sarkozy, à qui j’ai adressé une lettre en décembre, fasse une déclaration. Qu’il dénonce ces actes inqualifiables. Bref, qu’il cherche à apaiser les inquiétudes des musulmans, qui sont des citoyens au même titre que les chrétiens ou les juifs”, a déclaré M. Zekri.

A mosque in Fairfax County suffered thousands of dollars in damage. News4's Megan McGrath has the story.

$60,000 in damage! An attack on any religious establishment is an attack on all religious establishments.

Mosque in Fairfax County Vandalized

View more videos at: http://nbcwashington.com.

By Megan McGrath

Construction crews should be putting the finishing touches on the Mubarak Blessed Mosque in Chantilly. Instead, they are repairing the work of vandals.

Sometime between Sunday evening and 6 a.m. Monday morning, the mosque was pelted with stones and masonry blocks. Nearly all the custom made windows and glass doors on the first floor were shattered.  Damage has been estimated at $60,000.

Investigators found beer and liquor bottles in the woods behind the mosque, and they believe teenagers may be responsible.

“It is very sad,” said the mosque’s general secretary, Usman Ghumman.  “But at the same time, our community is very resilient.  We have asked our community members to fervently pray that we are able to overcome this hurdle.”

Mubarak Blessed Mosque has been under construction for a year, and was scheduled to open in just weeks.

Jerrold Foltz, pastor at the Wellspring United Church of Christ, said acts like this are an affront to area’s entire religious community.  “Its an insult to the whole religious establishment,” Foltz said, “whether its a church or a mosque or a synagogue.”

Investigators say there is no evidence that it is a hate crime – nothing was taken and no graffiti was left behind.  However, because of the extent of the damage, those responsible face felony charges.

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) has asked the FBI to investigate the possibility of a bias motive in the incident.

The home of Mohamed Soltan and Ahmed Mahmoud was set on fire on the morning of Martin King Jr. Day. Soltan said the crime was hate oriented.

We reported on this story almost two weeks ago, and now the facts are out:  it was an arson attack.

‘Suspicious’ arson leaves students in cold

“One second I’m comfortable in bed, and the next second I’m running out of the house in the freezing cold, running for my life,” recalls Mohamed Soltan.

Soltan, a sixth-year in economics at Ohio State, and his roommate Ahmed Mahmoud, a third-year in finance, were victims of arson in their Hilliard home on Martin Luther King Jr. Day.

The FBI, along with the Hilliard Division of Police, have yet to identify the culprit of the arson that caused hundreds of thousands of dollars in repairs.

On Jan. 16, Norwich Township Fire Department responded to a 911 call made by Soltan at about 5:30 a.m.

Mahmoud, the first of the two to discover the fire, said although he did hear what he described as a “loud banging noise,” it was not until the smoke detectors went off that he realized the house was on fire.

“I immediately ran into Mohamed’s room and woke him up. That’s when we realized the situation and what’s going on, and we got out of the house,” Mahmoud said. “At first, I figured it was Mohamed moving around. I was laying in bed and all of a sudden the smoke detectors went off.”

Soltan said he was in a deep sleep, and it wasn’t until Mahmoud woke him up that he became aware of his surroundings.

“I’m a very heavy sleeper, and I remember Ahmed coming into my room shouting ‘Soltan, Soltan, there’s a fire’,” Soltansaid.

Both men said they did not actually see the fire, but they were surrounded by thick clouds of smoke as they made their way out of the burning house.

Soltan calls the arson a hate crime, saying there was no way the fire was an accident.

“We don’t use the fireplace; I make sure that (when) I cook, I turn everything off, so there is no way this could’ve been anything else but a hate crime,” Soltan said. “So for someone to purposefully set the house on fire while people are sleeping at five in the morning, there is no other explanation for it that these people are attempting to kill my friend and I.”

Doug Francis, chief of police for the city of Hilliard, said the origins of the fire seemed “suspicious,” due to the lack of burn patterns, the fire’s point of origin and the use of flammable materials.

“Our investigations show that there was in fact an accelerant utilized in the home, and they ruled out any natural cause of the fire, and so with utilizing their tools, they determined it was an arson,” Francis said.

Francis said the FBI and the Norwich Township Fire Department are also involved in the investigation.

Francis contacted the FBI because there have been previous reports of Soltan’s home and car being painted with anti-Arab and anti-Muslim slurs.

“We immediately brought in the FBI simply because if we did determine it was in fact an arson, we also wanted to look at it as a potential hate crime,” Francis said.

Francis also said in order to determine the arson as a hate crime, the individual responsible for the fire must be captured.

Despite media reports saying the motive behind the arson was to target the 24-year-old’s father, Salah Soltan, who is said to be a controversial Muslim scholar, Mohamed Soltan said his father’s opinions and views are “irrelevant.”

“My father’s views are 4,000 miles away,” Mohamed Soltan said.

Eric Manske, fire marshal at Norwich Township Fire Department, said the fire originated at the “back half of the house.”

Francis called the arson a form of “ethnic intimidation,” and said the case is “very unique” because Hilliard has never experienced cases of hate crime in the past.

“Not only has it destroyed a home, but it has provided a lot of fear in the victim and that’s what happens with these ethnic intimidation and hate crime issues,” Francis said.

Jennifer Nimer, legal director for the Ohio chapter of The Council on American-Islamic Relations, said she has called the FBI to report the arson as a hate crime.

Nimer also said there is only one hate crime incident she’s come across in her seven years with CAIR that was as “drastic” as Mahmoud and Mohamed Soltan’s case.

“A couple of years ago a woman that was sprayed in the face with pepper spray, that’s probably the most egregious incident other than this one that I’ve come across since I’ve been working here,” Nimer said.

>> Continue reading: ‘Suspicious’ arson leaves students in cold

EDL Thug: Lee Preston

These violent attacks have been occurring with some frequency, just a few days ago we reported on an EDL supporter who attacked a family with knives and threatened to kill them. Now we have another incident in which an EDL yob attacks a Muslim. Remember the EDL is Horowitz tool Robert Spencer’s favorite UK group, he once termed them, “freedom fighters.”

Jail for racist thug who shouted ‘EDL’ when he attacked a taxi driver

A racist thug who punched a taxi driver and dragged him along a street, has been jailed for 18 months.

Lee Preston, 22, targeted cabbie Mohammed Rashid, leaving him with two black eyes, a bruised face and grazes to his shoulders caused when he was dragged to the ground.

Mr John Hallisey, prosecuting, said the cabbie received a call at 9pm on April 16 to collect five men from Chaddesden. He noticed they were carrying cans of lager and told them these could not be drunk in his vehicle. But after a few minutes, the men started drinking.

“Mr Rashid told them to stop and the response was to start hurling abuse. The defendant was saying ‘we are EDL,’ referring to the English Defence League,” said Mr Hallisey.

Preston, of Walbrook Road, Derby, began to throw beer cans out of the taxi until Mr Rashid closed the windows – a move which angered the passengers. Mr Rashid stopped his cab and told the five to leave. One said: “Get out and we’ll sort you out.”

When they eventually left, they failed to close the rear doors but Mr Rashid waited until he thought they had walked away before getting out of the cab. But he was then grabbed and prevented from getting back into the vehicle before being attacked.

During this, he heard chants of “EDL” and one man said: “I’m going to kill you.” When a second taxi driver stopped to help, he was also assaulted and had his vehicle kicked.

Police were called and Preston was found hiding under a bush.

He admitted affray and racially aggravated assault causing actual bodily harm.

Derby Telegraph, 30 January 2012

Victoria Road in Thornhill Lees

Robert Spencer’s favorite UK anti-Muslim brigade.

EDL supporter attacked family with knives, threatened to kill them

A family barricaded themselves in their home as a neighbour armed with knives threatened to kill them, a court heard. Daniel Smith is said to have shouted racist abuse and English Defence League slogans as he smashed his way into the Thornhill Lees home.

Yesterday, victim Waaqas Ahmed said: “He was like a vicious animal against his prey, lunging. It’s a miracle I didn’t get hurt.”

Leeds Crown Court heard the attack on August 26, 2011, was the culmination of a long-running dispute between Smith’s girlfriend and their neighbours in Victoria Road.

Prosecutor Christopher Tehrani said Smith started a fight in the street with two of his neighbour’s brothers at around 7.30pm. When the fight was broken up, the brothers went into their sister’s house and locked the front door.

Soon after, Smith, 38, arrived armed with two knives and a screwdriver. Jurors saw mobile phone footage of him banging at the door and making threats.

Zubair Yasin said: “Everyone was on their phones calling the police. My little niece was screaming, my sister was crying. We could not imagine how this could be happening in our own home.”

Mr Tehrani said the family wedged an ironing board against the door, but Smith forced his way in. He threatened family members one-by-one with a knife.

Junaid Azad’s arm was cut when he tried to protect his sister. “It was pandemonium,” he said. Mr Azad said he defended himself and his family with a broom handle and exercise bar, and threw a milkshake at Smith.

Smith denies assault by beating and aggravated burglary.

Dewsbury Reporter, 27 January 2012

Sanjiv Bhatt

“Substantial evidence” to prosecute Modi: Sanjiv Bhatt to SIT

(The Hindu)

The suspended Gujarat cadre IPS officer, Sanjiv Bhatt, has strongly urged the head of the Special Investigation Team, R.K. Raghavan, to proceed with the prosecution of Gujarat Chief Minister Narendra Modi as there was “substantial direct evidence as well as overwhelming circumstantial evidence” to establish his alleged complicity in the anti-Muslim pogrom of 2002.

Mr. Bhatt, who shot off yet another letter to Mr. Raghavan on Tuesday (his fourth this month), said he was writing in response to reports that the SIT had sought legal opinion on whether or not to prosecute Mr. Modi for the post-Godhra violence. Drawing on his depositions before the SIT, Mr. Bhatt said he had personally met and alerted Mr. Modi to the deteriorating law and order situation on February 28, 2002, focusing especially on “the imminent carnage at Gulberg Society.”

He said he met Mr. Modi twice that day and “by the time of the second meeting… the carnage at Gulberg Society had begun in full view of the police personnel who were deployed there… The Chief Minister was accordingly briefed about the complete police inaction and complicity. The Chief Minister was also explicitly informed about the imminent threat to the lives of ex-MP Ehsan Jafri and his family members.”

Mr. Bhatt also drew the SIT’s attention to the “numerous Situation Reports and Alert Messages” sent “contemporaneously to the Office of the Chief Minister,” especially concerning the “developing violent situation and imminent carnage at Gulberg Society.”

He said Mr. Modi was also kept informed on telephone about the developments. A fax alert dated February 28, 2002 attached to the letter to Mr. Raghavan said: “As informed telephonically to the Hon’ble CM, ex-MP Ehsan Jafri and his family members residing at Gulmarg Society [Mr. Bhatt told The Hindu the alert had erroneously referred to Gulberg as Gulmarg because that is the first time he had heard of the housing society], Chamanpura, Meghaninagar have been summoned and are being attacked by a Hindu mob in the presence of policebundobust [deployment]. The lives of Ehsan Jafri and other family members are in imminent danger…” The alert was addressed to the Personal Secretary to the Chief Minister and the Personal Secretary to the Minister of State (Home) with copies to the Home Secretary and the Commissioner of Police, Ahmedabad.

Mr. Bhatt said that instead of reacting to the alerts, Mr. Modi instructed him (Mr. Bhatt) to dig out details of “past instances wherein Mr. Jafri had supposedly opened fire on Hindus during earlier communal riots in Ahmedabad.” Mr. Bhatt said that as he emerged from the meeting, he got the information that Mr. Modi was “independently getting real-time information updates on the developments that were taking place at Gulberg Society.”

Mr. Bhatt said the Chief Minister’s conduct made it “unambiguously and absolutely clear” that he was not interested in discharging his “constitutionally mandated legal obligation of directing the police force to act with all firmness in order to protect the life and property of helpless citizens.” Instead, he wanted to collect information that could be used to build a case that the Gulberg carnage was triggered by Mr. Jafri himself.

The police officer argued further that these “acts of commission and omission” by the Chief Minister amounted to “facilitation and abetment of the gruesome carnage at Gulberg Society” and he was liable to be charged for abetment under Sections 109, 112, 115, and 117 of the Indian Penal Code and for concealing design to commit an offence under Sections 118 and 119.

Later, Mr. Bhatt told The Hindu that he had repeatedly made two requests to the SIT: to allow his statement to be recorded before a magistrate under Section 164 of the Cr.PC. and to examine control room inspectors and other officers who were in a position to testify on the developments of February 27 and 28, 2002, and who could, by their statements, support or negate Mr. Bhatt’s claim that he attended a late night meeting held at Mr. Modi’s residence.

The police officer said: “My depositions to the SIT have been under Section 161 of the Cr.PC which does not even require my signature. However, a statement under 164 of the Cr.PC cuts both ways. It is legally binding, but if I have lied, it also allows my prosecution for perjury. Is that too much to ask?”

This man is responsible for a war crime, and it is totally sick that he is getting away with massacring innocent civilians:

Marine gets three months in jail for massacring two dozen civilians

(RT)

More than six years after Staff Sergeant Frank Wuterich led a squad of Marines into two Haditha, Iraq homes and massacred two dozen civilians, the American serviceman in charge has reached a plea deal.

For nine counts of manslaughter, Wuterich will get three months of confinement.

Wuterich is the last of eight men tied to the November 2005 killing that left 24 Iraqis dead, including women, children and the elderly. It was announced on Monday this week that he had reached a plea with prosecutors during his military tribunal and is now expected to be sentenced as early as Tuesday. According to the Associated Press, Wuterich will face a maximum of three months of confinement, the forfeiture of two-thirds of his pay and a rank demotion.

Of the other seven Marines charged with the now-notorious massacre, one was acquitted and six had their charges dismissed. Wuterich’s attorneys have been confident throughout the ordeal that he would see a similar outcome. “He’s going to be glad to have it over because he knows that he’ll be exonerated,” lawyer Neal Puckett told National Public Radio earlier this month.

On November 19, 2005, Wuterich led a squad of men into two separate homes in the town of Haditha and opened fire on everyone in sight. Prosecutors say that a roadside bomb exploded moments before the Marines stormed the home, and were brought into hysterics by seeing a fellow soldier die in the attack. In response, they went on a rampage and for 45 minutes raided the two homes and were never faced with gunfire. Wuterich later said he instructed his team to “shoot first and ask questions later.”

“My Marines responded to the threats they faced in the manner that we all had been trained,” he explained to CBS’ 60 Minutes in 2007. After the roadside bomb was detonated, Wuterich said that, “My responsibility as a squad leader is to make sure that none of the rest of my guys died. And at that point, we were still on the assault.”

Lt. Col. Joseph Kloppel, spokesman of the Camp Pendleton marine Corps base near San Diego, California, told the media on Monday that “By pleading guilty to this charge, Staff Sergeant Wuterich has accepted responsibility for his actions.”

To date Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents ever.

Andrew Adler wrote that he thinks Benjamin Netanyahu should assassinate President Barack Obama because he is not pro-Israel enough. Obama has been one of the most pro-Israel presidents out there and still you got the nutbags on the Right who want him dead.

Imagine if an American Muslim publisher had wrote this? He would be getting water-boarded in Guantanamo as we speak. Also, you could bet that the condemnations from Muslim leaders would barely be recognized, unlike in this case, where the outrage at Adler’s statements from within the Jewish community is highlighted very well.

Uproar after Jewish American newspaper publisher suggests Israel assassinate Barack Obama

(Haaretz)

NEW YORK – The owner and publisher of the Atlanta Jewish Times, Andrew Adler, has suggested that Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu consider ordering a Mossad hit team to assassinate U.S. President Barack Obama so that his successor will defend Israel against Iran.

Adler, who has since apologized for his article, listed three options for Israel to counter Iran’s nuclear weapons in an article published in his newspaper last Friday. The first is to launch a pre-emptive strike against Hamas and Hezbollah, the second is to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities and the third is to “give the go-ahead for U.S.-based Mossad agents to take out a president deemed unfriendly to Israel in order for the current vice president to take his place and forcefully dictate that the United States’ policy includes its helping the Jewish state obliterate its enemies.”

Adler goes on to write: “Yes, you read “three correctly.” Order a hit on a president in order to preserve Israel’s existence. Think about it. If have thought of this Tom-Clancy-type scenario, don’t you think that this almost unfathomable idea has been discussed in Israel’s most inner circles?”

Adler apologized yesterday for the article, saying “I very much regret it; I wish I hadn’t made reference to it at all,” Adler told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. And in an interview with Gawker.com, Adler denied that he was advocating an assassination of Obama.

	The op-ed in Atlanta Jewish Times.

The American Jewish Committee in Atlanta last night issued a harsh condemnation of Adler’s article, saying that his proposals are “shocking beyond belief.”

“While we acknowledge Mr. Adler’s apology, we are flabbergasted that he could ever say such a thing in the first place. How could he even conceive of such a twisted idea?” said Dov Wilker, director of AJC Atlanta. “Mr. Adler surely owes immediate apologies to President Obama, as well as to the State of Israel and his readership, the Atlanta Jewish community.”

It is an understatement to say that violence against women is a serious issue today, as I wrote in a previous article titled, Rampant Sexual Harassment of Women…in the West, “women are mistreated across the globe, across cultures, races, and religions at unfortunately high and gross levels.” This was proven with empirical evidence and scholarly analysis from various studies.

In the intro of the article I reminded readers that Islamphobes,

love to trot out the talking point that Muslims (due to Islam of course) are unique in harassing and oppressing women. According to them, anytime a Muslim man harasses or otherwise assaults a woman it is considered a result of Islam or somehow encouraged by “Islamic behavior.”

This belief, however, is not limited to anti-Muslim bigots but has also crept into the popular imagination and perception of the mainstream.

It is within that context that we review another recent manifestation of this “anti-Muslim talking point” creeping into the mainstream. As many of those who watched the recent South Carolina GOP Presidential Primary debate are aware, Fox News’s Brett Baier asked Gov. Rick Perry about Turkey’s “Islamist oriented” government, and what our relationship should be towards them (Turkey is one of our oldest allies). He set up the question this way,

“Since the Islamist oriented party took over in Turkey the murder rate of women has increased 1400% there…”

My jaw dropped when I heard that, what an astronomical and frankly unbelievable number! The clear implication was that the “increase in violence” was related to the rule of the so-called “Islamist oriented” AKP party. Once again something “Islam” or “Islam” related was being cast as the source and cause of violence.

Imagine the effect this had on those watching the debate? It either reinforced or created the perception that Islam and Muslims are incredibly violent towards women, and that any “Islam” oriented political party will result in a degradation of women’s rights.

Brett Baier’s question was extremely misleading to say the least. It provided no context or evidence linking the AKP party to the “increase” in murders. To say that the AKP is “Islamist oriented” is misleading as well, a more appropriate analogy may have been to the “Christian Democratic” parties in Europe.

I have found conflicting origins on the source of the “1400% increase” statistic. On some news outlets we learn that the figures were released by Women’s Rights lawyer Aydeniz Alisbah Tuskan,

The figures are based on data issued by lawyer Aydeniz Alisbah Tuskan, Co-ordinator of the Istanbul Bar Association Centre for Women’s Rights.

while others claim it was the Ministry of Justice,

According to the data of the Ministry of Justice, the number of women murders increased by factor 14 between 2002 and 2009. While 66 women were killed in 2002, this figure raised to 953 women murders in 2009. The development of the increase was documented as follows: 83 women murders in 2003; 128 in 2004; this figure more than doubled in 2005 with 317 women killings; again a sharp increase with 663 in 2006; a peak of 1011 women murders in 2007 and a small decrease in numbers in 2008 with 806 women murders.

Regardless of the source there seems to be agreement on the numbers. Tuskan in her report also added another startling fact regarding violence towards women,

The data revealed an additional startling dimension of the problem: 85 percent of about 2000 annually registered divorce applications in Istanbul are based on violence.

According to Tuskan the reason for this explosion in the number of divorce applications stemming from violence is, “based on the fact that women do not endure violence as they used to do in the past.”

This however does not address the increase in the number of murders. As Elif Shafak asks in her Guardian article, Turkey Opens it’s Eyes to Domestic Violence,

Are violent incidents against women on the rise in Turkey? Or is it just that we are finally getting a clearer picture of something that has been happening at the heart of Turkish society for some time?

If one were to listen to Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, it has been his government that has started compiling these statistics, whereas before his administration statistics on the issue were not even “calculated,”

While numerous sources argued over the last week that violence against women increased by 1,400 percent in the past seven years, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan said earlier this week that the issue was presented as if violence against women was on the rise. Highlighting that they would not ignore a single act of violence, Erdoğan said: “Before we started keeping track of this, statistics on the issue were not even calculated and no one was aware of these incidents. … I expect a responsible approach from both the opposition and the media over the matter and I say that, with solidarity and responsibility, we can decrease violence to the lowest level.”

I don’t see any reason to doubt Erdoğan’s assertion, however it would be vital to verify.

Either way, the statement from Erdoğan clearly contradicts Brett Baier’s misleading assertion that the so-called “Islamist-oriented” AKP which Erdoğan heads is the cause or root of the violence.

Erdoğan also went on to say,

“Violence against women is remorselessness, ruthlessness and, I say this without hesitation, contemptible”

Not really the evil, misogynist Islamic terrorist that Baier and Rick Perry thought ruled Turkey, aye?

Since the stats came out on the number of murders and incidences of violence directed against women there has been an intense debate on the subject in Turkey. It is no longer a taboo subject locked behind closed doors. There have also been massive grassroots campaigns and new legislation countering the violent trend,

In recent months, both print and visual media in Turkey have been running story after story about domestic violence: ex-husbands who shoot their ex-wives in front of their children, abusive husbands who come back to kill, boyfriends or fiancés who cannot forgive being dumped and seek revenge.

…

As disheartening as the situation is, there is also a growing reaction and a grassroots movement to stop it. Nowadays it is widely acknowledged that violence against women is not only confined to a few uneducated families in remote undeveloped regions. More importantly, until today, it was mainly assumed that such cases were a “family affair”. If a husband was beating his wife, this was their problem. Now this assumption is fully debunked. More and more public figures are coming out to say that domestic violence is everyone’s business and we should, as a society, interfere.

Family and social policies minister Fatma Sahin has announced that abusive husbands will be kept away from their homes with the help of electronic handcuffs. A group of men in the eastern province of Van have organised a significant march to protest at male violence. The group’s speaker proclaimed: “We are ashamed of men who attack women and do so in the name of manhood.”

University students are marching on the streets, women’s organisations are collecting signatures. Through blogs, websites, magazines, fanzines, panels and conferences activists are raising their voices, singers give concerts to honour women who have been victims of killings, writers and poets condemn the violence openly and contest it with their words. And yet, all this is not enough. Unless we change the way we raise our sons and discard our belief that they are superior to our daughters, unless we mothers stop treating our sons as the sultans in the house, nothing will be enough.

Lastly, it should be highlighted that Brett Baier’s misleading question is damaging most of all because it obfuscates the true issue of violence directed at women. It deflects from the root causes (cultural norms, cultural traditions, patriarchy) in exchange for the easy Orientalist scapegoat–Islam.

As Ilisha pointed out in her article on Honor Killing, by focusing on Islam, anti-Muslim Islamophobes are actually doing a disservice to those who are truly challenging violence towards women. Brett Baier’s question had the added effect of dehumanizing a whole nation, and I echo Ilisha’s call that Islamophobes, “give up their vicious campaign against Islam and join us in the struggle to end violence against women from all cultural and religious backgrounds.”

UPDATE I:

For further information on this topic I suggest reading The Journal of Turkish Weekly, which conducted an exclusive interview with Dilek Karal, a specialist at USAK Center for Social Studies regarding violence against women. According to Karal, there is no way to solidly identify whether murders against women have increased or decreased,

How should we read violence against women in Turkey? How accurate is it to say that violence has drastically increased in recent years?

D. Karal: There are a lot of factors which can trigger violence such as sociocultural factors, economic factors, and psychological factors in the environment where people grow up. We need to look at what conditions they become prominent under. The efforts shall target eliminating the roots of these factors. However this is not limited to the motto which is liberally used in Turkey—“education is a must”. Educated people also beat their spouses or commit different kinds of violence against them. Education is just one dimension. The issue should be tackled with integrated multi-agency policies. It is compulsory to operate family and child services efficiently, and formalize different environments where boys and girls grow up to not normalize the violence. All in all, violence as a phenomenon needs to leave our lives altogether.

For instance, Turkish Ministry of Justice 2010 data shows violence against women has increased 1400% during the last seven years. This is a very big number. According to some other data during the first seven months of 2010; 226 women were murdered while 478 women were raped and 722 women sexually abused. There are a lot of similar cases. Over 100,000 women suffered from sexual attacks. Although the numbers are as such, they cannot present us solid data regarding whether the violence has increased or decreased. This is because there are certain problems in evaluating statistical data in Turkey. The fact that they are being presented in a systematic fashion in recent years can be interpreted as the invisible tip of the iceberg slowly surfacing.

In other words, violence against women existed before as well but can now be better measured with in-depth research, which has made the issue more apparent. Without longitudinal studies it is very difficult to understand if the violence has increased or not. However, we need to underline that the existing circumstances in the context of this issue are already too tragic. According to Hacettepe University’s research, 39% of the women in this country (more than a third) are victims of physical violence and 15% are victims of sexual violence. 42% of women say that they have experienced a form of one or the other. The interesting part is the women who experienced violence did not make appeals to official units or to non-governmental organizations. More than half of them shared the situation with just close relatives. Only 8% of the women requested help from official units. This rate is very low. In a society where violence is skyrocketing, this low rate points to ignorance. Women either do not see themselves sufficient socioeconomically or they normalize violence in a sociocultural sense.

UPDATE II:
I also came across figures on murders of women since 2009 in the article, “This is a Civil War…” There is a large discrepancy between 2009 (1,126 murders) and 2010 (217 murders). If one were to be disingenuous regarding the issue, one could claim a massive decrease in murders!:

Here is the number of women murdered by year:

2002 – 66

2003 – 83

2004 – 164

2005 – 317

2006 – 663

2007 – 1,011

2008 – 806

2009 – 1,126

2010 – 217

Two stories coming out of Ohio related to Islamophobia. The first is still being investigated for a possible hate crime, and the second story shows that even within the prison system there is a double standard when it comes to Muslims.

Authorities investigate arson at Islamic scholar’s former home

By  Randy Ludlow

A deliberately set fire at the Hilliard home of the son of a controversial Islamic scholar is being investigated as a possible hate crime.

The arson fire heavily damaged a house at 4907 Britton Farms Dr. once occupied by Salah Soltan, but now the home of his 24-year-old son, Mohamed, authorities said.

The younger Soltan and a friend escaped the fire without injury after it was reported to Norwich Township firefighters at 5:24 a.m. Monday.

Firefighters arrived to find flames coming from the rear of the $290,000 house, which sustained extensive damage, said Fire Chief Dave Long.

The house was painted with anti-Islamic slurs a couple of months ago, authorities said.

The elder Soltan, who now lives abroad, is a native of Egypt and formerly was a professor at Cairo University and president of Islamic American University in suburban Detroit.

Some conservative critics have accused Soltan of being sympathetic to terrorist causes. He has said while he supports Palestinian rights, he condemns terrorism as a violation of Islamic law.

The Ohio chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations yesterday called on the FBI to assist in the investigation of the motive behind the fire.

The FBI is working with Hilliard police in investigating the circumstances of the fire, said Special Agent Harry Trombitas, spokesman for the Columbus field office.

Hilliard police called in state fire marshal investigators yesterday to assist in the probe and determined it was arson.

*******************************************************************

Ohio Muslim inmates settle meal preparation suit

By ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS, AP Legal Affairs Writer

COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — A Muslim death row inmate has settled a lawsuit that accused the Ohio prison system of denying him meals prepared according to Islamic law while providing kosher meals to Jewish prisoners.

Ohio had previously decided to remove all pork products from prison menus in response to the lawsuit, though inmates weren’t seeking a ban on pork.

Details of the settlement announced Wednesday afternoon weren’t released. Neither the inmate’s lawyer or the Department of Rehabilitation and Correction would comment.

The state argued as recently as last month that providing the meals, known as halal, could bankrupt the state’s food service system because thousands of inmates have declared themselves Muslim.

Attorneys for Abdul Awkal (ab-DUHL’ AW’-kuhl) and a second inmate argued that the state was exaggerating the cost.

Copyright © 2012 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.

Talks over Sunbury-on-Thames schoolgirl race attack

(BBC)

The girl was attacked by older white girls who kicked her, pushed her to the ground and drew on her face.

Surrey Police said it seemed the girl had been targeted on 11 January because she was wearing a headscarf.

Spelthorne councillor Colin Strong said the incident was being raised at a meeting with neighbourhood police as an issue that affected the community.

‘On busy road’

Detectives said they were treating the incident in Vicarage Road as a racially-aggravated assault.

Det Con Simon Egan said the girl had been targeted as she waited for a bus.

He said the suspects had kicked the victim in the leg, pulled her rucksack from her, pushed her to the floor, used make-up to draw on her face and racially abused her.

After the incident, the girl picked up her bag and ran away.

Det Con Egan said: “This was an appalling assault where a young victim has been targeted in a completely unprovoked attack.

“It would seem that suspects targeted the victim for no reason other than because she was wearing a headscarf.”

In an appeal for witnesses, he said the assault had taken place at the side of a busy road in daylight and urged any pedestrians or drivers who saw the attack to come forward.

The issue will be discussed at a neighbourhood policing meeting at the Sunbury Youth Centre, in Bryony Way, on Thursday evening.

Benjamin Netanyahu

Do we even have to spell out a “what if…” scenario here?

MJ Rosenberg has a great piece on the assassination campaign against Iranian scientists and its implications.

Assassination in Tehran: An act of war?

by MJ Rosenberg (AlJazeera English)

Washington, DC - I rarely learn anything meaningful from reading The Atlantic‘s Jeffrey Goldberg. In my opinion, his tight relationship with the Israeli government and its lobby here greatly influences his take on both foreign and domestic events. Although he occasionally deviates from the Israeli line, he not only appears very uncomfortable doing so, he tends to correct course fairly rapidly.

Nonetheless, in a Goldberg column about Iran this week, there was one paragraph that was dead-on and which he will have a hard time taking back (should he be so inclined).

Writing about a piece in the current edition of Foreign Affairs that endorses bombing Iran as a neat and cost-free way to address its nuclear programme, Goldberg explains why he thinks the author, Council on Foreign Relations fellow Matthew Kroenig, is wrong. Goldberg says he now believes:

 …that advocates of an attack on Iran today would be exchanging a theoretical nightmare – an Iran with nukes – for an actual nightmare: A potentially out-of-control conventional war raging across the Middle East that could cost the lives of thousands Iranians, Israelis, Gulf Arabs and even American servicemen.

Think about that for a minute. Uber-hawk Jeffrey Goldberg is saying that the threat posed by Iran is a “theoretical nightmare” while a war ostensibly to neutralise that threat would present an “actual nightmare”.

No critic of US policy toward Iran could say it better or would say it differently. And why would we?

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency, Iran has not yet made the decision to go nuclear. Speaking to CBS’ Face the Nation last Sunday, Defence Secretary Leon Panetta made the same point. Iran is not working on the bomb.

We do know, as Goldberg says, that a “potentially out-of-control conventional war raging across the Middle East” could “cost the lives of thousands of Iranians, Israelis, Gulf Arabs and even American servicemen”.

And that makes the decision against war a no-brainer. As Goldberg puts it:

Now that sanctions seem to be biting – in other words, now that Iran’s leaders understand the President’s seriousness on the issue – the Iranians just might be willing to pay more attention to proposals about an alternative course.

That alternative course would be an attempt “to try one more time to reach out to the Iranian leadership in order to avoid a military confrontation over Tehran’s nuclear programme”.

In short, dialogue.

The US, to this day, has never attempted a true dialogue with Tehran. Even under President Obama, all we have done is issue demands about its nuclear programme and offer to meet to discuss precisely how they comply with those demands.

That is not dialogue and it’s not negotiation; it’s an ultimatum.

The one attempt at dialogue (i.e., a discussion that involves give and take by both sides) was initiated by the Iranian government in 2003. That was when it proposed, according to the Washington Post, “a broad dialogue with the United States,” in which “everything was on the table – including full co-operation on nuclear programmes, acceptance of Israel and the termination of Iranian support for Palestinian militant groups”. In exchange, Iran wanted normalisation of relations with the United States.

As is well known, the United States did not respond. In fact, we chastised the Swiss intermediary who delivered the offer for having the temerity to do so.

It was us, not Iran, that spurned a process that would have led to improved relations.

Rather than diplomacy, we’ve pursued a policy of sanctions, which we escalate every time the war lobby demands them.

But sanctions will not prevent Iran from developing nuclear weapon capability, nor will “regime change”, considering that Iranians across the political spectrum support the Iranian nuclear programme. The only effect sanctions have is to please AIPAC, which has made confronting Iran central to its mission. AIPAC writes the sanctions bills, Congress passes them, the president signs them, and the Iranian people (not the regime) bear the brunt of the effects. (The politicians who endorse such measures, however, quite often are well rewarded.)

Goldberg deserves some credit for calling for dialogue. But his seriousness is undermined when he explains that the US offer must be our final one. Although real dialogue is a process, Goldberg’s suggestion is to try to talk just “one more time”. And then: war.

Nonetheless, Goldberg does not seem to be on the same page as the Israeli government or its neoconservative backers here, who reject any dialogue at all.

Any doubt on that score came today when an Iranian civilian nuclear scientist was assassinated in his car on a Tehran street. This was the fifth Iranian scientist killed in such an attack in the last two years.

The attack today certainly looks like an Israeli hit, especially when top Israelis themselves have warned that “unnatural” events were about to befall Iran. At this point, circumstantial evidence is all we can go on.

That, and the answer to the ancient Latin question: Cui bono? Who benefits? (Check out Commentary, the neocon website that iscelebrating the murder.)

In theory, at least, the Netanyahu government benefits. A 32-year-old Iranian nuclear scientist is dead. The opportunities for dialogue or successful multilateral negotiations diminishes. And, if Iran responds in any way, US neocons (including Congress, which will recite its AIPAC talking points) will intensify calls for war.

On the other hand, actions like these against civilians in one country endanger civilians in others. Imagine how the United States or Israel would react if Iran or even Canada started bumping off nuclear scientists (or anyone else) in Washington.

Innocents in Israel, the US, Europe or elsewhere will pay a price for this criminal act of colossal stupidity. And from a security standpoint, such clear acts of aggression can only convince the mullahs that they need to develop a nuclear deterrent.

Here is Jeff Goldberg again in a column subsequent to the one I already cited:

If I were a member of the Iranian regime (and I’m not), I would take this assassination program to mean that the West is entirely uninterested in any form of negotiation (not that I, the regime official, has ever been much interested in dialogue with the West) and that I should double-down and cross the nuclear threshold as fast as humanly possible. Once I do that, I’m North Korea, or Pakistan: An untouchable country.

In short, for those hell-bent on getting the US engaged in a war that even Jeff Goldberg views as a “nightmare” for both the US and Israel, this is a very good day indeed.

Congratulations. Or something like that.

MJ Rosenberg is a Senior Foreign Policy Fellow at Media Matters Action Network. The above article first appeared in Foreign Policy Matters, a part of the Media Matters Action Network.

You can follow MJ on twitter @MJayRosenberg

There are those who look at violence between Muslims and Christians with glee, such as Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller. For them, when Muslims act criminally or hatefully it is more fodder to smear Islam, while dismissing the same logic for Christian attacks on Muslims.

What boggles their mind however is when Muslims and Christians come together and oppose sectarianism and actively seek peace and reconciliation.

This is the case in Nigeria, where many want to transcend sectarian and ethnic violence (h/t: SK).

Here for example are pictures of recent protests in Nigeria showing solidarity and unity between Nigerians and Muslims:

Muslim and Christian Nigerians holding up their respective symbols

An Imam and a Pastor in a show of unity

Christians protesters protecting praying Muslim protesters (something we also saw in Egypt):

Muslims are also protecting Christian centers of worship. This needs to become a movement within Nigeria (h/t: Thomas Miles):

Protest: Muslim Youths Guard Churches

Some youths, mainly Muslim faithful, organised themselves into groups yesterday to guard worshippers in some churches in parts of Minna, Niger State capital, as part of a solidarity gesture against the removal of oil subsidy.

LEADERSHIP observed in Kpakungu area of Minna that some of the youths earlier dispersed by the Police on Friday from protesting at the Polo Field, Minna, had regrouped to protect some of the churches.

It was observed that the youths mounted the gates of the churches as their Christian counterparts were worshipping, and conducted themselves peacefully in order not to cause any apprehensions.

The youths, under the umbrella of Concerned Minna Residents, were last Friday dispersed by the police for lack of identity, with the Commissioner of Police, Ibrahim Mohammed Maishanu,  saying they could not be granted a permit to hold protest.

The leader of the group, Awaal Gata, told LEADERSHIP in an interview at St Mary’s Catholic Church, Kpakungu, said, “we are protecting our fellow Christian brothers and sisters to show the people that our leaders cannot use religion to divide us.

“In this struggle, we are determined to make sure that the removal of fuel subsidy will not stay; we want to send a signal – by coming here to protect our Christians friends and to show that we are one and our Christian brothers will do same on Friday,” he added.

Asked whether they got police permit to do what they were doing, he said: “We are peaceful; we are here to protect ourselves and to emphasize that security is not only in the hands of the police -  security is the responsibility of every citizen.”

These are the forces and the voices who should be promoted. Yet extremists on both sides want to see violence in a push for power.

If Muslims were attacking synagogues or churches at this rate, we would not hear the end of it from right-wing nuts like Spencer and Geller.

Another ‘price tag’ attack in West Bank

Three cars were torched and a mosque wall was spray painted with the sentence “price tag Gal Arye Yosef” in the village of Dir Istiya near Ariel in the early hours of Wednesday morning. The sentence refers to the name of an illegal outpost that was evacuated in the last few days.

The head of the Dir Istiya local council, Nazmi Salaman, told Ynet that at 1:40 am residents noticed a car with three passengers and an Israeli license plate driving at high speed on the village’s main street towards the exit. “Immediately after that the residents noticed that three cars parked cars were on fire near the mosque and one of the fences that surround the mosque had the ‘price tag’ graffiti.”

Salaman added that at first the residents called the Palestinian DCO to report the incident, later Israeli police along with IDF troops arrived due to the fact that Dir Istiya is in Area C. “This is a continuation of attacks against Palestinians and mosques in the West Bank,” he said.

He noted that this was the second time that village property was vandalized. “The first time was in September when the Palestinian Authority launched their UN bid, and then settlers came and unsuccessfully tried to set the mosque on fire.”

Ynetnews, 11 January 2012

A Star of David and anti-Arab slurs were spray-painted at a mosque in Quebec

Harper condemns ‘heinous attacks’ on Gatineau mosque

Prime Minister Stephen Harper took time this week to condemn an attack by vandals at a mosque in Gatineau, Que., across the river from Ottawa.

“Our government strongly condemns these heinous attacks that have been terrorizing the whole community,” the Prime Minister said in a statement in French.

Bernie Farber, former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress, wrote an Op-ed in the Ottawa Citizen about the importance of protecting those who face such despicable acts of racism as the vandalism of the Gatineau Mosque. 

Op-ed: The worst society has to offer

It’s difficult for those who have never experienced unbridled hatred to feel the pain that congregants of a Gatineau Mosque must be feeling today. Over the last two weeks hateful vandals have smashed windows, tried to torch cars in their parking lot and spray-painted anti-Islamic graffiti including of all things “Stars of David,” on the Mosque’s doors and windows.

Five hours west of Gatineau in the sleepy GTA bedroom community of Newmarket, Rita Brown and her partner Seun Oyinsan awoke Christmas morning to find that racist vandals had scratched an ugly epithet on the hood of their car. You see Rita and Seun are a mixedrace couple and it seems that there are at least a bigoted few in Newmarket who have yet to enter the 21st century.

Incredibly this was not the first such racist attack on this couple. In early September they were the victims of two other attacks. Swastikas and that despicable “N”-word were spray painted and scratched on the couple’s garage and van. The van also was defaced with acid and sharp nails embedded into small pieces of wood were placed under the tires. Ominously all this was followed by a warning that Rita and Seun were “not wanted in Newmarket” with a threat of violence.

In Newmarket there has been an outpouring of support. Local community newspapers have editorialized and condemned the actions. Neighbours and friends have rallied to the side of the beleaguered couple. In Gatineau condemnation came from the very top; Prime Minister Stephen Harper spoke out strongly, as has mainstream Jewish leadership all too familiar with such faith-based attacks.

Sadly some used newspaper online comments to remind us that there still remain a small number of bigotry’s fellow travellers.

Regarding the Newmarket attack one poster wrote: “I will bet a loonie or toonie that they did it themselves, they over paid for their house, couldn’t sell it and are using ‘racism’ to gain sympathy. They know some braindead liberal with White Guilt will swoop in and save the day.”

Sadly similar comments were also found online pertaining to the Gatineau incident: “This appears to be an inside job by one of the congregation trying to put the blame on Jews by spray painting the Star of David on the door …”

Thankfully, here in Canada, like most of the western world, we have created anti-hate laws as a fence of protection from the very worst society has to offer. Laws prohibiting the vilest of racist expression make it a criminal offence punishable by up to two years in jail. Acts of violence and property destruction motivated by hatred can add months and even years to a sentence.

Recently there has been a debate raging here in Canada regarding the necessity of antihate laws. There are those who believe that any restriction on speech whatsoever is an infringement on our valued right to free-speech. In 1990 the Supreme Court of Canada upheld our anti-hate laws by a slim margin. While it found that such laws were a limitation on speech, given the serious need to ensure protection of vulnerable minorities such an infringement, it argued, was justified.

I agree. We are a democracy based on justice and law. We understand that human beings are far from perfect, hence we created laws to protect society. Anti-hate laws are a kind of insurance for the future. Such laws help define us as a tolerant society. To be sure we must find the correct balance between freedom of expression and the right to equality that we all share.

Rita Brown, her partner Seun Oyinsan and congregants of the Gatineau Mosque have the right, as do we all, to live in safety, free from hatred and vilification. We have the responsibility as a nation to protect identifiable groups as defined in law from the contemptible few who find hatred their oxygen of life.

As we enter a New Year let us join hands with Rita, Seun and the Islamic community of Gatineau and wish them strength for a better 2012. Let us also hope that those who committed these despicable crimes are apprehended and face the full force of Canada’s anti-hate laws.

Bernie Farber is the former CEO of Canadian Jewish Congress. He writes often on human and civil rights issues.

Islamophobia in China: Violence Breaks Out in Xinjiang

by Chally Kacelnik (Global Comment)

Western China is far from the happiest place in which to be Muslim right now. At the end of December, police killed seven people in Xinjiang, an area traditionally dominated by the Uighur Muslim ethnic group, using some very sketchy justifications. Days later, the government destroyed a mosque in Ningxia that was just set to reopen after refurbishment, prompting a fight in which at least two more people were killed. The details available on these events have been sparse and often in stark contradiction. It might seem as though we have wandered back in time to the Cultural Revolution, but we’re looking at a very twenty-first century brand of Islamophobia, infused with a legacy of ethnic tensions.

What happened in Xinjiang? The state claimed that police officers confronted a group of fifteen men who had kidnapped two people, and the kidnappers were Muslim extremists or terrorists off to “jihadist training” across the border. Government media sources and spokespeople refuse to specify the ethnic origins of the fifteen. One police officer was also killed.

Non-state media sources are reporting that this group was all Uighur, included children, and was attempting to escape Chinese repression. Other members of the group were taken into custody, and their fates are unknown. It’s far from the first time state information on violence involving Muslims has been questionable, as Edward Wong catalogues at the New York Times. There’s a lot that’s disturbing about this story, from implying that killing a group of people for supposedly kidnapping would somehow justify the killings, that they were killed in front of children, and that these people weren’t welcome in China, but weren’t allowed to leave, either.

As for Ningxia? Taoshan villagers raised USD $127 000 to renovate their mosque. After Friday prayers, the day before the opening ceremony, one hundred villagers faced one thousand soldiers and police officers. Three guesses how that went. The two confirmed dead are reported to have been elderly. This was so unexpected and unprecedented in this area that it sends a message of the state cracking down hard. That’s particularly so given that the soldiers and officers weren’t sent out until the mosque was completed, and all the more so following on immediately from the Uighur deaths.

A major difference between what happened here and what happened in Xinjiang is that the Taoshan Muslims, who say they’ve never experienced religious persecution before, are Hui. China’s biggest Muslim ethnicity, the Chinese-speaking Hui have been far better treated and tolerated by the state than any other Muslim group as they have been considered more properly Chinese – or at least they have been since the mid-twentieth century state classification of ethnic groups. (This is not at all to endorse the sentiment in the piece linked at the start of the last paragraph that Hui “are practically indistinguishable from the Han”. One wonders to whom they are practically indistinguishable.)

Read the rest: http://globalcomment.com/2012/islamophobia-in-china-violence-breaks-out-in-xinjang/

Eric Bikubi and Magalie Bamu

The “witchcraft” imbecility rears its ugly head again. If this were a report coming from Saudi Arabia you could be sure that Islam would be blamed.

 Kristy Bamu ‘murdered over witch claim’ in Newham

A 15-year-old boy was tortured and drowned by his sister and her boyfriend because they believed he was a witch, the Old Bailey has heard.

Kristy Bamu, from Paris, was found dead in Newham, east London, on Christmas Day in 2010.

The boy had 101 injuries and died from being beaten with a metal bar and drowning, the court heard.

His sister Magalie Bamu and her boyfriend, Eric Bikubi, both Congolese and aged 28, of Newham, deny murder.

Prosecutors told jurors of acts they described as “depraved”, “wicked” and “cruel”.

Kristy Bamu and his siblings were visiting London from Paris during the Christmas holidays

Mr Bikubi admitted manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility, a plea not accepted by the prosecution.

‘Armoury of weapons’

Kristy and his siblings were visiting the couple for Christmas, but Mr Bikubi had accused the boy and two of his siblings of witchcraft, the court heard.

All three were beaten and other children were forced to join in the attacks. But it was Kristy who became the focus of Mr Bikubi’s attention, the prosecution said.

The teenager was said to be in such pain after days of being hit with an “armoury of weapons” including sticks, pliers, a metal bar, hammer and chisel that he begged to die.

Brian Altman QC, prosecuting, said: “Eventually Bikubi took him into the bathroom, put him in the bath and started to run the water.

“Kristy was just too badly injured and exhausted to resist or to keep his head above the water.

“It was only when he [Mr Bikubi] realised that Kristy was not moving that he stopped what he was doing and pulled him from the water.”

He added: “By then it was too late.”

The youngsters were forced to lie to their parents about what was happening when they phoned home, the jury heard.

Mr Altman said of Kristy’s father: “He had sent his children on holiday, not to a torture chamber.”

When police arrived they found Kristy and his siblings – brother Yves, 22, and and sister Kelly, 20, and other children.

Mr Altman said: “All were standing in the living room, hysterical, terrified and soaking wet.

‘Sorcerers’

“None of them spoke any English.”

Kelly Bamu said Mr Bikubi and Ms Bamu accused Kristy, herself and a third child of “being witches or sorcerers – practising witchcraft” which adversely influenced another child.

“Despite her own siblings’ denials that they were sorcerers, Magalie Bamu joined her boyfriend in repeating these fantastic claims and participating in the assaults,” Mr Altman said.

The three were beaten and refused food, drink and sleep and eventually, to stop the torture, they admitted being sorcerers, the jury was told.

Mr Altman said Mr Bikubi’s admission of manslaughter was rejected by the prosecution, which argues the couple carried out “the very deliberate murder” of Kristy.

‘Feral and evil’

Ms Bamu also denies two charges of causing actual bodily harm to her other siblings.

The defendants are originally from the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

The jury heard that witchcraft or sorcery – called kindoki – is practised in Congolese Christian churches.

Mr Altman said that taken out of the church’s control “it may take on a feral and indeed evil character, as we suggest it did here”.

The court heard that in 2008 Mr Bikubi had accused a family friend of being involved in witchcraft and had forced her to cut her hair short to purge herself.

The trial continues.

Police say the Outaouais Islamic Centre has been the target of vandalism four times in the last six months. (CBC)

Gatineau mosque again hit by vandals

WARNING: This article contains images with offensive language

A mosque in Gatineau, Que., that has been a target of vandalism was spray-painted with graffiti overnight.

Workers at the Outaouais Islamic Centre awoke Thursday to discover swear words and derogatory references to Arabs and Allah spray-painted in white.

The vandals painted messages on the front doors, across the building’s side and on two other entrances to the building.

The mosque had earlier been vandalized Monday morning when windows were damaged and someone attempted to set fire to two cars in the parking lot.

4th incident in 6 months

Gatineau police were investigating a number of incidents of vandalism at the mosque over the last few months. Police said it was the fourth incident in the last six months.

Mosque secretary general Amadou Thiam said the vandalism was a “provocation” and called on members of the mosque to remain calm.

Thiam urged police to do their utmost to find the perpetrators. The mosque has turned over security video footage to police.

Thiam also urged Gatineau city officials to show their support for the mosque.

Graffiti was spray-painted on the front door and two back doors of the mosque. (CBC)

Muslim, Jewish groups condemn attack

The Canadian Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CAN) condemned the vandalism Thursday and said authorities should investigate the incident as a hate crime.

“The repeated vandalism, within days of the previous attack, of this specific mosque is deeply troubling. Attacks on all our nation’s houses of worship must be condemned by all Canadians and should be investigated and prosecuted using all available law enforcement resources,” said Ihsaan Gardee, CAIR-CAN executive director.

Jewish Stars of David were also spray painted on the walls.

Shimon Fogel, CEO of the Centre for Israel and Jewish Affairs, also condemned the attacks.

“We unequivocally condemn all acts of vandalism committed against any place of worship,” Fogel said in a statement.

National Muslim and Jewish groups have condemned the vandalism. (CBC)

Mosque member says he isn’t taking attack personally

The mosque, located off Saint Joseph Boulevard just north of St. Jean-Bosco Park, draws about 500 people for Friday prayers and serves a community estimated at close to 5,000 people.

Mosque member Walid Ali said he didn’t think the incident was a hate crime.

“Maybe someone was drunk or something, I don’t think he deeply means it,” said Ali.

“I’ve been here more than three years and this has never happened,” he said.

Original post: Gatineau mosque again hit by vandals

Ray Lazier Lengend

Another update to the story. The man did want to kill as many Muslims and Arabs as possible.

Alleged Queens firebomber wanted to massacre Muslims in mosque, prosecutors say

By Rocco Parascandola, Matt Mcnulty, Kerry Burke AND Kevin Deutsch

(NYDailyNews)
THE UNHINGED Queens pyromaniac who unleashed a scary New Year’s Day firebombing spree had planned to take out “as many Muslims and Arabs as possible” by lobbing Molotov cocktails at worshipers inside a mosque, prosecutors said.

Ray Lazier Lengend, 40, allegedly told cops he had planned to inflict “as much damage as possible” by hurling all five of his firebombs from the balcony of Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center onto the crowd below.

The hateful bomb-hurler, who is under psychiatric observation at Bellevue Hospital center, flat-out told detectives he did not like Muslims or Arabs, prosecutors said.

“This is a message to anyone who does this in the future,” said Imam Maan Al-Sahlani, leader of Imam Al-Khoei Islamic Center, where Lengend planned to inflict major casualties. “It’s a good message that justice will come for you, the police will come for you.”

The imam applauded prosecutors’ use of the hate crime statute and hoped it would deter further anti-Muslim crimes.

“Obviously there is something wrong with him,” Al-Sahlani said.
Lengend, an unemployed truck driver from Queens Village, will face a judge via video arraignment Thursday from his bed at Bellevue.

He faces 18 charges including arson as a hate crime and weapon possession for throwing Starbucks Frappuccino bottles filled with gasoline at four occupied Jamaica buildings — two of them places of worship.

Lengend’s brother-in-law, Bejai Rai, 73, said his Elmont, L.I., house was also firebombed because he evicted Lengend for not paying rent.

“He had a vendetta against us,” Rai told the Daily News. “He tried to kill my wife, my two sons and my sister. I’m glad they got him otherwise he’d be back to firebomb us again.”

Rai said his family could not sleep until Lengend was caught.

“This is the first night we’ve been able to rest since the bombing.”
Lengend carried out his spree in a silver Buick Regal, which had been stolen from a rental car business at Kennedy Airport.

He first drove to to a gas station off the Van Wyck Expressway at Hillside Ave. and bought five glass Frappuccino bottles, before heading to another gas station and filling them with fuel.

His first target was Hillside Deli on 179th St., where Lengend threw a flaming glass bottle that ignited upon hitting the floor.

He burned four other targets, including the mosque and a Hindu place of worship on 170th St., but did not inflict the massive damage he hoped for, prosecutors said.

Lengend confessed to three earlier attacks as well, sources said. He claimed ongoing beefs were his motive for all eight crimes.

With Thomas Zambito
kdeutsch@nydailynews.com

Read more: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/alleged-queens-firebomber-wanted-massacre-muslims-mosque-prosecutors-article-1.1001193#ixzz1ibr8d9Z8

Mosque Attack

The Newcastle mosque in Australia has been attacked several times. “Srebrenica,” a reference to the slaughter of thousands of Muslims during the genocide against Bosnian Muslims was spray painted on the mosque just a month ago.

Now, a few thugs forced worshippers into locking themselves in the mosque so as to avoid confrontation and violence with them. I don’t believe there is a correlation between Spencer’s recent visit to Australia and this attack on the mosque, however, such attacks are the Islamophobes’ wet dream.

Many Islamophobes love violence against Muslims. Violent rhetoric against Muslims is what sites like BareNakedIslam regularly indulge in, such sites are defended by Robert Spencer and Pamela Geller, whose own sites have approved of violence and intimidation directed at Muslims.

(Visit the original site for video of the attack):

Wallsend mosque attack: worshippers fear escalating violence

BY JANEK SPEIGHT (The Herald)

AN attack on a Newcastle mosque, trapping seven worshippers inside, has been caught on security camera.The attack happened only minutes after a group of children had finished a scripture class and is the latest in a series of incidents that have left the city’s Muslim community feeling ‘‘vulnerable and scared’’.In the security footage, which has been provided to police, two tattooed men are seen to approach the Wallsend mosque about 9.30pm on Monday.One man, with a large tattoo of a cross on his neck, kicks through the fence gate and hurls an object at the mosque’s front door.

Then he runs and smashes a flying kick into the door.

More objects are thrown at the building and one of the men is seen to shout what appears to be abuse.

Newcastle Muslim Association vice-president Diana Rah said seven worshippers were inside the mosque at the time and managed to lock the main entrance on the side of the building.

The two men tried to kick through this entrance but were unsuccessful, she said.

Ms Rah said a group of children left the mosque after an evening scripture class only minutes before the men arrived.

Newcastle police Chief Inspector Dean Olsen said the attack was being investigated. He called for anyone with information to come forward.

Click below to see images taken from the CCTV footage.

Ms Rah said incidents against the mosque had increased in the past three months.

Garbage had been thrown across the mosque’s front lawn and the fence had been broken down on another occasion.

In April, an envelope containing photographs of three slaughtered pigs was left at the mosque’s doorstep. The pigs had been half-buried on land where a new mosque was to be built.

Last month the word ‘‘Srebrenica’’ was sprayed in graffiti across a neighbour’s car parked outside the mosque.

Srebrenica is the name of the town where 8000 Muslims were massacred in July 1995 during the Bosnian war.

The association had also received abusive emails and threats.

Ms Rah said that in the past 20 years there had been only a handful of isolated incidents directed at the Wallsend mosque.

But since the association had made plans to establish its mosque at Elermore Vale, the incidents had increased and were ‘‘starting to become a pattern’’.

Ms Rah said the Newcastle Muslim Association had ‘‘a lot of faith in the wider Newcastle community’’ and knew the majority were not responsible for the ‘‘unacceptable’’ acts.

The association had installed a high-tech security camera system.

Shopper hit by stun gun possibly a hate crime victim

By HOWARD ALTMAN

TAMPA –

A stun gun apparently was used on a woman at a New Tampa Walmart on New Year’s Day, and police are investigating whether she was the victim of a hate crime.

The victim, a Muslim who was wearing a traditional ethnic dress known as a salwar, told investigators she was hit by a stun gun fired by another shopper shortly before 9 p.m. Sunday at the store at 19910 Bruce B. Downs Blvd., Tampa police spokeswoman Laura McElroy said.

A video of the incident does not show the victim being hit by the stun gun, said McElroy. But she did have marks “consistent” with being hit by a stun gun, McElroy said.

“She has two marks on her back,” McElroy said. “We have no reason to doubt what she is saying.”

The video shows the suspect and another woman following the victim through the store as if she were being targeted, McElroy said. The video does not show an exchange between the women, the stun gun incident or the victim being hit, but that may have occurred off-camera, said McElroy.

Before police can determine if the incident rises to the level of a hate crime, they must first find the suspect, described as a heavy-set white female, about 5 feet, 6 inches tall and between ages 30 and 49, said McElroy.

Investigators, she said, will have to determine if the offense “was based on prejudice against victim’s race, religion, ethnicity or sexual orientation.”

McElroy said the victim’s daughters raised the issue of whether she was being targeted because of her religion.

Another possibility, said McElroy, is that the victim may have been targeted because of the big purse she had in her shopping cart.

Efforts to reach the victim by phone were not immediately successful.

Hassan Shibly, spokesman for the Council on American Islamic Relations, said, “If indeed this was a hate crime it is a clear sign that anti-Muslim rhetoric is not cost free and may unfortunately lead to senseless attacks against law abiding American Muslims.”

Shibly said via email that regardless of the motive, he hopes the suspect is caught.

The man had a personal vendetta against his targets, but also confessed anti-Muslim sentiments. (Thanks for all the hat tips)

Suspect confesses in Queens, L.I. firebomb attacks: cops 

A Queens man confessed Tuesday to a firebombings spree on New Year’s Day — claiming a personal vendetta drove him to tossing the Molotov cocktails, police said.

The firebug — identified by sources as Raylazir Legend, 40 — told detectives that each of the five attacks in Queens and Elmont, L.I. — including an attempt to torch a Jamaica mosque — stemmed from ongoing beefs.

“The suspect made statements incriminating himself in each of the five firebombings, citing a personal grievance or dispute in each instance,” said Paul Browne, top spokesman for the NYPD.

Legend, an unemployed towtruck driver, was still waiting to be charged Tuesday, but a law enforcement official said he faces arson and hate-crime charges because of “broad anti-Muslim statements” he made during his confession.

Legend was cuffed about 8 a.m. Tuesday, after Detectives Richard Johnson and Charles LoPresti of the 103rd Precinct saw him get into a stolen car linked to the first attack: a Hillside Ave. bodega.

Legend was caught by workers at the bodega on Dec. 27 trying to steal a carton of milk and a Starbucks Frappuccino.

There is no indication that Arrington and his accomplice are Muslim, their motivations are still unclear. Already the hatemongerers at FreeRepublic are casting Arrington as a Muslim youth.

Police detain person of interest in Los Angeles arson attack

(Reuters) – A “person of interest” was being questioned in connection with as many as 55 arson fires, most started in cars, in a spree that began on Thursday, Los Angeles Fire Department said on Monday.

Early Monday, several fires broke out in cars and structures in Hollywood and the surrounding areas, said an alert posted on the fire department’s website.

An unidentified person of interest was detained hours after Los Angeles police released video of a man who they said witnesses and security video footage placed at several locations where the fires started.

“It is too early to speculate if this person is responsible for the spree of arson fires,” the LAFD alert said.

The security camera video distributed by police at a news conference showed a white male in his late twenties to early thirties, dressed in black, with receding hair held in a ponytail.

Since the attacks began, a total of 55 “fires of concern” broke out, including 45 in the Los Angeles area, nine in West Hollywood and one in Burbank, the fire department said on its website.

Most of the fires started in cars and some spread to carports and homes.

Police spokesman Cleon Joseph urged residents to be on the lookout for anyone acting suspiciously.

“Keep your lights on, be diligent, watch your surroundings. If you see anything, call 911,” Joseph said.

Los Angeles Police Department Commander Andrew Smith said dozens of detectives had worked through the night to gather evidence and sift through clues.

“We’ve reassigned dozens of detectives,” Smith said. “Those detectives are now working together around the clock… We’ve got hundreds of clues, dozens of witnesses, and countless pieces of evidence,” he added.

So far, no one has been seriously hurt, but a firefighter was treated and released for injuries suffered at the site of one blaze over the weekend and another person suffered minor injuries on New Year’s Eve.

One of the fires damaged a house in the Hollywood Hills, where The Doors lead singer Jim Morrison was inspired to write the 1968 song “Love Street” about his girlfriend Pam Courson and what was then a hippie hangout.

Fire chiefs declined to say how the blazes were started.

(Additional reporting by Barbara Goldberg; Editing by Greg McCune)

Corrects attribution in paragraph four to LAFD.

All the facts on this are not clear yet, but it is being reported as a bias crime in many reports. If this holds true then it will be another manifestation of the all too real threat to Muslim communities from radical hatemongers.

Four Attacks in Queens With Homemade Firebombs

By ELIZABETH A. HARRIS (NYTimes)

A wave of arson attacks spread across eastern Queens on Sunday night, and the police said the firebombings were being investigated as bias crimes — with Muslims as the targets.

No one was hurt in the four attacks, in which homemade firebombs were apparently used. In three of the four attacks, the police said, Molotov cocktails were made with Starbucks bottles.

The first attack occurred just before 8 p.m. at a bodega at 179-40 Hillside Avenue.

Ten minutes later, another crude firebomb was thrown, this time at a private home at 146-62 107th Avenue, and the house caught fire.

Half an hour after that, an Islamic center at 89-89 Van Wyck Expressway was the target. The last attack occurred at a house at 88-20 170th Street, the police said.

The Islamic center, the Imam Al-Khoei Foundation, houses one of the most prominent Shiite mosques in New York. According to its Web site it offers funeral services, counseling and free SAT classes. It lists branches in several cities, including Montreal and Islamabad, Pakistan. Calls to the foundation were not returned Sunday night.

The firebomb, made with a glass Starbucks bottle, was thrown at the door of the center, possibly from a van as it drove it by, the police said. The door was blackened, but the building did not catch fire.

A similar weapon was found at the bodega, the site of the first attack, according to the police. The bomb might have been thrown from inside the store, because the counter sustained some damage, the police said.

It was the second attack, on 107th Avenue, police and fire officials said, that caused the most damage.

Shortly after 8 p.m., someone called 911, saying that a Molotov cocktail had been thrown at their home. The house caught fire, and it took more than 60 firefighters about 40 minutes to bring it under control.

In the fourth attack, two bottles were thrown at the house on 170th Street. A spokesman for the Fire Department said that the person who called 911 said they saw a vehicle drive by as the bottles were hurled toward their home. But the flames quickly fizzled.

Joshua Scaggs

A reader of BareNakedIslam or JihadWatch perhaps?

(Hat tip: JD)

CAIR believes Champaign stabbing was hate crime

(Muslim News)

The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) called for federal civil rights charges to be filed against a man seeking to “save his country” by allegedly stabbing a faculty member of the University of Illinois College of Law who he thought was Middle Eastern.

The non-Muslim victim of Sri Lankan origin was stabbed December 7 on the second floor of the Illinois Terminal Building in Champaign, Ill. The victim was singled out due to his perceived ethnicity and the attacker allegedly committed the offense to, in his words, save his country. The victim underwent surgery for a stab wound to his neck.

His alleged attacker, 23-year-old Joshua Scaggs, was charged with attempted murder and a hate crime.

We thank local law enforcement authorities for their swift and professional actions in this case and urge the US Department of Justice to consider what federal civil rights charges could be filed in the case, said a CAIR spokesman.

Adding, Our society must begin to address the rising level of anti-Muslim sentiment that can lead to such disturbing incidents.

CAIR contacted the FBI and local police to seek the investigation of a possible bias motive for the stabbing of a Sikh man at Fresno Yosemite International Airport in California.

Dutch mosques defaced 117 times

Between 2005 and 2010 mosques in the Netherlands were defaced 117 times, according to research by social researcher Ineke van der Valk. The acts of vandalism were motivated by a hatred of Islam, the researcher is quoted as saying on VPRO radio programme Argos.

In 43 cases, the mosques were daubed with offensive symbols or slogans. In 37 instances, the mosques sustained material damage. In 99 of the incidents the police failed to find any of the culprits. In the United States there were 42 similar incidents during the same period. Most of the vandalised mosques in the Netherlands are located outside the major cities.

There are some 450 mosques in The Netherlands, which has a population of more than 16.5 million. Some five percent of the population is believed to be Muslim, some 44 percent Christian and over 41 percent agnostic. As a percentage of the population, the Netherlands has Europe’s second-largest Muslim community, inferior only to France, which has a Muslim community of more than nine percent.

(cl)

© Radio Netherlands Worldwide

Robert "police blotter" Spencer Inventing "Islamic" Crimes

Inventing “Islamic” crimes has been one part of the hatemongers consistent methodology of smearing Islam and Muslims.

For instance, in the past month Spencer and Geller falsely accused Islam and Muslims as the perpetrators of invented Jihad attacks at least twice to our count:

*Recently Spencer tried to tie a Belgian shooter to Islam: Belgium, Islam and the Boomerang of Loon Idiocy

*Pamela Geller Turns Hollywood Shooting Tragedy into Islamophobic Hate-Fest

And now we can add a third:

Anti-Muslim Bloggers Invent Another ‘Honor Killing’

by Charles Johnson (LGF)

The so-called “counter-jihad” bloggers are covering themselves in glory again, slobbering and ranting and trying to take advantage of a terrible crime to advance their un-American agenda.

Same bigotry, different day.

This time they’ve seized on a story about a man in Texas who killed six members of his own family on Christmas morning while dressed in a Santa suit, then committed suicide. The man’s wife had left him, his home had been foreclosed upon, his business was failing, and he had filed for bankruptcy; with anyone else, these things would be considered strong motives for committing this massacre.

But because the man’s name was Aziz Yazdanpanah, and he was apparently unhappy about who his daughter was dating, these bloggers have decided it had to be an “Islamic honor killing.” And now they’re letting their bigotry run free again.

Hate group leaders Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer are out in front, as always.

Geller: ISLAMIC HONOR KILLING IN TEXAS: “SANTA KILLER” WAS MUSLIM WHO HATED DAUGHTER DATING A NON-MUSLIM!!!!! – Atlas Shrugs

The mainstream media has reported this as the “Santa killer.” No mention that it was an Islamic honor killing until this Dallas Morning News story. Our daughters and granddaughters are going to be the ones who will suffer because of for this obfuscation and excusal of barbarism.

This has been going on for years. When Amina and Sarah Said were brutally murdered by their father, also in Texas, on New Year’s Day 2008 for the same reason — having non-Muslim boyfriends — I thought, this is it. This is going to break the dam wide open. America would not, could not possibly, ignore this horror caused by and sanctioned by Islamic beliefs, assumptions, and attitudes.

And yet America continues to ignore this horror. And more and more people are victimized every day.

Spencer: Islamic honor killing in Texas: ‘Santa’ who murdered family on Christmas morning was Muslim who didn’t like his daughter dating a non-Muslim – Jihad Watch

Again and again we have seen honor killings in which fathers kill daughters who are dating non-Muslims or have supposedly besmirched the family honor by some sexual indiscretion. Lt. Todd Dearing says that motive isn’t important — which is generally only the case when Islam is involved.

To recap: Yazdanpanah killed his family members while they were all celebrating Christmas and then committed suicide. He was wearing a Santa suit. His life was falling apart in just about every possible way.

But to these vile bigots, it had to be an “honor killing” — for no other reason than the man’s nominal Muslim faith. It’s almost unbelievably disgusting.

And the posts by these bloggers are just the tip of the iceberg; their followers have no restraint whatsoever. Some of the comments posted at “counter-jihad” blogs about this tragedy:

Satan and muzzies are two of a kind…..

[…]

savages

[…]

We can’t offend muslims with Christmas but a muslim can kill his whole family on Christmas day and the media won’t even go near the fact they were all muslims.
We only find out on the crazy right-wing internet.

Once again we have the media filtering out information they don’t think we need to know.

[…]

2 miles from my house, a stinkin’ Muslim is committing honor killings. Islam, the Koran, and all true followers need to burn.

[…]

Islam. Satan’s church.

[…]

We live in the same neck of the woods. My Granny lived there for a year, was a nice complex, but over the last few years has had more and more muzzies moving into it. The entire metroplex has had a huge upspike in moozlim population. But still the Media and the masses are lulled to sleep with the peaceful moozlim rhetoric.

[…]

These men who are Muslim and believe in this should never have children or be castrated.

[…]

Americans may wish to consider how safe it is to have Muslims in their neighborhoods, but that would make us bigots wouldn’t it.

Islam is a deathcult

[…]

Here’s an example of the double bladed sword of ” PC “. This piece of camel crap doesn’t deserve to be buried in the ground!!!! They should kill a pig and bury it with him!!!!

[…]

I AM surprised that this being a raghead, he didn’t rape his daughters first.

[…]

As sad as this event is it nonetheless points out the truth that a muslime can not be anything but a brutal, murdering, control freaking, inbred son of a muslime sex slave who-e.
No matter their public persona their heart and mind is convuluted and warped to commit atrocities.

[…]

Go figure, a sheethead dressed as santa kills everyone, and then himself.

[…]

Perhaps Mr. Yazdanpanah was suffering from the terrible disease known as “SUDDEN JIHAD SYNDROME” though I doubt an autopsy will be be of any help. If he was a faithful muslim the demons probably summoned him to butcher his family for rebelling against Allah.

[…]

What a waste of life. Islam = hate and murder. Islam offers NOTHING to anyone, anywhere, anytime. Absolutely nothing.

[…]

The satanic cult of death REQUIRES BLOOD SACRIFICE for any number of offenses: being non-muslim, apostasy, misbehavior, disobedience, insulting the pedophile prophet of death, drawing the pedophile prophet of death, dating, etc.

These are only pious demon worshipers practicing their demonic cult, fully protected, by an army of feds and prosecutors all of whom report to comrade holder, as a *religion*.

There are thousands of similar comments about this story, all over the right wing blogs. These people aren’t even trying to pretend they’re not hateful bigots any more — they’ve embraced their sickness.

We at Loonwatch unequivocally condemn the Christmas Day bombings in Nigeria. We condemn all acts of terrorism and the killing of innocent civilians, no matter who is responsible.

Today whenever Muslims anywhere commit an act of violence, it seems that all Muslims are indicted and considered guilty until proven innocent. If each and every act is not expressly condemned, the assumption is that Muslims are giving their tacit approval.

When Muslims do expressly condemn terrorism, either carte blanche or in response to a specific incident, they are still asked by many, “Why don’t you condemn terrorism?” Muslim voices condemning terrorism seem to be drowned out in the major media by more sensational headlines.

Terrorism committed by Muslims is not only morally reprehensible and horrifying, but a disaster for the entire Muslim community. In the current climate, Muslims who mourn the innocent victims of violence must also face a backlash.

When non-Muslims commit acts of violence, it seems a different set of standards is applied. In the case of Nigeria, sectarian violence cuts both ways. Last August, Christian youth in Nigeria attacked and killed innocent Muslims gathering to celebrate Ramadan. The incident received relatively light media coverage, and there were few demands for Christians worldwide voice their condemnation.

Portraying only one side of a conflict is misleading and counterproductive. All Nigerians, and all people everywhere, deserve to live in peace and security, and to celebrate their holidays without the threat of violence.

***************************************************************

Christmas Day Bombings

(This Day Live)

The umbrella Islamic body for Muslims in the North, the Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI), yesterday condemned the bombing of St. Theresa’s Catholic Church, Madalla, Niger State and another church in Jos, Plateau State, saying it is not in a religious war against Christians. Both incidents claimed the lives of over 40 persons.

But the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) in the 19 Northern states and FCT warned yesterday that the attacks may spark a religious war.

Secretary General of JNI, Dr. Khalid Abubakar Aliyu, while reacting to the bombings in a telephone interview with THISDAY, said Islam, as a religion, respects human lives and would do everything to preserve it.

“Human lives must be preserved and protected by all including security agencies; it is rather unfortunate that Nigerians are losing their lives to bomb blasts,” Aliyu said.

The Islamic body also tasked security agencies to fish out the perpetrators and bring them to justice, stressing that it is only when the culprits are fished out and punitive measures taken against them that it would serve as deterrent to others planning to carry out such nefarious activities.

In his reaction, the Sultan of Sokoto, Alhaji Sa’ad Abubakar III, who joined other Muslims in voicing condemnation against Boko Haram, said taking of human lives in the name of religion was strange in Islam.

The sultan, at the formal opening of Islamic Vacation Course (IVC) organised by Muslim Students’ Society of Nigeria (MSSN), B-Zone, said dispute could only be resolved through dialogue and not by violence or bloodbath.

He said Islam abhorred violence and called for unity among Muslims to address the challenges facing them.

“Violence is not part of the tenets of Islam and would never be allowed to tarnish the image of the religion,” the sultan said.

Chastising Boko Haram, another Islamic group, Muslim Public Affairs Centre (MPAC), said “cold blooded murder of innocent worshippers” was “horrifying and sickening.”

In a statement by its Director of Media and Communications, Disu Kamor, MPAC described the perpetrators of the dastardly act as “criminal and devilish hate cultists bent on imposing their evil ideology on us”.

“On this occasion and in similar incidents, Nigerian Muslims and Muslims everywhere stand shoulder-to-shoulder with our Christian brothers and sisters and we are determined to continue to work together to remove the mischief of those seeking to destroy peaceful co-existence and harmony. We feel the sorrow and share the grief of all that were affected by this tragedy – this evil attack is a crime committed against mankind,” MPAC added.

Also, the Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC) said it is “shocked and petrified by this development”.
MURIC in a statement by Dr. Ishaq Akintola disagreed with Boko Haram, which had said it carried out the attack to avenge the killing of Muslims during the last Sallah.

He said: “The attackers cannot claim that they were revenging the attack on Muslims in Jos during the last Eid el-Fitr on August 30, 2011 which left many Muslims dead because Christians celebrating Christmas earlier on December 25, 2010 were the first to be killed in bomb explosions.

“Nothing in the scriptures of Islam justifies this kind of attack. We therefore assert clearly, unequivocally and unambiguously that Boko Haram is not fighting for Nigerian Muslims.”

Similarly, the Chairman of the Sokoto State chapter of Izalat Bida’a Waikamtul Sunnah (JIBWIS), Sheikh Abubakar Usman Mabera, said the killing of innocent citizens, under any guise, is a case of murder and in contrast to Islamic teachings.

“Whoever takes the life of a fellow human being has committed evil irrespective of his religion – whether Christian or Muslim – and will pay for his sins.  So, this is an act of terrorism which is against Islamic teachings,” he said.

Mabera, who frowned on the act, said: “Almighty Allah forbids the killing of a fellow human being. Whoever thinks that he is carrying out Jihad by destroying places of worship and killing innocent citizens is ignorant of Islam because the religion forbids that.”

The Muslim Congress frowned on the Madalla blast and said the continued killing of innocent Nigerians by the activities of Boko Haram is uncalled for and should be condemned by all Nigerians.

The Amir of the Congress, Mallam Abdulraheem Lukman, said in a statement that:

“The endemic killings can best be described as inhuman, wicked, condemnable and totally unacceptable in civilised societies….

The action is even more repulsive during the periods of celebrations and this is highly condemnable.”

CAN in the 19 Northern states and Abuja has warned that attacks on churches by Boko Haram are capable of igniting a religious war in the country.

But labour unions in the country have urged Christians not to retaliate the Christmas attacks on churches in Niger, Plateau and Yobe States which left scores of people dead.

The pan-Northern Nigeria group, Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), also condemned the attacks yesterday, warning that they serve no good in the prevailing circumstances.

At a news conference in Kaduna yesterday, Secretary-General of Northern CAN, Elder Saidu Dogo, said the bombing of churches and killing of Christians was an invitation to religious war in Nigeria.
Dogo urged Islamic leaders to call the perpetrators of the dastardly act to order to avert confrontation, saying that no group should push the other to the wall to fan the ember of religious war.

He said if the authorities fail to track down those behind the killings of innocent Nigerians, “we shall henceforth in the midst of these provocations and wanton destruction of innocent lives and property be compelled to make our own efforts and arrangements to protect the lives of innocent Christians and peace-loving citizens of this country”.

While calling on Christians to be law abiding, he expressed the need for them to defend themselves whenever the need arises.
He called on the Muslim Umma and Ulamas in Nigeria “to live up to their responsibilities by calling to order, all Islamic sects in the country to have respect for human lives and stop these killings. For we fear that the situation may degenerate to a religious war and Nigeria may not be able to survive as one. Once again, enough is enough”.

“We appreciate the efforts of the Federal Government and its security agents in trying to curtail these attacks. However, we are piqued that the efforts of government are being undermined by the sponsors of the Islamic fundamentalists in the North.

“We are particularly disturbed that the perpetrators of these dastardly acts and their sponsors are well known to government and no serious or decisive actions have been taken to stem their nefarious activities.

“The Federal and state  Governments of Niger, Plateau, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna, Borno, Yobe, Adamawa and such other areas that these wanton destruction of lives and property have been or are being perpetrated, should arrest and bring to book all the perpetrators and their sponsors.

“Government at all levels should provide 24 hours security services to all churches, Christian religious institutions and organisations in the county, especially in the North.

“We are also calling on the federal and state governments to urgently stem these massacres of Christians and the destruction of their churches and property in the North. The attacks so far have proved that some Islamic fundamentalists want to exterminate Christianity in the Northern states. We are assuring all Christians that the church will not allow that to happen,” Dogo said.

The ACF, on its part, condemned the frequent explosions, saying the Christmas attacks were capable of diverting attention to religious crises that would serve no one good.

The forum, in a statement emailed to THISDAY by its National Publicity Secretary, Mr. Anthony Sani, urged Boko Haram to embrace dialogue in pursuit of the resolution of whatever grievances it had with the authorities, stressing that the bombings and killing of innocent Nigerians and destruction of property were misguided.

“The spate of bomb blasts on Christmas day, which were directed at places of worship across some parts of the North, is a serious source of concern to Arewa Consultative Forum, to Northern Leaders and to the good people of the North, indeed, to patriotic Nigerians.

“Source of concern not because past bombings were less serious but because those on the Christmas day are capable of diverting attention to religious crises that would serve no one, including the perpetrators, any good now and for a long time to come.
“Consequently, ACF calls on the perpetrators of violence to stop forthwith and avail themselves to due process of addressing perceived grievances that are in place.

“ACF also wishes to say killing of innocent Nigerians is not correct and offends God and many people’s sense of justice. This is because a good number of those who go to places of worship are not lettered in either Western or Islamic education.
“More so that Western education is not necessarily the cause of the collapse of national ideals, moral values and cause of indiscipline in the polity, since there are examples of Muslim countries and Christian countries with western education that are morally sound. Turkey belongs to the former and Nordic country of Norway belongs to the later.

“Nigerians of all faiths must therefore come together and confront corruption in all ramifications by inspiring cultural renaissance for collective good. Corruption in Nigeria is not an exclusive preserve of Western education but a national malaise that should be confronted by all, and not government alone. Enough of the bombings and killing of innocent Nigerians,” the ACF said.
The Trade Union Congress (TUC) warned that there are certain disgruntled elements in the polity who want to divide Nigeria along sectarian lines.

President General of the TUC, Comrade Peter Esele, in a telephone conversation with THISDAY in Abuja yesterday, appealed to Nigerians, especially Christians, to be calm and avoid being incited to reprisal.

He added that it was necessary for Nigerians to stay united at these critical moments and not to allow any plot that is aimed at dividing the country along religious or ethnic lines to succeed.

The Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) called on the Federal Government to make the fight against crime and terrorism its priority rather than diverting the attention of Nigerians with its debate on the need to remove fuel subsidy.

It added that it is necessary that the root causes of insecurity – poverty and unemployment – be addressed as budgeting huge sums of money for security would not solve the problem.

In a statement yesterday, the Acting General Secretary of the NLC, Comrade Owei Lakemfa, condemned the attacks in strongest terms, describing the perpetrators as “terrorists whose minds are as blurred as their vision”.

He called on Nigerians not to be deterred by the terrorists or give up on building a peaceful and united country where the will of the people would prevail.

France: Muslim War Graves Attacked

Thirty war graves of Muslim soldiers who fought in World War I have been attacked and defaced in the southern city of Carcassonne.

Racist insults and swastikas were painted on the graves, which are identified by the Islamic symbols of the star and crescent.

Slogans including “France for the French” and “Arabs out” were painted on some of the gravestones, reported daily newspaper Le Figaro.

The graves of Muslim soldiers in the same graveyard were attacked earlier this year in September.

Abdallah Zekri, president of a body that monitors Islamophobia, condemned the attacks on the graves of soldiers who “died for France.”

He pointed to a “significant and very worrying increase in Islamophobia in France.”

He said such attacks are up by 34 percent in 2011. In November alone, these included six fires at mosques in the country.

The graves were cleaned and a religious ceremony to honour the dead is planned for Tuesday morning.

twitter.com/matthew_warren

Matthew Warren (news@thelocal.fr)

Deep seated racism and anti-Muslim sentiment based on the Islamophobia Industry’s conspiracy theories coupled with a neo-fascist ideology can lead to deadly results.

Gianluca Casseri: the Dracula of Florence? Making sense of racism and Muslim-phobia that kills

by Gabriele Marranci (Islam, Muslims and an Anthropologist)

On the 13th of December, in my birthplace Florence, an Italian gunman killed two street vendors from Senegal, wounded another three, and committed suicide when the police reached him. The killing was racially-motivated and Gianluca Casseri, 50, was a writer for and member of CasaPound, a neo-fascist group. The Senegalese street vendors he killed (Samb Modou, 40yrs old, and Diop Mor, 54yrs old) lived in Italy for a considerable time and leave behind their wives and children in Senegal. The life of migrants in Italy, in particular for Muslims such as the Senegalese, is known. The xenophobic Lega Nord has built its political reputation on the exploitation of Italians’ frustration with a badly managed migration policy and an increase of refugees. Furthermore, Italians often know very little about Islam and Muslim culture, despite the centuries of, for the most part peaceful, cultural and scientific exchanges. The ‘Mamma li Turchi’ attitude, facilitated by local newspapers and Italian neo-fascist websites, has reached its epitome. The former Berlusconi government and its rhetoric has also played a part in cultivating such atmosphere. The difficulties that Muslims in Italy face to build a proper mosque often seem insurmountable.

This killing in Italy did not catch me by surprise. During my visits in Italy I became aware of how a certain anti-Muslim rhetoric, which Fallaci powerfully expressed, has found not only sympathizers and fervent believers, but also the attention of a general public for which anti-Muslim attitudes posses a cathartic function within a country condemned to a populist political and economic decline. Among the millions screaming in forums, in newspapers and on blogs against the immigrants, Muslims and the now fully implemented (it appears) Shari’a in Italy, there will always be some who dream of being a ‘hero’.

Such people, in the name of the Italic supreme race, or in the name of Jesus, or both (as is often the case), will fantasize about taking matters into their own hands and spilling the hated blood of the ‘Saladin’ in order to bring Europe back to Christendom.  Some will depart from fantasy and take a step further and plan actions. On the 13th of December, Gianluca Casseri succeeded in what was planned as a ‘suicide’ terrorist action.

Although many are the differences between Breivik and the more mysterious Casseri, many are also the similarities. The isolated lonely life, the love of fantasy literature (Casseri published some books), the Celtic imaginary tradition (so dear to the Lega Nord), and the reference to heroic resistance to Islam through more or less mythological heroes. In the case of Casseri, this ‘hero’ was the cruel Dracula whom historically in 1461 killed every Turk and Muslim he could find in southern Walachi.

Analyzing some of the messages left by members of radical far-right forums, we encounter again the Nazi imagination which is full of a mix of pagan symbolism and empty Christian rhetoric and the need of an enemy other, in this case the Muslim rather than the Jew. The similarity, in those forums, of the rhetoric praising Breivik and Casseri is impressive. Both them have been mythologized in a similar way to how suicide bombers or jihadi fighters are.  Perhaps most striking is the evident hate of the ‘different’ and an impressive lack of empathy. Empathy is indeed the key to understanding these incompressible acts of hatred.

Racism, or attitudes of hatred towards the so called ‘out-group’, which often is the main cause of radicalism, as I have suggested in my last book, is better explained through processes of identity and emotions. Recent psychological, neurological and even endocrinological behavioral studies (to which anthropologists have paid too little, if any, attention) have shown what I call a ‘natural‘ bias that we have for the ‘other‘, in particular when phenotypical traits are involved (such as skin colour for instance).

Just to mention some of these studies, Matteo Forgiarini et.al (2011) have investigated ‘the existence of a racial bias in the emotional reaction to other people’s pain and its link with implicit racist biases.’  The study confirmed, while testing Caucasian people, ‘a reduced reaction to the pain of African individuals was also correlated with the observers’ individual implicit race bias’.  Alessio Avenanti et all (2010) studied the empathic sensorimotor resonance with other-races as far as pain was concerned, and again this study found that  although ‘human beings react empathically to the pain of stranger individuals [...] racial bias and stereotypes may change this reactivity into a group-specific lack of sensorimotor resonance’.

More recent studies, interestingly, have even challenged that the famous Oxytocin is a bit more sinister than the ‘hug hormone’ we knew, and found, as Carsten K. W. De Dreu et al’s study (2011) has shown, that it may have a role in the emergence of intergroup conflict and violence. Yet this seems not enough to explain the actions of Gianluca Casseri. Indeed, there is another element that we have to consider: dehumanization. Now, for a long time social science, and in particular anthropology, has discussed the dehumanization of certain groups as merely a cultural process.

Yet the reality again becomes more dramatic when we combine what we know from interviews with what neuroscience, through fMRI studies, can tell us. Lasana Harris and Susan Fiske (2006) have shown that dehumanization is not just an attitude, but rather something that is clearly identifiable within brain functions – such as the absence of the typical neural signature for social cognition, as well as exaggerated amygdala and insula reactions (consistent with disgust) and the disgust ratings they elicit.

I could provide other evidence of the fact that all of us, as human beings, have these ‘natural’ biases, yet the difference is that the majority of us is able to control them, to see them as stereotypes which we have been educated to reject or at least challenge. Yet the above ‘natural’ characteristics, as they can be controlled, they can also be reinforced and transformed into a cognitive lens through which to make sense of the world. Paranoia is surely the result and it is clear that both Casseri and Breivik were and are paranoid, but not crazy. Indeed, they are the result of certain rhetoric, ideology and culture – what in other words is becoming, to use Dan Sperber’s epidemiological model, a robust replication system.

Casseri needed his victims’ blood to become the mythical hero of those Italians (but also Europeans, Americans and Australians) whom have decided to live in the darkness of their ignorance and believe that they are fighting a civilizational war; a belief marked by an explosive mix of mythology, religion and fantasy. Casseri is at the same time the extreme product of such robust replication system and another ‘infectious’ agent. Like in the case of terrorism perpetrated by Muslim fanatics, Cessari’s fantasy can only be the nightmare of the too often silent moderate majority; the only force that can stop the system from replicating beyond return.

300 Ultra Orthodox Clash with Police Over Sign

Ultra-Orthodox, Israel Police clash in Beit Shemesh; officer wounded

(Haaretz)

A police officer was wounded as clashes erupted between ultra-Orthodox Jews and Israel police on Monday in two separate neighborhoods in Beit Shemesh.
Two residents were also arrested in the clashes.

Approximately 300 ultra-Orthodox Jews began chasing police officers, hurled rocks at them, and burned trashcans after police were called to remove a sign on a main street that orders the separation of men and women in the neighborhood. The sign has been removed and re-instated several times over the past two days.

Confrontations also occurred in another of the city’s neighborhood after a Channel 10 news crew attempted to film a news piece in the neighborhood. The crew was surrounded by ultra-Orthodox residents who began harassing the crew, who immediately called for police reinforcement.

Officers arrived on the scene, and clashed with residents who laid on the ground in order to protect those which the police sought to apprehend for questioning.

On Sunday, a Channel 2 news team was attacked and beaten by 200 ultra-Orthodox men at the same location on the street where the sign that was removed had been hanging.

After the assault on the Channel 2 news team earlier Sunday, one resident living nearby said that the sign in question has existed for six years already. He added that it does not order women not pass in the street, but to abstain from gathering on the sidewalk.

David Nienberg is being held in a Harris County Jail on $30,000 bail. / HCSO

Family says attack on Muslim man in Tomball should be hate crime

By LINDSAY WISE, HOUSTON CHRONICLE

Yaqub Bham’s visit to a residence in Tomball on Wednesday was supposed to be routine for the 61-year-old ADT salesman, who had come to inspect a client’s property before installing a home security system.

Instead, the homeowner, David L. Nienberg, allegedly tried to stab Bham with a fork, bit off part of his ear, and beat him so badly that he broke 10 ribs.

Nienberg, 42, of Tomball, is charged with aggravated assault. If convicted, he could serve from two to 20 years in prison.

Bham’s distraught family members want the incident investigated as a possible hate crime against Bham, a Muslim native of Pakistan who became an American citizen in 2007.They say an agitated Nienberg became violent after asking Bham about the origin of his name and where he was from.

Harris County sheriff’s deputies who responded to a 911 call from Nienberg’s family about 5:50 p.m. on Wednesday did not mention the questions about Bham’s name and origins in their report, said Deputy Thomas Gilliland, spokesman for the Sheriff’s Office.

Gilliland said Nienberg apparently became angry while reviewing the contract for a security system in his four-bedroom home on Everhart Pointe Drive. When Bham offered to make another contract, or change it, “the defendant took the backpack that Mr. Bham had and wouldn’t give him the backpack, which contained the keys to his vehicle,” Gilliland said.

The two men’s verbal disagreement then became physical, the deputy said.

Nienberg lunged at Bham with a fork, Gilliland said he was told. Relatives took the implement away, but Nienberg allegedly managed to get Bham in a choke hold, beat him, and bite him while muttering about military operations.

When deputies arrived, Nienberg refused to let go of Bham until they “secured the perimeter” and “secured women personnel,” Gilliland said.

It took three deputies to pull Nienberg off Bham, he said. They deployed Tasers on Nienberg twice, and even then, the furious man continued to kick and spit after they wrestled him into a patrol car, said Gilliland.

Victim hospitalized

Bham, who was recovering Friday in a local hospital, immigrated to Houston in 1997 and is the married father of three adult children. He and his family proudly became U.S. citizens four years ago, said his daughter, Shazdeh Bham, 23.

“When we moved to the States, it was for educational opportunities and just a better living, a better life,” she said.

Every once in a while, the Bham family hears negative comments like, “Go back to your country where you belong,” Shazdeh Bham said, “but it’s never bothered us. It never made us think twice about anything.”

The attack on her father was different, though, and frightening.

“I’m just really angry, and I’m extremely confused because I still don’t understand why this happened, and what triggered this … and why this person caused this much harm and this much hurt to my father,” she said. “Now I just want to see justice. I want to see this person punished for what he did.”

Shazdeh Bham said her father is a hardworking citizen who would never say anything negative about anyone.

“He is a patient and positive person,” she added. “He is very easy to work with. His family is his entire life, which is his only priority.”

Nienberg’s questions about Bham’s name and background suggest that the attack might have been motivated by racial or religious bias, said Mustafaa Carroll, executive director of the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. The group on Friday joined Bham’s family in calling on local law enforcement and the FBI to investigate the incident as a possible hate crime.

“It’s because of what precipitated the attack that makes us think it has all the elements of a hate crime: ‘What does your name mean? Where are you from?’ And then boom, he jumped on him,” Carroll said.

“The level of hate speech and rhetoric that we hear on a fairly regular basis in society – the baseless accusations that Muslims are trying to take over America, or they’re trying to bring Sharia law, or they’re trying to subvert the government – this baseless rhetoric keeps the environment heated for something like this to happen, for the possibility of violence,” he said. “When you say that stuff over and over and over, it begins to play on your psychology toward a certain group of people.”

Motives a mystery

Nienberg has no prior criminal history in Harris County.

After hearing about his use of military terms, deputies asked Nienberg’s relatives if he suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, Gilliland said. They were told that Nienberg is a veteran but that he had never served in any type of conflict, nor had he ever been deployed overseas.

Neither Bham nor Nienberg’s family members offered a clue as to what went wrong, Gilliland said.

He said deputies are looking into whether Nienberg was under the influence of narcotics or alcohol or had suffered a mental break, “because it was just incoherent, the things that he was saying.”

It will be up to prosecutors to decide whether to upgrade the charges to a hate crime, Gilliland said.

As it is, Nienberg is charged with a second-degree felony.

He is being held in a Harris County Jail on $30,000 bail.

Masjid Ar-Rahman was defaced with Nazi graffiti yesterday. How’s that French tolerance?

Via. Jay Haywood.

Hate slogans sprayed on mosque near Hebron

Attackers sprayed a West Bank mosque with anti-Islamic and pro-settler graffiti on Monday, a Palestinian official said, in an assault that bore the hallmarks of another raid by Jewish extremists.

The mayor of Bani Naim south of Hebron said that slogans in Hebrew sprayed on walls surrounding the village’s Sahaba mosque included “curses against the Prophet Mohammed” as well as “price tag” and “Yitzhar youth,” a reference to a hardline settlement and nearby outpost in the northern West Bank.

Mayor Radwan Manasra said that the mosque was on the village’s southern edge, facing the settlement of Pnei Haver, about 3.5 kilometres (two miles) away.

It was the seventh suspected attack in as many days by ultra-nationalist Jews fighting government plans to dismantle wildcat settlement outposts by vandalising mainly Palestinian property, although they have recently struck at Israeli army bases and the homes and offices of leftwing Israelis.

It was the third mosque attack since Wednesday, one of which coincided with the demolition by troops of the Mitzpe Yitzhar outpost.

AFP, 19 December 2011

More price-tag operations.

Another mosque torched in West Bank

Vandals set fire to another mosque in the West Bank on Thursday and defaced it with Hebrew graffiti.

The governor of Ramallah, Laila Ghanam, said arsonists doused the mosque in the village of Burqa with gasoline, then set it afire. The Hebrew words for “war” and “Mitzpe Yitzhar” were painted in red on a wall, and the Israeli military said carpets and chairs were burned.

Mitzpe Yitzhar is an unauthorized Jewish settlement outpost in the West Bank where Israeli security forces demolished two structures early Thursday.

In recent years, settlers have attacked Palestinian and Israeli military targets in retaliation for Israeli government operations they see as overly sympathetic to Palestinians. The increasing frequency of the attacks, the sparse number of arrests and paucity of indictments have generated allegations that the Israeli government isn’t acting forcefully enough against extremists after two years of violence.

On Wednesday, following an assault on an Israeli military base, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu approved measures to clamp down on extremists, including giving soldiers the authority to make arrests and to ban extremists from contentious areas.

Associated Press, 15 December 2011

Jerusalem price tag attack, Dec. 14, 2011. Photo by: Jerusalem Fire Dept.

If Muslims were attacking synagogues or churches at the rate that these attackers are, the right-wing nuts would be having a feeding frenzy.

Jerusalem mosque set alight in suspected ‘price tag’ attack

Jerusalem Mayor denounces arsonists’ attack on burial site of noted Muslim figure, saying zero tolerance should be shown to violence of any kind, and that coexistence in the city must be kept.

By Oz Rosenberg and Nir Hasson

Arsonists set fire to a deserted mosque in central Jerusalem during the night between Tuesday and Wednesday. There was no structural damage reported and the damage mainly consisted of the blackening of walls and graffiti reading “Price Tag,” and anti-Islamic phrases.

The Nebi Akasha mosque, apparently built under the Ayyubid dynasty in the 12th century with additions made under the Mamluk dynasty in the 13th century. It is believed that the mosque was founded on the burial site of combatants in Saladin’s army, though an ancient tradition designates the site as the place where Akasha, a friend of the Prophet Muhammad, was buried.

The mosque is uniquely located in central Jerusalem in the midst of a Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood. It was abandoned in the Israeli War of Independence. Its was recently renovated and turned into a municipal storage facility.

Graffiti spray painted on the historical site included inscriptions such as “Muhammad is Dead,” “Muhammad is a Pig,” and “Price Tag.”

The Jerusalem municipality closed off the entrance to the mosque, and the police and Shin Bet began an investigation.

Continue reading

Robert Spencer

There is no denying the uptick in right-wing terrorism in Europe, Anders Breivik being the most glaring example of this violence. The ties between fanatical right-wingers in Europe and in the United States is well known, Robert Spencer being a prominent figure in such circles. Of course, right-wing Islamophobes are in denial about the resurgent xenophobia and anti-Muslim hysteria they have helped foster and which is now having deadly consequences.

Now, Robert “Police Blotter” Spencer is at it again, resorting to his well worn modus operandi of trying to link any possible crime “allegedly” committed by a Muslim to Islam.

He does this of course to dehumanize Muslims, inflate and exaggerate the stealth-Muslamic-Islamization threat and also to deflect from any negative news regarding the so-called “counter jihad” movement.

This is clear when we learn that just today a man with links to extreme right-wing groups in Italy murdered two Senegalese traders. This is the sort of violence that is usually applauded amongst the “internet counter jihadis,” including on Spencer’s own site as well as that of his friends.

Spencer quickly jumped on a Telegraph report about an attack in Liege, Belgium, in which four people were killed and dozens injured. According to the Telegraph report, the attacker was identified as Nordine Amrani citing (without a link) something called the “Karachi Post,” saying the attack was linked to an “honor killing.”

To say the least, this whet Spencer’s enormous anti-Muslim Islamophobic appetite. Spencer went on to write,

…the Telegraph notes a link to an honor killing case that could indicate that this was yet another act of violence by Misunderstanders of the Religion of Peace.

Spencer’s own fans took issue with his jumping the gun, cautioning him not to make a fool out of himself:

GnaeusNaevius | December 13, 2011 7:01 AM | Reply

Right Wing British National Party

The recent case of an assault on a white woman by Somalis in Britain is being fully exploited by loons on both sides of the Atlantic. Islamophobia Watch investigated and exposed the distorted coverage, though as usual, the truth cannot wash away the residue such sensationalism invariably creates.

Daily Mail’s bigoted and inaccurate reporting provokes more right-wing anti-Muslim hysteria

Simon Beech

Simon Beech sentenced to prison for ten years was a member of the EDL and the BNP, any surprise?

Hanley mosque arson accused’s links to far right parties

One of the men accused of setting fire to a Stoke-on-Trent mosque was a member of the British National Party (BNP) and English Defence League (EDL).

Simon Beech was a serving soldier with the 2nd Battalion, The Yorkshire Regiment, based at Weeton Barracks near Preston, Lancashire, when he is alleged to have set fire to the City Central Mosque in Regent Road, Hanley, in the early hours of December 3 last year.

He is accused of entering the mosque, which was still under construction, with his co-accused Garreth Foster. The Crown Prosecution Service allege the pair were responsible for starting a blaze on the ground floor and feeding a gas pipe upstairs, from a neighbouring property.

Beech, of Hilton Road, Hartshill, and Foster, aged 28, of Hartshill Road, Stoke, deny arson.

Yesterday at their trial at Stoke-on-Trent Crown Court the jury heard Beech, aged 23, subscribed to Facebook and the EDL.

Peter McMaster, an intelligence researcher with Staffordshire Police, said on November 10, less than a month before the arson, Beech posted comments including “Let’s start bashing skulls, dirty, rotten rodents, they breed like rats here, they need to die like rats” and “I say we need to start taking things into our own hands because they are running the place”.

The next day he posted “Get as many heads as we can, go and smash some skull and take over Shelton”.

And Beech said he “liked” a comment someone else posted – “Nuke all mosques”. He also posted comments including “Time we took things into our hands,” and “I say we put a stop to it before it’s too late.”

Also on November 11, Beech said: “The time has come we burn their place, burn the lot of them.”

The Sentinel, 7 December 2011

Click to read more …

Robin Shepherd

(via. Islamophobia-Watch)

We’ve taken on the issue of Honour Killings in the past and exposed the hypocrisy and double standards of the anti-Muslim brigades who seem to think it is a “Muslim only” problem. The piece below eviscerate a recent smear by the likes of Robert Spencer and his echo chamber in the Islamophobe-sphere that was making the rounds, claiming that there was an “alarming rise of ‘Muslim honour attacks in the UK.”

How the Henry Jackson Society promotes anti-Muslim bigotry

Media coverage of the police figures for so-called “honour” crimes in the UK, revealed by the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation in association with the Guardian, was generally fairly balanced, avoiding the Islamophobic stereotyping of the Muslim community that you might have anticipated. Even the Daily Star managed to report the issue without blaming Muslims.

The exception was the Daily Mail, which headlined its report “Alarming rise of Muslim ‘honour attacks’ in the UK”. This irresponsible accusation against British Muslims was predictably endorsed by Robert Spencer atJihad Watch (“The Daily Mail headline goes straight for the elephant in the room: this is largely a phenomenon within Muslim communities in Britain”), while his friend Pamela Geller of course agreed (“As Muslim immigration increases, so does sharia, misogyny and gendercide”).

The ignorance and bigotry underpinning such views hardly need underlining. As a Metropolitan Police spokesperson told the Mail: “Honour-based violence cuts across all cultures, nationalities and faith groups – it is a worldwide problem.” Honour attacks are a problem in Hindu-majority India, for example, but are not evident in the world’s most populous Muslim country, Indonesia. Even contributors to a discussion thread on the Mail‘s own website were able to make the obvious point that honour-based violence is a cultural rather than a religious phenomenon.

It was notable that the Iranian and Kurdish Women’s Rights Organisation itself made no claim that Muslims were mainly or disproportionately responsible for honour crimes in the UK. This was by no means because IKWRO suffers from over-sensitivity towards Muslims and their faith. It is a hardline secularist organisation that lines up with the Islamophobic right on a number of issues – supporting the French ban on the veil, for example, andbacking the anti-sharia bill tabled by Geert Wilders’ ally Baroness Cox. But IKWRO is sufficiently familiar with the situation on the ground to know it makes no sense to depict honour attacks as a specifically Muslim problem.

There are no official figures for honour crimes in the UK broken down according to the faith of the victims and perpetrators. However, IKWRO director Diana Nammi has been quoted as saying that honour-based murders in the UK occur mostly in the Muslim, Hindu and Sikh communities, with Muslims responsible for around two-thirds of these crimes. Based on the last available census, the total Muslim-Hindu-Sikh population of the UK is 2,485,000, of whom 1,591,000 are Muslims – 64% of the total. Which would indicate that Muslims are no more likely to carry out such murders than Hindus or Sikhs are.

You might think that all of this was pretty obvious, and that nobody with half a brain or a shred of intellectual honesty would buy the Islamophobic myth that Muslim communities are inspired by their faith to commit acts of violence against young women. You should try reading a piece posted by Robin Shepherd on his website The Commentator. Entitled “BBC reveals huge scale of honour attacks in Britain, fails to mention the word ‘Islam’”, this poisonous article is worth quoting at length, in order to convey how deeply unpleasant it is:

The families giving the orders, as well as the victims, are in all, or almost all, cases Muslim. Surprised? No, of course you’re not. Honour attacks ranging in brutality from beatings to murder are commonplace in many parts of the Muslim world.

Since Britain, like many other European countries, has imported sizeable Muslim communities, which are to a significant degree unassimilated, the cultural practices of the old country have survived the transition to the new….

Enter the BBC, which reported on the matter in a lengthy, 700-plus word article and failed to mention the words “Muslim”, “Islamic” or “Islam” even once.

As I write this I am flicking back to the story itself so I can double check using the Find function. Could I be mistaken?

Here goes: “Islamic”? “No Matches”. “Muslim”? “No Matches”. “Islam”? “No Matches”.

This is how societies go down: when matters of the profoundest significance to their character, and potentially their very existence, have been rendered undiscussable by the people that set the terms of public debate.

Clearly the people who wrote and edited that story should be dismissed.

They won’t be of course because the mind-numbing, multiculturalist narrative that demanded censorship of the salient evidence is effectively institutionalised as the dominant narrative across the BBC as well as the wider liberal establishment.

So be it. Go ahead and have a conversation about deep-seated problems inside the fastest growing demographic group in Europe without mentioning what that group is. The quality of your discussion will be moronic. But you reap what you sow.

Shepherd goes on to berate Sky News and the Daily Telegraph, not generally known as warm supporters of the UK’s Muslim community, for following the BBC in its “politically correct” suppression of the supposed link between Islam and honour crimes.

This is the kind of foam-flecked rant you might expect to read on some extreme “counterjihadist” blog of the sort that inspired Anders Breivik. But Shepherd is Director of International Affairs at the Henry Jackson Society, which is advertised as a sponsor of The Commentator site. Nor is Shepherd the only raving anti-Muslim bigot to hold a prominent position in the HJS. Douglas Murray(“Why is it that time and again the liberal West is crumpling before the violence, intimidation and thuggery of Islam? … All immigration into Europe from Muslim countries must stop…. Conditions for Muslims in Europe must be made harder across the board”) is anAssociate Director of the organisation.

Yet the Henry Jackson Society serves as the secretariat for two All-Party Parliamentary Groups – on Homeland Security andTransatlantic & International Security. The former’s objective is to “provide parliamentarians with up-to-date information and analysis on homeland security and national resilience issues”, while the latter provides the same service in connection with “international security issues, global defence concerns, international incidents and the efforts being made to comment and react to them in Britain and abroad”.

Do MPs and peers really think it appropriate that an organisation like the HJS should hold the position of secretariat to officially recognised parliamentary groups which seek to influence government policy on domestic and international security issues? Andrew Gilligan, Paul Goodman and the Jewish Chronicle waged a vicious campaign to remove ENGAGE as the secretariat to the APPG on Islamophobia, falsely accusing them of political extremism and antisemitism. But Gilligan, Goodman and the JChave nothing to say about the parliamentary role of an organisation headed by real extremist bigots like Robin Shepherd and Douglas Murray.

The so called price tag attacks against Mosques and Muslims continues unabated in Palestine.

Suspected hate crime at mosque near Qalqilyah

Anonymous vandals hurled a burning tire at the entrance of a mosque in Brukin, a village south-east of Qalqilyah. They also spray painted the walls and smashed the windshields of two nearby vehicles. The police have launched an investigation into the suspected hate crime.

The IDF said in response: “The IDF and Defense Ministry are working to locate those responsible and take incidents in which property is damaged very seriously, especially in the case of holy sites.” (Yoav Zitun and Omri Efraim)

So the IDF is “working to locate those responsible?” Well, maybe they should look at their own ranks, as three Israeli soldiers were recently arrested for partaking in “price tag” attacks.

The EDL?

Muslim woman, 52, racially abused by Telford gang

A Muslim woman was spat at and abused by a gang of six teenagers in Telford who pulled off her religious headdress in a racially motivated attack.

The gang, who were all male, surrounded the 52-year-old woman and started aggressively pushing and shoving her as she walked along a footpath by the skate park near William Reynolds Infant School in Woodside on Tuesday. Chris Ammonds, spokesman for Telford police, said the woman was abused between 6pm and 6.20pm.

“After circling the victim the youths then started to racially abuse her. At least one of the youths spat at the victim too.

“The youths then pulled the victim’s hijab – a traditional Muslim headdress – off her head and taunted her with it but she quickly managed to grab it back off them and flee.

“The victim has been left very shaken by this incident and also suffered a long scratch to her right cheek as a result of the assault.

“The youths that surrounded the victim are all described as being white, aged between 15 and 17 and as wearing tracksuits and hooded tops or caps.

“Officers are very keen to identify the youths that assaulted this woman.”

Anyone with information should call Telford police on 101 or Crimestoppers anonymously on 0800 555111.

Read more: http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/2011/12/01/muslim-woman-52-racially-abused-by-telford-gang/#ixzz1fVSMUVur

San Jose man punched, called ‘terrorist’ on grocery trip to Lucky

By Lisa Fernandez

lfernandez@mercurynews.com

Just before Thanksgiving, a 32-year-old industrial designer was leaving a Lucky store in San Jose with some turkey broth and salt when he was assaulted by a group of men who broke his jaw and called him a “terrorist.”

This week, the man, who asked this his name not be used for fear of retaliation, underwent jaw surgery, and he is still in need of dental care for the six teeth that were knocked out about 9 p.m. Nov. 21 in the parking lot of the Lucky at 3270 S. White Road near Aborn Road.

“I believe they hit me with the tequila bottle,” he said. “Then they spit on me and called me a terrorist.”

None of the suspects, possibly three or four men, who were all wearing dark, hooded sweatshirts during the attack, have been arrested.

San Jose police confirmed the assault, but aren’t saying much more.

The victim’s family, originally from Calcutta, India, moved to Silicon Valley more than 30 years ago. They are Hindu, and the victim has no criminal record in Santa Clara County, according to a review of court records. He said he graduated from San Jose State with a degree in industrial design.

In 2010, FBI statistics show there were 24 hate crimes reported in San Jose, compared with about 140 hate crimes reported in Los Angeles, a city about four times the size.

A detective this week met the victim, police confirmed. The detective is trying to track down witnesses and find out whether the grocery store’s security camera documented.

La Dépêche reports that racist graffiti and Nazi symbols were daubed in red paint on the walls of the Louis-Nicolas-Vauquelin secondary school in Toulouse last weekend. The slogans “Arabs out of France”, “Arabs sod off” and “Islam get out” were accompanied by swastikas and other Nazi signs such as 88 (i.e. Heil Hitler).

Via Islam in Europe

Anders Breivik's choice for the "Noble Peace Prize," Robert Spencer

Extremist far right anti-Muslim, MEK-Terror linked, Terrorist Inspirer, and conservative Catholic apologist Robert Spencer‘s bigotry and hatred for Islam and Muslims is evident to most rational individuals. Just take a brief glance at our copious documentation of his words, statements and activities if you are unsure of what we mean. You can also see what others have said about Spencer.

Spencer is so stuck in his goofy 11th century Crusader mentality that he is once again defending open calls to genocide. I guess he didn’t learn anything from the Anders Breivik fiasco, you know, the “insane” terrorist who thought Robert Spencer deserved the “Noble Peace Prize.”

This time Spencer is going to bat for the loony-even-by-Geller-standards, BareNakedIslam (BNI) website, which was briefly shut down by WordPress for violating its terms and conditions.

A few days ago, Sheila Musaji of The American Muslim reported on the unanimous cacophony of sadistic joy displayed by the owners and commenters on BNI regarding repeated arson attacks on mosques in France,

An anti-Muslim site called Bare Naked Islam has posted an article celebrating this. The article is titled “WOO HOO! Yet ANOTHER anti-Muslim attack on a French mosque”.  Just in case they take it down, CAIR has saved the page here.  The headline of the article states Apparently, Hell hath no fury like a Frenchman scorned. It’s the third attack on a mosque just this month. Will the Muslims ever get a clue that they are not welcome in France?

Most of the comments below the Bare Naked Islam article are hateful.  Some examples:

The following six comments are from the same individual, Keith Mahone:

Musaji notes:

This last comment by Keith Mahone is the most extreme, and a particular concern since he says in his long rambling rant that he regularly drives past a mosque in Falls Church, Virginia, and that the sight of that mosque causes him distress.

I waded through a few articles on the site and the comments, and found that this sort of rabid hatred of Muslims and encouragement of not only limiting the civil rights of American Muslims, and encouragement of not only limiting the civil rights of American Muslims, but also actually murdering them is common.

Read Sheila Musaji’s complete piece, it details even more examples of the rabid and visceral genocide-calling on BNI.

Spencer has linked to BNI for years now and the two have a mutual admiration for one another. Spencer does not take issue with BNI’s anti-Muslim genocidal rants nor does he condemn them, rather he resorts to conspiracy theory and forwards the argument that BNI is a victim of “Islamic supremacist” warfare.

Instead of apologizing for associating with BNI he rushes full hog into their corner, lauding them as an “anti-Jihad website.” He gives the meager caveat that “he doesn’t agree with everything they write,” and that “he doesn’t condone threats” but then he puts on the apologist cap, saying they were just a few “unhinged comments.”

No, Spencer, they aren’t a few comments, they are a sample of the consistent violent anti-Muslim rhetoric pervasive in the Islamophobesphere, including your own blog (one example out of many):

Spencer oddly attempts to deflect by posting screen shots by commenters “Mosizzle” and “RefutingActs” from Spencerwatch.com which he interpreted as threats; however even some of Spencer’s own followers considered this a ludicrous stretch.

It is really a pathetic attempt at “deflection,” especially when anyone with half a brain knows that what is written on a daily basis on JihadWatch and BareNakedIslam cannot compare to our meticulous care in deleting hateful or bigoted remarks, and even allowing some vile Islamophobes such as “halal pork” to post.

At the end of the day, Spencer is so far down the rabbit hole he probably doesn’t understand what he is doing. More likely however is that this is how he truly feels, he wishes to see the end of Islam and Muslims and he is willing to realize that goal by any means.

Fired from TSA, Mpls. man gets prison term for off-duty hate crime against Somali

Article by: PAUL WALSH , Star Tribune 

A Minneapolis man who lost his job with the Transportation Security Administration for an off-duty assault of an elderly Somali man has been sentenced to six months in prison for the hate crime.

George Thompson, 64, who pleaded guilty, was sentenced Tuesday in federal court in Minneapolis under the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act. Thompson’s case was the first prosecuted under the act.

Signed into law in October 2009, the act was named after Matthew Shepard, a gay Wyoming teen who died after being kidnapped and beaten in 1998, and James Byrd, Jr., a black man who was dragged to death in Texas that same year.

“Physical violence motivated by racial or religious hatred exacerbates fear and tears at the fabric of our society,” B. Todd Jones, U.S. attorney for Minnesota, said in a statement issued after Thompson’s sentencing. “Here in Minnesota, we have vibrant and diverse communities and should be celebrating that fact, not assaulting people because of it.”

Thompson also was charged in state court about three months after the May 4, 2010, assault in another bias-inspired attack on the same street as the earlier incident, but that allegation was dropped once the federal case was filed.

According to the criminal complaint in the dismissed case:

Thompson approached a man and asked him whether he was Somali. The man said he was, prompting Thompson to chase and threaten to kill him. The man found refuge with police officers who were nearby.

Thompson then went into a neighborhood bar, where he was arrested. He was drunk and had two loaded firearms with him and a permit to carry them.

Both incidents cost Thompson his job with the Transportation Security Administration. He worked for eight years with the federal agency that provides security to the nation’s airports.

According to court documents in the federal case:

Thompson was leaving a bar in his Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and “punched or shoved” an 82-year-old Somali man without provocation. The man nearly fell.

“You Muslims, go back to your country,” witnesses reported Thompson as saying, along with, “You Somali, go back to your country.”

The defense acknowledged that Thompson was embarrassed and sorry for the assault, but also noted that the defendant was frustrated by trouble that Somali youth had been causing in his neighborhood.

The defense pointed out that Thompson and others were subjected to threats, assaults, robberies and indecent exposure from Somali youth.

Paul Walsh • 612-673-4482

How much do you want to bet that the woman who attacked Inas Kadri is a reader of AtlasShrugs or JihadWatch?

GTA woman has niqab pulled off in assault

(CBC News)

A Muslim woman from Mississauga, Ont., who had her niqab pulled from her face at a local mall, says her young children no longer feel secure with only her nearby.

Inas Kadri, whose assault at Sheridan Centre in Mississauga was caught on a security camera, spoke to CBC News on Tuesday as she awaits the sentencing of the woman who attacked her.

Kadri was shopping with her three-year-old son and two-year-old daughter when she was approached by two women. One of the women began swearing at her, about her religion and her veil, telling her, “Leave our country. Go back to your country,” Kadri said.

The woman can be seen in the video grabbing Kadri’s veil and pulling her off-camera. The attacker walked away while Kadri ran for help.

“Being attacked for no reason — for no reason — that’s something difficult,” she said.

Kadri’s victim impact statement reads, in part, that, “My kids don’t feel secure with me alone, and always prefer to have someone bigger in size than me to feel safe.”

The accused, Rosemarie Creswell, pleaded guilty after the video was played in court.

When CBC News spoke to Creswell on the phone, she admitted to pulling off the veil but insisted it was all just a misunderstanding, before hanging up mid-interview.

Kadri believes the attack was motivated by hate, which could bring a stiffer sentence.

York University law professor Faisal Kutty, who is Muslim, will watch for the judge’s sentencing Friday with interest.

“As Canadians in a multicultural, liberal, democratic society, I think we need to send a clear message and I hope the judge does so,” he said.

Kadri said she won’t stop wearing her face veil no matter what anyone else says or does.

“Not my father, not my husband, not no one at all,” she said. ” It’s me, and it’s my choice.”

This is like deja-vu, how many times have we ran such a headline?

French mosque is target of arson attack and Nazi graffiti

Sud Ouest reports that when a member of staff arrived at the mosque in Villeneuve-sur-Lot in south west France on Saturday morning they found that the slogan “Islam out of Europe” had been daubed on the walls in black paint along with swastikas and “88″ (Nazi code for “Heil Hitler”). A wooden pallet had been set on fire against the front door but had only caused minor damage. Police also discovered a bottle thought to contain a fire accelerant.

A report by Ajib (via Islam in Europe) points out that the graffiti and arson at Villeneuve-sur-Lot is the latest in a series of criminal attacks on French mosques. Earlier this month the mosque in Montbéliard was the target of an arson attack that caused serious damage. A few days before, on the day of Eid al-Adha, Muslims in Saint-Armand-les-Eaux in the département du Nord were shocked to discover racist graffiti on the door of their mosque.

In a statement condemning the attack in Villeneuve-sur-Lot the Conseil Francais du Culte Musulman reiterates its call for a parliamentary inquiry into the rise of anti-Muslim hatred in France.

“Burn this one.” (hat tip:B Boy Blue)

Midlands Mosque Vandalised on Remembrance Day

A Midlands mosque was vandalised on the morning of Armistice Day in what is suspected to be a hate crime