Author: Mick Hartley

r “action squads”, that followed the German army into Russia, shooting close to a million Jews and political enemies before the killing centres, such as Treblinka and Auschwitz, were established in Poland.

Husseini had met Adolf Eichmann, Hitler’s chief architect of the Holocaust, several times to settle details of the slaughter.

Update: Amin al-Husseini also makes an appearance in this excellent article by Matthias Küntzel (via Will):

The majority of Arab Palestinians wanted to accept the United Nation’s two state solution in 1947. After all, at this time around 10, 000 Palestinians were working in predominantly Jewish-led industries such as citrus farming. But the Mufti of Jerusalem, Amin el-Husseini, rejected the two state solution without consulting his fellow Palestinians and persuaded the leaders of the five neighboring Arab nations to prevent the establishment of a Jewish state by all means. The war of 1947-48, just as disastrous as it was avoidable…

Further to this, here’s more on Amnesty International:

For many journalists, diplomats, and political activists, Amnesty International is considered to be a highly reliable and objective source of information and analysis on human rights around the world. But the halo that surrounds its reports and campaigns is beginning to fray, as the evidence of political bias and inaccuracy mounts.

Recently, the Economist, published in Britain, noted that “an organisation which devotes more pages in its annual report to human-rights abuses in Britain and America than those in Belarus and Saudi Arabia cannot expect to escape doubters’ scrutiny.”…

As Amnesty releases its annual report on human rights for 2006, amid highly choreographed public relations events, and repeating the familiar condemnations of Israel and America, NGO Monitor has also published a report on Amnesty’s activities in the Middle East. The result is not a pretty picture for those clinging to the “halo effect.”

Using a detailed and sophisticated qualitative model for comparing relative resources devoted to the different countries, this report clearly shows that in 2006, Amnesty singled out Israel for condemnation of human rights to a far greater extent than Iran, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, Libya, Syria, Egypt, and other chronic abusers of human rights.

China’s relationship with Sudan isn’t the only area where the 2008 Olympics provide an opening for putting on some pressure. There’s also the forced repatriation of those who escape Kim Jong Il’s prison camp of North Korea (via):

A civic group dedicated to promoting the human rights of North Korean defectors started a protest outside the Chinese embassy in Seoul Wednesday, demanding that China halt its forced repatriations of North Korean defectors.

Justice for North Korea (JFNK) launched a 444-day one-man demonstration against China’s forceful repatriation of North Korean refugees, which is to be continued until Aug. 8, the first day of the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

The Berlin wall came down, remember, when the East Germans could no longer control the wave of refugees fleeing to the West.

visions that cast a shadow on international relations,” she said…

It also criticises the US government for what it said were kidnappings, arbitrary detention, tortures and secrets transfers of terror suspects – the practice known as “extraordinary rendition”.

Widespread human rights abuses in Afghanistan, Belarus, China, Iran, Russia, Syria, Vietnam and Zimbabwe are also mentioned in the report.

As an afterthought, presumably. Mind you, they (the BBC, that is) miss out on some of the juicier items in the report:

Prime Minister John Howard finds himself alongside Zimbabwean president Robert Mugabe in an Amnesty International report which says they are among short-sighted fear-mongers dividing the world.

Amnesty secretary-general Irene Khan says the fear generated by leaders such as Mr Howard thrives on myopic and cowardly leadership.

Ms Khan included Mr Howard with Mr Mugabe, US President George Bush and Sudan’s President Omar Al-Bashir in the same scathing paragraph in her foreword to the group’s annual report published today.

orks of President Kim Il Sung including his historic speeches, conclusions and talks between January and August, Juche 68 (1979).

The works contain unique ideas, theories and policies he laid down for the victorious advance of the socialist cause on the basis of a profound insight into the requirements of the developing revolution.

Such works as “On Further Strengthening the Party Guidance to the Socialist Economic Construction” and “Let’s Bring About a Fresh Turn in the Party Guidance to the Administrative and Economic Work” expound the idea of further increasing the militant functions and roles of the party organizations to bring about a great change in the party guidance to socialist construction.

Such works as “On Developing Transport Rapidly in Keeping with the Requirements of a Higher Stage of Socialist Economic Construction” and “On Putting Enterprise Management on a Regular Basis and Improving Labour Administration” deal with the tasks to be implemented to steadily round off the inter-sector structure of the economy and strengthen the country’s economic independence so as to meet the lawful requirements of the socialist economic construction.

In his “On the Tasks Facing the Korean Scientists and Technicians in Japan for Developing Science and Technology in Our Country,” “It Is Necessary to Intensify the Study of Methods of Cultivating Crops to Suit the Conditions of Alpine Areas” and other works the President indicated the orientation and ways of rapidly developing all fields of the socialist cultural construction including science and education. And in his “We Should Reunify the Country by the Concerted Efforts of Our Nation” and “Talks with the UN Secretary General and His Party” and other works he enunciated the idea of preventing the permanent division of the nation and achieving the country’s reunification by the concerted efforts of the Koreans.

The meteorite impact theory’s been generally accepted as an explanation for the end of the Cretaceous period and the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago, so I suppose it was only a matter of time before someone invoked it to explain the extinction of the American megafauna some 12,000 years ago:

Two University of Oregon researchers are on a multi-institutional 26-member team proposing a startling new theory: that an extraterrestrial impact, possibly a comet, set off a 1,000-year-long cold spell and wiped out or fragmented the prehistoric Clovis culture and a variety of animal genera across North America almost 13,000 years ago.

Driving the theory is a carbon-rich layer of soil that has been found, but not definitively explained, at some 50 Clovis-age sites in North America that date to the onset of a cooling period known as the Younger Dryas Event. The sites include several on the Channel Islands off California where UO archaeologists Douglas J. Kennett and Jon M. Erlandson have conducted research…

The researchers propose that a known reversal in the world’s ocean currents and associated rapid global cooling, which some scientists blame for the extinction of multiple species of animals and the end of the Clovis Period, was itself the result of a bigger event. While generally accepted theory says glacial melting from the North American interior caused the shift in currents, the new proposal points to a large extraterrestrial object exploding above or even into the Laurentide Ice Sheet north of the Great Lakes.

“Highest concentrations of extraterrestrial impact materials occur in the Great Lakes area and spread out from there,” Kennett said. “It would have had major effects on humans. Immediate effects would have been in the North and East, producing shockwaves, heat, flooding, wildfires, and a reduction and fragmentation of the human population.”

Well who knows? – maybe there’s something in it. It just seems to me too much of a coincidence that the Australian megafauna died out sometime around 50,000 years ago, just when humans first arrived. Then the American megafauna died out 12,000 years ago, just when humans first arrived. And the New Zealand megafauna (well, megabirds) died out around 1500 years ago, when humans first arrived. People and megafauna don’t mix, except in Africa where they evolved together.

Hot news from Nepal:

Hundreds of people have flocked to a remote village in eastern Nepal to see a “sweating” idol of a Hindu god, a sign of impending turmoil or natural disaster for the devoutly religious nation.

Witnesses said that sweat seeped out of the idol of the Bhimeshwor god at a temple in Dolakha, a few hours drive from Kathmandu, during evening prayers at the weekend.

“I saw the right side of the black stone idol had become wet because of sweating,” said Shanta Krishna Shrestha, chairman of a committee responsible for maintaining the temple.

“This denotes something like major political change or a natural calamity,” said Shrestha.

“We must hold special prayers and make sacrifices asking for forgiveness.”

Yes indeed. Of course you must.

It’s happened before:

Sweating was seen on the idol in 2001, media reported, months before a palace massacre when King Birendra and eight other members of the royal family were shot dead in a drug-and-drink fuelled shooting spree by the then crown prince, who later turned the gun on himself.

You see? Get those knives sharpened.

The intricacies of Islamic scholarship (via):

Cairo’s al-Azhar Islamic University has suspended a lecturer who suggested men and women work colleagues could use symbolic breastfeeding to get around a religious ban on being alone together.

I’m not quite clear what symbolic breastfeeding involves – well OK, I’ve got a pretty good idea – but it sounds like it could add a whole new dimension to office politics.

The lecturer, Ezzat Atiya, had drawn on Islamic traditions that forbid sexual relations between a man and a woman who has breastfed him to suggest that symbolic breastfeeding could be a way around strict segregation of males and females.

But after controversy in the Egyptian and Middle East media, university president Ahmed el-Tayeb suspended Mr Atiya overnight pending an urgent investigation into his opinions, the Egyptian state news agency MENA reported.

Mr Atiya is the head of the department that deals with sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the university is part of the al-Azhar institute, one of the most prestigious in Sunni Islam.

Mr Atiya’s unusual opinion was widely publicised by Arabic-language satellite television channels and featured in a discussion in the Egyptian parliament.

The Dubai-based channel Al Arabiya quoted him as saying after five breastfeedings the man and woman could be alone together without violating Islamic law and the woman could remove her headscarf to reveal her hair.

But a committee from al-Azhar said his proposal contradicted the principles of Islam and of morality.

Mr Atiya had said he had drawn on medieval scholarship to justify his position. The opposition party newspaper al-Ahrar overnight quoted him as saying he retracted his views because they were based on the opinions of a minority of scholars.

nd of meta-rationality attached to it.

For a woman politician in Pakistan, “violating the Islamic moral norms” can be fatal to your career:

Pakistan’s woman tourism minister tendered her resignation today after hardline Islamic clerics accused her of obscenity for hugging her instructor after a charity parachute jump.

Nilofar Bakhtiar, the Federal Minister for Tourism, was pictured wearing a brightly coloured jumpsuit and hugging her instructor after a tandem jump to raise money for child victims of the earthquake that struck Pakistan in October 2005.

The images provoked the wrath of clerics in Islamabad, who accused Ms Bakhtiar of posing in an obscene manner and violating the Islamic moral norms.

A religious court set up by the clerics at a radical mosque in Islamabad issued a fatwa, or religious edict, against Ms Bakhtiar when the photographs first appeared in local newspapers last month.

They urged the Government to punish her and fire her from the Cabinet. Ms Bakhtiar failed to win the support of Cabinet colleagues and the Government appeared to cave in to the demands of the militants.

As she announced her intention to resign today, Ms Bakhtiar complained of a campaign of intimidation against her.