Author: Mick Hartley

I’m off for a few days. Back on Monday.

Many wonderful photos at the Library of Congress American Memory site, “from the Great Depression to World War 2” (via – thanks Damian). Some of my favourites (click to enlarge):

In the roundhouse at a Chicago and Northwestern Railroad yard, Chicago:

Proviso Railroad Yard, Chicago:

At the Great Lakes Steel Corporation, Detroit:

And the Pennsylvania Rail Road Ore Docks:

The trial starts today of French magazine Charlie Hebdo:

Two French Muslim organisations are suing the magazine Charlie Hebdo for printing cartoons satirising the Prophet Muhammad.

The Muslim groups charge the magazine with “insulting a group of people on the basis of religion”.

Charlie Hebdo reprinted Danish cartoons that provoked a violent backlash in the Muslim world a year ago.

Supporters of the magazine, including some French Muslims, say the trial is a test case for free speech.

The decision of Charlie Hebdo to publish the cartoons “was part of a considered plan of provocation aimed against the Islamic community in its most intimate faith,” say the Union of French Islamic Organisations and the Paris Grand Mosque.

It was “born out of a simplistic Islamophobia as well as purely commercial interests”. […]

The two-day trial, opening on Wednesday, is being seen as a test of the boundaries of free speech and religious sensitivities in France.

A group of French academics, including some Muslims, published an open letter in the magazine Liberation on Monday.

“Democrats the world over and especially Muslims hope to see in Europe, and above all in France, a secular haven where their words are not blocked by dictators or fundamentalists.

“If Charlie Hebdo were to be convicted … we would all lose this shared space of resistance and liberty,” the letter said.

Here’s Abu Omar Al-Baghdadi, appointed by Al-Qaeda as “head of the Islamic State of Iraq”, in a message dated February 2, 2007 and titled, “Victory from Allah, Victory is Near”:

“Oh Muslim youths, remember the cut up bodies of the children, the voices of their bereaved [parents] and the anguished cries of the elderly. Let the volcano of your wrath burst forth. Burn the ground beneath the feet of the Jews and their helpers, eradicate their army, destroy their equipment, down their planes, ambush them in their homes, in the wadis and on the roads. Hide in the darkness of night and turn their morning into hell… We are not afraid of your coalitions…We have drunk blood [in the past], and we find no [blood] sweeter than that of the Byzantines [i.e. Christians]… Roast their flesh with car bombs, cut off their supply lines with [explosive] charges and tear out their hearts with sniper fire. Know that offense is the best [form of] defense, and be careful not to lay down your weapons before the war is over… We are not fighting out of nationalism, but with the aim of making Allah’s word supreme.

“To the mujahideen who have not yet pledged allegiance to the Islamic State [of Iraq], I wish to say that they are our brothers and we defend them with our bodies and tongues and do not [mean to] accuse them of heresy or corruption. But we regard their tardiness in rising to the demand of the hour – which is to unite, to adhere to the [way] of Allah and to join their brothers in the Islamic State [of Iraq] – as defiance, especially now that the infidels have united their ranks…

“O Islamic nation, we now stand where the Prophet and his companions stood in the beginning of the Medina period [when the jihad began]. Our war with the Persians has [now] begun just like our war with the Byzantines, only the Persian rule is [even] more depraved and despicable than that of the Byzantines…

A regular Ho Chi Minh de nos jours….

It’s 10 years since the Gulja massacre in Xinjiang (via):

Dozens of exiled Uighur Muslims have protested outside China’s embassy in Washington DC on the 10th anniversary of a massacre that some say was on a similar scale to events in Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Protesters waved Uighur flags and chanted slogans calling on China to account for the many people they say were killed on February 5, 1997.

Human rights group say hundreds, possibly thousands, were killed and injured when police broke up a demonstration in the city of Gulja in China’s Xinjiang region.

Speaking at Monday’s protest, Rebiya Kadeer, the exiled Uighur leader, said China continued to brutally oppress the Uighur people.

She said China had done nothing to explain the events at Gulja, now known as Yining, and some 8,000 there had “disappeared without a trace.”

“Ten years have passed but the Chinese authorities have still not accounted for the innocent lives lost and those missing following the Gulja massacre,” she said

“What is worse is China continues to oppress our people.”

She has accused China of committing “cultural genocide” against the Uighur people as it seeks to develop the rich energy and mineral resources in the vast western region of Xinjiang.

More on Xinjiang here and here. Plus some photos of Xinjiang here.

Christopher Hitchens, on Iraq:

[T]here is the unspoken assumption that what the United States does in Iraq is a fully determined action, whereas what other people do is simply a consequence of that action, with no independent or autonomous “agency” of its own. This mentality was perfectly expressed, under the byline of Marc Santora, in the New York Times of Jan. 31. Santora explained the background of the murderous attacks on the Shiite festival of Ashura: “At Ashura, Shiites commemorate what is for them the most formative event of their faith, a celebration that had been banned under Saddam Hussein. In recent years, Sunni militants, caught up in a renewed sectarian split, have attacked worshippers on the holiday.” (My italics.)

I suppose that might be one way of putting it. But a factually neutral way of phrasing the same point would be to say that three years ago, the leader of al-Qaida in Mesopotamia wrote to his guru Osama Bin Laden, saying that there was a real danger of the electoral process succeeding in Iraq and of “suffocating” the true Islamist cause. The only way of preventing this triumph of the democratic heresy, wrote Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was to make life so unbearable for the heretical Shiites that they would respond in kind. The ensuing conflict would ruin all the plans of the Crusader-Zionist alliance. I can still remember the chill that went through me when I read this document and realized that it combined extreme radical evil with a high degree of intelligence. Santora’s reportage is not alone in slightly declining the responsibility for facing this central truth.

If there is a sectarian war in Iraq today, or perhaps several sectarian wars, we have to understand that this was latent in the country, and in the state, and in the society all along. It was not the only possible outcome, because it had to be willed and organized, but it was certainly high on the list of probabilities. (The Saddam Hussein regime, which thrived on the worst form of “divide and rule,” certainly represented a standing invitation to run this risk.)

In other words, those who now deplore and decry the “civil war” (or the “civil wars”) must, in order to be serious, admit that they would have deplored such an outcome just as much if it had not happened on America’s watch or had (like Rwanda) been something that we could have pretended to watch as disinterested or—even worse—uninterested spectators.

The habit of viewing Iraq as a crisis that only began in 2003—a lazy habit that is conditioned by the needs of the impending 2008 election—is an obstacle to understanding.

From the Daily Star:

At the Cairo Book Fair, the largest and most important event of its kind in the Arab world, religious works dominate, while literature and scientific texts are often pushed to the margins. Millions of Cairenes thronged to the fair, giving it an air of carnival on the vast exhibition grounds covering 80,000 square meters in northern Cairo and featuring some 1,400 stands of books and CDs. By Sunday, when the 39th annual fair came to a close, organizers estimated that some 2 million people had visited, dwarfing similar events in Beirut, Casablanca and Abu Dhabi – though many complain that the crowds are just there to picnic and buy religious books….

Korans of all styles, from the simple to the leather-bound, share shelf space with collections of religious sayings and fatwas as well as their more modern incarnations on cassettes and compact disks. The collected works of late venerable preachers like Egypt’s Sheikh Mohammed Shaarawi and Saudi Arabia’s Abdel Aziz bin Baz were present as well, though there was stiff competition from the young “new look” television preachers like Amr Khaled….

The fair also has its darker sides, with anti-Christian polemics advocating conversion to Islam as the only solution to a flawed religion and, of course, plenty of editions of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for sale.

“It makes up a big part of our success, especially among the 18-25 crowd,” says Mahmoud Abdallah of the Syrian-Egyptian Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi publishing house.

Another voice from the Arab world in response to the latest Baghdad bombing – this time The Big Pharoah:

Everytime a suicide bomber kills himself along with hundreds of innocent people in Iraq I ask this question: how come up till now the Arab/Muslim world is not asking itself where these suicide bombers are coming from? Iraq’s suicide bombers are just too many. It’s very scary people. Here are people willing to kill themselves just to slaughter a few Shittes in a market or poor Iraqi police recruits. That freakin scary. If you can convince someone to blow up himself in the midst of a group of Shittes, then you can convince another to blow up anything. And what really makes me so angry is the fact that the Arab Muslim world, its intelligentsia, its religious leaders, its Al Jazeera, are paying zero attention to the fact that hundreds upon hundreds upon hundreds of Muslim youth are willing to blow themselves in anything. What makes me so angry is the fact that the Arab/Muslim world have no time to think about the mass murderers it’s pumping out everyday, it’s busy rioting over cartoons 4 months after they were published, busy complaining about “Islamophobia” in the West.

Whenever a Muslim blows up himself to kill hundreds of other Muslims I always tend to call that “the curse of the Jew”. We allowed and justified suicide bombings against innocent Israelis in cafes and malls. We religiously sanctioned the actions of every Palestinian suicide bomber who killed and maimed Israelis. Now it seems the suicide bombers are killing far more Muslims than Jews.

The deafening silence of the Arab/Muslim world towards the mass slaughters in Iraq indicate one thing: this region will stay in the abyss of darkness, ignorance, and backwardness for a very long time until someone really rises up, takes it by the neck, and forces it to look in a mirror and see the ugly reflection.

arms to kill people of other faiths are paying the heavier price.

First they attacked universities and schools, and now marketplaces and I don’t know what’s going to be next on their list. You can’t predict what power maniacs and insane terrorists are planning for.

The security plan isn’t at work yet and Baghdad is receiving heavy blows. This is not unexpected because the enemies recognize what Baghdad means to the outcome of this war. Life and stability in this city will mean defeat for terrorists of all backgrounds and they feel they must fight hard to stop this from happening.

In Rostov-on-Don they really know how to do abandoned houses:

And here’s Mendeleev’s old home: