Author: Mick Hartley

What are Alien, Star Wars, Jurassic Park and so on really about? Iranian film critic Majid Shah-Hosseini has the answer:

Hollywood in the 1980’s was suddenly filled with monster movies, which were great blockbusters. Some of these monsters looked like aliens from outer space, others emerged from the bowels of the earth, and yet others came from prehistoric or mythical times to threaten modern mankind. At any rate, they were monsters. […]

In some cases, the message was so tangible that the viewer himself might unconsciously reach the conclusion that the prehistoric monster might be the embodiment of Islam, and that the monster underwent metamorphosis in modern times, and now threatens the very foundations of modernity.

These monsters would typically break free of the control of the normative system, and would behave in a very destructive manner. Whenever the monster would assume a more complex form, such as in Alien, it would break out of ancient eggs, which were released all over the galaxy several millennia ago. It would attack the American astronauts in the head, penetrate their minds, and nest within their bellies, and from there it would break out. During this painful delivery, it would kill the host who was contaminated by it. It was highly contagious, and would spread from one person to another. Some of these monsters had green blood, as a symbol [of Islam]. Sometimes, even this green blood itself was dangerous. […]

Another thing happened in the field of historical films, which should serve as a warning sign to us, and I think Iranian society has let it go by much too easily. I am referring to the film Alexander, produced by Mr. Oliver Stone. In this movie, for the first time, America’s rule of hegemony presented on screen its greatest wish – the conquest and occupation of Iran.

I blame Edward Said.

The comments on this Surrey Comet aricle are well worth five minutes of your time.

(via Metafilter)

Theocracy with a vengeance:

Residents of a southern Somalia town who do not pray five times a day will be beheaded, an Islamic courts official said Wednesday, adding the edict will be implemented in three days.

Public places such as shops and tea houses in Bulo Burto, about 124 miles northeast of the capital, Mogadishu, should be closed during prayer time and no one should be on the streets, said Sheik Hussein Barre Rage, the chairman of the town’s Islamic court.

Those who do not follow this edict “will definitely be beheaded according to Islamic law,” Rage told The Associated Press by phone. “As Muslims, we should practice Islam fully, not in part, and that is what our religion enjoins us to do.”

Great name, Sheikh Rage…

Sophie Scholl: The Final Days, a German film about the execution of a woman who distributed anti-Hitler literature in Munich in 1943, wins an award in Zimbabwe:

The audience in the cinema in Bulawayo was distressed, said the German Ambassador. Paul Themba Nyathi, the articulate opposition figure, had just been charged with inciting the Armed Forces to rise against Robert Mugabe, the President of Zimbabwe. Police had intercepted pamphlets that he and a party worker were distributing, which criticised the Government’s failure to ensure their welfare . “They are struggling to pay for food and health and education because they are poorly paid,” it said. He could get 20 years in jail….

“It was the echo that was so disturbing,” the ambassador said. The film won first prize in the local film festival, probably because of that, he said. Here it comes again.

Miss Scholl’s father was jailed after a workmate reported him for making a critical remark about Hitler; just like Bassanio Chikwiriri in Gwanda, who remarked in a bar that Mr Mugabe was the architect of Zimbabwe’s economic collapse. He got three months — suspended.

That’s all that seems to happen these days, arrest, arrest, arrest, usually with a beating, for the crime of inciting revolt or insulting the President, which seem to be the same thing. A word, a gesture out of line is hammered flat when it’s barely spoken. Last week four street actors in Bulawayo were performing a skit on hunger and queues. They were arrested and beaten up. No one in the commuter minibuses in Harare opens his mouth any more because of the likelihood of a Central Intelligence Organisation plant among the passengers.

“Die Sonne scheint noch,” (the Sun still shines), Miss Scholl said before they cut off her head. Like-minded Germans had an Allied invasion to look forward to, but Zimbabweans are content with lesser victories — such as Charles Zinyembe after he staged a demonstration in the small, dangerous town of Rusape with a placard saying, “Mugabe must go”.

Which Mugabe? The magistrate asked, and bravely acquitted him.

Or the elderly white man caught cursing the President under his breath as he left a Harare supermarket, which is what most people do, in shock at the latest surge in prices. He sped off before the police could stop him, and they couldn’t track him down at the central vehicle registry because the records were in chaos. He got away with it, and those who heard the story rejoiced in their hearts.

This (via Solomonia) is encouraging:

When a new student organization tried to push six anti-Israel bills through the student union at London’s Kingston University over the weekend, Muslim and Jewish students banded together to vote them down.

In a rare alliance, they argued that if their campus supported one political position over another, the university’s ideal of diversity would be damaged.

British universities have become increasingly known for taking action against Israel, either in student unions or through academic boycotts, and it seemed last week that Kingston would become yet another school on the growing list of anti-Israel institutions.

When the freshly-founded Friends of Palestine (FOP) set out a package of six anti-Israel resolutions for the student union to adopt, the 15 members of the university’s Jewish society thought they had no chance at fighting the legislation on a campus with thousands of Muslim students.

“I heard that the motions were put forward only 36 hours before the vote,” Sammy Kalmanowicz, an International Law student and president of the Kingston Jewish Society, told The Jerusalem Post.

“I read through the whole student union constitution. The whole day we were trying to bring people along because we knew that the FOP had been organizing these motions for weeks.”

Kalmanowicz contacted the campus chaplaincy and the Union of Jewish Students to ask for help.

Help also came from a less expected quarter. Shermarke Salah, Kalmanowicz’s Somali-born, Iraqi-raised Muslim flatmate decided to join in the struggle.

“It was the underlying principle of the proposals which I opposed,” said the soft-spoken Salah.

“Me and my flatmate Sammy have political differences, but we didn’t feel that the student union was the right forum to discuss them. The SU is there to serve the student body in a neutral position,” he said.

Salah characterized Friends of Palestine’s initiative as “a campaign from people outside of the university to impose politics on the campus.”

Salah, whose family left Somalia for Iraq, and then fled Iraq immediately prior to the first Gulf War, said he had strong views about diversity.

“Right now we have a good university. It’s tolerant and it’s calm, but it just takes one spark to set off an explosion. We must make it clear that we won’t accept such attitudes on campus,” he said, adding that his father had frequently reminded him that “the difference between tolerance and intolerance is just two letters.”

Salah’s message eventually carried the day. In the end, even the head of the university’s Islamic Society opposed the propositions because of the possibility that they would divide the student body.

“In the beginning, we had the better arguments, but we didn’t have the majority,” said Kalmanowicz. “I was so pessimistic, I was surprised that we got even one proposal defeated,” he said. Kalmanowicz described his campus as “culturally diverse” and without much racial tension.

That very diversity, he said, was what brought many of the campus’s Muslim student body as well as the Christian Society to vote against the proposals.

wandan Patriotic Front, made up mostly of Tutsis previously driven from their homeland by a series of earlier massacres, had invaded.

During the next three years Mitterrand had no compunction in sending in troops to save a brutal and corrupt regime. The Hutu army received millions of dollars of French weaponry; and the French elite training corps trained its Rwandan allies in how to dismember bodies, fire its new heavy artillery and use attack Gazelle helicopters.

Habyarimana was assassinated on April 6, 1994, when unknown assailants shot down his Falcon 50 jet, another present from the French taxpayer. The event ushered in possibly the hundred bloodiest days in history. Up to one million Tutsis were slaughtered.

As the body count grew, France welcomed ministers of the genocidal Government to an official reception in Paris. Meanwhile, its military continued to send arms to bolster its Hutu allies in power, regardless of the genocide they were perpetrating.

Since 1994 France has been adept at trying to hide this stain on la gloire. Its ministers, including the current Prime Minister, constantly repeat the “double genocide” myth, which alleged that while Hutu killed Tutsi, the Tutsi also killed Hutu. It is akin to claiming that Holocaust victims were also mass murderers.

So the latest French government attempt to cover its Rwandan shame is no surprise to observers of La Françafrique. The timing behind the sudden release of Judge Jean-Louis Bruguière’s report, which blames Kagame for Habyarimana’s death, is no coincidence. Four senior French military and political figures will shortly give testimony before the international war crimes tribunal in Arusha. They have been called by the defence team of Colonel Théoneste Bagosora, who faces charges of being the mastermind behind the genocide.

It is deeply embarrassing, like being called to defend Nazis at Nuremberg. Shortly, too, Kagame’s government of reconciliation, which drove the genocidaire out in 1994, will announce the findings of its own inquiry into the French involvement in the genocide. It promises to uncover even more explicit details of Mitterrand’s crime.

And what of those old allies of the French, the Hutus who were driven out of Rwanda into the Congo when Kagame and his Rwandan Patriotic Front seized power, the Interhamwe? – or as they now style themselves, the Federation for the Liberation of Rwanda. Well, this – if you have a strong stomach – is what they’re up to nowadays.

se views did not align with its policies to retire. University and faculty heads were replaced by associates of President Ahmadinejad, many of them lacking experience in academic administration. These moves evoked widespread protest on the part of university students and faculty, which have been brutally suppressed by the regime. Today, a second wave of dismissals appears to be underway at the Iranian universities.

In the past months, the regime has also targeted numerous websites and online papers affiliated with intellectuals and reformist dissidents. For example, the online dailies Sharq and Rouzegar and the monthly Nameh have been closed down, while the website Entekhab and the women’s monthly Meidan-e Zanan have been blocked to readers inside Iran.

excel,” Payton said.

“For example, where death certificates and hospital reports are required, the regime’s attitude is ‘tell us what you want, we’ll give it to you.’”

In the case of a ferry accident that allegedly took place last April, near the coastal city of Wonsan, North Korean authorities declared that 129 people had died aboard the vessel after it struck a rock about 1,000 yards off the Korean coast, and only about 100 yards from an island. All of them, the Koreans claim, had been automatically covered with life insurance when they bought their ferry ticket, and that insurance risk had been passed on to the London market through a common reinsurance product known as “excess loss personal accident reinsurance.” Here the claims from reinsurers totaled about 5 million euros, or roughly $6 million.

The North Koreans claimed that most of the victims had died of hypothermia in the freezing water. Industry sources say that when insurance investigators discovered that weather conditions were warmer than claimed at that time, the North Koreans responded that severe winds were blowing from Siberia in the spring, making the water unusually frigid.

When insurers asked for permission to send an independent diver to inspect the ferry wreck, they were refused.

To get North Korea’s side of the story, FOX News approached the regime’s official insurance representative in London, Song Ryon Ko, at his home. Song refused to discuss the issue and hastily closed his door.

It’d make a great dystopian sci-fi novel: a totalitarian regime which survived by killing its citizens and claiming the life insurance money. Too far-fetched, I suppose.

(via One Free Korea)

love trumped racism. If that’s the case, maybe there is hope for a multicultural France after all.

Yes indeed, hope for a multicultural France after all: united by their common hatred of the Jews.

Jenny McCartney in the Telegraph, on veil politics (via b&w):

Britain, for all its faults, is not a society in which women are pestered or harassed as a matter of course. When we walk outside we have to contend with a tuneless wolf whistle at worst. For a woman here to argue that simply uncovering her face will automatically inflame the men around her to dangerous levels of lust is absurd: indeed, it is ostentatious modesty inflated to the point of vanity. To feel compelled to wear the full veil in Britain is the sexual equivalent of attending a Quaker meeting accompanied by three heavily-armed bodyguards.

The rest of the article’s pretty good too.