Author: Mick Hartley

From the Washington Post:

Saudi Arabia’s public schools have long been cited for demonizing the West as well as Christians, Jews and other “unbelievers.” But after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 — in which 15 of the 19 hijackers were Saudis — that was all supposed to change.

A 2004 Saudi royal study group recognized the need for reform after finding that the kingdom’s religious studies curriculum “encourages violence toward others, and misguides the pupils into believing that in order to safeguard their own religion, they must violently repress and even physically eliminate the ‘other.’ ” Since then, the Saudi government has claimed repeatedly that it has revised its educational texts….

The problem is: These claims are not true.

A review of a sample of official Saudi textbooks for Islamic studies used during the current academic year reveals that, despite the Saudi government’s statements to the contrary, an ideology of hatred toward Christians and Jews and Muslims who do not follow Wahhabi doctrine remains in this area of the public school system. The texts teach a dualistic vision, dividing the world into true believers of Islam (the “monotheists”) and unbelievers (the “polytheists” and “infidels”).

This indoctrination begins in a first-grade text and is reinforced and expanded each year, culminating in a 12th-grade text instructing students that their religious obligation includes waging jihad against the infidel to “spread the faith.”

An example from the Eighth Grade:

“As cited in Ibn Abbas: The apes are Jews, the people of the Sabbath; while the swine are the Christians, the infidels of the communion of Jesus.”

“God told His Prophet, Muhammad, about the Jews, who learned from parts of God’s book [the Torah and the Gospels] that God alone is worthy of worship. Despite this, they espouse falsehood through idol-worship, soothsaying, and sorcery. In doing so, they obey the devil. They prefer the people of falsehood to the people of the truth out of envy and hostility. This earns them condemnation and is a warning to us not to do as they did.”

“They are the Jews, whom God has cursed and with whom He is so angry that He will never again be satisfied [with them].”

The Sunday Times on slavery in Pakistan:

A senior member of an Islamic organisation linked to Al-Qaeda is funding his activities through the kidnapping of Christian children who are sold into slavery in Pakistan.

The Sunday Times has established that Gul Khan, a wealthy militant who uses the base of Jamaat-ud Daawa (JUD) near Lahore, is behind a cruel trade in boys aged six to 12.

They are abducted from remote Christian villages in the Punjab and fetch nearly £1,000 each from buyers who consign them to a life of misery in domestic servitude or in the sex trade.

Khan was exposed in a sting organised by American and Pakistani missionaries who decided to save 20 such boys and return them to their homes. Using a secret camera, they filmed him accepting $28,500 (£15,000) from a Pakistani missionary posing as a businessman who said he wanted to set up an operation in which the boys would beg for cash on the streets.

Khan was observed driving from the meeting with a knapsack full of cash to the JUD headquarters at Muridke, near Lahore. […]

The undercover missionaries have demanded the prosecution of Khan and an investigation into his work for the JUD, which claims to have created a “pure Islamic environment” at Muridke.

Hafez Muhamed Sayeed, its leader, was accused of inciting riots in Pakistan this year with speeches denouncing western “depravity” after a Danish newspaper published cartoons of the prophet Muhammad.

ess an opinion on anything remotely political. This is what Kanan Makiya meant when he described Saddam Husseins regime as a republic of fear.

Today, again by way of dramatic contrast, Iraqis are voluble to a fault. Talk radio, television talk-shows, and Internet blogs are all the rage, while heated debate is the order of the day in shops, tea-houses, bazaars, mosques, offices, and private homes. A catharsis is how Luay Abdulilah, the Iraqi short-story writer and diarist, describes it. This is one way of taking revenge against decades of deadly silence. Moreover, a vast network of independent media has emerged in Iraq, including over 100 privately-owned newspapers and magazines and more than two dozen radio and television stations. To anyone familiar with the state of the media in the Arab world, it is a truism that Iraq today is the place where freedom of expression is most effectively exercised. […]

What all of this demonstrates is that, contrary to received opinion, Operation Iraqi Freedom was not an attempt to impose democracy by force. Rather, it was an effort to use force to remove impediments to democratization, primarily by deposing a tyrant who had utterly suppressed a well-established aspect of the countrys identity. It may take years before we know for certain whether or not post-liberation Iraq has definitely chosen democracy. But one thing is certain: without the use of force to remove the Baathist regime, the people of Iraq would not have had the opportunity even to contemplate a democratic future.

the ideology of the Nazis.”

Iranian expatriates living in Canada yesterday confirmed reports that the Iranian parliament, called the Islamic Majlis, passed a law this week setting a dress code for all Iranians, requiring them to wear almost identical “standard Islamic garments.”

The law, which must still be approved by Iran’s “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenehi before being put into effect, also establishes special insignia to be worn by non-Muslims.

Iran’s roughly 25,000 Jews would have to sew a yellow strip of cloth on the front of their clothes, while Christians would wear red badges and Zoroastrians would be forced to wear blue cloth.

Update: (via Harry’s Place) this story is being disputed. It is, I’ll admit, implausible – though with Ahmadinejad anything’s possible.

The hobbit controversy rears up again, with another claim that homo floresiensis was just a microcephalic homo erectus. As usual, Carl Zimmer is the man with the details.

A look at some masterpieces of Stalinist architecture which never made it to the materialist stage of history (via). Check out the Palace of Soviets, taller than the Empire State building, topped off with a 100 metre statue of Lenin, and, my favourite, the building of the People’s Commissariat of Нeavy Industry, a wonderful piece of proletarian classicism. Something about it just appeals to my inner ant.

Scarcely a week goes by without another group of scientists claiming to have shown that language isn’t a uniquely human skill. It’s as though it’s part of a scientist’s job description: prove that we’re really no different from animals.Here’s the latest effort:

Monkeys are able to string together a simple “sentence”, according to research that offers the first evidence that animals might be capable of a key feature of language.

British scientists have discovered that the putty-nosed monkey in Nigeria…sometimes communicates by combining sounds into a sequence that has a different meaning from any of its component calls, an ability that was thought to be uniquely human.

Although many animals communicate with one another using calls that have a particular meaning — usually a warning signifying the presence of a certain predator — none has been known to combine these alarm calls into sequences similar to those of human language.

The findings suggest that the rudiments of syntax, a basic component of human language, may be more widespread among primates than is generally thought, and could ultimately shed light on the evolution of this most distinctly human of traits.

The putty-nosed monkeys, Cercopithecus nictitans, of the Gashaka Gumti National Park, have two main alarm call sounds. A sound known onomatopoeically as the “pyow” warns other animals against a lurking leopard, and a cough-like sound that scientists call a “hack” is used when an eagle is hovering near by.

Kate Arnold and Klaus Zuberbühler, of the University of St Andrews, have now observed the monkeys using these sounds in a new way. A particular sequence of pyows and hacks appears to mean something entirely different.

The monkeys live in groups consisting of a single adult male accompanied by several adult females and their young. When the male utters this “sentence”, consisting of up to three pyows followed by up to four hacks, it seems to be a command telling others to move, generally to find safer, less exposed terrain.

Isn’t it rather begging the question to assume that this is syntactical? They’ve got one call for leopards, another for eagles, and now it seems there’s a third for a general “let’s move” command, which happens to consist of a mix of the two other sounds. So what? It might be convincing if one pyow followed by three hacks meant, “hey, let’s party”, two hacks a pyow and a fart meant, “fancy scratching my arse?”, and a pyow, three hacks, another pyow and a raising of the right leg meant “I’m bored with all this leaping about from tree to tree, can’t we just, you know, cool it and admire the view?”, but really, this is no big deal.

Face it, chaps – language really is uniquely human.

Saddam’s quarter-century in power was a virtually uninterrupted exercise in bloodletting in nearly every direction.

Soon after becoming president, he massacred personal opponents in and outside of his ruling Baath party. For the next two decades, he would subject critics and adversaries to a steady stream of torture, assassination, and terror, including the rape rooms, prison horrors, and executions that were regularly reported by Amnesty International and others. Fellow Sunni Arabs were not exempt, but the main categories of victims were Iranians, Kuwaitis, and Iraq’s Kurds and Shiites.

In 1980, Saddam launched a needless and bloody war against majority-Shiite Iran and terrorized Iraq’s own Shiites to ensure their quiescence. As that war wound down, Saddam was freed to turn his attention to the Kurds whose loyalty was, indeed, questionable. In the 1988 “Anfal” campaigns, his henchmen killed 100,000 or more Kurds (including through poison gas) and forcibly resettled thousands more in desolate regions elsewhere in Iraq–events that Human Rights Watch declared “genocide.”

Two years later, he invaded Kuwait and treated its civilians with notable brutality. When Operation Desert Storm shattered Saddam’s army, both Kurds and southern Iraqi Shiites rose in revolt, and the regime maintained power through astonishing savagery, which filled mass graves across southern Iraq with an unknown number of Shiites–perhaps in the hundreds of thousands. The same images are evoked again and again: rapes, murder of children, forms of torture that make your eyes flinch from the page, and masses of victims buried in the night.

The book’s marketing strategy prominently claims that Saddam’s quarter-century claimed two million lives. That might overstate the tragedy. It’s also premature; researchers simply can’t settle on a persuasive number of victims until those mass graves are unearthed in the years to come. But what cannot be denied is the scope of Saddam’s atrocities. Within his regime, Saddam ruled like Stalin: Everyone in the elite was a potential victim, and knew it. Outside the regime, he ruled more like Hitler: Since oil-rich Iraq didn’t need Soviet-style slave labor, Saddam simply killed his adversaries.

In one of the most insightful essays, Hazem Saghieh, a prominent London-based Lebanese journalist, argues that comparisons to those totalitarian counterparts are not out of place. And in the preface, Bernard Kouchner, the human rights campaigner and founder of Doctors Without Borders, unabashedly calls Saddam “one of the worst tyrants in history.”

Ah well.

I thought we might hold on, but once Barca had equalised there was only one winner.

Still, great game. Shame about Lehmann. It’s in the nature of goalies that they’re either heroes or villains: he just picked a bad night to get sent off.

ul says many here already see this as an attack on secularism itself – the founding principle of the Turkish republic.

The attacker was apparently carrying papers that identified him as a lawyer – although it is not known if these were genuine – and made it past security guards undetected.

He reportedly burst into a committee meeting of the Council of State, the top administrative court, at 1000 local time (0700 GMT) shouting “Allahu akbar” (God is great) as he fired his weapon.

Tansel Colasan, deputy head of the Council of State, said the attacker yelled “I am the soldier of God”, and said he was carrying out the attack to protest against the court’s decision on headscarves….

Judge Mustafa Birden made headlines earlier this year when he ruled that schoolteachers, who are banned from wearing the Islamic headscarf at work, could not cover their heads even on their way to school.

An Islamist newspaper printed photographs of him and fellow judges from the court’s second chamber, which deals with education issues….

The court’s decision on headscarves has been condemned as illegal by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, whose ruling party has Islamist roots.

Anyone shouts “Allahu akbar”, it’s odds on they’re aiming to kill people.