Author: Mick Hartley

e establishment of] an Islamic state that would discriminate against religious minorities, marginalize them and encourage them to emigrate…

“The spreading of the Islamic movement and extremist Salafi views throughout Egyptian society led to the removal of Copts from the Parliament, municipalities, labor unions and [other] prominent positions, and limitations began to be imposed on the building and renovation of churches. Some [churches] were [even] attacked and burned down, and Christians were accused of heresy. […]

“During its last years in power, Saddam’s regime in Iraq gave the Salafi movements freedom of action, and after its fall [these movements] led the terrorist activity along with the remnants of the old regime… Among their most conspicuous actions was the bombing of six churches on a single Sunday, resulting in massive Christian emigration. Since the Gulf War, at least a third of Iraq’s Christian population has emigrated [to other countries]…

“In the West Bank and Gaza, armed Islamic movements regard Palestine as a Muslim waqf [religious endowment], and call to defend the places holy to the Muslims while disregarding places holy to the Christians… The few Christian women living in Gaza have to wear a veil out of fear of the extremists. A few weeks ago, the last shop selling wines in Gaza was bombed, even though it belonged to international organizations…

“The Christians of Saudi Arabia were rooted out centuries ago. The hundreds of thousands of Christians who now work in Saudi Arabia, arriving from the neighboring countries or from far-away lands, are not allowed to build churches there. [Moreover], they risk beatings, imprisonment, and deportation, [even] if they hold their ceremonies in secret, in their own homes. At the same time, the Saudi regime uses its oil profits to build grandiose mosques all over ‘heretical’ Europe.

“The Christians in Lebanon have diminished from 50% before the civil war to 35% today. Christians comprise 3.5 million out of the 5 million Lebanese emigrants living in the West…

“While in ancient times, discrimination, marginalization, accusations of heresy, and persecution drove many [Christians] to convert to Islam, today they are driven to emigrate, as long as the gates remain open. This may cause Christianity to decline in its original home in the East.

“Are we moving towards exclusively Muslim societies? Will this deterioration stop here, or will it lead, after the Eastern countries are emptied of Christians, to [a state] of sectarian purity in each country?

Camilla Cavendish in the Times:

For years, the Immigration and Nationality Directorate and the Prison and Probation Service have been slowly dissolving in the stew of their own staggering incompetence. Those on the inside can only shrug at the latest revelation that more than 1,000 convicted rapists, murderers, drug dealers and other nasties who should have been deported are roaming a land where they have no business to be, with no one knowing where most of them are. Those on the outside have suddenly had enough. This should be a turning point.

In the past few years the metropolitan elite have been too busy boasting about how little they pay their Filipina nannies and Hungarian cleaners to bother much about the violent gangs, paedophiles, traffickers and drug mules who have slipped in alongside. Now they are told that Wormwood Scrubs is occupied by 85 nationalities speaking 24 languages, and that almost 13 per cent of those in detention are foreign, it will be harder to cast the white working classes so exclusively as the thugs and xenophobes. The failure to deport foreign criminals is not just a “breakdown in communications”, as Charles Clarke has claimed. It is also a consequence of the deliberate policy of encouraging immigration on an unprecedented scale, a policy that has never been put to the electorate. Once again the Government is lamenting that it has lost control of the paperwork, and is promising to do better. But when you’ve lost control of the borders, the paperwork is pretty meaningless.

Since the abolition of embarkation controls in 1988, there has been no effective record of who comes in and out of Britain. Our visa offices overseas, as one despairing immigration officer with 40 years’ experience told me recently, “are instructed to issue visas to all and sundry with the most cursory of interviews or none at all”. A criminal record was no bar to entry for the Latvian rapist who had served ten years at home before killing a schoolgirl in Greenford, West London last year. Nor to the Pole who raped a woman in Llanelli after serving nine years in Poland.

Might these facts – just possibly – have something to do with the recent BNP scare?

What makes it worse is the zeal with which the Home Office pursue genuinely deserving cases: for instance, their determination to deport Zimbabwean asylum seekers back into the hands of Mugabe’s goons, or the case of Eleonora Suhoviy.

It looks like symbolic gestures are the best we can hope for on Darfur:

The UN Security Council has passed a resolution imposing sanctions against four Sudanese nationals accused of war crimes in Sudan’s Darfur region.

The four include two rebel leaders, a former Sudanese air force chief, and the leader of a pro-government militia, accused of widespread atrocities.

But the war goes on:

The BBC’s Orla Guerin in Darfur met streams of civilians who said they were fleeing their remote village of Jogana.

They said they had been attacked by government aircraft and militiamen that were fighting rebel forces in the area.

Our correspondent said she could hear the sound of bombing from 40km (25 miles) away.

African Union (AU) peacekeepers met the civilians and gave them water but did not intervene in the fighting.

Meanwhile (via AL Daily) a suggestion: go private.

The UN and others clearly have legitimate questions about whether private military companies can do what they claim. But the industry, agitating to lend a hand where the international community has dragged its feet, has raised some legitimate questions of its own. When the world’s governments and multilateral organizations have proven as ineffectual as they have in Darfur, should they turn to the private sector for help? In the absence of a viable alternative, is the international community’s aversion to what some call ”mercenarism” stronger than its will to fight genocide?

Private contractors have been providing logistics in low-intensity conflicts in African nations for years, and conducting training operations as well. Dyncorp, for example, is currently involved in what is by most accounts a very successful mission in Liberia, helping train the army and national guard in the aftermath of Liberia’s long and bloody civil war.

Indeed, while the industry has grown and matured in Iraq due to the US military’s unprecedented reliance on contractors there, it’s actually in Africa that early private military companies first did significant work.

itical activists. But if we had to pick on a single figure, it would have to be Noam Chomsky.

The problem is that Chomsky’s separation of science and politics is a myth. His own science – his linguistics – is political through and through. Chomsky defines language as not social. He defines it as an object inside the individual head. He says it doesn’t have any special communicative function – mostly, we use language just for privately thinking to ourselves. He says that the meanings of words are not socially negotiated but wired into the brain in advance as features of the human genome. In my view, to say all this is pure nonsense – stark, raving nonsense. But it is not politically neutral nonsense. To argue for such far-fetched positions is is to adopt an ideological stance – that of the liberal bourgeoisie. Chomsky is the most virulent imaginable opponent of social science in general and of Marxism in particular. Since the late 1950s, bourgeois hostility towards Marxism in western intellectual life has found its most extreme and articulate champion in Noam Chomsky.

There’s a quote to try out at your next Respect meeting.]

chair, connect various cables to different parts of your body. When they turn them on, you started hallucinating. You hear weird and frightening sounds in your ears and you want to die. At least 400 prisoners who entered this room attempted suicide, and 90 lost their sanity.”

Vakit: “How was the morale among the prisoners?”

Sen: “Despite all the tortures, morale is alive among the Guantanamo prisoners. Sacred dreams help with this. […] One day an Afghani brother called to a Kuwaiti sage and told him that he had dreamed that the Prophet [Muhammed] had spoken to him and said that Allah had not forgotten them and that the angels were watching them – and that a good surprise was awaiting them […]

Vakit: “How were you received at Guantanamo?”

Sen: “The same way as at the military base in Kandahar. We were received with attacks by U.S. soldiers. Even though we were chained and our heads were covered, they kept beating us. My entire body was bleeding. I passed out. When I woke, I was in an interrogation room. They had removed the sack from my head. Facing me were 10 soldiers with Jewish skullcaps on their heads, four women and six men, and a Turkish translator. […] One of the soldiers instructed the women soldiers to strip me. The women soldiers cut my clothes with scissors and left me […] naked. […]”

Vakit: “You mentioned soldiers with skullcaps. Were there many of these at Guantanamo?”

Sen: “I can tell you. Ninety percent of the soldiers at Guantanamo wore skullcaps. They all had Jewish names. There were also 15 rabbis in Guantanamo that we counted. At least one rabbi was present during interrogations […]”

Vakit: “For how long did you stay in the interrogation room?”

Sen: “I was subjected to continuous torture for 10 days straight. They kept asking me where Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar could be found. […] Then they took me to another room where there was a TV. They made me watch an immoral film. They beat me and gave me more electricity whenever I lowered my head. After that, two soldiers carried out [sexual] activity with one another in front of everyone. A woman soldier asked me to do the same. […] When I refused, they took me to the ‘insanity room.’ […]”

Vakit: “[…] What did you do in your cells every day?”

Sen: “We read the Koran all the time […] and organized some protests. […] We sang marches praising Osama bin Laden […] We called out slogans that the victory promised by Allah would soon be delivered, that the jihad fighters would win and that Islam would be victorious […]”

Wait till the Independent gets to hear about this….

Muslim-controlled government in Khatoum.

The Sudanese government’s genocidal campaign against the Darfurians, he contended, is part of a “longstanding project” of Arabization of the southern part of the country inspired by Sudanese leaders Omar al-Bashir and Hassan al-Turabi, former associates of Libyan leader Muammar al-Qaddafi. The campaign is part of a larger plan to spread Arab control over the African continent, Soyinka said.

Soyinka criticized the press for labeling any conflict that breaks out in Africa as “tribal” or “ethnic” but “going silent when the conflict is between the Arab and black world.”

This “bashfulness” about holding Arabs responsible for their crimes extends to history as well, he said. “You can’t speak about the history of slavery without engaging with the Arab role.”

d, and several senior al Qaeda and Sunni Arab terrorist leaders were caught. In many ways, the Sunni Arab terrorists are more lethal than the al Qaeda groups. Most of the Sunni Arab groups are remnants of Saddam Hussein’s security forces. These fellows have lots of blood on their hands, and fear retribution, either in the form of war crimes trials, or simply revenge from the kin of the many people they killed. Vengeful Kurds and Shia Arabs know exactly who they are looking for, as Saddam’s thugs never hid their identities. So the desperate thugs go on killing, in hopes of getting an amnesty deal. But to make a deal, they need someone to deal with. That won’t happen until the new government is in place. In the beginning of the year, American commanders held their fire, but then it was decided to keep going with the anti-terrorist operations, as it appeared that the Iraqis were deadlocked on forming a new government. So May will be a bloody month as well.

Meanwhile, members of the pro-Iran Badr militia are showing up in the northern oil city of Kirkuk. That’s odd, because Shia Arabs are a small minority up there, where the most numerous groups are Kurds and Sunni Arabs (plus Turks and Iraqi Christians.) In Kirkuk, Kurdish civilians continue to move back to the city, and, with the assistance of Kurdish militias, try to force out Sunni Arabs moved in over the last two decades by Saddam (who forced out the Kurds who are now returning.) American troops and Iraqi police will interfere with blatant attempts at ethnic cleansing, but it goes on anyway, just more slowly, quietly and sort of out of sight. The Kurds want to make Kirkuk, and all its oil (some $30 billion worth a year), part of the Kurdish controlled north. Ultimately, that has to be decided by the Iraqi parliament, and the Kurds are ready to deal on this point. The Sunni Arabs see themselves as the big losers, because the rest of Iraq’s oil is in the south, where Shia Arabs are very much the majority, and in control.

While the Kurds lust after Kirkuk, they are being threatened by the Turkish and Iranian armies. That’s because of Kurdish support for PKK radical nationalists. The Kurdish government in the north has tolerated the presence of several thousand PKK fighters. The PKK is fighting for “Greater Kurdistan” (including southeast Turkey, northern Iraq, parts of Iran and Syria.) This sort of thing is very popular with most Kurds, thus the Kurdish leaders feel they cannot crack down on the PKK (as the U.S. and Turkey constantly demand). This year, the PKK has been very active just across the border in Turkey and Iran, attacking police and army units. The Turks and Iranians are fighting back. There are already over 2,000 Turkish troops inside Iraq. This sort of presence has been tolerated for years, as long as the Turks were just looking for PKK camps in remote areas. But the Turks have over 50,000 troops on the border, and appear ready to expand their operations in northern Iraq. Meanwhile, to the east. Iranian troops are moving to the border, and Iranian artillery is being fired into Iraq, at areas believed occupied by the PKK.

Maybe it’s the name change that appeals. He used to be Trevor, from Hackney. Now he’s Abu Izzadeen, leading ideologue of the extreme Islamist Saved Sect.

The Times has obtained transcripts of Omar Brooks, now known as Abu Izzadeen, preaching holy war and discussing killing Tony Blair in a recent sermon in London. Abu Izzadeen had previously described the July 7 bombings as “completely praiseworthy” and organised demonstrations in support of the September 11 hijackers.

His organisation, the Saved Sect, was formed from the remnants of the disbanded extremist group al-Muhajiroun, which the Government intended to proscribe. However, it is not on the Home Office’s list of 40 banned terrorist organisations, and a spokeswoman refused to comment on whether it could be outlawed. […]

The Saved Sect, also known as the Saviour Sect, rejects democracy and wants Britain to adopt Sharia, or Islamic law. It believes that it is the only group representing the true Islamic path, but has links with another al-Muhajiroun successor, al-Ghurabaa, whose leader was arrested during extremist protests against the publication of cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad.

In lectures given last month at an unknown London location, Abu Izzadeen said that a war was being fought to make Islamic law “completely dominant” in Britain, and that “all Jews and Christians are going to hell fire”….

Abu Izzadeen said: “There is a war here [in Britain]. Maybe you don’t have weapons, but there is [sic] arrests against the Muslim community, there is brutality by the police. It is a form of war against the Muslims here as well.” He elicited laughter when he said: “If I said to you we’re going to conquer Rome, or if I said to you, we’re going to kill George Bush and we’re going to kill Tony Blair, you said to me: ‘Which come first bro?’.

And then there’s David Myatt, neo-Nazi fruitcake and leader of Combat 18, who now calls himself Abdul Aziz ibn Myatt:

[H]is belief is now that: “The pure authentic Islam of the revival, which recognises practical jihad (holy war) as a duty, is the only force that is capable of fighting and destroying the dishonour, the arrogance, the materialism of the West . . . For the West, nothing is sacred, except perhaps Zionists, Zionism, the hoax of the so-called Holocaust, and the idols which the West and its lackeys worship, or pretend to worship, such as democracy.

“They want, and demand, that we abandon the purity of authentic Islam and either bow down before them and their idols, or accept the tame, secularised, so-called Islam which they and their apostate lackeys have created.

“This may well be a long war, of decades or more — and we Muslims have to plan accordingly. We must affirm practical jihad — to take part in the fight to free our lands from the kuffar (unbelievers). Jihad is our duty.”

The five Bulgarian nurses and Palestinian doctor accused of infecting hundreds of Libyan children with HIV are to face a new trial next month:

The Bulgarian foreign ministry said the trial in Libya would begin on 11 May.

In December, Libya’s Supreme Court overturned death sentences and ordered a retrial for the medics who say they were tortured into confessing.

It is alleged that they deliberately used HIV-tainted blood on children at a hospital in Benghazi in the 1990s.

See here for some background.

ange persistence of a proven forgery:

A catalog of threatening modernity is being boasted of: liberal rights proliferate, faith falters, commerce rules, citizens are seduced by “corruption and luxury.” “Think carefully of the successes we arranged for Darwinism, Marxism, Nietzscheism,” the Jews in “The Protocols” say, and look what “disintegrating” effect these ideas have had. These Jews claim to be undermining the world with “disenchantments” in order to take it over.

This forgery encapsulates the image of the cosmopolitan Jew as the unprincipled molder of modernity.

But modernity and liberalism are never really meant seriously by these Jews; the ideas are manipulations, fabrications. In addition these Jews sound as if they could confirm Al Qaeda or Islamist movements in their indictments against the West. The Jews of “The Protocols,” in their determination to dissolve national boundaries in pursuit of power and profit, could also as easily be associated with globalization, inspiring anti-Americanism as much as anti-Semitism. “The Protocols” feeds into a wide variety of resentments and longings for a premodern world.

But the really astonishing thing is this: These Jews, in secretly planning to overturn the very forces of liberalism and modernity they have just created are doing just what their anti-Semitic nemeses desire. That is not the only point of agreement. Look at the Jews’ approach in “The Protocols.” They believe in absolute power. They will brook no opposition. They will use the rights and values of liberalism to undermine it, exploiting its weaknesses. They will be patient and ruthless and unrelenting.

Hitler once said he used similar techniques for similar ends. He did. So do the Islamists. If “The Protocols” has found such resonance among anti-Semites across the world, it is partly because, in its villainous Jews, they see images of what they yearn to be.