Author: Mick Hartley

ria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

“They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, ‘God is great!’ ” she said. “At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god.” […]

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, “Are you a heretic?” He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: “Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see.” She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, “If someone were to kill you, it would be me.”

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.

“I have no fear,” she said. “I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles.”

e was violence. Anyone not affiliated with them was treated badly. During prayer time everyone was required to go to the mosque. If we didn’t go we were insulted and fined 50 dollars.”

50 dollars may not be a lot of money in the United States, but was a huge amount in a remote village in Iraqi Kurdistan while all of Iraq was under international sanctions. People needed the Oil for Food program just to stay alive.

“Did anyone here actually like Ansar Al Islam?” I asked.

“There were one or two very young people,” he said. “I am from here. We never had anything like that before. I was joking with my friends in this tea shop. We were arrested, chained, blindfolded, and beaten. Laughing was banned.”

“They were like the Taliban,” his friend said.

This news lends support to Eric Reeves’ prediction of grim times ahead in Darfur:

The United Nations refugee agency says it is being forced to cut its relief work in Darfur because of continued insecurity in the Sudanese region.

It said its 2006 budget for Darfur would be revised downwards by 44%. […]

The security situation is so volatile that aid workers cannot get to those in need.

Humanitarian convoys are being targeted, the agency said in its statement released in Geneva, and access to large areas of west Darfur is severely limited.

The refugee agency had been concentrating its work on west Darfur where there are currently over 650,000 internally displaced people.

But the increased violence means that work is being scaled down.

Winners of the Nobel Prize for Literature can, very occasionally, talk sense. Here’s Wole Soyinka (via b&w):

The action of the irreverent cartoonists and their editor need never have become a global issue. At best the offending images would have been seen by the small, minor community of its readers. What the atavists of religion have done is to expand the “territory of insult” into a limitless one. It is they who have brought greater contumely on the image of the Prophet through the now inevitable proliferation of the cartoons. More to the point, they have raised questions about the followers of the Prophet and their understanding of the world’s complexity. Let all such ponder, in all sobriety, on the commentary of yet another cartoon — this time by a French newspaper. That cartoon depicts a brooding, frustrated Prophet Mohammed while the caption reads: “It’s hard to be loved by idiots.” If only some of these professed lovers of Mohammed were not also psychopaths of faith! […]

While the mobs rage, the massacres of innocents, even within that same religion of Islam, continue unabated in Darfur. Never, in recent memory, has rape become so routine, almost mandatory, as a cherished weapon of aggression. Ancient societies are wiped out daily in a brutal campaign, openly articulated, to eliminate a racial identity. A refugee problem of gargantuan proportions stares the African continent in the face, a continent already riven apart by multiple civil wars.

Is it in the midst of this rampaging, racist obscenity called Darfur that the world is being invited to shift even its hazy focus, close down shop on vital concerns, wallow in an orgy of remorse, while the United Nations suspends its operations on behalf of traumatized humanity, all on account of some obscure cartoonist possessed by the Muse of irreverence? Clearly the world is askew, but not in the way some see it.

Industrial ruins and abandoned buildings from the other side of the iron curtain (via). I wonder what this used to be. Or this, and this.

unt question:

“The mayhem in Darfur, in western Sudan, where some 400,000 people may have been killed and 2 million-plus displaced, is worsening. The misery is spreading west into neighbouring Chad, unhinging that country and threatening a proxy war with Sudan. What can be done?” (“Chaos in western Sudan is threatening to engulf neighboring Chad” [dateline: N’Djamena, Chad], The Economist, March 2, 2006).

Obscenely, the question posed (“what can be done?”) has only answers increasingly attenuated by circumstances on the ground. “What can be done” to halt ongoing genocide by attrition—given the widespread and conspicuous failure of international will to date—is increasingly little. Darfur is poised to see a season of death like no other in this three-year catastrophe. Having dithered, delayed, postured, and obfuscated for so long, the international community has now simply run out of time. The most urgent of currently contemplated responses simply cannot halt the cascade of deadly effects rippling across the brutalized terrain of Darfur. Huge numbers will die in the coming rainy season, especially children under five (the rainy season runs from June to September, with July, August, and September typically the months of heaviest rains). Indeed, there are already signs of increased mortality, as well as morbidity and malnutrition that are harbingers of accelerating mortality rates.

A recent overview from the UN’s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs offers an unsparing assessment of curent trends. The prosaically entitled “Preliminary analysis of the impact of reduced access and funding shortages on humanitarian activities” (February 2006) forces upon us a terrifying vision of the likely consequences—near- to medium-term—of the ongoing contraction of humanitarian delivery, access, and resources.

Meanwhile demonstrators in Khartoum protest against UN plans to take over peacekeeping operations in Darfur:

The marchers, including militias backed by the government, chanted slogans and held banners saying such things as “UN Troops bring your coffins with you”. […]

Stirred up by violent rhetoric in Islamic newspapers, several thousands of people marched on the UN headquarters.

Our correspondent says many believe their country’s sovereignty is at stake, with the West eager to turn Sudan into another Iraq.

Death threats against Western diplomats have been published and militia groups have warned of a holy war.

And how’s this for chutzpah?

A Sudanese envoy has stressed his government’s opposition to the United Nations taking over peacekeeping duties from the African Union in Darfur.

The envoy, Mohamed Elsamani, said Western troops in any prospective UN force were particularly unacceptable to Sudan referring to the behaviour of US soldiers in Iraq.

“Regarding the bad conduct or treatment of some, whatever linked with the UN or individual countries like America, how it is treating people in Guantanamo, how the allies are treating people in Iraq, in Abu Ghraib prison, or killing civilians – it is not a process which will be accepted in Sudan,” he said.

irl participating in violent attacks…

(Thanks, Dom)

d” animals.

Pritchard’s list of selected genes also includes five that affect skin color. The selected versions of the genes occur solely in Europeans and are presumably responsible for pale skin. Anthropologists have generally assumed that the first modern humans to arrive in Europe some 45,000 years ago had the dark skin of their African origins, but soon acquired the paler skin needed to admit sunlight for vitamin D synthesis.

The finding of five skin genes selected 6,600 years ago could imply that Europeans acquired their pale skin much more recently. Or, the selected genes may have been a reinforcement of a process established earlier, Dr. Pritchard said.

It’s hard to imagine that classic natural selection – the survival of the fittest – would be responsible for such rapid evolution: just a few thousand years. I suppose it’s possible, but it would surely have to involve mutations which provide significant survival advantage, which would tend to rule out the usual suspects like being able to produce more vitamin D with pale skin. So perhaps sexual selection is involved here – which would tie in nicely with the recent speculation about blondes in Northern Europe.

Also, the possibilty that evolution continued long after the migration out of Africa, and after the distinctions between races had evolved, suggests that Steven Pinker’s answer to the Edge Annual Question (what is your dangerous idea?), that groups of people may differ genetically in their average talents and temperaments, might have been prescient.

f cruelty. Whether the Islamists – who are far from representing all Muslims – like it or not, there is no common measure between negating known facts and criticising any one of the beliefs which every European has the right to practice or poke fun at.