At MEMRI, the first of several reports on anti-semitism in the Turkish media. With Mein Kampf in the bestseller list, here’s Abdurrahim Karakoç, a columnist at the Islamic newspaper Vakit:
It is impossible not to admire the foresight of Adolph Hitler, who is presented to public opinion as ‘racist, sadistic, and monstrous.’ Way back then, Hitler foresaw what would happen these [present] days. He cleansed off these swindler Jews, who believe in racism for a religion and take pleasure in bathing the world in blood, because he knew that they would become [this] big a curse for the world.
Plenty more where that came from.
h as studying or working hard. The Public Security Ministry warned people against participating in other demonstrations.
The reason? Partly trade, of course:
The People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party, on Wednesday published a front-page editorial urging local consumers not to boycott Japanese products amid the recent surge in anti-Japan sentiment.
The paper said that refusing to buy Japanese products hurts China as well as Japan. “China’s and Japan’s economies are more and more inter-dependent,” the editorial said. “To resist merchandise is destined to hurt the producers and consumers on both sides.”
But there’s a deeper reason: concern that the protests could get out of hand, and become spontaneous outbursts against the regime.
A major Chinese state-run newspaper has said in a staff editorial that the wave of popular protests against Japan were part of an “evil plot” with “ulterior motives,” suggesting that at least some elements of the Chinese leadership now wish to portray the demonstrations as a conspiracy to undermine the Communist Party.
The editorial, carried by the Liberation Daily of Shanghai on Monday, used the most strident language to date in an escalating campaign against the anti-Japan protests. Officials did relatively little to stop – some say they even encouraged – the protests over three consecutive weeks from late March to mid-April.
The authorities have now made it clear that they will not tolerate more protests and have detained some people involved in vandalism during earlier demonstrations, including 42 people Shanghai officials said they took into custody in recent days.
Officials are clearly concerned that the protests, if left unchecked, could evolve into a direct challenge to the party, especially as a string of sensitive political anniversaries approach in early May.
The Socialist Worker (!) sums it up:
During the Shanghai march, one 23 year old demonstrator claimed that the marchers were not simply motivated by opposition to Japan. “People are taking part in this march because they aren’t allowed to protest about anything else,” he told reporters.
There are signs of growing resistance in China. A riot broke out in the eastern village of Huankantou on 12 April following the police killing of two elderly women taking part in a protest against factory pollution.
Villagers fought off over 1,000 riot police, hospitalising 30. Official figures show a 15 percent rise in protests last year, involving over three million participants.
Faced with this the ruling party has a difficult balancing act. On 14 April a senior Communist Party official said that while he welcomed the anti-Japanese protests, “there is a state of concern, even panic, about whether this could get out of hand”.
After the furore over Larry Suimmers’ suggestion that innate differences in the male and female brain might be one factor underlying the relative scarcity of women in science, here’s an informative overview of the latest research:
To date, no one has uncovered any evidence that anatomical disparities might render women incapable of achieving academic distinction in math, physics or engineering. And the brains of men and women have been shown to be quite clearly similar in many ways. Nevertheless, over the past decade investigators have documented an astonishing array of structural, chemical and functional variations in the brains of males and females.
These inequities are not just interesting idiosyncrasies that might explain why more men than women enjoy the Three Stooges. They raise the possibility that we might need to develop sex-specific treatments for a host of conditions, including depression, addiction, schizophrenia and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Furthermore, the differences imply that researchers exploring the structure and function of the brain must take into account the sex of their subjects when analyzing their data–and include both women and men in future studies or risk obtaining misleading results.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center has the North Korean regime firmly in its sights (via NK Zone):
A human rights organization known for tracking down Nazi war criminals is taking aim at North Korea, saying the regime uses deadly nerve gas on its own citizens and may even be operating experimental gas chambers.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center sent American rabbi Abraham Cooper, the centre’s associate dean, to Asia to investigate the reports, which the North Korean regime denies.
Cooper interviewed a number of former North Korean officials who have since defected.
One man, a 55-year-old chemist, claimed he was in charge of an experiment to test the effect of deadly nerve gas on political prisoners.
“He said he was involved in the killing of two people – one who did not expire for 2½ hours, and the second didn’t die till 3½ hours had passed,” Cooper told CBC for a documentary airing Wednesday night on the radio program Dispatches.
Other defectors told him of “mass starvations, gruesome experimentations, and yes, as we now are beginning to learn and to confirm, gas chambers,” he said.
Soon Ok Lee, a North Korean now living in the United States, said she spent years in a political prison camp before escaping.
“When I was in jail, there was at least once or twice in the prison camp, chemical testing on humans that I witnessed,” she said.
Cooper said the Simon Wiesenthal Centre intends to pursue action against the North Korean regime, which it says might be guilty of crimes against humanity.
“We’re not talking about mass murder, utilizing these gas chambers to mass-murder huge numbers of people,” he said. “But on the other hand, you have in the North Korean regime folks who have learned from Hitler, from Stalin.”
During the Second World War, Hitler’s regime killed an estimated six million Jews, many of them in gas chambers. More than 10 million are estimated to have died as a result of Stalin’s collectivization policies and political purges in the 1930s.
The Simon Wiesenthal Center was founded in 1977 by a Holocaust survivor to preserve the memory of those killed by taking action against racism and genocide around the world, as well as helping bring Nazi war criminals to justice.
“We are here today to put the ‘N’ back into ‘Never again,’” said Cooper.
On Thursday, human rights activists in Asia, Europe and North America plan to stage demonstrations in a number of cities to draw attention to alleged rights violations in North Korea.
They are calling the effort “North Korea Freedom Day.”
he war but also the beginning of nearly a half-century of Soviet occupation, during which one in 10 Balts were murdered or deported to concentration camps and exile villages. The thought of applauding the same Red Army veterans who helped “pacify” their countries after 1945 was too much for the Estonian and Lithuanian presidents, who have refused to attend. Although the Latvian president will attend the Moscow festivities, she’s had to declare that she will use her trip to talk about the Soviet occupation. The president of Poland also has spent much of the past month justifying his decision to celebrate this particular anniversary in Moscow. By May 1945, after all, the leaders of what had been the Polish anti-Nazi resistance were already imprisoned in the Lubyanka, the KGB’s most notorious Moscow prison.
The Russian president hasn’t made anyone’s trip easier. Recently he told a radio interviewer that the Soviet Union was justified in signing the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939, in which the two totalitarian powers agreed to divide Poland and cede the Baltic states to the U.S.S.R. The Soviet Union, Putin said, was within its rights to protect the “security of its western borders,” as if annexing other countries were a legitimate form of border patrol. This week Putin went on to describe the collapse of the Soviet Union — which resulted in the liberation of Eastern Europe — as the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe” of the 20th century, presumably ranking it higher than the war itself. His countrymen, in symbolic agreement, have commissioned a host of new Stalin statues around the country to commemorate the end of the war. […]
Bush, too, should show that he understands what really happened in 1945. Every recent U.S. president has visited Auschwitz, and many have visited concentration camps in Germany, too. Perhaps it’s time for American presidents to start a new tradition and pay their respects to the victims of Stalin. This is made difficult by the dearth of monuments in Moscow, but it isn’t impossible. The president could, for example, lay a wreath at the stone that was brought from the Solovetsky Islands, the Soviet Union’s first political prison camp, and placed just across from the Lubyanka itself. Or he could visit one of the mass-execution sites outside of town.
Of course these would be nothing more than purely symbolic gestures. But a war anniversary is a purely symbolic event. Each commemoration helps all of us remember what happened and why it happened, and each commemoration helps us draw relevant lessons for the future. To falsify the record — to commemorate the triumph of totalitarianism rather than its defeat — sends the wrong message to new and would-be democracies in Europe, the former Soviet Union and the rest of the world.
ience with them will snap. There has been much bloodshed in Arab life, everyone knows all too well. But the Hariri murder, in full public view at midday in West Beirut, claimed the Syrian power structure as its collateral damage. Assad’s move to replace the head of military intelligence with his brother-in-law only days after Hariri’s murder was a clumsy response to the suspicions swirling around Syria.
The claims of an Iranian-Syrian accord should also not be given much credence. Iran’s horizons are wider, and Iran’s interests differ radically from those of Syria. For all their strident revolutionary poses, the Iranians are shrewd, unsentimental practitioners of realpolitik. Iran’s pursuit of its nuclear ambitions (or the barter of these ambitions for economic and political concessions from Europe and the United States) overwhelms the concerns of Syria, with its extortion rackets in the Bekaa Valley and Tripoli. Tehran will not ride to the rescue of Damascus. […]
[S]uddenly it seems like the autumn of the dictators. Something different has been injected into this fight. The United States — a great foreign power that once upheld the Arab autocrats, fearing what mass politics would bring — now braves the storm. It has signaled its willingness to gamble on the young, the new, and the unknown. Autocracy was once deemed tolerable, but terrorists, nurtured in the shadow of such rule, attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. Now the Arabs, grasping for a new world, and the Americans, who have helped usher in this unprecedented moment, together ride this storm wave of freedom.
away. The force of the explosions is impressive. “It’s like hitting a slightly rotten orange with a golf iron,” one Green activist explained yesterday. […]
Germans are particularly attached to toads and they have become, in some respects, a symbol of the Green movement.
aria law and they have taken measures to prevent this from happening.
In fighting causes of apostasy and bringing changes to the Muslim world, Mr. Warraq sees one solution: “without any post-colonial guilt, we must defend our values. We still have freedom of expression and the right to criticize Islam”. In this sense, publications in the West are very important in helping populations in Islamic countries.
“Jihad is the worst evil facing the world and the people of Sudan have experienced its cruelty more than any other group on earth”, began Mr. Simon Deng, former Sudanese slave. He continued by denouncing the Islamization, Arabization and enslavement that Southern Sudanese are currently victims of. These are accompanied by atrocities such as mass murders, slavery, systematic rape, religious persecution, enforced starvation and exile. Perpetrators of these crimes are “the radical jihadist regime in Khartoum”. According to Mr. Deng, the only reason for these attacks is the faithfulness to their religion and African culture of the Southern Sudanese.
“I was a slave. I am not ashamed to say it”, Mr. Deng continued. When he was nine years old, his village was raided, children shot dead, disabled or burned in their huts. He was abducted and given to an Arab family as a gift, but “when you look at me, do you see a gift? Do I look like an object?” He was forced to sleep next to the animals and eat his “masters” leftovers. However, “there is no shame in being a slave. It is not a choice. There is only shame in being a master”, he stated.
The former slave also stressed that this genocidal war conducted against Southern Sudanese was conducted in the name of Jihad. He noted that friends in the Arab world, especially Libya, have armed the jihadists.
Mr. Deng strongly criticized the international community and especially the UN, for being indifferent when “millions of African blacks were being slaughtered”. After the Holocaust, after Pol Pot’s massacre in Cambodia and even after Rwanda, despite its inaction, the international community said “never again”. In the case of Sudan, Mr. Deng argued, “nobody said anything at all. Our fate seems largely invisible to the world”. He saw two reasons for this silence. First, because the victims are black, the Southern Sudanese are victims of a global racism; second, they are victims of Arabs. Indeed, “when it comes to the ideology of Jihad, the Commission on Human Rights is muted, no one wishes to be seen as anti-Islamic”, he explained.
The Japanese are fighting back:
The Japanese Government is to conduct a survey of bias and propaganda in Chinese school textbooks to counter Chinese claims that it distorts its own history.
Nobutaka Machimura, the Japanese Foreign Minister, announced the survey yesterday after an inconclusive summit on Saturday between Junichiro Koizumi, the Japanese Prime Minister, and President Hu Jintao of China.
“From the perspective of a Japanese person, Chinese textbooks appear to teach that everything the Chinese Government has done has been correct,” Mr Machimura told a television chat show.
“There is a tendency toward this in any country, but the Chinese textbooks are extreme in the way they uniformly convey the ‘Our Country is Correct’ point of view.”
Are they going to dare mention Tibet? Highly unlikely: the Chinese don’t take kindly to insinuations about what does and what doesn’t constitute part of the People’s Republic.
On August 31, 2000, the Chinese government banned a Matsushita plant from selling its mobile phones in China for a full year because its phone software displayed the abbreviation, roc (an acronym for the Republic of China) when calling Taiwan. Matsushita claimed that this was an inadvertent mistake, and recalled the four models of telephones with the offending software. The company published apologies in the People’s Daily and 29 other newspapers. This contrition did not convince the government to remove the ban, however.
A few sharp reminders about the Great Leap Forward or the Cultural Revolution might be salutary, though.