Blog

s that the Israeli president is being kept alive by organs stolen from Palestinian children, and an Israeli military commander is seen kidnapping UN employees and Palestinians.

Update: Once that old trade-in-human-organs meme gets going, there’s no stopping it. This story from the Saudi government daily Al-Watanwas was also published in the Iranian daily Jomhouri-ye Islami, and the Syrian daily Teshreen:

“Secret European military intelligence reports indicate the transformation of the American humanitarian mission in Iraq into a profitable trade in the American markets through the practice of American physicians extracting human organs from the dead and wounded, before they are put to death, for sale to medical centers in America. A secret team of American physicians follow the troops during their attacks on Iraqi armed men to ensure quick [medical] operations for extracting some organs and transferring them to private operations rooms before they are transferred to America for sale.

“The reports confirm the finding of tens of mutilated cadavers or cadavers missing parts. Some were found without a head. The American military command could not offer reasons to explain the bewilderment about the missing parts, suggesting that this may have been caused by the penetration of bullets to the [missing] parts. But these excuses cannot be medically accepted. The reports also confirmed that the burning of bodies was deliberate in order to conceal the crime of organ extraction. [The reports] further indicate that American medical teams have [made] active and suspicious moves in Iraq to recruit some Iraqis to guide them to dead and critically injured individuals to engage in the extraction of organs. These teams offer $40 for every usable kidney and $25 for an eye. The reports confirm the finding of mutilated bodies in Fallujah. The reports indicate that the cadavers are immunized inside special cars to prevent the spread of the plague until the bodies are buried by their relatives.

It’s not exactly a surprise, but now the Iraqis claim to have evidence that senior Syrian officials have been assisting the Iraqi insurgency:

The evidence includes photographs of Syrian officials taken from Iraqi fighters captured during the offensive against Fallujah last month.

US Marines in Fallujah also found a hand-held global-positioning system receiver with waypoints originating in western Syria and the names of four Syrians in a list of 27 foreign fighters contained in a ledger.

Hassan Allawi, Iraq’s newly appointed Ambassador to Syria, told The Times in Damascus: “Prime Minister Iyad Allawi wrote a letter to the Syrians saying he had the pictures but was not going to release them despite being under pressure from the Americans to do so.”

Mr Allawi said the photographs were found in the possession of Moayed Ahmed Yasseen, also known as Abu Ahmed, leader of the Jaish Muhammad group composed of former Baathist intelligence personnel. One picture showed Mr Yasseen standing beside a senior Syrian official, he said. Mr Yasseen was arrested in Fallujah in mid-November.

The evidence has triggered renewed accusations by US and Iraqi officials that Syria is providing assistance to former Iraqi Baathists who are believed to be running the insurgency from Damascus.

Last week General George W. Casey, commander of US forces in Iraq, said that the exiled Baathists had formed a group called the New Regional Command and were directing operations from Damascus. He said the Syrian authorities were “not going after the big fish, which is really the people that we’re interested in”.

Mr Allawi claimed there was an “Iraqi Baathist invasion of Syria” which was a real danger to the Syrian Government. “It is overwhelming,” he said. “They stole gold and robbed banks and came here. They have enough funds to keep fighting for 30 years.” […]

Most of the wealthier Iraqi exiles have settled in the Mezzeh district of west Damascus. They drive expensive cars and dine in the priciest restaurants. Most Sunni Iraqi exiles openly support the anti-US resistance.

Among names mentioned by the exiles as leaders of the reorganised Iraqi Baath party are Sabawi Ibrahim, a half-brother of Saddam Hussein, who headed Iraqi intelligence at the time of the 1991 Gulf War, and Mohammed Younis al-Ahmed, secretary-general of the Iraqi Baath party regional command.

Many Iraqi exiles say that Syria is being unfairly singled out for criticism when there are many more Baathists, including senior figures of the old Iraqi regime, living in Jordan.

Those happy to see the cancellation of the Behzti play in Birmingham are all quite adamant that this is nothing to do with censorship. From the co-founders of the Three Faiths Forum, in the Times’ Letters to the Editor:

Whatever the message intended by the offending play, it can surely be set within a context other than a place sacred to the Sikh community, and we hope Birmingham Stage Company will not decide to perform the play without considering amendments which will take account of the feelings of the Sikh community. This is not a request for censorship but a plea to show sensitivity — something surely not beyond the skills of the artists concerned — and to desist from religious harassment and deliberate provocation.

From Clare Gorst (“one of the few non-Asian protesters at the demonstration outside Birmingham Repertory Theatre last Saturday”):

The opposition to the production was generated not by a desire by the Sikh community to curtail freedom of speech but by sanctity besmirched.

From Arun Arora (Director of Communications, Diocese of Birmingham, 2000-04):

The issue is not free speech or censorship. Rather it is a matter of religious sensitivity and respect.

If people are at risk of being offended by a play, they have the option of not going to see it. It’s as simple as that. Forcing the play’s cancellation is, um, censorship.

Update: according to the Scotsman, the play may be staged at the Royal Court theatre in London in the new year.

What you always wanted to know but somehow couldn’t be bothered to ask…..who’s who on the Sgt. Pepper album cover.

egion in the world, by far, is Africa. It never happens there. There are numerous desperate people in the world, in different cultures, countries and continents. Desperation does not provide anyone with explosives, reconnaissance and transportation. There was certainly more despair in Saddam’s Iraq then in Paul Bremmer’s Iraq, and no one exploded himself. A suicide murder is simply a horrible, vicious weapon of cruel, inhuman, cynical, well-funded terrorists, with no regard to human life, including the life of their fellow countrymen, but with very high regard to their own affluent well-being and their hunger for power.

Update: an eagle-eyed Norm has pointed out that I linked to this article back in June – and he knows because he did as well.

062004″>reports that they’re pouring arms and ammunition into the region “in apparent preparation for a major military offensive”:

[T]he warning from the African Union suggests that the Sudanese government intends to step up its campaign against rebel forces in Darfur, placing the lives of millions more people at risk.

Nigerian Major-General Festus Okonkwo, attending the African Union-sponsored peace talks in Nigeria, said it was clear from the military build-up over the last two weeks that Khartoum intended to fight on.

“The quantity of arms and ammunition brought into Darfur to meet the present build-up of troops in the region is [so] astronomical that the issue is no longer whether there will be fighting or not, but when fighting will start,” he said.

He also knew that time was short. The senior political and military chiefs in the Kremlin would have only about 12 minutes to wake up, get to their phones, digest Petrov’s information and decide on a counterattack.

Read on to find out if the plucky Muscovite initiated a nuclear attack which devastated the planet, or decided it was a false alarm…..

Orlando Figes, in his cultural history of Russia “Natasha’s Dance“, describes how the civilisation of the aristocracy depended on a limitless supply of cheap labour:

At Kuskovo there was a horn band in which, to save time on the training of players, each musician was taught to play just one note. The number of players depended on the number of notes in a tune; their sole skill lay in playing their note at the appropriate moment.

Jeff Jacoby (via lgf) on the documentary “Voices of Iraq”:

Last spring, three enterprising Americans — filmmakers Eric Manes and Martin Kunert, both former producers for MTV, and Gulf War veteran Archie Drury, a former Marine…..distributed 150 digital video recorders to ordinary Iraqis and asked them to film anyone or anything they thought important — and then pass the cameras on to someone else.
From April to September, the cameras circulated from hand to hand through every region of the country. What eventually came back to the three Americans was 450 hours of raw video recorded by more than 2,000 Iraqis from all walks of life — and not one frame of it influenced by an outside director or crew. Edited down to a taut 80 minutes, the result — “Voices of Iraq” — is a gripping documentary that for the first time shows Iraq as even the most skillful American journalist will never be able to show it: through the eyes and ears of Iraq’s people.
“Voices of Iraq” is by turns heartbreaking, exhilarating, and inspiring. The war and its destruction is never far from the surface. One of the opening scenes is of a car bombing in Sadr City, and when a little girl is asked by her off-camera interviewer, “What do you want to tell the world about Iraq?” she answers poignantly: “These explosions are hurting everyone.” A mother weeps for her son, killed in the crossfire during a fight between US soldiers and looters. There is even footage — supplied, Drury told NPR, by a sheik from Fallujah — of insurgents preparing a bomb.
But bad as the war is, the horror it ended — Saddam Hussein’s 24-year reign — was worse.
In the film, a young Kurdish mother tells her daughter, who is wielding the camcorder, how she would burn herself with cigarettes to prepare for the torture she knew was coming. A policeman recalls what it was like to arrest a member of the Ba’ath Party. “You’d be scared,” he says. “You’d shake with fear.” One man explains that Saddam’s son Uday “used to come often to Ravad Street — every Thursday for the market — to choose a girl to rape.” A few brief clips are shown from a captured Fedayeen Saddam videotape: A blindfolded man thrown to his death from a rooftop, a man’s hand getting severed, someone’s tongue being cut out.
It isn’t hard to understand the emotions of the man who answers, when asked how he reacted to the news of Saddam’s capture, “I danced like this! I kept dancing. Then I cried.”

sed language on the Web, behind English and Chinese? Farsi. Iran now has about 75,000 individual Web logs. That’s because a young, Toronto-based Iranian journalist who publishes as Hoder created tools in Farsi to make it possible. Only 10% of the Iranian blogs could be called political; most discuss music, movies, poetry and Iranian or Western culture. “Iran’s most interesting political conversations take place in taxis,” said Hoder.

And, according to NK Zone contributor Andrei Lankov, even in North Korea, where the old system of thought control is “slowly disintegrating”:

As a former citizen of a communist country, the Soviet Union, this analyst can confirm that Western radio propaganda broadcasts greatly contributed to the demise of the communist camp. But it seems that these days in North Korea most subversive information is spread largely in visual, video, not audio channels. The first VCRs turned up in the North around 1990, but for a decade they remained beyond the wildest expectations of the average North Korean.

The situation changed around 2000 when northeast China was flooded with cheap DVD players and newer VCRs. Old machines are now sold very cheaply by their owners, and then smuggled to North Korea via its porous (essentially, uncontrolled) border with China. In North Korea the used VCRs are resold at high premiums, but a machine still only costs the equivalent of US$35 or $40 – definitely within the reach of a more successful North Korean family. VCRs are largely used for copying and watching tapes of South Korean TV soap operas, which have become major hits in North Korea in the past few years. The South Korean actors and actresses are much admired, and their hairstyles and fashions are eagerly imitated by the Pyongyang youth.