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An orthodox Jew shot dead in the street – and a politician of Moroccan origin taken into protective custody after being threatened with “ritual killing” for being “critical of radical Islam and conservative aspects of Muslim culture.”

Moshe Naeh, a British Orthodox Jew and a father of five, was shot in the head and killed outside his home near Antwerp’s diamond quarter, which is at the centre of a large Jewish community.
The police found Mr Neah, who was in his twenties, lying in a pool of blood in the early hours of the morning. He was dressed in the long black robes and hat worn by Orthodox Jews. He worked as a rabbi’s assistant in a local synagogue.

There has been rising concern about anti-Semitic attacks against the 17,000-strong Jewish community in Antwerp, but a spokeswoman for the prosecutor’s office said that there was no evidence that the attack was inspired by extremism or racism. Police suspect it was the result of a personal dispute.

In June, a Jewish teenager was stabbed by Arab youths outside a Jewish school in an Antwerp suburb. No one has been arrested. Days later, a Jewish man, 43, was beaten unconscious.

The federal Government has vowed to crack down on anti-Semitism. Most of the attacks are thought to be by young men from the city’s 50,000-strong North African community. On Wednesday, Mimount Bousakla, a Socialist senator of Moroccan origin in Antwerp, was taken into protective custody after being threatened with “ritual killing”. He had been repeatedly critical of radical Islam and conservative aspects of Muslim culture.

Update: a man’s been arrested for the threats against Mimount Bousakla.

ped child. Wolfgang Daschner, 61, who was acting head of the Frankfurt police when 11-year-old Jakob von Metzler was seized in 2002, has described the case as “like a Greek tragedy”.

“Either I violated the rights of the suspect, or I put at risk the life of the victim. In weighing up the options it was clear to me what I had to do, and I would do the same again.”

In an emotionally charged and morally complex case — dubbed the “torture trial” — he is accused of ordering a senior officer to threaten a suspect. Even though the word torture did not figure in the indictment read out yesterday, the implications of the case go well beyond the responsibilities of police interrogators. At stake is the ethical question: how far can the State violate its own principles to protect innocent lives? Jakob, son of a prosperous banking family, was kidnapped by his former tutor, Magnus Gäfgen, 27, who demanded a €1 million (£700,000) ransom. Police tracked Gäfgen as he picked up the cash and arrested him when he did not seem to be returning to his hostage.

For 36 hours, Gäfgen was interrogated about Jakob’s whereabouts but he peppered his statements with lies and evasions. Police were nervous that the imprisoned child would suffocate or freeze in his hideaway. Eventually Herr Daschner, currently suspended, took the decision to threaten force. According to his defence lawyer, Eckart Hild, Herr Daschner sought and received the go-ahead from an unnamed senior official in the Interior Ministry.

In fact the chain of command may go close to the top of the political tree. At the time of the kidnapping Roland Koch, the Prime Minister of Hesse — tipped to be a future German chancellor — publicly expressed understanding for the police action. Gäfgen is now serving a life sentence.

Herr Daschner did not personally utter the threat; that task was passed on to the interrogators. Gäfgen crumpled within 20 minutes of the threat and admitted he had killed the child within hours of the kidnap. He then led police to the body. Herr Daschner — who has won the sympathy of Germany’s tabloid press — could face between six months and five years in jail if found guilty.

The German Constitution, shaped partly in response to the Nazi years, places the highest priority on “human dignity”, which suggests that the ban on torture may be more powerful in legal terms than the need to save a life. Herr Daschner’s defence team has to convince the court that the policeman weighed up both the rights of the victim and the suspected killer and made his decision according to his conscience. The hearings are set to continue until the end of the year.

A tricky one: there should never be any room whatsoever in a legal framework for the use of force or the threat of the use of force…..and yet, one would want senior police officers to use their judgement, as this one did, in particular exceptional cases. So it’s right that the policeman’s been brought to trial, but I hope he gets off – this was surely a responsible decision to exceed his powers.

The Scotsman has the latest from Nairobi, where a special session of the UN Security Council is meeting to discuss the situation in Darfur:

The charity’s [Oxfam’s] Brendan Cox, who was attending the Security Council meeting, accused the UN of failing the people of Darfur. “The atmosphere at the meeting here in Nairobi is very flat. Nobody seems very concerned,” he said.

“The only people who will benefit from this meeting are the travel agents and those people who will collect their free air miles. There is no optimism about the outcome of the meeting. We are expecting an even weaker draft resolution than before. It will probably be passed, but it will not make any difference.

“This is like Groundhog Day. You have got the same situation as before, worse even, and yet the UN Security Council keeps coming up with more and more watered-down resolutions.”

Kofi Annan, the UN secretary general, told Security Council members that a swift conclusion of an agreement to end the 21-year civil war in southern Sudan was critical to solving the rest of the problems in Africa’s largest country.

But he went on: “I regret to report that the security situation in Darfur continued to deteriorate, despite the ceasefire agreement signed earlier.”

Mr Annan urged the Security Council to issue “the strongest warning” to all the forces fighting in Sudan, adding that an agreement to end the war in southern Sudan would provide a basis for bringing peace to Darfur.

“When crimes on such a scale are being committed, and a sovereign state appears unable or unwilling to protect its own citizens, a grave responsibility falls on the international community, and specifically on this council,” he said.

Well yes, you would have thought so. So what do they intend to do?

The Security Council is today expected to pass another resolution on Sudan in which it will pledge to monitor the situation in the country and “take appropriate action” against any side that fails to support the peace process.

There’ve been a number of stories around over the past few days about the removal of some official portraits of Kim Jong-Il, the dear leader, in North Korea. Is it a reflection of internal power struggles, or is it Kim Jong-Il himself deciding to play down his personality cult? NKZone has some posts on the subject, with links. Now (via Roger Simon) a Japanese paper is reporting that hand-made flyers by an underground anti-Kim Jong-Il group are circulating around inside North Korea:

There are several flyers which counter the common DPRK Party myths and deifications about Kim Jong-il, showing Kim as a spoiled aristocrat rather that a man of the people, with the Russian nickname “Yura” who did not even grow up nor was born in North Korea. Driving wedges between Kim and the starving people, commenting on the rich food he eats while people starve. Saying the “Chuche” Ideology of the North is a big farce which merely enslaves the Korean people. Another underground flyer (again hand written and many copies run off) that is making the rounds in North Korea says “Kim Jong-il killed his father Kim il-Sung”.

Sankei reports the North Korean Secret Police is mobilizing in an attempt to find out who is doing this. They have re-instituted/re-fortified a civilian registration system in Pyongyang to track citizens with an eye toward cracking down on this type of subversion. The flyers also contain detailed personal information on Kim Jong-il that only those in select positions would know. Accordingly, north Korean defectors theorize that these flyers are gaining some cooperation from some people in positions of power in the NK military or Party (anti-Kim elements emerging?).

The headline of this lead article in the Scotsman today spells it out: Genocide out of control yet still the UN refuses to act:

The price of the United Nations’ procrastination over the genocide in Sudan is revealed today in stark human terms: 35,000 further deaths since the UN Security Council first warned Khartoum to clean up its act.

As the 15-strong Security Council meets in special session in Nairobi today to debate Sudan, the crisis in Darfur is worse than on 30 July when the first resolution was approved by 13 votes to nil. Every five minutes, another person dies.

UN staff say the Khartoum government’s armed forces have continued to attack their own people. Refugees have been beaten while UN workers stand by helplessly. Women and children have been gunned down in Darfur’s marketplaces. The world’s worst current humanitarian crisis is getting worse.

The death toll has been notoriously difficult to tally, thanks, in large part, to the obstructiveness of the Sudanese government. A figure of 70,000 deaths has been mooted, but aid workers say that simply accounts for deaths as a result of military action. Yesterday, the British aid agency Save the Children took the plunge: its spokesman, Paul Hetherington, estimated that between 200,000 and 300,000 people had died since the start of the Darfur conflict.

According to the UN’s World Food Programme, about 10,000 people are dying every month.

Since 13 May, when Kofi Annan, the UN Secretary General, wrote to Omer al-Bashir, Sudan’s president, urging him to disarm the Janjaweed militias, maintain the ceasefire, improve access for humanitarian workers and negotiate a settlement to the conflict in Darfur, 61,500 have died.

Since 30 June, when Mr Annan arrived in Khartoum for the start of a three-day visit to see for himself the extent of the crisis, 46,000 people have died.

Since 30 July, when the UN Security Council voted to take action against Sudan if it did not make progress on the pledges it had made to relieve the situation in Darfur, 36,000 people have died.

Since 6 October, when Tony Blair stopped off in Khartoum and confidently announced he had secured a pledge from the Sudanese government to clean up its act and accept a five-point plan for action, including a force of several thousand African Union troops, 14,000 people have died.

Oil for Food deal, Mr. Annan’s Secretariat pulled in a 2.2% commission on Saddam’s oil sales, totaling a whopping $1.4 billion over the life of the program, to cover the costs of supervising Saddam. Yet somehow the Secretariat never found the funding to fully meter oil shipments, ensure full inspections of all goods entering Iraq, or catch the pricing scams that by the new estimates of Senate investigators let Saddam rake in $4.4 billion in kickbacks on relief contracts.

Mr. Annan and his aides would also have us believe that Oil for Food had nothing to do with Saddam’s smuggling of oil–which generated the lion’s share of his illicit income. But it was only after Oil for Food geared up that Saddam’s oil smuggling really took off, totaling $13.6 billion during his entire 12 years between wars, but with more than two-thirds of that–an estimated $9.7 billion–earned during the era of Oil for Food. Those were precisely the years in which Mr. Annan repeatedly went to bat to enable Saddam, under Oil for Food, to import the equipment to rebuild Iraq’s oil infrastructure, whence came all that smuggled oil.

Transparency from the start might have flagged the world and stopped the scams as things turned deeply rotten under Oil for Food. But Mr. Annan’s policy to this day has been secrecy. On Monday, Sen. Coleman summed up his subcommittee’s efforts to get at the truth, as having required so far, eight subpoenas, 13 chairman’s letters, “numerous interviews with key participants, and receipt of over a million pages of evidence” to begin to understand “the behind-the-scenes machinations of the participants in the Oil for Food program.”

“Participants” are generally understood to have been Saddam’s chosen contractors. But we need to recognize that one of the biggest of those contractors was, in effect, the U.N. itself. As Oil for Food was not only designed but expanded, embellished upon and run for more than six years under Mr. Annan’s stewardship, it became not so much a supervisory operation, but a business deal with Saddam, in which the U.N. in effect provided money laundering services, the Secretariat collected a percentage fee from Saddam–and somewhere in there, between the kickbacks, surcharges, importation of oil equipment and smuggling out of oil, they jointly ran a storefront relief operation.

According to the NYT, an Iranian opposition group has evidence that Iran has a covert nuclear enrichment facility (via American Future):

An Iranian opposition group says it has new evidence that Iran is producing enriched uranium at a covert Defense Ministry facility in Tehran that has not been disclosed to United Nations inspectors.

The group, the National Council for Resistance in Iran, is planning to announce its finding in Paris on Wednesday. The group says that inspection of the site would demonstrate that Iran is secretly trying to produce nuclear weapons even while promising to freeze a critical part of its declared nuclear program, which it maintains is intended purely for civilian purposes.

A senior official of the group, Muhammad Mohaddessin, said in a telephone interview late on Tuesday that the group had shared the new information “very recently” with the International Atomic Energy Agency. But he and other officials of the group said it had not discussed the matter with the United States government, and its claims could not be verified.

Iran’s mission to the United Nations did not return messages seeking comment on the assertion.

The group, based in Paris, is the political arm of the People’s Mujahedeen, which is listed by the United States government as a terrorist organization because of its involvement in attacks on Americans in the 1970’s. But the group also has a successful track record in gathering intelligence on Iran, and was the first, in 2002, to disclose the existence of what was then the secret Iranian nuclear site at Natanz.

United Nations inspectors “should not be fooled or deceived by the Iranian regime,” Mr. Mohaddessin said.

After the shooting of two bodyguards of Mahmoud Abbas on Sunday, hopes that the death of Arafat would provide the opportunity for a new breakthrough in Israeli-Palestinian relations are looking increasingly implausible. In the Financial Times a leader of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades – now happily renamed the Brigades of Martyr Yasser Arafat – says he’d support PLO leader Mahmoud Abbas as the candidate for the Palestinian Authority chairmanship as long as he abided by the Palestinians’ “unalterable demands.” Which are: a state on pre-1967 lines, its capital in Jerusalem, the right of return of refugees, and the release of prisoners. Demands which Israel of course will never accept.

Armed Fatah militants may be on course for a showdown with the new Palestinian leadership unless it gives them a role in the post-Arafat era, one of their senior commanders said on Monday.

Zachariah Zubeidi, head of al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades in Jenin, said he would not abide by the decisions of the central committee of Fatah, the dominant faction of which Arafat was commander-in-chief, unless it explicitly recognised the militants as its armed wing.

“With Abu Amar [Arafat], I could be confident that I could handle resistance to the Israeli occupation knowing that he was taking care of the political work,” Mr Zubeidi told the Financial Times at a safe house in Jenin. “Now I am uneasy.”

His remarks reflected tensions in Palestinian ranks since Arafat’s death and the emergence of Mahmoud Abbas as the senior member of an interim leadership pending presidential elections on January 9.

MEMRI look at reaction in the Iraqi press to Bush’s re-election:

The recent campaign in the United States resulting in the election of President Bush was followed closely and intensely in the Iraqi press. The introduction of freedom of the press after Saddam’s removal has allowed a diversity of views to be heard, and the views regarding the re-election of President Bush are no exception.

Notwithstanding criticism of the Bush administration, editorials expressed undeniable admiration for a system that produced a winner and a loser without one shot being fired and without the legitimacy of the results being questioned.

Editorials also expressed strong appeals to President Bush to fulfill his commitments to uproot the sources of terrorism, even if it means using force against two of Iraq’s neighbors – Syria and Iran – accused of endorsing and supporting terrorism in Iraq.

From Aziz Al-Haj, who represents the National Organization of Civil Society and the Rights of Iraqis:

“Much can be said about this event, its meaning and consequences… I wish to express my feelings of happiness as a nationalist democratic Iraqi about this victory, which confirms anew the legitimacy and justice of the war of liberation of Iraq from the Saddam regime and the danger it had posed to the security of the region and the world.

“Kerry’s opportunistic maneuvers with the Iraqi subject have failed, particularly his claims that Saddam did not represent a threat to the American and world security. We know that the Saddam danger was far greater than the danger of Al-Qa’ida and bin Laden because Saddam’s regime had enormous capabilities in a very sensitive region and possessed forbidden weapons and capacities and programs to produce many types of these weapons. The betting on the defeat of Bush by the terrorists with all their tribes and branches, the nationalists, the Arab and European left, and the murderers in Fallujah, Ramadi, and Mosul, and the Iranian and Syrian regimes, has failed… These groups with disparate ideologies and objectives had one common denominator – a blind hatred for Bush. We offer them our deep condolences…”

As predicted, the far-right Belgian Vlaams Blok party, declared racist and effectively banned last week, has dissolved and reformed itself as Vlaams Belang, a mainstream conservative party pushing for the independence of Flanders. There’s more at Majority Rights:

Although it is of course terrible to say so, the recent political murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh has, along with the judicial murder of Vlaams Blok, given a boost to the debate about freedom in Belgium. We all understand that you are free to speak and think or you are not. A partial freedom is not freedom at all, and neither is a freedom that is limited by politico-judiciary chicanery. In Flanders we say you become “mouth dead”.

People abroad don’t always understand why the Blok was so successful, all the more because of the hatchet job that was so skilfully performed on its reputation. In the free encyclopedia Wikipedia it is written-off as a racist and would-be antisemitic party. This is black propaganda, equivalent to claiming that Israelis make seder with the blood of Arab children. It is a sad fact of human nature that when such stories are retailed there are always some who will believe them.

So what is the real nature of Flemish nationalism? Well, read the Party Manifesto (below). If ever it was what the Belgian government claims it to have been, this is now a respectable and modern European conservative party. It is free-market oriented and possessed of many ethical concerns. Moreover, the personnel and the Party meetings are very convincing and enthusiastic. Being serious about power has become a political cliché in Britain. But the men and women who gathered to inaugurate Vlaams Belang are exactly that.

For leftist and French-speaking Wallonia, this seriousness is their worst nightmare. Brussels will be filled with busy groups of Walloon elite trying to find the means to stop the Flemish a second time.