October 9, 2007 No.1734
Islamists Websites Monitor No. 141
ISI Video Shows Launching of “Al-Zarqawi-2” Missiles
A video by the ISI’s Media Production Company Al-Furqan, recently posted on the Islamist website http://www.shmo5alislam.com/vb/, which is hosted in Malaysia, shows mujahideen firing a new missile called the Al-Zarqawi-2 on a U.S. base in Iraq.
http://memri.org/bin/articles.cgi?Page=subjects&Area=iwmp&ID=SP173407
[photo]
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2007/10/4_russians_coul.php
http://yalibnan.com/site/archives/2007/10/4_russians_coul.php
4 Russians could face death penalty in Lebanon
Wednesday, 10 October, 2007 @ 6:51 AM
Beirut - Eighteen-year-old Sergey Vysotsky is one of four Russian
citizens who could be put to death in Lebanon if found guilty of
terrorist offenses. The teenager is under arrest in the capital Beirut.
fatah al islam - armed militants.jpg The other three Russians remain
at large. All four are thought to be part of the radical Palestinian
movement Fatah Al-Islam.
Lebanese authorities met Russian diplomats in Beirut to confirm the
charges against the four Russian citizens. All are suspected of
terrorist activities. The men could face the death penalty if found
guilty.
However, Geidar Dzhemal, the Chairman of Russia’s Islamic Committee
says it’s likely the four Russians will be sent home.
“We have information that they will not be sent to Guantanamo or sent
to any other Lebanese prison. They are Russian citizens and will be
returned home, to Russia. Whether it will be followed by a court trial
or what sort of court - is still a question to be agreed. It shall be
decided between the legal agencies of the two countries,” he said.
Teenager wanted to study in Lebanon
The teenager Sergey Vysotsky, 18, claims he came to Lebanon at the
beginning of the year with the intention of going to university in
Tripoli, in the north of the country. He says the college had no place
for him when he arrived. He says he then became friendly with a group
of youths from a nearby Palestinian refugee camp. That’s the reason,
he says, he was in the area of the battlefield when he was arrested in
early September.
The Press-Attache of the Russian Embassy in Lebanon, Vladimir
Cherepanov, told Russia Today that the Head of the Consular Department
visited Vysotsky in prison. He saw the conditions he is being kept in
and said they were acceptable. He also confirmed that embassy staff
will be present when police question the youth.
“Vysotksy has said he has no complaints about being kept in custody.
He appears quite healthy. He was not tortured during the preliminary
investigation and it is apparent from the way he looks. He confirms
that he was detained in early September in the battle area. From
October 11 interrogations will begin with the preliminary
investigation, during which our consul will be present as agreed with
the Lebanese side,” Mr Cherepanov informed.
Sergey Vysotsky is said to be co-operating with officers, but has
consistently denied the accusations against him. He says he was no way
involved in the killing of Lebanese military and police personnel.
On Thursday he will appear before a Lebanese judge for the first time,
which will be his first official interrogation. The Russian Embassy
has requested that a representative be present. They will also provide
a translator.
Under Lebanese law Vysotsky must be provided with a lawyer, free of
charge, once his trial begins. But before that the Russian Embassy
will be providing him with one, including at the first session to take
place on Thursday.
The Embassy says it’s satisfied with the close co-operation between
the Russian and the Lebanese authorities.
Surprise at Russian involvement
There has been surprise in Lebanon that some of the militants of the
radical Palestinian movement Fatah Al-Islam could come from Russia.
The four Russian citizens are the first non-Arab nationals to have
been charged with such serious crimes in Lebanon.
russia - dr nasser.jpg”Russians among them ? What are you talking
about ?” wondered Oksana Naser ( right) , a Dagestani woman living in
Nahr al-Bared refugee camp. “I heard only about one - from Chechnya.
And from Dagestan? I am hearing it, first time, from you,” she told
RT’s correspondent. Oksana herself comes from Dagestan, a republic in
the South of Russia. But unlike the four charged Russian nationals,
one of whom allegedly comes from her hometown, she was an innocent
bystander to the violence that wrecked her home and destroyed her
private gynaecological practice in the Nahr al-Bared camp four months
ago.
Together with thousands of others, she’s found temporary shelter
nearby.
“I used to see these men from Fatah Al-Islam in our camp. Some of
their wives were my patients. Many of them were pregnant. I had a
chance to talk to them,” Oksana recalls.
Here at the Naser family, the despair is overwhelming.
“I want to go back to Russia, I want to work there if I can,” Dr Ali
Naser confesses.
The family has lost everything. They live now on borrowed money and
forgotten dreams.
Dr. Raed El-Haj, who was born in Nahr al-Bared, has also found
temporary shelter nearby. He is one of fifty doctors from the camp who
studied in Russia. He remembers seeing one of the men patrolling the
streets.
“He was just in military uniform, like soldiers were, and was carrying
a Kalashnikov machine gun. But not all of them were dressed like
soldiers. I knew he was Russian because I studied in Russia for twelve
years. I can tell from the face if a man is Russian in the same way
that he can tell I am Arab. Many of them were undercover. Their real
power became known only after the war started,” Dr. Raed El-Haj said.
“We’d have sent the Russians home”
The war was between the Lebanese army and Islamist militants belonging
to an Al-Qaeda offshoot - Fatah al Islam. The residents of the
northern Lebanese Palestinian camp became its victims.
Now, waiting to return, they keep themselves well-armed.
russia arkanbader.jpgAbdelary Arkanbader ( right) , the leader of the
Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, said they were
surprised in the beginning to find there were Russians fighting with
Fatah Al-Islam.
“But now we know that there are a handful of Russians involved and in
my opinion, they probably come from Chechnya. They arrived here from
Iraq. I wish we’d known before the fighting started that there were
Russians, we would’ve taken them to the Russian Embassy because we
have good relations with Russia and we would have let them go home,”
Abdelary Arkanbader noted.
Late last week, 98 suspected Fatah al-Islam militants were buried in a
mass grave. None were identified. Mr Abdelary says it is possible some
of the missing Russians could be among them.
Top picture: Fatah al -Islam armed militants as seen inside the Nahr
el Bared Palestinian refugee camp in northern Lebanon
Sources: Russia Today
Who’s Behind the Censorship of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week?
By http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.aspx?Name=BenJohnson
Ben
Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, October 10, 2007
CALL IT THE LEFT’S VERSION OF PREEMPTIVE WAR. The three co-equal
branches of
the Unholy Alliance - Islamic radicals, far-Left activists, and
academics -
have returned to their usual level of discourse - intimidation,
slander, ad
hominem attacks - in an attempt to ban
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism-awareness-week
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week from college campuses before it ever
occurs.
National “Muslim and Arab rights” organizations are pressuring college
administrators to prevent students from holding the peaceful,
educational
seminars. Conservative students have been accused of “hate speech”
actually
manufactured in their name by radical campus leftists, and at least one
conservative is being harassed although she is not in any way
associated
with Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.
THE NATIONAL “MUSLIM RIGHTS” HATE CAMPAIGN
continued, but with too many links for me to clean up and post, should be read by all..........granny
A Forgery and a Hate Crime
By http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.aspx?Name=DavidHorowitz
David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, October 09, 2007
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=AE350496-96B7-4F95-8357-831F7BA4414C
In a stratagem typical of the deceitful smear campaigns the left seems
to
favor, an obviously fake hate flyer has been posted all over the George
Washington University campus with the intention of sabotaging
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/news/67/islamo-fascism-week/
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (October 22-26), and smearing its
sponsors the
David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Young America’s Foundation.
continues.
Who’s Behind the Censorship of Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week?
By http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.aspx?Name=BenJohnson
Ben
Johnson
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, October 10, 2007
CALL IT THE LEFT’S VERSION OF PREEMPTIVE WAR. The three co-equal
branches of
the Unholy Alliance - Islamic radicals, far-Left activists, and
academics -
have returned to their usual level of discourse - intimidation,
slander, ad
hominem attacks - in an attempt to ban
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/islamo-fascism-awareness-week
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week from college campuses before it ever
occurs.
National “Muslim and Arab rights” organizations are pressuring college
administrators to prevent students from holding the peaceful,
educational
seminars. Conservative students have been accused of “hate speech”
actually
manufactured in their name by radical campus leftists, and at least one
conservative is being harassed although she is not in any way
associated
with Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week.
THE NATIONAL “MUSLIM RIGHTS” HATE CAMPAIGN
continued, but with too many links for me to clean up and post, should be read by all..........granny
A Forgery and a Hate Crime
By http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/authors.aspx?Name=DavidHorowitz
David Horowitz
FrontPageMagazine.com | Tuesday, October 09, 2007
http://frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=AE350496-96B7-4F95-8357-831F7BA4414C
In a stratagem typical of the deceitful smear campaigns the left seems
to
favor, an obviously fake hate flyer has been posted all over the George
Washington University campus with the intention of sabotaging
http://www.terrorismawareness.org/news/67/islamo-fascism-week/
Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week (October 22-26), and smearing its
sponsors the
David Horowitz Freedom Center and the Young America’s Foundation.
continues.
Palestinian Authority Cartoon Prays That Allah Will Kill Americans
http://www.cnsnews.com/ViewForeignBureaus.asp?Page=/ForeignBureaus/archive/200710/INT20071010c.html
Palestinian Authority Cartoon Prays That Allah Will Kill Americans
By Julie Stahl
CNSNews.com Jerusalem Bureau Chief
October 10, 2007
Jerusalem (CNSNews.com) - A cartoon published Tuesday in an official
Palestinian Authority newspaper shows a Muslim man calling on Allah to
kill
Americans, said a group that monitors Palestinian media.
Palestinian Media Watch, an independent research group, said the
cartoon
shows the Muslim man kneeling before a U.S. fighter jet. His prayers
are
enclosed in four missiles aimed at the American plane.
He prays: “Allah, scatter them!” “And turn their wives into widows!”
“And
turn their children into orphans!” “And give us victory over them!”
Al Hayat al Jadida is the newspaper of P.A. Chairman Mahmoud Abbas’
Fatah
faction and is controlled by the P.A., Palestinian Media Watch said.
The U.S. is supporting Abbas as a moderate Palestinian leader and a
peace
partner for Israel. But according to PMW, anti-American sentiments are
nothing new in the P.A.
In a recent report on 12th grade Palestinian textbooks, PMW said the
United
States is presented as a “human rights abuser, violator of
international
humanitarian law” and “an ‘occupier’ of Iraq.”
The world history book presents those fighting American soldiers in
Iraq as
the “brave resistance to liberate Iraq.”
The U.S. also is depicted as leading the West in a “clash of
civilizations”
against the Islamic-Arab world.
Info sharing could bankrupt terror financing: expert
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=4c23ca0a-8d46-4d58-af97-2fe1fea39d0c &k=38604
http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=4c23ca0a-8d46-4d58-af97-2fe1fea39d0c&k=38604
CanWest News Service
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
The international battle against terrorism could be aided by better
information sharing between countries through agencies monitoring
suspect
charities, the Air India inquiry heard Tuesday.
Kenneth Dibble, of the Charity Commission for England and Wales, said
there
are no formal arrangements between his agency and the charities branch
of
the Canada Revenue Agency or similar regulatory bodies in other
countries.
Dibble testified in Ottawa before Commissioner John Major about the
broader
powers held by his Charity Commission, which can conduct covert
investigations, remove trustees and seize assets of charities suspected
of
terrorist financing.
Dibble said that sometimes charities believed to have a link to
terrorist
financing have branches around the world.
He cited the example of the British-registered Tamil Rehabilitation
Organization, which was sending money to the banned Tamil Tigers
terrorist
group. The same organization was operating in North America and in
other
countries, Dibble said.
Richard Quance, a lawyer representing the Air India victims’ families,
suggested that more information-sharing between regulatory bodies would
be
helpful.
“Would it be your view that it would be of assistance in fighting the
global
war on terrorism to have a greater flow of information of that nature
between yourself and your partners?” Quance asked.
“I think it would,” replied Dibble.
Dibble added there is informal information sharing between agencies,
including his and his counterpart in Canada.
But if the British had identified a charity that was a front group for
a
terrorist organization, they would not automatically contact Canada or
other
countries, Dibble said.
Dibble stressed that the vast majority of British charities do not have
any
involvement in terrorist financing. And he said where cases have been
identified, his agency has sought to remove trustees and replace them
with
legitimate people who will keep the charity work continuing.
That contrasts with what the inquiry has heard about the Canadian
approach,
which is to de-list charities suspected of being involved in terrorist
financing.
Dibble said his commission wants to strike a balance between cracking
down
on abuse within the charity sector and ensuring that money reaches
people in
dire need, even when they live in parts of the world where terrorist
groups
are operating.
Even when the imam at the North London Central Mosque, Abu Hamza, was
preaching violent rhetoric, the Charity Commission did not shut down
the
mosque. Instead it replaced Hamza, who was later charged and convicted
of
terrorist offences.
“The issue in a sense didn’t go away immediately,” Dibble said. “His
supporters were still quite vociferous in relation to their engagement
in
the charity.”
The inquiry into the investigation of the June 23, 1985, Air India
bombing,
which killed 331, is now into its third week exploring the issue of
terrorist financing in Canada and what is being done to combat the
problem.
A SLAPP Against Freedom
Attorneys have an effective new way to defeat Islamic groups’ libel suits.
Judith Miller
Autumn 2007
Nothing gets a journalist’s attention like a subpoena. While authoritarian regimes silence critics by murdering or jailing them, journalists (and other critics) in the United States face gentler, but still effective, intimidation: libel lawsuits. Over the last few years, Islamists have tried silencing reporters, scholars, and citizens by suing them for defamation, often successfully. But recent legal cases in California, Massachusetts, and Minnesota suggest that the tactic may finally be backfiring, at least in the United States, if not in Britain, where libel laws overwhelmingly favor plaintiffs. The American lawsuits’ outcomes—poorly covered by the media—represent victories for the free expression and public participation that the First Amendment guarantees.
The latest victory came in August, when an Islamic charity, KinderUSA, and its board chairman, Laila Al-Marayati, dropped the libel suit they had filed in April in California state court against former Treasury Department official Matthew Levitt, the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (which now employs him), and Yale University Press. In 2006, Yale published Levitt’s book on Hamas, which Washington says supports terrorism. Levitt never mentioned Al-Marayati in his book, but he did assert that KinderUSA, founded to raise money for Palestinian children, had ties to terrorist groups.
Al-Marayati and KinderUSA charged that Levitt had made “false and damaging” charges that caused “irreparable harm to its reputation,” and they sought at least $500,000 in damages, a public retraction, and a halt to the book’s distribution. But Levitt and his codefendants stood by his claims. In June, they filed a motion against the charity and its chairman, seeking to quash the libel suit and demanding that the plaintiffs pay all legal fees. They cited a California law that bans “SLAPP”—or “strategic litigation against public participation”—suits, which aim not at winning in court, but at intimidating into silence a group or a publication raising issues of public concern. “California enacted anti-SLAPP legislation to get rid of inappropriate lawsuits like this one,” they wrote in a 15-page brief.
Less than six weeks later, Al-Marayati and KinderUSA dropped the suit. Todd Gallinger, who represented the plaintiffs, insisted that the charity had sued not to intimidate or silence Levitt, but rather to force him to correct charges that it still considers libelous. “They were trying to suppress the charity’s legitimate activities,” he said. But KinderUSA underestimated the costs involved, he acknowledged, and the defendants’ anti-SLAPP motion was a factor in its decision to drop the suit.
“Anti-SLAPP laws are a very powerful tool,” agreed Roger Myers, an attorney who specializes in using the law to defend journalists in libel claims. “There has been a fairly dramatic decline in the number of libel cases being filed here in California.”
Levitt’s case isn’t unique. Last May, the Islamic Society of Boston dropped its suit against the Boston Herald, a local Fox news channel, journalist Steven Emerson, and 14 others. The Society had accused the defendants of libel and of infringing its civil rights by claiming that it had funded terrorist organizations, received money from Saudi Arabia, and bought land for a mosque below market value from the City of Boston.
Though Massachusetts’s anti-SLAPP law does not cover media firms, ten of the non-media defendants filed a motion to quash the Society’s suit. When a state judge rejected the motion, a legal discovery process got under way while the defendants appealed. Bank records and other documents revealed that, contrary to its claims, the Society had raised over $7 million from Saudi and other Middle Eastern sources and had funded two groups that the Bush administration has designated terrorist entities: the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development and the Benevolence International Foundation. Records also showed that Society directors had deleted all e-mails about the Society’s land purchase. Finally, discovery revealed that the deputy director of the Boston city agency in charge of negotiating the land deal not only was a Society member whom it had paid to raise money in the Middle East, but also secretly advised the group about obtaining the land cheaply—a clear conflict of interest.
On May 29, soon after the state appellate court heard arguments on the anti-SLAPP appeal, the Society abandoned the suit. Though its lawyers did not respond to requests for comment and its website tried to put a good face on the surrender, Jeff Robbins, who represented several defendants in the complex lawsuit, expressed their belief that the Society had caved, fearing the prospect of paying what could have been millions of dollars in court and legal fees. “The anti-SLAPP motion clearly played a role,” said Robbins, who represented two clients for free because First Amendment issues were involved. Another factor, he said, was the Society’s fear that the court would order it to answer questions under oath and release information that it had tried to keep secret, such as the names of its donors. The case shows that while anti-SLAPP legislation makes it somewhat easier, cheaper, and faster for those accused of libel to fight back, “it doesn’t solve the problem entirely,” said Jeff Hermes, a lawyer for the Boston Herald. “Media companies are not covered by our state’s statute, and defendants in such cases still need to prepare a full defense.”
In Minnesota, a third lawsuit didn’t involve journalists or SLAPP statutes, but it did threaten citizens’ right to petition or warn the government on public safety issues. It also prompted Congress to protect people retroactively who report suspicious behavior. The defendants were anonymous citizens whose complaints about what they considered suspicious behavior by six Muslim imams on a flight in late 2006 led US Airways to remove the clerics from the plane. In a 2007 federal lawsuit claiming discrimination, the imams sued the airline, the Minneapolis airport, and several of the passengers who had complained.
But in August 2007, the “flying imams” dropped all claims against the passengers after Congress approved legislation to protect passengers from retaliatory lawsuits for reporting potentially terror-related activity. Under the measure, as in an anti-SLAPP law, if the plaintiffs cannot prove that a passenger lied in his complaint to the government, they can be held responsible for all court and legal fees. “The imams saw the handwriting on the wall,” said Representative Peter King, the New York Republican who promoted the bill. Gerry Nolting, a lawyer who represented a passenger, also without a fee, said that the imams might never have filed their suit if Minnesota had on its books an anti-SLAPP law like California’s.
However intimidating and expensive defamation lawsuits remain in the United States, the challenge is far greater in Britain, where journalists must prove that their allegations are true. Rachel Ehrenfeld, a New York–based terrorism researcher and the author of Funding Evil, is among more than 30 writers and publishers whom Saudi billionaire Khalid bin Mahfouz sued for libel in England for accusing him of ties to terrorist groups, a charge he denies. But rather than give him the apology, retraction, and $225,000 in fees that a British court ordered, Ehrenfeld, whose book was never even published in England, fought back. In 2004, she countersued bin Mahfouz in New York, asking the federal court here to declare the judgment against her unenforceable in America and contrary to the First Amendment protections that Americans enjoy.
In June, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, overturning a lower court ruling, asked the state’s highest court to determine whether bin Mahfouz should be subject to New York jurisdiction. If it rules affirmatively, Ehrenfeld would be able to obtain considerable information about his finances in preparing for a trial. If he then failed to cooperate, he might have difficulty doing business in America.
Ehrenfeld’s effort comes none too soon, says Andrew McCarthy, a former federal prosecutor, for bin Mahfouz no longer needs to sue to intimidate his critics. After he merely threatened Cambridge University Press with a libel suit this spring, the prestigious publisher agreed to apologize on its website, pay his legal costs and unspecified damages, and stop distributing Alms for Jihad, a book written by J. Millard Burr, a former State Department analyst and relief coordinator, and Robert O. Collins, a former University of California history professor, which outlines bin Mahfouz’s alleged financial support for terrorism. Cambridge also asked libraries to remove the book from their shelves. On its website, Cambridge states that it took such steps because “under English libel laws, we simply did not have a defensible case.” A court victory for Rachel Ehrenfeld, and more anti-SLAPP statutes—only some 20 states have enacted such laws—would help curb the pernicious “libel tourism” so inimical to the free flow of information on which an informed citizenry and effective counterterrorism depend.
Judith Miller, a contributing editor of City Journal, is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who writes about national security issues. She has written or coauthored four books, including Germs: Biological Weapons and America’s Secret War.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_sndgs01.html
Breaking the Chinese Code
Welcome to the People’s Republic, land of “harmony” and “community.”
E. S. Savas
10 October 2007
At the start of a recent international conference in Shanghai, I listened to two local public officials deliver welcoming addresses that repeated over and over the words “harmony” and “community.” Over the next ten days in China I saw these words frequently in the two English-language, government-issued newspapers. Having been exposed before to the language of authoritarian regimes, I wondered: Why these repetitions? What did these code words mean? My hypothesis, formed over the next few days, found confirmation in discussions with local academics and others.
First: “harmony.” For the Chinese government, it means “suppression of individualism.” Errant thoughts threaten central control of the masses. Dissent is bad and punishable. John Stuart Mill correctly wondered whether, under an autocratic regime, “there would be any asylum left for individuality of character; whether public opinion would not be a tyrannical yoke; whether the absolute dependence of each on all, and the surveillance of each by all, would not grind all down into a tame uniformity of thoughts, feelings, and actions.” In China, the reigning belief is that nonconforming ideas will fracture the enforced consensus and produce factionalism. There seems to be no James Madison in power who can raise his head and point out that having numerous factions enables governance of a large country.
Chinese leaders fear the huge and growing gaps between urban and rural, rich and poor, coastal and interior residents, and those with and without “guanxi” (connections). Inharmoniousness is rife. Preaching harmony is a desperate measure, and it is not enough. The hopeful view: this is stop-gap rhetoric while national policy shifts from economic development to the more intractable issue of societal development in an authoritarian state. But the hopeful view may not reflect reality.
What about “community”? The word has an explicit and formal meaning: it refers to an official subdistrict of a city. For example, Shanghai consists of 18 geographic districts, each with a district government. Further, every district in turn is divided into multiple subdistricts, each with its own government. In a city of 18 million people, the average district has a population of about 1 million; the subdistricts are commensurately large. I visited the government facilities of two subdistricts and was astonished: Mayor Bloomberg and New York’s city council members would envy their size, trappings, and obvious wealth. The subdistrict where you live is your “community”; you belong there and you are officially under that government unit. An even more localized “street-level” worker from the Communist Party acts as a neighborhood nag and watchdog. The expectation is that you will be loyal and uncomplaining, and will behave harmoniously.
Before Deng Xiaoping’s reforms, the work unit, not the “community,” was dominant, as in the old Soviet Union. The government or state-owned enterprise provided not only wages but also services—housing, health care, education, and even vacations in the countryside. Since the reforms, however, job mobility has eroded the role of the workplace, and the community has become a significant provider of social services—and inevitably the locus of social control.
But the “community” is not quite what it seems. All residents in the harmonious community are equal, but some are (much) more equal than others—in Orwell’s trenchant phrase. Three distinct populations exist in a community—residents, visitors, and migrants—and they have very different rights. China has some 200 million migrants, well more than 10 percent of the workforce, and they constitute up to 28 percent of a city’s population. Migrant workers are akin to illegal aliens in the United States. Their labor helps staff the factories, but their families, who would strain the capacities of community services, are unwelcome. Therefore migrants aren’t officially members of the “communities” where they live. This may help explain why officials assert that the community, not the family, is the “basic unit of society.” If the families of migrants are excluded, how could the family possibly be that basic unit?
During the conference, I was asked what “community” means in the United States. I explained that we don’t think of community as a single, all-encompassing societal glue. Americans belong to many different communities simultaneously: the residential communities where we live, of course, and where we vote (a not-so-subtle reminder to the audience); the communities where we work and where we play. We are members of religious groups, ethnic groups, advocacy groups, political parties, labor unions, charitable groups, sports “communities” (Yankee fans, golfers), hobby clubs, environmental associations, alumni organizations, veterans’ associations, fraternal organizations, and myriad others. Each of us chooses which to participate in, and how, when, and how much to participate. It works for us, I said; it is a fundamental feature of our individual freedom.
“The health of a society is . . . measured . . . by how freely people can move between institutions,” wrote David Brooks recently. “In a sick society people are bound by one totalistic identity. In a healthy society, a person can live in a black neighborhood, send her kids to a Catholic school, go to work in a lawyer’s office and meet every Wednesday with a feminist book club.” This remains a striking difference between our society and China’s, of course. That I was asked about community in America, however, suggests that Chinese intellectuals are aware of the difference and may be starting to question the current Chinese concept. It will be interesting to watch how it—and “harmony”—evolve in the People’s Republic.
E. S. Savas is Presidential Professor at the School of Public Affairs of Baruch College, at the City University of New York.
http://www.city-journal.org/html/eon2007-10-10es.html
Islamic Radicals and Western Elections: A Microcosm
I don’t think anyone seriously doubts that Islamic radicals often carry out attacks for the purpose of influencing votes in Western democracies. The railway bombings in Spain, just a few days in advance of an election that ousted a pro-American government and put the Socialists in power, are an obvious example. On a broader scale, it seems clear that the attacks carried out on American forces by al Qaeda and other terrorist groups in Iraq have little or nothing to do with any tangible military objective, but rather are intended to influence American public opinion, with the goal of electing antiwar politicians here in the U.S.
Currently, a good illustration of this phenomenon is on display in Afghanistan, where the Taliban, knowing that Germany’s Parliament will vote on Friday on that country’s participation in the NATO effort there, has unleashed a series of attacks against Germans:
A large-scale terror campaign has been launched against German soldiers in Afghanistan to negatively influence Friday’s parliamentary vote in Berlin over the future of the German mission in the violence-ridden country.
A series of terror attacks has shocked the German troops stationed near Kunduz, in northern Afghanistan: Sunday evening, terrorists fired four rockets at the German camp. Two rockets missed and two hit their target. One tore through the roof of the camp’s kitchen but didn’t explode — it is sheer luck that nobody was injured. The attacks came just two days after three German soldiers were injured in a suicide bombing.
The German Parliament this Friday will decide the future of the country’s Afghanistan mission, and security experts see the latest upsurge in terror attacks against Germans as a large-scale campaign to attack the public support of the mission in Germany.
“Dead German soldiers are the best argument against prolonging the (Afghanistan) mandate,” one high-ranking military official told German news magazine Der Spiegel.
In further support of its propaganda initiative, the Taliban released a video of a 62-year-old German hostage named Rudolf Blechschmidt, pleading for his release. Today, the German government announced an exchange in which five Taliban prisoners were traded for Mr. Blechschmidt and four Afghan prisoners of the Taliban.
Islamic radicals think that Westerners are soft and decadent. They don’t believe that we can sustain a brutal struggle over a long period of time, and therefore they will inevitably prevail in the end. The jury is still out on this theory, but, candidly, there is considerable evidence to support it. The current controversy in Germany is a good test case because the conflict in Afghanistan is, in principle, uncontroversial. If Germany’s 3,000 troops can be driven home simply by fighting them, it will be more evidence that the Western democracies (outside of the United States, in any event) cannot sustain a medium-term military effort of any kind.
Beyond that, one wonders why the Taliban’s public relations campaign against Germany is so freely acknowledged as such, while al Qaeda’a equally transparent effort to influence American public opinion on Iraq is so often obfuscated.
To comment on this post, go here.
Posted by John at 8:16 PM
Al Qaeda goes dark
obl29.jpg
Eli Lake has the story of the day in today’s New York Sun: “Qaeda goes dark after a U.S. slip.” Lake reports that the September 7 Osama bin Laden video (the one with the funny looking black beard) was picked up by Rita Katz’s SITE Institute and provided to the National Counterterrorism Center:
The head of the SITE Intelligence Group, an organization that monitors Jihadi Web sites and provides information to subscribers, Rita Katz, said she personally provided the video on September 7 to the deputy director of the National Counterterrorism Center, Michael Leiter.
Ms. Katz yesterday said, “We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies.”
As a result of the leak, al Qaeda discovered that its intranet communication setup was not secure, and has shut it down:
One intelligence officer who requested anonymity said in an interview last week that the intelligence community watched in real time the shutdown of the Obelisk system. America’s Obelisk watchers even saw the order to shut down the system delivered from Qaeda’s internal security to a team of technical workers in Malaysia. That was the last internal message America’s intelligence community saw. “We saw the whole thing shut down because of this leak,” the official said. “We lost an important keyhole into the enemy.”
***
The founder of a Web site known as clandestineradio.com, Nick Grace, tracked the shutdown of Qaeda’s Obelisk system in real time. “It was both unprecedented and chilling from the perspective of a Web techie. The discipline and coordination to take the entire system down involving multiple Web servers, hundreds of user names and passwords, is an astounding feat, especially that it was done within minutes,” Mr. Grace said yesterday.
***
Ms. Katz said, “The government leak damaged our investigation into Al Qaeda’s network. Techniques and sources that took years to develop became ineffective. As a result of the leak Al Qaeda changed their methods.”
Who leaked the video? Lake has a round of denials:
Ms. Katz yesterday said, “We shared a copy of the transcript and the video with the U.S. government, to Michael Leiter, with the request specifically that it was important to keep the subject secret. Then the video was leaked out. An investigation into who downloaded the video from our server indicated that several computers with IP addresses were registered to government agencies.”
Yesterday a spokesman for the National Counterterrorism Center, Carl Kropf, denied the accusation that it was responsible for the leak. “That’s just absolutely wrong. The allegation and the accusation that we did that is unfounded,” he said. The spokesman for the director of national intelligence, Ross Feinstein, yesterday also denied the leak allegation. “The intelligence community and the ODNI senior leadership did not leak this video to the media,” he said.
Brian Ross’s September 7 ABC report refers only to “intelligence sources.” Who might they be?
JOHN wonders: Can we please, finally, have an investigation into a real leak?
UPDATE: Rusty Shackleford persuasively argues that SITE was not the source of the leaked video transcript and that al Qaeda was not prompted to go dark by the alleged leak described by the Sun (and the Washington Post).
Posted by Scott at 6:30 AM |
[Has charts and hidden urls]
The countries with big current account surpluses have problems too
October 10th, 2007
We have discussed the problems of those countries running large current account deficits, particularly those of the United States, on many occasions, including the troubling implications for trade policy. But those countries that are running large surpluses have some important structural issues as well.
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Martin Wolf writes in the FT, “China’s forecast surplus — an amazing 12 per cent of GDP — is twice as big, relative to GDP, as Japan’s has ever been.” Furthermore, China’s supply-side continues to grow much faster than its demand-side: “China, in particular, is now exporting a big net contraction, not expansion, in demand to the rest of its world, because its supply is growing far faster than its domestic demand. The difference this year alone is 2.5 per cent of GDP.”
Thus, while countries like China with big current account surpluses have the wherewithal to better weather an economic downturn, their huge build-up in their exporting capacity (a) could be a contributing factor to a downturn, and (b) could make a downturn far worse when it eventually arises. Whether increases in domestic demand in these fast-growing economies is enough to take up the slack when demand from the West flags is one of the major economic questions of our time. Martin Wolf explains:
today’s financial strength in emerging economies is a mirror image of US weakness. Charles Dumas of London-based Lombard Street Research brings this point out in an analysis with which I have great sympathy. The global balance of payments sums to zero. If emerging economies have chosen to run huge current account surpluses, partly because they bear deep scars from the financial crises of the 1990s and partly because they wish to conserve revenue from the soaring prices of the commodities many of them export, then someone else must run deficits.
In the 2000s, that someone has largely been the US. This has entailed fast growth of domestic debt and debt service, chiefly among households. Falling house prices and the “subprime” debacle have now derailed this debt-accumulation machine.
The good news, then, is that what has made the US vulnerable is also precisely what has made it easier for emerging market economies to cope with a US-generated shock…The bad news, however, is that the emerging market economies will indeed have to adjust, probably aggressively. It seems unlikely that growth of demand will now accelerate in western Europe and Japan. The opposite is, alas, more likely. More important is the fact that China’s surging current account surplus, forecast by the World Bank to reach $380bn (£187bn) this year, up from $250bn in 2006, is extracting demand from the rest of the world to the tune of ¾ per cent of the latter’s aggregate GDP. China’s forecast surplus — an amazing 12 per cent of GDP — is twice as big, relative to GDP, as Japan’s has ever been.
The analytical point is that offsetting any slowdown in US demand requires faster growth of demand in the rest of the world. This is still more true if, as seems quite likely (and also desirable), US demand growth slows, relative to growth of GDP, and so the US current account deficit shrinks further. In that case, the rest of the world’s demand must rise relative to its output and, ideally, must grow faster than potential output, to ensure full employment of resources. But that is exactly the opposite of what China - vastly the most important of emerging market economies - is now doing.
The conclusion, then, is simple and disturbing. Yes, emerging economies are, with a few exceptions, in a better position to offset a US slowdown and tightening of global credit conditions than ever before. But they are almost certainly going to have to do just that. The difficulty they face, however, is that neither western Europe as a whole, nor Japan, nor, not least, the giant among them, is likely to help the rest very much. China, in particular, is now exporting a big net contraction, not expansion, in demand to the rest of its world, because its supply is growing far faster than its domestic demand. The difference this year alone is 2.5 per cent of GDP.
It is a fascinating time. Whether increases in domestic demand in these fast-growing economies like China’s is enough to take up the slack when demand from the West flags is one of the major economic questions of this period, and a test of China’s development policies.
We observe that when a similar scenario played out 80 years ago in the developing United States in real estate (1926-1927) and then the stock market (1929), things did not end so well. Meanwhile, today the beat goes on for the moment. You will recall that Shanghai 4000 occurred only in May of this year. Now the Shanghai index has touched 5860.86 before closing a little lower. Who knows if and when it will all end?
Posted in General, business, China | No Comments »
[charts, hidden urls, and many other articles]
Faster than everyone expected
October 9th, 2007
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We have compared the rise of industrial China with the development of the US a century ago. But in today’s China, with the speed of communications and the mobility of cutting edge technology and infrastructure, the changes from third world to first world are taking place much faster than they did in the America of the early 20th century. WSJ:
A 1998 survey by consulting firm A.T. Kearney found more than one-third of multinationals were losing money in China, and an additional 25% were barely breaking even. In 1999, when the American Chamber of Commerce in China polled its members on how long it took their local operations to post a profit, many of them responded by writing humorous notes on their forms…
This year, China for the first time will contribute more to global economic growth than any other country, including the U.S., according to estimates by the International Monetary Fund. With its economy expanding at a rate of more than 11% this year, China is on track to surpass Germany as the world’s third-largest national economy by dollar value, although its annual output is still less than one-quarter of the U.S.’s at market exchange rates.
“People were not sure how fast this could happen,” said Sam Su, China division president of Yum Brands Inc., which gets nearly 20% of its revenue from its Pizza Hut and KFC restaurants in China. Although Yum Brands, of Louisville, Ky., has been in China for 20 years, longer than most Western companies, it is no longer exceptional in reaping significant revenue in China.
And that growing revenue is increasingly translating into profit. In surveys by the U.S.-China Business Council and the European Union Chamber of Commerce, more than 80% of respondents said their China operations were profitable last year…
– AstraZeneca expects sales to increase 25% this year and for China to be its third-largest market within five years. China “is an emerging market, but it’s also a market of huge scale. It’s a mixture of two worlds. So it gets a very high level of management attention,” said David Smith, AstraZeneca’s London-based executive vice president of operations.
– Yum Brands also has changed how it runs its business to reflect China’s clout. With the KFC and Pizza Hut restaurant chains having taken off in the current decade, China is now, by far, Yum’s most important growth market…Yum would have reported an operating loss if not for the $65 million in operating profit from China…
– Intel Corp. has made similar changes, as China’s share of its total revenue rose to 14% last year from 6.4% in 2000, the first year it started reporting China sales separately. This year, it made China a separate business unit, one of five globally that reports directly to headquarters in Santa Clara, Calif. “China is the only country outside the U.S. with such an extensive and full operation” for Intel, said Wee Theng Tan, president of Intel China.
Those who say that we ought to stop importing from China, or that Chinese companies should not be able to buy American companies, often have no idea of the Pandora’s box they are trying to pry open. Having said that, there is no excuse for the US not to get its current account deficit under control.
Posted in General, Democrats, Republicans, business, China | No Comments »
Looking backwards
Always attack
October 9th, 2007
The piece in the American Thinker by Kyle-Anne Shiver on the strangest political controversy of the year makes it seem not so strange after all. Shiver makes reference to Saul Alinsky’s famous Rules for Radicals. They include some brilliant observations. Here are some excerpts of those rules:
Always remember the first rule of power tactics: Power is not only what you have but what the enemy thinks you have.
The second rule is: Never go outside the experience of your people. When an action is outside the experience of the people, the result is confusion, fear, and retreat.
The third rule is: Wherever possible go outside of the experience of the enemy. Here you want to cause confusion, fear, and retreat.
The fourth rule is: Make the enemy live up to their own book of rules. You can kill them with this, for they can no more obey their own rules than the Christian church can live up to Christianity.
The fourth rule carries within it the fifth rule: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
The sixth rule is: A good tactic is one that your people enjoy. If your people are not having a ball doing it, there is something very wrong with the tactic.
The seventh rule is: A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag. man can sustain militant interest in any issue for only a limited time, after which it becomes a ritualistic commitment…
The eighth rule: Keep the pressure on, with different tactics and actions, and utilize all events of the period for your purpose.
The ninth rule: The threat is usually more terrifying than the thing itself.
Shiver says: “Hillary Clinton has been the perfectly patient disciple of Alinsky’s since she wrote her thesis about him her senior year at Wellesley in 1969. If her admiration of Alinsky had died with her thesis, no one would care. But it didn’t. He remained a close confidant until his death (The Shadow Party, p. 56) and his tactical fingerprints are all over her projection of the false “Centrist” image she is manipulating to garner political power…she is following the Alinsky model, which admonishes revolutionaries to milk their white, middle-class backgrounds and appearances to achieve the political power necessary to carry out the socialist revolution.” It’s quite an accusation.
Posted in General, War, Democrats, Republicans, radical chic | No Comments »
Dangerous nonsense
October 9th, 2007
President Bush:
I believe in an almighty God, and I believe that all the world, whether they be Muslim, Christian, or any other religion, prays to the same God…I believe that Islam is a great religion that preaches peace. And I believe people who murder the innocent to achieve political objectives aren’t religious people.
We just don’t know where to begin with this dangerous, ahistorical nonsense. So we’ll perhaps just focus on the least wrong part of Bush’s statement. From the Encyclopedia Britannica: “Polytheism - the belief in many gods. Polytheism characterizes virtually all religions other than Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which share a common tradition of monotheism, the belief in one God.”
Follw-up question for the President: Are people “religious” who believe it is okay to prohibit churches and synagogues in their country, or who persecute missionaries, threaten women for talking, or who think it is okay to “command good and forbid evil” to the extremes of putting people to death for apostasy or homosexuality?
Posted in General, War, Religion | 2 Comments »
[hidden urls to parts of stories]
http://www.dinocrat.com/archives/2007/10/08/different-kinds-of-higher-education/
Different kinds of higher education
Michael Barone describes one sort of higher eduction today:
Colleges and universities today almost universally have speech codes, which prohibit speech deemed hurtful by others, particularly those who are deemed to be minorities (including women, who are a majority on most campuses these days). They are enforced unequally, so that no one gets punished when students take copies of conservative alternative campus newspapers left for free distribution and dump them in the trash. But should a conservative student call some female students “water buffaloes,” he is sentenced to take sensitivity training — the campus version of communist re-education camps. The message comes through loud and clear. Some kinds of speech are protected, while others are punished.
Where did speech codes come from? There certainly weren’t many when I was in college or law school. So far as I can tell, they originated after college and university administrators began using racial quotas and preferences to admit students — starting with blacks, now including Hispanics and perhaps others — who did not meet ordinary standards. They were instituted, it seems, to prevent those students from feeling insulted and to free administrators from criticism for preferential treatment — treatment that arguably violates the Civil Rights Act of 1964…
Racial quotas and preferences continue to be employed…in spite of state laws forbidding them, and university administrators seem to derive much of their psychic income from their supposed generosity in employing them. This, even though evidence compiled by UCLA Professor Richard Sander suggests they produce worse educational outcomes for their intended beneficiaries and even though Justice Clarence Thomas makes a persuasive case in his book “My Grandfather’s Son” that they cast a stigma of inferiority on them…one indispensable requirement for being a college or university administrator is intellectual dishonesty. You have to be willing to lie about what you consider one of your most important duties. So much for open inquiry and intellectual rigor…
in the 1960s, they abandoned their role as advocates of American values — critical advocates who tried to advance freedom and equality further than Americans had yet succeeded in doing — and took on the role of adversaries of society. The students who were exempted from serving their country during the Vietnam War condemned not themselves but their country, and many sought tenured positions in academe to undermine what they considered a militaristic, imperialist, racist, exploitative, sexist, homophobic — the list of complaints grew as the years went on — country. English departments have been packed by deconstructionists who insist that Shakespeare is no better than rap music, and history departments with multiculturalists who insist that all societies are morally equal except our own, which is morally inferior.
Victor Davis Hanson describes another sort of educated person:
The brilliance of U.S. army and marines officers has not been fully appreciated. I met scores with PhDs and MAs, from Majors to Colonels, who are literally all at once trying to defeat al Qaeda gangs and Shiite militias, rebuild government facilities, arbitrate tribal feuds, repair utilities and train Iraqi army and police. As was true of the last trip to Iraq, I am left with three general impressions about the military.
(1) Our army and marines are far too few and overextended. The United States must either radically increase the size of these traditional ground units or scale back its commitments in Europe, Asia, and the Middle East Through constant rotations, we are literally burning out gifted officers and lifetime professionals— and will lose their priceless expertise if they begin, as I fear, retiring en masse due to the sheer exhaustion.
(2) There is more optimism about success among the battlefield soldiers than present with analysts in Baghdad. The sudden decrease in violence has left many units stunned that Iraqis who used to try to kill them are suddenly volunteering information about terrorists and landmines, and clamoring to join the joint security force. Usually those behind the desk are the optimists, the soldiers who die the pessimists. But instead there is genuine feeling on the front that after four frustrating years of ordeal, at last there are tangible signs of real, often radical improvement.
(3) As a supporter of some four years of the now unpopular effort to remove Saddam and leave a democracy in his place, I continue to have only one reservation, albeit a major one. The U.S. soldier in the field is so unusually competent and heroic that one comes to despair at the very thought of losing even one of them. As a military historian I know that an army that can’t take casualties can’t win, but I confess after spending 16-hour days with our soldiers in impossible conditions one wonders whether the entire country of Iraq is worth the loss of just of these unusual Americans. I understand both the lack of logic and perhaps amorality in such a sweeping statement, but feel it nonetheless out here.
Society would appear to be splintering in unhealthy ways.
This entry was posted on Monday, October 8th, 2007 at 10:30 am
[2006 with many hidden urls]
http://www.dinocrat.com/archives/2006/11/24/ten-empirical-deficiencies-of-islamic-sharia-societies/
Ten empirical deficiencies of Islamic sharia societies
The Modern World in the West has a number of terrible problems that come from its wealth and ease, its licentiousness, and the profound ignorance of its people about how they came to be so rich and fortunate, as compared to almost all other people at all other times in the history of the world. We have discussed these problems in this space from time to time.
It is certainly arguable that what the West needs as a corrective to its failings, narcissism, and spiritual void is an infusion of religion. There are those even on the Left in America who argue that. However, it is hard to make the case that Islamic sharia law would be a useful corrective, based on the empirical evidence from Islamic sharia societies.
We have previously argued that Islamic sharia law is incompatible in important ways with the Judeo-Christian-Enlightenment tradition of law that America and the West are heir to. It is our contention that the more closely a society adheres literally to a seventh century book as the last word on law and the proper organization of society, the more dysfunctional that society will be in the Modern World. Today, we thought we’d take a moment to see what the empirical evidence seems to indicate.
In our view, Islamic sharia has a very poor track record as a legal system and means of organizing a society in the technologically oriented and globalized Modern World. Here are some categories for your consideration:
1) Poverty. Sharia societies are very poor as a consequence of their ideology. The total GDP of the Arab world, minus oil revenues, is less than that of tiny Finland. To make a side-by-side comparison, Israel’s GDP per capita is about 20x that of Egypt. China has gone from nothing to a $2 trillion economy over the last quarter century while Iran has stagnated for 25 years under revolutionary Shiism at a small fraction of China’s GDP. These are self-inflicted wounds of sharia.
2) Unemployment. Sharia socieites experience mass unemployment. Iran’s youth unemployment is 34% or more, Saudi Arabia’s unemployment is 25%, and the Palestinians have unemployment of 25-40% (Israel’s is 9%). Interestingly, these dysfunctional numbers in sharia countries carry over to Muslim populations in the West: in France and England, Muslim unemployment is 3x the national average. (We can’t help recalling the words of Khalid ibn Al-Walid on loving death over life when we read these depressing statistics.)
3) Technology and innovation. Sharia societies have a dreadful track record on innovation, the mother’s milk of keeping up in the Modern World. Saudi Arabia recently went six years without issuing a patent, Iran issued only one patent a couple of years ago, and Indonesia issued 30 patents over the last five years. By contrast, China went from issuing zero patents thirty years ago, to hundreds of thousands today. In the US, more patents were issued last year to the people of Utah than have ever been issued in the entire history of all sharia societies combined. (We recall Bernard Lewis’s oft-repeated comment that Islamic languages do not have a good equivalent for the word “curiosity.”)
4) Freedom of speech. There is little freedom of speech in sharia countries, as the Cartoon Riots all over the Islamic sharia world (and among those in the West who want sharia imposed) amply demonstrates. Freedom of speech only exists where freedom of controversial speech is tolerated and protected, and the Cartoon Riots demonstrated completely and for all time where Islamic sharia societies stand on this matter. A corollary of free speech is free expression in all the arts, and here too sharia societies have generally an awful track record.
5) Freedom of the press. Freedom of the press does not exist in sharia countries where journalists are jailed or killed for failing to toe the party line. We quote from a Somali Muslim journalist: “In the House of Islam, you cannot have a principle other than that of the community. Every thing you do is referred to Islam. The mantra is “that’s stupid BUT…But we cannot do this because we are Muslims.” One hears this expression ad nauseam. In the Islamic world you cease to be a human being. You become only a Muslim, whatever that entails. You are not allowed to be a person with vices and virtues, you cannot follow your own reasoning, and you cannot be unpopular or defend an unpopular idea. You cannot go out of the circle. To express yourself freely means to risk death. And death indeed if you change your faith. Invention itself is considered as an act of blasphemy…Censorship in the Islamic world is instilled at childhood.”
6) Freedom of religion. Sharia societies frown on or prohibit the free exercise of religion. Sharia societies like Saudi Arabia do not permit churches or synagogues on their soil. Moreover, Sharia societies put apostates to death or exact other punishments for ceasing to believe in Islam. Christian schools and churches have been attacked in Pakistan, Indonesia, Palestine and elsewhere in the Islamic world. Sharia societies celebtrate Jihad as the means to spread sharia law globally, and establish Islam as the dominant or only religion.
7) Women’s rights. Sharia societies are famous for their lack of women’s rights. In strict sharia societies women cannot drive cars, vote, or walk the streets unaccompanied. Other restrictions are even more ridiculous. The recent comment by a prominent imam that women without the hijab were “uncovered meat” who were instruments of Satan is indicative of the attitude sharia societies take towards women, and their view of the God-given natural perquisites of men. We refer you to these other discussions by Shrinkwrapped, Dr. Sanity, and neo-neocon for further reference.
8 Homosexual rights. They hang homosexuals in Iran, and there appears to be universal agreement in sharia societies that homosexuality must be punished.
9) Mental health treatment. Mental health treatment in sharia societies appears to be appalling. The West’s dominant belief is that humans are flawed, and often have issues that result from childhood experiences, internal conflicts, and unconscious impulses; these can be treated through psychotherapy, psychoanalysis, or medication. By contrast, in sharia societies, man was created with a fitrah, an inherent nature that is “pure and sinless.” The Freudian concept of the unconscious is rejected. Instead, “being crazy in the Islamic perspective mean that one is possessed by the jinn” (demons). The Islamic belief is that a “perversion cannot possibly be innate.” As a consequence, people with psychological troubles are “treated with the Koran”. In Pakistan the education minister said regarding pyschological treatment: “Solution to our problems lies in the teachings of Islam. We can achieve success and peace by following universal principles of our religion.” Good luck.
10) Educating the young. Probably the worst offense committed by sharia societies is that they condemn their children to the same blinkered and distorted worldviews that promise war and violence to this generation. Sharia societies have textbooks that say that Jews are apes and pigs, they say that “Jihad is the summit of Islam”, and that a Muslim “cannot maintain a loyal friendship” with a non-Muslim. Sharia societies have TV shows and videos of children pledging suicide-murder to kill the Jews.
There are also a number of relatively trivial items to list. Some sharia societies (and the sharia-minded) forbid football, women’s soccer, watching the world cup, cell phone ringtones, Burger King ice cream squiggles, and other things. But they all ultimately boil down to one thing — who gets to make the decisions about one’s life. The West has chosen — though poorly implemented — the concept that the Rule of Reason should govern the law-making of governments and the decision-making of men. In sharia societies, such a statement would be evidence of man’s cardinal sin in Islam, the sin of pride. To choose Reason (or any man-made construct) over submission to God is man’s central failing in Islam.
We may think that the above list is very clever and persuasive. To millions of people who live ordinary or devout lives in sharia societies, the list is evidence of our perfidy. Therein lies the problem of the world today.
This entry was posted on Friday, November 24th, 2006
http://www.khodorkovsky.info/worldwide_support/opinion/133956.html
WORLDWIDE SUPPORT | OPINION
December 22, 2005
Andre Glucksmann: Khodorkovsky Is A Prisoner Of The “Power Vertical”
“Why is Khodorkovsky Behind Bars?”
Andre Glucksmann, French philosopher
December 22, 2005
Where There is a Will, There is a Way
Since 2000 we have been watching Russia slip further and further backwards. I remember back in 1978, when Valery d’Estaing was receiving Brezhnev in the Champs Elysées, public opinion was outraged by the situation of the Gulag prisoners. The Recamier Theatre saw the cream of intellectual Paris gather in order to receive dissidents banished from Eastern Europe by the Kremlin. Foucault, Sartre, Aron and yours truly attracted more reporters than the head of the Kremlin. That is why Putin tricksters must not be allowed to dazzle; it is quite possible to make the public sit up and take notice of Mikhail Khodorkovsky’s sentence.
Khodorkovsky’s Arrest is Not an Arrest of a Businessman...
continued, with info also on other prisoners............
http://traces-cl.com/june04/terroristnihil.html
Greats interviews
Terrorist Nihilism and the Crisis of the West
The terrorist attacks on Atocha and the Twin Towers and the affirmation that values and truth no longer exist: symptoms of a disintegration of the “I,” of a nihilism that pervades all of society and sends it into crisis. West against West? We talked about this with one of today’s most authoritative intellectuals
edited by José Luis Restán e David Blázquez
The fundamental thesis of your thought lately is that terrorism is challenging the Western world, the free and democratic world. More precisely, it is nihilism’s challenge to civilization. The menace surrounding us is something multiform, not describable in definitive terms and hard to name, whose source of action is what you call nihilism. What is the nihilism that you posit as the origin of modern terrorism and that we saw in its radical form in the March 11th attack?
Terrorist nihilism is not a product of Islam, and it is not this simply because it is a modern product and because the murderers kill, first and foremost, Muslims themselves. I have followed terrorism in Algeria closely, and the victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslim children, peasants, and women. Precisely for this reason, I do not want to reduce the problem of terrorism to something that is born solely out of the Islamic world. In my opinion, nihilist terrorism is above all a war against civilians. And this war was already going on in the twentieth century in the totalitarian regimes that set themselves up in order to terrorize people. The cry that arises from Manhattan, the cry that arises from the murderers in Atocha–“Long live death”–is, after all, equal to the statement they wrote right after the attacks: “You love life, we love death.”
The new thing about this terrorism is that it has been transformed into a world phenomenon. This nihilist terrorism was first described by Dostoevsky in his novel Demons. In it he describes a terrorist group made up of very different people, each with his own beliefs. Some believed in God, others declared He was dead, those beyond them believed in the great Russia, and those even farther along did not believe in anything, but they all had in common the will to destroy and pleasure in destruction. And it is precisely this that makes up nihilism. Nihilism cannot be only love for God, because one can be nihilist and believe in God (this is Bin Laden’s position), or not believe in anything, or believe in race (like the Nazis or Bolsheviks). Whatever the case, what characterizes nihilism is that it does not consider it evil to do evil. Nihilism does not place itself beyond good and evil, but thinks that everything it does is good. Indeed, Bin Laden thinks he is an envoy of God. But one can also be atheist and thus, even without realizing it, one becomes God, because, as Dostoevsky said, “If God is dead, all is permitted.” The problem, then, is not that of believing or not believing in God, but evil. The problem is that for nihilism there is no evil, all is permitted, there are no taboos. You can murder anyone, in any way. Remember Atocha: they were workers from poor neighborhoods, all of them against the war in Iraq, but this did not stop the terrorists’ attack.
What I call nihilism is the capacity to destroy and to generate terror just for the pleasure of destroying and of generating fear.
In Europe, there are many intellectuals who lately have proclaimed a radical relativism, i.e., a break with the bonds of traditional society. Many of them state that neither truth nor falsehood exist, but everything is relative: a radical cynicism. It is true that these intellectuals are not in favor of terrorism, but by doing this, a cultural and moral base is being cultivated that is incapable of standing up to the challenge of terrorism, isn’t it?
There are two forms of nihilism, Nietzsche said. On one hand, there is the active form of nihilism that tends to destroy, that enjoys destruction, that shouts “Long live death!” On the other, there is passive nihilism, the kind that lets the terrorists shout, that lets the cry of “Long live death!” ring out, that lets populations be destroyed. This passive nihilism is widespread in Europe. Thus, there is a European–but also American–crisis, and when I say that the West is against the West, I say this because I really think there is a crisis of civilization.
Let me recall here that Bin Laden asked Europeans to accept the terrorist power of the Muslims without opposing Islam by withdrawing their troops from Iraq. To my mind, the problem is that if we start to give in to this blackmail, we end up yielding all the way. Here arises the problem of Islamic veils in school, but not only this. Bin Laden is demanding a part of Spain (Al-Andalus) that belonged to a caliph of Baghdad centuries ago. Passive nihilism, which I tried to express in the title of my latest book [West Against West], is not just the opposition between Europe and America—Europe is divided, each person is divided in his conscience. There is a great division within the West, a profound, philosophical division. This is nothing new: all happy civilizations–and we, in the midst of all our difficulties, are the happiest in the world–have wanted to believe that their happiness was eternal, but happiness is always threatened. What characterizes the West ever since ancient Greece is the capacity to fight whoever threatens our happiness.
In your book, you say that Europe is no longer able to say “I;” it no longer knows who it is. You also say that the European institutions do nothing more than manage a conceptual desert. But it seems that among politicians and intellectuals, there is not a clear intention to want to define what Europe is, to want to acknowledge their own tradition and roots. Can the future of the European Union be built on the basis of the person, setting aside this identity that pertains to Europe?
I believe that Europe’s problem now is that it is not able to evaluate the evil that surrounds it and the disasters that can occur. It is precisely for this reason that we are amazed by events like what happened at Atocha, just as the Americans were struck dumb by the attack on Manhattan. This consciousness of disaster in common is what can unite Western civilization, not a shared conception of God or Paradise.
Even if this has been the case and there has not been unity, as you have said, what is true is that there were shared traditions, common experience. But now, the impression I have is that the individual is radically isolated, as though the elements of society that transmitted tradition and the value of the world (from the family to religious communities) no longer existed and the social fabric were weaker and weaker. Is this situation a solid base for being able to fight against the great challenge of terrorist nihilism?
Ever since the Greeks, Europe has not been built on a solid social fabric. Go read Plato’s dialogues, and you will see the Greeks’ problems: adolescents who said what Mom and Dad had told them. We see this in Plato’s dialogues in ancient Greece five centuries before Christ. The crisis of the social fabric exists not only in modern times, but since the beginning of the West, and, quite rightly, the capacity of Western culture to face this crisis is what has kept it united.
The alternative is this: to face this crisis or to sleep serenely, pretending not to see the problems. The capacity to face the challenges of the current situation is the most important thing about Europe (as we can see in the Greek tragedies, in Homer…). But, on the other hand, the greatest mistake is to close one’s eyes in front of the world.
During World War II, in 1938 and 1939, France lived in a peaceful, idyllic world and sang a popular song that said: “Everything is going very well!” And when the Third Reich fell, Europe and American sang: “The big battles are over! Violence is no more. There are only small conflicts, low-level conflicts.” During the ten years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the terrible “success” in Manhattan, American intellectuals said: “We are living the end of conflicts.” And it was not true. I have always said that letting women be killed in Afghanistan, leaving their dictators in place, was not only a problem of the people of Afghanistan, but also of the Americans of Manhattan.
How do you judge the phenomenon of the pacifism that has invaded our European cities since the US intervention in Iraq?
I have been very critical of pacifism for a number of years. I started by criticizing the German pacifists when they took to the streets to manifest against American missiles, against the missiles that were defending us from the Soviet missiles. The expression “Make tea, but not war” is entertaining, but totally useless. Making tea is good for the digestion, but it does not solve the problems. The pacifists are not true pacifists; if they were true pacifists, they would not have risen up against the intervention in Iraq, forgetting to protest the worst of wars that a particularly important power, which is a permanent member of the United Nations Security Council, Russia, is building up against the Chechen people. Where were the pacifists when Grozny was destroyed? Where are they when a people like the Chechen one is threatened? To be sure, the Chechen population is not huge, at the most a million people, but is this any reason not to ask for peace in Chechnya? The fundamental reason why people fill the streets for peace in Iraq, but not for a people that is close to destruction, is that in one case they would have to take to the streets against Putin, but no one is interested in demonstrating against Putin, and in the other case they have to demonstrate against Bush. The pacifists are not pacifists, but anti-American and anti-Bush.
I do not understand how we can accept not defending the Chechen people, when everyone declares himself to be a “friend of peace.” There is a great hypocrisy and great irresponsibility on the part of the demonstrators who say they are pacifists. This is nothing new–there were pacifist demonstrations in 1947 in favor of the Communists and against nuclear weapons (because, at that moment, only the United States had them), but from the moment when Stalin also had his nuclear armament, nobody remembered to demonstrate until the 1980s. The idea that pacifism claims to be an absolute truth should already be reason enough not to trust it. I have always asked the pacifists why they did not demonstrate against the war in Chechnya, but I never got an answer, while the Chechen people is destroyed in the most complete silence.
Let’s go back one step. You cited as a characteristic of European history the subjecting of everything to criticism. But criticism is always sustained on a previous point, i.e., on the fact that there was a tradition that was put up for discussion. But there is a core of certainties that has always been untouchable: the idea that killing is evil, the idea that what happens in the Congo has to do with me in Madrid. I have the impression that an educational cultural effort that generates this type of conscience does not exist. I would like to ask, from where do we start today? Where can we find the energy to stand up to a challenge like this one, if there is nothing positive from which to start?
I believe that Europe has always united “against” and not “in favor of”–but, for example, when someone fights an illness, it is because he has some idea what health is. Being in a democracy means living in the regime that is least bad of them all, but it does not mean living in Paradise, because democracy is what enables us to fight against certain ills, against oppression. But good is relative to evil. Doctors do not know what perfect health is. When one wants perfect health, he is not a physician but a charlatan. In my opinion, it is the same thing in politics and philosophy; we have an idea of what is false. Even if we do not have an idea of what eternal life is like, we know that two plus two is not five, we have some idea of evil, we know that concentration camps are an absolute evil, and thus we have points on which we can come together and define a life that is less bad. The wisdom of the West is this.
I am less positive than you are, because I do not think that we lost the roots and idea of good ten or twenty years ago. It is sufficient to see that the stage on which the greatest massacres of the twentieth century were perpetrated is Europe. Hitler was born in Europe, as was Communism with its millions of dead, and so we are not innocent, we are not angels, we fought wars of religion long before Islam, we were capable of genocide long before the rest of the world. Indeed, the idea of genocide is already there in Greek literature, in the Odyssey and the Iliad, in which the city of Troy is destroyed. The worst of evils is that of closing one’s eyes in front of the evil we commit and that we are able to think up.
Shakespeare does not tell us that the whole world is good and has grand intentions; he does not tell us that all we have to do is drink tea for violence to disappear. Shakespeare analyzes the roots of violent behavior: envy, malice… This is culture: to open our eyes even when it hurts. And to my mind, this is what is missing today. We are full of good intentions, we have grand ideas about our innocence, but we have left free room in the world for great crimes to be committed, while we were celebrating the end of wars and the reign of reason. Neither the UN nor the United States nor Europe intervened in the last great genocide of the twentieth century: Rwanda. There, for three months, 10,000 Tutsis were killed every day; in other words, a million in three months. Thus, we cannot declare ourselves innocent, but must open our eyes to our own complicity.
We are facing one of the most important moments in history. Reflect on this: immediately after the attacks on the Twin Towers, people called the site Ground Zero. This was the term used to refer to the place where the atom bombs dropped before Hiroshima exploded. People, seeing the attacks of September 11th, felt they were facing a power of devastation analogous to that of the H-bombs. In 1945, men discovered that history could end, that man could come to an end with his existence. Before that time, only God’s power could put an end to mankind, but it was inconceivable that man himself could put an end to the human adventure. In 1945, a great responsibility was born for the country that had the H-bomb. We discovered from Manhattan that the power of devastation and the will for evil are much more widespread than we thought. There is no longer a monopoly in the hands of nations with nuclear capabilities. The power of the nuclear bomb is in the hands of the first madman passing by. What happened at Hiroshima can happen again. Atocha would have been much worse if the trains had not been late. About 10,000 people could have died. There is a great power of destruction in the hands of empty-headed people who can kill cheaply, because we must not forget that the attacks on the Twin Towers cost roughly the price of two apartments in Madrid. Now we are much more responsible than we were before. I do not say we should be optimists or pessimists; what I am saying is that we have to be much more responsible.
We have gone from the era of the nuclear bomb, the H-bomb, to the human bomb, the h-bomb.
The temptation is to avert our gaze and to try to live happily as though nothing had happened, but when one yields to this temptation, reality comes crashing in as at the Twin Towers or Atocha. We have to be sentinels to danger. Biography
by Benedetta Villani
André Glucksmann was born on June 19, 1937, in Boulogne-Billancourt, France. He studied in Lyon and at the Ecole Normale Supérieure de Saint Cloud, earning a degree in philosophy. He is currently one of the most famous intellectuals and polemicists of our time. In the 1970s he was a protagonist of the debate initiated by the nouveaux philosophes, along with Bernard Henri Lévy and Alain Finkielkraut. During the 1980s he was a precise and attentive commentator on political change in Eastern Europe.
He has long been committed to the causes of the Soviet dissidents, the Vietnamese boat-people, and, more recently, the Chechens.
For some years, he has devoted his attention to analyzing the international social-political situation in light of the new events connected with Islamic terrorism. Works
by B.V.
Glucksmann published his first book (Le Discours de la Guerre) [The Discourse of War] in 1968, but his reputation grew on the basis of two essays, La Cuisinière et le Mangeur [The Cook and the Eater] (1975), in which he drew a parallel between Nazism and Communism, and Les Maîtres Penseurs [The Master Thinkers] (1977). Among his most recent books are Le Bien et le Mal [Good and Evil] (1997) and the Troisième Mort de Dieu [The Thirteenth Death of God] (2000).
Posted by Orrin Judd at 7:41 AM
FULL FORCE DEMAND:
A match made in October (Luke Pyenson, October 10, 2007, Boston Globe)
Cider doughnuts are a well-known accompaniment to apple cider, but nobody knows exactly when and why the two were first eaten together. According to the “King Arthur Flour Baker’s Companion,” recipes for beignets, a kind of high-class fried dough, came here from France and Holland during Colonial times. Autumn was the time for fall butchering, and so it was the only season when there was enough fat available to fry things. As a result, doughnuts became an autumnal treat in the Northeast. In many homes, “cake” doughnuts - made with baking powder or baking soda instead of yeast - would be fried in fat rendered after the slaughter. This coincided with the season for apple cider production, and the two seemed to be a natural pairing. Whether someone spilled cider into the doughnut mix accidentally or purposely wasn’t recorded. But there is actually apple cider in the batter for cider donuts. In fact, it’s often the main liquid.
“That’s what makes them so yummy!” says Honey-Pot Hill Orchards co-owner Julie Martin Sullivan. The Stow orchard uses its own cider in the batter, which is a secret recipe. The doughnuts are about one-third the size of regular doughnuts and come plain or covered in cinnamon sugar. Half-dozen bags come with three of each, but be careful. Their size makes it dangerously easy to unknowingly consume several. Outside they’re crispy and inside they’re dense; they’re best right out of the fryolator and washed down with, or even dipped into, Honey-Pot Hill’s apple cider, which is for sale in individual-serving cartons.
“Sometimes on the weekends the demand is full force and there’s a bit of a wait,” says Martin Sullivan. But don’t worry, “We keep making them.”
Rich Rounds Of Cider, No Less (Kara Newman, 10/06/04, The Washington Post)
Apple Cider Doughnuts
Makes 18 doughnuts
and doughnut holes
These apple cider doughnuts — dense, richly spiced and with a faint taste of buttermilk — are adapted from a recipe by pastry chef Lauren Dawson from Hearth restaurant in New York City’s East Village. Hearth serves the doughnuts with applesauce and whipped cream.
For the doughnuts:
1 cup apple cider
3 1/2 cups flour, plus additional for the work surface
2 teaspoons baking powder
1 teaspoon baking soda
1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/8 teaspoon ground nutmeg
4 tablespoons butter, at room temperature
1 cup granulated sugar
2 eggs
1/2 cup buttermilk (low-fat or nonfat work fine)
Vegetable oil for frying
For the glaze:
1 cup confectioners’ sugar
2 tablespoons apple cider
For the doughnuts: In a saucepan over medium or medium-low heat, gently reduce the apple cider to about 1/4 cup, 20 to 30 minutes. Set aside to cool.
Meanwhile, in a bowl, combine the flour, baking powder and soda, cinnamon, salt and nutmeg. Set aside.
Using an electric mixer on medium speed (with the paddle attachment, if using a standing mixer) beat the butter and granulated sugar until the mixture is smooth. Add the eggs, 1 at a time, and continue to beat until the eggs are completely incorporated. Use a spatula to scrape down the sides of the bowl occasionally. Reduce the speed to low and gradually add the reduced apple cider and the buttermilk, mixing just until combined. Add the flour mixture and continue to mix just until the dough comes together.
Line 2 baking sheets with parchment or wax paper and sprinkle them generously with flour. Turn the dough onto 1 of the sheets and sprinkle the top with flour. Flatten the dough with your hands until it is about 1/2 inch thick. Use more flour if the dough is still wet. Transfer the dough to the freezer until it is slightly hardened, about 20 minutes. Pull the dough out of the freezer. Using a 3-inch doughnut cutter, cut out doughnut shapes. Place the cut doughnuts and doughnut holes onto the second sheet pan. Refrigerate the doughnuts for 20 to 30 minutes. (You may re-roll the scraps of dough, refrigerate them briefly and cut additional doughnuts from the dough.)
Add enough oil to a deep-sided pan to measure a depth of about 3 inches. Attach a candy thermometer to the side of the pan and heat over medium heat until the oil reaches 350 degrees. Have ready a plate lined with several thicknesses of paper towels.
For the glaze: While the cut doughnut shapes are in the refrigerator, make the glaze by whisking together the confectioners’ sugar and the cider until the mixture is smooth. Set aside.
To fry and assemble: Carefully add a few doughnuts to the oil, being careful not to crowd the pan, and fry until golden brown, about 60 seconds. Turn the doughnuts over and fry until the other side is golden, 30 to 60 seconds. Drain on paper towels after the doughnuts are fried. Dip the top of the warm doughnuts into the glaze and serve immediately.
THE CLANNISHNESS OF DYING PEOPLES:
A Portrait of Europe’s Aging Population: EU residents over age 65 outnumber those under 14, a Spanish study says, as the bloc’s young population has fallen 21% in 25 years (Elitsa Vucheva, 10/09/07, Business Week)
There are currently more elderly people than children living in the EU, as Europe’s young population has decreased by 21 percent - or 23 million — in 25 years, 10 percent of which in the last ten years alone.
Only 16.2 percent of today’s EU population is less than 14 years old, while one sixth (16.6 percent) is 65 years or more. In addition one out of every 25 EU citizens is over 80 years old.
Italy has the least young people (14.2%) and one out of every five Italians is more than 65 years old. At the other end of the scale, Ireland has the most youngsters (20.7%), according to a recently-released report by the Institute for Family Policies based in Spain.
However, the decrease in numbers has been greatest in Spain, where the young population has diminished by 44% in the 1990 to 2005 period.
Despite these figures, the EU population has grown by 8.2% over the last 27 years, now reaching almost 500 million.
This paradox can mostly be explained by an ever increasing number of immigrants coming to the EU. Last year alone, 75% of the population growth was the result of immigration flows, says the report.
Bickering Belgians Find a Point of Unity in Toughening Borders (DAN BILEFSKY, 10/09/07, NY Times)
[S]igns of a breakthrough in the talks emerged Tuesday morning when the Christian Democrats and Liberals temporarily put aside their differences and agreed on a tough new approach to asylum policy and economic migration.
Political analysts stressed that the crisis was far from over with the important issue of how to grant more autonomy to Flanders and Wallonia still hanging in the balance. They underlined, however, that the deal illustrated how immigration had become a unifying issue in the country.
“A toughening stance on immigration has overtaken politics in Belgium and made immigration a swing issue, and we are seeing this across Europe,” said Pierre Blaise, secretary general of Crisp, a sociopolitical research organization in Brussels.
Note the irony that we’re trying to break tribalism in the pre-Judeo-Christian Middle East even as post-Judeo-Christian Europe reverts to it.
Posted by Orrin Judd at 6:58 AM
CONNECT THE DOTS?:
From Washington to war in Waziristan (Syed Saleem Shahzad, 10/11/07, Asia Times)
A dramatic sequence of events in Pakistan has grabbed global attention, but few have so far connected the dots between the hurried issuance of a National Reconciliation Ordinance on October 5 and the savage fighting that is currently raging in the North Waziristan tribal area. [...]
While last week’s political machinations were under way in Pakistan, the US was providing intelligence to Islamabad about a massive regrouping of the Taliban in the Pakistani tribal areas in preparation for a big campaign against NATO forces in southeast Afghanistan. The US feared that a disruption of the political dialogue would mean a hiatus in Pakistan’s political transition, and delay military operations against the thousands of Taliban and al-Qaeda forces gathering in North Waziristan before launching attacks on the Afghan provinces of Khost, Paktia, Paktika, Gardez and Ghazni, and then Kabul with unending waves of suicide missions. If the Taliban were allowed to hatch their plans unmolested during a political vacuum in Islamabad, Washington believed the Taliban would seize the upper hand in Afghanistan.
That was the situation when a representative of the US spoke to Bhutto and noted her minimum demand for a political deal: “At least a signed letter by General Pervez Musharraf which would document his promises against my demands.” US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice then spoke to Musharraf by telephone, and immediately thereafter, Musharraf’s legal team promulgated the National Reconciliation Ordinance.
Waziristan is the dot.
MORE:
Al-Qaeda has built safe haven in Pak tribal areas: US (Sridhar Krishnaswami, October 10, 2007, Rediff)
Al-Qaeda has regenerated a ‘safe haven’ in Pakistan’s tribal area, the latest United States policy document has stated. A top American official has also blamed the failure of a peace agreement in the Afghan border area for the terror network regaining its strength there.
Since the 9/11 attacks, the US-led war on terror has deprived al-Qaeda of its safe haven in Afghanistan, said the new ‘National Strategy for Homeland Security.
“But the group has protected its top leadership, replenished operational lieutenants, and regenerated a safe haven in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas —core capabilities that will help facilitate another attack on the homeland,” the White House document said.
Comments (1)
Posted by Orrin Judd at 12:00 AM
LIKE SEEKS LIKE:
Brothel Sponsors Italian Soccer Team (Der Spiegel, 10/10/07)
The Italian fourth-division soccer team Trento Calcio 1921 has stepped into the reddish spotlight for having a sponsorship deal with an Austrian brothel.
The team, which is based in Trento in northern Italy, displayed the company Casa Bianca at the top of its list of sponsors, which also include local restaurants and an electrical goods retailer, on its official Web site. However visitors who clicked on Casa Bianca’s innocuous white rose icon found themselves taken to a Web site for a brothel.
[LOL, bet you read it twice........granny]