The Outside World

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Deja Vu All Over Again In Afganistan

By Walter Rodgers

The assessment of the war in Afghanistan from the top US general there is grim. Without more troops, Stanley McChrystal warned in a report that was leaked recently, “The conflict will likely result in failure.”

His candor should be applauded. It gives President Obama and the American public – nearly half of whom now oppose the war there – an opportunity to ask themselves how we are going to save Afghanistan when we have not figured out how to engage in successful nation-building at home.

There’s no question we need it. Thirty percent of our students drop out before finishing high school. Our border with Mexico is awash in drugs and violence. Mexican and Russian mafias have strong criminal footholds in our cities.

Some of our Rust Belt cities have unemployment levels on par with third-world countries. Michigan, once America’s industrial heart, is on government life support. California, once the country’s dynamo, is near bankruptcy.
Taking on these tough challenges will require US leaders, both Democrat and Republican, to relinquish the idea they can remake much of the world in America’s image and likeness.

Giving up that idea is hard to do in Washington, even for presidents. It requires them to defy powerful pressure.

Mr. Obama should recall that in 1962 President Kennedy instinctively resisted Defense and State Department pressure to send more troops to Vietnam. President Johnson was also wary of a troop buildup in Vietnam, but he fell prey to his own fears that Republicans would accuse him of being soft on communism if he flinched in the face of a festering Viet Cong insurgency.

America has a poor record of nation-building abroad. The George H.W. Bush administration and Clinton White House failed in Somalia. The most recent Bush administration bungled it in Iraq, where Iraqis continue to blow one another up now that Americans are increasingly out of reach as targets.
And now, bright as he is, Obama is showing us he learned next to nothing from the nine-year Soviet attempt at nation-building in Afghanistan that helped hasten the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Not long ago, a friend, a high Canadian government official, met with his Chinese government counterparts. The discussion turned to the subject of the United States. My Canadian friend told me that the Chinese delegate coolly observed, “We always expected the American empire to collapse, but we had no idea it would collapse so quickly.”

The Pentagon and the US military command in Afghanistan now find themselves caught in a trap inadvertently set by their own politicians.
The US military speaks of winning the hearts and minds of Afghans when it’s almost certainly the case that the Americans will always be seen as “infidel outsiders” occupying a Muslim country, just as the Russians were seen on the same real estate in the l980s.

Even if the Obama administration were to send half a million troops, the results would be little different. Just as the Communist Vietnamese enjoyed havens in Cambodia, Laos, and North Vietnam, so the Taliban and the rabidly anti-American Islamists in Afghanistan would enjoy similar sanctuaries in Pakistan and Iran.

Few US politicians have had the courage to tell the public that Afghanistan has a corrupt, tribal government, too weak to go it alone without US troops. Obama unwisely made Afghanistan his problem by escalating, rather than winding down, US involvement upon taking office. Now, the US is committed to policing it, creating a modern infrastructure out of a medieval society, while providing Afghans security and jobs.

How does this count as an intelligent investment when we are struggling to do the same thing here in the US? American political leaders have a moral obligation to repair their own republic before they try to reengineer Afghanistan. Nation-building at home will be at least as challenging as in Iraq or Afghanistan and far more important.

A prerequisite for this domestic nation-building is a spirit of goodwill with civil discourse that scorns rabid political posturing. Members of Congress must see themselves as colleagues, not enemies, and the public must not let buffoons with megaphones shape the debate at the expense of serious-minded observers.

No matter how great their material wealth, democratic nations cannot long survive, let alone mend themselves, without a spirit of public goodwill in the body politic. The run-up to the American Civil War demonstrated this.
Today, a similar ideological malice stalks the land. It is arguably more destructive than any Islamist terrorist threat spawned in Afghanistan. And this malevolent public rancor needs to be addressed with far greater urgency than Afghanistan, which is probably too broken to fix.

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Pakistan Is Like A Boat – A Hole In The Water Into Which You Pour Money

By KATHY GANNON

ISLAMABAD, Pakistan – The United States has long suspected that much of the billions of dollars it has sent Pakistan to battle militants has been diverted to the domestic economy and other causes, such as fighting India.
Now the scope and longevity of the misuse is becoming clear: Between 2002 and 2008, while al-Qaida regrouped, only $500 million of the $6.6 billion in American aid actually made it to the Pakistani military, two army generals tell The Associated Press.

The account of the generals, who asked to remain anonymous because military rules forbid them from speaking publicly, was backed up by other retired and active generals, former bureaucrats and government ministers.
At the time of the siphoning, Pervez Musharraf, a Washington ally, served as both chief of staff and president, making it easier to divert money intended for the military to bolster his sagging image at home through economic subsidies.

“The army itself got very little,” said retired Gen. Mahmud Durrani, who was Pakistan’s ambassador to the U.S. under Musharraf. “It went to things like subsidies, which is why everything looked hunky-dory. The military was financing the war on terror out of its own budget.”
Generals and ministers say the diversion of the money hurt the military in very real ways:
_Helicopters critical to the battle in rugged border regions were not available. At one point in 2007, more than 200 soldiers were trapped by insurgents in the tribal regions without a helicopter lift to rescue them.
_The limited night vision equipment given to the army was taken away every three months for inventory and returned three weeks later.
_Equipment was broken, and training was lacking. It was not until 2007 that money was given to the Frontier Corps, the front-line force, for training.

The details on misuse of American aid come as Washington again promises Pakistan money. Legislation to triple general aid to Pakistan cleared Congress last week. The legislation also authorizes “such sums as are necessary” for military assistance to Pakistan, upon several conditions. The conditions include certification that Pakistan is cooperating in stopping the proliferation of nuclear weapons, that Pakistan is making a sustained commitment to combating terrorist groups and that Pakistan security forces are not subverting the country’s political or judicial processes.

The U.S. is also insisting on more accountability for reimbursing money spent. For example, Pakistan is still waiting for $1.7 billion for which it has billed the United States under a Coalition Support Fund to reimburse allies for money spent on the war on terror.

But the U.S. still can’t follow what happens to the money it doles out.
“We don’t have a mechanism for tracking the money after we have given it to them,” Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col. Mark Wright said in a telephone interview.

Musharraf’s spokesman, retired Gen. Rashid Quereshi, flatly denied that his former boss had shortchanged the army. He did not address the specific charges. “He has answered these questions. He has answered all the questions,” the spokesman said. Musharraf took power in a bloodless coup in 1999 and resigned in August 2008.

The misuse of funding helps to explain how al-Qaida, dismantled in Afghanistan in 2001, was able to regroup, grow and take on the weak Pakistani army. Even today, the army complains of inadequate equipment to battle Taliban entrenched in tribal regions.

For its part, Washington did not ask many questions of a leader, Musharraf, whom it considered an ally, according to a U.S. Government Accountability Office report released last year.

Pakistan has received more money from the fund than any other nation. It is also the least expensive war front. The amount the U.S. spends per soldier per month is just $928, compared with $76,870 in Afghanistan and $85,640 in Iraq.

Yet by 2008, the United States had provided Pakistan with $8.6 billion in military money, and more than $12 billion in all.

“The army was sending in the bills,” said one general who asked not to be identified because it is against military rules to speak publicly. “The army was taking from its coffers to pay for the war effort — the access roads construction, the fuel, everything. … This is the reality — the army got peanuts.”

Some of the money from the U.S. even went to buying weapons from the United States better suited to fighting India than in the border regions of Afghanistan — armor-piercing tow missiles, sophisticated surveillance equipment, air-to-air missiles, maritime patrol aircraft, anti-ship missiles and F-16 fighter aircraft.

“Pakistan insisted and America agreed. Pakistan said we also have a threat from other sources,” Durrani said, referring to India, “and we have to strengthen our overall capacity. “The money was used to buy and support capability against India.”

The army also suffered from mismanagement, Durrani said. As an example, he cited Pakistani attempts to buy badly needed attack helicopters.
Pakistan asked for Cobra helicopters because it knows how to maintain them, he said. But the helicopters were old, and to make them battle-ready, the Pentagon sent them to a company that had no experience with Cobras and took two years, he said.

As a result, in 2007, Pakistan had only one working helicopter — a debilitating handicap in the battle against insurgents who hide, train and attack from the hulking mountains that run like a seam along the Afghan-Pakistani border.

The army was also frustrated about not getting more money. Military spokesman Gen. Athar Abbas said the U.S. gave nothing to offset the cost of Pakistan’s dead and wounded in the war on terror. He estimated 1,800 Pakistani soldiers had been killed since 2003 and 4,800 more wounded, most of them seriously.

The hospital and rehabilitation costs for the wounded have come to more than $25 million, Abbas said. Pakistan’s military also gives land to the widows of the dead, educates their children and provides health care.
“These costs do not appear anywhere,” he said. “There is no U.S. compensation for the casualties, assistance with aid to the grieving families.”

Even while money was being siphoned off for other purposes on Pakistan’s end, the U.S. imposed little control over or even had specific knowledge of what went where, according to reports by the U.S. Government Accountability Office. The reports covered 2002 through 2008.

The reports found that the Pentagon often ignored its own oversight rules, didn’t get adequate documents and doled out money without asking for an explanation.

For more than a year, the Pentagon paid Pakistan’s navy $19,000 a month per vehicle just for repair costs on a fleet of fewer than 20 vehicles. Monthly food bills doubled for no apparent reason, and for a year the Pentagon paid the bills without checking, according to the report.
Daniyal Aziz, a minister in Musharraf’s government, said he warned U.S. officials that the money they were giving his government was being misused, but to no avail.

“They both deserved each other, Musharraf and the Americans,” he said.

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No MO

Yale University Press has ditched plans to reprint the Danish cartoons and other caricatures in a study of the controversy

Yale University Press has decided against reprinting the Danish cartoons of the prophet Muhammad in a book examining the controversy, after being advised by Islam and counterterrorism experts that doing so could incite violence.

As well as leaving out the 12 cartoons which provoked riots across the Islamic world in 2006, Yale also bowed to recommendations not to include any other illustrations of Muhammad, including a 19th century sketch by Gustave Doré of Muhammad in Hell from Dante’s Inferno, in the book, The Cartoons That Shook the World.

Author Jytte Klausen said the book had been ready to go to print when the illustrations were pulled, after Yale received some “quite alarmist” statements from experts to whom it had sent the title. A professor of politics at a Massachusetts university, Klausen argued for inclusion of the cartoons in the book, which is due out in November in the US and January in the UK. “People think they know the cartoons and actually, by printing the cartoons, I’m arguing that some of them are Islamophobic, and in the tradition of anti-Semitism. If we can’t look at them, how can we discuss this?” she said today.

She eventually consented – “reluctantly” – to removing them (she “didn’t think it was necessary”) but “argued every step along the way” against the excision of the other illustrations: the Doré sketch, an Ottoman print showing the Prophet with a veil over his face, and a reproduction of the cover of a Danish children’s book depicting Muhammad.

“You can walk up and down the high street in the UK and pick [the Doré sketch] out of antique bins. The ubiquity of this illustration moved me to want to include it,” she said. Admitting that it is “quite explicit” – it illustrates the Inferno canto which shows Muhammad with his entrails hanging out – she proposed substitutions: the same scene has been painted by Rodin, Blake and Dali, but these were not accepted.

“Sadness, not anger, characterises my feelings,” said Klausen. “The cartoons … one can discuss. The removal of the other illustrations poses problems for the text, which was written to the illustrations. I cannot yet judge how confusing it will be to the reader to follow my argument without the illustrations, but for sure these illustrations were intended to awake the reader to the history of depiction of Muhammad in Ottoman, Persian, and Western art – and to show also how we live with images and do not examine them. Well, they will not be examined this time.”

Yale said in a statement that “as an institution deeply committed to free expression”, it was initially inclined to publish the cartoons and other images as proposed. However, after considering the fact that republication of the cartoons had “repeatedly resulted in violent incidents, including as recently as 2008″, it decided to “consult extensively with experts in the intelligence, national security, law enforcement, and diplomatic fields, as well as leading scholars in Islamic studies and Middle East studies”.

“All confirmed that the republication of the cartoons by the Yale University Press ran a serious risk of instigating violence, and nearly all advised that publishing other illustrations of the Prophet Muhammad in the context of this book about the Danish cartoon controversy raised similar risk,” the statement said. Yale added that it recognised that Klausen’s consent was “with reservations”, and that “inclusion of the cartoons would complement the book’s text with a convenient visual reference for the reader, who otherwise would have to consult the internet to view the images”.

But Sheila Blair, professor of Islamic and Asian art at Norma Jean Calderwood University and one of the authorities consulted by Yale about publication, said she had “strongly urged” the press to publish the images. “To deny that such images were made is to distort the historical record and to bow to the biased view of some modern zealots who would deny that others at other times and places perceived and illustrated Muhammad in different ways,” she wrote in a letter to the New York Times which is yet to be published.

The president of the American Association of University Professors, Cary Nelson, said in an open letter that the organisation’s members “deplore this decision and its potential consequences”. “They are not responding to protests against the book; they and a number of their consultants are anticipating them and making or recommending concessions beforehand … What is to stop publishers from suppressing an author’s words if it appears they may offend religious fundamentalists or groups threatening violence?” Nelson wrote.” ‘We do not negotiate with terrorists. We just accede to their anticipated demands.’ That is effectively the new policy position at Yale University Press.”.

Klausen has interviewed Middle East politicians, European Muslim leaders, the Danish editors and cartoonists and the Danish imam who kicked off the controversy for the book, which Yale described as “the first comprehensive investigation of the conflict”. She argues that the Muslim reaction to the Danish cartoons – which included one

depiction of Muhammad with a bomb in his turban – was not a spontaneous emotional reaction, rather that it was orchestrated, “first by those with vested interests in elections in Denmark and Egypt, and later by Islamic extremists seeking to destabilise governments in Pakistan, Lebanon, Libya, and Nigeria”. “Klausen shows how the cartoon crisis was, therefore, ultimately a political conflict rather than a colossal cultural misunderstanding,” said Yale of the book.

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Anti-Christian Violence By Muslims In Pakistan

By Aleem Maqbool

On a street in the small Punjabi town of Gojra, house after house stands gutted and looted.

One home in particular is the focus of attention. The windows and doors are gone, what is left of the furniture lies gnarled inside, and some of the ceilings have collapsed. People are peering into a small bedroom at the back of the building.

It is from here that the charred bodies of six members of the Hameed family, from Pakistan’s minority Christian community, were recovered. The youngest of the dead was four-year-old Mousa.

We found his father, Almass Hameed, 49, in a crowded hospital ward nearby.

“He was such a bright boy. His teachers complained that he was cheeky at times, but nobody could doubt how clever he was. But now he’s gone,” Mr Hameed said, breaking down.

It was like the most horrific movie. They destroyed our lives.

He described how an angry Muslim mob came through the area, known here as the Christian Colony.

“I think there were thousands,” he said. “My elderly father went out to see what was happening and they shot and killed him. We were all shocked and crying. Before we knew it, they were breaking into the house.”

Mr Hameed explained how he and nine other members of the family hid in the bedroom as the house was over-run.

“We could hear them smashing everything and dividing our belongings amongst themselves,” he said. “Then they started beating on the door saying they would teach us a lesson and burn us alive.”

Soon after, a fire was raging through his house.

“We just couldn’t breathe,” he said. “I grabbed my eldest son and managed to get out of the room through the flames, my brother came out with one of my daughters, but the rest were stuck and we had no way of rescuing them.”

As well as his father and Mousa, Mr Hameed lost his 11 year-old daughter, his wife, a brother, a sister-in-law and her mother.

“It was like the most horrific movie. They destroyed our lives.”

Tensions had risen after allegations that Christians in the nearby village of Korrian had torn up and burnt pages of the Koran at a wedding a few days earlier.

Six members of the Hameed family perished in the inferno.

“They started it,” 19-year-old Omar Ali Raza said in Gojra’s marketplace.

“We Muslims are the victims. We gathered to protest about what they did to the Koran in Korrian and just wanted to walk through their area, but they threw stones at us and fired shots.”

“Of course it is bad that Christians died,” he added. “But they provoked the Muslims here. I don’t understand why everyone is on their side.”

But an elderly Muslim man passing by interrupts. “The responsibility is with the one who actually burns the Koran, not all Christians,” he said. “Here, we live together, and there were no problems before this.”

As it happens, a local police chief, Ahmed Javaid, said he believed the claim that Christians desecrated the Koran was not true in the first place.

“Yes, pieces of paper had been cut up to look like money at a Christian wedding, but they were not pages of the Koran,” he said.
“However, the rumour spread and the issue became politicised.”

Christians in Lahore responded to the attacks by holding a rally
Very soon after the allegations from Korrian surfaced, politicians from several parties held large rallies denouncing Christians in the area, calling for action. These were not just politicians from expressly right-wing Islamist parties.

PML-N leaders have visited Gojra in recent days, expressing solidarity with minority communities. But Christians here say they are sceptical.

They accuse the party and others of having previously taken advantage of anti-Christian feelings rather than helping to calm things down.
‘Rare’ violence

Senator Pervaiz Rashid, at the headquarters of the Nawaz party, told me it was very serious in its commitment to minority rights.

“We acknowledge there were problems in Gojra, and it is an embarrassment,” he said. “However, it was an isolated incident and the local president, Qadeer Awan, has now had his party membership suspended.”

“I do not believe that there are any other local politicians in our party involved in such activities.”

Violence of this scale against Pakistan’s estimated three million strong Christian community may be rare (this is the worst such incident in seven years), but complaints of discrimination are certainly commonplace.

The family is now recovering from its terrifying ordeal
The government says it has opened an inquiry into what happened in Gojra, but Asma Jahangir, the chairperson of the Human Rights Commission, is not expecting the type of change she thinks is needed.

“For too long the Pakistani state has protected people with extremist views,” she said.

“It is not just political parties. There are radicalised individuals, and supporters of militant groups within the judiciary, the education system, the bureaucracy and police as well.”

This was not the vision of Pakistan held by its founder, Muhammad Ali Jinnah.

“Minorities, to whichever community they may belong, will be safeguarded. Their religion or faith or beliefs will be secure,” he said just weeks before Pakistan’s creation in 1947.

“They will be, in all respects, the citizens of Pakistan without any distinction of caste or creed.”

But as Pakistan prepares to mark its independence day, many of its citizens do not see any cause for celebration.

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10 Big Brother Companies: Ranking The Worst Consumer Privacy Infringers

How much would you sell your private data to a company for? Would you take $100 to let someone see every site you have visited over the past year, how about $1,000? Today, many major companies spend millions collecting a variety data on individuals such as; what charities you donate to, your political beliefs, your shopping habits, your educational data and your contact information.

Unfortunately, you never get to decide how much your privacy is worth to you, because these companies aren’t asking your permission.

In this article we highlight ten of the worst corporate offenders when it comes to invading privacy.

While we aren’t so naive as to think that this sort of exposure is enough on its own to cause any real changes in corporate behavior, we hope that by helping to bring to light some of the personal privacy infringements that these companies are engaged in, more people will begin to select the companies they do business with on the basis of their privacy policy. If that starts to happen, real consumer-driven change is possible.

So without further adieu, here are the top ten big corporate privacy offenders:

10. Response Unlimited

In what is perhaps the boldest (and most brainless) information scam of all time, Response Unlimited, a large marketing firm, received authorization to sell a list of Terri Schiavo’s financial contributors to other companies as sales leads. The story broke on Response Unlimited’s company wide privacy mining operation only after it was revealed that most of the donors were constantly getting loads of spam and telemarketing calls.

Response Unlimited’s shameless consumer data mining scheme earns them the number 10 spot on this countdown.

9. LexisNexis

Taking ninth place in our ranking is a company as notorious for its inability to secure the private information it has as it is for its privacy invasions. LexisNexis maintains the LexisNexis database, which includes millions of records which include mailing addresses of almost every person in the United States. In July of 2005, the LexisNexis security system was compromised resulting in more than 300,000 records being stolen by computer hackers. This security breach ranks among the top personal data heists of all time. Luckily, the LexisNexis hackers were identified as a few teenage kids looking to have some fun, but it demonstrated how inept their security measures are at protecting one of the largest caches of private data in the world.

8. America Online

America Online’s privacy intrusion efforts are so aggressive and offensive, that the only explanation seems to be that AOL thought its clientele was so naïve they would never catch on to the company’s privacy invasions. In August of 2006, America Online released web search data from more than 650,000 users without prior consent. A handful of users involved have since then filed a lawsuit against America Online citing that the released data contained information some users considered too private to ever make it beyond the comforts of their own home.

To attract new customers, America Online is currently using an anti-spyware software campaign. What America Online fails to tell you is that packaged within portions of their software (including AIM and various online games) lies WildTangent, an application that reports personal information directly to various databases. America Online went so far as fail to tell users WildTangent was being installed on their machines in the End User License Agreement, until mounting complaints finally forced their hand.

7. Amazon.com

It should come as no surprise that the world’s biggest online store has a lot of private information pass through its servers on a daily basis. Amazon.com happens to have receipts on more than 59 million active customers, which are used by the company to track the purchases that individual customers make.

To make matters worse, Amazon.com now has the capability to cross reference their database with public records to create enough marketing information to make any unscrupulous retailer squeal with delight. Amazon.com is currently among the world leaders in distributing information about its users to advertisers, and if they continue this practice the recent advancements in data mining by Amazon threaten to make shopping online with any form of anonymity a thing of the past. To give you an idea of the severity of Amazon.com’s commitment to exploiting their costumers here is an excerpt from their privacy policy:

“As we continue to develop our business, we might sell or buy stores, subsidiaries, or business units. In such transactions, customer information generally is one of the transferred business assets.”

Yes, you read that correctly, Amazon is in the business of selling private consumer data. And for that move, they earn the #7 spot in our ranking.

6. Yahoo!

The world’s most popular website Yahoo! is also one of the world’s biggest data aggregators. The plethora of services Yahoo! offers provides the ideal data collection scheme. The beauty of the system is, Yahoo! doesn’t have to go through any extraordinary means to obtain your personal information; instead, users voluntarily give Yahoo! their information every time they use a Yahoo! product, perform a search, enter a Yahoo! promotion or sweepstakes, or purchase products through Yahoo!. Eventually, Yahoo! has acquired enough of your personal data to create for each user an individualized profile which they use to target advertisements that are most likely to appeal to you.

5. Microsoft

It will come as little surprise to many that Microsoft products are among the world’s elite when it comes to privacy invasion. Microsoft is constantly developing new ways to aggregate customer data for the ostensible purpose of creating a “smoother ride” for the user. Practically speaking, however, many Microsoft products and features are designed simply to provide a convenient way for the program to report back to Microsoft databases what type of activities you regularly engage in on your computer. In effect, the Windows operating system works like a two-way mirror: the customer has little idea that Microsoft is literally watching every move he makes.

Perhaps the most insidious method of privacy invasion Microsoft employs is the “Windows Live ID” (formerly Microsoft .NET Passport). The Windows Live ID collects data from the majority of Microsoft networks including MSN, Hotmail, and Xbox Live, and stores them in a central database. This data includes email addresses, generic personal information (name, age, etc), your favorites (books, video games, gadgets, etc), address books and contact lists (so your friends can be exploited too!), and much more. Microsoft then takes this data and generates ads targeted specifically to you.

4. Accenture

Accenture takes the forth sport on this list for their growing reputation in expanding digital dossiers and accepting a $10 billion dollar contract with the United States Department of Homeland Security to build a surveillance system that tracks visitors, to, from, and within the United States. The system calls for extensive fingerprints and photographs of all visa wavier travelers and non-naturalized U.S. residents. The system is also experimenting in futuristic technologies such as biometrics via iris scanning and facial recognition. So not only does Accenture know your credit history and previous court dates (even if only jury duty), they also know what you look like.

3. Acxiom

Dubbed as the premiere source of addresses and telephone numbers for telemarketers and mass mailers, Acxiom has a reputation of collecting data better than anyone else. Acxiom boasts records on millions of Americans including drug test and criminal histories, education data, and the popular “Suspected Terrorist Watchlist” available at a premium price. The company claims this data is to help employers weed out untruthful applicants and illegal employees, but often the information is used to create very targeted ads by advertisers.

2. Google

It seems the only thing growing faster than Google’s control of online searches is their database which they hope will eventually hold information on every internet user in the world. Google boasts databases big enough to permanently save the countless number of searches internet users make each and every day. The information Google stores on its users is great enough to create a virtual identity equipped with information ranging from favorite flavors of ice cream to sexual fantasies. And who can forget Google’s infamous eye in the sky, also known as Google maps. How scary of a thought is this: a group of people monitoring servers in California know everything you did yesterday, your major plans for the rest of the week, and where you live. To top it off, Google offers services such as GMail and Web Accelator that can store even more information about your personal life. Unfortunately, however, that isn’t the worst of Googles privacy offenses.

Google’s most prominent form of data assimilation lies in their cookies. Where most websites set cookies to expire in a few days (or in rare cases a few months) Google configures their cookies to expire in 30 years. Google claims this gestation period is to gather information to provide users with more accurate search results and protect Google from denial of service attacks and other cyber-crimes, but the simple truth is Google is gathering your information and has the storage space to create a very detailed picture of your online activity.

1. ChoicePoint

ChoicePoint, a marketing conglomerate, wins our coveted George Orwell award as the company most likely to be watching you right now; i.e., Big Brother. ChoicePoint maintains more than 17 billion records on 220 million people with topics ranging from social security numbers to DNA samples. The majority of ChoicePoint’s information is sold to the highest bidder which more often than not happens to be a representative of the United States government, a leading American company, or a Nigerian fraud group. In addition to their willingness to sell private information to questionable sources, another factor that makes ChoicePoint the biggest privacy threat is the company’s failure to provide a high level of data security.

In 2005 ChoicePoint announced that approximately 160,000 users in their database had various forms of sensitive information compromised. This breach in security resulted in more than 750 cases of full blown identify theft.

Conclusion

This list of the worst ten copmanies for privacy invasion and data mining is intended to highlight some of the worst actors among big business. While this exposure on its own cannot make a big difference in causing companies to change their policy, by having citizens and internet users who are more aware and concerned about the threats posed by data mining, real change can actually occur. So if this article leaves you with anything, I encourage you to become more educated about the privacy policies of the companies you do business with, and consider making consumer decisions on the basis of what you learn.

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Herbivorous In Tokyo

By Yumi Otagaki

TOKYO Hotel worker Roshinante has no interest in actively pursuing women, is nonchalant about a career and finds cars a bore — and he is not alone in opting for a quiet, uncompetitive lifestyle.

Roshinante, 31, who prefers the anonymity of his online handle, is one of a growing group of men dubbed “herbivorous boys” by the media, who are rejecting traditional masculinity when it comes to romance, jobs and consumption in an apparent reaction to the tougher economy.

Forget being a workaholic, corporate salary-man. These men, raised as the economic bubble burst, are turning their backs on Japan’s stereotypical male roles in what is seen as a symptom of growing disillusionment in their country’s troubled economy.

“Since I was a child, I hated people telling me, ‘Behave like a man’,” said Roshinante, who runs a forum on popular Japanese social network site Mixi for frank discussion about herbivores.

For decades, Japanese men were expected to work full-time after graduating from high school or college, marry and support their wife and children.

Roshinante, a university graduate, has no plans to follow that path.

“I don’t think my parents’ way of life is for me,” he said in a telephone interview. “I still struggle between the traditional notion of how men should be and how I am.”

Almost half of 1,000 men aged 20-34 surveyed by market research firm M1 F1 Soken identified themselves as “herbivorous,” defined literally as grass-eating but in this context as not being interested in flesh or passive about pursuing women.

The media hype has sent marketing experts scurrying to see if there is money to be made from herbivores, many of whom are spending more time and money on their appearance.

“We cannot ignore herbivorous boys because they are almost a majority,” said Shigeru Sakai, a researcher at M1 F1 Soken.

Most herbivorous boys lack self-confidence, like to spend time alone, and use the Internet a lot, the survey showed.

The mindset appears to be a reaction to the end of Japan’s late 1980s “bubble economy” of soaring asset prices, when everything looked rosy, and a subsequent economic slump.

“Herbivorous men always existed,” said columnist Maki Fukasawa, who is credited with coining the term. “But the bursting of the bubble and the collapse of lifetime employment contributed to their increase.”

Experiencing tough times has given this new breed of men different attitudes about consumption.

“In the bubble era, whatever led to consumption was good and people measured their worth by money,” Fukasawa said. “But herbivorous men don’t buy things to show off.”

Partly, at least, that’s because they can’t afford to.

Their generation joined the work force after deregulation measures helped to swell the ranks of contract and other non-regular employees to about one-third of all workers.

Roshinante worked part-time until two years ago, when he took a full-time post at a hotel chain. But he’s still anxious about the future.

“At my previous workplace, a whole bunch of managers in their 40s and 50s were laid off,” Roshinante said.

Marriage isn’t on his agenda at the moment, but he couldn’t afford it even if it were.

“I think there are many part-time workers who cannot get a full-time job and cannot plan their life and marriage. That is also the case of romantic relationships. While they don’t want to follow the traditional model, they don’t know what to do,” he said.

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Iran’s Regime Reveals Its Brutality

By William Pfaff

The truly significant result of the suppressed Iranian revolt is that the most important Islamist radical movement in the contemporary world has demonstrated that it has become a brutally repressive dictatorship whose leaders rig elections and beat down clear popular demands for a true election count or repeat of the election itself.

This affair has nothing to do with the alleged war of civilizations or the machinations of the American Great Satan, or of the hereditary enemy of Iran, the British Empire. It is the consequence of the abuse of power by leaders who established a new form of religious republic, meant to combine what they believe to be God’s law, as set forth in the Quran, with the exigencies of modern politics and power, among them nuclear power, leading toward nuclear weapons to deter enemy Israel and infidel America.

Iran has made itself the leading Islamic state in the Middle East, a republic standing alongside the traditional Muslim monarchies of Jordan, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. It was meant as a model of Muslim self-liberation from foreign oppressors.

It had been an exemplar in both 1951 and 1979 of popular uprising against Western domination, and subsequently of the installation of a modern Islamic form of government with a democratic substructure, controlled within clerical institutions, with a clerical supreme leader who spoke the divinely inspired final word on government decisions.

This government now stands discredited internationally, as well as in the eyes of what clearly seems the majority of Iranians, who are ruled today by a massive deployment of police power for the sake of unaccountable personal or clan advantage of the leadership. They, and Muslims in general, should learn from this that the enemies are not all without—they are also within the Islamic world.

The Iranians have been revolutionaries twice in modern times, both times eventually submitting to foreign power. This time it is Iranian and Islamic power that abuses them, not foreign oppressors. Could they successfully revolt once more, against domestic tyranny? Or does the revolt still go on?

The first rebellion followed World War II occupation by Britain and the Soviet Union, followed by an attempt by the USSR to set up a Soviet-controlled splinter state in the north. However, Iran’s constitutional movement goes back to the start of the 20th century, and the Shah of Iran at that time accepted a constitution and parliament in 1906. However, the country was divided into czarist and British spheres of influence, and the United States took over from both after the Second World War.

In 1945, the national movement was led by a veteran prewar parliamentarian, Muhammad Mossadegh, who demanded nationalization of the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Co.

When parliament voted the nationalization, the shah was compelled to name Mossadegh prime minister. But Mossadegh’s resistance to the terms demanded by Britain led to a political crisis in which the shah fled the country—to be brought back and reinstated by the CIA.

Mossadegh was sent to prison for three years of solitary confinement, and then held in house arrest for the remainder of his life.

The shah encountered the second rebellion 28 years later, the CIA being unable to save him a second time. The successful Islamic revolt of 1979 installed the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, and the revolutionaries sacked the U.S. Embassy to boot, successfully holding its members ransom for more than a year.

(Why this was allowed to happen remains a mystery. Instead of recognizing the seizure of the embassy as an implicit act of war, and detaining Iranian officials, businessmen and students in the United States for exchange under the auspices of the Red Cross, the Carter administration frantically forced all the Iranians in the country to leave the U.S. as fast as possible. The American Embassy staff then endured 444 days’ imprisonment, and an ill-conceived military rescue fiasco, before the Iranians triumphantly handed them over to Ronald Reagan.)

The admirable Lebanese editor and commentator Rami G. Khouri has just written that ordinary Arabs elsewhere, living under autocratic and potentially vulnerable leaders of their own, have watched this Iranian uprising with “forlorn envy.”

Why forlorn? What stops them from their own revolts, if that is what they want? The Pakistan tribesmen of the Swat Valley, and elsewhere in the country’s northwest territories, are even now fighting to expel Taliban intruders.

The Iranian revolt may not be over. But even if it is, Iranians will one day surely try again. The Iraqis, whose nation seems approaching another sectarian or ethnic precipice, could, if they had wanted, have saved themselves much bloodshed and misery by rebelling against Saddam Hussein themselves, as they had done against previous unwanted rulers. People must make their own decisions. If not, they risk getting the governments, or the liberators, they deserve.

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A Girl’s Terror In Vietnam

by John Boudreau

RACH GIA CITY, Vietnam — The offer came to families on the edge of desperation, living and working around the clock on garbage dumps whose sickening stench seeps into their clothes.
A motherly woman accompanied by a kindly gentleman arrived one day in early December, shortly before the New Year’s Tet celebration when the poorest of the poor hope for a little extra cash for modest festivities. The two said they were looking for attractive young women to work in a Ho Chi Minh City cafe, and they were ready to give each family a $60 advance — a small fortune for people barely scraping by on a couple of dollars a day — or less.
Though at least two fathers objected, they were overruled by their wives and daughters, who were willing to take any risk to help their struggling clans. After examining each girl like livestock, the man chose five of the prettiest teenagers, and picked two more from a neighboring area. The teens quickly packed a few belongings and left.
Seventeen-year-old Truong Thi Nhi Linh was one of those chosen. It was, she says, the best chance to help her family — a chance to make considerably more money than she earns working 4 p.m. to 4 a.m. in the dump, sloshing around on rainy nights in knee-high sludge among swarms of other workers looking for bits of junk.
She reassured her parents, who opposed her leaving. “I said, ‘It’s OK. I’m just going to work.’ ” She added, “I want to help my family.”
Hours later, one of the few parents with a cell phone received a panicked call from their daughter — they were not headed north to Ho Chi Minh City but to Cambodia, where the girls would be forced into the sex trade.
Young and vulnerable
It is a misfortune that falls on many young women in Southeast Asia with the twin vulnerabilities of being pretty and poor. Like their parents, they often are illiterate and profoundly uninformed about the dangers of international sex trafficking and how strangers drug or lure unsuspecting teens into a life of satisfying the cravings of foreign men. Their innocence is prized: Some Asian men are willing to pay as much as $600 to have sex with a virgin because they believe it will restore their youth, give them good fortune or even cure them of AIDS.
Vietnam, with an abundance of beautiful young women living in desperate straits, is a magnet for human brokers — some of whom pay families to marry off their daughters to men in Korea, Taiwan and China; others are linked directly to human trafficking. Parents often ignore the dangers to their daughters in pursuit of a better life.
“The families are so poor,” said Quach Thi Phan, chairwoman of the Women’s Union of Rach Gia City in Kien Giang Province, which organizes anti-trafficking educational campaigns. “They just think about how to get money, how to find a job.”
In the case of the Rach Gia teens, the police conducted a last-minute raid near the Cambodian border to rescue them after receiving calls from a community member and, eventually, at least one worried parent. The almost routine incident received no local news coverage, underscoring the virtual daily threat to the world’s underclass.
“It’s globalization in its ugliest form,” said Diep Vuong, president of Pacific Links Foundation, a Milpitas nonprofit started by Vietnamese-Americans. The organization works to prevent human trafficking by providing educational opportunities to at-risk Vietnamese girls and those who escape the sex trade.
“If you don’t know how to read the public announcements or have enough money for newspapers and you barely have enough to eat, how can you understand there are risks?” she said. “It’s so easy to look the other way. I meet many young women who say, ‘I know it’s risky, but I must try because we are so poor.’ I tell them, ‘Do you think you’ll be able to sleep with 15 guys a day?’ They are mostly terrified and surprised; ‘What are you talking about?’ they ask.”
Fighting back
More than 600,000 young women are trafficked each year around the world, according to a U.S. State Department estimate. In Vietnam, the government recently reported that last year there were 6,684 victims of trafficking, with 2,579 returned to their homes. It also said there were 21,038 people reported missing who could have been sold into prostitution. Experts, though, question the accuracy of the Vietnam government’s statistics and fear the numbers are higher.
Vietnamese authorities in recent years have moved aggressively to stop sex trafficking. Police in the home province of the seven teens, for instance, have officers dedicated to cracking down on traffickers. Overall, though, neither the national nor local governments have enough resources to adequately fight the problem, experts say.
In 2004, NBC’s “Dateline” news show broadcast a report about Cambodia’s sex trade. To the horror of the Vietnamese-American community, the young prostitutes spoke Vietnamese. As a result of the broadcast, a number of Vietnamese in the Bay Area and elsewhere began creating programs to prevent such sexual exploitation, said Benjamin Lee, chairman of San Jose-based Aid to Children Without Parents.
They set up organizations to provide opportunities and hope for those at the bottom of the economic ladder and assistance to those who escape forced prostitution.
But they face a culture that makes their task difficult; in some cases, parents willingly sell their daughters to traffickers for thousands of dollars. “In the Eastern way of thinking, the children have to obey their parents: ‘I have my body. I will do this for my family,’ ” said Nguyen Kim Thien, director of Ho Chi Minh City’s Little Rose Warm Shelter for sexually abused girls.
This modern-day slavery takes root in regions isolated by abject poverty and close to Cambodia’s thriving sex trade, such as parts of the Mekong Delta. One such place is on the outskirts of the bustling port city of Rach Gia in a majority ethnic Khmer community.
Day-to-day misery
Though Vietnam boasts a literacy rate of about 90 percent, many of the residents in this community have little or no education. They spend their days and nights picking through heaps of garbage for recyclable materials, such as plastic and metal. Children, barefoot and barely clothed, play amid the foul-smelling waste.
“This is a community in which we had to teach them how to use soap, how to use a bathroom — the basics of the basics,” said Caroline Nguyen Ticarro-Parker, co-founder and executive director of the U.S.-based Catalyst Foundation, which has set up a school in the area and is working with Habitat for Humanity to construct homes for people in the community.
“Their day-to-day life is, ‘How do I get food on the table today? Who is going to take care of my child today?’ ” she said. “Life has been so hard for them. They can’t think of the future.”
They live in huts with thatch roofs on or near a garbage dump swarming with flies and mosquitoes. On a recent morning, 23-year-old Kim Thi Mau sorted dirty plastic bags. Last year, her 4-year-old son Lam drowned when he fell in a ditch filled with water while she and her husband worked nearby. She has two other sons, 20 months and 4 months old.
“I hope there is a school that can take care of my children — some place not like this, dirty,” said Kim who, like her 28-year-old husband, is illiterate.
So it can be difficult to resist strangers who arrive in a village promising good-paying jobs. Many of these families survive on $1 or $2 a day. In the case of the seven teens, the traffickers said they could pay each one about $120 a month working in a city cafe.
Taken from home
On that December morning, a unwitting family in Rach Gia’s Vinh Quang ward sent out word about the employment offer. More than a dozen girls and their families gathered at a house.
“The man looked at our faces and said, ‘This girl is OK. This one is OK,’ ” said Danh Thi Anh, a shy and soft-spoken 20-year-old, who was one of those picked and 19 at the time.
The selection process began at 11 a.m. By 1 p.m., the teens were on the road. Soon after they left, a Catalyst employee who tried to dissuade the teens from going told one member of the community to call the police.
Most of the young women had never been far from home by themselves. Within a few hours, one figured out they were not heading to Ho Chi Minh City, Truong and two other teens recalled.
The girls, using a cell phone one of them had, began calling home, and eventually one of their mothers called the police.
Some of the teens began to cry. They had arrived in An Bien City, south of Rach Gia, and were to travel to the coast and board a fishing boat to Cambodia.
“We were very afraid,” Truong said. “We did not know where we were.”
But police, who had tracked other human traffickers taking the same route, found them at 10 p.m. They arrested the woman who was escorting them. The man got away.
About 4 a.m. the next day, the teens were back in Rach Gia.
It is unclear what the community learned from the narrow escape. Catalyst Foundation representatives held community meetings afterward. “We said, ‘This is what will happen: Your child will be raped, and not by one person, but by many people,’ ” said the organization’s co-founder Nguyen. But she can’t be sure it won’t happen again.
For those living in brutal conditions, Nguyen said, “It is a lot of money.”
Seventeen-year-old Truong, who lives in a cramped thatched home elevated over water with nine family members, said she has not given much consideration to what would have happened to her had she ended up in Cambodia.
“I don’t think about that,” she said passively. “If it had happened, it would have been because it was my destiny. That’s the life.”

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Prairie Village, Kan.

Back in grade school our teachers would take us to the statehouse in Topeka, Kan., and maneuver us in front of John Steuart Curry’s terrifying mural of John Brown, trying to make abolitionism seem fresh and vivid. But we were children of the 1970s and knew that slavery was a brutish subject from long ago. This was the modern world. If we thought about such things at all, we understood that the concerns of our time were matters like inflation and the Problem of Conformity.

Over the intervening years, however, bonded labor has made a comeback, spotted by journalists in places like Saipan. And now it has apparently come all the way home, from the exotic periphery to the beige office building you pass every day in your air-conditioned sedan.

On May 27, a federal grand jury indictment was unsealed accusing a group of 12 people, mainly Uzbekistanis along with a company called Giant Labor Solutions, of running a labor trafficking ring in Kansas City, Mo., and its suburbs. If the indictment is to be believed, the scam involved the same sort of debt-bondage tricks that have pushed workers elsewhere into servitude for years.

The way it allegedly worked was this: The Kansas City ring recruited hundreds of workers from Jamaica, the Philippines, and the Dominican Republic with promises of visas through the federal H-2B seasonal worker program. To get the process started, however, the indictment says that workers had to pay the accused racketeers hefty fees.

Once in America, the workers found themselves at the mercy of the traffickers, who allegedly kept “them as modern-day slaves under threat of deportation,” in the words of James Gibbons of Immigration and Customs Enforcement. The recruiters apparently took care to keep the workers in debt, charging them fees for uniforms, for transportation, and for rent in overcrowded apartments. Paychecks would frequently show “negative earnings,” in the words of the indictment. And if the workers refused to go along with the scheme, the traffickers held the ultimate trump card, the indictment claims: They “threatened to cancel the immigration status” of the workers, rendering them instantly illegal.

So the workers allegedly had no choice but to do as they were bid, cleaning up rooms at some of the best-known hotels in Kansas City and elsewhere — including Branson, Mo., that symbolic capital of red-state culture.

This is where our story takes a turn from the grotesque and the sordid to the uncomfortably familiar. I have stayed in some of the very hotels that were allegedly cleaned by the victims’ barely compensated toil. The office of the main labor leasing firm accused in the indictment of racketeering and visa fraud, Giant Labor Solutions, is located only five or six blocks away from my father’s office on a street I have probably driven on hundreds of times in my life.

The Web site of Giant Labor Solutions, still accessible as of yesterday, dazzles with its ordinariness, its stock photos of perky businesspeople and its sultry soundtrack. “Let us worry about your labor needs so you may focus on your business!” it crows. This homage to entrepreneurial zeal is followed by a guarantee that your labor troubles are over, that a Giant Labor work force is a work force that will remain servile and smiling: “Our clients receive happy appreciative employees that will thank you for allowing them the opportunity to work for you.”

The days of appreciative servitude are over now, however, and a spokesman for the city’s hoteliers told the Kansas City Star that they had nothing to do with the labor recruiter’s alleged distasteful practices.

But I suspect this problem won’t be brushed off so easily. Hotel chains may denounce their former labor recruiter, but the Web site of the hotel industry’s trade association still bellows its support for the federal H-2B visa program that may have made it all possible.

However, according to Ana Avendano, the director of the Immigrant Worker Program at the AFL-CIO, the federal visa program builds worker powerlessness into the equation. When workers sign up with labor recruiters overseas, she told me, they often “have to leave a deed to their house or some other collateral to ensure they don’t leave the program.” Once here in America, of course, they can’t quit, or else they lose their visa status.

It’s a recipe for indenture even without the old-school flourishes allegedly added by the Kansas City recruiters. As I was told by the author John Bowe, an authority on modern slave systems, if you import workers without rights equal to ours “of course they’re going to get exploited.”

What I keep wondering is why we have such a program. Unemployment is over 9% and climbing. Why make it worse?

The answer comes in another choice phrase from the Web site of the accused: Bring on Giant Labor and “your recruiting, hiring and payroll expenses will drastically drop.”

It’s a “labor solution,” all right. It’s “a win-win situation,” even. For everyone but the workers.

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Inside North Korea’s Prison Camps

By MELANIE KIRKPATRICK
Last week a North Korean court sentenced American journalists Euna Lee and Laura Ling to 12 years of “reform through labor.” The women, arrested in March along the North’s border with China, were researching the plight of North Korean refugees who flee to China. Their trial was closed, and their crimes — other than the alleged illegal border crossing — were unspecified.

In recent years, I have spent many hours interviewing refugees from North Korea, including some who escaped from re-education camps. Their accounts of prison life accord with a recent assessment by the U.S. State Department. Conditions are brutal and life threatening, according to the February report. “Torture occurred,” the report notes matter-of-factly. Refugees have spoken to me of newborns separated from their mothers and left to die.

North Koreans can end up in re-education camps for such crimes as listening to foreign radio broadcasts, secretly practicing a religion, or crossing the border to China in search of food. Inmates are subjected to forced labor and are required to memorize political tracts. They receive little food, no medical care and sometimes serve multiyear terms wearing the clothes in which they arrived at camp. I interviewed a woman who had been wearing high heels when she was arrested and had to bind her feet in rags when those wore out. Many prisoners die of abuse or malnutrition.

Political prisoners are held under even harsher conditions in kwan li so penal camps. The Committee for Human Rights in North Korea estimates the number of political prisoners at 200,000; the State Department puts it at between 150,000 and 200,000. Political offenses include such crimes as sitting on a newspaper that contains a picture of dictator Kim Jong Il. Punishment is often collective and can extend to three generations of the offender’s entire family.

Shin Dong-Hyok may be the only person to have escaped from a kwan li so camp. Mr. Shin, now in his mid-20s and living in Seoul, was born and spent the first 22 years of his life in Camp No. 14, a so-called total control facility. In an interview at The Wall Street Journal’s headquarters in New York last year, Mr. Shin spoke of growing up. His formal education was limited to the rudiments of reading and writing. Because political prisoners are usually incarcerated for life, the camps don’t bother with political re-education; Mr. Shin said he didn’t even know who Kim Jong Il was until after his escape. Nor did he understand the concept of money until, after his escape, he walked through a market and noticed bits of colored paper being exchanged for food.

At 12 or 13 — he is unsure of the year in which he was born — he was forced to watch the executions of his mother, who was hanged, and his brother, who was shot. They had attempted to escape. Hoping to pry information out of him — Mr. Shin had none — camp officials bound the boy’s hands and feet, embedded a hook in his groin and dangled him over a fire. In the Journal’s conference room, Mr. Shin pulled up a leg of his trousers to show me the scars.

Mr. Shin survived thanks to the kindness of a fellow prisoner, a former government official who had run afoul of the regime. They plotted a route to China — a country Mr. Shin had never heard of — but his friend was electrocuted on the wire that surrounded the camp. Mr. Shin literally crawled over his body to freedom.

Incredibly, he made his way to the border and on to Shanghai, where he climbed over the wall of the South Korean consulate. In 2005, the Chinese government permitted Mr. Shin to go to Seoul.

North Korea hasn’t said where Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling will be incarcerated. It’s possible that they will receive more favorable treatment than ordinary prisoners, especially if the North wants to use them for propaganda purposes.

In the epilogue to “The Aquariums of Pyongyang,” his 2000 book about growing up in the infamous Yodok prison camp, Kang Chol-Hwan expresses his anger at the world’s indifference to the human-rights abuses in the North. “We’re told that this debate would be better left until another day,” he writes. “But by then we’ll all be dead.”

I pray Ms. Lee and Ms. Ling will come home soon. But if the Americans’ ordeal raises international awareness of the horrors of North Korea’s gulag, it will not have been in vain.

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Machine Guns For Gun Loving Cops

Massachusetts has suspended a program that distributes high-powered, military weapons to local police departments following criticism into the way the program is operated.

A spokesman for the state Public Safety Department said Monday the program has been suspended pending the completion of a review to look at the way it is run, the weapons involved, and the communities that get them.

The move was ordered by Gov. Deval Patrick following a review by The Boston Globe that found 82 police departments in Massachusetts have obtained more than 1,000 military-grade assault weapons.

The weapons in some cases have been distributed to small towns with little crime, without any type of community or legislative input, and in excess of federal guidelines.

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Well, God Damn It!!

The Scriptures are very clear: Thou shalt not take the name the Lord thy God in vain. It’s the third commandment (Exodus 20:7). Using the Creator’s name as profanity or without good reason is a no-no. So when Kirstie Allsopp repeatedly violated the Decalogue while filming a new series of Relocation, Relocation it was inevitable that she would reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7) for her sins.

But Allsopp, like a modern-day Jezebel, turned away from Mosaic law and micro-blogged apostasy on the godless Twitter platform. “Just been told I can’t say ‘for god’s sake!’ or ‘Christ almighty’ on TV (& it’s channel 4!!), I am so sick of compliance I could scream!” she tweeted. “Aah!” she added, to show she wasn’t bluffing. Jesus.

I think we can permit Kirstie her “Aah!” and maybe even a “Grrr!” as this is Channel 4 we’re talking about: the land of a thousand fucks. The network that brought you Animal Passions, a touching, non-judgemental documentary about a man’s love for a pony, and Real Blue Nuns,
a probe into the neglected pornography subgenre Nunsploitation that featured sexually explicit images of women in Islamic dress. So why the sensitivity?

Maybe after Jerry Springer: The Opera, they feel like cutting Christians some slack. 63,000 complaints about a “little bit gay” Jesus in a big nappy were rejected by the BBC on the grounds of “artistic significance” outweighing offence caused. Christians felt (correctly) that the BBC would never countenance broadcasting an Islamic equivalent, a feeling shared by Hindus and Sikhs. So the question arises: do we tailor our religious sensitivity according to how brutal we perceive the backlash? This is a decidedly wonky moral compass.

In a secular society like ours, it’s obvious that religious beliefs should have no special protection, and be subject to the same praise and derision as secular beliefs. We can’t keep treating religious faith as if it is a handicapped child, giving it special seats near the front, saying “there, there” when the difficult questions come. If we can comfortably say “I can’t stand atheists” then surely we can stomach a posh girl saying “Christ on a bike” a heartbeat before the watershed?

Candidly, if it’s a backlash you’re worried about, I’d be keeping an eye on Kirstie. She already knocks through more walls than the Hulk – with stress levels on the rise, being blamed for the slump in property prices and now being forced into multiple takes, I dread to think what she’ll make of the next property they let her loose on. How about some sensitivity towards a Baron’s daughter struggling to make her way in the world? There’s a cause we can all get behind.

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Murderers For Christ Kill Doctor

Dr. George Tiller, whose Wichita, Kansas, women’s clinic has been the target of anti-abortion protests for years, was shot and killed at his church Sunday morning, his attorneys said.

Dr. George Tiller was one of the few U.S. physicians that performed late-term abortions.

Laura Shaneyfelt, an attorney with the firm of Monnat and Spurrier, confirmed Tiller’s death.

The 67-year-old doctor was one of the few U.S. physicians who still performed late-term abortions. He survived a 1993 shooting outside his clinic.

Wichita police said they were searching for a powder-blue Ford Taurus in connection with the killing, which took place outside Reformation Lutheran Church shortly after 10 a.m.

Witnesses provided a license number of the car the killer used to speed away from the church, police spokesman Gordon Bassham said.

The anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, which has led numerous demonstrations at Tiller’s clinic, condemned the shooting as a “cowardly act.”

“Operation Rescue has worked for years through peaceful, legal means, and through the proper channels to see him brought to justice,” the group said in a statement. It offered its prayers for Tiller’s family, “that they will find comfort and healing that can only be found in Jesus Christ.”

Abortion is one of the hottest buttons in U.S. politics, with opponents arguing the practice is tantamount to the murder of an unborn child. Abortion rights supporters argue that the decision to terminate a pregnancy is best left to the woman.

On its Web site, Operation Rescue refers to Tiller as a “monster” who has “been able to get away with murder,” and abortion rights opponents have launched several efforts to get his clinic shut down.

In March, Tiller was acquitted of 19 counts of performing procedures unlawfully at his clinic. In 2008, a probe initiated by abortion opponents who petitioned state authorities to convene a grand jury ended without charges.

The 1993 attack on Tiller left him wounded through both arms. An ardent foe of abortion, Shelley Shannon, was convicted of attempted murder and is serving a 20-year sentence in federal prison for the shooting.

If Tiller was slain because of his work, he would be the fourth U.S. physician killed by abortion opponents since 1993. In addition, a nurse at a Birmingham, Alabama, clinic was maimed and an off-duty police officer was killed in a 1998 bombing by Eric Rudolph, who included abortion among his list of anti-government grievances.

Rudolph admitted to that attack and three other bombings — including the 1996 attack on the Olympic games in Atlanta, Georgia — and is serving life in prison

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Justice In Saudi Arabia

Saudi Arabian officials beheaded and then publicly displayed the body of a convicted killer in Riyadh on Friday, an act that prompted a stiff denunciation by a leading human rights monitor.

The Saudi Interior Ministry said Ahmed Al-Shamlani Al-Anzi was sentenced to death and then “crucifixion” — having his body displayed in public — for the kidnapping and killing of an 11-year-old boy and for the killing of the boy’s father, according to the official Saudi Press Agency.

Amnesty International issued a statement deploring the punishment, with the group’s Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui saying in a statement it is “horrific” that beheadings and crucifixions “still happen.”

Even though the word “crucifixion” is used to describe the public display, the act has no connection to Christianity and the crucifixion of Jesus. The bodies are not displayed on crosses, Lamri Chirouf, who researches Saudi Arabian issues for Amnesty, explained.

The Saudi Interior Ministry asserted that Al-Anzi’s body was displayed as a warning that those involved in similar crimes would suffer the same fate, the press agency reported.

The ministry said Al-Anzi kidnapped the boy and held him for a “malicious purpose” at a grocery store where he worked. He tied rope around the boy’s neck and strangled him to death, the ministry said.

When the boy’s father came to the store looking for his son, Al-Anzi axed the father repeatedly until the man died. When police came to arrest Al-Anzi, Al-Anzi resisted arrest by threatening them with a knife.

Police later discovered that Al-Anzi had been previously convicted of other crimes, including possession of pornographic videos and sodomy, the Interior Ministry said.

Chirouf, the Saudi Arabian researcher for Amnesty International, said his understanding of how the Saudi government carries out crucifixion jibed with Saudi Press Agency’s account.

Government officials do use crucifixions, or public displays of executed bodies, as a tool to deter people from committing such a crime, he said.

This latest case was classified as an offense of rebellion, one that basically rejected all of the rules of religion and society, he said.

Chirouf said those crucified are beheaded first and then their heads are sewn back on their bodies. Then, the corpse is mounted on a pole or a tree.

The English-language Saudi Gazette newspaper said the body was placed on public display throughout the evening and Chirouf said it was his understanding that the body was to be displayed for a few hours.

In its denunciation of the punishment, Amnesty International deplored the “extensive use of the death penalty” in Saudi Arabia.

“King Abdullah should show true leadership and commute all death sentences if Saudi Arabia is to have any role to play as a global leader or member of the G-20,” Sahraoui said.

The group asserts that “trial proceedings” in the country “fall far below international fair-trial standards.”

“They usually take place behind closed doors without adequate legal representation. Convictions are often made on the basis of “confessions” obtained under duress, including torture or other ill-treatment during incommunicado detention,” Amnesty International said.

“Those who are sentenced to death are often not informed of the progress of legal proceedings against them or of the date of execution until the morning when they are taken out and beheaded.”

Amnesty International said there were 102 executions in Saudi Arabia in 2008 and is aware of 136 people believed to be awaiting execution. It says there has been “a high number of executions of migrant workers and other foreign nationals, in particular from Asia and Africa.”

Al-Anzi was a Saudi national, said Chirouf — who added “nobody knows how many people are on death row” in Saudi Arabia.

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Orthodox Priests Brutally Beat Rehab Patients

BELGRADE, Serbia – Serbian authorities are investigating a church-backed drug rehab facility after the publication of a video showing one of the patients being beaten with a shovel and brass knuckles.

The Health Ministry said in a statement Friday that it has dispatched an inspection team to investigate methods used at the Crna Reka (Black River) rehabilitation center in southern Serbia, which is run by Serbian Orthodox Church priests. Government human rights monitor Sasa Jankovic said he has filed torture charges against the facility.

The rehabilitation center — located on the grounds of the Crna Reka monastery — has been known for its strict methods, isolated location and poor living conditions. Earlier media reports about the facility have shown rehab patients carrying out daily duties in total isolation from the outside world.

But the video posted this week by the Vreme weekly shows a young man — apparently a patient — being beaten with a shovel and punched and kicked by a man wearing brass knuckles. The beating takes place in a room decorated with icons — traditional Orthodox Christian religious paintings.

The magazine did not say where it obtained the video.

The priests at the facility said beatings were a necessary part of the therapy and were carried out with the consent of patients’ parents.

The head of the center, Branislav Peranovic, said “a heavy hand is necessary.”

“Whoever has a junkie in the house knows what I am talking about,” he told B92 television.

Priest Dejan, who also works at the center, told the Friday edition of the Politika daily that some of the patients admitted to the center are violent and refuse to obey the rules.

“In that case we have no other option but to use force,” Priest Dejan said.

The Serbian Orthodox Church has declined comment.

Vreme said the center is secured by guards with pit-bulls and Dobermans. The weekly also published interviews with former patients who spoke about the beatings by the guards.

“Once, when I watched what they were doing, I got so sick that almost fainted,” an unidentified former drug addict was quoted as saying. “They will beat you for anything, even for a word they don’t like or if you give them a wrong look.”

Doctors and psychologists said physical violence cannot help the rehabilitation of addicts.

Jasmina Daragan-Saveljic, head of the state-run hospital for treating addicts, said beatings were “unacceptable.” She said treatment must be voluntary to be successful.

Rights ombudsman Jankovic added: “It is no therapy. It is a criminal act.”

The ministry said Crna Reka does not have a license for treating drug addicts. It did not specify if the center would be closed.

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A Twit For Scottish Catholics

by Christopher Null

Leave it to God to spoil the party: The Catholic churches of Scotland are speaking out against Twitter, Facebook, and other social networking technologies, which are being decried by the Church as creating an “obsessive” reliance in their users.

A message from Bishop Tartaglia, president of a Bishops’ Conference of Scotland communications group, has been sent to the 500 Catholic parishes of Scotland with instructions that it be read aloud at mass in every church.

Tartaglia writes that “we need to be wary of the inane chatter that can go on in the digital world which does nothing to promote growth in understanding and tolerance.” In other words: Idle hands, when outfitted with a Twitter account, truly do perform the devil’s work.

The letter goes on to complain that e-friendships are poor substitutes for those in the real world and that “we should avoid an obsessive need for virtual connectedness and develop primary human relationships, pursuing true friendship with real people.”

As well, the letter naturally wonders about the safety of our children on social networking sites, worried that the minions of Satan may be on the other end of the virtual conversation.

This is hardly the first time the Catholic Church has dabbled in technological matters. In March, the faithful were urged to give up SMS messaging for Lent, and even the Pope has his own YouTube channel. A Catholic-centric social network, Xt3.com, also exists.

Which technologies are bad and which are good? That’s a question only you — with the help of your priest, perhaps — can answer.

Amen.

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Lust Forbidden to Mohammedans

By INDRA HARSAPUTRA

SURABAYA, Indonesia – Muslim clerics are seeking ways to regulate online behavior in Indonesia, saying the exploding popularity of social networking sites like Facebook could encourage illicit sex.

Around 700 clerics, or imams, gathering in the world’s most populous Muslim nation on Thursday were considering guidelines forbidding their followers from going online to flirt or engage in practices they believe could encourage extramarital affairs.

Inside Facebook, an independent Palo Alto, Calif.-based blog dedicated to tracking the site, says Indonesia, a nation of 235 million, was the fastest-growing country in Southeast Asia for the site in 2008, with a 645 percent increase to 831,000 users.

It is already the most visited site in Indonesia, and with less than 0.5 percent of Indonesia’s citizens wired, there is a huge potential for growth.

“The clerics think it is necessary to set an edict on virtual networking, because this online relationship could lead to lust, which is forbidden in Islam,” said Nabil Haroen, a spokesman for the Lirboyo Islamic boarding school, which was hosting the event.

Though followers could still be members of the networking site, guidelines dealing with surfing the Web and Islamic values are urgently needed, he said.

“People are typically using Facebook to connect with their friends, family or learn about local and world issues and events,” said Debbie Frost, a Facebook spokeswoman. “We have seen many people and organizations use Facebook to advance a positive agenda.”

Ninety percent of Indonesians are Muslim and most practice a moderate form of the faith.

An edict by the clerics would not have any legal weight. But it could be endorsed by the influential Ulema Council, which recently issued rulings against smoking and yoga. Some devout Muslims adhere to the council’s rulings because ignoring a fatwa, or religious decree, is considered a sin.

Amidan, who heads the Ulema Council, said the growing number of Facebook users in Indonesia was a controversial subject among Muslim leaders and that he favored a ban because of possible sexual content.

“People using Facebook can be driven to engage in distasteful, pornographic chatting,” said Amidan, who was monitoring the two-day conference in the town of Kediri, in eastern Java.

Many clerics are concerned that “inappropriate content” on Facebook could be accessed by children, said Amidan, who like many Indonesians goes by a single name.

Facebook is the top ranked site in Indonesia, ahead of search engines Yahoo and Google, according Alexa.com, which tracks Internet traffic. Nearly 4 percent of all Facebook visitors are from Indonesia, making it the largest source of visitors after the United States, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

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Religious Abuse In Ireland

DUBLIN — A fiercely debated, nine-year investigation into Ireland’s Roman Catholic-run institutions says priests and nuns terrorized thousands of boys and girls in workhouse-style schools for decades — and government inspectors failed to stop the chronic beatings, rapes and humiliation.

High Court Justice Sean Ryan on Wednesday unveiled the 2,600-page final report of Ireland’s Commission to Inquire Into Child Abuse, which is based on testimony from thousands of former students and officials from more than 250 church-run institutions.

More than 30,000 children deemed to be petty thieves, truants or from dysfunctional families — a category that often included unmarried mothers — were sent to Ireland’s austere network of industrial schools, reformatories, orphanages and hostels from the 1930s until the last church-run facilities shut in the 1990s.

The report found that molestation and rape were “endemic” in boys’ facilities, chiefly run by the Christian Brothers order, and supervisors pursued policies that increased the danger. Girls supervised by orders of nuns, chiefly the Sisters of Mercy, suffered much less sexual abuse but frequent assaults and humiliation designed to make them feel worthless.

“In some schools a high level of ritualized beating was routine. … Girls were struck with implements designed to maximize pain and were struck on all parts of the body,” the report said. “Personal and family denigration was widespread.”

Victims of the system have long demanded that the truth of their experiences be documented and made public, so that children in Ireland never endure such suffering again.

But most leaders of religious orders have rejected the allegations as exaggerations and lies, and testified to the commission that any abuses were the responsibility of often long-dead individuals.

Wednesday’s five-volume report sides almost completely with the former students’ accounts. It concludes that church officials always shielded their orders” pedophiles from arrest amid a culture of self-serving secrecy.

“A climate of fear, created by pervasive, excessive and arbitrary punishment, permeated most of the institutions and all those run for boys. Children lived with the daily terror of not knowing where the next beating was coming from,” the report concluded.

The commission said overwhelming, consistent testimony from still-traumatized men and women, now in their 50s to 80s, had demonstrated beyond a doubt that the entire system treated children more like prison inmates and slaves than people with legal rights and human potential.

The report proposed 21 ways the government could recognize past wrongs, including building a permanent memorial, providing counseling and education to victims and improving Ireland’s current child protection services.

But its findings will not be used for criminal prosecutions — in part because the Christian Brothers successfully sued the commission in 2004 to keep the identities of all of its members, dead or alive, unnamed in the report. No real names, whether of victims or perpetrators, appear in the final document.

Irish church leaders and religious orders all declined to comment Wednesday, citing the need to read the massive document first. The Vatican also declined to comment.

The Irish government already has funded a parallel compensation system that has paid 12,000 abuse victims an average of €65,000 ($90,000). About 2,000 claims remain outstanding.

Victims receive the payouts only if they waive their rights to sue the state and the church. Hundreds have rejected that condition and taken their abusers and those church employers to court.

Wednesday’s report said children had no safe way to tell authorities about the assaults they were suffering, particularly the sexual aggression from church officials and older inmates in boys’ institutions.

“The management did not listen to or believe children when they complained of the activities of some of the men who had responsibility for their care,” the commission found. “At best, the abusers were moved, but nothing was done about the harm done to the child. At worst, the child was blamed and seen as corrupted by the sexual activity, and was punished severely.”

The commission dismissed as implausible a central defense of the religious orders — that, in bygone days, people did not recognize the sexual abuse of a child as a criminal offense, but rather as a sin that required repentance.

In their testimony, religious orders typically cited this opinion as the principal reason why sex-predator priests and brothers were sheltered within the system and moved to new posts where they could still maintain daily contact with children.

But the commission said its fact-finding — which included unearthing decades-old church files, chiefly stored in the Vatican, on scores of unreported abuse cases from Ireland’s industrial schools — demonstrated that officials understood exactly what was at stake: their own reputations.

It cited numerous examples where school managers told police about child abusers who were not church officials — but never did this when one of their own had committed the crime.

“Contrary to the congregations” claims that the recidivist nature of sexual offending was not understood, it is clear from the documented cases that they were aware of the propensity for abusers to re-abuse,” it said.

Religious orders were chiefly concerned about preventing scandal, not the danger to children, it said.

The commission also condemned Ireland’s Education Department for aiding the abusive culture through infrequent, toothless inspections that deferred to church authority.

Inspectors were supposed to restrict the use of corporal punishment and make sure the children were adequately fed, clothed and educated — but the report called those inspections “fundamentally flawed.”

It said a lone inspector was responsible for monitoring more than 50 industrial schools, schools were told about the visits in advance and inspectors rarely talked to the children.

Wednesday’s report also highlighted the rarity of human kindness in the institutions.

“A word of consideration or encouragement, or an act of sympathy or understanding, had a profound effect. Adults in their 60s and 70s recalled seemingly insignificant events that had remained with them all their lives,” the report said.

“Often the act of kindness, recalled in such a positive light, arose from the simple fact that the staff member had not given a beating when one was expected.”

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Those Who Did This Were The Real Pigs

By MAAMOUN YOUSSEF

CAIRO – A leading animal rights group criticized Egypt on Monday for using “shocking and cruel” methods to slaughter the country’s pigs over swine flu fears, responding to a YouTube video that showed men skewering squealing piglets with large kitchen knives and hitting others with crowbars.

The controversy was the latest swirling around Egypt’s decision to kill all the country’s 300,000 pigs out of concerns they will spread swine flu. But the World Health Organization has said it is entirely unnecessary because the illness is being spread through humans.

The government decision also brought accusations that Muslims are attacking minority Christians, who breed the animals. Most Muslims consider pigs unclean and do not eat pork.

The Egyptian government has denied the claims and subsequently expanded its rationale for the slaughter to confront a long-standing hygienic problem posed by pigs raised by garbage collectors who live amid the refuse in Cairo slums.

The latest troubles started after the independent Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper posted the video showing men standing in the backs of trucks, killing pigs with knives and crowbars and tossing them in front of a bulldozer. The piles of bleeding bodies, some of them still moving, were then transferred to larger trucks, which took them to the desert to be buried in Qalyoubiya province, some 25 miles (40 kilometers) north of Cairo.

Mohammed Fathi el-Mugharbel, a government official supervising the operation, was shown in the video saying some of the pigs were sprayed with chemicals to paralyze and kill them before being buried.

Peter Davies, who heads the London-based World Society for the Protection of Animals, called the methods “inhumane.”

“I am writing to express my deepest objection and request corrective action regarding the inhumane cull of pigs being carried out in Egypt,” Davies said in a letter to Egyptian Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif circulated to media.

There were also protests within Egypt’s parliament. Christian lawmaker Seyada Ilhami Gress expressed anger Sunday over the “government’s random and inhumane way of slaughtering the pigs.” Responding to the criticism, Parliament Speaker Ahmed Fathi Sorour said the killing should be done in a “civilized and humane way because animals have rights like human beings.” But he did not specifically comment on the video.

Both Muslim and Christian lawmakers supported the government late last month when it issued its order to kill the country’s pigs, even though no swine flu cases have been reported.

The Ministry of Agriculture issued instructions at the time that owners should kill their pigs by piercing their hearts with a needle and then slitting their throats before burying them in pits lined with quicklime.

But the video showed that those recommendations were not being heeded.

“I’m used to seeing a lot of shocking images. … But what I saw today in YouTube is among the most shocking and cruel,” said Sofia Parente, an international program manager for Davies’ organization.

The head of the Egyptian Society of Animal Friends, Ahmed el-Sherbini, said in a statement published Monday in Al-Dustour newspaper that some of the pigs were being buried alive. The government said it was not aware of the practice.

“I have not seen or been informed of such treatment, but there might have been some individual cases,” Hamed Samaha, the director general of veterinarian services at the Ministry of Agriculture, told The Associated Press.

The government’s decision to kill the pigs initially met some resistance, with pig farmers hurling stones at Health Ministry trucks and clashing with police.

The World Health Organization says the H1N1 virus that has sickened more than 8,000 people around the world and killed 76 is being spread by humans, not pigs, and pork products are safe to eat.

Many believe the Egyptian government made the decision to slaughter the pigs to look strong in the face of the crisis. It was criticized for not taking enough precautions when bird flu first appeared in Asia in 2003 and ended up killing over two dozen people in the country.

Egyptian authorities quarantined a French family at a hospital after they arrived Monday because two of the children showed signs of fever, said Hassan Shabaan, an official at the airport’s health department. The family will remain at the hospital for 24 hours while they are tested for swine flu, he said.

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Continuing Abuse And Outrages Against Women By Muslim Militants In Afganistan

Afghan actress Parwin Mushthal’s passion for her job has exacted a heavy toll – resulting in the murder of her husband and forcing her to live in hiding with her two children.

Ms Mushthal’s career choice appears to have upset the Taleban and their supporters.

She has received threatening telephone calls and abuse in the streets from people telling her to stop acting.

She told the BBC that she believes her continued defiance of those threats resulted in the shooting by unknown gunmen of her 39-year-old husband, a taxi driver, in Kabul in December.

Since then her life has been turned upside down.

Parwin Mushthal’s interest in acting stemmed from her days at high school. She has appeared in more than 20 theatre productions and dozens of films and is a regular on Afghan televsion.

She is currently in the television series, Bulbul, and has appeared in numerous adverts.

Her best known performances are in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour Lost, which was performed in the Dari language, and in Soeurs (which she co-created). Both productions were in collaboration with Kabul’s Foundation for Culture and Civil Society.

But although Ms Mushthal was well known, she had to hide her career from her husband’s family, because many people in Afghanistan link acting with immorality. Women who act can find themselves accused of prostitution.

“When his brothers came from the provinces to our home [in Kabul] as guests, we didn’t put on the TV because I was always on ads,” the 41-year-old told the BBC World Service’s Outlook programme.

“I was scared that they would see it, so I would just put on a DVD and show them that,” she said.

But as her fame grew, so did the level of threats against her. She began to receive warnings from people who recognised her.

“When I was going to work, people were standing in my way waiting for me,” she said.

“They were usually on bikes and they were telling me that, ‘you women shouldn’t be here any more’.”

At first she brushed the threats off but then things started to get worse.

“My husband… was getting phone calls from Khost Province asking him why he was letting his wife appear on TV,” she said.

Ms Mushthal at first thought that the threats were not serious and could be connected to her choice of clothing, so she started to wear a big scarf.

“Then later, I understood that it was about me working on TV and that I should stop doing so,” she said.

Over time, the attacks became more menacing.

“I was walking towards home and then a man came behind me on a bike and punched me in my back,” said Ms Mushthal.

“I fell down in the street really badly, I still have a pain in my leg, because he punched me really hard.

“I was with my little son and I was crying and we were running to get home.”

Her husband was concerned as to why she was in pain, but she did not want to worry him and just said that she had fallen and hurt her leg.

However, things took a turn for the worst as her husband became the target of a horrific attack.

“That night, this guy who killed my husband had been calling him constantly to come out [of our home],” said Parwin.

“My husband was very tired and he couldn’t be bothered to go out. The same guy called the next day at around five o’clock in the evening and asked him to come and meet him.

“My husband went out, I realised that it was a bit late and it was getting dark.”

When her husband failed to return home, she tried calling him but his phone was off. It was dark and there was no electricity.

“At eight o’clock, I heard a shooting, I couldn’t go out because I was scared and very upset,” said Parwin.

“I was alone with my kids as there was no other man in my family. I could feel that something had happened but I didn’t know what.

“My children started crying and asking where their dad was. I couldn’t do anything so I let them sleep and just said that dad would come.”

Ms Mushthal locked the door and stayed awake all night, in fear that someone might come for her and her children, who are eight and nine.

‘Our life was happy’

In the morning, she received shocking news from the police that her husband had been killed.

“I saw my husband lying down on the floor, his face was full of blood. They didn’t allow me to go near his body but you could see that they had shot him so many times. I was just shouting and crying,” she said.

“That day my children were very upset and they were really scared, they kept holding and to me and saying, ‘don’t go out because they will kill you as well’.”

Her husband’s family took his body to Khost Province and she has now been in hiding for three months with her two children.

She also has to wear a full-length burka so that no one recognises her.

“I’m still in hiding, no one knows where I am,” she said.

“Our life was really happy, we were really close to each other, he really loved me.”

Parwin Mushthal is not alone.

Correspondents say there is marked sense of unease among many other working women in Kabul and other Afghan cities as the presence of the Taleban – who have made no secret for of their disapproval of women working – appears to grow ever stronger.

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Clerics Hit On Women Again

Hardline Saudi clerics have called on the government to ban women from appearing on television and to prohibit their images in print media, which they called a sign of growing “deviant thought.”

In a letter to new Information Minister Abdul Aziz al-Khoja that appeared on websites this week, the 35 Islamic clerics also condemned the increase of music and dancing on television, as well as images of women in popular newspapers and magazines that they labelled “obscene.”

“Our faith in you is great to carry out media reform, for we have seen how perversity is rooted in the ministry of information and culture, on television, radio, in the press, literary clubs, and book fairs,” the letter said.

It cited an alleged plan to “westernise” Saudi women by “reducing their rights to a question of removing veils, wearing makeup and mixing with men.”

It added that the ministry had permitted the import of “obscene newspapers and magazines that are filled with deviant thought and pictures of beautiful women on its covers and inside.”

“There should be no Saudi woman on television, in any case,” they said.

“There is no doubt that this is religiously impermissible.”

The clerics, including justice officials and academics from a conservative Islamic university, cited several cabinet-endorsed orders and policies from years past which they said supported their argument.

They appeared to be challenging a growing push for liberalisation of tough restrictions on women, including near-mandatory use of black, full-face veils, which are rooted in its ultra-conservative Wahhabi version of Islam.

Both Saudi television and print media increasingly feature women, while Arabic-language magazines showing women in Western garb and makeup are also widely sold in the country.

The letter came in the wake of an information ministry-sponsored book fair in Riyadh in early March at which religious conservatives complained that men and women were allowed to mix freely, and that some books on sale violated Islamic principles.

The book fair was marred by the muttawam, or Islamic morality police, harassing a woman author promoting her book and trying to prevent men from obtaining her autograph.

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from Islam In Europe:

Denmark: Girls supervise each other

Religious bullying and the mutual social control among young Muslim women in Danish educational institutions appears extensive.

Muslim boys are also particularly active in the supervision, it appeares from a new qualitative study, prepared by the Welfare Ministry, about being a Muslim woman in Denmark.

One of the teachers in the study says that social monitoring is an appalling problem. It’s so dominating, that people think it’s lies, the gossip and the talk, the monitoring of these young people who can’t allow themselves anything.

The Equality Department in the Welfare Ministry had Phd Tina Magaard from the Theology Institute at Aarhus University prepare an in-depth interview of 34 Muslim girls and women, as well as 11 non-Muslim women teachers in educational institutes with Muslim students.

The goal was to map how Muslim women themselves experience the problems of equality between the sexes, when it comes to education, marriage, laws of life, punishment, etc.

Tina Magaard stresses that to the study of 220 pages don’t give a complete picture of reality, and she warns politicians of using the women’s and teachers’ statements as bullets for a political battles and unuanced debate.

“In the report, both sides can surely find something they can hit the other over the head with. I focused on letting the women and teachers express themselves, without me coming with a proposal of a solution,” says Tina Magaard.

The report shows that traditions, norms and a conservative family structure, together with Islam, are controlling factors in the existence of the interviewed women. Some of the women are pressured and strained, impeding their development, for others it’s a system and answer, which gives them a safe and regulated life.

Equality minister Karen Jespersen says in a press release that this report gives good insight into how a segment of young Muslim women see their situation. It can hopefully help Muslim women who wants to enjoy more of what Danish society offers them. And she also thinks it can be useful for those who support and guide this group of women.

Martin Henriksen, education spokesperson for the Danish People’s Party (DPP) and member of the Integration Committee, is shocked about the expamples in the report of religious bullying and oppression and wants to ban Muslim prayer houses and headscarfs in education institutions.

Martin Henriksen says that cultural and religious special consideration encourages parallel societies and rewards the wrong ones by charging those who want to integrate. Henriksen says that we must recognize that dialogue won’t get us far with very orthodox Muslims and fundamentalists but that banning Muslim prayer houses and headscarves will automatically remove an essential part of the means used for social control.

Martin Henriksen adds that there should be better support options for the Muslim girls who are being bullied. He says he expects a real proposal for a solution from both the government and the opposition for this problem. If they won’t support the repeated proposal of the DPP for a serious handling of religious bullying in the schools, they would have to come up with soemthing better. As we can see from the Aarhus University report, it’s needed urgently.

From the report:

A girl who doesn’t wear a headscarf says that there are spies, and no such thing as privacy. Everything is dictated. ‘where are you going? and when will be get back home? 10 minutes before the hour or ten minutes after?’ There are many who think that she’s a very open and liberal girl, but regardless of how liberal one is, there’s always something which pulls one back.

A girl with a headscarf says that they grew up with religion and so don’t think much about whether it’s herself, her parents or her religion which plays a role. It’s just part of her and she acts by it. But she always has religion in mind, when she has to choose; for example, being alone with a man at work – it’s something one thinks about, not just at work, also when you visit somebody, you’re not allowed to be alone with a man in a room.

Another girl without a headscarf: “The very religious women and some of my friends from before, they try to give a frightening image of God. But they also try to impress on her that she should be ashamed. Ashamed of not going with a headscarf, of not being so religious, of going with pants, for dressing so that men can see her figure.

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A Danish convert in her early 20s says in the report that she the second wife of an Arab man. She says he has permission from God to take up to four wives.

R. says it’s obviously diffuclt when feelings come into it. It’s then a little hard, but she’s surprised that it’s actually working as good as it does. Asked what would happen her husband would tell her he married a third wife, she smiles, but says that if her husband does it properly, she wouldn’t be able to say anything.

A Turk without a headscarf says that there’s a growing group of women who marry a man who’s already married. They get an imam to marry them since they’re then accepted into society. They have no open alternative. It’s deplorable, she says, that it’s happening in Denmark. She think that if one would tally it all up, which is very difficult, it might be higher than we think.

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Danish Muhammad Cartoonist Returns

One of the controversial Danish cartoonists who sparked riots in the Muslim world in 2005 by drawing caricatures of the prophet Muhammad is set to return soon with new works reflecting on the incident.

Kurt Westergaard, the Danish caricaturist forced into hiding after the publication of his depiction of the prophet Muhammad in the newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005, is set to return with a new set of potentially controversial drawings.

According to a report in the Copenhagen Post, Westergaard is expected to have 26 illustrations in a new book that compiles the sardonic columns by Danish writer Lars Hedegaard for the Berlingske Tidende newspaper.

The paper writes that one of the drawings in the book features former Danish foreign minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, who spoke out against the original Muhammad cartoons, kneeling with an inkwell that reads “freedom of expression.” A black-bearded man with a bomb in his turban is peering out of the inkwell. Writer Hedegaard told the paper there was “no intention to depict the so-called prophet,” but that people could always interpret drawings in different ways. He said he expected no backlash as a result of the publication.

Westergaard, 73, was forced to go into hiding under protection from the official state secret service agency and had to live in safe houses after a plot to kill him was uncovered. Last summer he returned home, though he still remains under protection.

Comparisons had been drawn between his situation and that of Dutch populist politician Geert Wilders, whose critisism of Islam also led to death threats and constant police protection. When Wilders used the Danish’s drawing in his anti-Islam film Fitna this March, however, Westergaard filed for an injunction to force Wilders to take the picture out of the film. The cartoonist said that he did not want the cartoon to be used against Muslim society as a whole. He also responded by drawing Wilders with a bomb in his trademark peroxide blond hair and a sign saying: Danger! Freedom of expression. Wilders did replace the Muhammad cartoon in a second version of his film.

Drawing by Danish cartoonist Kurt Westergaard depicting Dutch politician Geert Wilders.
The cartoonist has repeatedly stated that he has no regrets about drawing the original caricature for Jyllands-Posten. In an interview last spring Westergaard also said that he is not anti-Muslim: “I know a lot of Muslims living here in Denmark who accept democracy completely and who live their religion as a very private matter. I hope that all Muslims will adapt to secular society. There is currently friction between Muslim and Christian culture. But I am quite sure that our Western Democratic culture will prevail over the darker version of Islam. We must have Islam-light.”

Responding to the protests and deadly riots the caricatures sparked in the Muslim world, Westergaard said: “If it hadn’t been the cartoon, it would have been a book or play or a film that would have provoked the protests. We have to get through this period of friction between the two cultures. I hope that our Muslim fellow citizens will understand what it means to live in a democracy. Even if you are against the democracy, you can still live there, but you must fight with peaceful means.”

One of the two Tunisian born-men arrested in February for plotting to kill Westergaard remains in Denmark because he faces torture should he be deported to Tunisia. Over the weekend, though, the government in Copenhagen agreed to transfer him from Aarhus, where Westergaard lives, to Sandholm Asylum Centre north of Copenhagen. The suspect will be able to move freely in and out of the facility, but he must be in daily contact with the police. The Copenhagen Post reported that Westergaard was happy about the transfer.

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The Real Enemy

By Rory McCarthy

New evidence has emerged revealing the extent of the crackdown by Hamas during and after Israel’s war in Gaza last month.

Amnesty International said Hamas forces and militias were involved in a “campaign of abductions, deliberate and unlawful killings, torture and death threats against those they accuse of ‘collaborating’ with Israel, as well as opponents and critics”. It said at least two dozen men had been shot by Hamas since the end of December and “scores of others” shot in the legs, kneecapped or beaten.Amnesty gave detailed accounts of some of the cases and said there was “incontrovertible evidence” that Hamas security forces and militia were “responsible for grave human rights abuses”. Hamas officials have admitted hunting for suspected collaborators, but they have denied this campaign of attacks.

Hamas apparently fears it lost some of its control in Gaza during Israel’s devastating three-week war and launched a new and violent crackdown to enforce its rule, targeting not only those suspected of giving information to the Israeli military but also escaped prisoners and all perceived internal opponents.

The new evidence corroborates witness accounts given to the Guardian, as well as an investigation by the Palestinian Centre for Human Rights, based in Gaza City, that found 32 people had been killed by the Palestinian security services and other gunmen in Gaza since the war began, and that dozens more were shot or beaten.

In an interview today, one Palestinian working for a civil society organisation described how he was forced to leave Gaza because of the growing intimidation and threats. Mowaffaq Alami, 36, worked for the One Voice organisation in Gaza promoting grassroots discussions about Israeli-Palestinian peace proposals.

After Hamas took full security control of Gaza in June 2007, its forces raided the group’s office and seized computers and other equipment. One Voice later closed its office, but the staff went on working from home. Then Hamas ordered all civil society groups to obtain its permission to continue their work. One Voice refused and six months ago halted all its work in Gaza.

“People are afraid to live normal lives, to express their opinions freely,” Alami said. “There is no freedom of speech, of movement, of travelling or having real healthcare. Hamas is raising George Bush’s policy: those not with us are against us.” One of his colleagues was forced to leave Gaza after receiving threats from Hamas.

The Palestinian Centre for Human Rights said Hamas had tightened its restrictions on civil society groups, ordering them to inform the Hamas authorities before receiving or distributing aid and obtain Hamas approval before starting new construction or development work.

Alami, who secured a rare permit to leave Gaza a week ago with his family to live in the West Bank, said there were frequently differences between orders given by local Hamas commanders on the ground and the more senior leadership within the movement. Other small extremist movements were also beginning to return to force again – one prominent cafe in Gaza City was bombed last week.

He said many Palestinians no longer felt affiliated to any political group, either Hamas or Fatah, its West Bank-based rival. “Politicians and the media think that there is a simple division between Gaza and the West Bank, between Hamas and Fatah … The majority of the Palestinian people today are with none of them.”

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Un Pas Assez Historique

Le Monde

La chancelière allemande, Angela Merkel, et le président français, Nicolas Sarkozy, ont confirmé, samedi 7 février, l’installation prochaine de soldats allemands en France, pour la première fois depuis la seconde guerre mondiale et l’occupation nazie.

“C’est pour nous un honneur et une joie que, pour la première fois depuis la deuxième guerre mondiale, la France ait déclaré que la Brigade franco-allemande ne soit pas seulement stationnée en Allemagne mais également en France”, a déclaré la chancelière allemande à la presse. “C’est une démarche historique, conscients que nous sommes que nous devons être à la hauteur de ce qu’ont fait nos prédécesseurs en matière d’amitié entre l’Allemagne et la France”, a renchéri le président français, après un déjeuner de travail avec Angela Merkel, en marge de la 45e conférence de Munich sur la sécurité.

Selon le ministère de la défense français, le bataillon allemand, qui s’installera à Strasbourg-Illkirch, comptera plus de 600 hommes – des fantassins et des unités spécialisées. Il s’agira d’une unité opérationnelle de la brigade franco-allemande, qui compte au total quelque 5 000 hommes mais était jusqu’ici entièrement stationnée en Allemagne.

Le ministère de la défense français a par ailleurs indiqué que le 16e bataillon de chasseurs basé à Sarrebourg, reliquat des forces françaises stationnées en Allemagne depuis la guerre, sera bientôt rapatrié en France. Il sera envoyé à Bitche, en Lorraine, pour remplacer un régiment un régiment d’artillerie dissous. Quant au 110e Régiment d’infanterie, l’autre régiment français de la brigade franco-allemande, il restera en Allemagne.

Ces annonces ont été accueillies avec soulagement à Illkirch et Bitche, alors que l’est de la France a payé un lourd tribut à la réforme de la carte militaire.

Le journaliste du Figaro Pierre Rousselin raconte dans son blog comment a été prise la décision d’installer des troupes allemandes à Illkirch. Selon un témoin, cité par M. Rousselin, M. Sarkozy a évoqué cette proposition au cours de son déjeuner avec Mme Merkel. Celle-ci “s’est étonnée de cette offre en demandant au président français s’il se rendait compte de l’impact que pourrait avoir sa proposition en France : ‘Tu me proposes de faire un pas immense. Es-tu bien sûr de toi ?’ ‘Nous avons changé d’époque, a répondu Sarkozy. Je serai honoré d’accueillir des troupes allemandes sur le sol français.’”

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Bush Regime “loses” Twenty-three Million e-mails

By Amy Goodman

Karl Rove recently described George W. Bush as a book lover, writing, “There is a myth perpetuated by Bush critics that he would rather burn a book than read one.” There will be many histories written about the Bush administration. What will they use for source material? The Bush White House was sued for losing e-mails, and for skirting laws intended to protect public records. A federal judge ordered White House computers scoured for e-mails just days before Bush left office. Three hundred million e-mails reportedly went to the National Archives, but 23 million e-mails remain “lost.” Vice President Dick Cheney left office in a wheelchair due to a back injury suffered when moving boxes out of his office. He has not only hobbled a nation in his attempt to sequester information—he hobbled himself. Cheney also won court approval to decide which of his records remain private.

Barack Obama was questioned by George Stephanopoulos about the possibility of prosecuting Bush administration officials. Obama said: “We’re still evaluating how we’re going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions and so forth. … I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand, I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. … [W]hat we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed to looking at what we got wrong in the past.”

Legal writer Karen Greenberg notes in Mother Jones magazine, “The list of potential legal breaches is, of course, enormous; by one count, the administration has broken 269 laws, both domestic and international.”

Torture, wiretapping and “extraordinary rendition”—these are serious crimes that have been alleged. President Obama now has, more than anyone else, the power to investigate.

John Conyers, chair of the House Judiciary Committee, has just subpoenaed Karl Rove while investigating the politicization of the Justice Department and the political prosecution of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman. Rove previously invoked executive privilege to avoid congressional subpoenas. Conyers said in a press release: “I will carry this investigation forward to its conclusion, whether in Congress or in court. … Change has come to Washington, and I hope Karl Rove is ready for it.”

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who blocked impeachment hearings, is at least now calling for an investigation. She told Fox News: “I think that we have to learn from the past, and we cannot let the politicizing of the—for example, the Justice Department—to go unreviewed. … I want to see the truth come forth.”

Why not take it a step further?

Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, who led the charge in Congress for impeachment of Bush and Cheney, has called for “the establishment of a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation, which will have the power to compel testimony and gather official documents to reveal to the American people not only the underlying deception which has divided us, but in that process of truth-seeking set our nation on a path of reconciliation.”

Millions have served time in U.S. prisons for crimes that fall far short of those attributed to the Bush administration. Some criminals, it seems, are like banks judged too big to fail: too big to jail, too powerful to prosecute. What if we apply President Obama’s legal theory to the small guys? Why look back? Crimes, large or small, can be forgiven, in the spirit of unity. But few would endorse letting muggers, rapists or armed robbers of convenience stores off scot-free. So why the different treatment for those potentially guilty of torture, widespread illegal spying and leading a nation into wars that have killed untold numbers?

Which brings us back to George Bush and books. Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451” is one of the titles in the National Endowment for the Arts’ “The Big Read.” This ambitious program is “designed to restore reading to the center of American culture.” Cities, towns, even entire states choose a book and encourage everyone to read it. In “Fahrenheit 451” (the temperature at which paper spontaneously combusts), books are outlawed. Firemen don’t put out fires, they start them, burning down houses that contain books. Bradbury said: “You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” The secretive Bush administration is out of power; the transparency-proclaiming Obama administration is in. But transparency is useful only when accompanied by accountability.

Without thorough, aggressive, public investigations of the full spectrum of crimes alleged of the Bush administration, there will be no accountability, and the complete record of this chapter of U.S. history will never be written.

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French Bullies Attack Jewish Schoolgirl

VILLIERS LE BEL – Four teenagers from the Paris suburbs have been charged with beating a Jewish schoolgirl and taunting her over the Israeli offensive in Gaza, officials said Friday.

The 14-year-old victim told investigators she was called a “dirty Jew”, kicked in the legs and forced to eat snow by a group of youths outside her high school in the rough suburb of Villiers le Bel.

One of her attackers allegedly told her: “We don’t like what your brothers are doing in Gaza,” lawyers said.

A special judge for minors charged the three youths late Thursday with acts of violence linked to a person’s religion, and a fourth for failing to prevent a crime, the state prosecutor’s office said.

According to defence lawyers, the judge suggested the youths, aged between 13 and 15, could be sent on a course on the subject of racism and anti-Semitism.

All four have been suspended from school and are set to face disciplinary action.

France, home to Europe’s biggest Arab and Jewish populations, has been on alert for an increase in anti-Semitic violence as the conflict in Gaza stirred communal tensions.

On Monday, unidentified attackers rammed a burning car into a gate outside a synagogue in southern France, while French Jewish groups have recorded a spike in anti-Semitic taunts and attacks.

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Police Remove Israeli Flag during Islamist Protest March

By Yassin Musharbash

Police in the western German city of Duisburg have admitted they removed flags a student had hung in his apartment in support of Israel during a pro-Palestinian protest march in the city. Officers broke down his door and removed the flags. The city’s police chief has issued an apology, but outrage is spreading.

It’s certainly not a new phenomenon in Germany for feathers to be ruffled every time bombs fall or rockets fly in the Middle East. It is unusual, though, for German police officials to use force to enter into an apartment and remove an Israeli flag from a bedroom because people protesting the Gaza Strip invasion on the street below are bothered by it.

This flag angered protesters in the German city of Duisburg, so police removed it.
But that’s what happened this weekend in Duisburg in the western German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. Around 10,000 people had gathered on Saturday morning at the central station in the city, located in the Ruhr region, to protest against Israel’s course of action in the Gaza Strip. The protest, organized by the Islamist group Milli Görüs, which, although legal, has been monitored for years by German domestic intelligence agencies in charge of observing potentially radical or fundamentalist groups.

After a short time, the protest passed along one of the city’s main thoroughfares. At a house on the corner, protesters spotted two Israeli flags — one hanging from a balcony and the second from the window of a bedroom inside the apartment. Twenty-five-year-old student Peter P.* and his 26-year-old girlfriend had mounted them there.

‘Suddenly I Saw a Police Officer in my Bedroom’

It wasn’t the first time, either. At the beginning of the year, P. flew the Israeli flag on the day commemorating the Holocaust. And in May, he flew the flag for several weeks because the state of Israel was celebrating its 60th birthday. For years, Hamas fired rockets at Israel, and few people took notice, P. told SPIEGEL ONLINE, explaining his reasons for flying the flag. This time around, he said, he did it to express “solidarity with the sole democracy in the region.”

P. also knew that on that day people participating in the protest march against the Israeli offensive would go past his house. But he said he was also concerned about what he saw as the “greatest onslaught of anti-Semitism in Europe since 1945,” namely marches against Israel’s actions that included anti-Semitic hate campaigns that he claims are being tolerated in cities like Paris and London.

As the first protesters recognized the flag, P. and his girlfriend were standing on the street nearby. He said he followed the march because he wanted to document any incidents of anti-Semitism or hate campaigns. He described the sentiment that developed within the crowd as it viewed the Israeli flag as tantamount to that of a “lynch mob.” “Death to Israel,” some of the protestors shouted. He said the police appeared to be overburdened.

“Suddenly,” the student explained, “I saw a police officer on the balcony on the second floor” in the apartment located directly beneath his. The officer ripped down the Israeli flag that had been affixed to P.’s balcony. A short time later he witnessed an officer inside his own apartment taking down the flag that had been hung in the bedroom.

A Hail of Icicles, Nail Clippers and a Pocket Knife

The police’s moves caused loud cheering amongst the protesters — a fact not only reported by the student, but also confirmed in videos of the event that have been widely circulated on YouTube. The incident first came to the attention of the media after journalists at the local blog “Die Ruhrbarone” reported on it. The objects reportedly thrown at the apartment included what appeared to be small chunks of ice, a folded up pocket knife, nail clippers and also what looked like a stone.

P. said he was “shocked” by the incident. Afraid to return to his apartment, he first went to a friend’s place nearby. Around two hours later he returned with his girlfriend and an acquaintance — but he claims youths were still throwing things at the house.

He said he didn’t return to the apartment until they had left. A police car passed by and P. asked the officers to come to his apartment. The officers warned that P. and his girlfriend should stay away from the window and that police would watch the house for a few hours.

“I was beside myself,” P. said, “I was afraid.” Two hours passed without any incident. Then P.’s acquaintance, also in the apartment, went out to the balcony for a smoke and claims he was immediately cursed as a “shit jew”.

Two minutes later, the police returned to P.’s door — and for the second time they did something unexpected. They ordered the acquaintance to leave the apartment.

A Police Apology

The actions of Duisburg officials have since caused outrage — sparking criticism from the Central Council of Jews in Germany. Rainer Wendt, the head of the German Police Union for the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, said: “It is intolerable that German Islamists be able to determine police actions.” At the same time, he expressed understanding for what he described as a “difficult deployment situation” police officials in Duisburg had run up against. He said it appeared too few officers had been dispatched to the protest. Frank Richter of the Union of Police, another organization representing officers in the state, said the police mission should be explored and clarity brought to the incident.

Initially, Duisburg police defended their actions. In its Monday issue, the Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung newspaper quoted a police spokesperson stating that the flags had been removed in order to de-escalate a potentially dangerous situation. German news agency DDP quoted the spokesperson on Tuesday saying “the right thing had been done here.”

But by Tuesday afternoon, the city’s chief of police, Rolf Cebin, expressed his apologies for the incident. “I deeply regret the fact that, especially, the feelings of Jewish people were hurt. From the standpoint of the present, it was the wrong decision.”

Despite the apology, the row may not be over yet. The state chapter of the center-left Social Democratic Party (SPD) wants a discussion about the police actions to take place in the state parliament in Düsseldorf. “We are going to raise the issue during a meeting of the state domestic affairs committee on Thursday,” the party’s deputy parliamentary chief, Ralf Jäger, told SPIEGEL ONLINE. “The central question is this: Why was the potential for danger during the protest so underestimated that police were forced into a situation in which they had to concede to the demands of violent (protesters) rather than (protect) the right to the freedom of speech of others?”

The politician claims that Duisburg police believed 1,000 people would attend the rally, far fewer than the 10,000 who eventually turned up. He claims they should have better predicted the situation and the fact that they didn’t raises the question of whether the state’s Office of Criminal Investigation had done enough “preparation.”

As of Tuesday, Milli Görüs has not yet provided any statement about the incident. The acting spokesperson for the organization’s secretary general could not be reached for comment, and the group’s office said its chairman was currently outside the country.

On Tuesday, Peter P. said he had obtained the services of a lawyer. He still hasn’t been told who will be held responsible for paying for the door broken down by police.

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Eyeless in Gaza at the Mill with Slaves

by C. A. Montaner

Gaza’s True ‘Disproportion’

Israelis are being accused of suffering too few casualties in their confrontation with the Hamas terrorists. Those who reason thus usually speak the words “disproportion” or “asymmetry” in an indignant tone. While at this writing close to a thousand Arab Palestinians have died or been wounded as a result of the bombings, the Israeli losses amount to just over a dozen.

Tel Aviv’s critics — from whom an anti-Semitic stench often rises — do not say whether Israel should increase its quota of cadavers or if it must reduce the Arabs’ quota to achieve the reasonable proportion of blood that will soothe the peculiar itch for parity that afflicts them. Nor do they specify the morally permissible number of casualties to end the rain of rockets that for years has been constantly falling on the heads of Israeli civilians.

This demand for “proportionality” can only be called surprising. Until this conflict began, history books everywhere always expressed great satisfaction and a certain chauvinistic pride when a nation’s army inflicted on the enemy a large number of casualties, vis-à-vis a trifling price paid by “our boys.” Israel is the only country expected to behave differently and, in fact, it does; I know of no other nation that announces where and when it will drop its bombs, thus enabling civilians to evacuate the territory. Of course, in this it behaves asymmetrically, because the Hamas terrorists, forever eager to cause the greatest damage possible, never announce when or where they will launch their rockets against Israel’s civilian population.

In turn, Israel has not the slightest interest in causing casualties. All it wants is to stop Hamas’ attacks the only way it can: by eliminating the terrorists and destroying their arsenals. There’s no other way to deal with them. Hamas is not a political organization with which agreements can be reached, but a fanatical gang intent on wiping Israel off the map. To achieve this objective, its members are even willing to turn their own children into human bombs, just to kill the hated Jews.

Here’s another very important asymmetry. The Jews build underground shelters in all houses near the border; they close the schools and hide the children at the least sign of danger; they treat the death of a single soldier as a national tragedy; they do everything possible to rescue their prisoners, and protect the civilian population from the consequences of war. In contrast, the authorities in Gaza, drunk with violence, fire their machine guns irresponsibly into the air to express joy or grief (causing numerous injuries), do not hesitate to install their headquarters or hide their guns in schools, mosques or hospitals, use human shields to protect themselves, turn to suicidal terrorists and reward the families of such “martyrs” with money.

One week before Hamas broke the truce and stepped up its rocket attacks against the Jewish state (the spark that set off this conflict), I was in Israel, where I had been invited to deliver a lecture at the University of Tel Aviv. As part of the contacts organized by my hosts, I visited the Wolfson Medical Center to learn about the program “Save a Child’s Heart.” I was very moved. It is a foundation devoted to providing heart surgery for very poor children, most of them from the Arab world. As it happened, I witnessed the hurried arrival of a tiny 5-day-old girl, who had to be operated on at once to keep her from dying. She was brought in by her mother, a woman in a black head covering that allowed me to see only her tear-filled eyes, and her husband, a small, bearded man who watched with amazement the indescribable kindness with which a group of doctors and nurses treated the baby. The family came from Gaza.

Since the war erupted, I have asked myself constantly what became of them all.

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In Gaza, the real enemy is Iran

By Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael B. Oren

Reporting from Jerusalem — The images from the fighting in Gaza are harrowing but ultimately deceptive. They portray a mighty invading army, one equipped with F-16 jets that have bombed a civilian population defended by a few thousand fighters armed with primitive rockets. But widen the lens and the true nature of this conflict emerges. Hamas, like Hezbollah in Lebanon, is a proxy for the real enemy Israel is confronting: Iran. And Israel’s current operation against Hamas represents a unique chance to deal a strategic blow to Iranian expansionism.

Until now, the Iranian revolution has appeared unstoppable. The Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s ended with Iranian troops occupying Iraqi territory. Iranian influence then spread to Saudi Arabia’s heavily Shiite and oil-rich Eastern province, and to Lebanon through Hezbollah. Since the fall of their long-standing enemy, Saddam Hussein, Iranians have deeply infiltrated Iraq. Syria has been drawn into Iran’s sphere, and even the Sunni sheikdoms of the gulf now defer to Iran, dispatching foreign ministers to Tehran and defying international sanctions against it. Iran has co-opted Hamas, a Sunni organization closely linked to the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, transforming the Israeli-Palestinian conflict into a jihad against the Jewish state. But Iran’s boldest achievement has been to thwart world pressure and approach the nuclear threshold. Once fortified with nuclear weapons, Iranian hegemony in the Middle East would be complete.

All of which helps explain the public statements from moderate Arab leaders, such as Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Palestinian Authority head Mahmoud Abbas, who have blamed the end of the tenuous Israel-Hamas cease-fire on Hamas. Egyptian Foreign Minister Ahmed Aboul Gheit has even called on the Arab world to stop using the U.N. as a forum for blaming Israel alone for the fighting, surely a first. Those leaders understand what many in the West have yet to grasp: The Middle East conflict is no longer just about creating a Palestinian state but about preventing the region’s takeover by radical Islam. Indeed, Palestinian statehood is impossible without neutralizing the extremists who oppose any negotiated solution.

If Israel successfully overthrows Hamas in Gaza, it would strengthen anti-Iranian forces throughout the Mideast and signal the region that Iranian momentum can be reversed. The Israeli military operation could begin the process that topples a terrorist regime that seized power in the Gaza Stripin 2007 and has fired thousands of rockets and mortar shells into Israeli neighborhoods.

And whether or not Hamas is ultimately overthrown, Israel can achieve substantial goals. The first is an absolute cease-fire. Previous cease-fires allowed Hamas to launch two or three rockets a week into Israel and to smuggle weapons into Gaza through tunnels. To obtain a cease-fire now, the international community should recognize Israel’s right to respond to any aggression over its international border and monitor the closure of Hamas’ weapons-smuggling tunnels.

Above all, the goal is to ensure that Hamas is unable to proclaim victory and thereby enhance Iranian prestige in the Arab world.

Yet even those limited goals are far from guaranteed. An earlier opportunity to check Iran — during Israel’s war against Hezbollah in 2006 — was squandered through a combination of Israeli incompetence and international pressure. Hezbollah manipulated the Western media by grossly inflating the number of civilian casualties and even “recycling” corpses from one bombed site to another.

The international community responded by imposing a cease-fire before Israel could achieve its goals and installing a peacekeeping force that has since allowed Hezbollah to more than double its prewar arsenal. Though the Israeli army killed a quarter of Hezbollah’s troops and destroyed its headquarters, Israel was widely perceived as the loser. The winner was Iran.

Israel learned the bitter lesson of Lebanon. For the last two years, the Israeli army has gone back to basics, rigorously training and restoring its fighting spirit. Israeli leaders drew on that spirit to attack Hamas bases in one of the most impressive airstrikes since the 1967 Six-Day War.

Yet the question remains whether the international community has learned its Lebanon lesson, or will once again allow the jihadists to win.

Hamas is attempting to portray the Israeli invasion as a war against the Palestinian people. Television viewers are being presented with heartbreaking images of dead and injured children and supposedly indiscriminate devastation. Palestinian doctors claim that Israel has blocked the supply of vital medicines, and humanitarian organizations warn of imminent starvation. In fact, many of those claims are exaggerated.

Though civilians have, tragically, been hurt, about three-quarters of the 400 Palestinians killed so far have been gunmen — an impressive achievement given that Hamas fires rockets from apartments, mosques and schools and uses hospitals as hide-outs.

Israel has recently allowed nearly 200 truckloads of food and medicine to enter Gaza, even under shellfire. It is in Israel’s urgent interest to minimize civilian suffering and forestall international criticism. For that same reason, Hamas welcomes the suffering of Palestinian civilians. According to a BBC report on Dec. 30, dozens of ambulances were dispatched by Egypt to its border with Gaza, only to remain empty because, according to Egyptian authorities, Hamas wasn’t allowing wounded Palestinians to leave.

The international community must not be duped again. If Hamas is successful in manipulating world opinion into the imposition of a premature cease-fire, it will proclaim victory and continue to stockpile long-range missiles for the next round of fighting. That would mean another triumph for Iran.

No less crucially, the international community must not allow the Gaza crisis to divert its attention from the imminent — and ultimate — threat of a nuclear Iran. Intelligence sources now measure that threat in months rather than years.

President-elect Barack Obama has declared his intention to confront Iran through diplomacy. Ideally, that process should begin in the aftermath of an Iranian defeat. If Israel is allowed to achieve its goals in Gaza, the Obama administration will be better poised to achieve its goals in Iran.

Yossi Klein Halevi is a senior fellow at the Adelson Institute for Strategic Studies of the Shalem Center in Jerusalem. Michael B. Oren is a distinguished fellow at the Shalem Center and a professor at the foreign service school of Georgetown University.

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You don’t want to read this: When Military and Police Have Their Way

BUENOS AIRES, Argentina—Inside a once-secret detention center where political dissidents were tortured and killed during Argentina’s dictatorship 25 years ago, forensic anthropologists have discovered a pit containing 10,000 bone fragments.

The first discovery of human remains inside a detention center confirms the testimonies of hundreds of survivors who have said for years that authorities tortured, killed and burned the bodies of political opponents, they said Tuesday.

“This scientifically confirms the testimonies of the detained,” said Luis Fondebrider, a forensic anthropologist who helped uncover the remains inside the former detention center in La Plata known as Arana.

The 10,000 bone fragments were unearthed between February and September, and on Tuesday Fondebrider and his team announced that the remains were human. Now months of laboratory work is needed to determine even the minimum number of bodies that were destroyed in the pit.

But the evidence already shows that bodies were thrown into the pit, covered in fuel and burned along with tires, to mask the smell of burning flesh. More than 200 bullet marks were found along a wall bordering the mass grave.

The bones weren’t completely reduced to ash, allowing for genetic analysis to identify the dead. But Fondebrider cautioned that it won’t be possible to identify many of the victims, since prolonged exposure to fire destroys most DNA.

“This is the first time there is proof that Arana wasn’t only a detention and torture center, but also a center of elimination,” said Maria Vedio, 47, legal chair for the Permanent Assembly for Human Rights La Plata.

Some supporters of the military dictatorship have denied that detainees were tortured or killed, despite the well-documented toll from the “dirty war” crackdown in which political opponents of the junta were made “to disappear,” along with their spouses, children, and other innocent people unlucky enough to appear in their address books.

Official records put the number of disappeared at 13,000, while human rights groups 30,000 were killed.

Much of the evidence disappeared as well — their bodies were thrown into the sea from airplanes in so-called “death flights,” while others were buried or burned in mass graves far from detention centers.

The confirmation of human remains at Arana rebukes any efforts to deny this history, Vedio said.

The military and police operated about 10 detention centers during the 1976-1983 dictatorship in La Plata, a city of universities south of Buenos Aires where the crackdown’s toll on college students was particularly severe.

The Argentine Forensic Anthropology Team has identified 350 bodies in Argentina over more than two decades.

At least 14 former Argentine state security agents and their civilian allies have been found guilty of human rights crimes, including forced disappearances and kidnapping. Another 358 are awaiting trial, according to the Buenos Aires-based Center for Legal and Social Studies.

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Orthodox Church Priests Beat Patients In Drug Rehab

BELGRADE, Serbia – Serbian authorities are investigating a church-backed drug rehab facility after the publication of a video showing one of the patients being beaten with a shovel and brass knuckles.

The Health Ministry said in a statement Friday that it has dispatched an inspection team to investigate methods used at the Crna Reka (Black River) rehabilitation center in southern Serbia, which is run by Serbian Orthodox Church priests. Government human rights monitor Sasa Jankovic said he has filed torture charges against the facility.

The rehabilitation center — located on the grounds of the Crna Reka monastery — has been known for its strict methods, isolated location and poor living conditions. Earlier media reports about the facility have shown rehab patients carrying out daily duties in total isolation from the outside world.

But the video posted this week by the Vreme weekly shows a young man — apparently a patient — being beaten with a shovel and punched and kicked by a man wearing brass knuckles. The beating takes place in a room decorated with icons — traditional Orthodox Christian religious paintings.

The magazine did not say where it obtained the video.

The priests at the facility said beatings were a necessary part of the therapy and were carried out with the consent of patients’ parents.

The head of the center, Branislav Peranovic, said “a heavy hand is necessary.”

“Whoever has a junkie in the house knows what I am talking about,” he told B92 television.

Priest Dejan, who also works at the center, told the Friday edition of the Politika daily that some of the patients admitted to the center are violent and refuse to obey the rules.

“In that case we have no other option but to use force,” Priest Dejan said.

The Serbian Orthodox Church has declined comment.

Vreme said the center is secured by guards with pit-bulls and Dobermans. The weekly also published interviews with former patients who spoke about the beatings by the guards.

“Once, when I watched what they were doing, I got so sick that almost fainted,” an unidentified former drug addict was quoted as saying. “They will beat you for anything, even for a word they don’t like or if you give them a wrong look.”

Doctors and psychologists said physical violence cannot help the rehabilitation of addicts.

Jasmina Daragan-Saveljic, head of the state-run hospital for treating addicts, said beatings were “unacceptable.” She said treatment must be voluntary to be successful.

Rights ombudsman Jankovic added: “It is no therapy. It is a criminal act.”

The ministry said Crna Reka does not have a license for treating drug addicts. It did not specify if the center would be closed.

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