Ghulam Muhammed

France: A Decomposing Civilization

2017-11-11T10:53:00.001-08:00

‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables

2017-11-06T00:25:00.000-08:00

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Impact <Editor@impact-magazine.com>
Date: Sun, Nov 5, 2017 at 3:54 AM
Subject: ‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables

‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables

28 October 2017

WIKILEAKS founder Julian Assange today said the CIA and Mossad were responsible for paving the way for ISIS as the whistle blowing organisation released more than half a million formerly confidential US diplomatic cables dating back to 1979.

On the sixth anniversary of the first infamous “Cablegate” by WikiLeaks, when it releases its first batch of sensitive US files, on November 28 2010, it has expanded its Public Library of US Diplomacy (PLUSD) with 531,525 new diplomatic cables from 1979.

In a statement to coincide with the release of the cables, known as “Carter Cables III”, Mr Assange explained how events which unfolded in 1979, had begun a series of events that led to the rise of ISIS.

He said: “If any year could be said to be the “year zero” of our modern era, 1979 is it.”

Mr Assange added: “In 1979 it seemed as if the blood would never stop.

“Dozens of countries saw assassinations, coups, revolts, bombings, political kidnappings and wars of liberation.”

The Carter Cables III bring WikiLeaks’ total published US diplomatic cable collection to 3.3 million documents.

Aadhaar Overkill - Editorial - The Times of India (New Delhi edition), 30 Oct 2017

2017-10-31T01:32:00.001-07:00

Aadhaar Overkill

Originally conceived as an empowerment tool, it is disempowering citizens now

Editorial, The Times of India (New Delhi edition)

30 Oct 2017

After months of pestering customers to mandatorily link bank accounts with Aadhaar numbers by December 31, the deadline has been extended till March 31. Where bank accounts are linked with PAN, and PAN is seeded with Aadhaar, the government demand for Aadhaar-bank account linkage of PAN holders becomes redundant. Technology can do this coupling instead of the constant badgering for Aadhaar numbers, which is plain annoying for those not availing benefits like cash transfers, subsidies, pensions and scholarships.

Threats of suspension of bank accounts, where people save their hard-earned money, for non-compliance under Prevention of Money Laundering Rules add insult to injury, particularly considering that the Aadhaar Act 2016 has no provision making enrollment compulsory. No different is the insistence on Aadhaar to verify mobile connections, when the government should instead be trying to enhance mobile connectivity. The fear of local SIM cards falling into terrorists’ hands fails to take note of facilities like international roaming, prepaid cards, or satellite and internet telephony.

Unique identification was originally sold to citizens as a way to efficiently deliver welfare benefits without duplication and pilferage by intermediaries. In the last couple of years, however, it has grown into an all-encompassing Leviathan even as there has been little progress on welfare. On one hand we have central and state governments conceiving uses for Aadhaar in everything from property to death registration, hailing ambulances to getting rations. The enthusiasm has rubbed off on the private sector too, with three-year-olds requiring Aadhaar for nursery admissions and job opportunities tied to Aadhaar submission.

Making biometrics a keystone to access so many essential services invades privacy, increases the potential for abuse, makes doing business difficult and ties up everyday activities in red tape. Fake Aadhaar card rackets have been busted that allegedly exploited vulnerabilities in the UIDAI enrollment ecosystem. Biometric verification is susceptible to failures and unauthorised usage. Poor connectivity, lax cyber security and data storage standards heighten the risks. All-encompassing Aadhaar linkages create the framework for mass surveillance and enhanced cybercrime. It’s time to roll back the Aadhaar empire and initiate restrictions on its mandatory use. The passport, driving licence, PAN, ration and voter cards all serve specific purposes unlike Aadhaar. Prime Minister Narendra Modi once declared, rightly, “minimum government, maximum governance”. But it’s important to remember the converse of that proposition is equally true: maximum government, minimum governance.

Malignant mindset

2017-10-23T00:17:00.001-07:00

Malignant mindset: It is a measure of what has become of us as a people and a nation that we are actually applauding - or at least heaving an almost audible sigh of relief - at the turn of the Uttar Pradesh chief minister, Yogi Adityanath, as a 'good cop' in the latest episode of Hindutva's perverse pantomime.

What Killed the Promise of 'Muslim Communism'? By John T. Sidel, The New York Times

2017-10-10T06:54:00.000-07:00

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/09/opinion/muslim-communism.html?_r=0

THE NEW YORK TIMES

What Killed the Promise of 'Muslim Communism'?

John T. Sidel

RED CENTURY OCT. 9, 2017

LONDON — For a brief moment after the Bolshevik uprisings of 1917, it looked like revolution might be waged across vast swaths of the world under the joint banner of Communism and Islam.

Pan-Islam had emerged in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, with the efforts of Sultan Abdulhamid II to lay claim to the title of caliph among Muslims. New forms of Islamic schooling and associations began to emerge across the Arab world and beyond. From Egypt and Iraq to India and the Indonesian archipelago, Islam became a rallying call against European colonialism and imperialism.

Islam’s mobilizing power attracted Communist activists in the 1910s and 1920s. The Bolsheviks, who lacked organizational infrastructure in the vast Muslim lands of the former Russian empire, allied with Islamic reformers in those areas. They created a special Commissariat for Muslim Affairs under the Tatar Bolshevik Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, promising to establish a distinctive “Muslim Communism” across the Caucasus and Central Asia. During the 1920 Congress of the Peoples of the East in Baku, in what is today Azerbaijan, the Comintern chairman Grigory Zinoviev, a Ukrainian Jew, called for waging a “holy war” against Western imperialism.

But as we now know, Communism and Islam failed to coalesce into a lasting alliance. By the onset of the Cold War, they seemed irrevocably opposed. Differing views about Communism divided Muslims across Asia, Africa and the Middle East in their struggles for independence and emancipation during the second half of the 20th century. An anti-Communist jihad fundamentally remade Afghanistan in the 1980s and helped set the stage for the rise of Al Qaeda and the emergence of a new form of Islamist terrorism.

Yet around the time of the Russian Revolution, the prospects of Communism and Islam joining forces seemed very bright. They were perhaps no brighter than in the Indonesian archipelago, then under Dutch rule: In 1918-21, left-wing labor organizers working hand in glove with Islamic scholars and pious Muslim merchants built the biggest mass movement in Southeast Asia.

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Pan-Islam had emerged in the final decades of the Ottoman Empire, with the efforts of Sultan Abdulhamid II, shown in this undated photo, to lay claim to the title of caliph among Muslims.

In particular, members began to join the Sarekat Islam, an organization founded in 1912 as a Muslim batik traders’ association that had morphed into a broader popular movement and was staging mass rallies and strikes across Java. Socialist influence within the Sarekat Islam was already evident at the movement’s congress in 1916, where the Prophet Muhammad was proclaimed to be “the father of Socialism and the pioneer of democracy” and “the Socialist par excellence.”

The Russian Revolution further inspired the Sarekat Islam. By late 1917, activists from the Indies Social-Democratic Union had begun agitating and organizing among the lower ranks of the Dutch armed forces in the Indies. Borrowing the successful tactics of the Bolsheviks in Russia, hundreds of sailors and soldiers were recruited in the hope of staging mutinies and uprisings. The Dutch colonial authorities promptly arrested and imprisoned the activists and ordered their expulsion from the Indies.

But by 1920, the Indies Social-Democratic Union had renamed itself the Communist Union of the Indies, becoming the first Communist party in Asia to join the Comintern. New unions were formed on Java and Sumatra. Peasant villagers mobilized against landowners. A railway strike briefly paralyzed the plantation belt in eastern Sumatra.

It was in this context that the legendary figure of Tan Malaka first appeared. The scion of an aristocratic family from western Sumatra, Tan Malaka had spent World War I as a student in the Netherlands. He came into contact with Socialist activists and ideas, and witnessed the short-lived Troelstra Revolution of late 1918, during which Dutch social-democrats briefly tried to emulate an ongoing revolutionary uprising in Germany. In early 1919, Tan Malaka returned to Indonesia, where he was soon drawn into labor organizing. He joined the embryonic local Communist Party, quickly ascending to its leadership — before the colonial government forced him into exile, and back to the Netherlands, in early 1922.

And so it was with early experience of the revolutionary potential of combining Communism and Islam that Tan Malaka made an appearance at the Fourth Comintern Congress in Moscow and Petrograd in 1922. There, he delivered a memorable speech about the similarities between Pan-Islamism and Communism. Pan-Islamism was not religious per se, he argued, but rather “the brotherhood of all Muslim peoples, and the liberation struggle not only of the Arab but also of the Indian, the Javanese and all the oppressed Muslim peoples.”

“This brotherhood,” he added, “means the practical liberation struggle not only against Dutch but also against English, French and Italian capitalism, therefore against world capitalism as a whole.”

The official record of the proceedings notes that Tan Malaka’s impassioned plea for an alliance between Communism and Pan-Islamism was met with “lively applause.” But his memoirs recall that after three days of heated debate following his speech, he was formally prohibited from further contributing to the proceedings. The official conclusions of the Fourth Comintern Congress, including the “Theses on the Eastern Question,” are notably ambiguous on the question of Pan-Islamism and strikingly silent on Indonesia, even though the movement there was far more successful than any other Communist mobilization in the so-called East at the time.

An alliance between Communism and Islam was not to be, neither in Indonesia nor elsewhere. The strength of Communism, as a movement, was its ability to mobilize laborers to fight for better wages and working conditions through unions, whether in oil boomtown Baku or the plantations of Java and Sumatra. But as a form of government, Communism meant one-party rule, a command economy with collectivized agriculture and party-state control over all spheres of social life — including religion.

Islamism, by contrast, was a much broader and enduringly more open-ended and ambiguous basis for political engagement. In Java and elsewhere, “Islam” provided a banner for Muslim merchants to contest economic encroachment by non-Muslims and build an infrastructure for organizing in the countryside, largely through Islamic schools. Politically, it was a supple notion: Islamist scholars and activists could be for colonialism, Communism or capitalism.

In Indonesia, tensions between Communists and Islamic leaders had already begun to divide Sarekat Islam in the early 1920s. Communists urged escalating strikes and protests, whereas Islamic leaders advocated accommodation with the Dutch colonial authorities. Sarekat Islam dissolved in the face of Dutch repression after failed rebellions in 1926-7.

In the late 1940s, Islamic parties opposed the Partai Komunis Indonesia (P.K.I.), or Indonesian Communist Party, during the struggle for independence. Islamic parties were uncomfortable with the Communists’ insistence that independence from Dutch colonial rule also upend aristocratic privileges and bring about the establishment of Socialist forms of ownership over land and industry. This conflict extended into the early post-independence period. Islamic organizations actively participated in the anti-Communist pogroms of 1965-66, which destroyed the P.K.I. and left hundreds of thousands of casualties across Indonesia.

By this time, the pattern of antagonism was well established across the Muslim world, and it persisted throughout the Cold War. The institutional and ideological boundaries of both Communism and Islamism hardened, dashing prospects for renewed experiments in political alliance-building.

In Muslim areas of the Soviet Union, the party-state suppressed institutions of Islamic worship, education, association and pilgrimage, which were viewed as obstacles to ideological and social transformation along Communist lines. Where Islamic states were established, left-wing politics was often associated with blasphemy, and outlawed. In countries like Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Iraq and Iran, Communist and other left-wing parties found themselves in bitter competition for power with Islamists.

One effect of the failure of revolutionary forces to mobilize under the joint banner of Communism and Islam was to deeply divide Muslims, weakening their capacity first to fight colonialism during the first half of 20th century and then to resist the rise of authoritarianism across the Muslim world. Another effect was to stimulate new forms of U.S.-backed, anti-Soviet Islamist mobilization during the Cold War — including some that turned into the virulent anti-Western terrorist groups that partly define the world today.

Divisions between leftists and Islamists in Egypt after the fall of President Hosni Mubarak in 2011 also helped set the stage for the country’s return to military rule in mid-2013. Similar tensions divided the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad in Syria, paving the way for the country’s descent into civil war over six years ago. A full century after the Russian Revolution, the failed alliance between Communism and Islam continues to shape the politics of the Muslim world.

How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars - By Andrew Bacevich - LobeLog

2017-10-10T05:42:00.000-07:00

Let the world declare USA as a war-monger nation; to begin with.

http://lobelog.com/how-we-learned-not-to-care-about-americas-wars/#more-41460

How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars

by Andrew Bacevich

Let the world declare USA as a war-monger nation; to begin with.

http://lobelog.com/how-we-learned-not-to-care-about-americas-wars/#more-41460

How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars

by Andrew Bacevich

Consider, if you will, these two indisputable facts. First, the United States is today more or less permanently engaged in hostilities in not one faraway place, but at least seven. Second, the vast majority of the American people could not care less.

Nor can it be said that we don’t care because we don’t know. True, government authorities withhold certain aspects of ongoing military operations or release only details that they find convenient. Yet information describing what U.S. forces are doing (and where) is readily available, even if buried in recent months by barrages of presidential tweets. Here, for anyone interested, are press releases issued by United States Central Command for just one recent week:

September 19: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 20: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Iraqi Security Forces begin Hawijah offensive

September 21: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 22: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 23: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Operation Inherent Resolve Casualty

September 25: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

September 26: Military airstrikes continue against ISIS terrorists in Syria and Iraq

Ever since the United States launched its war on terror, oceans of military press releases have poured forth. And those are just for starters. To provide updates on the U.S. military’s various ongoing campaigns, generals, admirals, and high-ranking defense officials regularly testify before congressional committees or brief members of the press. From the field, journalists offer updates that fill in at least some of the details — on civilian casualties, for example — that government authorities prefer not to disclose. Contributors to newspaper op-ed pages and “experts” booked by network and cable TV news shows, including passels of retired military officers, provide analysis. Trailing behind come books and documentaries that put things in a broader perspective.

But here’s the truth of it. None of it matters.

Like traffic jams or robocalls, war has fallen into the category of things that Americans may not welcome, but have learned to live with. In twenty-first-century America, war is not that big a deal.

While serving as defense secretary in the 1960s, Robert McNamara once mused that the “greatest contribution” of the Vietnam War might have been to make it possible for the United States “to go to war without the necessity of arousing the public ire.” With regard to the conflict once widely referred to as McNamara’s War, his claim proved grotesquely premature. Yet a half-century later, his wish has become reality.

Why do Americans today show so little interest in the wars waged in their name and at least nominally on their behalf? Why, as our wars drag on and on, doesn’t the disparity between effort expended and benefits accrued arouse more than passing curiosity or mild expressions of dismay? Why, in short, don’t we give a [expletive deleted]?

Perhaps just posing such a question propels us instantly into the realm of the unanswerable, like trying to figure out why people idolize Justin Bieber, shoot birds, or watch golf on television.

Without any expectation of actually piercing our collective ennui, let me take a stab at explaining why we don’t give a @#$%&! Here are eight distinctive but mutually reinforcing explanations, offered in a sequence that begins with the blindingly obvious and ends with the more speculative.

Americans don’t attend all that much to ongoing American wars because:

1. U.S. casualty rates are low. By using proxies and contractors, and relying heavily on airpower, America’s war managers have been able to keep a tight lid on the number of U.S. troops being killed and wounded. In all of 2017, for example, a grand total of 11 American soldiers have been lost in Afghanistan — about equal to the number of shooting deaths in Chicago over the course of a typical week. True, in Afghanistan, Iraq, and other countries where the U.S. is engaged in hostilities, whether directly or indirectly, plenty of people who are not Americans are being killed and maimed. (The estimated number of Iraqi civilians killed this year alone exceeds 12,000.) But those casualties have next to no political salience as far as the United States is concerned. As long as they don’t impede U.S. military operations, they literally don’t count (and generally aren’t counted).

2. The true costs of Washington’s wars go untabulated. In a famous speech, dating from early in his presidency, Dwight D. Eisenhower said that “Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.” Dollars spent on weaponry, Ike insisted, translated directly into schools, hospitals, homes, highways, and power plants that would go unbuilt. “This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense,” he continued. “[I]t is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.” More than six decades later, Americans have long since accommodated themselves to that cross of iron. Many actually see it as a boon, a source of corporate profits, jobs, and, of course, campaign contributions. As such, they avert their eyes from the opportunity costs of our never-ending wars. The dollars expended pursuant to our post-9/11 conflicts will ultimately number in the multi-trillions. Imagine the benefits of investing such sums in upgrading the nation’s aging infrastructure. Yet don’t count on Congressional leaders, other politicians, or just about anyone else to pursue that connection.

3. On matters related to war, American citizens have opted out. Others have made the point so frequently that it’s the equivalent of hearing “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer” at Christmastime. Even so, it bears repeating: the American people have defined their obligation to “support the troops” in the narrowest imaginable terms, ensuring above all that such support requires absolutely no sacrifice on their part. Members of Congress abet this civic apathy, while also taking steps to insulate themselves from responsibility. In effect, citizens and their elected representatives in Washington agree: supporting the troops means deferring to the commander in chief, without inquiring about whether what he has the troops doing makes the slightest sense. Yes, we set down our beers long enough to applaud those in uniform and boo those who decline to participate in mandatory rituals of patriotism. What we don’t do is demand anything remotely approximating actual accountability.

4. Terrorism gets hyped and hyped and hyped some more. While international terrorism isn’t a trivial problem (and wasn’t for decades before 9/11), it comes nowhere close to posing an existential threat to the United States. Indeed, other threats, notably the impact of climate change, constitute a far greater danger to the wellbeing of Americans. Worried about the safety of your children or grandchildren? The opioid epidemic constitutes an infinitely greater danger than “Islamic radicalism.” Yet having been sold a bill of goods about a “war on terror” that is essential for “keeping America safe,” mere citizens are easily persuaded that scattering U.S. troops throughout the Islamic world while dropping bombs on designated evildoers is helping win the former while guaranteeing the latter. To question that proposition becomes tantamount to suggesting that God might not have given Moses two stone tablets after all.

5. Blather crowds out substance. When it comes to foreign policy, American public discourse is — not to put too fine a point on it — vacuous, insipid, and mindlessly repetitive. William Safire of the New York Times once characterized American political rhetoric as BOMFOG, with those running for high office relentlessly touting the Brotherhood of Man and the Fatherhood of God. Ask a politician, Republican or Democrat, to expound on this country’s role in the world, and then brace yourself for some variant of WOSFAD, as the speaker insists that it is incumbent upon the World’s Only Superpower to spread Freedom and Democracy. Terms like leadership and indispensable are introduced, along with warnings about the dangers of isolationism and appeasement, embellished with ominous references to Munich. Such grandiose posturing makes it unnecessary to probe too deeply into the actual origins and purposes of American wars, past or present, or assess the likelihood of ongoing wars ending in some approximation of actual success. Cheerleading displaces serious thought.

6. Besides, we’re too busy. Think of this as a corollary to point five. Even if the present-day American political scene included figures like Senators Robert La Follette or J. William Fulbright, who long ago warned against the dangers of militarizing U.S. policy, Americans may not retain a capacity to attend to such critiques. Responding to the demands of the Information Age is not, it turns out, conducive to deep reflection. We live in an era (so we are told) when frantic multitasking has become a sort of duty and when being overscheduled is almost obligatory. Our attention span shrinks and with it our time horizon. The matters we attend to are those that happened just hours or minutes ago. Yet like the great solar eclipse of 2017 — hugely significant and instantly forgotten — those matters will, within another few minutes or hours, be superseded by some other development that briefly captures our attention. As a result, a dwindling number of Americans — those not compulsively checking Facebook pages and Twitter accounts — have the time or inclination to ponder questions like: When will the Afghanistan War end? Why has it lasted almost 16 years? Why doesn’t the finest fighting force in history actually win? Can’t package an answer in 140 characters or a 30-second made-for-TV sound bite? Well, then, slowpoke, don’t expect anyone to attend to what you have to say.

7. Anyway, the next president will save us. At regular intervals, Americans indulge in the fantasy that, if we just install the right person in the White House, all will be well. Ambitious politicians are quick to exploit this expectation. Presidential candidates struggle to differentiate themselves from their competitors, but all of them promise in one way or another to wipe the slate clean and Make America Great Again. Ignoring the historical record of promises broken or unfulfilled, and presidents who turn out not to be deities but flawed human beings, Americans — members of the media above all — pretend to take all this seriously. Campaigns become longer, more expensive, more circus-like, and ever less substantial. One might think that the election of Donald Trump would prompt a downward revision in the exalted expectations of presidents putting things right. Instead, especially in the anti-Trump camp, getting rid of Trump himself (Collusion! Corruption! Obstruction! Impeachment!) has become the overriding imperative, with little attention given to restoring the balance intended by the framers of the Constitution. The irony of Trump perpetuating wars that he once roundly criticized and then handing the conduct of those wars to generals devoid of ideas for ending them almost entirely escapes notice.

8. Our culturally progressive military has largely immunized itself from criticism. As recently as the 1990s, the U.S. military establishment aligned itself with the retrograde side of the culture wars. Who can forget the gays-in-the-military controversy that rocked Bill Clinton’s administration during his first weeks in office, as senior military leaders publicly denounced their commander-in-chief? Those days are long gone. Culturally, the armed forces have moved left. Today, the services go out of their way to project an image of tolerance and a commitment to equality on all matters related to race, gender, and sexuality. So when President Trump announced his opposition to transgendered persons serving in the armed forces, tweeting that the military “cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail,” senior officers politely but firmly disagreed and pushed back. Given the ascendency of cultural issues near the top of the U.S. political agenda, the military’s embrace of diversity helps to insulate it from criticism and from being called to account for a less than sterling performance in waging wars. Put simply, critics who in an earlier day might have blasted military leaders for their inability to bring wars to a successful conclusion hold their fire. Having women graduate from Ranger School or command Marines in combat more than compensates for not winning.

A collective indifference to war has become an emblem of contemporary America. But don’t expect your neighbors down the street or the editors of the New York Times to lose any sleep over that fact. Even to notice it would require them — and us — to care.

Republished, with permission, from TomDispatch. Photo: Sailors from Mobile Inshore Undersea Warfare Unit One Zero Five board a plane to deploy to the 5th Fleet area of responsibility in support of the global war on terrorism. (Wikimedia Commons)

Andrew J. Bacevich, a TomDispatch regular, is the author, most recently, of America’s War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History. Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook. Check out the newest Dispatch Book, Alfred McCoy’s In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power, as well as John Dower’s The Violent American Century: War and Terror Since World War II, John Feffer’s dystopian novel Splinterlands, Nick Turse’s Next Time They’ll Come to Count the Dead, and Tom Engelhardt’s Shadow Government: Surveillance, Secret Wars, and a Global Security State in a Single-Superpower World. Copyright 2017 Andrew J. Bacevich

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Sujata Mody questions Western notions of Feminism

2017-09-30T06:52:00.000-07:00

Sujata Mody. sujatamody063@gmail.com

11:56 AM (7 hours ago)

to the-moderates

I was in Berlin in the mid 1990s after the fall of the Soviet Union and the Berlin wall, and was struck by the hundred of women from eastern Europe who were engaged in sex trade. Trafficking was the key word in women's groups. Eastern Europeans were confused, wanted freedom, but the lack of security was demeaning and frightening to them.

I also witnessed the arrogance of western feminism over their Eastern European counterparts, but the streets had huge posters and advertisements using women's bodies.

Today's piece in the Guardian about the horrid Playboy business magnate tells a lot about the achievements of western feminism. The way in which western feminism has allowed women's bodies to be commoditised and refused to challenge colonisation, capitalism and consumerism is an enormous failure. We in the former colonised and developing world have deepened our understanding of feminism. The western feminists got the condom and birth control pill, and the prosperity through white imperialism, but did they get liberation? Why is there so much inequality in ownership of wealth and does individualization of freedoms alone mean women are better off.

Feminism needs to be a much deeper exercise, it really must deal with the liberation and equality of all women, not some Indra Nooyi, while the others must look at them in wonderment. These are just some thoughts that come to my mind... Can we call someone who sells Pepsi and Coco Cola a feminist, someone who is instrumental in usurping water resources for private profit?

If I am wrong, I would think my entire life and work is wasted, as I spent with penniless, propertyless and powerless women, understanding and trying to make a difference.

I am asking western feminists who did not rage against war in Afghanistan, accepting government propaganda that war was required to destroy the Taliban had pushed women into the middle ages. It was such hogwash. They supported the worst regime - Saudi Arabia, while they without much noise recently destroyed Libya and Syria and would have done the same for Iran if they could.

We in India have an onerous task of dealing with the huge irrational baggage of Hinduism, along with prevailing hinduised sematic religions. There is no space for feminism, no rationality, no truth... While triple talaq did make a dent into the regressive Islam, are we working to build greater gender equality within the communities and groups that follow Islam?

The small spaces of freedom and privilege do exist for women all over the world and in all religions. However, what is the route for the larger groupings to be less free? What do we in the Moderates think??

Taking Educational Institutions Backwards - By Sandeep Pandey - Mainstream Weekly

2017-09-30T06:39:00.001-07:00

http://www.mainstreamweekly.net/article7499.html

Mainstream Weekly

Home > 2017 > Taking Educational Institutions Backwards

Mainstream, VOL LV No 41 New Delhi September 30, 2017

Taking Educational Institutions Backwards

Friday 29 September 2017,

By Sandeep Pandey

On September 11, 1893 Swami Vivekananda delivered his famous speech in the Parliament of World’s Religions in Chicago. The Bharatiya Janata Party Government decided to celebrate the event and Prime Minister Narendra Modi addressed the youth of the country. Incidentally, he shares his first name with Vivekananda’s original name, Narendra Nath Datta.

Vivekananda has inspired the youth of this country for long. His preachings are thought- provoking. For example, he says, ‘As certain religions of the world say that a man who does not believe in a Personal God outside of himself is an atheist, so the Vedanta says, a man who does not believe in himself is an atheist. Not believing in the glory of our own soul is what Vedanta calls atheism.’ At another place he pleads with his audience, ‘If you are not a prophet, there never has been anything true of God... Everyone of us will have to become a prophet.’

However, when this occasion was celebrated on September 11, 2017 on university campuses, students were asked to memorise the speech of Swami Vivekananda delivered in 1893 and regurgitate it. When students did not even bother to learn it by rote, they were allowed to read it from paper. Such is the sorry state of affairs of our academic institutions. If the Swami were alive today he would have cringed in despair.

He wanted everybody to have complete faith in themselves and feel like a sovereign but our higher educational institutions do not want our students to develop independent thinking. Had the students been asked to give their comments on Vivekananda’s speech they would have had to exercise their brain. But it is amazing that university-level students are just being asked to memorise and reproduce a speech! The entire idea of putting a curb on students’ thinking is contradictory to Vivekananda’s idea of empowerment. How can the students have belief in themselves if they are merely activating not the analytical power of the brain but only its photographic ability? Quite clearly the autho-rities want to produce followers and not leaders.

That Vivekananda is not taken seriously by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, the ideological parent of the ruling dispensation in India, is also clear from his statement in the same speech, ‘We believe not only in universal toleration, but we accept all religions as true. I am proud to belong to a nation which has sheltered the persecuted and the refugees of all religions and all nations of the earth.’ However, in the context of the current migration of Rohingya Muslims from Myanmar, the Home Minister, Rajnath Singh, says they are illegal immigrants and not refugees who have not followed the procedure to apply for asylum, but it is not clear whether the Government of India would welcome them even if they were to seek entry through the proper channel. They obviously don’t have Viveka-nanda’s large heart. Narendra Modi chose not to raise the issue of persecution of Rohingya Muslims during a meeting with its famous leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, in his recent maiden visit to Myanmar. That demonstrates India’s overall insensitivity towards the Rohingyas.

Vivekanand also said in Chicago, ‘Sectaria-nism, bigotry, and its horrible descendent, fanaticism, have long possessed the beautiful earth. They have filled the earth with violence, drenched it often and often with human blood, destroyed civilisation and sent whole nations to despair. Had it not been for these horrible demons, human society would be far more advanced than it is now.’ However sectarianism, bigotry, fanaticism and violence have increased with the BJP’s ascent to power. Some Sangh Parivarloyalists can argue that this is in response to the rise of similar tendencies in Islam globally. The moot question is: could there have been a different response rooted in Vivekananda’s and Mahatma Gandhi’s ideologies to it?

It is also worrisome that senior functionaries of the BJP governments are indulging in negating scientific and rational thinking. The Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister, Yogi Adityanath, while speaking at the convocation of the Sanjay Gandhi Post Graduate Institute of Medical Sciences in Lucknow on September 16, claimed that China was researching how Hindu God Ganesh’s head slain by his father Lord Shiva was replaced with an elephant’s head and exhorted the Indian doctors to delve into the treasure of our scriptures. He also beseeched the faculty and students to find the herb which brought back Laxman to life. According to him, Dr A.P.J. Abdul Kalam was inspired by the Mahabharata to work on missiles. Yogi Adityanath holds a Bachelor’s degree in Mathematics.

The State Minister for Human Resources Development at the Centre, Satya Pal Singh, claimed in a programme of the All India Council for Technical Education on September 20 in Delhi that Shivakar Babuji Talpade in India invented the air plane eight years before the Wright brothers. According to him, plants in Ravana’s kingdom were not required to be watered as they contained a mythical elixir, Chandramani. He wants engineering students to learn about the Hindu deity, Vishwakarma, puranas and mythology. Singh holds a Master’s degree in Chemistry and is a former Indian Police Service officer.

By not letting analytical thinking develop in students the RSS is ensuring that there will be no one to ask the Yogi when he makes the suggestion to doctors to research how an elephant’s head replaced the beheaded Lord Ganesh and that if indeed doctors were successful in doing this surgery, whose brain would the resultant creature possess—human’s or elephant’s? Or they don’t want any student to ask Satya Pal Singh that if India possessed the know-how of making planes, why is it not investing in rediscovering that knowledge rather than buying Rafale jets from France?

Noted social activist and Magsaysay awardee Dr Sandeep Pandey is the Vice-President of the Socialist Party (India). He was elected to this post at the founding conference of the party at Hyderabad on May 28-29, 2011.

---

Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News

2017-09-27T07:33:00.001-07:00

Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News

Wazeer e Kharija Khuwaja Asif ne Americans ko Khari khari suna dein

2017-09-27T07:30:00.001-07:00

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars -By Philip Giraldi - www.unz.com

2017-09-25T07:01:00.001-07:00

http://www.unz.com/pgiraldi/americas-jews-are-driving-americas-wars/

The Unz Review: An Alternative Media Selection

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars

Shouldn't they recuse themselves when dealing with the Middle East?

PHILIP GIRALDI • SEPTEMBER 19, 2017

• 1,600 WORDS • 1,046 COMMENTS • REPLY

UPDATE: On the morning of September 21st Phil Giraldi was fired over the phone by The American Conservative, where he had been a regular contributor for fourteen years. He was told that “America’s Jews Are Driving America’s Wars” was unacceptable. The TAC management and board appear to have forgotten that the magazine was launched with an article by founder Pat Buchanan entitled “Whose War?” which largely made the same claims that Giraldi made about the Jewish push for another war, in that case with Iraq. Buchanan was vilified and denounced as an anti-Semite by many of the same people who are now similarly attacking Giraldi.

I spoke recently at a conference on America’s war party where afterwards an elderly gentleman came up to me and asked, “Why doesn’t anyone ever speak honestly about the six-hundred-pound gorilla in the room? Nobody has mentioned Israel in this conference and we all know it’s American Jews with all their money and power who are supporting every war in the Middle East for Netanyahu? Shouldn’t we start calling them out and not letting them get away with it?”

It was a question combined with a comment that I have heard many times before and my answer is always the same: any organization that aspires to be heard on foreign policy knows that to touch the live wire of Israel and American Jews guarantees a quick trip to obscurity. Jewish groups and deep pocket individual donors not only control the politicians, they own and run the media and entertainment industries, meaning that no one will hear about or from the offending party ever again. They are particularly sensitive on the issue of so-called “dual loyalty,” particularly as the expression itself is a bit of a sham since it is pretty clear that some of them only have real loyalty to Israel.

Most recently, some pundits, including myself, have been warning of an impending war with Iran. To be sure, the urging to strike Iran comes from many quarters, to include generals in the Administration who always think first in terms of settling problems through force, from a Saudi government obsessed with fear over Iranian hegemony, and, of course, from Israel itself. But what makes the war engine run is provided by American Jews who have taken upon themselves the onerous task of starting a war with a country that does not conceivably threaten the United States. They have been very successful at faking the Iranian threat, so much so that nearly all Republican and most Democratic congressmen as well as much of the media seem to be convinced that Iran needs to be dealt with firmly, most definitely by using the U.S. military, and the sooner the better.

And while they are doing it, the issue that nearly all the Iran haters are Jewish has somehow fallen out of sight, as if it does not matter. But it should matter. A recent article in the New Yorker on stopping the impending war with Iran strangely suggests that the current generation “Iran hawks” might be a force of moderation regarding policy options given the lessons learned from Iraq. The article cites as hardliners on Iran David Frum, Max Boot, Bill Kristol and Bret Stephens.

Daniel Larison over at The American Conservative has a good review of the New Yorker piece entitled “Yes, Iran Hawks Want Conflict with Iran,” which identifies the four above cited hawks by name before describing them as “…a Who’s Who of consistently lousy foreign policy thinking. If they have been right about any major foreign policy issue in the last twenty years, it would be news to the entire world. Every single one of them hates the nuclear deal with Iran with a passion, and they have argued in favor of military action against Iran at one point or another. There is zero evidence that any of them would oppose attacking Iran.”

And I would add a few more names, Mark Dubowitz, Michael Ledeen and Reuel Marc Gerecht of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies; Daniel Pipes of the Middle East Forum; John Podhoretz of Commentary magazine; Elliot Abrams of the Council on Foreign Relations; Meyrav Wurmser of the Middle East Media Research Institute; Kimberly Kagan of the Institute for the Study of War; and Frederick Kagan, Danielle Pletka and David Wurmser of the American Enterprise Institute. And you can also throw into the hopper entire organizations like The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) and the Hudson Institute. And yep, they’re all Jewish, plus most of them would self-describe as neo-conservatives. And I might add that only one of the named individuals has ever served in any branch of the American military – David Wurmser was once in the Navy reserve. These individuals largely constitute a cabal of sanctimonious chairborne warriors who prefer to do the heavy thinking while they let others do the fighting and dying.

So it is safe to say that much of the agitation to do something about Iran comes from Israel and from American Jews. Indeed, I would opine that most of the fury from Congress re Iran comes from the same source, with AIPAC showering our Solons on the Potomac with “fact sheets” explaining how Iran is worthy of annihilation because it has pledged to “destroy Israel,” which is both a lie and an impossibility as Tehran does not have the resources to carry out such a task. The AIPAC lies are then picked up and replayed by an obliging media, where nearly every “expert” who speaks about the Middle East on television and radio or who is interviewed for newspaper stories is Jewish.

One might also add that neocons as a group were founded by Jews and are largely Jewish, hence their universal attachment to the state of Israel. They first rose into prominence when they obtained a number of national security positions during the Reagan Administration and their ascendancy was completed when they staffed senior positions in the Pentagon and White House under George W. Bush. Recall for a moment Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Scooter Libby. Yes, all Jewish and all conduits for the false information that led to a war that has spread and effectively destroyed much of the Middle East. Except for Israel, of course. Philip Zelikow, also Jewish, in a moment of candor, admitted that the Iraq War, in his opinion, was fought for Israel.

Add to the folly a Jewish U.S. Ambassador to Israel who identifies with the most right-wing Israeli settler elements, a White House appointed chief negotiator who is Jewish and a Jewish son-in-law who is also involved in formulating Middle East policy. Is anyone providing an alternative viewpoint to eternal and uncritical support for Benjamin Netanyahu and his kleptocratic regime of racist thugs? I think not.

There are a couple of simple fixes for the dominant involvement of American Jews in foreign policy issues where they have a personal interest due to their ethnicity or family ties. First of all, don’t put them into national security positions involving the Middle East, where they will potentially be conflicted. Let them worry instead about North Korea, which does not have a Jewish minority and which was not involved in the holocaust. This type of solution was, in fact, somewhat of a policy regarding the U.S. Ambassador position in Israel. No Jew was appointed to avoid any conflict of interest prior to 1995, an understanding that was violated by Bill Clinton (wouldn’t you know it!) who named Martin Indyk to the post. Indyk was not even an American citizen at the time and had to be naturalized quickly prior to being approved by congress.

Those American Jews who are strongly attached to Israel and somehow find themselves in senior policy making positions involving the Middle East and who actually possess any integrity on the issue should recuse themselves, just as any judge would do if he were presiding over a case in which he had a personal interest. Any American should be free to exercise first amendment rights to debate possible options regarding policy, up to and including embracing positions that damage the United States and benefit a foreign nation. But if he or she is in a position to actually create those policies, he or she should butt out and leave the policy generation to those who have no personal baggage.

For those American Jews who lack any shred of integrity, the media should be required to label them at the bottom of the television screen whenever they pop up, e.g. Bill Kristol is “Jewish and an outspoken supporter of the state of Israel.” That would be kind-of-like a warning label on a bottle of rat poison – translating roughly as “ingest even the tiniest little dosage of the nonsense spewed by Bill Kristol at your own peril.”

As none of the above is likely to happen, the only alternative is for American citizens who are tired of having their country’s national security interests hijacked by a group that is in thrall to a foreign government to become more assertive about what is happening. Shine a little light into the darkness and recognize who is being diddled and by whom. Call it like it is. And if someone’s feelings are hurt, too bad. We don’t need a war with Iran because Israel wants one and some rich and powerful American Jews are happy to deliver. Seriously, we don’t need it.

1046 Comments to "America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars"

Commenters to Ignore...to FollowEndorsed Only

Priss Factor says:

September 19, 2017 at 4:14 am GMT

• Replies: @יְהוֹחָנָן, @Viktor Pilarski, @No More Neos, @REALITY CHECK

REPLYAGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER THIS THREAD HIDE THREAD
wayfarer says:

September 19, 2017 at 4:15 am GMT

“Why the Media Loves Antifa!”

REPLYAGREE/DISAGREE/ETC. THIS COMMENTER
wayfarer says:

September 19, 2017 at 4:27 am GMT

“Trump’s Jews and Generals!”

• Replies: @Advisor519, @dav, @Aren Haich, @olde reb

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chris says:

September 19, 2017 at 4:41 am GMT

Wow, Phil, you hit another one right out of the ball park!

• Agree: Cloak And Dagger

• Replies: @Anonymous, @Wally, @Moi, @SMK

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Anonymous says: • Disclaimer

September 19, 2017 at 4:44 am GMT

Trump will exterminate the Iranians.

• Replies: @anonymous, @Santoculto, @attilathehen, @anon

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Monty Ahwazi says:

September 19, 2017 at 5:42 am GMT

Well said Mr Giraldi! Unfortunately the Jewish Mafia in this country won’t allow truth to be said and will do anything to keep us in the dark!

• Replies: @olde reb, @olde reb

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Bubba says:

September 19, 2017 at 5:54 am GMT • 100 Words

Amen brother! And I would like to throw some gasoline on your Neocon fire. President Trump has never worked with military generals before and he is extremely naive to their absolute Machiavellian manipulation of him. Most generals today are expert political backstabbers who advanced during the tragic Neocon and PC era of the past 30 years. Who can forget the disgusting General Casey when he said, “And what happened at Fort Hood was a tragedy, but I believe it would be an even greater tragedy if our diversity becomes a casualty here.” The generals that Trump hired for his administration are now running circles around him, particularly McMaster. They want war to keep the Neocons happy and that is what this crop of generals has been trained to do.

• Replies: @Lagertha, @jerrymac200

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Thomm says:

September 19, 2017 at 6:21 am GMT

...

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Europe: The Great White Death?

2017-09-24T06:45:00.001-07:00

Europe: The Great White Death?

The Theft of the Raj: The British Empire in India

2017-09-22T08:17:00.001-07:00

Aung San Suu Kyi made her first public speech on the violence in Rakhine.

2017-09-19T08:21:00.001-07:00

Jinnah, Rohingyas and Pakistan, Current Affairs, Yasser Latif Hamdani, New Age Islam

2017-09-12T07:31:00.001-07:00

This article is possibly written by an Ahmedi or on their behalf.

Jinnah, Rohingyas and Pakistan, Current Affairs, Yasser Latif Hamdani, New Age Islam

Amid fear of deportation, Rohingya Muslims seek 'justice from world'

2017-09-09T06:18:00.001-07:00

Amid fear of deportation, Rohingya Muslims seek 'justice from world'

Germany Heading for Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

2017-09-08T07:36:00.001-07:00

Germany Heading for Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10942/germany-election-merkel-schulz

Germany Heading for
Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

by Soeren Kern

September 8,
2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10942/germany-election-merkel-schulz

Share58

Comment

§ The policy positions of Merkel and Schulz on key issues
are virtually identical: Both candidates are committed to strengthening the
European Union, maintaining open-door immigration policies, pursuing
multiculturalism and quashing dissent from the so-called far right.

§ Merkel and Schulz both agree that there should be no
upper limit on the number of migrants entering Germany.

§ Merkel's grand coalition backed a law that would
penalize social media giants, including Facebook, Google and Twitter, with
fines of €50 million ($60 million) if they fail to remove offending content
from their platforms within 24 hours. Observers say the law is aimed at
silencing critics of Merkel's open-door migration policy.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, leader of the Christian
Democratic Union (CDU), is on track win a fourth term in office after polls
confirmed she won the first and only televised debate with her main election
opponent, Martin Schulz, leader of the Social Democratic Union Party (SDP).

A survey for the public broadcaster ARD showed that 55% of
viewers thought Merkel was the "more convincing" candidate during the
debate, which took place on September 3; only 35% said Schulz came out ahead.

Many observers agreed that Schulz failed to leverage the debate to
revive his flagging campaign, while others noted that Schulz's positions on
many issues are virtually indistinguishable from those held by Merkel.

Rainald Becker, an ARD commentator, described the
debate as, "More a duet than a duel."

"Merkel came out as sure, Schulz was hardly able to land a punch," wrote Heribert
Prantl, a commentator at Süddeutsche Zeitung. "The candidate
is an honorable man. But being honorable alone will not make him
chancellor."

Christian Lindner, leader of the classical liberal Free
Democrats, compared the debate
to "scenes from a long marriage, where there is the occasional quarrel,
but both sides know that they have to stick together in the future, too."

Television presenter Günther Jauch, writing in Bild, said he had hoped
to "at least understand what differentiates Merkel and Schulz in political
terms. Instead, it was just a conversation between two political professionals
who you suspect could both work pretty seamlessly in the same government."

Radio and television host Thomas Gottschalk said that the two
candidates agreed with each other too often: "They were both always
nodding their heads when the other was speaking."

Germany's general election is scheduled for September 24. If
voters went to the polls now, Merkel's CDU, together with its Bavarian sister
party, the Christian Social Union (CSU), would win 39%, according to a
September 4 Politbarometer survey conducted for the public broadcaster ZDF.

Coming in second, Schulz's SDP would win 22%; the classical
liberal Free Democrats (FDP) 10%; the far-left Linke 9%; the Greens 8% and the
anti-immigration Alternative for Germany (AfD) 8%.

The poll also found that 57% of respondents said they preferred
that Merkel serve another term; only 28% favored Schulz to become the next
chancellor. Nevertheless, half of Germany's 60 million voters are said to be
undecided, and some pollsters believe that the
country's huge non-voting population may determine the outcome.

As Merkel's CDU/CSU is unlikely to emerge from the election with
an absolute majority, the 2017 vote effectively revolves around the issue of
coalition-building. If current polling holds, Merkel, who has vowed to serve a
full four years if re-elected, will have two main options.

Merkel could form another so-called grand coalition, an alliance
of Germany's two biggest parties, namely the CDU/CSU and the SPD. Merkel
currently governs with a grand coalition and has done so during two of her
three terms in office.

Both the Christian Democrats and Social Democrats have said they
hope to end the grand coalition and lead the government with smaller partners
after the September election. After the debate, however, many observers believe
a grand coalition between Merkel and Schulz is more probable than not.

Merkel's second option would be to form a three-way coalition with
the Greens and the FDP, which served as junior coalition partner to the CDU/CSU
for almost half of Germany's post-war history. Merkel has already ruled out
forming a coalition with either the Linke or the AfD.

In any event, the policy positions of Merkel and Schulz on key
issues are virtually identical: Both candidates are committed to strengthening
the European Union, maintaining open-door immigration policies, pursuing
multiculturalism and quashing dissent from the so-called far right.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel (right)
and her main election opponent, Martin Schulz (left), whose policy positions
on key issues are virtually identical. (Image source: European
Parliament/Flickr)

Merkel and Schulz are ardent Europhiles and both are committed to
more European federalism. During an August 12 campaign speech in Dortmund, for
example, Merkel described the
European Union as the "greatest peace project" in history and vowed
that she would never turn her back on this "wonderful project."

Previously, Merkel said:

"We need more Europe, we need not only a monetary union, but
we also need a so-called fiscal union, in other words more joint budget policy.
And we need most of all a political union — that means we need to gradually
give competencies to Europe and give Europe control."

Merkel has also endorsed the idea
of a European Monetary Fund to deal with sovereign defaults by eurozone
countries:

"It could make us even more stable and allow us to show the
world that we have all the mechanisms in our own portfolio of the euro zone to
be able to react well to unexpected situations."

Schulz has argued that the EU
must be preserved at any cost:

"We are at a historical juncture: A growing number of people
are declaring what has been achieved over the past decades in Europe to be
wrong. They want to return to the nation-state. Sometimes there is even a blood
and soil rhetoric that for me is starkly reminiscent of the interwar years of
the past century, whose demons we are still all too familiar with. We brought
these demons under control through European structures, but if we destroy those
structures, the demons will return. We cannot allow this to happen."

Schulz has opposed the idea of
holding national referendums on leaving the EU:

"Referendums have always posed a threat when it comes to EU
policy, because EU policy is complicated. They are an opportunity for those
from all political camps who like to oversimplify things."

Schulz has also voiced optimism that
the British decision to leave the European Union would facilitate the creation
of a European Army:

"In the fields of security and defense policy, although the
EU loses a key member state, paradoxically such a separation could give the
necessary impulse for a closer integration of the remaining member
states."

During the September 3 debate, Schulz declared that he
would end Turkey's accession talks to join the European Union because of
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan's authoritarianism. Merkel initially
said she opposed such a move but then suddenly changed her mind. Unexpectedly,
Merkel said: "The fact is clear that Turkey should not become an EU
member."

On the issue of migration, Schulz and Merkel differ on procedure,
not principle. During the debate, for example, Schulz accused Merkel of failing
to involve the European Union in her 2015 decision to open German borders to
more than a million migrants from Africa, Asia and the Middle East. Merkel said
that although some mistakes had been made, she would take the same decision
again.

In fact, Merkel and Schulz both agree that there should be no
upper limit on the number of migrants entering Germany: "On the issue of
an upper limit, my position is clear," Merkel toldARD television.
"I won't accept one."

Schulz has said:

"A numerical cap is not a response to the refugee issue, even
if it is agreed upon in a European context. What do we do with the first
refugee who comes to the European frontier and has no quota available? Do we
send him back to perhaps a sure death? As long as this question is not
resolved, such a discussion makes no sense."

Schulz believes the
European Union should have a greater role in migration policymaking:

"What we need is a European right of immigration and asylum.
The refugee crisis shows us clearly that we cannot give a national response to
a global phenomenon such as the refugee movements. This is only possible in a
European context."

Merkel has criticized Hungary
for failing to show "solidarity" in aiding refugees. She has also
vowed to punish Poland for
its refusal to take in more migrants from the Muslim world:

"As much as I wish for good relations with Poland — they are
our neighbor and I will always strive for this given the importance of our ties
— we can't simply keep our mouth shut in order to keep the peace. This goes to
the very foundations of our cooperation within the European Union."

Schulz vowed that, if
elected chancellor, he would push for the EU to cut subsidies to countries that
do not take in refugees: "With me as chancellor, we won't accept that
solidarity as a principle is questioned."

Meanwhile, Merkel's grand coalition backed a law that
would penalize social media giants, including Facebook, Google and Twitter,
with fines of €50 million ($60 million) if they fail to remove offending
content from their platforms within 24 hours. Observers say the law is aimed at
silencing critics of Merkel's open-door migration policy.

Like Merkel, Schulz has reserved his worst vitriol for the
anti-immigration AfD, whose leaders he has described as
"rat catchers" (Rattenfänger) who are "trying to profit
from the plight of refugees." He has also called them "shameful and
repulsive."

In an August 22 interview with Bild, Merkel answered critics of
her desire to continue in power by saying that the
longer she rules, the better she gets: "I've decided to run for another
four years and believe that the mix of experience and curiosity and joy that I
have could make the next four years good ones."

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at
the New York-based Gatestone Institute.

Follow Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook

© 2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The
articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of
Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents
may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of
Gatestone Institute.

European Court Orders EU Countries to Take Migrants

2017-09-07T08:08:00.001-07:00

European Court Orders EU Countries to Take Migrants

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10956/european-court-migrants

European Court Orders EU
Countries to Take Migrants

"Politics has raped
European law and values."

by Soeren Kern

September
7, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10956/european-court-migrants

§ The September 6 ruling, which has been hailed as a
victory for European federalism, highlights the degree to which the European
Union has usurped decision-making powers from its 28 member states. The ruling
also showcases how the EU's organs of jurisprudence have become politicized.

§ Many so-called asylum seekers have refused to relocate
to Central and Eastern Europe because the financial benefits there are not as
generous as in France, Germany or Scandinavia.

§ "Let us not forget that those arriving have been
raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most
of them are not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because
Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in
itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian?
If we lose sight of this, the idea of Europe could become a minority interest
in its own continent." — Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán.

The European Union's highest court has rejected a complaint by
Hungary and Slovakia over the legality of the bloc's mandatory refugee quota
program, which requires EU member states to admit tens of thousands of migrants
from Africa, Asia and the Middle East.

The European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that the European Commission, the
powerful executive arm of the European Union, has the legal right to order EU
member states to take in so-called asylum seekers, and, conversely, that EU
member states have no legal right to resist those orders.

The September 6 ruling, which has been hailed as a victory for
European federalism, highlights the degree to which the European Union has
usurped decision-making powers from its 28 member states. The ruling also
showcases how the European Union's organs of jurisprudence have become
politicized.

Opponents of the relocation scheme say that decisions about the
granting of residence permits should be kept at the national level, and that by
unilaterally imposing migrant quotas on EU member states, unelected bureaucrats
in Brussels are seeking to force the democratically elected leaders of Europe
to submit to their diktat.

The dispute dates back to September 2015, when, at the height of
Europe's migration crisis, EU member states narrowly voted to relocate
120,000 "refugees" from Italy and Greece to other parts of the bloc.
This number was in addition to a July 2015 plan to redistribute 40,000
migrants from Italy and Greece.

Of the 160,000 migrants to be "shared," nine countries
in Central and Eastern Europe were ordered to take in around 15,000 migrants.
Although the Czech Republic, Hungary, Romania and Slovakia voted against the
agreement, they were still required to comply.

Since then, several states have refused to accept their assigned
quotas of migrants. Poland, for example, has a quota of 6,182 migrants, not one
of whom has been admitted. The Czech Republic has a quota of 2,691 migrants, of
whom only 12 have been taken. Hungary has a quota of 1,294, none of whom has
been admitted.

In the EU as a whole, so far only around 25,000 migrants have been
relocated (7,873 from Italy and 16,803 from Greece), according to the
EU's latest relocation and resettlement report, published on July 26, 2017. Of
the 28 EU member states, only Latvia and Malta have taken in their full quotas
— a combined total of 469 migrants.

Many so-called asylum seekers have refused to relocate
to Central and Eastern Europe because the financial benefits there are not as
generous as in France, Germany or Scandinavia. Hundreds of migrants who have
been relocated to Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, which rank among the poorest
countries in the EU, have since fled to Germany and
other wealthier countries in the bloc.

Hungary and Slovakia, backed by Poland, argued that the European
Union broke its own rules and exceeded its powers when it approved the quota
system with a "qualified majority"
— around two thirds of the bloc's members. They also argued that the relocation
scheme is a direct violation of the European Union's Dublin Regulation, a law
that requires people seeking refuge within the EU to do so in the first
European country they reach.

The European Court of Justice ruled that a qualified majority vote
was sufficient because the EU "was not required to act unanimously when it
adopted the contested decision." The ruling, which did not mention the
Dublin Regulation, concluded: "The mechanism actually contributes to
enabling Greece and Italy to deal with the impact of the 2015 migration crisis
and is proportionate."

Hungarian Foreign Minister Peter Szijjarto called the court
ruling "outrageous and irresponsible" and "contrary to the
interests of the European nations, including Hungary." He added: "The
decision puts at risk the security of all of Europe and the future of all of
Europe as well."

Szijjarto vowed that Hungary
would continue to challenge any attempts by the EU resettle migrants in Hungary
without its approval. "The real battle is only just beginning," he
said, adding that the decision was political: "Politics has raped European
law and values."

Slovakian Prime Minister Robert Fico said that while he
"respected" the court's decision, his government's opposition to the
relocation plan "has not changed at all." He added: "We will
continue to work on having solidarity expressed in different ways other than
forcing on us migrants from other countries that do not want to be here
anyway."

Polish Prime Minister Beata Szydło also was defiant: "I was convinced that the court
would make such a decision, but this absolutely does not change the stance of
the Polish government with respect to migration policy."

After the ruling of the European Court
of Justice that the EU has the legal right to order member states to take in
so-called asylum seekers, and that member states have no right to resist
those orders, Polish PM Beata Szydło was defiant, saying, "this
absolutely does not change the stance of the Polish government with respect
to migration policy." (ECJ photo by Transparency International/Flickr;
Szydło photo by Polish PM Chancellery)

German Foreign Minister Sigmar Gabriel said that the
ruling means Eastern European member states must abide by the refugee sharing
scheme: "I always said to our Eastern European partners that it is right
to clarify questions legally if there is doubt. But now we can expect all
European partners to stick to the ruling and implement the agreements without
delay."

EU Migration Commissioner Dimitris Avramopoulos welcomed the ECJ
ruling: "ECJ confirms relocation scheme valid. Time to work in unity and
implement solidarity in full." He warned holdouts of legal action if they
do not comply with the refugee obligations "in coming weeks."

The European Commission has already initiated legal
action against the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland for failing to take in
their quotas of migrants. The so-called infringement procedure,
which authorizes the Commission to sue member states that are considered to be
in breach of their obligations under EU law, could lead to massive financial
penalties.

The ECJ ruling and the continued threats from Brussels are likely
to help Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán in his campaign for re-election
in 2018. In a recent opinion survey, Orbán's Fidesz party polled at 53%,
followed by the nationalist Jobbik party, at 21%. He has said that his
campaign platform would focus on boosting the economy, improving security and
preserving national identity.

Orbán, who has emerged as the standard-bearer of European
opposition to German Chancellor Angela Merkel's "open-door" migration
policy, has repeatedly warned that Muslim
migrants are threatening Europe's Christian identity:

"Let us not forget that those arriving have been raised in
another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are
not Christians, but Muslims. This is an important question, because Europe and
European identity is rooted in Christianity. Is it not worrying in itself that European
Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? If we lose sight of
this, the idea of Europe could become a minority interest in its own
continent."

At a September 3 campaign rally in the town of Kötcse, Orbán cited expert
predictions that more than 60 million people are expected to make their way
from Africa into Europe during the next 20 years — thereby pushing Europe's
Muslim population to above 20% by 2030. "The Islamization of Europe is
real," Orbán warned.

Soeren Kern is a Senior Fellow at
the New York-based Gatestone Institute.

Follow
Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook

©
2017 Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The
articles printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of
Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents
may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of
Gatestone Institute.

Has France Been Bought by a State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism? by Drieu Godefrid iAugust 31, 2017

2017-08-31T05:20:00.001-07:00

Has France Been Bought by a State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10911/france-qatar

Has France Been Bought by a
State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism?

by Drieu Godefridi

August
31, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10911/france-qatar

Share30

Comment

§ It
is through these tax breaks that the Qataris are buying the "jewels"
of France. The U.S. is not selling its defense companies to Qatar.

§ Thanks
to its huge gas and oil reserves, Qatar has the highest per capita income in
the world and huge reserves of cash to invest everywhere, whereas France,
thanks to 40 years of socialism, is in dire need of cash.

The state of Qatar has been officially labelled as a "state
sponsor of terrorism", and an active supporter of Islamic terrorist
organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda and the Islamic State --
not by Western governments, but by Saudi Arabia, the
cradle of Islamic faith, and the other Islamic regimes of the region.

Knowing the facts of Qatar -- 11000km², one-third the
size of Belgium, population 2.5 million -- the question may seem far-fetched:
How could France, the great France, possibly be bought by a tiny state such as
Qatar?

For the single reason that, thanks to its huge gas and oil
reserves, Qatar has the highest per capita income in the world and huge
reserves of cash to invest everywhere, whereas France, thanks to 40 years of
socialism, is in dire need of cash and has a tradition of corruptible officials,
to say nothing of a propensity for "collaboration".

On August 4, the English press -- not the French press -- revealed that
French prosecutors are actively investigating two events: the awarding the 2022
World Cup of football (soccer) to Qatar, and the purchase by "Qatari
Diar", a state-owned investment company, of a stake in the French utility
firm Veolia.

At the center of the investigation is former French President
Nicolas Sarkozy. To be sure, Sarkozy has not been formally indicted (and he may
never be), but the evidence is overwhelming.

First, the World Cup. That the State of Qatar, known for decades
for its active support of Islamic terror organizations, and with a temperature
among the highest in the world -- in addition to zero tradition in the world of
football -- was awarded the 2022 World Cup is, of course, a source of wonder
ever since the award was announced by FIFA, the international governing body of
football.

French investigators are now looking into a meeting that took
place between then-President Sarkozy, Michel Platini -- the French former
president of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA), who sat on the
FIFA committee that chose Qatar -- and Qatari officials on November 23, 2010
(10 days before the vote). It is alleged that Platini was dead-set against
Qatar and that Sarkozy urged him to
change his mind: "They're good people."

The "deal" is said to have been sealed when Qatar agreed
to buy the biggest French soccer team, the Paris-Saint-Germain (PSG). It is
alleged that huge bribes were paid by Qatar to high-ranking French officials,
to secure these two deals: the World Cup and the Veolia investment. Although no
evidence has

yet been presented, the case would not have been opened by French
prosecutors without it. In addition, no one has ever denied the meeting of
November 23, 2010.

In April 2010, the "Qatari Diar" fund bought a 5% stake
in Veolia. Investigators are tracking 182 million euros suspected of having
been used to bribe French officials. Investigators are also looking into a
possible link between these two operations: Qatar investing in Veolia as a
favor to France, possibly in exchange for France's support for Qatar to host
the 2022 World Cup.

France's then-President Nicolas Sarkozy
(left) greets Qatar's then-Prime Minister Sheikh Hamad bin Jassim bin Jabor
al-Thani (right) on March 19, 2011 in Paris, France. (Photo by Franck
Prevel/Getty Images)

It is doubtful if the French investigators will ever get to the
bottom of these two cases. The judiciary in France has a long tradition of
submitting to the government. Since 1789, the French judiciary has not even
been an independent power -- as are the Legislative and the Executive
-- but a mere authority with a more limited scope.

It is revealing that these two investigations were exposed, not by
the French press, but by the English press.

What we already know for sure is the following:

1.
A state sponsor of terrorism, Qatar, was allowed to buy France's
leading soccer team, Paris-Saint-Germain, with the help of then-president
Nicolas Sarkozy. The former owner of the PSG was a private fund controlled
in Europe by one of Sarkozy's close friends. There would have been no deal
without the direct consent of Sarkozy -- that is the way France functions.

2.
A state sponsor of terrorism, Qatar, was not only allowed, but
actively courted, by French
officials to invest in some of France's largest companies, including defense
companies, such as Veolia, as well as the Airbus parent company, European
Aeronautic Defence and Space Company (EADS); the energy group EDF; the
construction firm, Vinci; and the media and defense group Lagardère.

3.
A state sponsor of terrorism, Qatar, was actively supported in its
2022 bid for the World Cup by the government of France and Nicolas Sarkozy,
who declared after the
FIFA vote in 2010: "Sport does not belong to a few countries. It belongs
to the world... I don't understand those who say that events should always be
held in the same countries and the same continents."

4.
There is a significant part of the French political class that
seems to consider the Embassy of Qatar in Paris some sort of automatic teller
machine (ATM), as has been showed by renowned journalists Christian Chesnot and
Georges Malbrunot in their book, Nos très chers émirs (Our
Very Dear Emirs) and deplored by the new
ambassador of Qatar in France, Meshaal al-Thani.

5.
Since 2008, a state sponsor of terrorism, Qatar, has benefited
from a huge tax break in France: the exemption of
profits on property sales. In France, profits on property sales are not only
taxed at 19%, they are subject to a further CSG/CRDS and social tax (15.5%),
resulting in a combined total minimum tax rate of 34.5%. The
rule is the same for everyone, whether a person or a corporation. Everyone,
that is, but the State of Qatar, when the administration of Nicolas Sarkozy
decided to exempt it from the tax. As a result, Qatar's royal family and
sovereign fund have since built up a huge portfolio of assets in France, one
that dwarfs the portfolio of a state such as Saudi Arabia. Qatar's portfolio
ranges from a Champs-Élysées mall to the Lido Cabaret. "Our deficit has
destroyed our freedom," said Nathalie Goulet, a
centrist senator from Lower Normandy, in 2013.

"The Qataris are here to
buy, while we are selling our family jewels." Which they did. [1]

Qatar and other Gulf states try to benefit from tax exemptions
everywhere in the world, but this convergence of facts -- the selling of
assets, sports clubs, defense companies and governmental representatives -- is
unique to France. It is through these tax breaks -- this is only one of them --
that the Qataris are buying the "jewels" of France. Of course, the
U.S. is also selling arms to the Qataris --
the U.S. has a military base in Al Udeid -- but the U.S. is not selling its
defense companies to Qatar.

We therefore probably do not even have to wait for the results of
the latest investigations to note that France, particularly but not exclusively
under the auspices of Nicolas Sarkozy, has literally been bought by a state
sponsor of terrorism, Qatar.

At the same time, Islam in France has been spreading. France has
been deeply infiltrated by the Muslim Brotherhood terror
organization, which is not categorized in France -- unlike the UK -- as a
sponsor of terror. This organization, since it was overthrown by Egypt's
current president, Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, is now the darling of Qatar. Without
Qatar, the Muslim Brotherhood would be without a home-base. Given its huge
financial, corporate and political dependence on Qatar, it is clear that France
-- in the name of "stability" -- would not do anything to displease
its darling.

Although France is a member of NATO and a nuclear power, nowhere
else in the West is Islamism so deeply embedded in the fabric of the
institutions, mind and zeitgeist of a country as it is there.
Even in the UK, you still find very powerful counter-powers (see the
governmental report on the Muslim Brotherhood). Not in France.

Consider the case of the Palestinian official Jabril Rajoub -- sentenced to life in
prison in 1970 for throwing a grenade at an Israeli army vehicle, but released,
along with others, in exchange for three Israeli soldiers taken hostage by the
Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP). Rajoub is now chairman of
the Palestinian Football Association -- another illustration of the deep
infiltration of FIFA by Islamists and Jew-haters sponsored by Gulf States,
beginning with Qatar. Would that position even be thinkable without France's
sponsorship of Qatar in FIFA? Probably not.

It is true that Qatar is buying assets from
around the world, including politicians, not only in France. And it is true
that the U.S. is also selling arms to the Qataris, as are many other countries.
It is one thing, however, to sell arms, but another to sell your defense
companies. It is one thing to be open to foreign investment, but another to
give huge tax breaks to a state sponsor of terror so it can acquire the
"jewels" of your country.

It is also not an accident that the main face of Islamism in
Europe, the Muslim Brother Tariq Ramadan (from his base in Oxford, England) now
sees France as the future of Islam in Europe,
and not the UK (still number 2 on the list).

The U.S. and other countries may be selling things, but France is
selling herself.

Drieu Godefridi, a classical-liberal Belgian author, is the
founder of the l'Institut Hayek in Brussels. He has a PhD in Philosophy from
the Sorbonne in Paris and also heads investments in European companies.

[1] The
6th of December 2014, Nicolas Sarkozy was invited and paid by
the "Qatar National Bank" to give a lecture in Doha. Subject?
Investment opportunities in France.

© 2017
Gatestone Institute. All rights reserved. The articles
printed here do not necessarily reflect the views of the Editors or of
Gatestone Institute. No part of the Gatestone website or any of its contents
may be reproduced, copied or modified, without the prior written consent of
Gatestone Institute.

The Fake News Media of Sweden By Nima Gholam Ali Pour

2017-08-30T02:05:00.001-07:00

The Fake News Media of Sweden

.

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10838/sweden-fake-news

The
Fake News Media of Sweden

by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

August 30,
2017 at 4:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10838/sweden-fake-news

Comment

§ In
most democratic countries, the media should be critical of those who hold
power. In Sweden, however, the media criticize those who criticize the
authorities. Criticism is not aimed at the people who hold power, but against
private citizens who, according to the journalists, have the "wrong"
ideas.

§ TV4
and all other media refused to report that it was Muslims who interrupted the
prime minister because they wanted to force Islamic values on Swedish
workplaces. When the Swedish media reported on the event, the public were not
told that these "hijab activists" had links with Islamist
organizations. Rather, it was reported as if they were completely unknown
Muslim girls who only wanted to wear their veils.

§ The
Swedish media are politicized to the extent that they act as a propaganda
machine. Through their lies, they have created possibilities for
"post-truth politics". Instead of being neutral, the mainstream
Swedish media have lied to uphold certain "politically correct" values.
One wonders what lifestyle and political stability Sweden will have when no one
can know the truth about what is really going on.

In February 2017, after U.S. President Donald Trump's statements about
events in Sweden, the journalist Tim Pool travelled to Sweden to report on
their accuracy. What Tim Pool concluded is now available for everyone to watch
on YouTube, but what is really interesting is how
the Swedish public broadcasting media described him.

On Radio Sweden's website, one of the station's employees, Ann Törnkvist, wrote an op-ed in which Pool
and the style of journalism he represents are described as "a threat to
democracy".

Why is Pool "a threat to democracy" in Sweden? He reported negatively
about an urban area in Stockholm, Rinkeby, where more than 90% of the
population has a foreign background. When Pool visited Rinkeby, he had to
be escorted out by
police. Journalists are often threatened in Rinkeby. Before this incident, in
an interview with Radio Sweden, Pool had described Rosengård,
an area in the Swedish city of Malmö heavily populated by immigrants, as
"nice, beautiful, safe". After Pool's negative but accurate report
about Rinkeby, however, he began to be described as an unserious journalist by
many in the Swedish media, and finally was labeled the "threat to
democracy."

One might think that this was a one-time event in a country whose
journalists were defensive. But the fact is that Swedish journalists are deeply
politicized.

In most democratic countries, media are, or should be, critical of
those who hold power. In Sweden, the media criticize those who criticizes those
who hold power.

In March 2017, the public broadcasting company Sveriges
Television revealed the name
of a person who runs the Facebook page Rädda vården ("Save
Healthcare"). The person turned out to be an assistant nurse, and was
posting anonymously only because he had been critical of the hospital where he
worked. Swedish hospitals are run by the local county councils, and thus when
someone criticizes the healthcare system in Sweden, it is primarily politicians
who are criticized. Sveriges Television explained on its
website why it revealed the identity of the private individuals behind
Facebook:

"These hidden powers of influence abandon and break the open
public debate and free conversation. Who are they? What do they want and why?
As their impact increases, the need to examine them also grows."

It is strange that Sveriges Television believes
that an assistant nurse who wants to tell how politicians neglect public
hospitals, is breaking "the open public debate and free
conversation". This was not the only time that the mainstream Swedish
media exposed private citizens who were criticizing those who hold power. In
December 2013, one of Sweden's largest and most established newspapers, Expressen, announced that it
intended to disclose the names of people who commented on various Swedish
blogs:

"Expressen has partnered with Researchgruppen.
The group has found a way, according to their own description, without any kind
of unlawful intrusion, to associate the usernames that the anonymous commentators
on the hate websites are using to the email addresses from which comments were
sent. After that, the email addresses have been cross-checked with registries
and authorities to identify the persons behind them."

The term "hate websites" (hatsajterna) is what
that the mainstream media uses to describe some of the blogs that are critical
of Islam or migration.

It is one thing to be critical of bloggers who you may consider
have racist opinions. But exposing the people who have written in comments
sections of various blogs in one of Sweden's biggest newspapers is strange and
terrifying.

Researchgruppen has clear links to Antifascistisk
Aktion (Antifascist Action), a group which, according to the
Swedish government, consists of violent left-wing extremists. For their efforts
to expose private individuals in the comments section, Researchgruppen received
the Guldspaden, a
prestigious journalistic award in Sweden.

Jim Olsson was one individual exposed in Expressen simply
because he wrote something in a blog's comments section. A 67-year-old docent
in physical chemistry, Olsson received a home-visit from Expressen with
a camera and microphone present. A private citizen with no connection to any
political party or organization, he exposed by Sweden's media because he
had written the
following in the comments section:

"The Swedish asylum system rewards swindlers with a permanent
residence permit. There are, of course, swindlers flooding Sweden."

The Swedish newspaper Expressen accessed
databases of website commenters, targeted critics of immigration, and
confronted them at home. The above screenshot is taken from a video on
the Expressen website, published under the headline
"Jim Olsson writes on hate sites."

Another private individual, Patrik Gillsvik, with no political
links, was exposed and fired from his job because, in a blog's comments
section, he wrote:

"I would like to join the structural prejudices of the
majority in society and state that gypsies are inventive and witty
entrepreneurs who can enrich our culture -- yes, and then they steal like
ravens, of course!"

Although the statement can be criticized for being unacceptably
racist, what is unique is that the mainstream media in a Western democracy can
expose private individuals because they wrote something in a blog's comments
section. Criticism is not aimed at the people who hold power, but against
private citizens who according to the journalists have the "wrong"
ideas.

Moreover, each of these private citizens, who have had their lives
ruined because they wrote something distasteful in a comments section, serves
as a warning, so that others will not dare to make the mistake of posting
something politically incorrect on a blog.

It is shocking that in a democracy, the media acts this way, but
that is how Swedish -- and, increasingly, other Western media -- operate these
days.

In addition to punishing private individuals who, according to the
them, communicate "wrong" ideas, the media celebrate and support
people who have the "right" ideas. On May 1, 2017, Sweden's Prime
Minister Stefan Löfven was interrupted by a number of hijab-wearing activists
who were protesting a verdict of the Court of Justice of the European Union
that employers are entitled to prohibit staff from wearing a hijab. Given that
Sweden's prime minister cannot directly influence the Court, and that one
should not interrupt the country's prime minister when he speaks, one would
think that these "hijab activists" might be criticized in the media.

TV4, a national TV-channel and one of the first media outlets
to report this incident,
refused to say that those who interrupted the prime minister were wearing the
Islamic veil. The title of TV4's clip was "Demonstrators Interrupted
Löfven speech". The sub-headline read as follows: "Female protesters
screamed out their anger against the prime minister and wondered where the
feminist government was."

From the text, it is not clear that these activists demonstrated
against the verdict of the Court of Justice of the European Union; that all
activists wore a hijab, or that they screamed, "Stand up for Muslim
women's rights!" However, information that
these activists were wearing hijabs and protesting the verdict of the Court of
Justice of the European Union was on their Facebook page and YouTube.
Nevertheless, TV4 and all other media refused to report that those who
interrupted the prime minister were Muslims who were interrupting the prime
minister because they seemingly wanted to force Islamic values on the Swedish
workplace.

The day after their protest, in an interview with
Radio Sweden, these activists had the opportunity to explain why they protested
-- but were not asked any critical questions. The next day, an Expressen columnist,
Maria Rydhagen, compared one of the hijab-activists glowingly with one of the
founders of the Swedish Social Democratic Party, Axel Danielsson. Rydhagen
wrote the following about
Jasmin Nur Ismail:

"Then, on Monday, the protest of the girls was perceived as
only an incident. But imagine if it was the start of something big? Perhaps
history was being written, there and then? Imagine if Jasmin Nur is the Axel
Danielsson of 2017. Hero and rebel. In that case: Was it not a pity to remove
her with the help of the police?"

As the media refused to write anything negative about the protest
against the prime minister, this author began to investigate the matter. It
took half an hour to find out several important thingswhich were never
mentioned by the Swedish mainstream media. Jasmin Nur Ismail had written about
the incident on her Facebook page shortly after the protest. Who was behind the
protest was not a secret.

The demonstration had been organized by the Hayat Women's Movement
and a network called, "The Right to Our Bodies". The Hayat Women's
Movement was founded by Aftab Soltani, who in March 2017 was one of the speakers at a much-criticized annual
Islamic event in Sweden, Muslimska Familjedagarna (Muslim
Family Days). The event was blamed by both the left and the right for inviting hate preachers,
anti-Semites and Muslim radicals as speakers. Another speaker at this Islamic
event in March 2017 was Jasmin Nur Ismail, a heroine of the Swedish
media. Muslimska Familjedagarna was organized by the Islamist Ibn Rushd Educational Association,
the Islamic Association of Sweden (Islamiska Förbundet i Sverige) and
Sweden's Young Muslims (Sveriges Unga Muslimer).

Jasmin Nur Ismail, hailed as a heroine in Expressen, is
a public figure. Southern Sweden's largest newspaper, Sydsvenskan, described her in an
October 2016 article as an "activist, anti-racist and writer".
According to Sydsvenskan, Jasmin Nur Ismail's political role-model
is Malcolm X. During the Swedish Forum for Human Rights in 2016, Jasmin Nur
Ismail was, in a panel discussion, the
representative for Malmö's Young Muslims -- in turn, a subdivision of an Islamist organization, Sweden's
Young Muslims.

Swedish newspapers did not write a single word that the person and
organizations behind the protest against Sweden's prime minister had links with
Islamist organizations. When the Swedish media reported about the event, the
public were told that these hijab-activists were completely unknown Muslim
girls who only wanted to wear their veils.

Mainstream Swedish media outlets simply do not report some things.
When the largest mosque in Scandinavia was
opened in Sweden's third largest city, Malmö, the news about this was first
published in the Qatar News Agency and The Peninsula on
May 3, 2017. The reason that Qatar's media wrote about it was because Qatar
financed a large part of the mosque. On May 5, an article about this mosque was
published in Breitbart. On May 6, one
day after Breitbart reported the news and three days after the Qatari media
reported the news, the Swedish terrorist expert Magnus Ranstorp sent a tweet about this
mosque, but he linked it to the Qatari media. At this time, there are still no
Swedish media outlets that have reported anything about the largest mosque in
Scandinavia.

On May 8, the Swedish blog Jihad i Malmö wrote about the
mosque and its Qatari financing. On May 9, the Swedish blog Pettersson
gör skillnad wrote about the
mosque. At the same time, the Norwegian author and activist Hege Storhaug, who
is critical of Islam, wrote about the
mosque and noted that the Swedish media had not yet written about it:

"I had expected that the Swedish media at the very least
would mention the opening of Scandinavia's largest mosque with positive words.
But no, not a word in Swedish mainstream media, as far as I have noticed. You
have to go to the English version of Arabic media to get some limited
information, like Qatar News Agency."

By the time I tweeted about it on May 10, the
mainstream Swedish media still had not widely reported it. On May 15, I wrote
an article on it for
the news website Situation Malmö, run by the Sweden Democrats party
branch in Malmö. With one hour's research, I managed, through what the mosque
had published on Facebook, to discover that one of the leading Social Democrat
politicians in Malmö, Frida Trollmyr, a municipal commissioner with
responsibility for culture, recreation and health, had been at the mosque's
opening. Representatives of the Qatari government also attended, but the
mainstream Swedish media still had not reported anything about it.

On May 17, two weeks after the Qatari media had written about the
opening of Scandinavia's largest mosque in Malmö, 12 days after Breitbart had written
about the event, and two days after my article, the Sydsvenskan newspaper wrote about the
mosque opening. You could not read the article, however, if you had not paid
for "premium membership" to this newspaper.

One can see this omission as an unfortunate coincidence, but it is
strange when Breitbart succeeds in communicating more information about Malmö
than southern Sweden's largest newspaper, which is headquartered in Malmö. Why
would the Swedish media not write about the mosque? It was certainly not a
secret. There was no explanation from the Swedish media or anyone else. Yet,
these same media outlets did not hesitate to expose the names of private citizens
who wrote inappropriate opinions on a public comments page.

There are journalists in Sweden who change their views as soon as
the government changes its opinion. Göran Greider, a journalist and editor,
active in the public debate in Sweden for more than 30 years, wrote the following in August
2015, about migration policy:

"The European governments who say no to increasing the number
of refugees received not only show a shameful lack of solidarity. They are also
silent when they decline to rejuvenate their populations."

In November 2015, only three months later, when the Swedish
government was forced to change its migration policy because of the migration
crisis, Göran Greider wrote:

"But even the left, including many Social Democrats and
members of the Green Party, have sometimes been characterized by an
unwillingness to discuss the great challenges that receiving refugees, in the
quantity we have seen lately, implies for a society. No one wants to be a
nationalist. No one wants to be accused of running the errands of Sweden
Democrats, or racism. But in this way, people on the left, who are so broadly
for bringing in refugees, have often locked themselves out of a realistic
discussion."

There is nothing wrong in reconsidering one's opinion. But it has
become common for Swedish journalists frequently to have opinions that favor
certain political parties -- often the Social Democrats, the Left Party and the
Green Party. The issue is not even about values. People who work for the
mainstream Swedish media are ready to reconsider their values so long as it
helps certain parties to stay in power. This is far from what is presumably the
media's main task in a democracy.

How is it that no newspaper is rebelling against this order? It
would be a good business proposition; such a media outlet could gain financial
benefits. Sweden's political establishment is, after all, not popular. Well, we
can look at the example of someone who tried. In February 2017, a financier,
Mats Qviberg, bought a free daily newspaper, Metro, usually
distributed in subways and buses in Sweden. In May, he gave an interview to the
newspaper Nyheter Idag, considered by the Swedish establishment to
be "right-wing" or "populist". In his interview, Qviberg
gave a slight playful hint that Metro might in some way
cooperate with Nyheter Idag.

The consequence of the
playful statement was that the Green Party in Stockholm County Council
threatened that Stockholm County would stop handing out Metro in
Stockholm's subways. A columnist stopped writing for the paper. Other media
outlets started to wonder out loud if Metrowere becoming a racist
platform. Before the month of May was over, Qviberg had sold his shares
in Metro. That politicians would punish a newspaper owner who had
"wrong" views did not surprise anyone in Sweden; the situation was
not worth mentioning. In Sweden, even owners of newspapers are supposed to
follow the political order.

In June 2017, the leader of the Sweden Democrats (SD), Jimmie
Åkesson, spoke in Järva, a district in Stockholm dominated by immigrants. The
Sweden Democrats is a social-conservative party in the Swedish parliament; it
supports, among other matters, a restrictive migration policy. While Åkesson
was speaking, there were protests against him; and among the protesters were
various placards. A photograph of Radio Sweden's van showed an anti-SD placard
inside it. On it, one could read "Jimmie = Racist". The explanation from
Radio Sweden was:

"Someone put a sign on Ekot's (a Radio Sweden news program)
car in Järva on Sunday evening. It was taken down and put into the car and then
thrown away on the way from there."

You can have a discussion about why Radio Sweden spends its time
discarding placards that left-wing protesters use. Is that what journalist are
supposed to do when they are covering a story? In the end, however, it does not
matter. The people's confidence in the mainstream media in Sweden is being
eroded as we write.

A new study from Institutet för Mediestudier shows that 54%
agree, or partly agree, that the Swedish media are not telling the whole truth
about problems in society linked to migration. Instead of the media accepting
that they are biased and starting to change their ways, the media continue to
attack citizens who appear critical.

In June 2017, the editorial writer of the daily Aftonbladet,
Anders Lindberg, wrote an editorialtitled,
"Hitler Did Not Trust the Media Either," in which he equated the
critics of the Swedish media with Nazis. Anders Lindberg, after working 10
years for the Social Democrats, resigned as the
Communications Ombudsman for the Social Democrats in 2010, to start working as
an editorial writer for Aftonbladet. He is so well-known for what
his critics view as unusual versions of the truth that he has the privilege of
writing for Sweden's largest newspaper. In 2015, he described the issue
of organized begging, a visible problem in northern Europe, as "legends
and folklore". Today there is no party that denies that organized begging
is a real problem.

I often have difficulty explaining to many of my American friends
and colleagues how the Swedish media work. Often, there may be clear examples
of anti-Semitism and other unsavory behavior. The first question I always get
is: Why is the media not writing about this? The answer is simple. The Swedish
media are politicized to the extent that they act as a propaganda machine. It
is not a propaganda machine in the traditional sense of the word, with an
official Ministry of Propaganda. But in Sweden, many journalists and editors
are either old established political party employees, as Anders Lindberg, or
simply ideologically indoctrinated and therefore extremely biased. The Swedish
propaganda machine punishes those who have the "wrong" opinions and
celebrates those who have the "right" opinions.

What happened to Tim Pool was a part of how media works in Sweden.
As long as he said the "right" things, the Swedish media gave a
positive picture of him. When he started to have the "wrong" opinion,
the propaganda machine started doing its work and Pool became "a threat to
democracy".

There are, of course, more examples that show how sick the Swedish
debate- and media-climate has become. In such a negative environment, there are
many casualties. The first casualty is, obviously, the truth. When people start
to understand that the mainstream media are lying, they turn to alternative
media. Alternative media outlets, however, also usually have political agendas.
A democracy cannot survive well only on biased media. A democracy desperately
needs mainstream media outlets that inform its citizens and criticize people
who hold power. That is something Sweden does not have today.

A large portion of the Swedish population are apparently aware of
this and do not trust the media. Through its lies, the Swedish media have
created possibilities for "post-truth politics" in Sweden. Instead of
being a neutral party, the mainstream Swedish media have lied to uphold certain
"politically correct" values. The result is an atmosphere where many
people believe that everything that the media says has a political agenda. When
the mainstream media in Sweden lie shamelessly, where can one go to find the
truth? One wonders what lifestyle and political stability Sweden will have when
no one can know the truth about what is really going on.

Nima Gholam Ali Pour is a member of the board of education in the
Swedish city of Malmö and is engaged in several Swedish think tanks concerned
with the Middle East. He is also editor for the social conservative website
Situation Malmö, and is the author of the Swedish book "Därför är mångkultur förtryck"("Why
Multiculturalism is Oppression").

Follow Nima Gholam Ali Pour on Twitter and Facebook

My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 - Episode 2/2

2017-08-26T08:36:00.001-07:00

Youtube BBC documentary on partition

Top comments

Ghulam Muhammed1 second ago

It is reprehensible that BBC of all the media,
should ignore the role of British colonials, especially Churchill, who
conspired with USA, to carve a military outpost for their security needs and
exploited Jinnah to spread the lies that Pakistan was meant to be carved as
refuge for Muslims. Nehru and Patel refused to cooperate with the leaving
British and paved the way to partition. US and UK were afraid of the marauding
Soviet Communist Russia, that had to be stopped forging south in search of warm
water access to Indian Ocean. Communist Russia would have cut of access to
Persian Gulf oil to the West, that desperately needed oil for reconstruction of
war ravaged Europe. BBC should have guts to come out in the open about the
ghastly conspiracy which is already exposed by Sarila in his well-researched
book - The Great Game.

India: Triple Talaq Verdict, Gender Justice and RSS Combine | LS Herdenia

2017-08-25T07:57:00.001-07:00

India: Triple Talaq Verdict, Gender Justice and RSS Combine | LS Herdenia: Dated: August 24, 2017 by LS Herdenia Although the BJP and Sangh Parivar celebrating Talaq judgment of Supreme Court and claiming credit...

Communalism Watch

Resources for all concerned by the rise of the far right in India (and with occasional information on other countries of South Asia and beyond)

August 24, 2017

India: Triple Talaq Verdict, Gender Justice and RSS Combine | LS Herdenia

Dated: August 24, 2017

by LS Herdenia

Although the BJP and Sangh Parivar celebrating Talaq judgment of Supreme Court and claiming credit for liberating Muslim women from the male dominating Muslim society. But there was no evidence that they took any initiative for empowering Hindu women. On the contrary they took every possible step to stall a major initiative taken by our first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nahru and our first law minister Dr. B.R. Ambedkar.

It may be recalled that a draft Hindu code bill was introduced in the constituent assembly which incorporated several measures to empower Hindu women including right to divorce. The moment they came to know the contents of the bill RSS with the cooperation of other likeminded organisations launched a vicious campaign against Nehru and Ambedkar. What that campaign was and how they maligned both great leaders is described by eminent historian Ram Chandra Guha in his book "India After Gandhi". Relevant contents from the book are being reproduced here –

Outside the Assembly the cries against the bill grew louder. Already in March 1949 an All-India Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee had been formed. This held that that the Constituent Assembly has 'no right to interfere with the personal laws of Hindus which are based on Dharma Shastras'.

The Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee was supported by conservative lawyers as well as by conservative clerics. The influential Shankaracharya of Dwarka issue an 'encyclical' against the proposed code. Religion, he said, 'is the noblest light, inspiration and support of men, and the State's highest duty is to protect it'.

The Anti-Hindu-Code-Bill Committee held hundreds of meetings throughout India, where sundry swamis denounced the proposed legislation. The participants in this movement presented themselves as religious warriors (dharmaveer) fighting a religious war (dharmayudh). The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh threw its weight behind the agitation. On 11 December 1949, the RSS organized a public meeting at the Ram Lila grounds in Delhi, where speaker after speaker condemned the bill. One called it 'an atom bomb on Hindu society'. Another likened it to the draconian Rowlatt Act introduced by the colonial state; just as the protests against that act led to the downfall of the British, he said, the struggle against this Bill would signal the downfall of Nehru's government. The next day a group of RSS workers marched on the Assembly buildings, shouting 'Down with Hindu code bill' and 'May Pandit Nehru perish'. The protesters burnt effigies of the prime minister and Dr Ambedkar, and then vandalized the car of Sheikh Abdullah.

The leader of the movement against the new bill was one Swami Karpatriji Maharaj. We know little of this swami's antecedents, except that he was from north India and appeared to be knowledgeable in Sanskrit. His opposition to the Bill was coloured and deepened by the fact that it was being piloted by Ambedkar. He made pointed references to the law minister's caste, suggesting that a former Untouchable had no business meddling in matters normally the preserve of the Brahmins.

In speeches in Delhi and elsewhere, Swami Karpatri challenged Ambedkar to a public debate on his interpretations of the Shastras. To the law minister's claim that the Shastras did not really favour polygamy, Swami Karpatri quoted Yagnavalkya: 'if the wife is a habitual drunkard, a confirmed invalid, a cunning, a barren or a spendthrift woman, if she is bitter-tongued, if she has got only daughters and no son, if she hates her husband, [then] the husband can marry a second wife even while the first is living.' The swami supplied the precise citation for this injunction: the third verse of the third chapter of the third section of Yagnavalkya's smriti (scripture) concerning marriage. He did not, however, tell us whether the injunction also allowed the wife to take another husband if the existing one was a drunkard, bitter-tongued, a spend-thrift, etc.

For Swami Karpatri, divorce was prohibited in Hindu tradition, while 'to allow adoption of a boy of any caste is to defy the Shastras and to defy property'. Even by the most liberal interpretations, the woman's inheritance was limited to one-eighth, not a half as Ambedkar sought to make it. The bill was altogether in violation of the Hindu scriptures. It had already evoked 'terrible opposition', and the government could push it through only at its peril. The swami issued a dire warning: 'As is clearly laid down in the Dharmashastras, to forcibly defy the laws of God and Dharma very often means great harm to the Government and the country and both bitterly rue the obstinate folly.'

Of course, not all Hindus were of the liberal party either. The reservations of the orthodox, as expressed in Parliament, were carried forward in the streets by the cadres of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. They brought batches of volunteers into New Delhi, to shout slogans against the Hindu Code Bill and court arrest. Among their larger aims were the dismemberment of Pakistan and the unseating of Jawaharlal Nehru – as they shouted, 'Pakistan tod do', 'Nehru Hakumat Chhod Do'.

The main speaker at these RSS-organized shows was usually Swami Karpatriji Maharaj. Addressing a meeting on 16 September 1951, the swami challenged the prime minister to a debate on the proposed bill. 'If Pandit Nehru and his colleagues succeed in establishing that even one section of the proposed Hindu Code is in accordance with the Shastras', said Karpatri, 'I shall accept the entire Hindu Code'. The next day, in pursuance of this challenge, the swami and his followers marched on Parliament. The police prevented them from entering. In the ensuing scuffle, reported a Hindu weekly, 'police pushed them back [and] Swamiji's danda [stick] was broken, which is like the sacred thread, [the] religious emblem of the sannyasis.'

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

2017-08-22T06:30:00.005-07:00

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10887/barcelona-attack

Spain:
Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren
KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10887/barcelona-attack

Share87

Comment

§ The measures to place bollards or planters in public
areas were never implemented in Barcelona because the leaders of the Catalan
independence movement did not want to be seen as taking orders from the central
government in Madrid.

§ Far more difficult to explain is why no one reported
suspicious activity at the chalet.

§ Although some Catalans are having second thoughts about
the wisdom of promoting Muslim mass immigration as a strategy to achieve
Catalan independence, at least 10,000 Catalans with links to the separatist
movement have actually converted to Islam in recent years..

As details emerge of the August 17 jihadist attack in Barcelona,
the evidence points to one overarching conclusion: the carnage could have been
prevented if a series of red flags had not been either missed or ignored.

The failure to heed intelligence warnings, enhance physical
security and report suspicious activity are all factors that facilitated the
attack, which had been in the planning stage for more than six months.

The attack was also enabled by the idiosyncrasies of Spanish
politics, especially the tensions that exist between the central government and
the leaders of the independence movement in Catalonia, the autonomous region of
which Barcelona is the capital.

Failure to Install Bollards on Las Ramblas

The Barcelona attack could have been prevented had municipal
officials complied with an order to install bollards, vertical poles designed
to prevent car ramming attacks, on the Rambla, the city's main tourist
thoroughfare.

On December 20, 2016, one day after a Tunisian jihadist drove a
truck into a Christmas market in Berlin, killing 12 people and injuring 56,
Spanish National Police issued a circular ordering all central, regional and
municipal police departments in Spain to "implement physical security
measures to protect public spaces" to prevent jihadist attacks "in
places with high numbers of people." The circular advised:

"Municipalities should protect these public spaces by
temporarily installing large planters or bollards at access points to hinder or
prevent the entry of vehicles."

The measures were never implemented in Barcelona because the
leaders of the Catalan independence movement did not want to be seen as taking
orders from the central government in Madrid.

After receiving the directive, Catalan autonomous police, known as
the Mossos d'Esquadra, accused the central government of "alarmism"
and insisted that it would not order municipalities in Catalonia to implement
this "indiscriminate measure." The Mossos also claimed to have the
jihadist threat under control, that local police were trained to "detect
symptoms or radicalization," and that there were "no concrete
threats."

After the Barcelona attack, Deputy Mayor Gerardo Pisarello blamed the absence of bollards on the Catalan Interior
Ministry. "The City of Barcelona has never refused to install bollards.
Whenever it has been requested, we have done so," Pisarello said. Ada
Colau, Barcelona's leftwing mayor, however, has repeatedly refused to
"fill Barcelona with barriers," insisting that it must remain "a
city of liberty."

El Periódico de Catalunya, a paper based in
Barcelona, elaborated:

"The total absence of police collaboration between the Mossos
d'Esquadra, which is the police force deployed on the ground, and the National
Police and the Civil Guard translates into huge security deficiencies. The
relationship between police forces — influenced by the political situation — is
terrible and, in the case of the Mossos and the National Police, it is open
war.

"The result is that the information services of the Mossos,
on the one hand, and those of the National Police and the Civil Guard, on the
other, do not exchange information. The cooperation is reduced to the personal
relationships of individual agents who, without the knowledge of their
superiors, exchange information and put safety first."

On August 19, hours after the jihadist attack in Barcelona,
Spanish Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido repeated that it would be "appropriate" for all
municipalities to comply with the December circular. His ministry issued a new
letter calling on municipalities to install safety measures in the neuralgic
points of cities. It remains to be seen if Catalan officials will now implement
the recommendations.

Too little, too late.

Police officers line the street on Las Ramblas on August 18, 2017, near the
scene of the previous day's terrorist attack in Barcelona, Spain. (Photo by
Carl Court/Getty Images)

Failure to Heed Warnings

In June, the CIA reportedly warned Catalan police that Barcelona
was being targeted by jihadists: "Two months ago the Central Intelligence
Agency warned Catalan police of a threat to Las Ramblas," according to El Periódico.

Additionally, on June 30, two weeks before the Barcelona attack, a
Twitter account associated with the Islamic State warned of an impending attack against al-Ándalus,
the Arabic name given to those parts of Spain, Portugal and France occupied by
Muslim conquerors from 711 to 1492. Many jihadists believe that territories
Muslims lost during the Christian Reconquest of Spain still belong to the realm
of Islam and that Islamic law gives them the right to re-establish Muslim rule
there.

It remains unclear why Catalan authorities failed to increase
security in light of the warnings and threats. El Periódico wrote:

"In recent years Barcelona has become a city known all over
the planet. Both because of its attraction as a tourist destination and because
of the media impact of the Barça football club, the Catalan capital is a world
icon. In the eyes of the jihadists, that makes it a priority objective, as they
seek to attack sites that generate a great impact at the international level.

However, neither the authorities nor the citizens seems to have
realized that their city is on the same list of targets as other major cities
such as New York, Paris, London or Madrid."

Failure to Report Suspicious Activity

The jihadists prepared for the Barcelona attack at a chalet in the
beachfront town of Alcanar, situated 200 kilometers (120 miles) south of
Barcelona. A year ago, the terror cell "occupied" the property, which
was foreclosed and had been vacant. Squatters are protected by Spanish law, so
it is common for youth in Catalonia to take over vacant
properties. This may explain why neighbors did not contact the police.

Far more difficult to explain is why no one reported suspicious
activity at the chalet. During the course of several months, the jihadists
collected more than 100 large gas canisters, which investigators believe were
to be used as car bombs. An explosion on August 16, the night before the
Barcelona attack, leveled the property.

Investigators later found traces of the
explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), also known as the "Mother of
Satan," a substance widely used by members of the Islamic State in Europe.

Failure to Follow-Up on Leads

Police found the remains of at least two people in the rubble of
the Alcanar chalet. The head of the Mossos d'Esquadra, Josep Lluís
Trapero, confirmed that one of the bodies was that of Abdelbaki
Es-Satti, a Muslim cleric who is suspected of organizing the terror cell and
radicalizing its members.

Es-Satti, a Moroccan national who lived in the Catalan town of
Ripoll, served in a local mosque. He was a convicted drug trafficker who had
spent four years at a prison in Valencia, where he is believed to have met
Rachid Aglif, known as "The Rabbit," one of the main plotters of the
2004 Madrid bomb attacks that killed 192 people and wounded 2,000. Police are
now looking into whether Es-Satti was involved in the ISIS attacks on the
Brussels airport and metro in 2016.

Ali Yassine, the director of the mosque in Ripoll, said that he
had reported Es-Satti to local police more than a year ago as part of a
security protocol to monitor Muslim preachers. Authorities did not place him on
a watch list, however, even though he had been convicted of trafficking drugs
and violating Spanish immigration laws.

Catalan Migration Policy Fuels Radicalization

Catalonia not only has the highest Muslim population in Spain, it
is also one of the most Islamized regions of the country. Catalonia has 7.5
million inhabitants, including an estimated510,000 Muslims, who account for around 7% of the
total Catalan population. In some Catalan towns, however, the Muslim population
is above 40% of the overall population.

In his book "Jihadism: The Radical Islamic Threat to
Catalonia," Catalan terrorism analyst Jofre Montoto estimates that
at least 10% of the Muslims in Catalonia are "radicals" who are
hardcore believers in the "doctrine of jihadism."

A five-page diplomatic cable, dated October 2, 2007, described the link between mass immigration to Catalonia
and the rise of radical Islam in the region:

"Heavy immigration — both legal and illegal — from North
Africa (Morocco, Tunisia, and Algeria) and Southeast Asia (Pakistan and
Bangladesh) has made Catalonia a magnet for terrorist recruiters. ... The
Spanish National Police estimates that there may be upwards of 60,000
Pakistanis living in Barcelona and the surrounding area; the vast majority are
male, unmarried or unaccompanied, and without legal documentation. There are
even more such immigrants from North Africa. ... They live on the edges of
Spanish society, they do not speak the language, they are often unemployed, and
they have very few places to practice their religion with dignity. ... Individually,
these circumstances would provide fertile ground for terrorist recruitment;
taken together, the threat is clear....

"There is little doubt that the autonomous region of
Catalonia has become a prime base of operations for terrorist activity. Spanish
authorities tell us they fear the threat from these atomized immigrant
communities prone to radicalism, but they have very little intelligence on or
ability to penetrate these groups."

Many of Catalonia's problems with radical Islam are
self-inflicted. In an effort to promote Catalan nationalism and the Catalan
language, Catalonian pro-independence parties have deliberately promoted
immigration from Arabic-speaking Muslim countries for more than three decades,
in the belief that these immigrants (unlike those from Latin America) would
learn the Catalan language rather than speak Spanish.

Although some Catalans are having second thoughts about the wisdom
of promoting Muslim mass immigration as a strategy to achieve Catalan
independence, at least 10,000 Catalans with links to the separatist movement
have actually converted to Islam in recent years.

It is believed that two out of every ten Catalan radicals who
belong to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), a far-left political party,
are converts to Islam.

The ERC, which now governs Catalonia, has
vehemently refused to sign a cooperation agreement with the central
government in Madrid to fight jihadist terrorism.

Soeren Kern is
a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone
Institute

Follow Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook

---

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

2017-08-22T06:30:00.003-07:00

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10887/barcelona-attack

Spain:
Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren
KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10887/barcelona-attack

Share87

Comment

§ Far more difficult to explain is why no one reported
suspicious activity at the chalet.

Failure to Install Bollards on Las Ramblas

"Municipalities should protect these public spaces by
temporarily installing large planters or bollards at access points to hinder or
prevent the entry of vehicles."

The measures were never implemented in Barcelona because the
leaders of the Catalan independence movement did not want to be seen as taking
orders from the central government in Madrid.

El Periódico de Catalunya, a paper based in
Barcelona, elaborated:

Failure to Heed Warnings

It remains unclear why Catalan authorities failed to increase
security in light of the warnings and threats. El Periódico wrote:

However, neither the authorities nor the citizens seems to have
realized that their city is on the same list of targets as other major cities
such as New York, Paris, London or Madrid."

Failure to Report Suspicious Activity

Investigators later found traces of the
explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), also known as the "Mother of
Satan," a substance widely used by members of the Islamic State in Europe.

Failure to Follow-Up on Leads

Catalan Migration Policy Fuels Radicalization

A five-page diplomatic cable, dated October 2, 2007, described the link between mass immigration to Catalonia
and the rise of radical Islam in the region:

It is believed that two out of every ten Catalan radicals who
belong to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), a far-left political party,
are converts to Islam.

The ERC, which now governs Catalonia, has
vehemently refused to sign a cooperation agreement with the central
government in Madrid to fight jihadist terrorism.

Soeren Kern is
a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone
Institute

Follow Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook

---

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

2017-08-22T06:30:00.001-07:00

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10887/barcelona-attack

Spain:
Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren
KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/10887/barcelona-attack

Share87

Comment

§ Far more difficult to explain is why no one reported
suspicious activity at the chalet.

Failure to Install Bollards on Las Ramblas

"Municipalities should protect these public spaces by
temporarily installing large planters or bollards at access points to hinder or
prevent the entry of vehicles."

The measures were never implemented in Barcelona because the
leaders of the Catalan independence movement did not want to be seen as taking
orders from the central government in Madrid.

El Periódico de Catalunya, a paper based in
Barcelona, elaborated:

Failure to Heed Warnings

It remains unclear why Catalan authorities failed to increase
security in light of the warnings and threats. El Periódico wrote:

However, neither the authorities nor the citizens seems to have
realized that their city is on the same list of targets as other major cities
such as New York, Paris, London or Madrid."

Failure to Report Suspicious Activity

Investigators later found traces of the
explosive triacetone triperoxide (TATP), also known as the "Mother of
Satan," a substance widely used by members of the Islamic State in Europe.

Failure to Follow-Up on Leads

Catalan Migration Policy Fuels Radicalization

A five-page diplomatic cable, dated October 2, 2007, described the link between mass immigration to Catalonia
and the rise of radical Islam in the region:

It is believed that two out of every ten Catalan radicals who
belong to the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC), a far-left political party,
are converts to Islam.

The ERC, which now governs Catalonia, has
vehemently refused to sign a cooperation agreement with the central
government in Madrid to fight jihadist terrorism.

Soeren Kern is
a Senior Fellow at the New York-based Gatestone
Institute

Follow Soeren Kern on Twitter and Facebook

---

Ghulam Muhammed

France: A Decomposing Civilization

‘CIA and Mossad created ISIS’, says Julian Assange as Wikileaks releases 500k US cables

Aadhaar Overkill - Editorial - The Times of India (New Delhi edition), 30 Oct 2017

Malignant mindset

What Killed the Promise of 'Muslim Communism'? By John T. Sidel, The New York Times

What Killed the Promise of 'Muslim Communism'?

Exploring the history and legacy of Communism, 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars - By Andrew Bacevich - LobeLog

How We Learned Not To Care About America’s Wars

Sujata Mody questions Western notions of Feminism

Sujata Mody. <sujatamody063@gmail.com>

Taking Educational Institutions Backwards - By Sandeep Pandey - Mainstream Weekly

Taking Educational Institutions Backwards

Westerners: Guilty of Reading the News

Wazeer e Kharija Khuwaja Asif ne Americans ko Khari khari suna dein

America's Jews Are Driving America's Wars -By Philip Giraldi - www.unz.com

Europe: The Great White Death?

The Theft of the Raj: The British Empire in India

Aung San Suu Kyi made her first public speech on the violence in Rakhine.

Jinnah, Rohingyas and Pakistan, Current Affairs, Yasser Latif Hamdani, New Age Islam

Amid fear of deportation, Rohingya Muslims seek 'justice from world'

Germany Heading for Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

Germany Heading for Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

by Soeren Kern

September 8, 2017 at 5:00 am

European Court Orders EU Countries to Take Migrants

European Court Orders EU Countries to Take Migrants

"Politics has raped European law and values."

Has France Been Bought by a State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism? by Drieu Godefrid iAugust 31, 2017

Has France Been Bought by a State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism?

The Fake News Media of Sweden By Nima Gholam Ali Pour

The Fake News Media of Sweden

by Nima Gholam Ali Pour

August 30, 2017 at 4:00 am

My Family, Partition and Me: India 1947 - Episode 2/2

India: Triple Talaq Verdict, Gender Justice and RSS Combine | LS Herdenia

August 24, 2017

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

Failure to Install Bollards on Las Ramblas

Failure to Heed Warnings

Failure to Report Suspicious Activity

Failure to Follow-Up on Leads

Catalan Migration Policy Fuels Radicalization

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

Failure to Install Bollards on Las Ramblas

Failure to Heed Warnings

Failure to Report Suspicious Activity

Failure to Follow-Up on Leads

Catalan Migration Policy Fuels Radicalization

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

Spain: Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

Failure to Install Bollards on Las Ramblas

Failure to Heed Warnings

Failure to Report Suspicious Activity

Failure to Follow-Up on Leads

Catalan Migration Policy Fuels Radicalization

Sujata Mody. sujatamody063@gmail.com

Germany Heading for
Four More Years of Pro-EU, Open-Door Migration Policies

September 8,
2017 at 5:00 am

European Court Orders EU
Countries to Take Migrants

"Politics has raped
European law and values."

Has France Been Bought by a
State Sponsor of Islamic Terrorism?

The
Fake News Media of Sweden

August 30,
2017 at 4:00 am

Spain:
Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren
KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

Spain:
Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren
KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am

Spain:
Barcelona Attack Was Preventable

by Soeren
KernAugust 22, 2017 at 5:00 am