Nur ein Wort

☫ Saudade of reality

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Tue, 10 May 2011 13:32:00 +0000

Analysis The wave of GCC failures, now strikes Yemen

Saudade of reality

Saudade is a unique Galician and Portuguese word roughly explained as,

“A feeling of nostalgic longing for something or someone that one was fond of, and which is lost. It often carries a fatalist tone and a repressed knowledge that the object of longing might really never return."

Enrique Ruiz (Discriminate or Diversify)

The Saud Family: Astray From Reality

It was February of 2011, and the popular will of Egypt had the dictator Hosni Mubarak clinging to a rope. As soon as Mubarak's rule had began in 1981, the founder of the Islamic Revolution, Ayatallah Ruhollah Khomeini, was consistently condemning the illegitimacy of the foreign-appointed Pharaoh and his state apparatus (ZK).

Thanks to the 'international community' whitewashing of the brutal regime, Egyptians would need 30 years to take things into their own hands. With a delay of three decades - and only once things became too obvious to be silenced any longer - our most notorious Western NGOs finally echoed Khomeini's calls of the 1980s, and even Washington saw itself forced to fold behind few days later. Most likely not because of a concern for freedom or democracy, but fearing blowback.

And therefore, at the height of the protests in Tahrir square, only the most enthusiastic supporters of Mubarak's secularist regime were left to undermine the realities of the revolution. Al Arabiya, one of the official voices of the Saud family and partner oil emirati regimes (a Saudi-sponsored partnership called GCC - for Persian Gulf Cooperation Council) was one of the last media outlets coming into the aid of the ailing Egyptian dictatorship (example: Nur ein Wort).

This was not even new for 2011, as the Saud family was the first to give shelter to the dictator freshly overthrown from Tunisia (Nur ein Wort).

Saud-ade Of Reality Ensues

The GCC's calculated omissions and distortions of events surrounding the Arab revolts were only warming up with Egypt.

When the time came for Libya, the false reporting of Western media to justify a military intervention on the African oil-rich country (PhilStar) were seized by Jordan and GCC members (UAE and Qatar) to test the toys - fighter jets and weaponry - that they had received as a reward for fueling the US military industry. While seeking for a share in the oil contracts of a to-be fragmented Libya, they ignored that they were embarking into a much deeper entanglement.

By the time the most gross brutalities ensued against the protesters in Bahrain, the GCC rushed to blame Iran of interventionism, and to play the sectarian card, a card learned from their arms' suppliers. Ironically, using it as an excuse to militarily invade Manama and help the Khalifa monarchy there further crush the Bahraini people (Morning Star). People who have received no millionaire contributions from Washington to protest in regime change attempts, especially since the US Fifth Fleet feels so comfortable under the Saud-Khalifa protection in the waters of the Persian Gulf small island. Yet no matter how brutal the oppression, which latest victim has been a 6-year old kid (NBC), the GCC has certainly gambled -and wildly- against the reality of a country where Shias who are denied political rights and social participation, and Sunnis who recognize the injustices and lack of self-determination, form a certain overwhelming majority.

Once the millions of dollars that the US State Department poured into Syria regime change attempts since Bush's times (Washington Post) finally bore some fruits, the GCC once more saw another chance to prove itself useful to the aims of the Tel-Aviv regime at crippling the Resistance (Nur ein Wort). With former Mossad chief admitting that the protests are helping Israel (Haaretz), the Saud begin to show signs of frustration via Al Arabiya's calls for faster and more resolved actions from the international community against Al Assad (Al Arabiya). Although it is not clear what is to come from the foreign-hijacked unrest in the Levant, Al Arabiya has given continuity to its practices, by showing the protests in Bahrain as if they were in Syria (Al Arabiya), proving the dishonesty on which the GCC relies to achieve political goals.

Most recently, in a new attempt to legitimize Washington's occupations in the Middle East and Central Asia, Al Arabiya has spread a fake picture of Bin Laden's death throughout the Arab world (Nur ein Wort). Something that proves instrumental for Obama's ambitions to justify further military intervention and drones' bombing of innocent civilians in Pakistan for the sake of keeping the war "on" terror fresh.

One episode after another, the Saud and emirati regimes have tried to portray themselves as an influential regional power, but having no other result than getting caught up in extremely unpredictable scenarios - with high chances of backfiring in some of their own regimes - and needing to display their deceptive manners in the open. All of this only helps to gradually awaken the Arab people and to bring down the mirages that the occupiers of Hijaz badly rely on.

Yemen: The Latest Chapter

In their most recent estrangement from reality, the Saud family and its GCC cousins claimed themselves credible brokers of a deal between the protesters in Yemen and the dictatorship of Sanaa. The deal was to give immunity to the outgoing Saleh, for his three decades of abuse of power, and partner in crime to the GCC just last year, when Saudi fighter jets rushed to slaughter Yemeni civilians and Houthi rebels who sought to oppose the Al-Qaeda-breeding US-backed regime (Nur ein Wort).

But at the last minute, Saleh betrayed his former associates, and backed out from signing the deal, showing how the secular nationalisms that run through the GCC are to incessantly undermine every attempt for the organization to portray itself as an influential power, or at least one that could be of any use for its foreign managers.

The many ways in which the Saud family and partner monarchies have alienated themselves from reality and regarded God - if they even believe in God - as negligent as their own selves, is bound to cost them dearly sooner or later. The lessons on what is the ultimate fate of those who sought to impose their personal and foreign-imported whims onto their peoples is carved now all around them, whether by looking West to Tunisia and Egypt, North to Turkey, or East to Iran.

//End

☫ Fatima Zahra's key to understanding

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sat, 07 May 2011 13:08:00 +0000

Analysis On the martyrdom anniversary of the Prophet's daughter

Fatima Zahra's key to understanding

Condolences on the martyrdom anniversary of Fatima Zahra, daughter of Prophet Mohammad, and Mother of the Imams.

A courageous woman whose refusal to bow down to tyrants earned her broken ribs, a miscarriage and ultimately martyrdom.

The Umayyad dynasty, while invading Christian Spain as self-made ambassadors of Islam, murdered Fatima's both sons, Hassan and Hossein, Prophet Mohammad's beloved grandsons.

Prophet Muhammad said,

"Fatima is part of me. Whatever upsets her upsets me, and whatever harms her harms me."

Sahih Muslim, v. 5, p. 54

"Fatima is the head of the women of Paradise."

Sahih Al-Bukhari, v. 3

Ruhollah Khomeini:

"She was the essence of humanity. She is the pride of the world."

In my personal opinion,

Fatima Zahra is a key figure to understand the relations between Western and Muslim world. In the West we are usually taught that Islam spread by the sword into Spain. When in reality, those Umeyyad caliphs invading the Iberian peninsula were none others than the killers of the Prophet's own daughter and the Prophet's own grandsons.

This is not a minor issue, because the Prophet himself unambiguously declared his Household as the role models of Islam for mankind, according to the so-called tradition of Thaqalayn, accepted by all Muslim schools of thought. And these were persecuted and assassinated by the same invaders of Spain.

Hence, the story surrounding Fatima is a narration that repeats over and over throughout history. Especially this day, in which monarchist regimes in Arabia claim themselves to represent Islam while:

1) Breeding terrorist movements that preach violence against innocents (The Australian),

2) Setting alliances with the enemies of Islam (Tel-Aviv University) and occupiers of the Middle East (NPR),

3) Persecuting (Democracy Now) and killing (Yemen) the descendants of Prophet Mohammad.

Fatima Zahra is therefore a figure in bridging the gap of worlds and correcting misunderstood historical narratives which cause an innate perception of enmity between East and West. Perhaps it is not coincidental, although mixed with its share of superstition, that many Moroccans adorn their doors - gates between the inside and outside worlds - with the hand of the daughter of Prophet Mohammad.

//End

☫ Tunisia's open arms for change

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Tue, 03 May 2011 14:10:00 +0000

Correspondents A political watershed | by Khaoula Mimouni

Tunisia: open arms for change

Former Tunisian president Ben Ali's 23-year rule came to an end on 25th January after weeks of street protests culminated in the victory of a popular revolution. Tunisia was previously portrayed as 'paradise' but in fact it suffered an era marred by numerous human rights violations and acts of torture hiding behind tourism brochures.

Unfortunately the process of the revolution costed many civilians their lives. A massacre unfolded and at least 50 people (aged from 13 to 90) have been shot dead by police during protests against corruption and dictatorship in Tunisia. A number of young men have publicly committed suicide in protest at Government policies, one of which is Abo Aziz, a Tunisian student from Sidi Bouzid.

Britain and the European Union remained silent; not that we needed their help, but it remains a fact that they allowed the Tunisian authorities to escalate their brutal crackdown with impunity. However, the Tunisan revolution proved that the Arab world does not need support from abroad to achieve liberation.

Though the former Tunisian regime hangs on a bit through the prime minister now, the fact remains that this revolution has succeeded in toppling dictator Ben Ali and, as such, gave hope to the rest of the region on the way for liberation.

The Tunisian people demand a fresh start and till this day they stand strong and will not stop protesting until the old regime is out and no longer holds power over them. Moreover, President Ahmadinejad urged Tunisian politicians to exercise vigilance in face of foreign interference and pay due attention to the needs and choices of their people, and stressed Tunisians want an Islamic government.

The role of Islamists in the political future of Tunisia is now the topic of feverish debate. After Islam was pushed to the sidelines for so many years, one of the biggest changes that the Tunisian people hope for from this revolution is to bring Islam into the light. However, while some fear the establishment of a theocracy, others would like to see political Islam tolerated.

Influenced by the previous regime's propaganda, many women in Tunisia fear a silent Islamization of the country's politics and society. “We don't want a theocracy in Tunisia, we want democracy.” Every day, demonstrators are still taking to the streets of Tunis. On this occasion, it is the turn of Tunisian women. Most are dressed in modern fashion, in jeans and t-shirts, skirts or business suits. “We want the rights of women to be protected, we don't want Tunisia to go back to the Middle Ages, and we want respect for the role of women in society," lawyer Zouhair Mahlouf says.

Protestors carry a placard bearing the words: “No to the Islamists, no to Rachid Ghannouchi.” Ghannouchi, leader of the Islamist Al Nahda (The Renaissance) party, returned to Tunisia a month ago after 20 years in exile in London. If many women had indeed followed the Facebook call to receive Sheikh Ghannouchi at the airport dressed in bikinis, Zouhair Mahlouf would have loved to have been there to witness it.

But then images of Ghannouchi's arrival were for some reminiscent of Ayatollah Khomeini's arrival in Iran. The Tunisian airports were over-crowded with people who wanted to express their joy for his return and show their support for his party.

Some Tunisians were left unsettled. Their fears, however, are completely groundless. The accusation that the group is anti-enlightenment and violent is a total fabrication. That is an ideological argument that is being used demagogically against Al Nahda party. The Islamists are simply demanding their place beneath the Tunisian sun!

There is nothing wrong with Islam playing a major role in Tunisian politics, especially after Ben Ali’s secular regime proved to be no good. Islamist party leader Rachid Ghannouchi returned home on 30 January 2011 after two decades in exile.

While his party Al Nahda was branded an Islamic terrorist group by Ben Ali, it is considered by scholars to have a reasonable approach to political life. Al Nahda aims to take part in upcoming parliamentary elections and compares itself to the Turkish governing AKP. A party that has, after all, shown that Islam could even have an edge over democracy in terms of popular representation.

Ben Ali used the political system all these years to cement the division between religion and the state. But in society, Islam still plays a major role. If the state is to be reconciled with its people, religion must be respected.

This is a pressurized situation for Al Nahda, because in Tunisia nerves start jangling whenever religious fundamentalism is involved. Even though Tunisia is a Muslim country, religious beliefs and practices have been oppressed for centuries. Women cannot wear a headscarf freely nor are men permitted to grow a beard freely and join religious gatherings without being taken to prison for suspicion of terrorism.

Muslims in Tunisia are fed up with these dictatorial regimes and we will not stop until Islam is back in power. The biggest change the Tunisian people hope for from the revolution of 2011 is for the rebirth of Islam and the total freedom to practice it proudly.

Why is it always assumed that a country is run by Islamists is a threat? Islam is the best path for the Tunisian revolution and the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, not the methods prescribed oversees by the West. Only Islam could bring peace, tranquillity and freedom to Tunisia, not secularism, not dictatorship, or any other secular ideology supported by the West.

This is a huge task, but if a sector of Tunisia continues to behave as though the Islamists don't exist, then there would be no difference between the new Tunisia and the former dictatorship. After all, a man like Ben Ali consolidated his power by saying to the West: 'It's me or the Islamists.' Tunisians are not afraid of the bearded ones. As a Tunisian I want to live in a country that successfully manages a political and religious balancing act.

A nation where people are free to decide whether they want to connect to their Creator and Sustainer in a mosque or spend their time somehow else. The author personally believes that 'Al Nahda' party is the beacon of hope for the Tunisian people, optimistic that Tunisians will prove themselves to be in favour of radical change without being ignorant in their own religion, an ignorance that could lead them to fanaticism.

//End

☫ Unnatural politics

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Fri, 29 Apr 2011 07:46:00 +0000

Analysis The blackmailing of Damascus

On Syria: unnatural politics

In spite of my personal distaste for Al Assad, the recent remarks by a top US government Pentagon official on the unrest in Syria (Charlie Rose) have convinced me of how unnatural - an adjective she uses to describe the ties of brotherhood between human beings of different ethnic groups - the Levant protests are:

“Syria has a more fundamental choice (on how to quench the protests). Which is, it has had an unnatural alliance with Iran in recent years, which we believe isn't in its best interest... And we think there is an opportunity for Syria to break its alignment with Iran, realign with the Gulf (monarchist dictatorship) countries and actually, potentially, open itself to an (Israel tailor-made) peace process."

Michele Flournoy, US Under Secretary of Defense for Policy

Notice the logical implications here:

Nobody in Syria is protesting against ties with Iran. Nobody in Syria is protesting to go back under the sphere of influence of the Arab monarchist dictatorships. And nobody in Syria is protesting to open up to the bogus peace process - as a matter of fact, recent signs of Damascus leaning for it were precisely frowned upon (BBC).

Yet Flournoy asserts with much confidence that should the Syrian government follow these three guidelines - which are nothing but the demands of Washington, Tel-Aviv and Riyadh for the crippling of the Resistance movement against the illegal Israeli occupation of Palestine and Lebanon - this will magically bring stability and satisfy the bulk of protesters.

The Resistance: Syria's strategic importance at the center of a growing bloc of Middle East nations, from the Persian Gulf to the shores of the Mediterranean, seeing past ethnic and sectarian divides

That is, the US and its delegates in Syria are not concerned about democracy or freedom for Syrians, but about Syria rejecting the Resistance, and this signals to who is the very source of instability. As a more evident example, a Saud family media station has recently been caught red-handed showing scenes of protests in Bahrain as if they were Syrian protests (Al Arabiya).

Beyond something that might sound to some as speculation, the very Washington Post recently revealed that Washington has been funding the Syrian opposition with millions of dollars since as early as 2006 towards the deposition of the Syrian government, as reported by a US-financed anti-Iran news agency (RFE/RL).

These are clear indications of a foreign axis fueling the bulk of unrest in Syria in an attempt to blackmail Al Assad to give up his alignment with the Resistance movement. If sincerely-intended protesters are not smart enough to detach themselves from it, they are bound to continue eroding their own cause.

//End

☫ Iran in Latin America IV

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 16:11:00 +0000

Analysis Iran in Latin America | Part 4

Imam Ali and The Fearless Tiger

Iran's Victory, Islamic Style

“What would make you know what is the undertaking of the Hard Task? It is the freeing of a slave, or feeding the starved in the time of famine, an orphan which is near kin, or a needy person in desolation; and above all to enjoin one another to steadfastness and patience in God's path, and enjoin one another to kindness and compassion to mankind.”

Quran (90:12)

It certainly is impossible for anyone to know what is in the heart of the Iranian politicians who implemented a fluent opening of ties towards Latin America, or to learn in full detail what their aims and gains have been at each step of the way. But the founding principles of the Islamic Revolution unequivocally show that the positive influence of Iran, far from a coincidence, is an intended consequence of the nature of human exchanges proposed by the fundamentals of the religion. And on policies which are practiced for the sake of God, no one as eloquent as martyr Hemmat who reminds us that,

“If we want God's blessings, His mercy and His forgiveness to reach over us we must have utter devotion [ikhlas]... So we take a step for God's pleasure, we hold pencil-on-paper for God's pleasure, we talk for God's pleasure, we chant slogans for God's pleasure, we fight in defense for God's pleasure. Whether we strike or get killed in this path, we are successful. Nothing scares us, and defeat means nothing to us anymore.”

It is key for Iranians to remain informed of the events unfolding in Latin America, and to explore the historical threads of discords in the region, as they result extremely familiar to even the amateur student of Iranian historiography. At the same time, many people in Tehran ignored that while Western media condemned Iran over a supposed infringement of press freedom in 2009, a military dictatorship in Honduras backed by that same West was assassinating dozens of opposition journalists, with NGOs such as Reporters Without Borders not deeming it worth of mention or consideration as a violation of free press.

Unfortunately, a number of Iranians consider such pseudo-humanitarian organizations -fanned by billions of dollars from Western governments- as legitimate judges on human morals, and they do so precisely because they are not properly informed of world affairs. Being informed is not just a duty of any believer, but a requirement for the benefit of mankind, as Allamah Tabatabaei noted,

“Before all else, members of society should be able to gain a true vision of the world and of men based on the real nature of things. Only then could they know and perform their duties as human beings - in which lay their real welfare.”

These days several Latin American countries, including traditional ally of the United States, Britain and Israel, Chile, are moving to officially recognize Palestine as a sovereign state based on the 1967 borders. And the drive was unsurprisingly spearheaded by those countries friendly to Iran, such as Brazil and Bolivia. In 2009, as a result of the Gaza Holocaust, and after calling for the leaders of the secularist regime of Tel-Aviv to be tried for genocide, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua cut ties with them, while Ecuador ordered its ambassador in Tel-Aviv to leave “as an act of protest against the attack which left civilians killed and injured.”

All these moves should always be measured in terms of their implications, as they don't amount to mere press headlines, but are in practice the loss of millions of dollars for the American and Israeli weapons industries -industries which fuel instability in Iran's borders as well as in Africa and far East Asia-, and ultimately help bring about consciousness to the international community of the injustices taking place in our world, even if the majority of other nations are still bribed by exorbitant debt and a variety of political trickery.

A step and a friend at a time, the influence of the faithful Iranians in the global scenario and its correlation with the courage of other nations to stand up to foreign oppressors and their plots for seeding discord among fellow humans, would seem to be spreading as the teachings of Imam Ali which taught Malik Ashtar to be known as the Fearless Tiger.

//End

☫ Iran in Latin America III

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Thu, 17 Feb 2011 15:04:00 +0000

Analysis Iran in Latin America | Part 3

Imam Ali and The Fearless Tiger

Iran In Latin America: A Threat To Which United States?

It is quite arrant that the presence of Iran in the American continent poses no threat to the people of the United States. Yet it undoubtedly presents a major burden for those holding that nation to ransom by massive debts, a colonialist foreign policy, and a dependence on worldwide drug trafficking rings. It is this protection of the kidnappers of the US, rather than the protection of its people, which has prompted the US Department of State to repeatedly raise threats at Latin American leaders 'flirting with Iran.'

The cooperation that Iran has been providing during the last years to energy and industrial development initiatives from the Gulf of Mexico to the Strait of Magellan runs far beyond the facades of automotive assembly lines, deep water ports, hydroelectric power plants, and health and education infrastructure. Because several Latin American nations have heavily relied on Western foreign aid, they inadvertently opened their doors to development agencies such as USAID, which are notable for invasive political agendas maintaining a colonialist view of what international cooperation is supposed to mean.

But the hand that Iran has been extending, as part of the Islamic duty to help the oppressed and neglected human beings stressed by the founder of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, Imam Khomeini, has for the first time offered a genuine alternative to the Western unilateralism.

Achieving an unchallenged pervasiveness in Latin America with the failure of the Soviet Union, Western so-called cooperation agencies finished consolidating the weaving of two heinous enterprises which had already been brought to life by the CIA-backed military dictatorships when they leveled the region earlier on: The generation of massive external debt (primarly owed to the IMF and World Bank), and the drug trafficking industry (particularly of cocaine).

a. DEBT, OR THE LOSS OF SOVEREIGNTY

Table 1 shows how massive external debt was generated in an artificial manner in Latin America in two different stages, in a collusion between CIA-backed dictatorships, the IMF, the World Bank, and subsequent pro-US Latin American governments.

Country indebted to IMF/World Bank	Debt % at start of US-backed dictatorship	Debt % at end of US-backed dictatorship	Debt % in 1996 (through US DoS)
Argentina	9.3	48.9	93.8
Bolivia	0	2.7	5.2
Brazil	5.1	105.1	179
Chile	5.2	18	27.4
El Salvador	0.9	2.2	2.2
Haiti	0	0.7	0.9
Paraguay	0.1	2.4	2.1

Table 1. Generation of debt in Latin America (or loss of sovereignty); first through CIA military dictatorships, and later through pro-US Department of State regimes and “cooperation.”

Unbelievably, the importance of the nations' external debt is often overlooked, even when a country enslaved to irrational debt sees its policies and sovereignty overridden by the interests of foreign loaners - often not foreign nations, but internationalist cartels of usury bankers.

In 2010 the former President of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, was asked how did Brazil manage to enter the arena of emerging powers of the world, with an independence to even vote against the unjustified UNSC sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program: “We paid off the IMF, we paid off the Paris Club. We don't owe anything to anybody,” was his brief explanation. Two years ago in Ecuador, Correa declared the external debt illegal, and almost simultaneously he ceased an agreement allowing the United States military presence in the Manta base.

b. COCAINE, THE OPIUM OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE

For the people of the Middle East it is common knowledge that the US official speakers claim their administration to be doing one thing, while actually being engaged in the exact opposite, especially when it comes to the so-called war 'on' terror. In Latin America the story would seem to go along a similar narrative in the so-called war 'on' drugs, with Mexico and Colombia suffering the most thanks to 7 million American addicts and their suppliers.

In 1996 and at the peak of a successful journalistic career which included the Pullitzer prize, the San Jose Mercury News investigative journalist, Gary Webb, unveiled for the first time the deep ties running between the CIA and the cocaine trafficking networks of Latin America. In 'Dark Alliance,' a work triggered by his interest in the rise of cocaine-related criminality in Los Angeles, Webb focused primary in the DEA cooperation with the Nicaraguan contras to ship cocaine from Latin America into the United States.

The implications were astounding. But first Webb had to take the fall, enduring a seemingly organized campaign of ridicule from the rest of the mainstream media, leading many to believe that his premature death few years later was no suicide; after all, how can anyone kill himself from multiple shots to the head? After a very successful passage through the Western media industry, Webb summed up his awakening to the myth of freedom in it stating that “the reason I enjoyed such smooth sailing for so long [in the media industry] hadn't been, as I'd assumed, because I was careful and diligent and good at my job. The truth was that, in all those years, I hadn't written anything important enough to suppress.”

In an editorial article of December of 2010, Le Monde Diplomatique Spanish editor, Ignacio Ramonet, has been the latest one to update the controversy in his article 'Mexico At War, The US Is To Blame.' Ramonet has indicated that the 90% of the weapons in both sides involved in the violence spree of Mexico -police and drug cartels- which left tens of thousands of people killed in 2010 alone, are being supplied by the United States. He further noted that a 90% of all the profits off of the sale of drugs -45 billion dollars yearly- ends up inside the United States, whereas a 10% stays in Latin American drug cartels.

The United States maintains military bases throughout Latin America, most prominently in Colombia, under the excuse of fighting drugs. But it would always seem that wherever an American military base pops up, the drug trafficking market thrives. This is a very straightforward fact in Central Asia, especially in Afghanistan's opium crops.

In contrast, in a June 2010 report, the United Nations congratulated the joint efforts of Iran and Turkey at cutting the Afghan poppy crop down by 48%. Iran's influence in Latin America is going along those same lines. While the US constantly tries to associate independent Latin American governments with drug traffickers, people in the streets of Iran-allied Bolivia are quite aware of the decrease in coca production in that country ever since Morales estranged ties with the United States.

The ease for countries like Ecuador, Bolivia and Nicaragua to stop relying on suspicious American military presence and politically toxic development agencies is rooted in Iran's offering of an alternative and genuine form of cooperation, based on Islamic tenets. Since applying the Iranian experience at cutting down Central Asian poppy crops in the Latin American cocaine silk road would get in the way of a juicy revenue of 45 billion dollars for the United States -plus the earnings from the selling of weaponry-, it somehow becomes clearer why the US Department of State has unsuccessfully tried to prevent Iran's influence from expanding.

At the same time, breaking the materialistic unilateralism offered to Latin American countries by the West and the East, provides an option away from usurping debt plans that take independence and sovereignty away from the people.

//End of part 3 (Next; Iran's victory, Islamic style)

☫ Iran in Latin America II

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sun, 06 Feb 2011 12:48:00 +0000

Analysis Iran in Latin America | Part 2

Imam Ali and The Fearless Tiger

This victorious system of ideas [Islamic Revolution] can be considered under two headings: populism and religion. The use of the word populism, however, calls for an explanatory note: it means what democracy used to mean and is still assumed to mean -- namely, government by the people, direct or representative. However, since the word democracy is now almost universally applied to states which are not democracies as defined in the dictionaries, it can only be said to have ceased to be "lawful tender."

Ivor Benson (Some Angles on the Islamic Revolution)

ALBA Bloc: Communism Or Justice?

The Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our America (ALBA) is a Latin American conglomerate of 8 nations, wrapping up 70 million people, boasting friendly ties with Iran, including Ecuador, Bolivia, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua and Barbuda, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, with Paraguay, Uruguay, Grenada, Syria, and Haiti as observers.

The numbers were slightly higher in 2009, until the Obama administration scored its first military coup: A Honduran plebiscite threatened to turn the US Palmerola Air Base into a civilian airport, and the US wouldn't tolerate giving up on a key airfield along the cocaine silk road. So a president kidnapped, a military junta legitimized by our West, dozens of opposition journalists assassinated, and zero mentions of it in the Reporters Without Borders NGO later, Honduras no longer belonged to ALBA.

Even so, Honduran folk singers of the resistance did have chance to coin the motto “Nos tienen miedo porque no tenemos miedo (They are scared of us because we are fearless),” a slogan that has become more of a defining feature of the ALBA members than Communism or left-wingery. An adjective that right-and-left-wing journalists and academics still stuck in the Cold War era insist on branding onto ALBA, failing to give consideration to the underlying inspirations of the members of the bloc.

As the most categoric example, in the same Bolivia where Guevara's enthusiasm failed to enforce a reductionist Marxism based on materialistic and hateful class' struggles -totally alien to a nation where the land is vast and the population scarce, and peasants are the owners of their own land-, Evo Morales has very successfully brought back respect and dignity to the indigenous majority of the country neglected and discriminated for centuries by European settlers and their descendants. The latter's racist slurs in the public transportation of La Paz against the Amerindians are now only echoes of a sour past, informs me a white Bolivian graduate student here in Tokyo, proud of Morales' Plurinational State.

While Guevara attempted to inject in Bolivia the artificial ideas of the European Karl Marx by force of arms, Morales has incarnated the struggle for equality of the Aymara and Quechua ethnic majorities of the southern fringe of the former Inca Tawantinsuyu who never settled under the subjugation and discrimination of a white minority, and has represented their world view which advocates deep respect for the 'Pachamama' or Sacred Created Nature.

While the Communist Party of Ecuador suffered constant splits reacting to the death of Stalin in Russia -rather than answering to the needs of the Ecuadorean people-, Rafael Correa has actualized the will of his own Andean nation and its historic reality through what he has called a 'Citizen's Revolution,' replacing the Soviet Atheism with the Monotheism of the Christian faith he shares with the 98% of Ecuador.

These examples of nations replacing Marxism apologists with justice-seeking popular movements, paralleled in almost every member of ALBA, serve to illustrate the nature of those that Iran is setting strategic alliances with. Attempts to restore human dignity and resist to foreign oppression and its impositions, rather than proletarian/master struggles rooted in the selfish ideas of a cohort of Europeans and Russians from the outdated era of reductionism.

//End of part 2 (Next; Iran in Latin America:

A threat to which United States?)

☫ A tale on speculators

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Fri, 04 Feb 2011 10:55:00 +0000

Flashbacks The priceless

A tale on speculators

The Idea

He was one of ours. An elegantly dressed speculator from one large metropolis came up with a fine idea: "Everything has a price, thus everything can be bought," he thought to himself, completely absorbed in self indulgence.

Echoes of his own brightness bounced back from walls sheltering nothing but cerebral tissues, making his already numb senses even dimmer. And he enjoyed it. The pleasure got to the point that he arranged a meeting to be attended by the trendiest speculators. And he did this even though his agenda was pretty full. That generous was the man with his own genius.

The meeting was an undeniable success. The atmosphere had that precise degree of thickness at which secrets don't leave rooms and lies become pale enough to sound like timid truths. The speculators all congratulated each other for the precious finding on how to turn their 'jobs' into even simpler and more profitable tasks.

One of them allowed himself to walk towards the large scenic windows of the hall. From there he cast a gaze at the gray city below their feet, contemplating its mutation at every new speech that was pronounced.

Once it all concluded, they rushed with their resolutions to television stations, educational institutions, news agencies, academic communities and publishers. As far as it was profitable to do so, of course. If that was not enough, they could always count on simply doing nothing.

It just took some years, some wars and some rivers of blood, for people to finally accept it. But it was done. The speculators were not only interested in this concept to be long-lived; they were also willing to sit in trial whoever would be daring enough to raise complaints.

The Test

At a given day, of those in which the dropping of curtains glitches, such a person showed up. She claimed her ideals were priceless, and that everyone could find something in their lives that could live beyond any given limit. She was instantly taken to trial.

Finding herself surrounded by nervous and elegantly dressed-up men, some of them smoking as if the world was coming to its end, she slid her existence through the eye of the needle leading to the judging camara. The plaintiffs and their lawyers arrived through the back door.

"It's simply outrageous," some of them thought through their pores. Meanwhile the woman waited patiently for her trial to begin, even when she knew that the rulings were inescapable, and nothing but unjust rulings could come out from the hall.

All of a sudden, the first speculator came forward with the defendant's best friend. They walked alongside an old man and a convicted felon. The speculator tied the three of them facing an array of pipes that the speculators quickly unveiled. The devices all consisted on a shotgun placed at the end of ridiculously intricate tubes, through which bullets were to be carefully accelerated. They could thus pull the triggers and have their victims, at the other end, dying a good number of hours later. This certainly removed much of the guilt from their minds.

The session began. "Do you give up your ideals for the life of this criminal? He has murdered people, but you would still call him a human being. Your ideals for his life?"

Sadness poured from the woman's eyes, but then smiled at the criminal and said: "No, I wont give up on them."

The first speculator then pulled the first trigger. A second speculator continued: "Do you give up your beliefs for the life of this old man? You know him not, but feel you no pitty for this man whom you would still call a human being? Your beliefs for his life?"

With her heart once more drowned in anguish, the judged woman smiled at the old man and replied: "No, I can't sell you what I hold."

The second speculator pulled then the second trigger. A third speculator cried out filled with rage: "Don't you have those which you would call feelings? What ridiculous ideals do you shelter that you let other people be killed for them? I can never understand you beasts. Only your best friend remains. You know more about her than I can tell you, so would you save her in return for giving up on your beliefs?"

Entirely overwhelmed by grief, the woman ran to her best friend, hugged her tightly and then said: "You can kill her, but I know of something that can't be bought."

The third speculator pulled the trigger. A fourth speculator, quite forgetfull of his elegant manners, tied the woman in front of the fourth machine and then asked...

The Answer

A throng of reporters waited for the woman outside the judging hall, so when she finally left the building she was intercepted by the swarm of cameras, flashes and questions.

"How could you let innocents die for your ideas? You were not even willing to to sacrifice your own life!" "How can you be so insensitive?" "Do you see yourself as a murderer?"

Indeed the woman didn't seem to be sad. She took a calmed pause before replying to everyone:

“The ones who died have died as martyrs, knowing that they were dying for something bigger than just their lives: something that can't be bought.”

“Why would I see myself as a murderer? While speculators not only took their lives away, but deprived them of real ones, my beliefs offered them a way to become great human beings. Whose ideals have pulled triggers this afternoon, and whose gave them real lives?”

“About me, they might have shot me too, but they could not even dream of pushing me into non-existence.”

☫ PLO funded Iran opposition

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sun, 30 Jan 2011 13:33:00 +0000

Analysis Revealed in Al Jazeera's leaked minutes

Palestinian Authority raised funds for Iran opposition

The approach was made by Iranians seeking to exploit old contacts with the PLO, but failed.

The Guardian, UK

It was 2009, and hundreds of Iranians fueled by our Western media's passion for democracy --a passion rather absent in Tunisia and Egypt due to some odd reason-- took to the streets embracing the slogan "No to Gaza."

Little did they know that as they chanted, the Palestinian Liberation Organizaton (PLO) of Mahmoud Abbas was raising tens of millions of dollars to contribute to their regime change aspirations in Tehran, in an attempt to prove itself useful to the interests of the Obama administration, and thus gain leverage at the negotiating table with the Tel-Aviv regime.

The Leaked Minutes

The bizarre revelation surfaced from the Palestinian-Israeli secret negotiation minutes, which were leaked in January of 2011 by the Qatari media outlet Al Jazeera (Al Jazeera). The talks, involving the financing of Iranian opposition, were conducted between the PLO chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat, and the US General, James Jones. In one passage during October of 2009 conversations, Erekat is recorded as saying to the American General,

So where do we fit in all of this... in the bigger picture... Al Qaeda and Ahmadinejad… Where are we?… Ten days ago, we had to convince a Palestinian businessman to pay $50 million for Mousavi [Iranian opposition leader] to have a radio station. In the past we went into negotiations and we trusted people and they failed us. We want to help you.

The fact that Palestine, a nation surviving through the last decades thanks to foreign aid, lacks the such funds, can only mean that these arrived via either Tel-Aviv, Washington or Riyadh.

In the same October of 2009, Erekat held conversations with the US Middle East envoy, George Mitchell, in which he also referenced the Mahmoud Abbas' move that sought to appeal to the US administration (The Guardian),

Ahmadinejad is in Gaza and Lebanon. Pakistan is going failed. The Arab states are doing nothing. You know AM [Abu Mazen/Mahmoud Abbas] had to convince a businessman to pay for Mousavi to have [a] radio station.

Response From The PLO

Far from denying the contents of the leaked conversations, Erekat has only vowed to accuse Al Jazeera of taking quotes out of context. The PLO has established a special committee to find out who turned their backs on them, serving as whistleblower for the Qatari network (Ma'an News Agency).

If investigation proves the documents were leaked by employees within the negotiations department, I will take full responsibility.

Beyond The Iranian Opposition

Earlier the same year, Erekat said he had flown to the Iraqi Kurdistan, where the US and Israel are known to train and supply ethnic separatist terrorist groups against Iran and Turkey such as the PKK and MEK (PressTV). The PLO chief negotiator proudly stated on the occasion,

We are breaking the Arab behaviour of going to America and telling him what we need. Instead we are telling Obama that we can help... And Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Jordan all need to tell Obama how they can help him. If other countries think they can use Hamas as a card we will do the same with them. We are not running a charity. Iran is playing games, they are using Hamas as a card.

Back In Tehran

The Reformist opposition leader, Mir Hossein Mousavi, has rushed to reject the claims that link him directly to US-and-Israeli-inspired drives for undermining the Islamic Republic. But many among his own camp long ago ceased to see him as a honest political player, and the Iranian society is already outraged at the new findings, viewing them as significant evidence to try Mohammad Khatami's protégé for treason.

Conservative and Reformist mafias which have sought to oust president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad ever since he took office in 2005 are not to be neglected in the picture, and only time will tell if the balance between their massive economic influences against the push of the faithful Muslim youth, is to yield a sentence for Mousavi.

☫ Egypt: deja entendu

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Fri, 28 Jan 2011 19:07:00 +0000

Analysis Revolutions needn't colors when they are the colors

Egypt: deja entendu

This alliance that we (Israel) have with Egypt, Jordan and Saudi Arabia, is an alliance of anxiety.

Asher Susser, Director of Moshe Dayan Center, University of Tel-Aviv

While the US Department of State has recently urged its media machinery to attempt distancing themselves from falling allied Pharaohs in North Africa, in a desperate drive to dodge future political repercussions (New York Times), the reality remains inescapable:

The Egyptian Mubarak dictatorship has consolidated itself through the last decades as the third biggest recipient of US foreign aid in the entire world (USAID: From the American People), only topped by the US own occupation of Iraq and the Tel-Aviv regime.

The American administrations have not hesitated to justify their financial, political, and propagandist support for secular nationalism around the Nile basin. In one of the most memorable examples, CNN's leading advocate for Muslim secularization, Fareed Zakaria, presented us the Egyptian dictator-to-be, Gamal Mubarak (Hosni's son) in March of 2009. In his GPS show, Zakaria introduced Gamal to his audience not just as a legitimate politician, but a hero for Muslims in Arabia, by setting the claim that his father's secularist tyranny had achieved more for the spread of Islam than any other movement in the Muslim world (CNN) --in tacit omission to the Islamic Republic of Iran, when Zakaria remarks that such progress has been observed "particularly in the (secular, US-allied) Arab world."

Added to the yearly 2 billion US dollars in foreign aid to Cairo, scenes like those of Fareed Zakaria pouring praises over the heads of cold-blooded oppressors of the Arab peoples have been showcased non-stop for as long as Egyptians were still too scared to take to the streets (Nur ein Wort). All along, the so-called torchbearers of democracy in Washington could save face wrapped up in claims of a supposed three-long-decades democratic reelection of Hosni Mubarak.

Yet today the images of uncompromising protests spreading through Cairo, Alexandria and Suez, can't help but to remind of the scenes once widely fanned by Western media in 2009 Iran. What seems more slippery to the collective memory is how those protests ended: not with Iranian leaders reading a script redacted in Washington for engaging into reforms. They ceased, fading into the annals of media propaganda campaigns, when millions of grassroots faithful Iranians poured to the streets of dozens of cities nationwide in support of the Islamic Republic (IRIB).

Thus while Hosni Mubarak goes into the telecast, with the same instructions once handed to the last Shah of Iran (BBC), a very key question comes into the table: whatever happened to those masses who supposedly got Mubarak reelected for three consecutive decades and who legitimized the billions of dollars of American taxpayers going into the pockets of the Mubarak family?

And when the ghost-like nature of those missing pro-Mubarak masses is precisely the cause to the protests which today threaten an important US-Israeli pillar for the humiliation of Palestinians, will our Western media also --as has been methodically instructed to it in the case of Iran (FOX, Boston Globe, Guardian, Wikipedia, New York Times, BBC)-- fanatically prefix the mentions of Egyptian elections as "disputed"?

☫ UK's favorite word is... Iranian

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Mon, 24 Jan 2011 17:15:00 +0000

Analysis According to BBC poll

UK's favourite word is... Iranian

Serendipity -i.e. a natural gift for making discoveries quite by accident- is an English word that Iranians would have widely heard of ten years ago, when a BBC poll determined it to be Britain's favourite, upon counting 15,000 submitted votes through the World Festival Trustee project (BBC).

1	Serendipity
2	Quidditch
3	Love
4	Peace, Why
5	Onomatopoeia
6	Hope
7	Faith
8	Football, Muggle, Hello, Family
9	Compassion, Home
10	Jesus, Money

The full top ten list of Britain's favorite words.

Coined by Horace Walpole, from the Iranian 14th-century fairy tale The Three Princes of Serendip (an Iranian name for Sri-Lanka), serendipity stands as yet another example (Nur ein Wort) of the overt nonsense of some in Europe who excuse themselves on "national identity" concerns in an attempt to censor minarets, hijabs, and religions altogether.

Unfortunately Iranians were robbed a smile or two over the bizarre occurrence, as their Minister of Culture of the time, Ata'ollah Mohajerani, was too busy back then to let them know, opening up the local market (Nur ein Wort) to the books of the Satanist Paulo Coelho (AC2012), architect of the Neda narrative almost a decade later, and director of the Shimon Peres Institute for Peace (Jewcy).

Note: The way in which the author learned of this decade-old news was particularly serendipitous!

☫ Iran in Latin America I

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Wed, 19 Jan 2011 16:30:00 +0000

Analysis Iran in Latin America | Part 1

Imam Ali and The Fearless Tiger

This day are those who disbelieve in despair of ever harming your religion; so fear them not, fear Me.

Quran (5:3)

A mere day before the 2009 Iranian elections I receive a call from the BBC in my room in Tokyo. They want me in their “BBC World” radio show. As a staunch supporter of the Islamic Revolution, I am aware that their intentions are far from offering their audience alternative views. I accept nonetheless, suspecting their panel's utter incompetence at the topic that I planned to bring up: the interesting reach of Iranian influence in Latin America.

As expected, the mention of the Islamic Republic's successful ties in that corner of the world not only infuriates the handpicked couple of Iranian youth flown into the BBC's Tehran studio, Arash and Arezou, but prompts the BBC producer to cut my connection, thus breaking their initial promise to keep me on air throughout the show. What was it that they were so afraid of?

Someone Is Sensitive About Latin America

The BBC's reaction to my expression of support for Iran due to its positive relations with Latin America was not much of a surprise. In January of the same year, the US Defense Secretary, Robert Gates, gave away the American administration's fear over Iran's presence in their former backyard, by stating that he was

more concerned about Iranian meddling in the region than I am about the Russians.

Later that year, the US Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, desperately insisted, cautioning that

if people (in Latin America) want to flirt with Iran, they should take a look at what the consequences might be for them. And we hope that they will think twice.

Regardless of the fact that interference in internal and/or external affairs of a sovereign State and people are in direct violation of the Charter of the United Nations, it is most interesting to ask where does this zealous jealousy come from.

Some Latin American countries were indeed emotionally blackmailed by such pressures, with a still-too-fresh memory of times when the United States covered the region in military coups and the blood of tens of thousands of people who, just as Gazans, voted for the 'wrong' party or leader. As Henry Kissinger thought, the issues were

much too important for the Chilean (or Latin American) voters to be left to decide for themselves,

thus perishing under CIA-backed puppets as Videla who best summed things up stating that

as many people as necessary must die in Argentina (or Latin America) so that the country will again be secure.

However, not everyone in Latin America was intimidated, and those fearless ones have boosted their ties with Iran. Even when in 2010 US President, Barack Obama, resurrected the threats prohibiting the continent to establish ties with Iran, President Evo Morales of Bolivia replied,

we are a sovereign country and we wont tolerate a single threat. He claims Iran exports terrorism, but who exports terrorism really? Those who send troops to invade other countries; those who build military bases there. Those are the ones practicing and enacting terrorism.

//End of part 1 (Next; ALBA Bloc: Communism or Justice?)

☫ HSBC censored ad

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Tue, 28 Dec 2010 09:22:00 +0000

Analysis Our secularist society's ban on reality

HSBC censored ad on women in Iran

"Only 4% of American films are made by women. In Iran it's 25%" With these words, HSBC advertisers stepped into forbidden grounds. Or at least so deemed our secularist Western society.

The London-based bank HSBC was pressured to pull one of its December of 2010 ads, in which it illustrated the concept of tapping into potentials from unexpected places (Washington Post).

The advertisers were not aware of what a key taboo it is to challenge the caricatures against the Islamic Republic -- after all we are meant to believe Islam in politics is all about oppressing women --, and the display of an ounce of positivity about Iran saw HSBC bombarded with criticism from lobby groups and mainstream media, being ultimately forced to pull the ad. All under the excuse that it is irresponsible to confront the myth of female oppression in a Muslim society. Cries on female stoning repeatedly refuted (Nur ein Wort) and supposed infringement of anti-Iran sanctions were floated to add up to the case.

Woman in the Muslim society

In the Islamic Republic of Iran, 60% of higher education students and university professors are women, while our own Western studies of 2010 have determined that (World Public Opinion),

(The current Iranian government) was reelected garnering majority support from women who went to the polls.

Something rather odd if women were being oppressed.

Yet our Western pillars of power (i.e. lobby private interest groups and media) seem to have a big problem dealing with reality. A reality which enables women in a Muslim society to engage in an active social role rather than be reduced to sexual objects easing the selling of unnecessary products. In his Final Testament and Will, Khomeini had made this idea explicit,

We are proud that our women, young and old, regardless of their status, are present and active, side by side with the men, often more active than men, in all scenes including cultural, economic and military areas.

Our women have extricated themselves from the deprivations imposed on them by the enemies of Islam and by the inadequate knowledge of friends of Islamic tenets. They have bravely discarded the superstitions created by enemies through some ignorant preachers.

What does it all mean?

The ad might seem innocent to the unaware eye, but the rush of criticism it drew towards HSBC has only demonstrated how fundamental it is for our cultural warfare to never allow any ray of truth to shine from the other side of the fence. At the same time, it has highlighted the fragility of the stereotypes we have devised in order to keep people ignorant on what Islam really proposes to human kind.

If the undergoing economic failures of our unjust world model weren't enough, these desperate propaganda tactics unmistakably add up to the similarities between our current situation and that of people in the 1980s waiting for the Berlin Wall to collapse.

☫ Blaming religion: Makes sense?

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 10:10:00 +0000

Analysis From ancient to contemporary Crusades

Blaming it on religion: makes sense?

Excerpt from a letter to Jonathan Cook on his article Israel's Right Wing Rabbis Pour Forth Hateful Ideas for The National emirati newspaper.

Upon reading your December 9th article for The National, I felt really curious to know why you would attribute something so intrinsically anti-religious as racism precisely to none other than religion, by associating Monotheism (Judaism) to the fanatic secularism of the Tel-Aviv regime.

It was Monotheism (Zoroastrianism) which allowed the Achaemenids to establish an empire in Iran based on inter-ethnic tolerance including the recognition of over 50 different ethnic groups, thus challenging backwards ideas on Persian supremacism.

It was Monotheism (Judaism) which allowed Moses to marry an Ethiopian woman in times of strict tribalism, even recounting the punishment of those who spoke in racism against such union including Moses' own sister (Numbers 12).

It was Monotheism (Christianity) which unambiguously called on the peoples to love their neighbors irrespective of their social condition or race and which taught of the good Samaritan from the Levant (Luke 10).

And it was the pearl of Monotheism (Islam) which rid not just the tribes of the Arabian peninsula from backwards racism, but rapidly united peoples from South East Asia to the Atlantic Ocean and which insists upon cultivating the love for the peoples whom we are told are our brethren either in religion or brethren in human kind (Epistle on Islamic Governance by Ali Ibn Abi Talib).

On the opposite, it was a lack of Christianity and a betrayal of its foundations -- not faithfulness to it -- which drove the European murderous colonization of the Americas, the Crusades, and the contemporary Western colonization of the Middle East - particularly through new age Evangelical cults and secular academics like Eden Naby and Richard Nelson Frye who promote Persian, Arab and Assyrian racial pride - in clear contradiction and defiance against the advices of Jesus of Nazareth.

In contrast, it was a betrayal of the fundamentals of Islam -- not faithfulness to it -- which saw the Umeyyad conquest of the Spanish peninsula while the very family of Mohammad the Prophet were suffering persecution and assassinations back in the Middle East at the hands of self-appointed caliphs who restored the pre-Islamic tribal sentiments.

And in contrast, it was the betrayal of Judaism and the commandments laid out by Moses -- not faithfulness to them -- which led himself to declare to the tribes of Israel (Deuteronomy 31),

For I know that after my death ye will utterly corrupt yourselves, and turn aside from the way which I have commanded you, and evil will befall you in the latter days because ye will do evil in the sight of the Lord, to provoke him to anger through the work of your hands.

A warning placed into effect by Jesus himself when declaring (Matthew 21),

That the Kingdom of God shall be taken away from you and given to a nation bringing forth the fruits thereof.

That is, not to a genetically superior nation, but one which would deserve them through the merits of their own efforts, the good work of their hands.

According to 2010 Israeli government polls, some 70% of Israeli citizens either don't believe in God or they declare to not take religion seriously (France 24), hardly making Israel a Jewish state with regards for the laws of the Torah.

Among those 30% who do declare themselves religious, the vastest sector is made up of anti-Judaic new age cults like the Kohanim who prohibit marriages even with people who are not "sufficiently" Jewish (Haaretz), some sort of mockery of Moses, his wife and the Torah. This while the tiny percent of genuine Jews are persecuted (YouTube) in the bizarrely-called "Jewish state."

There is a grave problem in attributing to religion what is alien to it, and in particular in portraying the Middle East crisis as a problem of religions, precisely because religion is the solution that has always been there to provide mankind relief from its torturous paths of arrogance and claims of superiority based on genes or tribal adherences. Associating religion with the problem is like veiling the emergency exits of a building being consumed by the flames.

☫ Muslim in France (Part 5)

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sun, 12 Dec 2010 18:36:00 +0000

Interviews Muslims in the Mecca of secularism | Part 5
In the right place at the wrong time?

What If...

As ending for this interview series, a hypothetical question has been laid out, always in the context of the French ban on education and free movement for women wearing burqa, to illustrate the critical importance of modesty - via hijab - for the Muslim woman.

If France was therefore to impose the same prohibitions on hijab that it has imposed on burqa, would the thousands of women affected be able to adapt, or would they see themselves forced to severely downgrade living standards or even make them leave their own country?

Imaneh briefly contests,

This day will never happen. It is hard to imagine. If it happens however, of course I would leave France. I would have made all that I was able to do, but not to remove my hijab, not this!

whereas Leila gets in depth with the reasons of that 'never happening,'

The main excuse to forbid burqa in France was that it hid the face and it didn't correspond to the value of a free woman. They also used the fact that there was already a law in place stating that nobody can cover his face in any public places for safety reasons.

The question of hijab would be totally different, because contrary to burqa it doesn't concern some hundreds of women only, but thousands of women in France.

With the accumulation of frantic debates on Islam, the law against religious signs at schools, the law banning the burqaa in the street, and all the messages of Islamophobia we hear every day in the media, it would be the final straw that broke the camel's back. The limit of the bearable, not only for Muslims, but I think also for the other countries who kept silent until now.

Then in the imaginary scenario,

Am I supposed to leave my country or to change my religion? I'm French. And I'm Muslim. Where should I go then? I think many women would go for some alternatives, like wearing a hat. But if we talk about me, a hat would be a humiliation, so I think I would prefer to wear a real hijab until they arrest me.

At least I would have worn my hijab up to the end. And if they asked me to remove it, I think I would seriously think to move to another country. But I hope it will never happen. I believe in France, and I believe that France needs me.

Closing Remarks

This interview series came about as a reaction to the latest French law targeting the freedom to movement of Muslim women who decided to wear burqa. Instead of a simple attack on the law, it has been a humble attempt at shedding light on the nature and concept of modesty of clothing for Muslim women, as well as their perceptions of the issue revolving around their own lives.

Special thanks to Imaneh and Laila for agreeing to share their views and realities, for the sake of anyone out there concerned in seeing humanity beyond the superficial differences between fellow peoples.

☫ Wikileaks disinformation

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:29:00 +0000

Analysis Information or web 2.0 propaganda pamphlet?

What Wiki'Leaks' is really all about

Word cloud from the Wiki'Leaks' latest series of disclosed cables. The size of each words is proportional to the number of times that the word appears in the documents (FastCompany).

Notice how Turkey, Turkish and Turkey's summed up amount to a hot topic comparable to Russia and certainly greater than Afghanistan and Iraq. Surprisingly, Israel is barely noticeable, while running the vastest network spying on Americans (FOX News).

Consider who are the only ones cheering for Wiki'Leaks' (Ynetnews). And consider the popularity of those who have challenged the crimes of the occupation of Palestine (Times).

Might it be that the so-called leaks, sugar-coated as ultimate truths, are aimed to vilify those who dare stand up to the secular regime of Tel-Aviv?

The certain thing is Wiki'Leaks' founder Julian Assange's hiding turns him into yet another Emmanuel Goldstein (Wikipedia) of our Western regimes, at times Osama Bin Laden and his own Brotherhood were not persuasive enough.

☫ Muslim in France (Part 4)

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 14:40:00 +0000

Interviews Muslims in the Mecca of secularism | Part 4
In the right place at the wrong time?

Why Hijab?

Strolling inadvertently along London's winter, a mere day away from embarking to the Middle East, I run into a Muslim procession coming from the Marble Arch.

While admiring the solemnity of the march, a group of Muslim women approaches me to explain why they decide to wear hijab. Suddenly it hits me: not only are these women not forced to dress modestly, but they are extremely proud of it and passionately defend it as a right.

In an attempt to recreate this impression, I ask Imaneh for her reason behind the wearing of hijab,

I wear it for chastity, knowing that chastity is an important base in Islam! Moreover, it is an obligation in Islam. The Quran (24:31) tells us:

And say to the faithful women to lower their gazes, and to guard their private parts, and not to display their beauty except what is apparent of it, and to extend their head coverings (khimars) to cover their bosoms (jaybs).

And in (33:59),

O Prophet! Say to your wives and your daughters and the women of the faithful to draw their outer garments (jilbabs) close around themselves; that is better that they will be recognized and not annoyed. And God is ever Forgiving, Gentle.

Binded to Reason

Obligation is a word that naturally causes some rejection, but what lies beneath it? The word itself comes from obligare, that is, binded to or engaged into something. Not necessarily a passive concept, but one which requires an active involvement. What is one binded to in Islam? A random dogma blindly obeyed? Leila helps elucidate while explaining her own choice for hijab,

Today I wear it firstly because it is an Islamic prescription and as a Muslim woman it is important for me to respect as much as I can the prescriptions which God ordered to us.

But for me, hijab is much more than a prescription. It is a real protection. Not a physical protection only, but mostly and especially a protection of faith, a feeling of safety in me and a religious reminder.

Because of the French law I could not wear my scarf at school for long years. So I know exactly what it feels to remove it and to live without it, and what is the difference with it. It is strange how a 'simple' scarf can entirely change your way of life and the feeling of devotion to God.

When I was without it I was much further from God, my religion, and my values. It preserves me from my pride. All that leads us unconsciously to the evident desire to be heard as a human, as a soul, and not as an attractive woman who made you more interested by what you see. And suddenly, all the justice of God appears like an evidence.

A Price to Pay for Modesty?

However, an extra piece of garment can't be on itself a simplification. Might it then amount to a burden? According to Leila,

It is exactly because it is not a burden that I have the strength to assume it. It is more of a responsibility, and a very hard one sometimes. I would be a liar If I told you it is always easy and pleasant. But it is a responsibility because once you take the decision to wear it you are also taking the decision to represent every hijabi woman in front of the people you meet, through your actions and behavior. Mistakes are not allowed!

While Imaneh even turns views around,

It's not a burden at all, on the opposite, to remove it would be a burden. I decided to wear it and I am proud of it! Without it I feel naked subhanallah. I was forced to remove it during my studies to make some training courses, and it made me cry. And I can assure you that I am not the only one in such situation.

A Personal Whim

The editor has often wondered if a certain comparison holds true in the view of Muslim women, so he has taken the chance to address the question to Imaneh who positively replies,

I totally agree to say that a hijabi woman forced to remove her scarf is like a non-Muslim woman forced to get naked.

With Leila warning,

To say it would also mean that all the faith of the Muslim woman lives in her scarf, and then if she removes it, she is loosing everything, which is in my point of view not true. Otherwise if we talk concretely, the comparison can be representative of the feeling of the Muslim woman if she would be forced to remove her scarf, in which case it holds true.

☫ Anglo-Pharisee terror

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 08:22:00 +0000

Analysis Assassination of Iranian nuclear professors

Anglo-Israeli terror strikes again

Professor Majid Shahriari from Shahid Behshti University and Dr. Fereydon Abbasi, head of the Nuclear Energy School of the same institution, were targeted Monday morning in Tehran in two simultaneous car bomb terrorist attacks hinting at more US and Israeli assassination strategies aimed at slowing down the Iranian quest for nuclear energy.

Fars News Agency has confirmed the death of Professor Shahriari immediately after the explosion of his Peugeot car, while Dr. Abbasi (above) was injured in the explosion of his own vehicle and taken to a hospital in the Iranian capital along with his wife.

The case is reminiscent from that of Dr. Massoud Ali-Mohammadi earlier in 2010, martyred in a similar terrorist attack which also involved the planting of bombs in the scientist's private car, and which was claimed by a Persianist supremacist cell.

Under a Bush administration directive revealed in 2005 by the investigate journalist Seymour Hersh (The New Yorker), the CIA has boosted its efforts to destabilize Iran through the mounting of black-ops covert operations, involving the allocation of half a billion dollars to dissident and separatist groups in order to create instability in the Islamic Republic.

It was later reported (ABC News) that the destabilization attempts were as well covering the placement of negative newspaper articles and propaganda broadcasts in Iran, as well as the financing of separatist terrorist movements in the Iranian borders.

This new terrorist attack comes only one month after John Sawers, MI6 (British intelligence) chief, declared that (The Telegraph),

Stopping nuclear proliferation cannot be addressed purely by conventional diplomacy. We need intelligence-led operations to make it more difficult for countries like Iran to develop nuclear weapons.

Involvement of Anglo-Israeli intelligence services far from an exaggeration seems to be a state policy, with the Israeli agencies boasting over a sustained campaign of murdering and kidnapping Iranian scientists over the last years (DEBKA).

An influential intelligence briefing published in February of 2006 pointed (Oxford Research Group, pp.7-8),

Given that the aim is to set back Iranian nuclear potential for as long as possible, it would be essential to go well beyond the destruction of physical facilities that could be replaced quite rapidly. The killing of those with technical expertise would have a much more substantial impact on any efforts to redevelop nuclear capabilities.

☫ Muslim in France (Part 3)

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sat, 20 Nov 2010 17:50:00 +0000

Interviews Muslims in the Mecca of secularism | Part 3
In the right place at the wrong time?

The Perception of Prejudices

Beyond the pretenses of political argumentations in the EU parliaments, Leila reminds us that there is a tangible reality for French Muslims to face each day,

Discrimination is always present everywhere. It is a part of my life.

Every day I hear some colleagues, friends, or any other people I talk to asking me if I was forced to wear hijab, as well as others' allusions to my supposed life as a 'subdued woman'. For me, this is a sort of implicit discrimination, involving the prejudices which media teaches to people and which become normally accepted.

When coming to explicit discriminations, isn’t the ban of hijab at school and work the biggest discrimination we can imagine?

Besides from what Leila calls implicit and explicit discrimination, Imaneh adds a more poignant daily experience that Muslim women are subjected to thanks to an overprotected defamation campaign against Islam and Muslims,

Of course there are discriminations, I was offended many times in the street. Just yesterday as a matter of fact.

It makes me laugh. But I have also got a lot of compliments which is heart-warming. Not because of the compliments themselves, but to know that my scarf does not disturb all people.

Constraints From Discrimination

Due to their different experiences and necessities, Leila and Imaneh share somehow contrasting views on how discrimination modifies their lifestyles. Because of her need to work in order to pay for her studies, Imaneh faces the reality of France's secularism in a harsher way,

What is really hard is to find a job as I said. We have to remove it (hijab), and it is a real constraint. So yes, I avoid to search a job with my hijab, even if removing it disturbs me a lot. I cry because of it.

Leila has been lucky to so far by-pass such situation,

Personally, I never avoid going to certain places. On the opposite: I always try to go and meet people. Fleeing solves nothing! I think it is really important to be in communication with others, and most times talking brings results!

But her approach still has validity for all Muslims in Europe who are - whether they fancy the idea or not - diplomats representing an ideology geared towards the improvement of human relations (Quran 49:13),

O mankind! We created you from a male and a female, and made you into nations and tribes, that ye may know each other and treat each other kindly. Verily the most honoured of you in the sight of God is (he who is) the most righteous of you. And God has full knowledge and is well acquainted (with all things).

In Media and Authorities We Trust?

No, I don’t feel respected by the authority and media, with all their emissions and reports. I don't even pay attention to it anymore. It hurts me and makes me cry.

Imaneh's frustrations and despair at the unfounded targeting of her community (Europol: EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report 2009) run deep in the feelings of European Muslims. The consequence of putting no stop to such harassment is a self-fulfilled prophecy from secularists blaming religion over the division of peoples,

That is why today I don't make efforts anymore. I live my faith without being worried. And if it disturbs France, I am sorry but I don't care; in the same way France does not care about me.

EUROPOL 2009 EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report (click to enlarge)

Leila takes it humorously,

I cannot refrain from smiling. The media and the authorities are the first causes of all these debates. Of course I don’t feel supported by them. Islam is a tool for journalists to have a beautiful main headline. Just marry some good words like 'Islam', 'terrorists', and 'scarf', and you will see your sales or your audience increasing. It is magical!

Or perhaps not that magical and not even coincidental (LoonWatch: Organized Islamophobia - The Facts).

☫ Land of the free?

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 20:27:00 +0000

Analysis We are free... to choose our means of humiliation

Naked body scanners or sexually abusive pat-downs?

It was the year 2007, and there was Waldemar Januszczak teaching us that (Britain Channel 4: Paradise Found, Islamic Architecture and Arts - 2007),

In modern Iran, the morality police can forcibly submit you to a virginity test.

This as the producers screened scenes of Iranian women wandering the alleys of Isfahan, perhaps -- we were forced to imagine -- a mere step away from facing a brutal deprivation of rights and dignity.

After all, what could illustrate better the arbitrary nature of a sinister regime than the sexual harassment of its citizens? As any fanatic distortion of reality though, this one by Channel 4 was bound to recoil.

It was not just the fact that the incumbent Iranian government demonized by Januszczak in 2007 achieved its reelection precisely by (World Public Opinion),

Garnering majority support among women who went to the polls.

But even more significantly, how the recent outrage sparked by victims of ever more humiliating airport 'security' measures in England and the United States, has evidenced yet another classical episode of our projection of own sins onto others overseas. As Mike Adams at NaturalNews has put it,

The message is clear: Go through the naked body scanner or we will sexually molest you.

Sexual molestation of citizens: Iran or our West?

The blowing up of airplanes was not even a new concept on September of 2001. Already in 1976, the now proud American citizen Luis Posada Carriles signed up as the worst terrorist in the history of Latin America by bombing the Cubana flight 455 and killing its 73 passengers (FBI).

In spite of such a long precedent, the sexual humiliation of airplane passengers did not arrive until the so-called War on Terror (Nur ein Wort). In the last decade, the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) of the US Department of Homeland Security has deployed so-called 'full body scanners' so widely that (ABC News),

More than 300 body scanners are now being used in 65 airports across the United States alone.

And a thousand new naked body scanners have been announced for 2011 also in that country alone. Britain does not stay behind (BBC).

Behind the euphemisms

'Full body scanners' actually refers to millitimeter wave scanners not just causing hazards to human health (AFP, Daily Mail), but capturing images of people's fully naked bodies with a great detail of genitalia, to the extent of bumping into child pornography laws (The Guardian).

The claims of the TSA and the British Department of Transport arguing that the images are discretely handled by personnel who do not store them, have been thrown overboard in repeated opportunities. In February of 2010, Bollywood star Shah Rukh Khan reported that revealing images of his naked body scan were circulated around Heathrow airport of London by the staff (Huffington Post). He further described his experience,

I was in London recently going through the airport and these new machines have come up, the body scans. You've got to see them. It makes you embarrassed. You walk into the machine and everything - the whole outline of your body - comes out.'

Our freedom to choose... how shall we be humiliated

Although air travelers are seldom informed about it, there is an alternative to presenting their naked bodies to strangers of unknown moral standards. Up until recently, the pat-down modality of searching for weapons on passenger's bodies was performed with the back of the hands on sensitive body parts.

However under brand new guidelines, security officers are instructed to make use of their palms and fingers to probe people's bodies, including on breast and groin areas (LA Times), in what some people have called a 'humiliating X-rated' pat-down technique.

In the first weeks of November 2010, the concerns have even spread to pilot unions in the United States, with some of them advising members to opt out from naked body scanners in order to avoid cumulative radiation exposure, but warning of the gruesome nature of the personal intense pat-downs.

One pilot union president reported that a US Airways pilot selected for a pat-down (ABC News),

Experienced a frisking that left him unable to function as a crew member. The words the pilot used to describe the incident was 'sexual molestation'. He afterwards vomited in his own driveway while contemplating going back to work.

Regimes sexually harassing their citizens

An increasing number of Westerners conclude that American and British airport security agents either want to see your naked body or feel it with their hands. Mike Adams points (Natural News),

If a security guard at a grocery store groped little children with his fingers and took naked body scanner pictures of customers, he would be arrested as a sex crime offender. So why are we letting our own federal government commit sex crimes against us when we'd be thrown in prison for the same lewd behavior?

Not a far shot from Januszczak's story on Iranian women submitting to virginity tests by the supposedly evil moral police of Iran. Unlike that tale though, the violation of basic human rights and of dignity taking place in our airports is no fiction, but a reality for tens of thousands of people who are submitted to naked body scanners or aggressive pat-down searches every single day only in the United States.

The question is left for those who trivialize their own humiliation and deprivation of rights while claiming our West to be free: What could illustrate better the arbitrary nature of a sinister regime than the sexual harassment of its citizens?

Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither.

Benjamin Franklin

☫ Why Yemen?

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 12:36:00 +0000

Analysis Building bridges for Bin-Laden, Inc.

Obama seeks sincere 'bridging' of gaps

Yemen is a great place to clearly distinguish how the so-called War on Terror is not much more of an euphemism for the backing of terrorism to be blamed on Islamic Fundamentalism.

The Christmas Underwear Bomber

Not even a year ago, in December of 2009, the exact same incompetence that allowed hijackers to fly planes into buildings on September of 2001 in the country boasting a bigger Defense budget than the entire rest of the world combined, made sure that the young Nigerian Abdul Mutallab would find his way into the land of James Madison, who had much earlier observed,

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.

It was Christmas. That is, the perfect timing for a terrorist attack that could get Muslims and Christians into fearing and hating each other more for the profit of the anti-religious zealots. Mutallab somehow managed to catch a plane from Nigeria to Schipol airport in the Netherlands, and was later found trying to ignite his explosive underwear in the Amsterdam-Detroit flight 253.

There was nothing careless about this incompetence though. Not only did the US Department of State comfortably brush off the dire warnings on Mutallab being up to no good presented by his own father in the US Embassy of Abuja days before the flight (BBC: Father alerted US about Nigerian plane bomb suspect), but he had already been awarded one of those 'very easy to get' American Visas while being a known Al-Qaeda trainee.

Allowing Adbulmutallab to keep the visa increased chances federal investigators would be able to get closer to apprehending the terror network he is accused of working with.

Said Patrick F. Kennedy, an undersecretary for management at the State Department, in testimony before the House Committee on Homeland Security (Detroit News: Terror suspect kept visa to avoid tipping off larger investigation).

That is to say, the reason why the general public is subjected to increasingly humiliating airport security searches around the world (Nur ein Wort) is so actual terrorists like Mutallab can board our planes with the certainty that no one else will get in their way.

Under the same excuse, every single terrorist act in the last decades might as well been left off to take place in order to avoid tipping off larger investigations. After all, those evil Muslims are supposedly trying to take over the world, so no investigation could ever be large-scale enough.

A Sequel: The Female Yemenese Mail Bomber

It doesn't even seem necessary to reinvent strategies or slogans to embark in the first American invasion and genocide of the recently-started decade, as the same 'conclusive intelligence' that pointed fingers at Iraq and its stockpiles of WMDs, now unanimously drives us to Yemen, in a series of repetitive plays of ever more ridiculous narrative.

Yemeni security forces arrested a woman suspected of sending two parcel bombs. The woman was arrested along with her mother after her mobile phone number was found on the receipt for the parcel bombs.

A Yemeni security official told AFP (Jakarta Globe: Yemen arrests woman over plane bomb plot).

It makes one wonder though, why would key related news from the previous days, informing that FBI probes on UPS packages found no explosives, would be removed (Bloomberg: FBI probes packages on UPS jets; toner unit shows no explosives, taken from Internet cache upon its deletion).

One would believe that a medical student from one of the top universities of the country would take precautions to not even leave fingerprints behind. Her father, a petroleum engineer, must be wondering how his daughter could not even think that her mom's phone number was somehow more incriminating. Unless...

A Yemen Before the Media Spotlight

For most people, who just tune in to the global affairs, Yemen might just sound like yet another exotic wasteland about to meet the wrath of the 'spreading of freedom and democracy.'

But for those who have been sharing the suffering of the Yemeni people for a longer while, the recent events and cooking of books by the grand master chefs of the hijacked American foreign policy is far from a surprise. It is rather a confirmation that the slaughtering of innocent children, men, and women in north Yemen (warning: very perturbing scenes) performed by the Saud family had all along full blessings from its allies in the White House.

Opposite to what our media would prefer us to believe, history in Yemen did not start last year in the hands of a Nigerian youth aided by the US Intelligence to attempt blowing up a transatlantic plane. People in Yemen have been enduring a Saud American-backed artificial regime forced on them before many of us had even been born.

The fact that this regime is clearly anti-Islamic is best noted in the eloquence of the opposition leader Abd Al-Rahman Ali Al-Jifri: Sunni cleric attacks Saudi distortions of Islam. And therefore the question: If Al Qaeda is really an Islamic Fundamentalist terrorist group, why isn't it fighting against the Sana'a and Riyadh regimes, and instead focuses on the assassination of innocents, a practice strictly forbidden in the Quran?

Obama's Aid to the Yemeni Dictatorship

While Obama pretends to be concerned about human rights in China and Iran, claiming to join the cause of so-called freedom fighters under iconic episodes of US and European interventionism, he himself has had no problem to rush into aiding the Sana'a regime's cleansing of its own people. Its main military backers in Riyadh have just been awarded a USD$60 billion deal in weapons by the 2009 Peace Nobel laureate (Xinhua: US announces 60-billion-dollar arms sale to Saudi Arabia).

But comes this as such a shocker? It is not like the Western world didn't fully back Saddam Hussein in the past when attempting a holocaust of Kurds, Sunnis and Shias of Iraq and Iran with chemical weapons. And it is not like previous US administrations didn't back the criminal Talibans to gain power in Afghanistan - with all their oppression to women and cruel murderous ways included - through a massive recruitment via Riyadh.

Why Yemen? Why Now?

For the movers and shakers of Western foreign policy, securing Yemen has a tremendous geopolitical importance.

It is not just the fact that the big Shia population there and along the Red Sea coast of Saudi Arabia might very well pose a serious threat to traditional strongholds and breeders of false Islamic extremism (e.g. Al Qaeda, Talibans, Lashkar-e Toiba) of Saudi Arabia and Yemen, key in Western operations against its foes China and Russia as well as the demonization of Islamic Fundamentalism (a way of undermining occupied nations' resistances in the Middle East).

It also is the case that Yemen boasts one of the most strategic locations in the world: As if having the Islamic Republic of Iran in control of the strait of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf was not enough of a headache for Western ambitions, the fragile US-backed dictatorship of Yemen guards the Bab Al-Mandeb strait, critical for the naval traffic through the Red Sea basin.

Having such two key water passageways at stake is a certain no-no. Not just for foreign colonialists, but even for the financial interests of the Bin Laden family: Osama's own half-brother is set to build the biggest suspension bridge in the world from Yemen to Djibouti in Africa at the mouth of the Gulf of Aden (The Independent: Bin Laden brother unveils £100bn plan for world's longest bridge).

For Yemeni people it must sound far from a coincidence that Bab Al-Mandeb actually means 'The Gate of Scars.'

One can only wonder if us, the people, on whom ignorance and indifference the hijackers of the US count on, will fulfill their expectations or not. Whatever the outcome, if Obama had really looked into the Holy Quran, rather than laying his hands on it for a political act in Cairo, he would have found an aya rendering him defeated before giving any further step (3:54),

They plotted and God planned, but God is the best of planners

☫ Muslim in France (Part 2)

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Tue, 02 Nov 2010 07:15:00 +0000

Interviews Muslims in the Mecca of secularism | Part 2
In the right place at the wrong time?

To Integrate Or To Disintegrate: Perchance Hijab Ain't the Rub

When a secularist realizes that oppressing others for his own peace of mind wont find public acceptance, a catchy maxim is resorted to,

Hijab prevents women from integrating to society. Hijab is, therefore, against their own wellbeing and we seek to help them.

Such concern for Muslim women could pass as sincere if those words were most prominently advocated by Muslim women themselves. Awkwardly, the claim raises most often from men who are not only outside the Muslim community, but have altogether no Muslim acquaintances - let alone bothering asking a Muslim woman for an opinion.

When this laziness is overcome though, the responses that are to be encountered drift apart from the convenient clause above. Asked whether the banning of religious clothing can be taken as a move towards integration, Leila answers,

It will only strengthen the real problem, and entrain all these Muslim women into opposition, by making them feel persecuted and disregarded by their own country. Do really secularists think naively that these women will tell to themselves that it will "help" them? In reality, if they want to ban the Islamic clothing it is only for their own interest, and to calm their own fears.

She thinks that what prevents Muslim women from integrating

Is not because of their scarves, but because they unconsciously trusted this propaganda in the media, which wants us to believe that hijab goes against integration.

Imaneh's experience is, however, beyond a problem in her own mentality, and more of a crude reality of humiliation that she is forced to experience to earn herself an education,

I personally don't feel integrated, simply because they don't integrate me. I am a student, and to pay my studies I have to work. But I must do so without my scarf, because they don't accept me with it. That intolerance is the real constraint for me, not hijab.

Indeed if hijab was the problem, it would be Imaneh behaving differently with/without the scarf - being thus perceived differently by the non Muslim French. But as she states, the change of behavior with respect to hijab is not on her side but on the receptors',

When I don't wear the scarf, people behave very differently towards me as to when I wear it. So I think if France accepts hijab, integration could take place. I think that as long as France doesn’t accep Islam, hijab will not be synonym of integration.

Acceptance and Everybody's Responsibility to Study

Accepting Islam as a way to solve the problem does not imply the French must convert to it. None other than the Quran (2:256) commands,

There is no compulsion in religion; truly the right way has become clearly distinct from error; therefore, whoever disbelieves in the Shaitan and believes in God he indeed has laid hold on the firmest handle, which shall not break off, and God is Hearing, Knowing.

Those who faithfully adhere to the religion are to follow suit. Which entails the question: Isn't it much better to encourage faithfulness to Islam among Muslims rather than unfaithfulness (i.e. moderation, secularization) to it?

When Western authorities try to deviate Muslims from sticking to the fundamentals of the religion and force the clerics of Muslim communities in the West into seminaries for secularization, aren't they actually paving the way for them to divert into - among many catastrophes of selfishly making up own rules - thinking they do have the right to impose a religion/ideology?

A valuable outlook into solving the issue is pointed out by Leila, which is all the more pertinent as it includes self-responsibility, another blessing of faithfulness to an Islam which considers that the greatest Holy War isn't even that outer one to protect the community from external aggressions, but the inner combat against the self,

In my opinion, the first thing to do is to stop right now all this propaganda which pushes the French to see only the differences, and not the resemblances between them. They always search for the differences, and never the points in common. Moreover, I think there is a real work we have to do in the center of the Muslim community. We cannot reach out for integration without making efforts! From both sides.

Furthermore, if the problem was the religious clothing or the faithful adherence to a religion altogether, Leila's following statement would be void of truth, which so evidently isn't,

But there is something that secularists don’t know or don’t want to know: Today even women without any religion and without Islamic scarf are not integrated.

For Western converts like the very editor of this interview, this is a striking reminiscence of a discovery in one's own self that a study of Islam - and what it really proposes for human kind -, far from being the problem, is more than worth the while.

☫ A tea for Monday and viceversa

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Sat, 30 Oct 2010 15:11:00 +0000

Flashbacks Diversions along Oxford Road
A tea for Monday and viceversa

It doesn't rain here as much as they said it would, I remember arguing last Sunday. And since that very night, water has been falling from the sky every single day. I shouldn't have opened my mouth? Maybe, but then again, what does the weather got to do with me?

So it was indeed raining that day I ran into Abdullah at Oxford Road right before our Farsi class, on my very way to wasting time in God knows which waste of time I was about to engage in. I can safely state the latter since I ended up in a café drinking my first ever cup of tea in the UK with the only Iraqi person I have met in my life.

Abdullah speaks quite loudly. But not in the usual annoying way: Rather in the way it makes you happy to be seating by the same table of that person who fills the atmosphere with echoes of passion.

I learned a lot. Quite a lot more than I would have learned reading a fair stack of material on the 80s Iran-Iraq war. Biased or not, I take the story as it comes, because nothing advices me to resist. Plus, it was for a good reason that I was that Monday sitting at a table with that precise Iraqi guy, instead of wasting my time sheltering from the rain rather than breathing under it.

Abdullah thinks way too many people enter the universities these days, when the real purpose of higher education institutions should be focused on a smaller elite group of people, who would be able to generate and create knowledge, a group which he doesn't feel he belongs to. The rest of us should just get to work right ahead, he says, of course in a more plausible way than just that.

Maybe I agree with his observation to a convenient personal interpretation:

What were universities first created for? Many wrong reasons pop into my mind in a reasonable flow. Focusing on careers rather than in life? Forgetting one is aiming to fill the spirit rather than one's CV? Believing that there is more to learn inside a classroom than outside of it?

Quite obvious wrong reasons yes, perhaps throughly debated and discussed over and over again even in highly academical environments. In spite of what I do admit I sometimes forget so, but as long as I am always catching up with the real meanings of existence every once in a while, the beauty of the world keeps shining clearly right in front of my very eyes. And I see it even under the rain, on our way to our Farsi class, leaving our tea cups behind.

☫ Muslim in France (Part 1)

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Thu, 21 Oct 2010 10:42:00 +0000

Interviews Muslims in the Mecca of secularism | Part 1
In the right place at the wrong time?

Islam: Timely Scapegoat for Decline of European Secularism?

Adapt to secularism or move back to the Middle East.

Such is the warning often issued by adherents of depriving Muslim women in Europe from education and free movement - ironically the same ones claiming a concern for women's rights in Muslim countries.

Yet Leila begins by raising an issue which drowns the secularist proverb back into the sea of ignorance that it stems from:

A really important point about women wearing niqab in France is that most were not born in a Muslim family. They are, for the major part, French converts.

Her own grandmother, an American convert who wears burqa and has written a book about her discovery of Islam, attests to it. Leila is herself French by birth, and by all means an exemplary citizen. Her only sins might consist on her fondness for Islam and her pride in wearing hijab. But which 'home' is she and those converts supposed to 'move back' to as a punishment for such grave offenses?

Leila combines her studies of Fine Arts in the north of France with illuminating personal views on the status of Muslims in her nation pointing to the need of self-criticism:

We cannot always react like victims. It is the worst of action plans. I think we have to make efforts too. When you see in France people who are spending their time in the streets, the major part of them are Muslims!

Asked whether these behaviors that represent an annoyance to French society are rooted in Islamic precepts, she resorts to a historical chronology that helps put things in perspective:

Since the beginning of the last century, there was a flow of Arabic immigration to France. But they were very simple people, coming to find a better job, without any actual notion of Islam. We could say that the real problem began some thirty years ago, when the offspring of the last generations saw themselves imprisoned into ghettos, forgotten and neglected by their country.

The reaction of a youth secluded in ghettos was violence. Year after year, the same silence in front of them. And you know what? The debates about hijab arrived in the exact same time. Coincidence? I really don't think so.

All this noise about Islam is just an excuse for hiding the real problems France is suffering from (e.g. unemployment, purchasing power, etc.). It is the scapegoat.

Imane is also a French national proud of her hijab and religion. Likewise, she has no other 'home' to move back to, other than the Paris where she studies Economics. She would seem to agree with the scapegoat theory:

It is true some people from the Muslim community have misbehaviors, may God guide them. But it is not such youth which causes the disturbance, even if it creates problems. The real problem in France has a direct relation with (intolerance towards) the elements of religion, particularly those of Islam.

Imane expresses skepticism over an immediate resolution for a conflict that is swamped in prejudice:

I think we have to wait for the renewal of the generation if we want Muslims, Africans, Arabs, and all their differences to be accepted, because for our generation there is no way.

But what guarantees that things will improve left to refresh themselves? Leila even contests:

We can notice there is more racism and discrimination these last years. Like my mother said, the difference between today and twenty years ago is that if people were racist back then, at least they were ashamed to admit it, in contrast to today!

If, as she pointed out, immigration has been going on for a long while, what exactly changed things to the point of making Europeans proud and open about their racism? As Newton's first law of motion states:

Every body (situation) remains in a state of rest unless it is acted upon by an external unbalanced force.

One cannot help but to wonder, what 'external unbalanced force' has then brought the situation out of 'rest'? Was it just an increase in the number of immigrants and a mounting social pressure, or rather a qualitative change?

Did Europeans really begin to perceive Islam as a threat to their identity in synchronism? The latter is dubious, when much of it can be traced back to a paranoia rush sowed by orientalists like Bernard Lewis who plagued academicist circles with stories about a supposed Muslim threat to the West.

Lewis' zeal for Israel has led him to grotesquely absurd prophecies proudly given diffusion by Western media and academia, including the Iranian nuking of the West scheduled for August 22 of 2006 (August 22: Does Iran have something in store? Wall Street Journal), and France becoming an Islamic Republic in a few decades time. But his influence has remained untouched and repeatedly praised by Western leaders who have shown themselves mastery at messing people's perceptions of reality. One of them, who convinced us Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, former US Vice President Dick Cheney, had to say about Lewis:

In this century, his wisdom is sought daily by policymakers, diplomats, fellow academics, and the news media.

It is thus not much of a surprise that Lewis' prophecies for garnering support for the Israeli occupation of Palestine have even been turned into viral YouTube videos resorting to the 'losing our identity' emotional bribe (e.g. Muslim Demographics), and that exacerbated racism in Europe far from subsiding might only be starting.

What is beyond any question, as Leila puts it, is that:

Even if today the main excuse is that hijab doesn't correspond to the values of France, it is in reality a 'package' of other facts.

☫ The bazar shutdown

noreply@blogger.com (Germán) — Thu, 30 Sep 2010 10:53:00 +0000

Correspondents When shopping centers have a soul | by Ahmad

The bazar shutdown

The bazar is an ancient concept of Iranian culture. It is the name given to the marketplace and economic heart of many cities in the Middle East.

In a Muslim society the bazar plays a well-defined role, in which it entirely merges with ethics and morality. A shopkeeper knows himself working for God and for the people before he works for his selfish interests and the money in his pocket.

Many stories of chivalry circulate through the halls of a bazar, about businessmen who grant benefits to each other. In such marketplace ruled by Islamic teachings, it is very usual for a shopkeeper to forward a customer to another shop when he knows the other shop has not made sufficient daily profits. Many of the biggest shops and businessmen stop selling their products when they feel it is enough for the day, and send more people to purchase the goods from other suppliers.

Entering the modern age, the bazar did not succeed to escape the claws of materialism, but still many qualities have survived from its traditional version.

One of these original qualities of the bazar which has survived the times is the deep connection to social and political issues. Shopkeepers feel a responsibility towards the society, and they shut down their business as a protest to react to some issue of social gravity.

One of the main arms of the Islamic Revolution was indeed the bazar. In many situations the Shah dictatorship saw itself forced to submit to the people's will in order to prevent the economics blackout regarding the bazar. The protests were not merely motivated by finances and interests, but their main inspiration were critical national matters.

For example, if the Shah regime had been receiving an illegal and illogical interest from its master government of the United States as a mere political show, the bazar would be one of the first social organs to interfere and prevent the dictatorship to engage in the game, by means of closing the shops.

After the Islamic Revolution the bazar has very rarely experienced the same social and political activism, because the government of the Islamic Republic relies on the votes of the people. But these days new campaigns have been ignited regarding international issues, as a symbol of national solidarity towards some major event.

Last week the bazar was shutdown for an entire day to express its protest against those who burnt the holy Quran in the United States and to show reverence to our scriptures. This move contains a very deep message for the US government, which is seen as responsible for the development and spread of Islamophobia: This nation is more than ready to confront any plot with the entirety of its social organs and economic, politic, cultural, and religious structures.