http://atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/JG24Ak01.html

Al-Qaeda’s got a brand new bag

By Pepe Escobar

WASHINGTON - Al-Qaeda is back - with a vengeance of sorts. Listen to Mustafa Abu al-Yazeed - a senior al-Qaeda commander in Afghanistan, in a very rare interview with Pakistan’s Geo TV, shot in Khost, in eastern Afghanistan.

“At this stage this is our understanding - that there is no difference between the American people and the American government itself. If we see this through sharia [Islamic] law, American people and the government itself are infidels and are fighting against Islam. We have to rely on suicide attacks which are absolutely correct according to Islamic law. We have adopted this way of war because there is a huge difference between our material resources and our enemy’s, and this is the only option to attack our enemy.”

The interview is not only about defensive jihad. Yazeed delves into classic al-Qaeda strategy - inciting a cross-border Taliban jihad against the US and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) forces and blasting a state, in this case the government of Pakistan. According to him, “Sadly, it is the government of Pakistan which has most damaged our cause. President [Pervez] Musharraf violated the trust of Muslims and contributed to the destruction of the Islamic government of Afghanistan … Musharraf and his government have made big mistakes, there is no such example in other Islamic states.”

Yazeed also said al-Qaeda was responsible for the suicide car bombing on the Danish Embassy in Islamabad in early June, when six people were killed.

So why is al-Qaeda feeling so emboldened to have one of its top commanders on camera - and on a foreign TV network to boot, not as-Sahab, al-Qaeda’s media arm?

I want my emirate
Jihadis now assess that the new Afghan jihad - against the “infidel” US and NATO troops combined - is more important at the moment than Iraq. So in this sense, Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama has got it right - Afghanistan, and not Iraq, is “the central front in the war on terror”.

But it’s much more complicated than that. The central front is actually in Pakistan. Al-Qaeda basically wants a pan-Islamic caliphate. The neo-Taliban, based in Pakistan, are not that ambitious. They already have their Islamic Emirate - it is in the Waziristan tribal areas on the border with Afghanistan. What they want most of all is to expand it. They also know they would never stand a chance of taking over the whole of Pakistan. A Pakistani expert on the tribal areas, currently in Washington, describes it as “a class struggle - almost like an evolving peasant revolution. Baitullah Mehsud [the neo-Pakistani Taliban leader] is but a peasant from a poor family.”

What is startling is that the neo-Taliban are now practically in control of North-West Frontier Province on the border with Afghanistan - whose capital is fabled Peshawar. They already control several Peshawar suburbs.

The Pakistani state has virtually no power in these areas. The Taliban enforce strict sharia law. If local security people refuse to obey, they are simply killed. No wonder the neo-Taliban now have subdued scores of middle- and low-ranking Pakistani officials. They even issued a deadline to the new secular and relatively progressive regional government to release all Taliban prisoners - or else. As for the government, the only thing it can do is to organize some sort of neighborhood watch to prevent total Taliban supremacy. This state of affairs also reveals how the Pakistani army seems to be powerless - or unwilling - to fight the Taliban.

Across the border, in Kunar and Nuristan provinces in Afghanistan, the Taliban now control almost all security checkpoints. No wonder Yazeed - speaking for al-Qaeda, envisions a war without borders. He said, in his Geo TV interview, “Yes, we cannot separate the tribal area people from Afghanistan which are part of Pakistan and the Pakistani people. Yes, we are getting support from tribal people in Pakistan, and in fact it is obligatory for them to render this help and it is a responsibility that is imposed by religion. It is not only obligatory for residents of the tribal regions but all of Pakistan.”

In a recent high-profile al-Qaeda meeting in Miramshah in North Waziristan, the al-Qaeda leadership made it clear it not only expects - it wants the new Afghan war/jihad to spill over to the tribal areas in Pakistan.

And this is what al-Qaeda will get - according to what Obama told CBS News’ Lara Logan, “… what I’ve said is that if we had actionable intelligence against high-value al-Qaeda targets and the Pakistani government was unwilling to go after those targets, then we should.”

The Pentagon for its part is preparing the battlefield - it has already sent Predator drones, repeatedly, over the tribal areas. An air war is in the works - not to mention scores of Pentagon covert special ops.

Al-Qaeda’s strategy is to suck in the US military - this is classic Osama bin Laden ideology, according to which the US should be dragged to fight in Muslim lands. Al-Qaeda is reasoning that an attack on the tribal areas, in fact a real third front in the “war on terror” (so dreaded by chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Michael Mullen) will have Pakistani public opinion so outraged that the Pakistani army would be powerless to follow the US track. And al-Qaeda, in the end, would be left with an even freer hand.

Obama and Osama
How does that fabled phantom, bin Laden, fit into this strategy? Is he alive or just … a phantom? Hassan Ibrahim from al-Jazeera television recently told independent journalist Kristina Borjesson “bin Laden is alive. The kidney failure and dialysis machine stories are nonsense, CIA rumors. In 2002 one of his wives was interviewed for a Saudi magazine and she categorically denied the dialysis story. After Tora Bora [in Afghanistan when the US invaded in 2001], his fourth wife asked for a divorce. He took on a new wife in April 2005, with whom he now has a son. Her father is a powerful Saudi businessman from Hejaz who announced in his mosque that his daughter had married bin Laden.”

There’s also chatter in the jihadi underground related to an ongoing theological debate with direct participation by bin Laden.

Obama for his part still cannot have grasped the full, complex, picture of what is going on the tribal areas - in his current world tour he’s only been to Jalalabad, in eastern Afghanistan, and only for a few hours. But he’s on a learning curve - although, for the moment, he seems to be playing to the US military establishment galleries, pledging to add 10,000 US combat troops to the Afghan theater of war. Al-Qaeda will be delighted.

What Obama has certainly accomplished for now is a certified three-pointer - turning George W Bush administration and neo-conservative rhetoric about the “war on terror” in Iraq upside down and applying it to Afghanistan. Obama has been emphasizing the “growing consensus at home that we need more resources in Afghanistan”.

In his press conference in Jordan, Obama also emphasized his decision to make Afghanistan the first stop on his world tour because it’s the “central front in the war on terror,” the place “where 9/11 was planned” and where “terrorists” are “plotting new attacks against the United States”.

And here’s the clincher - straight out of the neo-con playbook, “We have to succeed in taking the fight to the terrorists.” But that’s not all. Obama’s political jiu-jitsu has mixed this hardcore rhetoric with a global, multilateral vision - not to mention forcing Republicans to accept his own take on the “war on terror”. As for the tribal areas, he projects the impression he is allowing himself time to fully understand their complexity.

So what’s left to self-described national security expert and Republican presidential candidate Senator John McCain? Well, he did manage to tell ABC’s Diane Sawyer the new al-Qaeda and Taliban configuration is “a very hard struggle, particularly giving the situation in the Iraq-Pakistan border”.

Pepe Escobar is the author of Globalistan: How the Globalized World is Dissolving into Liquid War

“Here are two brother countries, united like a single fist,” said socialist Hugo Chávez during a visit to Tehran last November, celebrating his alliance with Islamist Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Che Guevara’s son Camilo, who also visited Tehran last year, declared that his father would have “supported the country in its current struggle against the United States.”

They followed in the footsteps of Fidel Castro, who in a 2001 visit told his hosts that “Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees.” For his part, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez (”Carlos the Jackal”) wrote in his book L’islam révolutionnaire (”Revolutionary Islam”) that “only a coalition of Marxists and Islamists can destroy the United States.”

It’s not just Latin American leftists who see potential in Islamism.

Ken Livingstone, the Trotskyite former mayor of London, literally hugged prominent I slamist thinker Yusuf al-Qaradawi. Ramsey Clark, the former U.S. attorney general, visited Ayatollah Khomeini and offered his support.

Noam Chomsky, the MIT professor, visited Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah and endorsed Hezbollah’s keeping its arms.

Ella Vogelaar, the Dutch minister for housing, neighborhoods, and integration, is so sympathetic to Islamism that one critic, the Iranian-born professor Afshin Ellian, has called her “the minister of Islamization.”

Dennis Kucinich, during his first presidential campaign in 2004, quoted the Koran and roused a Muslim audience to chant “Allahu akbar” (”God is great”) and he even announced, “I keep a copy of the Koran in my office.”

Spark, youth paper of Britain’s Socialist Labour party, praised Asif Mohammed Hanif, the British suicide bomber who attacked a Tel Aviv bar, as a “hero of the revolutionary youth” who had carried out his mission “in the spirit of internationalism.” Workers World, an American Communist newspaper, ran an obituary lauding Hezbollah’s master terrorist, Imad Mughniyeh.

Some leftists go farther. Several — Carlos the Jackal, Roger Garaudy, Jacques Vergès, Yvonne Ridley, and H. Rap Brown — have actually converted to Islam.

Others respond with exhilaration to the violence and brutality of Islamism. German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen termed 9/11 “the greatest work of art for the whole cosmos,” while the late American novelist Norman Mailer called its perpetrators “brilliant.”

And none of th is is new. During the Cold War, Islamists favored the Soviet Union over the United States. As Ayatollah Khomeini put it in 1964, “America is worse than Britain, Britain is worse than America and the Soviet Union is worse than both of them. Each one is worse than the other, each one is more abominable than the other. But today we are concerned with this malicious entity which is America.” In 1986, I wrote that “the U.S.S.R. receives but a small fraction of the hatred and venom directed at the United States.”

Leftists reciprocated. In 1978-79, the French philosopher Michel Foucault expressed great enthusiasm for the Iranian revolution. Janet Afary and Kevin B. Anderson explain:

Throughout his life, Michel Foucault’s concept of authenticity meant looking at situations where people lived dangerously and flirted with death, the site where creativity originated. In the tradition of Friedrich Nietzsche and Georges Bataille, Foucault had embraced the artist who pushed the limits of rationality and he wrote with great passion in defense of irrationalities that broke new boundaries. In 1978,

Foucault found such transgressive powers in the revolutionary figure of Ayatollah Khomeini and the millions who risked death as they followed him in the course of the Revolution. He knew that such “limit” experiences could lead to new forms of creativity and he passionately threw in his support.

Another French philosopher, Jean Baudrillard, portrayed Islamists as slaves rebelling against=2 0a repressive order. In 1978, Foucault called Ayatollah Khomeini a “saint” and a year later, Jimmy Carter’s ambassador to the United Nations, Andrew Young, called him”some kind of saint.”

This good will may appear surprising, given the two movements’ profound differences.

Communists are atheists and leftists secular; Islamists execute atheists and enforce religious law. The Left exalts workers; Islamism privileges Muslims. One dreams of a worker’s paradise, the other of a caliphate. Socialists want socialism; Islamists accept the free market. Marxism implies gender equality; Islamism oppresses women. Leftists despise slavery; some Islamists endorse it.

As journalist Bret Stephens notes, the Left has devoted “the past four decades championing the very freedoms that Islam most opposes: sexual and reproductive freedoms, gay rights, freedom from religion, pornography and various forms of artistic transgression, pacifism and so on.”

These disagreements seem to dwarf the few similarities that Oskar Lafontaine, former chairman of Germany’s Social Democratic party, managed to find: “Islam depends on community, which places it in opposition to extreme individualism, which threatens to fail in the West. [In addition,] the devout Muslim is required to share his wealth with others. The leftist also wants to see the strong help the weak.”

For four main reasons.

Listen to their interchangeable words: Harold Pinter describes America as “a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics” and Osama bin Laden calls the country “unjust, criminal and tyrannical.” Noam Chomsky terms America a “leading terrorist state” and Hafiz Hussain Ahmed, a Pakistani political leader, deems it “the biggest terrorist state.” These commonalities suffice to convince the two sides to set aside their many differences in favor of cooperation.

Second, the two sides share some political goals. A mammoth 2003 joint demonstration in London to oppose war against Saddam Hussein symbolically forged their alliance. Both sides want coalition forces to lose in Iraq, the War on Terror to be closed down, anti-Americanism to spread, and the elimination of Israel. They agree on mass immigration to and multiculturalism in the West. They cooperate on these goals at meetings such as the annual Cairo Anti-War Conference, which brings leftists and Islamists together to forge “an international alliance against imperialism and Zionism.”

Third, Islamism has historic and philosophic ties to Marxism-Leninism. Sayyid Qutb, the Egyptian Islamist thinker, accepted the Marxist notion of stages of history, only adding an Islamic postscript to them; he predicted that an eternal Islamic era would come after the collapse of capitalism and Communism. Ali Shariati, the key intellectual behind the Iranian revolution of 1978–79, translated Franz Fanon, Che Guevara, and Jean-Paul Sartre into Persian. More broadly, the Iranian analyst Azar Nafisi observes that Islamism “takes its language, goals, and aspirations as much from the crassest forms of Marxism as it does from religion. Its leaders are as influenced by Lenin, Sartre, Stalin, and Fanon as they are by the Prophet.”

Moving from theory to reality, Marxists see in Islamists a strange fulfillment of their prophesies. Marx forecast that business profits would collapse in industrial countries, prompting the bosses to squeeze workers; the proletariat would become impoverished, rebel, and establish a socialist order. But, instead, the proletariat of industrial countries became ever more affluent, and its revolutionary potential withered. For a century and a half, author Lee Harris notes, Marxists waited in vain for the crisis in capitalism.

Then came the Islamists, starting with the Iranian Revolution and following with 9/11 and other assaults on the West. Finally, the Third World had begun its revolt against the West,20fulfilling Marxist predictions—even if under the wrong banner and with faulty goals. Olivier Besancenot, a French leftist, sees Islamists as “the new slaves” of capitalism and asks if it is not natural that “they should unite with the working class to destroy the capitalist system.” At a time when the Communist movement is in “decay,” note analyst Lorenzo Vidino and journalist Andrea Morigi, Italy’s “New Red Brigades” actually acknowledge the “leading role of the reactionary clerics.”

Fourth, power: Islamists and leftists can achieve more together than they can separately. In Great Britain, they jointly formed the Stop the War Coalition, whose steering committee includes representation from such organizations as the Communist party of Britain and the Muslim Association of Britain. Britain’s Respect Party amalgamates radical international socialism with Islamist ideology. The two sides joined forces for the March 2008 European Parliament elections to offer common lists of candidates in France and Britain, disguised under party names that revealed little.

Islamists benefit, in particular, from the access, legitimacy, skills, and firepower the Left provides them.

Cherie Booth, wife of then-prime minister Tony Blair, argued a case at the appellate-court level to help a girl, Shabina Begum, wear the jilbab, an Islamic garment, to a British school. Lynne Stewart, a leftist lawyer, broke U.S. law and went to jail to help Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, foment revolution20in Egypt. Volkert van der Graaf, an animal-rights fanatic, killed Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn to stop him from turning Muslims into “scapegoats.”

Vanessa Redgrave funded half of a £50,000 bail surety so that Jamil el-Banna, a Guantánamo suspect accused of recruiting jihadis to fight in Afghanistan and Indonesia, could walk out of a British jail; Redgrave described her helping el-Banna as “a profound honour,” despite his being wanted in Spain on terrorism-related charges and suspected of links to al-Qaeda.

On a larger scale, the Indian Communist party did Tehran’s dirty work by delaying for four months the Indian-based launching of TecSar, an Israeli spy satellite.

And leftists founded the International Solidarity Movement to prevent Israeli security forces from protecting the country against Hamas and other Palestinian terrorism.

Writing in London’s Spectator, Douglas Davis calls the coalition “a godsend to both sides. The Left, a once-dwindling band of communists, Trotskyites, Maoists and Castroists, had been clinging to the dregs of a clapped-out cause; the Islamists could deliver numbers and passion, but they needed a vehicle to give them purchase on the political terrain.

A tactical alliance became an operational imperative.” More simply, a British leftist concurs: “The practical benefits of working together are enough to compensate for the differences.”

The burgeoning alliance of Western leftists and Islamists ranks as one of today’s most disturbing political developments, one that impedes the West’s efforts to protect itself.

When Stalin and Hitler made their infamous pact in 1939, the Red-Brown alliance posed a mortal danger to the West and, indeed, to civilization itself. Less dramatically but no less certainly, the coalition today poses the same threat. As seven decades ago, this one must be exposed, rejected, resisted, and defeated.

Iran in Latin America @ http://centerforsecuritypolicy.org/

Conscious Eating, Okay, But Where (On Earth) Do You Get Your Protein?

Kathy Freston, huffingtonpost

When I tell people that I’m a vegan, the most popular question, by far, inevitably follows: “But, how do you get enough protein?”

There it is again, I think, the meat industry’s most potent weapon against vegetarianism–the protein myth. And it is just that–a myth.

In fact, humans need only 10 percent of the calories we consume to be from protein. Athletes and pregnant women need a little more, but if you’re eating enough calories from a varied plant based diet, it’s close to impossible to not get enough.

The way Americans obsess about protein, you’d think protein deficiency was the number one health problem in America. Of course it’s not–it’s not even on the list of the ailments that doctors are worried about in America or any other countries where basic caloric needs are being met.

What is on the list? Heart disease, cancer, diabetes, obesity–diseases of affluence. Diseases linked to eating animal products. According to the American Dietetic Association, which looked at all of the science on vegetarian diets and found not just that they’re healthy, but that they “provide health benefits in the prevention and treatment of certain diseases.”

They continue: “Well-planned vegan and other types of vegetarian diets are appropriate for all stages of the life cycle, including during pregnancy, lactation, infancy, childhood and adolescence… Vegetarians have been reported to have lower body mass indices than nonvegetarians, as well as lower rates of death from ischemic heart disease; vegetarians also show lower blood cholesterol levels; lower blood pressure; and lower rates of hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and prostate and colon cancer.”

Dr. Dean Ornish writes of his Eat More, Weigh Less vegetarian diet–the one diet that has passed peer-review for taking weight off and keeping it off for more than 5 years–that in addition to being the one scientifically proven weight loss plan that works long-term, it “may help to prevent a wide variety of other illnesses including breast cancer in women, prostate cancer in men, colon cancer, lung cancer, lymphoma, osteoporosis, diabetes, hypertension, and so on….”

So when people ask me about protein, I explain that protein is not a problem on a vegan diet, that the real problems that are plaguing us in the West can be addressed in part with a vegetarian diet, and that I get my protein the same way everyone else does–I eat!

Beans, nuts, seeds, lentils, and whole grains are packed with protein. So are all vegetables as a caloric percentage, though they don’t have enough calories to sustain most people as a principal source of sustenance. And these protein sources have some excellent benefits that animal protein does not–they contain plenty of fiber and complex carbohydrates, where meat has none. That’s right: Meat has no complex carbs at all, and no fiber. Plant proteins are packed with these essential nutrients.

Plus, since plant-based protein sources don’t contain cholesterol or high amounts of saturated fat, they are much better for you than meat, eggs, and dairy products.

It is also worth noting the very strong link between animal protein and a few key diseases, including cancer and osteoporosis.

According to Dr. Ornish (this may be the most interesting link in this article, by the way–it’s worth reading the entire entry), “high-protein foods, particularly excessive animal protein, dramatically increase the risk of breast cancer, prostate cancer, heart disease, and many other illnesses. In the short run, they may also cause kidney problems, loss of calcium in the bones, and an unhealthy metabolic state called ketosis in many people.”

The cancer connection is spelled out at length in a fantastic book by Cornell scientist T. Colin Campbell, called The China Study. Basically, there is overwhelming scientific evidence to implicate that animal protein consumption causes cancer.

And just a few quick anecdotal points:

• Olympian Carl Lewis has said that his best year of track competition was the first year that he ate a vegan diet (he is still a strong proponent of vegan diets for athletes).

• Strength trainer Mike Mahler says, “Becoming a vegan had a profound effect on my training. … [M]y bench press excelled past 315 pounds, and I noticed that I recovered much faster. My body fat also went down, and I put on 10 pounds of lean muscle in a few months.”

• Bodybuilder Robert Cheeke advises, “The basics for nutrition are consuming large amounts of fresh green vegetables and a variety of fruits, to load yourself up with vibrant vitamins and minerals.”

A few other vegans, all of whom sing the praises of the diet for their athletic performance: Ultimate fighter Mac Danzig, ultramarathoner Scott Jurek, Minnesota Twins pitcher Pat Neshek, Atlanta Hawks Guard Salim Stoudamire, and Kansas City Chiefs tight-end Tony Gonzalez.

And let’s not forget about tennis star Martina Navratilova, six-time Ironman winner Dave Scott, four-time Mr. Universe Bill Pearl, or Stan Price, the world-record holder in bench press. They are just a few of the successful vegetarian athletes.

Basically, vegans and vegetarians needn’t fret about protein, but many Americans do need to worry about their weight, heart disease, cancer, and other ailments–many of which can be addressed by healthier eating, including a vegan or vegetarian diet.

Vegetarians and vegans get all the nutrients our bodies need from plants, and will thus, according to the science, be more likely to maintain a healthy weight and stave off a variety of ailments, from heart disease to cancer.

For answers to other popular questions about conscious eating, please check out my previous post on the topic here.  Happy eating!  http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kathy-freston/conscious-eating-okay-but_b_104502.html

Meet your MEAT @ http://www.chooseveg.com/animal-cruelty.asp

Its the Meat, stupid!  @ http://www.pcrm.org/news/release080709.html

Was Ahmet Yildiz the victim of Turkey’s first gay honour killing?

Nicholas Birch in Istanbul

19 July 2008

In a corner of Istanbul today, the man who might be described as Turkey’s gay poster boy will be buried – a victim, his friends believe, of the country’s deepening friction between an increasingly liberal society and its entrenched conservative traditions. 

Ahmet Yildiz, 26, a physics student who represented his country at an international gay gathering in San Francisco last year, was shot leaving a cafe near the Bosphorus strait this week. Fatally wounded, the student tried to flee the attackers in his car, but lost control, crashed at the side of the road and died shortly afterwards in hospital. His friends believe Mr Yildiz was the victim of the country’s first gay honour killing.

“He fell victim to a war between old mentalities and growing civil liberties,” says Sedef Cakmak, a friend and a member of the gay rights lobby group Lambda. “I feel helpless: we are trying to raise awareness of gay rights in this country, but the more visible we become, the more we open ourselves up to this sort of attack.”

Turkey was all but closed to the world until 1980 but its desire for European Union membership has imposed strains on a society formerly kept on a tight leash. As the notion of rights for minorities such as women and gays has blossomed, the country’s civil society becomes more vibrant by the day. But the changes have brought a backlash from traditionalist circles wedded to the old regime.

Bungled efforts by a religious-minded government to loosen the grip of Turkey’s authoritarian version of secularism have triggered a court case aimed at shutting the ruling party down, with a verdict expected within a month.

Against this backdrop, the issues of women’s rights, sexuality and the place of religion in the public arena have been particularly contentious. Ahmet Yildiz’s crime, his friends say, was to admit openly to his family that he was gay.

“From the day I met him, I never heard Ahmet have a friendly conversation with his parents,” one close friend and near neighbour recounted. “They would argue constantly, mostly about where he was, who he was with, what he was doing.”

The family pressure increased, the friend explained. “They wanted him to go back home, see a doctor who could cure him, and get married.” Shortly after coming out this year, Mr Yildiz went to a prosecutor to complain that he was receiving death threats. The case was dropped. Five months later, he was dead. The police are now investigating his murder. For gay rights groups, the student’s inability to get protection was a typical by-product of the indifference, if not hostility, with which a broad swathe of Turkish society views homosexuality. The military, for example, sees it as an “illness”. Men applying for an exemption to obligatory military service on grounds of homosexuality must provide proof – either in the form of an anal examination, or photographs.

“The media ignores or laughs off violence against gays,” says Buse Kilickaya, a member of the gay lobbying group Pink Life, adding that Ahmet Yildiz’s death “risks being swept under the carpet and forgotten like other cases in the past”. Turkey has a history of honour killings. A government survey earlier this year estimated that one person every week dies in Istanbul as a result of honour killings. It put the nationwide death toll at 220 in 2007. In the majority of cases, the victims are women, but Mr Yildiz’s friends suspect he may be the first recorded victim of a homosexual honour killing.

“We’ve been trying to contact Ahmet’s family since Wednesday, to get them to take responsibility for the funeral,” one of the victim’s friends said yesterday, standing outside the morgue where his body has been for three days. “There’s no answer, and I don’t think they are going to come.” The refusal of families to bury their relatives is common after honour-related murders.

Mazhar Bagli, a Turkish sociologist who has interviewed 189 people convicted of honour killings, has never heard of a death revolving around homosexuality but has no doubt that it could be used as justification. “Honour killings cleanse illicit relationships. For women, that is a broad term. Men are allowed more sexual freedom, but homosexuality is still seen by some as beyond the pale.”

While his death may be unique, Mr Yildiz is by no means the first victim of widespread homophobia. When an Istanbul court decided to close down the city’s largest gay rights group late this May, commentators took the decision as evidence of a crackdown on the community spearheaded by Turkey’s current religious-minded government. Lambda Istanbul had been taken to court by the Istanbul governor’s office on the grounds that it was “against the law and morality”.

However, many gay activists are reluctant to draw a connection with the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP), noting it was the first party in Turkey’s history to send a deputy to attend a conference on gay rights. This year’s Gay Pride parade in Istanbul was the largest ever, they also point out. Long active in more liberal parts of western Turkey, gay groups are even beginning to meet relatively openly in the conservative east of the country where Ahmet Yildiz came from.

But according to the former neighbour, the physics student’s blank refusal to hide who he was in any way may have been too much for his family. “He could have hidden who he was, but he wanted to live honestly,” the neighbour said. “When the death threats started, his boyfriend tried to persuade him to get out of Turkey. But he stayed. He was too brave. He was too open.”

Killed by those they loved

So-called “honour killings” continue to be a grim reality wherever conservative social mores resist the rule of law.

In Turkey, a recent government study estimated that around 1,000 honour killings have been committed in the past five years. The victims are mostly young women, murdered by male relatives for transgressing chauvinistic social rules.

Women have been killed for having illicit affairs, talking to strangers, or even for being the victim of rape. Turkey’s justice system has recently increased penalties for honour killings, and ended the practice of allowing murderers to claim family honour as an extenuating circumstance. However, getting a child relative to carry out the killing remains a horrifying way around the law.

The problem is not confined to Turkey. The UN estimates that 5,000 honour killings take place globally every year, from Brazil to Pakistan to Britain. Police estimate more than a dozen honour killings take place in the UK every year, such as the brutal rape and murder of 20-year-old Banaz Mahmod by her uncle and father in 2006, or the murder of Rukhsana Naz, strangled by her family because she wanted a divorce in 1999.

Honour killings have not so far really targeted gay men, although in 2006 a wave of anti-gay killings took place in Iraq, carried out by fanatical Islamist militias. A Jordanian man was shot and wounded by his brother in 2004, apparently for being gay.  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/was-ahmet-yildiz-the-victim-of-turkeys-first-gay-honour-killing-871822.html

Women ‘vow to raise kids for holy war’

Zeeshan Haider, Australian News

July 09, 2008 

Chanting slogans of “jihad is our way”, burqa-clad women, some with babies, listened to fiery speeches from the daughter of the mosque’s jailed cleric on the eve of the anniversary of a commando raid on the complex in which more than 100 people died.

“Our mujahideen (fighters) laid down their lives for the enforcement of the Islamic system in Pakistan. We are left behind to carry forward their mission,” the daughter of cleric Abdul Aziz told the tightly guarded rally in the mosque compound.

Several thousand men attended a similar rally on Sunday to mark the anniversary of the July 10 commando raid that ended a week-long siege that began when gunmen from the mosque clashed with police.

Shortly after the Sunday rally ended, a suicide bomber attacked police who had been guarding the gathering killing 18 people, all but three of them policemen.

The attack highlighted the danger posed by militants in nuclear-armed Pakistan, where a new coalition government has been preoccupied with what to do with the unpopular President Pervez Musharraf, a staunch U.S. ally who has been isolated since his allies were defeated in a February election.

The blast in the centre of the capital also compounded gloom on Pakistan’s financial markets where stocks have been sliding because of economic worries and the rupee has set new lows.

The Red Mosque had for years been a bastion of militant support in Islamabad, but the clerics and their followers had waged an increasingly defiant campaign to enforce Taliban rule.

They occupied a state library, kidnapped women they accused of prostitution and some
policemen, and stormed music and video shops and beauty parlours, much to the dismay of the moderate majority in the capital.

They also accumulated weapons and battled security forces for days after the siege began, rejecting calls to surrender.

President Pervez Musharraf ordered commandos to storm the mosque and an adjoining women’s madrasa to end the stand-off.

The assault unleashed a wave of suicide bomb attacks across the country in which hundreds of people were killed, including former Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23994931-12335,00.html   

Islam on Minorities @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jYUL7eBdHg&feature=related

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Undercover city detective finds hints of danger among mosques

PATRICE O’SHAUGHNESSY, NY DAILY NEWS

July 5, 2008

The undercover, a Muslim who came to America from Bangladesh when he was 7, gave only a glimpse of his work as an undercover when he testified during the trial of the Herald Square bomb plotters, the only known New York City homegrown plot to reach the jihadization stage.

The groups the detective interacted with resemble the “bunches of guys” that Marc Sageman, a noted terrorism authority and new scholar-in-residence at the NYPD, says are the real concern. His position has stirred a debate among security analysts.

While some experts contend the chief threat is Al Qaeda, Sageman, author of “Leaderless Jihad,” contends the threat comes more from radicalized individuals who meet and scheme in their neighborhoods and on the Internet.

“We’re still very much learning about our enemy,” said Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly. “Sageman will help us do that. He was with the CIA, a consultant to France and Spain. He’s a heavyweight.”

While the homegrown threat is real, “An attack from afar by Al Qaeda is always a possibility,” Kelly emphasized.

Intelligence analysts for the department have compiled a report, “Radicalization in the West,” that “conceptualized the whole notion of the homegrown threat,” said David Cohen, deputy commissioner of intelligence. The Internet as training ground and recruitment tool for homegrown radicals is strong, Cohen said, but the number of jihadist Web sites - up from a dozen in 1998 to more than 5,000 now - has probably flattened out.

“Along with expanding computer investigations done by the cyber unit, we have expanded our human program,” Cohen said, referring to traditional undercover detective work. The detective appeared in Brooklyn Federal Court two years ago as the final witness at the four-week trial of Shahawar Matin Siraj, 23, a Pakistani immigrant who was convicted of plotting to blow up the Herald Square subway station during the Republican National Convention in 2004.

The detective was not involved in that case, but testified that he had come across Siraj during his undercover work.

Testifying under the fake name of Kamil Pasha, he said he was taken from the Police Academy in October 2002 to be a “walking camera,” eyes and ears, among Muslims. He interacted with groups in Brooklyn and elsewhere in the city.

The detective has been involved in “numerous” investigations for the intelligence division, part of a cadre of undercovers who act as listening posts.

“We don’t target a group as a whole; we look for patterns of behavior, travel, training,” Cohen said.

The NYPD has studied attacks in Europe to enhance its understanding of the homegrown threat. For example, the July 7, 2005, London subway bombings that killed 52 people drove home the issue of plotting being done outside the target area. The attack plan was hatched in Leeds - more than 150 miles from London.

“We drew a 200-mile perimeter around the city, and we work with all the local police agencies from Maryland to Canada,” Cohen said.

“We have our ear to the ground,” Kelly said. “We are aware of the possibility of a threat to this city developing very close to home.”  poshaughnessy@nydailynews.com                  http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ny_crime/2008/07/05/2008-07-05_undercover_city_detective_finds_hints_of.html?page=1

Related Stories below:

Peace-loving Muslims @ http://jewishworldreview.com/cols/williams031908.php3

Islam on Minorities @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jYUL7eBdHg&feature=related

“Oppression” of Islam @ http://www.frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=B00B58F4-8F19-4C46-9F60-E874543A21E3

Is Fitna anti-Muslim @ http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2523

FITNA on Google: clips @ http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/020486.php

http://www.dailyexcelsior.com/web1/08july18/index.html

Terror funding in Kashmir from Europe

By Sanjeev Pargal 

Sources said about 20 days back also an “advisory” had been dispatched by the State Intelligence agencies that this bunch of “anti-India Indians” have joined hands for anti-India resolutions and terror raising funds. 

However, now, the response of the Foreign Ministry was very positive and they were expected to come down very heavily on anti-India protagonists.  

The External Affairs Ministry is likely to approach Netherlands High Commission to take action against their NGO for providing not only misleading information but the “data far from truth” in Europe against India on Kashmir. The Government is likely to seek complete ban on any international aid for Netherlands NGO. 

The Ministry, sources revealed, was also actively considering cancellation of visa of Kolkatta based woman and Ahmedabad based Advocate. 

Related stories: 

1) Uruguay backs J&K separatists @ http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=jain/jain121.txt&writer=jain 

2) Europe’s Civilising Mission @ http://www.neurope.eu/articles/87642.php 

5) NGOs: Anti-Nation Industry @ http://www.haindavakeralam.com/HKPage.aspx?PageID=5192&SKIN=C

6) Islamism Shakes Kashmir @   http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/JG08Df02.html

Kashmir Documents @ http://www.kashmir-information.com/historicaldocuments/index.html

Secularism Dies in J&K @ http://www.socialcause.org/getarticlefromdb.php?id=369

Islam’s Minoritism @ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6jYUL7eBdHg&feature=related

Does Europe have a Civilising mission in India?

JAKOB De ROOVER - neurope.eu

Recently, the European Parliament hosted a meeting on “caste discrimination in South Asia”. At the meeting, participants stated that “India is being ruled by castes not by laws” and that they demanded justice, because there “is one incredible India and one untouchable India.”

The EU was urged to come out with a policy statement on the subject. One MEP, referring to the caste system, said that “this barbarism has to end.”

This is not the first time. However, before the EU decides to publish policy statements on caste discrimination in India, we would do well to reflect on some simple facts.

First, the dominant conception of the caste system has emerged from the accounts by Christian missionaries, travelers and colonial administrators. Rather than being neutral, these accounts were shaped by a Christian framework. That is, the religion of European visitors to India had informed them beforehand that they would find false religion and devil worship there, and that false religion always manifested itself in social evils.

Especially the Protestants rebuked the “evil priests” of Hinduism for imposing the laws of caste in the name of religion. They told the Indians that conversion to Protestantism was a conversion to equality. Thus, Indian souls were to be saved from damnation and caste discrimination.

Second, this Christian account of “the Hindu religion” and its “caste system” informed colonial policies in British India. Building on the theological framework, scholars now wrote “scientific” treatises on Hindu superstition and caste discrimination.

The Christian mission found its secular counterpart in the idea of the civilising mission, which told the West that it had to rescue the natives from the clutches of superstition and caste. One no longer promoted religious conversion, but the colonial educational system harped on “the horrors of Hindu society.”

Third, the colonial educational project had a deep impact on the Indian intelligentsia. Hindu reform and anti-caste movements came into being, which reproduced the Protestant accounts of Hinduism and caste as true descriptions of India.

Their advocates did not adopt these descriptions as passive recipients, but actively deployed them to pursue socioeconomic and political interests. Political parties and caste associations were created to safeguard the interests of the “lower castes.”

The elites of these groups united in associations and received financial and moral support from the missionaries and other progressive colonials.

Fourth, the “Dalit” movement of today is the product of these colonial movements. The notion of “Dalits” makes sense only within the colonial account of India, which had postulated the existence of one single group of “outcastes” or “untouchables” that was supposedly exploited by the upper castes. In reality, it concerns a variety of caste groups, with no criteria to unite them besides the claim that they are all “downtrodden.”

Indeed, many of these groups are poor and discriminated against by other caste groups. However, their socio-economic interests have been hijacked by some of their western-educated elite members.

In the name of the downtrodden, these elites establish NGOs and then travel from conference to conference and country to country in order to reveal the plight of the “Dalits” to eager western audiences and secure funding from donor agencies.

Fifth, when present-day Europeans rebuke Indian society for the “barbarism” of caste discrimination, they are reproducing the old stanzas of the civilising mission. Such a stance of superiority perhaps worked in the context of colonialism. But today, at a time when Indians buy some of the European industrial giants and Europe is in need of more collaboration with India, it is ill-advised to continue this type of civilisational propaganda.

In fact, such propaganda derives its plausibility from a series of assumptions that no one would be willing to defend explicitly. It attributes all socioeconomic wrongs of the Indian society to its structure and civilisation.

The implication is that there is only one way to get rid of socio-economic wrongs here: one has to eradicate both the social structure and the Hindu civilisation. It is as though one would blame the racism, bingedrinking, pedophilia, poverty, homelessness and domestic violence in the contemporary West on its age-old civilisation.

The times have changed. As Europeans, we need to reflect on our deep-rooted sense of superiority and how this informs our moralising discourse on human rights in other parts of the world.

To appreciate the impression we give to Indians with our statements on caste discrimination, just imagine a possible world in which the Indian government regularly castigates the US for its racism against African-Americans and the disproportionate death penalties, and the EU for the treatment of South Asians in England, Turks in Germany, women in Romania, the Basque movement in Spain, gypsies in Italy … just imagine Indian members of parliament consistently blaming the very structure of western societies as the cause of all these wrongs.  

Europe needs to wake up fast. The time of colonialism is over. If we do not change our attitudes, the irritation towards the EU will grow in countries like India and China.

So will the unwillingness to collaborate. In the fast-changing world of the early 21st Century, Europe cannot afford this. http://www.neurope.eu/articles/87642.php

Jakob De Roover is a Postdoctoral Fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO) at the Research Centre Vergelijkende Cultuurwetenschap, Ghent University, Belgium

Related stories:

British Caste-System @ http://worldmonitor.wordpress.com/2007/11/27/militants-set-france-ablaze/

Backing the Separatists @ http://www.dailypioneer.com/columnist1.asp?main_variable=Columnist&file_name=jain/jain121.txt&writer=jain

UPDATE Below :

Outrage over Roma drownings  @ http://www.cnn.com/2008/WORLD/europe/07/21/italy.drowning/index.html

Italians and the Gypsies – an old prejudice revived  @  http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/world-focus-italians-and-the-gypsies-ndash-an-old-prejudice-revived-870863.html

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Bottom of the Heap

Economist.com

THE village of Vizuresti lies 35km (22 miles) from Bucharest and on the wrong side of the tracks. For the first few miles the road from the highway is paved, passing through a prosperous district with solid houses and well-tended fields. But once it crosses the railway, leading only to the Roma settlement, the tarmac stops. The way to Vizuresti is 20 minutes of deep potholes and ruts. Life for its 2,500 people, four-fifths of them Roma, is just as tough.

Mihai Sanda and his family, 37 of them, live in half-a-dozen self-built, mud-floored huts. In his two-room dwelling, seven people share one bedroom; chickens cluck in the other room. The dirt and smell, the lack of mains water, electricity, sewerage and telephone are all redolent of the poorest countries in the world. So is the illiteracy.

Ionela Calin, a 34-year-old member of Mr Sanda’s extended family, married at 15 without ever going to school. Of her eight children, four are unschooled. Two, Leonard, aged four and Narcissa, aged two, do not even have birth certificates; Ionela believes (wrongly, in fact) that she cannot register their birth because her own identity document has expired.

For the millions of Europeans—estimates range between 4m and 12m—loosely labelled as Roma or Gypsies, that is life: corralled into settlements that put them physically and psychologically at the edge of mainstream existence, with the gap between them and modernity growing rather than shrinking.

The statistics are shocking: a Unicef report released in 2005 said that 84% of Roma in Bulgaria, 88% in Romania and 91% in Hungary lived below the poverty line. Perhaps even more shocking is the lack of a more detailed picture. Official indifference and Roma reluctance mean that data on life expectancy, infant mortality, employment and literacy rates are sparse. Yet all are deplorably lower than those of mainstream society.

The immediate response to this (as for most of eastern Europe’s ills) is to blame history. The lot of the Roma has been miserable for a millennium, ever since their mysterious migration from Rajasthan in northern India sometime around 1000 AD.

With the possible exception of a principality in Corfu around 1360, they have never had a state. In parts of the Balkans, Roma were traded as slaves until the middle of the 19th century.

Mirroring America’s history at the same time, emancipation proved a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for freedom. The Roma of Vizuresti went from being slaves to being landless peasants. Even now, seasonal agricultural labour of the most menial kind is the main source of income; that, and begging.

But a twist of history in the next century meant that Europe’s Roma suffered even more than America’s blacks. Hundreds of thousands perished in the Nazi Holocaust. Compensation has been stingy, belated and badly administered.

It would be even easier to blame the Roma’s plight on communism. Certainly that system largely stamped out the Roma’s traditional nomadism. Countries such as Czechoslovakia also practised forced sterilisation (though Sweden did that, too). But the paternalistic structures of state socialism to some extent sheltered, if usually in the most menial jobs, those unable or unwilling to compete in a market economy.

And an ostensible commitment to the brotherhood of man restrained at least some racial prejudices. For the Roma, democracy unleashed their fellow-citizens’ latent hostility, while capitalism offered them few prospects.

As eastern Europe prospered, the Roma fell further behind. Their surviving traditional skills (handicrafts, horsetrading) were out of date; they lacked the administrative skills to set up businesses in the formal economy; even those wanting to work found few factories or offices willing to employ them.

And European Union membership has added a new bureaucratic burden even to the businesses in which they thrive. In Balteni, near Vizuresti, the local Gypsy chieftain or Bulibasha (at the age of 84 himself a Holocaust survivor) runs an immense informal scrapyard, where tractor-trailers, car shells drawn by horses and rickety lorries deliver precariously loaded piles of rusty metal to be sorted and then sold to a nearby metallurgy plant.

A vast bonfire of copper cables fills the air with fumes as insulating material is burnt off. A ragged, shoeless workforce of all ages sorts the inventory by hand. There is not a safety notice, a glove or a visor in sight, and it is hard to imagine the business or its illiterate owner managing to cope with any kind of bureaucratic inspection.

Criminal suspicions

The most conspicuous problem for the Roma is lack of education, which keeps them out of jobs. Others include hostility from the majority population, apathy in officialdom, dreadful public services and infrastructure, and a pervasive feeling of hopelessness.

It is hardly surprising that many tens of thousands of Roma have moved west in search of a better life. But if they did not fit in well at home, they adjust even worse to life in western Europe.

Begging on the street, for example, often with young children, scandalises the citizenry, as do Roma encampments in public spaces such as parks or road junctions. A delegation of top Finnish politicians visiting Romania this month publicly complained. “In Finland, begging is not a job,” the country’s president, Tarja Halonen, told her hosts with Nordic hauteur. Maybe not, but for Roma it may be the only choice they have.

West Europeans also tend to believe that Roma migrants are responsible for an epidemic of pickpocketing, shoplifting, mugging—and worse.

 In Italy, public patience snapped earlier this year after reports of gruesome muggings, rapes and the alleged stealing of a baby. Such reports were not matched by any change in the crime statistics.

But coupled with some incendiary statements by the incoming right-of-centre government, they were enough to provoke something close to an anti-Roma pogrom in May in Naples and other cities.

Rioters burned Roma caravans and huts; the authorities followed up with arrests and deportations.

West European attitudes differ little in essence from those of the ex-communist bureaucrats in the east. They want the problem to go away.

Emma Bonino, a feisty Italian politician and former EU commissioner, says that Roma make a “perfect scapegoat” for politicians who have failed to deal with Italy’s other, graver problems.

The authorities’ response has been milder than their rhetoric suggests, she says, but she laments the lack of any programme to help the Roma integrate into Italian society. The biggest danger, in her view, is that politicians have made anti-Roma racism respectable for the first time: “When you go down that road, you will not stop it just by saying ‘Enough is enough’.”

That is not just a moral cop-out. It is also bad economics. Excluding an Ireland-sized group of millions of people from the labour market, particularly when they typically have much larger families than the average in fast-greying Europe, is a colossal waste of human potential. But those looking for encouraging signs have to hunt hard indeed.

Europe is supposedly in the middle of a “Decade of Roma Inclusion”, launched in 2005 when the governments of the countries with big Roma populations (Bulgaria, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Macedonia, Montenegro, Romania, Serbia and Slovakia) agreed to close the gap in education, employment, health and housing. Fully €11 billion ($17 billion) is available from the EU’s social fund, with a further €23 billion earmarked from the regional development fund in coming years.

Yet the main effect so far has been to create a well-paid elite of Roma lobbying outfits, fluent in bureaucratic jargon, adept at organising seminars and conferences and nobbling decision-makers.

It has had little effect on the lives of the Roma themselves. As the Open Society Institute, funded by George Soros, a billionaire philanthropist, says in a recent report, most governments see the answer to the Roma problem in terms of “sporadic measures” rather than coherent policies. An official in Brussels says: “We don’t lack the laws and we don’t lack the money. The problem is political will.”

Unwillingly to school

Certainly a bit of willpower can work wonders. In Vizuresti, for example, only 6% of the children never go to school at all—a triumph by local standards. But it is still nothing to cheer about. “When the girls reach nine or ten they are ready to get married, and it is shameful for them to come to school,” explains a local, firmly adding that “marriage” in this sense means betrothal, not conjugality. “The boys don’t come if they are busy helping their fathers to collect scrap,” he continues, “and the boys drop out at 15 because then they have completed the eighth grade, which you need to get a driving licence.”

In much of eastern Europe Roma children are packed off to special schools for “backward” children, reinforcing stigma and prejudice and guaranteeing that they enter the labour market with a third-class ticket.

Another obstacle is the lack of birth certificates: schools that do not want Roma children can simply refuse to register those without official papers. But perhaps the biggest barriers are parental reluctance and poverty. Children in school can’t work. They need expensive uniforms and books. It may even be embarrassing if they can read when their parents can’t. So why bother?

A well-run country can try to spend large amounts of taxpayers’ money on alleviating social problems. The results may be patchy, but at least in western Europe they have got somewhere.

Spain, for example, is regarded as a big success story. Its Roma were marginalised and neglected under authoritarian rule; now a mixture of good policy and generous EU funding has brought widespread literacy, better housing and integration in the labour market. But the ex-communist countries have much weaker public administration, and neither politicians nor voters consider Gypsies a priority.

Vizuresti is doing better than most places. Thanks to a charismatic and impressive head teacher, Ion Nila, lack of documents is no barrier to registration at the village school. His teachers go door to door in the mornings, cajoling parents into sending their children to class. The real breakthrough, he says, will come if he can get Roma children to attend the nursery attached to the school. But, says Mr Nila, parents are reluctant to send their young children, as they don’t have the money to buy them shoes. He hopes that hot midday meals will be an incentive, if he can find the money to pay for them.

So, at the top, billions of euros are being pumped in; while, at the bottom, a teacher struggles to find the tiny amount needed simply to feed his charges.

Indeed, most of the progress in Vizuresti comes not from taxpayers’ money, which soaks away into bureaucracy far from the village, but from the work of a charity, Ovidiu Rom, headed by a fiery American philanthropist, Leslie Hawke. The charity, not the state, has paid for and helped with IDs, teacher training, student workbooks and a special summer programme designed to prepare 20 of the poorest children and their often illiterate parents for what seems, to them, scary school life.

Bound only by music

So why is Europe floundering? The conventional answer is that the Roma’s biggest problem is racism pure and simple. Enforcement of tough anti-discrimination laws, Roma-friendly curriculums in schools, cultural self-esteem, positive discrimination in both officialdom and private business are the necessary ingredients for change, say the politically correct.

But that is not the whole story. Even defining what “Roma” really means is exceptionally tricky. Europe has plenty of marginalised social groups, often with traditions of nomadism and their own languages: Irish Tinkers, for example, who speak Shelta. Their problems and history may in part be similar to the Roma’s, but they are not the same. Even within the broad category of Roma (meaning those with some connection to the original migrants from Rajasthan) the subdivisions are complex.

Some prefer not to use the word Roma at all, arguing that “Gypsy”, sometimes thought derogatory, is actually more inclusive.

The impressive catalogue to the Roma Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale insists that Roma is too narrow a term, excluding as it does “Sintis, Romunglo, Beas, Gitanes, Manus etc”. Even ethnographers find it hard to nail down the differences and similarities between such groups.

Moreover, those more narrowly defined as Roma have surprisingly little in common. The Roma tongue—originally related to Sanskrit—has splintered into dozens of mutually incomprehensible dialects. The sprinkling of internationally active Roma activists have developed their own version (sometimes derisively known as “NGO Roma”), but it bears little relationship to the creoles still spoken in the settlements.

The strongest common culture is traditional Roma music, where it survives. But its haunting chords and rhythms do not conquer tone-deaf bureaucracies.

The boundaries between the marginalised groups and “normal” society are fluid. One reason that a Roma middle class, which supposedly would provide role models, lessen prejudice and increase social and economic mobility, has failed so far to take root is that most Roma who become middle-class drop the “Roma” label at once.

Hopes for a change rest on the new generation of thousands of young Roma graduates, who may be less shy about their origins.

Similarly, those not born into the Roma world can end up there—by marriage, adoption or choice. In Balteni, a blonde girl, Roxana, shyly shows off a necklace of seven big gold coins given to her as a mark of impending puberty; not born a Roma, she was adopted from an orphanage into the family of a local patriarch. A Roma—which comes from the Romani word “Rom”, meaning husband—is, ultimately, anyone who wants that label.

Furthermore, as Zoltan Barany, author of a controversial but acute book on the Gypsies of eastern Europe, points out, Roma lobbyists tend not to notice that the Roma’s own habits and attitudes may aggravate their plight.

Speaking off the record, a westerner engaged in Roma welfare tells the story of an exceptionally talented teenage pupil at her country’s top academy. She was bound for university and a stellar career, but her family decided that this was too risky: she was bride-snatched, taken to a remote village, raped and kept in seclusion. From there she was trafficked to western Europe, where she is now in a group of beggars camping out near one of Europe’s best-known stadiums. Well-wishers tried to rescue her, offering a safe-house where she could continue her studies; she refused, frightened that her family would find her.

The result of that is what a senior official dealing with the issue calls “self-decapitation”. A handful of Roma politicians have emerged, including a couple of impressive members of the European Parliament. But even their symbolic value is limited.

The vast majority of Roma do not even vote in elections, let alone join the campaigns waged on their behalf. There is no sign of a Roma Martin Luther King, let alone a Barack Obama. But, notes the official, “There are lots of angry young men.”

Amid all this, the EU is tottering forward. A report due to be issued next week will criticise the “implementation gap” in the worthy policies conceived so far. It will rebuke governments for slow progress. Controversially, it is likely to say that formal equality before the law is only a starting point, and that American-style positive discrimination will be needed.

That may prove a risky course. As in America, race and a history of slavery make a potent combination, entrenching stereotypes and attitudes on all sides. But also as in America, it is unclear how far the problem is race, and how far it is a matter of poverty and other factors.

Stop treating Roma as a racial minority, Ms Hawke argues, and concentrate on the poor level of public services they receive in housing, health and particularly education.

Seeing the problem only through an ethnic lens is great news for the “Roma industry”, as the campaigning groups are sometimes derisively known. Their activities turn all too quickly into a theoretical, nit-picking discussion about politically correct language, complete with internecine feuds between different lobbies. It plays badly with voters, who already tend to blame the Roma for their own misfortunes.

In most ex-communist countries, polls show striking degrees of prejudice: as many as 80% of those asked say they would not want Roma neighbours, for example.

In Hungary, the commendable idea of integrating Roma and non-Roma children in the same schools has sent parents scurrying elsewhere.

But there are some shoots of hope. One is that the violence in Italy has highlighted the Roma issue in a way that would never have happened if the misery had remained concentrated in the slums and ghettos of eastern Europe.

“Just as Putin has galvanised Europe on energy policy, Berlusconi has galvanised Europe on Roma policy,” says Andre Wilkens, a thoughtful Brussels-based observer of the region who heads the Open Society Institute’s Roma efforts. He believes that the new member states of the EU have a chance to derive advantage from the Roma by finding an economic niche for them—for example, by turning their tradition of scrap-dealing into the basis for a modern recycling industry.

Such hopeful nibbles abound. But even an optimist would have to concede that Europe’s biggest social problem will persist for the lifetime of anyone reading this article, and probably far longer.

http://www.economist.com/world/europe/displayStory.cfm?source=hptextfeature&story_id=11579339

Targets of racial violence @ http://www.organiser.org/dynamic/modules.php?name=Content&pa=showpage&pid=245&page=41

Religious tolerance, not conversion, is the answer

- Jessica Montgomery,West Virginia U.

Religious tolerance is an issue that has been brought to my attention in recent weeks.

It all started a few weeks ago when I was talking to a few younger girls at the horse stables.

They couldn’t have been older than 14 years old. For one reason or another, I mentioned the fact that I am a Buddhist. Their reactions, I can honestly say, made my head spin.

One girl asked me how it was possible that I did not believe in God.

Another asked me how exactly I planned to re-route my supposed trip to Hell.

The questions went on, each being more preposterous than the next. I asked if they believed in evolution.

One of the girls remarked, “Do you honestly believe we came from monkeys? Science is just here to test our faith.” Another girl chimed in and informed me that in Bible school they learned that Charles Darwin admitted “making up” evolution on his deathbed. And right now, I really wish I were making this up.

I am all for freedom of religion. In fact, lay it on thick. Those girls could possibly be right about the whole thing, but that was not the issue.

What I find disturbing about the aforementioned situation, however, is that today’s youth should be learning how to think critically and be open-minded.

Instead, in places where we should see children learning to embrace diversity of thought, we see religious indoctrination that will undoubtedly lead to intolerance and conflict. See the Middle East for examples.

If anyone has seen the 2006 documentary, “Jesus Camp,” they should be well aware of the religious indoctrination of this country’s youth.

In this documentary, pastor Becky Fisher attempts to train children into what she calls “God’s Army.” She likens her camp to Islamic extremist camps, and expresses her wish to see children in this country radically laying down their lives for the Gospel just as children are in countries such as Pakistan and Palestine. Why? Because Pastor Fisher exclaims, “We have the truth.”

In the United States, we are assured freedom of religion. But when children are brought up in environments where they are constantly and incessantly preached to about the need to form “God’s Army,” are they really free from religion?

I find no harm in bringing up a child to hold a certain faith. However, in the interests of forming a productive and successful generation of future leaders, children should be brought up learning tolerance of other ideologies.

It is sad to see what our world has come to. If one were to examine all major world religions, one would find that although the details may differ, the message is the same - be a good person. Although many religions define “good” in different ways, it isn’t hard to find the commonalities.

For example, killing is looked down upon in most religions. If religions would just stop bickering over the details of their theology and embrace the parallels that most of them hold, everyone would be better off.

I am not insisting that any one religion is any better or worse than any other. Certainly all religions have their positive and negative points.

Furthermore, one can pick out extremists in every religion.

When children are brought up in closed-minded environments where they are taught that their set of beliefs are the only ones that can possibly be true, it is sure to cause problems in the future.

All the Islamic suicide bombers in the world wouldn’t be able to convince Christian zealots to embrace Allah. Conversely, all the Jesus Camp pastors in the world wouldn’t be able to convince Islamic radicals to convert to Christianity.

It is counterproductive for people to try and impose their own religious faiths on others. Instead, people of all religions should work together to help solve the problems that exist in the world today as opposed to creating more.

http://media.www.bgnews.com/media/storage/paper883/news/2007/04/13/Opinion/Religious.Tolerance.Not.Conversion.Is.The.Answer-2839430-page2.shtml

Related stories:

Protect Religions @ http://protectreligions.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=27&Itemid=42

Dinesh D’Souza’s Christianity @ http://www.thehumanist.org/humanist/Dinesh.html

In God they trust? @ http://www.telegraphindia.com/1080508/jsp/opinion/story_9238299.jsp

Ten Commandments @ http://atheism.about.com/od/tencommandments/a/commandment01.htm?nl=1

http://www.mahablog.com/2007/01/21/dinesh-dsouza-jumps-the-shark/