Archived news and commentary: October 31 - November 6, 2005

2005/10/31 - 2005/11/06
2005/10/24 - 2005/10/30
2005/10/17 - 2005/10/23
2005/10/10 - 2005/10/16
2005/10/03 - 2005/10/09
2005/09/26 - 2005/10/02

› From 2001/09/11 -

Sunday, November 6, 2005

News and commentary:

"Next up was this photograph..."
(zombietime, 2005/11/06)
From zombietime's gallery of "Justice Matters: Artists Consider Palestine", a new exhibit at the Berkeley Art Center, purporting to "address current contemporary issues of occupation and colonization within Palestine.":
"Next up was this photograph of two mannequin-hands holding a "blood"-soaked globe. You might wonder: what does this have to do with Palestine or Israel? The answer: everything. Because the image of greedy hands grasping a (frequently bloody) globe is one of the most notorious anti-Semitic illustrative themes of the last century. This motif was (and is) often used as an illustration for covers of the anti-Semitic tract The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion."

"Police Find Fuel Bomb Factory Near Paris" (Elaine Ganley, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/11/06)
Paris V: "Police also found a gasoline bomb-making factory in a rundown building in Evry, a southern Paris suburb that contained 150 explosives, more than 100 bottles, gallons of fuel and hoods for hiding rioters' faces, Jean-Marie Huet, a senior Justice Ministry official, said Sunday. ...
Unrest spread Saturday night across France, extending west to the rolling fields of Normandy and south to Nice and Cannes on the Mediterranean coast.
The Normandy town of Evreux, 60 miles west of Paris, appeared to suffer the worst damage. Arsonists burned at least 50 vehicles, part of a shopping center, a post office and two schools, said Patrick Hamon, spokesman for the national police.
Five police officers and three firefighters were injured in clashes with youths in the town, Hamon said.
"Rioters attacked us with baseball bats," Philippe Jofres, a deputy fire chief from the area told France-2 television. 'We were attacked with pickaxes. It was war.'"

"Wake up, Europe, you've a war on your hands" (Mark Steyn, Chicago Sun-Times, 2005/11/06)
Paris IV: "Ever since 9/11, I've been gloomily predicting the European powder keg's about to go up. ''By 2010 we'll be watching burning buildings, street riots and assassinations on the news every night,'' I wrote in Canada's Western Standard back in February.
Silly me. The Eurabian civil war appears to have started some years ahead of my optimistic schedule. ...
A few years back I was criticized for a throwaway observation to the effect that ''I find it easier to be optimistic about the futures of Iraq and Pakistan than, say, Holland or Denmark." But this is why. In defiance of traditional immigration patterns, these young men are less assimilated than their grandparents. French cynics like the prime minister, Dominique de Villepin, have spent the last two years scoffing at the Bush Doctrine: Why, everyone knows Islam and democracy are incompatible. If so, that's less a problem for Iraq or Afghanistan than for France and Belgium.
If Chirac isn't exactly Charles Martel, the rioters aren't doing a bad impression of the Muslim armies of 13 centuries ago: They're seizing their opportunities, testing their foe, probing his weak spots. If burning the 'burbs gets you more ''respect'' from Chirac, they'll burn 'em again, and again. In the current issue of City Journal, Theodore Dalrymple concludes a piece on British suicide bombers with this grim summation of the new Europe: ''The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.'' Which sounds an awful lot like a new Dark Ages."

"The wreckage of a burned down gymnasium..."
(Jacques Brinon, AP, 2005/11/06)
"The wreckage of a burned down gymnasium in Noisy-le Grand, east of Paris, Sunday, Nov. 6, 2005."

"Youths' poverty, despair fuel violent unrest in France" (Colin Nickerson, The Boston Globe, 2005/11/06)
Paris IV: "CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France -- Mahmoud Khabou, 20, the jobless son of Algerian immigrants, knows little of the world beyond the concrete housing projects that rise in bleak rows barely an hour's subway ride from the Eiffel Tower, Arc de Triomphe, and other grand monuments of Paris.
But he knows who his heroes are. ''Osama bin Laden and Rodney King," he said, referring to the Al Qaeda leader and the African-American whose videotaped beating by Los Angeles police in 1991 spawned massive racial riots.
''One because he gives pride back to the Muslims," the young man asserted as he and a trio of friends stood near the charred ruins of a carpet shop. ''The other because he was just a poor man, a 'nobody man' of color, but he caused a great city to burn." ...
In France, about 70 percent of immigrants and their second- and third-generation offspring are Arabs from Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia; recent years have also seen influxes of black Africans from former French colonies even farther south.
One significant change, is that until a decade or so ago, immigrants proudly referred to themselves as ''French Arabs," ''French Algerians," ''French Moroccans," and so on. Today, in a sign of alienation, they typically call themselves ''Muslims," taking religion, often the radical brand, as their strongest identity.
This is true elsewhere on the continent that once defined Christendom but that is now home to the largest population of Muslims outside the classic Islamic world."

"Rage of French Youth Is a Fight for Recognition" (Molly Moore, The Washington Post, 2005/11/06)
Paris III: "LE BLANC-MESNIL, France, Nov. 5 -- Mohammed Rezzoug, caretaker of the municipal gymnasium and soccer field, knows far more about the youths hurling firebombs and torching cars on the streets of this Paris suburb than do the police officers and French intelligence agents struggling to nail the culprits.
He can identify most of the perpetrators. So can almost everyone else in the neighborhoods that have been attacked.
"They're my kids," said Rezzoug, a garrulous 45-year-old with thinning black hair and skin the color of a walnut. ...
"It's not a political revolution or a Muslim revolution," said Rezzoug. "There's a lot of rage. Through this burning, they're saying, 'I exist, I'm here.'" ...
One of Rezzoug's "kids" -- the countless youths who use the sports facilities he oversees -- is a husky, French-born 18-year-old whose parents moved here from Ivory Coast. At 3 p.m. on Saturday, he'd just awakened and ventured back onto the streets after a night of setting cars ablaze.
"We want to change the government," he said, a black baseball cap pulled low over large, chocolate-brown eyes and an ebony face. 'There's no way of getting their attention. The only way to communicate is by burning.'"

"Unrest hits Paris as riots spread afar" (Jennifer Joan Lee, The Washington Times, 2005/11/06)
Paris II: "A 10-day rampage by angry immigrant youths spread last night and early today from the suburbs of Paris to the heart of the capitaland from Normandy in the west to Mediterranean cities of the south.
Muslim leaders made fruitless appeals for calm and police teams began chasing rioters, mostly Arab and African youths, as they sped from one attack to another in cars and on motorbikes. New security tactics yielded hundreds of arrests by early today.
In Grigny, a suburb south of Paris, residents fed up with the violence pitched in, hauling young rioters to police.
For the first time, the unrest spread to central Paris, where a Molotov cocktail was hurled at cars near the busy Place de la Republique. At least a dozen cars were burned near City Hall, police said. ...
Attacks were reported in Cannes and Nice. In the Normandy town of Evreux, arsonists burned at least 50 vehicles, part of a shopping center, a post office and two schools, the police spokesman, Mr. Hamon, said."

"France hit by a burning rage" (Matthew Campbell, The Sunday Times, 2005/11/06)
Paris I: "A few days ago Georges Bigot, a French firefighter, was standing with colleagues on a street in a suburb of Paris waiting for reinforcements to help put out a fire started by rioters. Suddenly a television fell out of the sky in front of him.
It had been heaved over a balcony eight floors up and shattered on the ground. “Have you ever seen a television exploding on the pavement?” asked Bigot wearily as he stood under a light drizzle. “Well, it gave me quite a shock.”
As he spoke, thick clouds of smoke billowed from a textile warehouse set ablaze the previous night by another gang of youths, mainly of north African and black African origin, in this shabby suburb north of the capital. Firefighters who had tried to put it out during the night were pelted with stones."

"A Gender Jihad For Islam's Future" (Asra Q. Nomani, The Washington Post, 2005/11/06)
Nomani on the first International Congress on Islamic Feminism, held in Barcelona a week ago:
"The force of our collective effort convinced me that we have the strength to challenge the men's club that defines most of the Muslim world. It was an affirmation of the commitment that had brought me and the 11 other participants here from as far away as Malaysia, Mali, Nigeria, France, Canada, the United Kingdom, the United States and refugee camps in the disputed territory of Western Sahara to share stories from the trenches in the "gender jihad." We Muslim feminists view it as a struggle that taps Islamic theology, thinking and history to reclaim rights granted to women by Islam at its birth but erased by manmade rules and tribal traditions masquerading as divine law.
In the communities where we live, we have begun challenging customs that deny women rights from the mosque to the bedroom: gender segregation, mandatory veiling, forced early marriages, clitorectomies, polygamy, death for sex outside of marriage, domestic violence and strict domestic roles."

"Al-Qaeda woos recruits with nuclear bomb website" (Uzi Mahnaimi and Tom Walker, The Sunday Times, 2005/11/06)
"An Al-Qaeda website containing detailed instructions in Arabic on how to make nuclear, “dirty” and biological bombs has attracted more than 57,000 hits and hundreds of readers’ inquiries. Terrorism experts are warning that the site could be boosting the organisation’s appeal to would-be assassins in Britain and abroad.
The manual, posted on October 6 on a forum titled Al-Firdaws, or Paradise, contains 80 pages of instructions and pictures of kitchen bomb-making techniques. It is divided into nine lessons under the overall heading The Nuclear Bomb of Jihad and the Way to Enrich Uranium, and is dedicated as a “gift to the commander of the jihad fighters, Sheikh Osama Bin Laden, for the purpose of jihad for the sake of Allah”. ...
“Perhaps nuclear weapons represent a technology of the 1940s. However, the Crusaders, the allies of the Satan, Allah’s curse be upon them, insist on depriving the jihad fighters of the right to have these weapons.”
The site’s appeal is evident from the enthusiasm of its correspondents. One of the most recent, Mariyam al-Jihadiyya, writes: “God bless you for this precious topic . . . fight them, through your hands God tortures them . . . and heal the hearts of the faithful people.” Beneath she includes a couple of pictures for her hero. “I love you, Osama,” she writes."

"Suicide bombers on Iran kids' TV" (Toby Harnden, The Sunday Telegraph, 2005/11/06)
Iran II: "Iranian state television has broadcast a cartoon that glorifies suicide bombings against Israelis, depicting a young boy blowing himself up after being told: "Go and show the Zionists how brave and heroic are the children of Palestine."
The cartoon, one of a series shown by the Islamic Republic of Iran Broadcasting on "Jerusalem Day" nine days ago, presents the actions of a boy who kills himself to strike back against Israelis as a noble example for children to follow.
More professionally produced and graphic than previous Iranian propaganda aimed at children, the cartoon appears to be part of a campaign led by President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to elevate the issue of the destruction of Israel. ...
Ali Ansari, an Iranian analyst at St Andrew's University, said the cartoon was "gory stuff" and different from previous anti-Israeli propaganda. "It's interesting they've gone to these lengths to develop a cartoon like this that is obviously directed towards kids." (See also: "Iranian Animated Film for Children Promotes Suicide Attacks" (MEMRI, Special Dispatch Series - No. 1018, 2005/11/03))

"Teheran 'providing refuge for al-Qaeda terrorists'" (Philip Sherwell, The Sunday Telegraph, 2005/11/06)
Iran I: "About 25 al-Qaeda leaders, including three of Osama bin Laden's sons, are running terrorist operations from their refuge in Iran rather than languishing under house arrest as the Teheran regime claims, intelligence officials have said.
The disclosure comes as Maj-Gen James Dutton, the commander of British forces in south-eastern Iraq, reiterated on Friday that the technology for lethal new rebel bombs was crossing into the country from Iran.
A "top-ranking Western secret service agent" has told Cicero magazine that the senior al-Qaeda operatives, who fled across the border from Afghanistan into Iran after the fall of the Taliban regime in late 2001, have been provided with a secure hiding place, logistical support and equipment by the Revolutionary Guards.
Cicero is a German investigative publication known for its strong intelligence contacts. ...
The 25 members of the Iran-backed al-Qaeda hierarchy are said to include bin Laden's oldest son Saad, often mentioned as an heir to his father, and his siblings Mohammed and Othman; the senior commander Saif al-Adel, who is the number three in the network's military structure; and a spokesman Sulaiman abu Ghaith." (See also: "Iran/Al Qaeda Axis" (Peter Brookes, New York Post, 2005/10/31))

Saturday, November 5, 2005

News and commentary:

"Childrens' photos remain stuck to the walls..."
(Jacques Brinon, AP, 2005/11/05)
"Childrens' photos remain stuck to the walls at a nursery school in Acheres, west of Paris, Saturday, Nov. 5, 2005, after rioters burned it to the ground during a wave of mass disorder that is sweeping through the country."

"Riots Spread Across France; 250 Arrested" (John Leicester, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/11/05)
Paris V: "The violence hit far-flung corners of France on Saturday, from Rouen in Normandy to Bordeaux in the southwest to Strasbourg near the German border, but the Paris region has borne the brunt.
In quiet Acheres, on the edge of the St. Germain forest west of the capital, arsonists burned a nursery school, where part of the roof caved in, and about a dozen cars in four attacks over an hour that the mayor said seemed "perfectly organized."
Children's photos clung to the blackened walls, and melted plastic toys littered the floor. Residents gathered at the school gate demanded that the army be deployed or suggested that citizens band together to protect their neighborhoods. Mayor Alain Outreman tried to cool tempers.
"We are not going to start militias," he said. "You would have to be everywhere."
In one particularly malevolent attack, youths in the eastern Paris suburb of Meaux prevented paramedics from evacuating a sick person from a housing project. They pelted rescuers with rocks, then torched the awaiting ambulance, an Interior Ministry official said.
Anger has spread to the Internet, with blogs mourning the youths.
Along with messages of condolence and appeals for calm were insults targeting police, threats of more violence and warnings that the unrest will feed support for France's anti-immigration extreme right.
"Civil war is declared. There will no doubt be deaths. Unfortunately, we have to prepare," said a posting signed "Rania."
"We are going to destroy everything. Rest in peace, guys," wrote 'Saint Denis.'"

"Tough French warning for rioters" (BBC News, 2005/11/05)
Paris IV: "France's interior minister has warned rioters of stiff jail sentences for arson after a ninth night of violence in African and Arab communities.
Nicolas Sarkozy said setting cars on fire could "cost dear in terms of sentences" after a night which saw nearly 900 vehicles damaged.
He said the government was "unanimous about standing firm" against violence.
Meanwhile hundreds of people joined marches in Paris suburbs to protest against the violence.
In Aulnay-sous-Bois, which has seen some of the worst of the rioting, residents walked past burnt out vehicles and buildings with banners reading "No to violence" and "Yes to dialogue".
Later Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin met eight key ministers and the head of the Paris mosque, Dalil Boubakeur.
After the meeting, Mr Boubakeur urged a change in tone from the government.
"What I want from the authorities, from Mr Nicolas Sarkozy, the prime minister and senior officials are words of peace," he said."

"Paris When It Sizzles" (Olivier Guitta, The Weekly Standard, 2005/11/14)
Paris III: "Yet despite all the national and international headlines they occasioned, last week's disturbances were no freak occurrence. For at least 15 years, the immigrant and first-generation suburbs around France's large and medium-sized cities have been out of control. Crime rates have gone through the roof: According to the Renseignements Généraux, a division of the police, 70,000 violent crimes have been recorded in urban settings since the beginning of the year. They include the torching of more than 28,000 cars and 17,500 trash bins. According to the Interior Ministry, some 9,000 police cars have been stoned by youths this year.
And property is not the only target. On October 27, the day the two died in Clichy-sous-Bois, three young thugs in another Paris suburb savagely killed a 56-year-old Frenchman who was photographing a lamppost. Plenty of witnesses were around, but none came forward to testify. The attackers were trying either to steal the man's digital camera or to "protect their turf" from an intruder. Ten days earlier, in Vaulx-en-Velin, a suburb of France's second largest city, Lyon, the police chased two teenagers on a stolen scooter and one fell and hurt his ankle. The rumor spread that he was in a coma because of the cops. A few nights of rioting ensued, with violent faceoffs between teens and police on the exact spot where similar, serious rioting occurred 15 years ago. ...
Some intellectuals speak of the Lebanonization of French society. Others speculate about civil war in ten years if nothing is done. Michel Gurfinkiel, editor of the news magazine Valeurs Actuelles, likens France today to the Weimar republic just before the rise of Nazism."

"What's not to like about Islam if you're the Prince of Wales" (Julie Burchill, The Times, 2005/11/05)
"It is said that one of Charles Windsor’s aims during his tour of the United States is to make the country more understanding towards Islam, a religion in which he has shown an inordinate interest for many years now. This would be the poor, persecuted underdog Islam, I take it, which already rules 56 nations on this earth of which only a handful — that’ll be a hand with amputated fingers, in Sharia style — are democracies.
That would be the Islam that oppresses its own people — the Lord forbid they should have anything as subversive and grown up as the vote! — and which in Sudan, Bali and beyond murders people of all faiths who have had the sheer nerve to attempt to straighten their necks from under the yoke of the theocrats. This would be the Islam that leads Iran to call for Israel to be wiped from the face of the earth, lest its example of obdurate democracy gives the serfs of the Muslim fiefdoms all around it ideas about freedom.
I wonder why Prince Charles seeks to big up powerful, theocratic Islam — which already controls so much land and wealth and yet will kill and kill to gain more — and not vulnerable, pluralistic Israel? Why doesn’t he invest as much energy in defence of the persecuted and murdered Christians who suffer for their beliefs under Islamic regimes? Well, I think I know why; because cleaving to Islam is the one way that men who wish to appear liberal and enlightened can promote reactionary ideas. Monarch-worshipping, woman-oppressing, non-democratic — what’s there not for Charles to like!"

"Fine words cannot disguise it: the clash of civilisations is real" (Michael Burleigh, The Times, 2005/11/05)
"Last week in Madrid, I attended a “Dialogue between Cultures and Religion”, organised by a foundation with links to Spain’s ruling socialists. ...
The conference opened with protestations of goodwill from Mohammad Khatami, Iran’s former president, delivered by an ambassador who was not among those recalled for failing to reflect the crazed views of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Felipe González, the former Spanish premier, chose to overlook Ahmadinejad’s rant, preferring to contest the notion of a “clash of civilisations”, as if this were US policy.
At least Miguel Ángel Moratinos, the Spanish Foreign Minister, managed condemnation of an elliptical sort. He has been a prime mover of the claim that you cannot “fight evil with evil”, a formula begging many questions about moral equivalences. He favours marginalising extremists through a dialogue with Muslim “moderates”. These included Dr Tariq Ramadan, an Egyptian intellectual, who is on an FBI watch list and banned from France, but welcome in Spain. ...
This was a dialogue of the deaf, because Western liberals have become totally unmusical on the subject of religion, which they nevertheless combat with an evangelical fervour. ...
Actually, the conference was a few minutes’ drive from the station where 200 people were killed by a Moroccan terrorist network. Dialogues between civilisations, Christian, Islamic or other, are fine, but a constant part of this must be the grim reality that visited Van Gogh on a cold northern street, an event depressingly indicative of the ethnic and religious complexity of Europe. We cannot wish away the clash of civilisations."

"This Muslim girl defied her father – and her lover paid with his life" (Daniel McGrory, The Times, 2005/11/05)
"For daring to fall in love with a Muslim girl, an Oxford student was stabbed 46 times by her vengeful family, who showed no remorse yesterday as they were convicted of the teenager’s murder.
The girl’s father, Chomir Ali, 41, who bullied his two young British-born sons into killing Arash Ghorbani-Zarin, 19, boasted that the murder was to "vindicate the family’s honour" after the popular engineering student made Ali’s daughter pregnant.
With so-called honour killings on the increase in Britain, detectives described this as one of the most tragic cases they had encountered.
Friends of the lovers had warned them not to be seen holding hands in public but Mr Ghorbani-Zarin insisted that no number of threats would make him give up his girlfriend. Gentle-natured and a Muslim himself, he said that it was not his intention to insult her family but felt that he had nothing to hide or apologise for.
Manna Begum, 19, defied her father’s demand that she marry a man she had never met in Bangladesh and tried to kill herself after her family held her prisoner at home. Her father even tried to stop paramedics getting into the house to take his daughter to hospital after she slashed her wrists."

"Protesters Riot as Bush Attends 34-Nation Talks in Argentina" (Larry Rohter and Elisabeth Bumiller, The New York Times, 2005/11/05)
"MAR DEL PLATA, Argentina, Nov. 4 - President Bush's troubles trailed him to an international summit meeting here on Friday as anti-Bush protesters turned violent just blocks from the gathering site, and Hugo Chávez, Venezuela's fiery populist leader, rallied a soccer stadium filled with at least 25,000 people against the United States. ...
Several hundred rioters, separate from the crowd at the stadium, smashed windows, looted stores, chanted anti-Bush slogans and threw rocks at the police. Others lobbed gasoline bombs into a bank, causing a fire that destroyed the interior of the ground floor. ...
Mr. Chávez's rally at the soccer stadium was preceded by a long march in a cold rain through the near-empty streets of this resort, Fearing violence and clashes with the police, many store owners along the route had closed their businesses and boarded up their windows. But that demonstration, at least, was entirely peaceful.
The thousands of protesters carried banners calling Mr. Bush a "fascist," "child-killer" or "genocidal beast," some with the "s" in his named replaced by a dollar sign or a swastika."

"Immigrant Rioting Flares in France for Ninth Night" (Craig S. Smith, The New York Times, 2005/11/05)
Paris II: "Critics say Mr. Sarkozy's confrontational approach has polarized the communities and the government.
"It's a game that has been started between the youth and Sarkozy," said a French-Algerian man wearing Chanel sunglasses outside Aulnay's mosque, in a converted warehouse. He would give his name only as Nabil. "Until he quits," he said, "it's not going to get better." ...
On Thursday, the Interior Ministry released a report on the deaths that touched off the newest rioting, asserting that a third boy who survived the incident had said he and his friends were not being chased and were aware of the danger when they entered the substation enclosure. The report suggested that the boys were hiding from the police because one of those who died had a record of armed robbery and the other was part of a group that had broken into a construction site that evening.
But those points have been lost amid the ensuing violence.
"It's the police who are provoking us," said a bearded man in a white cap and North African robe in Aulnay who would give his name only as Mohamed. 'They don't like foreigners.'"

"As Youth Riots Spread Across France, Muslim Groups Attempt to Intervene" (Molly Moore, The Washington Post, 2005/11/05)
Paris I: "SEVRAN, France, Nov. 4 -- By dusk Friday, the streets of Sevran were deserted. Inside high-rise apartments and stone cottages here on the outskirts of Paris, residents waited for the explosions and sirens to begin.
"Last night I thought I was in Baghdad, not somewhere in France," said Nabila Chaibi, a 22-year-old sales clerk, her angular face swathed in a white head scarf. Her eyes displayed the fatigue of a sleepless night. ...
On Wednesday night, youths firebombed a bus here with the passengers inside. As the last passenger, a 56-year-old woman, descended the steps on crutches, an assailant splashed her with gasoline and another threw a flaming rag at her, according to residents and police reports. The driver put out the flames and rushed her to a hospital, where she was diagnosed with second- and third-degree burns.
"The last two nights, there was panic everywhere," said Bekkay Merzak, a leader of the Islamic organization in Sevran. "People didn't know what was happening outside their own buildings. When they left a car out, they didn't know what they would find in the morning." ...
Two trains connecting Paris and the airport were attacked Thursday, prompting engineers to run only one in five trains on Friday, rail officials said. The U.S. Embassy warned travelers Friday against taking trains to the airport, calling conditions in the troubled areas 'extremely violent.'"

Friday, November 4, 2005

News and commentary:

"Picture shows a warehouse burning..."
(Jack Guez, AFP, 2005/11/04)
"Picture shows a warehouse burning in the early hours of 04 November 2005 in Aulnay-sous-Bois on the seventh consecutive night of violence on the ouskirts of the French capital."
[Note: Netscape News excellent news photo search function has a big drawback, as direct links to photos don't seem to work. :/]

"Eurabia on the rampage" (Melanie Phillips, melaniephillips.com, 2005/11/04)
Paris VI: "In line with routine contemporary moral inversion, in which the perpetrators of violence are excused and their victims blamed instead by an alliance of Muslims and western decadents (Britain was blamed for the July bombings of its citizens because of Iraq) the French authorities are being blamed for fanning the flames of discontent by discriminating against the country’s Muslims. Should we also blame the Danes for refusing to accept self-censorship and asserting their own values of freedom of expression? Is every country to be held responsible for the jihad being waged against it - despite the fact that in every case the alleged provocation is different — rather then responsibility being properly assigned to those who have declared war upon the free world? ...
Multiculturalism, the doctrine that governs Britain and Europe and which grew out of a war upon their values from within by allowing the values of minorities to trump the majority, has been applied by the west to appease an ideology that has declared war upon its values from without. The poulets have now come home to roost in France, but the message for the rest of us is just as ominous."

"Why Paris Is Burning" (Amir Taheri, New York Post, 2005/11/04)
Paris V: "In some areas, it is possible for an immigrant or his descendants to spend a whole life without ever encountering the need to speak French, let alone familiarize himself with any aspect of the famous French culture.
The result is often alienation. And that, in turn, gives radical Islamists an opportunity to propagate their message of religious and cultural apartheid.
Some are even calling for the areas where Muslims form a majority of the population to be reorganized on the basis of the "millet" system of the Ottoman Empire: Each religious community (millet) would enjoy the right to organize its social, cultural and educational life in accordance with its religious beliefs.
In parts of France, a de facto millet system is already in place. In these areas, all women are obliged to wear the standardized Islamist "hijab" while most men grow their beards to the length prescribed by the sheiks.
The radicals have managed to chase away French shopkeepers selling alcohol and pork products, forced "places of sin," such as dancing halls, cinemas and theaters, to close down, and seized control of much of the local administration.
A reporter who spent last weekend in Clichy and its neighboring towns of Bondy, Aulnay-sous-Bois and Bobigny heard a single overarching message: The French authorities should keep out.
"All we demand is to be left alone," said Mouloud Dahmani, one of the local "emirs" engaged in negotiations to persuade the French to withdraw the police and allow a committee of sheiks, mostly from the Muslim Brotherhood, to negotiate an end to the hostilities."

"Paris Burning" (Robert Spencer, FrontPage Magazine, 2005/11/04)
Paris IV: "But of course, all these problems are exacerbated by the non-assimilation policy that both the French government and the Muslim population have for so long pursued: the rioters are part of a population that has never considered itself French. Nor do French officials seem able or willing to face that this is the core of their problem today. It is likely that the riots will result only in intensification of the problems that caused them: if French officials offer an accommodation to Muslims, it will probably result only in further intensification of the Islamic identity, often in its most radical manifestations, among French Muslims. The French response to the riots is likely to unfold along the lines of a decision by officials in Holland last May: they declined to ban a book called De weg van de Moslim (The Way of the Muslim), even though it calls for homosexuals to be thrown head first off tall buildings. The Amsterdam city council did not want to contravene “the freedom to express opinions.”
That decision is a small example of what the Paris riots demonstrate on a large scale: the abject failure of the multiculturalist philosophy that disparate groups can coexist within a nation without any idea that they must share at least some basic values. The French are paying the price today for blithely assuming that France could absorb a population holding values vastly different from that of the host population without negative consequences for either.
That French officials show no sign, on the eighth day of the Paris riots, of recognizing that this clash of values is the heart of the problem only guarantees that before they will be able to say that their difficulties with their Muslim population are behind them, many more cars will be torched, many more buildings burned, and many more lives destroyed."

"Disabled Woman Set Ablaze" (Sky News, 2005/11/04)
Paris III: "A handicapped woman was doused with petrol and set on fire by youths during another night of rioting in Paris.
The 56-year-old suffered third degree burns to 20% of her body in the attack.
Witnesses said a youth poured petrol over the woman and then threw a Molotov cocktail on to the bus she was travelling on in the suburb of Sevran.
Other passengers were able to flee but she was unable to escape because of her disabilities.
It was the worst incident so far in more than a week of rioting.
For the first time, there were also signs of copycat rampages elsewhere in France.
Police said several cars in the eastern city of Dijon were set alight, while similar attacks took place in the western Seine-Maritime region and the Bouches-du-Rhone in the south of the country."

"Unwelcome Attention" (Christian Science Monitor, 2005/11/04)
Paris II: "Staff writer Peter Ford had just arrived in the Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois on Wednesday evening when he was approached by another journalist. "Excuse me, but when do the riots begin?" he was asked. This ghoulish approach has earned reporters a good deal of enmity in the Paris suburbs hit by violence on recent nights (see story). Two TV vans have been burned. Residents have complained that French television has not explained why the violence broke out. "Outside a mosque I spotted a couple of youths in hooded sweatshirts who might be interview candidates," says Peter, "so I approached them. But when I got close, I noticed one of them was holding a film cassette, and that a television cameraman was driving away from the scene fast. The young man had clearly just 'confiscated' the cameraman's film. I surmised that my questions might not be welcome. I went to talk to the mosque's president instead."

"A plainclothes police..."
(Remy de la Mauviniere, AP, 2005/11/04)
"A plainclothes police officer walks past the wreckage of some of the 27 city buses burned in a warehouse in Trappes, west of Paris, Friday Nov. 4, 2005."

"Rioters Attack Trains, Schools and Businesses in the Paris Suburbs" (Molly Moore, The Washington Post, 2005/11/04)
Paris I: "PARIS, Nov. 3 -- The street rampage of angry youths continued to expand across immigrant-dominated suburbs of Paris Thursday, with gangs attacking commuter trains, elementary schools and businesses in an eighth night of violence, according to local police officials.
French government leaders met in emergency sessions for a second day but again failed to agree on how to stem the violence.
Rock-throwing gangs attacked two trains linking Paris to Charles de Gaulle Airport, dragging out a conductor and smashing windows. Other attackers torched a car dealership, supermarket and gymnasium in violence in at least nine impoverished towns and communities populated primarily by immigrants and first-generation French citizens. A large percentage of the area's population is Muslim.
Police reported that guns were fired at police in the town of La Courneuve, north of Paris, and at firefighters in two other communities. Police said no one was reported hit in the shooting."

More on Paris:
"People watch a firefighter putting out a fire..." (Christophe Ena, AP, 2005/11/03)
"How the French riot" (Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator, 2005/11/05)
"Riots and Rage" (Tracy McNicoll, Newsweek, 2005/11/03)
"Seven Violent Nights on the Outskirts of Paris" (Molly Moore, The Washington Post, 2005/11/03)
"Ramadan Rioting in Europe's No-Go Areas" (Paul Belien, The Brussels Journal, 2005/11/02)
"Seventh Day of Violence Erupts Near Paris" (Jocelyn Gecker, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/11/02)
"A policeman looks towards a group of people..." (Stephane De Sakutin, AFP, 2005/11/01)
"Anger grips Paris riot suburb" (Alasdair Sandford, BBC News, 2005/11/01)
"13 Arrested In Paris Suburb Riots" (AP/CBS News, 2005/11/01)
"France defends policies after riot" (CNN.com, 2005/10/31)
"French youth face riot police..." (Reuters, 2005/10/29)
"A van burns..." (Reuters, 2005/10/29)
"Youths riot for second night in Paris suburb" (Laure Bretton, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/10/29)

"Muslims march over cartoons of the Prophet" (Kate Connolly, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/11/04)
"A Danish experiment in testing "the limits of freedom of speech" has backfired - or succeeded spectacularly - after newspaper cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed provoked an outcry.
Thousands of Muslims have taken to the streets in protest at the caricatures, the newspaper that published them has received death threats and two of its cartoonists have been forced into hiding. ...
Juste commissioned the cartoons after learning of the difficulties a children's writer, Kare Bluitgen, had in finding an illustrator for his book on the Koran and the Prophet's life. Bluitgen said all the artists he approached feared the wrath of Muslims if they drew images of Mohammed.
Many cited the murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamist as a reason for refusal. ...
Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch MP famous for her criticism of Islam and author of the screenplay for Mr Van Gogh's film Submission, supported the paper. "It's necessary to taunt Muslims on their relationship with Mohammed," she said.
'Otherwise we will never have the dialogue we need to establish with Muslims on the most central question: 'Do you really feel that every Muslim in 2005 should follow the way of life the Prophet had 1,400 years ago, as the Koran dictates?''"

More on Denmark:
"Prophet cartoons prompt Egypt to cut off Danish dialogue" (The Copenhagen Post, 2005/11/03)
"War in France, War in Denmark" (Henrik, Viking Observer, 2005/10/31)
"Selective Muslim Silence" (Judith Apter Klinghoffer, HNN, 2005/10/31)
"Denmark arrests 4 terror suspects" (AP/CNN.com, 2005/10/27)
"death will visit Denmark" (infovlad.net, 2005/10/15)
"Holy war against newspaper" (The Copenhagen Post, 2005/10/20)
"Muslim anger at Danish cartoons" (BBC News, 2005/10/20)
"Youth reported held in Denmark for death threats over Mohammed cartoons" (Middle East Times, 2005/10/17)
"Imam demands apology for Mohammed cartoons" (The Copenhagen Post, 2005/10/06)
"Image of Muhammad" (Kurt Westergaard, Fjordman, 2005/10/05)
"Fear Pervades Danish Art Community" (Patrick, Dhimmi Watch, 2005/09/18)

"Voted in, Hamas Sets a West Bank City Astir" (Steven Erlanger, The New York Times, 2005/11/04)
"QALQILYA, West Bank, Oct. 29 - The mayor won a landslide victory from the inside of an Israeli jail, and still sits there today. The city banned a cultural festival from its grounds, in no small part because singing, dancing and the mixing of men and women reflects "a Western mentality."
And yet, the budget deficit has been tamed, city employees are getting raises and more roads are being paved courtesy of the new party in power - Hamas.
A lot of eyes are fixed on Qalqilya, where the radical Islamic group Hamas won every seat on the city council five months ago. It was a major shock for Fatah, the dominant faction in the Palestinian Authority, and is emerging as a test case of Hamas's foray into electoral politics.
Hamas, which advocates Israel's destruction and is regarded by Israel and the United States as a terrorist group, is fielding candidates in the Palestinian local and parliamentary elections. Here in Qalqilya, its rule has already set off a fair amount of grumbling that the group is trying to impose a strict Islamist morality."

Thursday, November 3, 2005

News and commentary:

"People watch a firefighter putting out a fire..."
(Christophe Ena, AP, 2005/11/03)
"People watch a firefighter putting out a fire in Paris suburb Aulnay sous Bois, early Thursday, Nov. 3, 2005. Youths battled with police in Paris' troubled suburbs for a seventh straight night, setting fire to a car dealership and hurling stones at police in at least 10 towns, officials said Thursday."

"How the French riot" (Theodore Dalrymple, The Spectator, 2005/11/05)
Paris III: "The cause of the riot, apart from the relatively clement weather for the time of year that is a necessary but not sufficient cause of such rioting, was the death of two youths and the severe burns of another. They apparently formed members of a group of 15 who were peacefully breaking into a workshop when the police arrived and arrested six of them. Unlike the 14-year-old girl in Lozells who was allegedly raped by the friends and associates of the shopkeeper from whose shop she had been peacefully shoplifting, the three youths of Clichy-sous-Bois were incontestably real.
They fled and took refuge in an electricity transformer by climbing over two walls complete with eloquent notices that millions of volts were bad for you, where two of them were electrocuted to death and one suffered severe burns. The two dead were of Turkish and Malian extraction; perhaps the new methods of teaching had left them unable to read, at least at speed.
The police felt it politic, in order to calm the situation, to issue a statement to the effect that the three were not being chased ‘physically’ at the time of their sanctuary in the installation of Electricité de France — but, as the good book says, the guilty fleeth where no man pursueth.
Alas, the police’s sensitivity did not calm the situation; it was too late. Rioting at the terrible injustice done to the three youths ensued, kindergartens and schools were stoned in natural consequence of their martyrdom, and 28 cars were burnt."

"Riots and Rage" (Tracy McNicoll, Newsweek, 2005/11/03)
Paris II: "The nightly violence has now spread through other similarly ghettoized suburbs that ring Paris. Dozens of police officers have been injured, hundreds of vehicles have been torched; rioters even set light to a kindergarten. President Jacques Chirac has appealed for calm and national newspapers offer five-alarm headlines like THE REPUBLIC IS CATCHING FIRE. ...
The electrocution deaths may have set the suburb ablaze, but it was a murky incident at a crowded mosque that seems to have aggravated the expanding cycle of violence. The two-story Bilal Mosque is behind the market, sharing a building with pastry and meat shops and the public bath known as a hammam. Four years after it opened, the mosque has no signs out front, but, for the faithful, it needs none. It was packed with some 700 people last Sunday night when the week's street violence drifted into its tiled prayer room on a cloud of tear gas. Worshipers fled tearful and barefoot into the night. Someone caught the pandemonium on a camera phone and put it up on the Internet. ...
While riots continued in neighboring communities, with protestors chasing a television crew from their car before setting it ablaze and briefly invading a police station on the country’s seventh consecutive night of disturbances, Clichy-sous-Bois’s angry youth are largely staying off the streets — at least for now. The reason? Appeals for calm by 50 “big brothers,” neighborhood twentysomethings who have used their street cred to soothe the situation. The mentors have succeeded where police in riot gear have failed. But their very presence is yet another sign of the alienation of immigrants in the French Republic — and the need for a longer-term solution to their problems."

"Seven Violent Nights on the Outskirts of Paris" (Molly Moore, The Washington Post, 2005/11/03)
Paris I: "PARIS, Nov. 3 -- Violence continued for a seventh night Wednesday in immigrant-dominated towns on the edge of Paris with gangs of youths taking over a police station, vandalizing a shopping center and setting fire to businesses, buses and cars as feuding French officials struggled to devise a plan for halting the unrest.
Youths clashed with police in at least nine towns and communities, most of them concentrated in Paris' northern suburban areas, according to local police and news media. In the town of La Courneuve, two shots were fired at police but no one was injured, according to the Agence France Press news agency. ...
A rapid escalation of the violence Tuesday night appeared to shock France's leadership. Gangs set fire to as many as 228 vehicles in 13 poor, immigrant towns and communities, according to local police and news media.
Youths attacked a fire station in the northern suburban town of Aulnay-sous-Bois and a vacant social center in the southeastern community of Seine-e-Marne, and set fire to cars in Yvelines, west of the capital, police reported. ...
Television footage showed one group of riot policemen pointing their guns through the window of an apartment building's door as women and children cowered and ducked out of sight." (See also: "Seventh Day of Violence Erupts Near Paris" (Jocelyn Gecker, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/11/02))

"Prophet cartoons prompt Egypt to cut off Danish dialogue" (The Copenhagen Post, 2005/11/03)
"A Danish newspaper's decision to print cartoons of Muslim prophet Mohammed have caused a diplomatic crisis between Denmark and Egypt, national broadcaster DR reported on Thursday.
Egypt's ambassador in Libanon, Hussein Darrar, told news service AFP that Egypt had decided not to continue its dialogue with Denmark on human rights and discrimination.
The Egyptian ambassador in Denmark requested, along with ten other ambassadors of Muslim states, to meet with Danish Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen to discuss daily newspaper Jyllands-Posten's decision to print twelve caricatures of the prophet, an act considered blasphemous by many Muslims.
Rasmussen refused to meet with the ambassadors, saying that if they thought he had any power to influence what a national newspaper did and printed, the essence of Danish democracy had been lost on them.
Egyptian Embassy Councillor Mohab Nasr Mostafa Mahdy said he had not seen for himself what Darrar told reporters, but that he was certain it was based on the information Darrar had received on the matter.
'The Egyptian ambassador in Denmark has said that the case no longer rests with the embassy. It is now being treated at an international level. As far as I have been informed by my government, the cartoon case has already been placed on the agenda for the Islamic Conference Organisation's extraordinary summit in the beginning of December,' Mahdy said."

"Cheering Terror" (Ralph Peters, New York Post, 2005/11/03)
"On the surface, the support offered to Islamist fanatics by Western intellectuals appears baffling: Those privileged to speak out in safety are cheering on men who would gladly cut their throats.
The reason goes back to the maxim that "the enemy of my enemy is my friend."
Flanking the international insurgency of Muslim extremists is a global insurgency of frustrated intellectuals. Western civilization's rise to power shamed the failed cultures of the Middle East, while America's exposure of communism and socialism as deadly, incompetent systems robbed the intelligentsia of its dearest fantasy.
Global intellectuals and Islamist terrorists share common enemies — the United States, Israel and the West in general. They're unified by a disdain for freedom, capitalism and democracy — especially the latter. Religious extremists and the international intelligentsia alike distrust the will of the people at the ballot box. ...
Yet, in its perverse way, the global insurgency of anti-American intellectuals may be more pernicious even than al Qaeda. We can fight the terrorists. But the international intelligentsia spreads its poison without fear of penalty. Thanks to us."

Wednesday, November 2, 2005

News and commentary:

Theo van Gogh
(De Gezonde Roker, 2004/11/02)
Picture of Theo van Gogh from the frontpage of his website De Gezonde Roker, Tuesday, November 2, 2004.

"Ramadan Rioting in Europe's No-Go Areas" (Paul Belien, The Brussels Journal, 2005/11/02)
"If you want to know what is the matter with those that are described by the mainstream media as rioting “youths,” read Theodore Dalrymple’s poignant analysis in the latest issue of City Journal. We are just witnessing the beginning of Europe’s problems: “The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.”
Our mainstream media, in attempts to preserve the Left’s chimera of “universal cultural compatibility,” hardly write about all this. Nevertheless, for some years now West European city folk and police officers have been familiar with the reality that certain areas of major European cities are no-go areas, especially at night and certainly if you are white or wearing a uniform. ...
The riots in France have been going on for a week now. During the second night of street fighting in Clichy, police officers already warned that they are not up to the task Sarkozy has set them. “There’s a civil war underway,” one officer declared. “We can no longer withstand this situation on our own. My colleagues neither have the equipment nor the practical or theoretical training for street fighting.” If there is, indeed, a war going on, Sarkozy cannot win it with troops that are mere policemen and fire fighters. As Irwin Stelzer pointed out last July when discussing the British reaction to the London bombings: In a war, use the army, rather than police. The latter, however, is unlikely to happen. If the politicians bring in the army they are acknowledging what the policemen, the fire fighters and the ambulance drivers know but what the political and media establishment wants to hide from the people: that there is civil war brewing and that Europe is in for a long period of armed conflict. This is the last thing appeasing politicians want to do and so they have begun to criticise Sarkozy." (See also: "The Suicide Bombers Among Us" (Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Autumn 2005))

"Seventh Day of Violence Erupts Near Paris" (Jocelyn Gecker, AP/Yahoo! News, 2005/11/02)
"CLICHY-SOUS-BOIS, France - Menacing youths smoked cigarettes in doorways Wednesday and hulks of burned cars littered the tough streets of Paris' northeastern suburbs scarred by a week of riots that left residents on edge and sent the government into crisis mode.
In a seventh consecutive night of skirmishes, young people threw rocks at police Wednesday in six suburbs in the Seine-Saint-Denis region north of Paris — about a 40-minute drive from the Eiffel Tower. In one of them, Le Blanc-Mesnil, about a dozen cars burned and curious residents, some in slippers and bathrobes, poured into the streets. ...
The unrest spread to at least nine Paris-region towns overnight Tuesday, exposing the despair, anger and criminality in France's poor suburbs — fertile terrain for Islamic extremists, drug dealers and racketeers.
The violence, concentrated in neighborhoods with large African and Muslim populations, has highlighted the difficulties many European nations face with immigrant communities feeling marginalized and restive, cut off from the continent's prosperity and, for some extremists, its values, too. ...
"No matter what the politicians say, some neighborhoods are all but lost," said Patrice Ribeiro, national secretary of the Synergie police officers' union. 'Police patrols pass through but without stopping and with their windows rolled up.'" (See also: "13 Arrested In Paris Suburb Riots" (AP/CBS News, 2005/11/01))

"Spot the Difference" (David T, Harry's Place, 2005/11/02)
"The BBC:

"About 26,000 Iraqis have been either killed or injured in attacks by militants since January 2004, a report published by the Pentagon suggests."

The Telegraph:

Victims of insurgents in Iraq top 26,000

The United States military has for the first time admitted that it is keeping records of Iraqi deaths as it disclosed that it estimates 26,000 to have been killed or injured by insurgents since January last year.

The Guardian:

Pentagon reports 26,000 Iraqi casualties in 2 years

New Pentagon figures show that the number of Iraqis killed or wounded has risen sharply in recent months, and that the toll has reached 26,000 since the beginning of 2004. The figures are the first published estimate by the defence department of Iraqi casualties from the conflict.

The numbers, in the form of a bar graph in a recent report to Congress, do not distinguish between deaths and injuries, and include soldiers, police and civilians. An Associated Press survey found that about two-thirds of Iraqi casualties have been civilian. US officials admit that the figures are an underestimate, as they are based on incident reports from American soldiers with incomplete information."

"The Suicide Bombers Among Us" (Theodore Dalrymple, City Journal, Autumn 2005)
"The sweet dream of universal cultural compatibility has been replaced by the nightmare of permanent conflict.":
"According to Islamism, the West can never meet the demands of justice, because it is decadent, materialistic, individualistic, heathen, and democratic rather than theocratic. Only a return to the principles and practices of seventh-century Arabia will resolve all personal and political problems at the same time. ...
The West is a formidable enemy, however, difficult to defeat, for it exists not only in the cities, the infrastructure, and the institutions of Europe and America but in the hearts and minds even of those who oppose it and wish to destroy it. The London bombers were as much products of the West as of Islam; their tastes and their desires were largely Westernized. ...
Muslims who reject the West are therefore engaged in a losing and impossible inner jihad, or struggle, to expunge everything that is not Muslim from their breasts. It can’t be done: for their technological and scientific dependence is necessarily also a cultural one. You can’t believe in a return to seventh-century Arabia as being all-sufficient for human requirements, and at the same time drive around in a brand-new red Mercedes, as one of the London bombers did shortly before his murderous suicide. An awareness of the contradiction must gnaw in even the dullest fundamentalist brain.
Furthermore, fundamentalists must be sufficiently self-aware to know that they will never be willing to forgo the appurtenances of Western life: the taste for them is too deeply implanted in their souls, too deeply a part of what they are as human beings, ever to be eradicated. It is possible to reject isolated aspects of modernity but not modernity itself. Whether they like it or not, Muslim fundamentalists are modern men — modern men trying, impossibly, to be something else."

"If the Problem Is Muslim Terror, Then What?" (Victor Davis Hanson, City Journal, Autumn 2005)
"It is a tremendous historical irony that America’s liberal Left, embracing moral equivalence in this fashion, has all but refused to denounce the illiberal ideology of our enemies—an ideology that supports polygamy, gender apartheid, religious intolerance, hatred of homosexuals, and patriarchy. Sometimes, the terrorists even win outright praise: perhaps the most popular filmmaker of election year 2004 was Michael Moore, who celebrated the suicide bombers and terrorists of Iraq as “minutemen” akin to our own Founding Fathers.
If we are not sure as a nation that Islamists really are foes of Western values but instead see them as another persecuted group with legitimate gripes against us (occupied Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan, Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay, colonialism, the Crusades), then it becomes increasingly hard to identify, let alone fight, the practitioners of Islamic fanaticism at home. Even the military bureaucracy seems to be having trouble naming the enemy: witness the rebranding by some Pentagon officials of “the war on terrorism” into the “global war against violent extremism.” While the original nomenclature was unsatisfactory — wars aren’t fought against a tactic but rather against those using it — the new name is even less helpful."

"AFGESLACHT"
(De Telegraaf, 2004/11/03)

"A Year of Living Dangerously" (Francis Fukuyama, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/11/02)
"One year ago today, the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh had his throat ritually slit by Mohamed Bouyeri, a Muslim born in Holland who spoke fluent Dutch. This event has totally transformed Dutch politics, leading to stepped-up police controls that have now virtually shut off new immigration there. Together with the July 7 bombings in London (also perpetrated by second generation Muslims who were British citizens), this event should also change dramatically our view of the nature of the threat from radical Islamism. ...
In addition to Bouyeri and the London bombers, the March 11 Madrid bombers and ringleaders of the September 11 attacks such as Mohamed Atta were radicalized in Europe. In the Netherlands, where upwards of 6% of the population is Muslim, there is plenty of radicalism despite the fact that Holland is both modern and democratic. And there exists no option for walling the Netherlands off from this problem. ...
First, the challenge that Islamism represents is not a strange and unfamiliar one. Rapid transition to modernity has long spawned radicalization; we have seen the exact same forms of alienation among those young people who in earlier generations became anarchists, Bolsheviks, fascists or members of the Bader-Meinhof gang. The ideology changes but the underlying psychology does not.
Further, radical Islamism is as much a product of modernization and globalization as it is a religious phenomenon; it would not be nearly as intense if Muslims could not travel, surf the Web, or become otherwise disconnected from their culture. This means that "fixing" the Middle East by bringing modernization and democracy to countries like Egypt and Saudi Arabia will not solve the terrorism problem, but may in the short run make the problem worse. Democracy and modernization in the Muslim world are desirable for their own sake, but we will continue to have a big problem with terrorism in Europe regardless of what happens there." (See also: "Gunman kills Dutch film director" - News and commentary on the murder of Dutch film director Theo van Gogh in Amsterdam, Tuesday, November 2, 2004.)

"The good news from Iraq is not fit to print" (Jeff Jacoby, The Boston Globe, 2005/11/02)
"Consider The Washington Post. On the morning after the results of the Iraqi referendum were announced, the Post's front page was dominated by a photograph, stretched across four columns, of three daughters at the funeral of their father, Lieutenant Colonel Leon James II, who had died from injuries suffered during a Sept. 26 bombing in Baghdad. Two accompanying stories, both above the fold, were headlined ''Military Has Lost 2,000 in Iraq" and ''Bigger, Stronger, Homemade Bombs Now to Blame for Half of US Deaths." A nearby graphic -- ''The Toll" -- divided the 2,000 deaths by type of military service -- active duty, National Guard, and Reserves.
From Page 1, the stories jumped to a two-page spread inside, where they were illustrated with more photographs, a series of drawings depicting roadside attacks, and a large US map showing where each fallen soldier was from. On a third inside page, meanwhile, another story was headlined ''2,000th Death Marked by Silence and a Vow." It began: ''Washington marked the 2,000th American fatality of the Iraq war with a moment of silence in the Senate, the reading of the names of the fallen from the House floor, new protests, and a solemn vow from President Bush not to 'rest or tire until the war on terror is won.' " Two photos appeared alongside, one of Bush and another of antiwar protester Cindy Sheehan. And to give the body count a local focus, there was yet another story (''War's Toll Leaves Baltimore in Mourning") plus four pictures of troops killed in Iraq.
The Post didn't ignore the Iraqi election results. A story appeared on Page A13 (''Sunnis Failed to Defeat Iraq Constitution"), along with a map breaking down the vote by province." (See also: "Mock The Vote" (Investor's Business Daily, 2005/10/25))

"Iran sacks diplomats in purge of reformers" (Ramita Navai and Richard Beeston, The Times, 2005/11/02)
"The President of Iran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, has ordered an unprecedented purge of senior ambassadors who are regarded as too liberal for the policies of his administration, The Times can disclose.
At least 20 heads of mission and other top diplomats have been sacked or reassigned in the biggest shake-up since the Iranian Revolution of 1979. The majority were appointed during the decade of rapprochement with the West that Mr Ahmadinejad has abruptly reversed.
Four of the envoys, the ambassadors to London, Paris, Berlin and the representative to the United Nations in Geneva, were involved in months of delicate mediation between Iran and Europe over Tehran’s nuclear programme.
Iranian and Western officials told The Times that they feared the purge was a sign of a further hardening of the provocative foreign policy that has isolated Mr Ahmadinejad’s regime."

Tuesday, November 1, 2005

News and commentary:

"A policeman looks towards a group of people..."
(Stephane De Sakutin, AFP, 2005/11/01)
"A policeman looks towards a group of people in the northern Paris suburb of Clichy-sous-Bois. Police fired tear gas canisters and rioters hurled Molotov cocktails as violence hit a poor Paris suburb for the fifth straight night in unrest that officials said had also spread to neighbouring towns."

"Anger grips Paris riot suburb" (Alasdair Sandford, BBC News, 2005/11/01)
"If they didn't come here, into our area, nothing would happen...":
Paris II: "The evidence of the previous night's trouble is clear to see on the Bosquets estate.
Among the cars parked outside one block of flats are two burnt-out vehicles and small piles of debris. Rocks and stones are strewn across the street.
There is no sign of any security presence and people are shopping and chatting as on any normal day.
It does not take long to get a sense of the hostility some feel towards the police.
A driver pulls up in front of the market, his little boy strapped in the back of his car.
He admits belonging to a group that is sometimes a bit "chaud" - meaning troublesome - a hint at the unrest of the past few days.
He describes the nightly presence of the CRS, the French riot police, as provocation.
"If they didn't come here, into our area, nothing would happen," he says. "If they come here it's to provoke us, so we provoke back."
The French Interior Minister, Nicolas Sarkozy, has promised to send in special police units to "occupy" difficult estates, describing urban gangs as "scum".
"We're not scum," says the man, 'we're human beings, but we're neglected.'"

"13 Arrested In Paris Suburb Riots" (AP/CBS News, 2005/11/01)
Paris I: "Youths torched cars, set garbage bins alight and threw stones at police in a fifth night of rioting in a Paris suburb, and set two primary school classrooms on fire as rioting spread to two other suburban towns, police and an official said Tuesday.
Police said that 19 people were detained in the late Monday and early Tuesday rioting in Clichy-sous-Bois and three other suburbs and 13 of them jailed. A total of 21 cars — two of them police cars — were burned, police said.
The mayor of Sevran said youths set two rooms of a primary school on fire, along with several cars. Police said three officers were slightly injured in Sevran. ...
Sarkozy recently referred to troublemakers in the suburbs as "scum" or "riffraff" and in the past vowed to "clean out" the suburbs.
Such "warlike" words won't bring calm, Equal Opportunities Minister Azouz Begag said in an interview published in the daily Liberation newspaper.
He told the paper that he "contests this method of becoming submerged by imprecise, warlike semantics."
While re-establishing order demands firmness, "it is in fighting the discrimination that victimizes youths that order is re-established, the order of equality," said Begag, who was raised in a low-income suburb of Lyon." (See also: "France defends policies after riot" (CNN.com, 2005/10/31))

"Defending and Advancing Freedom" (Commentary, November 2005)
36 leading thinkers weigh in on the Bush Doctrine in a titanic symposium. Here are a few opening paragraphs:

Max Boot: "I applaud the Bush Doctrine. I think it was the right response — the only possible response — to the horror of 9/11."

Eliot A. Cohen: "I have never understood the supposed novelty of the Bush Doctrine. The right to preemption is inherent in the functioning of a more or less anarchical society of states. Were the French to face a probable attack from, say, Tunisia, and if they thought they could do something about it in advance, they would. So would any other state not run by cowards or fools."

Mark Helprin: "The present foreign policy of the United States rests heavily upon three fundamental errors, the consequences of which we are likely to escape only via divine intervention."

Richard Perle: "Despite a history of terrorist attacks on our ships and embassies and despite evidence that al Qaeda was recruiting, training, and organizing for even more murderous attacks on Americans around the world, the United States, under Clinton and then under Bush, did nothing. While we could have dealt a devastating blow to al Qaeda’s terrorist base in Afghanistan, we chose instead to help sustain, with substantial “humanitarian” assistance, the Taliban regime that sheltered it. We left Osama bin Laden unmolested; and we waited. On September 11, we knew we had waited too long."

Natan Sharansky: "If the Bush Doctrine means linking the foreign policy of the United States to the degree of freedom enjoyed by citizens of other countries — as called for by President Bush in his second inaugural address when he declared that America would “encourage reform in other governments by making clear that success in our relations will require the decent treatment of their own people” — then I have been a supporter of the Bush Doctrine for over three decades. It is the policy long championed by Andrei Sakharov, first practiced in the United States by Senator Henry M. Jackson, and used with devastating effect by Ronald Reagan to bring down the Soviet empire, free hundreds of millions of people, and help secure Western civilization."

"Mr. Stability: The wrongness of Brent Scowcroft's realism" (Christopher Hitchens, Slate, 2005/11/01)
"Jeffrey Goldberg's widely discussed essay on Brent Scowcroft's politics, published in The New Yorker of Oct. 31, makes an ideal starting point. It reminds us, for one thing, that the root-and-branch opposition to regime change in 2003 came not from the left, but from the right. There were many vocal leftists on the streets at that moment, as we all remember, but their slogans were so puerile (a war for Halliburton and all that) as to make them ignorable. Far more to the point were the arguments made by conservatives and "realists" to the effect that the status quo in the Middle East was preferable to any likely alternative. ...
He takes the view that the status quo is preferable to any forcible change, and also preferable to any change at all. For example, he warns that if Mubarak leaves or loses power in Egypt, he will be replaced by "bad guys" and sectarians. If this is true, then it must surely mean that the current "stability" of Egypt is illusory as well as undemocratic. He says that the Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon is the prelude to civil war, not independence: "[T]he sectarian emotions that were there when the Syrians went in aren't gone." Hardly a persuasive argument, then, for the healing effect of a Syrian presence that lasted 29 years. ...
Realism of the Scowcroft sort presided over the Iran-Iraq war with its horrific casualties and watched indifferently as genocide was enacted in northern Iraq. It allowed despots free rein from Saudi Arabia to Pakistan, and then goggled when this gave birth to the Taliban and al-Qaida. If this was "fifty years of peace," then it really was time to give war a chance." (See also: "Breaking ranks: What turned Brent Scowcroft against the Bush Administration?" (Jeffrey Goldberg, The New Yorker, 2005/10/31))

"Open Season on Muslim Women" (Robert Spencer, FrontPage Magazine, 2005/11/01)
"Can wife-beating be justified under any circumstances? According to some in Australia, yes — if the couple is Muslim.
The Australasian Police Multicultural Advisory Bureau has published and distributed 50,000 copies of an 82-page handbook for Australian police officers, directing them on how to deal with people from all the unfamiliar cultures that an Australian policeman may encounter. A Sikh, for example, may receive a three-day reprieve from arrest if the arresting officer happens upon him while he is reading his holy scriptures — a practice that takes fifty hours, and must not be interrupted. And Muslim husbands who beat their wives must be treated differently from other domestic violence cases, as a matter of cultural sensitivity: “In incidents such as domestic violence,” says the handbook, “police need to have an understanding of the traditions, ways of life and habits of Muslims.” ...
This backhanded endorsement of wife-beating in Australia has revealed in a harsh new light the bankruptcy of relativist multiculturalism. Is wife-beating intrinsically wrong? Evidently not in Victoria state. ...
But the folly of Victoria state runs deeper also: it reveals a gaping weakness in the West’s defense against the global jihad: this is, or threatens to become, not so much a clash of civilizations as a clash of barbarisms. One side contends for certain values that are, in a word, monstrous: the subjugation of women and non-Muslims, the stifling of freedom of conscience, and so on. But the other contends for no values at all, and opposes this great maelstrom with nothing more than a moral and intellectual vacuum in which no behavior, no matter how heinous, is beyond the pale." (See also: "Police told to respect traditions" (Liam Houlihan, Herald Sun, 2005/10/25))

"Confrontation is a good thing" (Mark Steyn, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/11/01)
"According to The Sunday Telegraph, on this week's whirlwind tour of the Great Satan, the Prince of Wales "will try to persuade George W Bush and Americans of the merits of Islam…because he thinks the United States has been too intolerant of the religion since September 11". His Royal Highness apparently finds the Bush approach to Islam "too confrontational".
If the Prince wants to take a few examples of the non-confrontational approach with him to the White House, here's a couple pulled at random from the last week's news: the president of Iran called for Israel to be "wiped off the map". Kofi Annan expressed his "dismay".
Excellent. Struck the perfect non-confrontational tone. ...
In Sulawesi, Indonesia, three Christian girls walking home from school were beheaded.
"It is unclear what was behind the attack," reported the BBC, scrupulously non-confrontationally.
In the Australian state of Victoria, reports the Herald Sun, "police are being advised to treat Muslim domestic violence cases differently out of respect for Islamic traditions and habits". Tough luck for us infidel wife-beaters, but admirably non-confrontational Islam-wise." (See also: "Prince Charles to plead Islam's cause to Bush" (Andrew Alderson, The Daily Telegraph, 2005/10/29), "Christian girls beheaded in grisly Indonesian attack" (AP/The Sydney Morning Herald, 2005/10/29) and "Police told to respect traditions" (Liam Houlihan, Herald Sun, 2005/10/25))

"The mullahs want Iran to be a mental hospital — so let's invite them over" (David Aaronovitch, The Times, 2005/11/01)
"Liberal Democrats peers: you never know whether you’re going to find them bravely castigating Western governments for human rights failures, or seeking to have us understand why much worse abuses committed by exotic foreigners are somehow less awful than they seem.
Under a fortnight ago the lawyer Lord Phillips of Sudbury (Andrew Phillips) was doing the second thing — attempting to explain the ways of President Ahmadinejad of Iran to fellow Britons. And though it must be said at once that this was not at all the kind of Assad-licking one gets from George Galloway, it was still a wonderful example of relativism.
Ahmadinejad was a “self-made man with a good doctorate in engineering, who lives in modest circumstances and has a reputation for incorruptibility”. Though a bit on the reactionary side he had fought a mainly secular campaign concentrating on the Iranian equivalents of schools-’n-hospitals.
Iran was a diverse country, Phillips emphasised, far more democratic than in the Eighties, and Iranians were well-educated, highly cultured “devourers” of a diverse press. As for all that stoning of adulteresses, hanging of homosexuals and imprisoning of editors, well, it should be kept in perspective. Then came this: 'Although a country of, by our traditions, cruel Sharia law, (Iran) is nonetheless a place full of humour, spirituality and aesthetic depth. Where in the West does one find the main thoroughfares and squares named after poets?'"

Added in archive:
"Police told to respect traditions" (Liam Houlihan, Herald Sun, 2005/10/25)

Monday, October 31, 2005

News and commentary:

"War in France, War in Denmark" (Henrik, Viking Observer, 2005/10/31)
Denmark II: "Not that well covered [compared to Paris] is a very similar series of riots, also running for four days, in Århus, Denmark. Nothing of it has penetrated to the english-language sections of Danish media, so the following is my translation of a piece in daily Jyllands-Posten:

Rosenhøj Mall has several nights in a row been the scene of the worst riots in Århus for years. "This area belongs to us", the youths proclaim. Sunday evening saw a new arson attack.
Their words sound like a clear declaration of war on the Danish society. Police must stay out. The area belongs to immigrants. ...
He calls himself 100 percent Palestinian, born in a refugee camp in Lebanon 19 years ago, and now out of work in Denmark.
"The police has to stay away. This is our area. We decide what goes down here".
And then the bit with the drawings of the prophet Muhammed comes around:
We are tired of what we see happening with our prophet. We are tired of Jyllands-Posten. I know it isnt you, but we wont accept what Jyllands-Posten has done to the prophet", he says aggressively, and the others nod approvingly. ...
"We have planned this for three weeks. That is why only two were arrested saturday nigh. The police will cordon off it all. But we know the ways out", he claims, and then disappears, munching on a piece of pizza from Fun Pizza.
The pizzerias windows are also held together by adhesive tape after the attacks with cobblestones."

(Hat tip: The Brussels Journal.)

"Selective Muslim Silence" (Judith Apter Klinghoffer, HNN, 2005/10/31)
Denmark I: "Consider the following headline: "Muslim embassies complain over Mohammed caricatures." ...
Suddenly, the ever silent Muslims states found their tongues. 11 ambassadors including those from a number of Arab countries, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Indonesia entered the fray not to calm the excesses of their coreligionists or condemn the threats of violence but to complain about the cartoons and Danish Islamophobia! The Turkish ambassador even seconded the Imam’s sentiments, berating the paper for “abusing Islam in the name of democracy, human rights and freedom of expression.” ...
So, here we are: part of the Muslim community is in the thrall of a totalitarian ideology which turns young Muslims into human bombs. Photos of Muslim and non Muslim civilian body parts flying in the middle of markets, mosques, discos and hotels have become routine. Beheadings of Christian and Jewish men and women are no longer surprising. And what do the ever-silent and passive-defensive Muslim countries, Organization of Islamic Conference and the Arab League vociferously condemn? They are condemning the publication of cartoons featuring Muhammad in a Danish paper. The absurdity of this action is only matched by its hypocrisy." (See also: "Muslim anger at Danish cartoons" (BBC News, 2005/10/20))

"France defends policies after riot" (CNN.com, 2005/10/31)
"BOBIGNY, France (Reuters) -- French Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy defended his tough crime policies on Monday after a fourth night of riots in a Paris suburb in which tear gas was fired into a mosque.
Sarkozy, addressing police officers, vowed to find how tear gas had been fired into the Muslim place of worship, an incident which had helped fuel the disturbances.
Youths hurled rocks and set fire to cars in the northeastern Clichy-sous-Bois suburb of the French capital, where many immigrants and poor families live in high-rise housing estates notorious for youth violence.
"I want these people to be able to live in peace," Sarkozy told reporters as he mingled with local residents outside the Seine-Saint-Denis prefecture in Bobigny, which oversees Clichy-sous-Bois.
French television said six police officers were hurt and 11 people arrested in violence partly fueled by the incident at the mosque. Sarkozy promised an inquiry.
"I am, of course, available to the imam of the Clichy mosque to let him have all the details in order to understand how and why a tear gas bomb was sent into this mosque," he told about 170 police officers at the prefecture." (See also: "Youths riot for second night in Paris suburb" (Laure Bretton, Reuters/Yahoo! News, 2005/10/29))

"Iran/Al Qaeda Axis" (Peter Brookes, New York Post, 2005/10/31)
"The most immediate threat Iran poses to American national security isn't its nuclear (weapons) program. It's the safe haven Tehran is giving al Qaeda terrorists, who are planning and directing jihad across the globe.
If the United States and its allies in the War on Terror don't take firm action against Iranian support to al Qaeda, the price in blood and treasure attributable to Osama bin Laden's killers — in Iraq and elsewhere — will continue to soar.
Shockingly, it's been long forgotten that Iran became home to some of al Qaeda's most wanted after the fall 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. Tehran admitted as much, claiming that al Qaeda operatives were under "house arrest" and would be tried.
Of course, nothing of the sort happened . . .
So al Qaeda "refugees" from Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Uzbekistan, North Africa and Europe — including senior military commander Saif al Adel, three of Osama's sons and spokesman Sulaiman Abu Ghaith — now operate freely from Iran.
In fact, just last week, the German monthly magazine Cicero, citing Western intelligence sources, claimed that as many as 25 al Qaeda thugs are living in Iran under the protection of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC).
Cicero cites a "top-ranking" Western intelligence official saying, "This is not incarceration or house arrest. They [al Qaeda members] can move around as they please." The IRGC even provides logistics help and training to al Qaeda."

"What Goes Around, Comes Around" (Christopher Hitchens, The Wall Street Journal, 2005/10/31)
"The Plame kerfuffle has made hypocrites of just about everyone":
"What if Mr. Wilson spoke falsely when he asserted that his wife, who was not in fact under "non-official cover," had nothing to do with his visit to Niger? What if he was wrong in stating that Iraqi envoys had never even expressed an interest in Niger's only export? (Most European intelligence services stand by their story that there was indeed such a Baathist initiative.) What if his main friends in Niger were the very people he was supposed to be investigating?
Well, in that event, and after he had awarded himself some space on an op-ed page, what was to inhibit an employee of the Bush administration from calling attention to these facts, and letting reporters decide for themselves? The CIA had proven itself untrustworthy or incompetent on numerous occasions before, during and after the crisis of Sept. 11, 2001. Why should it be the only agency of the governm