DIVERSITY: Ten years on, 9/13 a milestone for minorities

Today is the 13th day of September -- 10 years after an important milestone for the United States and the West. Ten years ago our way of life and our freedoms, our liberal democracy and our rule of law were all assaulted and violated.


No, it didn't take place in New York or Washington. It took place at a small family-run petrol station in Mesa, Arizona. A young man named Balbir Singh Sodhi, sporting a smartly kept beard and a turban, was shot dead. He was planting flowers in the garden of his family business.




But why mention his beard and turban? Was this at all relevant to Sodhi's murder?


When the planes first crashed into the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon, men sporting turbans and beards were all suspected of some kind of involvement. The first pictures released by the FBI of suspected terrorist passengers included men sporting beards and turbans. Even Sydney's Daily Telegraph carried a front page showing a man, his head bowed, sporting a small beard and a blue turban, being taken into custody. The headline screamed "FIRST ARREST".




Turbans and beards were now the symbol of terror. Why? Because Obam ... whoops ... Osama bin Ladin wore a turban.


Frank Silva Roque, 44, of Harvest, Ala., was sentenced to death or first-degree murder in the death of Balbir Singh Sodhi:

Roque was convicted of killing Sodhi, a Mesa gas station owner whom prosecutors said was targeted because Roque thought Sodhi was Arab. Sodhi wore a turban and beard as part of his Sikh faith.

According to an AAP report about Roque's sentencing in 2003, after shooting Sodhi, Roque shot at another gas station where the clerk was a man of Lebanese descent, and shot at the home of an Afghan family. They were not injured.  

This was just the beginning. The New York Times reports that

... an eclectic Sikh temple called Gobind Sadan was burnt down by four teenagers who thought that the turbaned worshippers were Muslims and that the temple's sign said 'Go Bin Laden'.

Sikhs, like other minorities, have suffered a disproportionate amount of prejudice since 9/11. They have stood out due to their visible religious devotions including wearing the dastaar, a traditional Punjabi-style head dress.


Until recently, Sikhs had to remove their turbans when flying. Sikhs also have their turbans frisked at airport security, a ridiculous and humiliating practice.


Paranoia about turbans has become so great that they even became an issue in the US Presidential elections when a picture of Obama wearing traditional clothes of Somali elders was leaked by opponents.


September 11 was the day when tragedy struck the US and when men and women of all nationalities and faiths were murdered by crazed fanatics. But 9/13 is the day when minorities of all nationalities and faiths started becoming subjected to abuse and denial of liberty in the name of protecting us from terrorists who wish to abuse our way of life and deny us liberty.


It isn't just about airport searches. Men from certain minorities have been detained more readily and for longer periods of time. Paranoia was even present in the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, when immigrants such as painting contractor Abdurrahman Zeitoun were detained and treated like terror suspects.


The war on terror hasn't just led to imbecilic wars that have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents. It has created a scud missile mentality where at home our collective hatred is hardly ever directed at the right people. Just ask the Sodhi family.

First published in Crikey on 13 September 2011.

CULTURE WARS: For the week ending 19 June 2011

[01] It seems New York Congressman Anthony Weiner is hiding the fact (?) that his untucking of his tackle is part of some devious form of taqiyya.

For those of you who don't know, the word taqiyya is an Arabic term used in Muslim jurisprudence. Basically what it means is that if someone pulls a gun out and threatens to shoot you if you confirm you are a Muslim, you are permitted to lie about your faith if it means you don't get shot. Sounds perfectly reasonable to me.

But according to some fruitloops in the mainstream Right of the United States, taqiyya is the mechanism by which Muslims, like their Jewish forebears, use deception and cunning to hide their true intentions - to take over the world. The protocols of the learned imams of ... um ... well everywhere!

Some rightwing Jews are also getting into the profoundly anti-Semitic act. Among them is Elaana Benador, who was once a darling of the neo-Cons and ran her own speakers bureau which had some of the most influential neo-Cons on its books.

Now Benador has turned her sights to former Congressman Anthony Weiner, claiming that he in fact is a secret Muslim. Her evidence goes something like this:

1. Some imam made a comment calling on Weiner's wife, Huma Abedin, to counsel her husband and have patience with him.

2. Huma Abedin comes from an Indian Muslim family.

3. The imam and Ms Anedin seem to be involved in some strange form of taqiyya.

4. The imam's excuse for Weiner is the kind of excuse that would only be made for a Muslim husband.

5. Weiner must have been converted to Zombi'ism after being his neck bitten by both the imam and Ms Abedin. He also became a Muslim.

Of course, this all means that Ms Abedin now has access to the upper echelons of power. She can use this access to ensure that by next week, the White House will have a Muslim president. That is, if it doesn't have one already.

Read more about it here and here.

POLITICS: More on Peter King's radical fiasco

Republican Congressman Peter King, Chair of the US House of Representatives Homeland Security Committee, has just commenced a set of controversial hearings on the "radicalisation of American Muslims".

Writing in the Boston Globe, John Tirman from the MIT Center for International Studies notes:

The START database on terrorism in America, which tracks all incidents of political violence, shows that most attacks in the last two decades have been on black churches, reproductive rights facilities, government offices, and individual minorities. And those have been committed mainly by right-wing extremists. From 1990 to 2009, START identified 275 “homicide events’’ that killed 520 people and were committed by right-wing ideologues. There were many more incidents of destruction of property, nonfatal attacks, and other acts of thuggery by white supremacists, private militias, and the like ...

King should expand his investigation to the largest sources of extremist violence in America — the Ku Klux Klan, the neo-Nazis, and their newer versions — and ask how hate speech and war fuel attacks. Those would be congressional hearings worth listening to.

Peter Bergen, director of the national security studies program at the New America Foundation, writes in the New York Times:

If law enforcement officials find it difficult to track down “homegrown” terrorists, then why have only 17 Americans been killed in the United States by jihadist terrorists since 9/11? Clearly law enforcement is having some success against such militants.

In the same time period, there were 73 homicides that the F.B.I. classified as hate crimes, and few lawmakers are suggesting that the agents aren’t doing enough about that issue. There are more than 15,000 murders in the U.S. every year, and few congressmen are claiming that law enforcement isn’t doing enough about such crimes.

To be continued ...

USA/COMMENT: Peter King's terror fantasy

A Republican Representative from Long Island in New York has just commenced Congressional Hearings in the United States on the dangers posed by Muslims. Apparently they haven't been doing enough to fight terrorism and extremism among their ranks. As a result, the whole of the United States is threatened.

No, Peter King isn't holding Congressional Hearings on extremism or terrorism. He's holding hearings on Muslim terrorism. Because as we all know, not all Muslims are terrorists but all terrorists are Muslims. Just ask King, who was quoted in the NY Daily News on 29 November 2010 as follows:

Rep. Pete King (R-L.I.) urged U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to designate WikiLeaks a "foreign terrorist organization," saying it "posed a clear and present danger to the national security of the United States," and to prosecute founder Julian Assange for espionage.

Hey, let's be honest with ourselves. King can spot an Islamic terrorist a mile away. I mean, the dude pictured below sure looks like a Muslim to me.

Making matters more interesting, King chairs the Homeland Security Committee.

And you thought having Cory Bernardi as Tony Abbott's Parliamentary Secretary was nuts.

There's just one problem. Peter King himself is (or at least was) a supporter of terrorism.

Back in June 22 2005, the New York Sun reported:

Since the late 1970s, a Long Island congressman, Peter King, has been aligned with one of the most violent terrorist groups in recent European history, defying critics in his own Republican Party and elsewhere, and yet managing to prosper ...


The Nassau County politician ... used to travel to Belfast as often as twice a year ...


Once a vocal and frequent House champion for the IRA's political wing, Sinn Fein, and its leader, Gerry Adams ... The politician once called the IRA "the legitimate voice of occupied Ireland," he was banned from the BBC by British censors for his pro-IRA views, and he refused to denounce the IRA when one of its mortar bombs killed nine Northern Irish police officers.

It makes interesting reading. Here's some more.

He forged links with leaders of the IRA and Sinn Fein in Ireland, and in America he hooked up with Irish Northern Aid, known as Noraid, a New York based group that the American, British, and Irish governments often accused of funneling guns and money to the IRA. At a time when the IRA's murder of Lord Mountbatten and its fierce bombing campaign in Britain and Ireland persuaded most American politicians to shun IRA-support groups, Mr. King displayed no such inhibitions. He spoke regularly at Noraid protests and became close to the group's publicity director, the Bronx lawyer Martin Galvin, a figure reviled by the British.


Mr. King's support for the IRA was unequivocal. In 1982, for instance, he told a pro-IRA rally in Nassau County: "We must pledge ourselves to support those brave men and women who this very moment are carrying forth the struggle against British imperialism in the streets of Belfast and Derry."


By the mid-1980s, the authorities on both sides of the Atlantic were openly hostile to Mr. King. On one occasion, a judge threw him out of a Belfast courtroom during the murder trial of IRA men because, in the judge's view, "he was an obvious collaborator with the IRA." When he attended other trials, the police singled him out for thorough body searches.


During his visits to Ireland, Mr. King would often stay with well-known leaders of the IRA, and he socialized in IRA drinking haunts. At one of such clubs, the Felons, membership was limited to IRA veterans who had served time in jail. Mr. King would almost certainly have been red-flagged by British intelligence as a result, but the experience gave him plenty of material for the three novels he subsequently wrote featuring the IRA.


If Peter King helped give the IRA a respectable face in America, in Ireland and Britain the IRA's reputation as a ruthless and skilled terrorist group was solidifying. The product of street disorders in 1969 in the wake of a civil rights campaign on behalf of Northern Ireland's minority Catholic population, the IRA's violent effort to end British rule against the wishes of the majority Protestant population lasted 25 years. Despite killings by state forces and Protestant terrorist groups who favored retaining Northern Ireland's British links, the IRA emerged as the single most violent group. More than 3,600 civilians, soldiers, and policemen died in the conflict between 1969 and 1994 - the per-capita equivalent death toll in America would be nearly 700,000 - and the IRA was responsible for around half of those killings.


Ireland was no stranger to episodic political violence, but the strife in Northern Ireland was the most intense and prolonged of all. At one stage, Britain had 30,000 troops stationed there to quell the violence. Meanwhile, the IRA took its campaign to Britain - where London's financial district was twice devastated by bombs - and to mainland Europe, where British NATO bases were frequently targeted. The IRA nearly killed Prime Minister Thatcher and her cabinet with a bomb in 1984, and it assassinated prominent British politicians and members of the royal family. The IRA's primary contribution to international terrorist know-how, the car and truck bombs now commonplace in Iraq, were devised and first deployed by the IRA in Belfast in 1972. The organization also developed homemade explosives, like the fertilizer-based device that destroyed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma in 1995.


Much of the conventional weaponry and a great deal of the money necessary for IRA violence came from Irish-American sympathizers. Mr. King's advocacy of the IRA's cause encouraged that flow and earned him the deep-seated hostility of the British and Irish governments. In America, official animosity was no less intense. The GOP in Nassau tried, unsuccessfully, to muzzle him, and he complained that the FBI was opening mail sent from Ireland, including letters from Sinn Fein's Gerry Adams. In 1984, the Secret Service listed him as a threat when President Reagan made a trip to Nassau County to watch a Special Olympics event.


Mr. King and the IRA made the oddest of political couples. While Mr. King was an opponent of legalized abortion, a fiscal conservative, and a prominent supporter of English First - which campaigned against federal funds for bilingual education - the IRA and Sinn Fein are close to supporting abortion rights, have campaigned to give the Irish language official parity with English, and were in a pseudo-Marxist phase when Mr. King made his alliance with them. None of that bothered the IRA's American supporters.


"People like Adams were banned from America, there was censorship in Ireland, and there was no one around who would support armed struggle," a former head of the Manhattan unit of Noraid, John McDonagh, said. "But here you had this guy whose father was an NYPD cop - a politician, a lawyer, and from Queens. We may not have liked his politics, but it was so good to have someone like that, a very credible person who spoke up for us."


As Mr. King became more outspoken in his support for the IRA he was also fashioning his political career. In 1977 he was elected to municipal office in Hempstead, and four years later he became Nassau County comptroller. His breakthrough came in 1985,and for that he could thank IRA supporters in New York.Four years before, 10 IRA prisoners had starved themselves to death on a hunger strike in protest of being denied political status by the British. Week after week during the lengthy fast, tens of thousands of Irish-Americans turned out for noisy Noraid protests - and mainstream politicians, from Mayor Koch to Senator D'Amato - lined up to speak from Noraid platforms.

King happily supported radical extremism and terrorism when it suited his own understanding of his ethno-religious identity. It was okay for him to spend years promoting and raising funds for violent terror cells. The Irish Catholic jihad was his jihad.

Now things have changed. Funny, that. Still, it isn't just terrorists of the wrong religion that Peter King has a problem with.

PAKISTAN: Can a security contractor claim diplomatic immunity?

There's a chap named Raymond Davis currently in a prison cell in Pakistan. He was in the country as a private contractor working for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). David was arrested after he gunned down two men in Lahore. A third person was run over by a US Consulate vehicle.

The Hindustan Times reports:

Davis, a US official, was arrested in Lahore Jan 27 after he shot dead two youths on a motorcycle. He claimed he acted in self-defence as the armed youngsters were trying to rob him.


His arrest has sparked a diplomatic crisis and strained relations between the US and Pakistan. The US has threatened to withhold the $1.5 billion aid package promised to Islamabad for the war on terror.

Views in Pakistan are ... well ... to put it mildly, quite strong. Here is what one columnist, a retired vice-admiral and former vice-chief of the naval staff, wrote in The News.

What sort of “strategic relationship” do we have with each other if America has let loose a horde of CIA operators in this country and is working towards its destabilisation.


The US position is that international conventions cannot be subservient to the laws of a signatory country. The Vienna Convention on Consular Relations was intended to specify the privileges of a mission to enable its diplomats to perform their function without fear of coercion or harassment by the host country. It is ironic that in the Davis case this convention has been turned on its head against the host country, for use as a legal cover to protect an American who committed first-degree murder.

The New York Times reports more reaction from Pakistan:

For Pakistanis, many of whom are angry at the apparent impunity with which the C.I.A.’s drone missiles regularly kill terrorism suspects — and, at times, innocent bystanders — Mr. Davis’s case has proved galvanizing. Protesters have called for Mr. Davis to be hanged.

The US government claims that the case is clear - Davis is subject to diplomatic immunity and must be released. Davis, they argue, was in Pakistan as a diplomat. Yet as the NYT reports:

... this case also rests on legal technicalities, with confusion arising from contradictory statements by the State Department in the first days after Mr. Davis’s arrest. Those statements have called into question whether Mr. Davis was working — officially, at least — as a diplomatic official or a consular one. Consular officials are afforded somewhat weaker legal protections because they are thought of as administrators, rather than diplomats.


Initially, State Department officials described Mr. Davis as a staff member for the United States Consulate in Lahore.


Days later, however, the United States government said that Mr. Davis was actually listed with the administrative and technical staff of the United States Embassy in Islamabad — and that it had formally notified the Pakistani Foreign Ministry of his status there on Jan. 20, 2010.


The distinction is crucial. If Mr. Davis was listed as a technical staff member for the embassy’s diplomatic mission, then he would be covered by a 1961 treaty that gives diplomats total immunity to criminal prosecution. In that case, Pakistan should be allowed only to expel him. Victims’ families, however, might still be able to sue him for civil damages.


But if Mr. Davis were instead listed as a staff member for the consulate in Lahore, then he would be covered by a 1963 treaty that governs the rights of consular officials and that allows host countries to prosecute them if they commit a “grave crime.”


The contradictory statements over Mr. Davis’s assignment are just part of the evidence that Pakistani news accounts have cited in criticizing the United States’ position.

I'll have to dust off my public international law textbooks to come up with a definitive answer to this one. Treaty interpretation isn't easy. The rules of international law are not like common law where clear rules of interpretation and construction apply and where case law usually provides clear guidance. Precedents are not binding in international law but are only a guide.

What really matters is international consensus of what the legal position is i.e. customary international law.

Of course, law aside, this case illustrates just how tricky it is for countries like the US that make extensive use of private contractors for off-shore intelligence and defense work.

Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf



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POLITICS: Bad intelligence ...

The New York Times reports the hilarious antics of a Californian conman who took advantage of Washington's terror hysteria.

For eight years, government officials turned to Dennis Montgomery, a California computer programmer, for eye-popping technology that he said could catch terrorists. Now, federal officials want nothing to do with him and are going to extraordinary lengths to ensure that his dealings with Washington stay secret.

This chap managed to make a tidy sum out of bogus anti-terrorism software.

... Mr. Montgomery and his associates received more than $20 million in government contracts by claiming that software he had developed could help stop Al Qaeda’s next attack on the United States. But the technology appears to have been a hoax, and a series of government agencies, including the Central Intelligence Agency and the Air Force, repeatedly missed the warning signs, the records and interviews show.

The implementation of this software had some interesting outcomes.

The software he patented — which he claimed, among other things, could find terrorist plots hidden in broadcasts of the Arab network Al Jazeera; identify terrorists from Predator drone videos; and detect noise from hostile submarines — prompted an international false alarm that led President George W. Bush to order airliners to turn around over the Atlantic Ocean in 2003.


The software led to dead ends in connection with a 2006 terrorism plot in Britain. And they were used by counterterrorism officials to respond to a bogus Somali terrorism plot on the day of President Obama’s inauguration, according to previously undisclosed documents.

Did anyone notice the fraud?

C.I.A. officials, though, came to believe that Mr. Montgomery’s technology was fake in 2003, but their conclusions apparently were not relayed to the military’s Special Operations Command, which had contracted with his firm. In 2006, F.B.I. investigators were told by co-workers of Mr. Montgomery that he had repeatedly doctored test results at presentations for government officials. But Mr. Montgomery still landed more business.


In 2009, the Air Force approved a $3 million deal for his technology, even though a contracting officer acknowledged that other agencies were skeptical about the software, according to e-mails obtained by The New York Times.

Of course, who could suspect that such an upstanding gentleman would engage in such a huge fraud.

Mr. Montgomery described himself a few years ago in a sworn court statement as a patriotic scientist who gave the government his software “to stop terrorist attacks and save American lives.”

Read the whole story. Not very good intelligence.

COMMENT: The neo-Con fantasy comes unstuck

Here’s an example of the kind of fruitloop reasoning that makes so many American conservatives such a laughing stock:

Are the Arabs capable of democracy? And if so, can Americans be the agents of their transformation? The answer, of course, is that no one knows. The lack of a single democratic Arab government gives grounds for skepticism. The claim that something in Arab culture makes it resistant to democracy cannot be refuted until the first Arab democracy comes into being. (Joshua Muravchik, former resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute)

Here's a simple bullshit-free translation: Sorry, sand-niggers. Your raghead culture is inferior to ours. You can’t have democracy unless we become the agents of your change. Without us, you won’t get anywhere. In the meantime, we'll blame your culture for shoving down your throats dictators that you hate but that guarantee us access to cheap oil.

Ordinary Egyptians took a mere 18 days to show what a load of crap this thinking was. And who opposed their peaceful uprising? Why none other than a large number of the same American conservatives. Funny that.

UPDATE I: Here's a few choice words from an Australian of Egyptian heritage as reported in the Sun-Herald today:

... Nour Eldin Tarraf, a 35-year-old orthodontist who moved to Sydney from Cairo five years ago, said the real threat to Egypt's prosperity was not religion. ''I'm a Muslim who grew up in a building that was half-Muslim, half-Christian - no one cared,'' said Mr Tarraf, of the Sydney Egyptian Revolution Solidarity Committee.



''The real problem is corruption. It infiltrated every rank of Egyptian society, and changing that will not be easy.''

UPDATE II: Even those who sold Mubarak to the nation are suddenly trying to reinvent themselves. The Washington Post recently published a piece about the editor of a pro-Mubarak (as in state-owned) newspaper:

For now, Osama Saraya is still editor in chief of al-Ahram, the state-run Egyptian newspaper that has long been a deferential mouthpiece for the president and his ruling party. 

But his main preoccupation seems to be reinvention. 

Portraits of Hosni Mubarak no longer adorn his office walls (one is stashed under the television, others behind a curtain). Photographs of Saraya with top government officials have been turned upside down. 

It was only last week that Saraya was denouncing the chaos caused by pro-democracy demonstrators. His editorial in al-Ahram on Sunday carried a very different tune. 

"A salutation to the revolution and respect to its youth," Saraya wrote. "The corrupt in Egypt were only a few that led to the destruction of the country, and their era is gone now.''

Words © 2011 Irfan Yusuf


Joe Jackson - Right And Wrong



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VIDEO: How Omar Suleiman made a mickey of the United States

The Americans and Israelis are very close to Egypt's long serving intelligence chief and recently appointed Vice President Omar Suleiman. And what has Suleiman offered in return? Watch this video from CNN's Parker Spitzer show to find out.



UPDATE I: Suleiman has also been personally linked to the torture of an Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib. I wrote something about this in Crikey back in 2008. Natalie O'Brien writes more about this for the Sun Herald here.

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VIDEO: Fox News reports a terrorist attack in America

Russian cable news network RT asks some pertinent questions.



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VIDEO: Anti-Semitism Texas style

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Jewish Speaker of Texas State House
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog</a> The Daily Show on Facebook

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OPINION: Rhetoric of religious right inflames zealots in East and West

There are certain similarities between recent political shootings in the US and Pakistan, IRFAN YUSUF writes

A bitter political debate is played out in the media and among politicians about the alleged danger posed by a tiny and extremely vulnerable minority. Populist and allegedly conservative politicians pass draconian legislation at the expense of this minority, thousands of whose members are then prosecuted. Rallies are held in support of the draconian laws and threats are made against those few politicians calling for law reform to protect the minority.

Then one of these politicians is shot in a broad daylight in a public area. Evidence shows the gunman is influenced by the inflammatory rhetoric of those conservative forces supporting the new law. The gunman believes the future of the nation is at stake and that the politician had to be killed.

I could be describing recent events on a main road in Islamabad in which a lone gunman murdered Governor Salmaan Taseer in Pakistan. Then again, I could just as easily be describing events at a shopping centre in Tucson, Arizona, in which another gunman shot and wounded Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords. Also killed were a US district judge and at least four others.

Taseer’s assassin was his own bodyguard. Evidence suggests the man’s religious sentiments were offended by Taseer’s calls to amend, if not abolish, Pakistan’s blasphemy laws. Malik Mumtaz Qadri was said to be inspired by the fiery rhetoric of Pakistan’s religious groups, whose leaders had drawn thousands to rallies calling for the mandatory death penalty for blasphemy to remain. These leaders claimed that any watering-down of the law represented a direct threat to the Muslim heritage of the Islamic Republic of Pakistan. The fact that these laws were often used to harass Christian minorities was of little consequence.

Evidence suggests Jared Lee Lougner, the 22-year-old who shot the Democrat congresswoman in Arizona, was inspired by the fiery gun-toting rhetoric of Tea Party elements in the Republican Party. The New York Times has described this rhetoric as reinforcing

the dominant imagery of the moment — a portrayal of 21st-century Washington as being like 18th century Lexington and Concord, an occupied country on the verge of armed rebellion.

Some may believe that comparing the two incidents is like comparing apples and oranges. Allegedly conservative politicians and pundits in Australia and other Western countries may especially be offended by the comparison between anti-immigrant and strong border protection sentiments of the Tea Party movement and the extreme Islamist sentiments of Taseer’s killer.

It’s often said by allegedly conservative commentators that Islamists are in alliance with the left. They should travel to Pakistan and see if anyone takes their claims seriously.

Salman Taseer, the progressive (albeit super-wealthy) politician, belonged to a socialist (albeit of the champagne variety) party calling itself the Pakistan People’s Party. His assassin says he acted to defend traditional values. Not only religious party leaders but also conservative pundits and small business leaders are coming to his defence.

And what are conservative opposition politicians saying in condemnation of the assassin’s actions? Not much. And why should they? After all, they are the beneficiaries of this sentiment in the long run. Not only that, but mainstream conservative parties in Pakistan almost inevitably rule in coalition with religious parties such as the Jamiat Ulema-e-Pakistan, one of whose leaders stated on Pakistani national television that Salmaan Taseer’s death was God’s verdict and nobody who loves the prophet Muhammad could or should condemn the governor’s murder.

Some readers will object that our conservatives generally don’t go around assassinating people. True, but how many Pakistani conservatives are assassins? But in both east and west we see the religious right engaging in similarly hostile rhetoric and using the prejudices of ethnic and religious zealots for their own political ends. Meanwhile, mainstream conservatives are silent, refusing to directly condemn violence and so fanning the flames of the dogwhistlers and making minorities feel vulnerable.

In both the US and Pakistan, powerful, well-funded forces are using conservative, religiously inspired political rhetoric to hijack the agenda. This is not just left versus right. In Pakistan, the allegedly socialist Pakistan People’s Party has been just as willing to enter into coalitions with the religious right. Benazir Bhutto’s government happily joined with her coalition partners to ensure religiously inspired punishments for adultery were kept.

The violent incidents in Tucson and Islamabad may be seen as being consistent with a wider struggle within both countries. There are those happy to see religious and cultural diversity maintained. Then there are those wishing to impose a form of monocultural uniformity. In the Cold War era, the latter were seen as representative of communism. Today, alleged conservatives are behaving like communists.

There is one clear difference between the US and Pakistan. People on all sides of politics in the US have come together to condemn the actions of the gunman in Arizona and to express their sympathy for his victims. Even the county sheriff has lashed out at ...

... the vitriolic rhetoric that we hear day in and day out, from people in the radio business, and some people in the TV business’’ and says Arizona has ‘‘become the mecca for prejudice and bigotry.

In Pakistan, religious forces have effectively silenced any opposition to blasphemy laws. One group, the Sunni Tehreek, has gone so far as to say ...

We will provide legal and constitutional protection to Mumtaz Qadri.

Religious parties are threatening a more organised form of vigilantism than provided by the Governor’s bodyguard. Popular TV preacher and scholar Javed Ghamdi has been forced to move to Dubai after receiving death threats for speaking out against blasphemy laws.

Pakistan’s religious right has gone off the rails and is taking the rest of the country with it. America hasn’t quite gone down that path. At least, not yet.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals. This piece was first published in the Canberra Times in Wednesday January 12 2011.


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MEDIA: WikiLeaks hysteria ...

This post will be a running tally of updates on WikiLeaks developments. I can't guarantee it will be updated regularly. If only I had the resources of Fairfax or News Limited!

UPDATE 1: Jeffrey T Kuhner, a writer for the Washington Times, a far-Right newspaper published by a Korean preacher, has called for WikiLeaks dude Julian Assange to be assassinated. He writes:

... we should treat Mr. Assange the same way as other high-value terrorist targets.

Yep, send him off to be tortured at Guantanamo. Clearly he is worse than the worst of the worst.

(Thanks to NB)

UPDATE 2: A bunch of (largely left-of-centre) academics, lawyers, journos and entertainers have signed an open letter to Julia Gillard regarding Julian Assange. Read it here.

UPDATE 3: Here's a discussion on the unusual offence Assange has been charged with under Swedish law. They call it "sex by surprise".

UPDATE 4: Here's another op-ed, this time from a newspaper that at times tries to emulate the other Washington newspaper owned by a Korean preacher I mentioned earlier. The headline reflects just how much George W Bush's imbecilic logic still pervades certain sectors of the American Right. Read this and try not to laugh:

Assange has threatened America with the cyber equivalent of thermonuclear war.

UPDATE 5: I am accustomed to hacking into Alexander Downer's record as foreign minister. Hence I always imagined he would be more stupidly pro-American than the ALP when it came to China. But The Age reports that Downer and Howard showed far more good sense on this issue.

... 2004 remarks by the then Howard government foreign affairs minister, Alexander Downer, that a conflict between America and China over Taiwan would not necessarily trigger Australia's obligations under the ANZUS treaty with the US. The ANZUS treaty, which came into force in 1952, commits Australia and the US to respond if the armed forces of the other party in the Pacific come under attack.

Mr Downer's comments - which he insisted were taken out of context - caused concern in Washington and prompted the then US ambassador Tom Schieffer to declare that America expected Australia's support in the event of conflict over Taiwan.

The then prime minister John Howard refused to comment publicly on what Australia would do if hostility broke out between the US and China, saying it was a hypothetical situation.

But what of Kim Beazley?

AUSTRALIA'S ambassador to the US and former opposition leader, Kim Beazley, assured American officials that Australia would always side with the US in the event of a war with China, a confidential diplomatic cable reveals.

Mr Beazley's remarks, made in a 2006 meeting with the then US ambassador Robert McCallum just months before Kevin Rudd replaced him as Labor leader, are significant because no Australian federal political leader has publicly disclosed what position they believe the nation should take if the US and China came to blows over Taiwan - an event that would present Australia's greatest foreign policy dilemma.

The cable, classified as confidential and not to be disclosed outside the US government, gave the following summary of Mr Beazley's comments: "In the event of a war between the United States and China, Australia would have absolutely no alternative but to line up militarily beside the US. Otherwise the alliance would be effectively dead and buried, something that Australia could never afford to see happen."

If the contents of this cable are correct, they show a troubling degree of political and foreign policy naivety. It also shows that our political establishment places the interests of a foreign power above those of our own nation.

UPDATE 6: While millions in his country were suffering after a massive cyclone and storm surge, the head of Burma's military junta wanted to spend $1 billion buying English football team Manchester United. We know about this because of WikiLeaks.

UPDATE 7: A report from AlJazeera English on WikiLeaks on Latin American leaders.



UPDATE 8: Julian Assange cites Rupert Murdoch in Rupert's own Australian flagship newspaper.

UPDATE 9: A Labor Right powerbroker revealed as one of numerous US Embassy contacts within the Labor Party.

UPDATE 10: Hopefully my credit card won't be affected by this revenge hacking.

UPDATE 11: Hilarious video.



Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

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VIDEO: When is a church not a church?

VIDEO: Bush continues to defend torture ...

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COMMENT: Switzer isn't into tea ...

Former Opinion Editor of The Australian Tom Switzer makes some interesting observations about the Tea Party.

Some argue that the Tea Party's success in Republican primaries is evidence of a rejuvenated right dedicated to a genuine constitutionalism and commitment to small government. But while the Tea Party is tapping into the economic anxiety and political estrangement that voters feel across the nation, the movement itself has its fair share of problems.

He continues.

It not only sports a few clowns and creeps who make embarrassing pronouncements; it is also leaderless and riven by chronic divisions over social and foreign policy. Moreover, it is not clear whether the Tea Party resonates with the broader electorate.

And what about some of the Tea Party's stars?

... some in the Tea Party scare centrists - think of Delaware candidate Christine O'Donnell, the former anti-masturbation advocate who "dabbled" in witchcraft. She will almost certainly lose a seat the Republicans should have won.

America, Switzer seems to say, is in economic and social free-fall at the moment. The Republicans would have won, with or without the Tea Party. Buut winning with the Tea Party is likely to be a one way ticket to long term political irrelevance.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf

VIDEO/IRAQ: Lengthy report on the Secret Iraq files ...

COMMENT: Arab Derangement Syndrome

Shaykh Musa bin Maymun, also known as Moses Maimonides

Arab Derangement Syndrome. Or ADS for short. An obsessive hatred of all things Arab or associated with Arab (or broader Muslim) culture.

No, I didn't make up this term. David Shasha did. And who is David Shasha?

David Shasha is the director of the Center for Sephardic Heritage in Brooklyn, New York. The Center publishes the weekly e-mail newsletter Sephardic Heritage Update as well as promoting lectures and cultural events. His articles have been published in Tikkun magazine, The American Muslim, the Christian Progressive and other publications.

In a recent piece for the Huffington Post on the so-called "Ground Zero Mosque" controversy, Shasha argues:

In recent weeks, we have heard a number of prominent right-wing Jews like Bernard Lewis, Hillel Halkin, Daniel Pipes, and David Horowitz express their outrage over the use of Córdoba as a symbol of Muslim openness, arguing instead that Córdoba was a place of Muslim intolerance and fanaticism.

In the midst of this new ginned-up outrage over what Sephardic Jews see as their cultural home, we can discover a much larger problem that has surfaced in what has become "Arab Derangement Syndrome" among so many Zionists.

Over the course of many centuries, Sepharad/Al-Andalus was a marker of Jewish creativity and cosmopolitanism afforded by Islam in contrast to the prison that was Christian Europe. "Arab Derangement Syndrome" sees things in quite the opposite way.

Shasha goes further.

The current demonization of Córdoba stems from an irrational and fanatic hatred of all things Arab and is clothed in the disingenuous garb of academic expertise. European-style Anti-Semitism is back-referenced to the Arab world ...

In other words, the Spanish city of Cordoba under Muslim rule was and remains the cultural heartland of a large proportion of the world's Jewish population. Yet other Jews are engaged in a process of what Shasha describes as ...

... this recent demonization of Sephardic Jewry and its Arabic culture ...

The piece makes very enlightening reading, though I wonder whether Shasha's depiction of Ashkenazi Judaism as being ...

... caught up in its disdain for the outside world and conducted an internecine battle waged over strictness in the observance of Jewish ritual.

... is a little unfair.

Shasha also has some harsh words for Zionists who enter into alliances which the ideological descendants of their former persecutors.

Jews, in spite of their startling success in the Western world, feel more alienated and fearful than at any other time in their history. This is strange given the recent experience of the Nazi genocide. But what Zionism and the ongoing problems of the state of Israel have generated in many Jews is a sense of insecurity that has served to reframe and refocus the Jewish mindset. Alliances with fundamentalist Christianity serve as a marriage of convenience that strengthens the perceived vulnerable status of Israel in what is seen as a region of Arab-Muslim barbarians. This is back-referenced to the Middle Ages and to Islamic Spain and Córdoba, and ultimately linked to the Sephardic Jews and their Arabic culture ... The demonization of Córdoba is often accomplished with the help of the very Sephardim whose history is being ripped to shreds by their Ashkenazi brothers. This Jewish fratricide is not simply an obscene act of sociocultural violence by one part of the Jewish community against another; it is a sign of a much larger problem for the Jewish world.

Those nutty anti-Semites (sadly many of them Muslims) who still maintain fantasies of Jewish conspiracies should take their heads out of the sand.

OPINION: When the idiot few hold sway

Paul Kelly once sang a touching tune called From Little Things Big Things Grow. The song was about human rights for indigenous minorities and reconciliation. Its basic message was that the actions of a few marginalised people can have a snowball effect.

The same effect is being played out in New York. A few marginal people have been taking small steps, and have managed to create a snowball effect. Unlike the heroes of Kelly's song, the marginal people at the heart of the so-called Ground Zero Mosque have little or no interest in minority rights or reconciliation.

The story has some ironies here in Australia. We have seen our own battles over Muslim independent schools and mosques. Few have been built without fierce and often hysterical opposition whipped up by prejudiced outsiders and opportunistic politicians.

Things weren't helped by the often imbecilic remarks of Muslim religious leaders and the refusal of Muslim religious bodies to invest in some decent public relations (or in some cases, much-needed ESL classes).

In 2004, the then Premier of NSW Bob Carr decided that he needed an outsider to help him address the poisonous atmosphere in community relations. Carr was visiting New York when he came across Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf.

Carr later told the ABC Compass program in December 2005 the reasons for inviting Rauf on a state visit.

I reached the view that it would be good for a lot of media commentators and the Australian public to hear the voice and American accent of an Islamic leader and Muslim scholar who was talking about Islam and talking about co-operation across cultures or civilisations. And I also thought it would be good for the Islamic community in Australia to hear his perspective.

Carr may have spoken to 9/11 family members such as Adely Welty, whose firefighter son was just 34 years old when he died trying to rescue people from the burning Twin Towers.

Welty wrote in the New York Post recently that Rauf ...

... led a peaceful congregation a couple of blocks away from the proposed Park
51 site for 27 years without incident.

Harper Collins, the publishing arm of Rupert Murdoch's vast media empire, doesn't have problems with Rauf's views. They flooded the market with the imam's book, entitled What's Right With Islam Is What's Right With America, to the extent that it is available from just about every bookstore from Mackay to Montreal.

Sadly, most other parts of Murdoch's empire are busy providing oxygen to the marginalised wingnut brigade who first came up with the idea that nothing representing Islamic culture should exist within sight of what was once the Twin Towers. As is always the case, these forces never allow the facts to get in the way of their prejudices.

Glenn Beck, the modern-day conservative messiah of FoxNews, declared that Rauf "seems to be connected to people who hate America". And how so?

Because Rauf said in a 2005 speech:

We tend to forget in the West that the United States has more Muslim blood on its hands than al-Qaeda has on its hands of innocent non-Muslims.

So if I speak the self-evident truth that the United States military has killed more Muslim civilians in its numerous invasions, raids and expeditions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Somalia, the Philippines etc than a loose terror network has killed non-Muslims, that makes me a dangerous foe of the United States. Even if I could be echoing the sentiments of prominent American generals, politicians, commentators, writers, academics and policy makers.

Others project Rauf as a dangerous proponent of radical Islamic theocracy ruled by a legal system characterised by little more than non-anaesthetic amputations. Sean Hannity, another FoxNews stalwart, claimed that Rauf wanted to set up a parallel legal system with separate sharia courts.

Hannity went on to interview Robert Spencer, the director of a far-right blog called JihadWatch. In the past, Spencer has used his blog to support, among others, a violent neo-fascist group calling itself the English Defence League and made up largely of former soccer hooligans. Spencer is also associated with the US-based and notoriously homophobic Christian Action Network. But does all this stop FoxNews from having Spencer on air?

Spencer many months ago joined forces with another far-right blogger, Pamela Geller, to form "Stop Islamisation in America", a franchise of an equivalent far-right group in Europe. Geller has her own blog which features a photo of herself wearing a Superman uniform. According to a Guardian report, she has written in support of Serbian war criminals and even white supremacists in South Africa. Geller's blog posts videos suggesting Muslims have sex with goats and even suggested that President Barack Obama's father was Malcolm X.

Spencer and Geller have for years been treated as marginal figures in conservative circles. They struggled to find money (much of it raised on their respective blogs) to fund advertisements on the sides of New York buses calling on people to stop the "Ground Zero Mega-Mosque".

You'd wonder how such elements could oppose an intercultural project headed by a man with decades of experience and who has represented his country's interests in tours sponsored by the US State Department during the Bush Administration. But from little things, big things grow.

The Spencer/Geller cause has now been taken on by Republican Party presidential hopeful and former US House speaker Newt Gingrich and former vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Geller has appeared on mainstream news channels, speaking on behalf of American values, 9/11 victims and anything and anyone else she can marshall to support her prejudicial fantasies.

The result has been, according to Salon.com, that

... the mosque story spread through the conservative and then mainstream media like fire through dry grass ... Geller had succeeded beyond her wildest dreams.

Indeed from little things, big things grow. A mere 48 hours after the September 11 attacks, Farqad Chawdury was born in a New York hospital. He never met his father, Mohammed, a waiter at the Windows of the World Restaurant in Tower One who perished on 9/11. His mother told a Canadian TV channel about the responses from people to her:

When they saw me ... I'm wearing a scarf. There is a hate look.

This year Farqad turns nine. He still doesn't know how his father died. His mother is too afraid to tell him.

Those who spew forth hatred on behalf of the victims will soon forget them. Glenn Beck famously once said:

... when I see a 9-11 victim family on television, or whatever, I'm just like, 'Oh, shut up!' I'm so sick of them because they're always complaining.

Meanwhile, the real victims just get on with their lives, generally too busy healing their wounds to care who is pretending to speak for or pillory them.

Irfan Yusuf is a lawyer and author of Once Were Radicals: My Years As A Teenage Islamo-fascist. This article was first published in the Canberra Times on 13 September 2010.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf




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VIDEO: Message from a New York City firefighter ...

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CRIKEY: Welcome to the US of Hey, that’s a lot of security

What do you get when you build your intelligence service up to such a size that it occupies three times the floorspace as the main centre of your executive government? When the services employ about150% of the population of your capital city? And when the amount of intelligence reports produced are so huge that a large proportion are just ignored completely?

Surely you’d have some kind of dictatorship or police state on the scale of China or North Korea or some tinpot Arab state. You’d also have the United States of America.

The Washington Post has produced an investigative report called “Top Secret America” (TSA), which has become effectively the fourth of three branches of US government since the September 11 terrorist attacks and has created

... what amounts to an alternative geography.

You’d think something this big would be effective in protecting Americans from terror. But as the Post argues,

... the result is that the system put in place to keep the United States safe is so massive that its effectiveness is impossible to determine.

That’s right. The “Land of the Free” has a huge but secretive inner core to protect the freedoms of the free but that the free have little knowledge of. And there is no co-ordinating “American Homeland Security Agency” (AHSA — credits to The Hollowmen.)

All this creates huge opportunities for corrupted or manufactured intelligence to enter the system and lead to bungle after bungle. TSA bungles could lead to the wrong person being indefinitely detained, deported, tortured or even killed. One such person could be Australian citizen David Hicks, who is currently seeking to have his conviction overturned. Another such person would definitely have to be Australian citizen Mamdouh Habib, released from Guantanamo gulag without a single charge being laid.

Most TSA spending went on during the Bush/Cheney administration.

[T]he Bush administration and Congress gave agencies more money than they were capable of responsibly spending ... In all, at least 263 organisations have been created or reorganised as a response to 9/11. Each has required more people, and those people have required more administrative and logistic support ... With so many more employees, units and organisations, the lines of responsibility began to blur.

And this was an allegedly conservative President who believed in small government.

TSA has a strong private industry focus, with about 2000 contractor companies and a staggering 850,000 people with top security clearance. Despite even US Defence Secretary Robert Gates saying that “getting your arms around [the growth of intelligence networks] ... is a challenge”, the response from the intelligence community was a predictable denial.

So much money is now being spent, we are told, to fight violent extremism. Yet some 25 years ago, huge amounts were spent to support the same violent extremism. Much of the money used to fight the Soviet Union, Reagan’s so-called “Evil Empire”, was spent on a group of “freedom fighters” in a tiny country called Afghanistan. Among America’s allies was an Afghan faction that included one Mullah Omar. Also allied to the US was a chap named Usama, a young member of a Saudi business family with close ties to the Bush family.

And now we are back there fighting the forces of Mullah Omar and Usama. And losing. And its costing America more money than anyone in the US government can count. It’s also costing Australia troops.

First published in Crikey on Wednesday 21 July 2010.

Words © 2010 Irfan Yusuf


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