Tuesday, November 08, 2005
Merde
>Despite the claims of right wingers in both France and America, Islam seems to play only a minor role in the current unrest.
- Those doing the rioting are running around chanting "ALLAH AKBAR!". (FUNNY how the media seems to not show any video of the rioters...hmmmm...wonder why???)
- They are torching Synagogues (and two Catholic Churches so far)
- `Each night we turn this place into Baghdad', says one masked youth in Sevran near Paris.
- If its only a problem with the French liberal welfare state why are the riots spreading to other European cities?
- The French police found a bomb factory...aka "Insurgent/Terrorist" style.
- They are now calling for their own "TERRITORY".
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." 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.
It's quite simple, the beginnings of Palestine in France.
Communicating Building An E-Mail Time Capsule David M. Ewalt, 10.24.05, 9:00 AM ET
From Oct. 24, 2005 to Nov. 30, 2005, Forbes.com will collect thousands of letters that our readers have written to themselves. And we'll deliver them up to 20 years later. Preserving a physical time capsule is simple: just shove it in the dirt and forget about it. But the process gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to store something digitally. Simply scheduling an e-mail for future delivery is pretty easy--just a matter of writing it and setting a send date in the future. Some e-mail clients will do it for you, and small Web sites like futureme.org will take over the task as well. But once your message is written and waiting to be sent, all kinds of things can happen to prevent delivery, particularly if you're going to be waiting for decades.
Click here to e-mail yourself in the future
From Oct. 24, 2005 to Nov. 30, 2005, Forbes.com will collect thousands of letters that our readers have written to themselves. And we'll deliver them up to 20 years later. Preserving a physical time capsule is simple: just shove it in the dirt and forget about it. But the process gets a lot more complicated when you're trying to store something digitally. Simply scheduling an e-mail for future delivery is pretty easy--just a matter of writing it and setting a send date in the future. Some e-mail clients will do it for you, and small Web sites like futureme.org will take over the task as well. But once your message is written and waiting to be sent, all kinds of things can happen to prevent delivery, particularly if you're going to be waiting for decades.
Click here to e-mail yourself in the future
Realism in Darfur Consider the horrors of peace.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:05 PM ET
It looks as if the realists have won the day in the matter of Darfur. Or, to phrase it in another way, it looks as if the ethnic cleansers of that province have made good use of the "negotiation" and "mediation" period to complete their self-appointed task. As my friend Johann Hari put it recently in the London Independent: "At last, some good news from Darfur: the genocide in western Sudan is nearly over. There's only one problem—it's drawing to an end only because there are no black people left to cleanse or kill."
By some reliable estimates, the Sudanese government or "National Islamic Front" has slain as many as 400,000 of its black co-religionists—known contemptuously as zurga ("niggers")—and expelled perhaps 2 million more. This appalling achievement has been made possible by a very simple tactic: The actual killers and cleansers, the Arab janjaweed militias, are a "deniable" arm of the Sudanese authorities. Those authorities pretend to negotiate with the United Nations, the United States, and the African Union, and their negotiating "card" is the control that they can or might exercise over said militias. While this tap is turned on and off, according to different applications of carrot and stick, the militias pretend to go out of control and carry on with their slaughter and deportation. By the time the clock has been run out, the job is done.
If it were not for the efforts of a few brave journalists and humanitarian workers, and at least one American soldier attached to the African Union "peacekeepers" who went public in disgust at what he had seen, the Sudanese government might have gotten away with the whole thing. But we have more than enough filmed and photographic evidence of Sudanese planes and helicopters, flying close support to janjaweed operations, to say with certainty that the relationship between the two is the same as between the Rwandan authorities and the "Hutu Power" mobs who destroyed the Tutsi population. In other words, a Rwanda in slow motion, and in front of the cameras and the diplomats. What was all that garbage about "never again"? What was the meaning of Clinton's apology to the Rwandans? What did Colin Powell mean when he finally used the word "genocide" to describe the events in Darfur, just before resigning as secretary of state and becoming an advocate for more realism all round?
And what on earth was I thinking when I employed that "carrot and stick" cliché a couple of paragraphs above? Carrots there have been. Only the other day, according to the New York Times, the Bush administration granted a waiver to the sanctions ostensibly in place against the Khartoum government in order to allow it to spend $530,000 on a lobbyist in Washington. Well, one would not want to deny a government indicted for genocide the right to make its case. That would hardly be fair. Meanwhile, the State Department has upgraded Sudan's status on the chart that shows "cooperation" in the matter of slave-trafficking. Apparently, you can be on this list and still be awarded points for good behavior. A hundred-plus congressmen recently signed a statement accusing the administration of "appeasement," which seems the only appropriate word for it. But that's about the extent of the protest. How can this be? Surely the administration did everything that could have been asked of it. Abandoning any sort of "unilateralism," it pedantically followed the Kofi Annan script of multiparty negotiations and patient diplomacy. It allowed the inspectors more time. It exhausted all avenues short of war and never even threatened the use of force. By the use of sanctions, it kept Sudan "in its box." And it has got exactly what anyone might have predicted for such a strategy. Perhaps that's why there is so little protest. After all, we know that "war is not the answer." And now Sudan has Darfur province in its box. It has taken the land and gotten rid of the people.
Any critique of realism has to begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace. Everybody now wishes, or at least says they wish, that we had not made ourselves complicit spectators in Rwanda. But what if it had been decided to take action? Only one member state of the U.N. Security Council would have had the capacity to act with speed to deploy pre-emptive force (and that would have been very necessary, given the weight of the French state, and the French veto, on the side of the genocidaires). It is a certainty that at some stage, American troops would have had to open fire on the "Hutu Power" mobs and militias, actually killing people and very probably getting killed in return. Body bags would have been involved. It is not an absolute certainty that all detained members of those militias would have been treated with unfailing tenderness. It is probable that some of the military contractors would have overcharged, and that some locals would have engaged in profiteering and even in tribal politics. It is impossible that any child of any member of the Clinton administration would have been an enlisted soldier. But we never had to suffer any of these wrenching experiences, so that we can continue to wish, in some parallel Utopian universe, that we had done something instead of nothing.
Or not exactly nothing. The United States ended up supporting the French military intervention in Rwanda, which was mounted in an attempt not to remove the genocidaires but to save them. Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder. Thank heaven that we are tough enough to bear the shame of this, and strong enough to forgive ourselves.
Related in Slate
In 2004 Lee Smith wondered if the Sudanese government would blow off a U.N. security council resolution calling for Sudan to "disarm and persecute" the janjaweed militia. No surprises here: They did. Click here for a Dispatch from Jennifer Abrahamson's two-month stay in Sudan setting up a public information/press office for the United Nations. Brendan I. Koerner explained the origins of the janjaweed militia. Click here for a slide show of pictures drawn by child refugees from the genocidal conflict in Sudan.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
By Christopher HitchensPosted Monday, Nov. 7, 2005, at 6:05 PM ET
It looks as if the realists have won the day in the matter of Darfur. Or, to phrase it in another way, it looks as if the ethnic cleansers of that province have made good use of the "negotiation" and "mediation" period to complete their self-appointed task. As my friend Johann Hari put it recently in the London Independent: "At last, some good news from Darfur: the genocide in western Sudan is nearly over. There's only one problem—it's drawing to an end only because there are no black people left to cleanse or kill."
By some reliable estimates, the Sudanese government or "National Islamic Front" has slain as many as 400,000 of its black co-religionists—known contemptuously as zurga ("niggers")—and expelled perhaps 2 million more. This appalling achievement has been made possible by a very simple tactic: The actual killers and cleansers, the Arab janjaweed militias, are a "deniable" arm of the Sudanese authorities. Those authorities pretend to negotiate with the United Nations, the United States, and the African Union, and their negotiating "card" is the control that they can or might exercise over said militias. While this tap is turned on and off, according to different applications of carrot and stick, the militias pretend to go out of control and carry on with their slaughter and deportation. By the time the clock has been run out, the job is done.
If it were not for the efforts of a few brave journalists and humanitarian workers, and at least one American soldier attached to the African Union "peacekeepers" who went public in disgust at what he had seen, the Sudanese government might have gotten away with the whole thing. But we have more than enough filmed and photographic evidence of Sudanese planes and helicopters, flying close support to janjaweed operations, to say with certainty that the relationship between the two is the same as between the Rwandan authorities and the "Hutu Power" mobs who destroyed the Tutsi population. In other words, a Rwanda in slow motion, and in front of the cameras and the diplomats. What was all that garbage about "never again"? What was the meaning of Clinton's apology to the Rwandans? What did Colin Powell mean when he finally used the word "genocide" to describe the events in Darfur, just before resigning as secretary of state and becoming an advocate for more realism all round?
And what on earth was I thinking when I employed that "carrot and stick" cliché a couple of paragraphs above? Carrots there have been. Only the other day, according to the New York Times, the Bush administration granted a waiver to the sanctions ostensibly in place against the Khartoum government in order to allow it to spend $530,000 on a lobbyist in Washington. Well, one would not want to deny a government indicted for genocide the right to make its case. That would hardly be fair. Meanwhile, the State Department has upgraded Sudan's status on the chart that shows "cooperation" in the matter of slave-trafficking. Apparently, you can be on this list and still be awarded points for good behavior. A hundred-plus congressmen recently signed a statement accusing the administration of "appeasement," which seems the only appropriate word for it. But that's about the extent of the protest. How can this be? Surely the administration did everything that could have been asked of it. Abandoning any sort of "unilateralism," it pedantically followed the Kofi Annan script of multiparty negotiations and patient diplomacy. It allowed the inspectors more time. It exhausted all avenues short of war and never even threatened the use of force. By the use of sanctions, it kept Sudan "in its box." And it has got exactly what anyone might have predicted for such a strategy. Perhaps that's why there is so little protest. After all, we know that "war is not the answer." And now Sudan has Darfur province in its box. It has taken the land and gotten rid of the people.
Any critique of realism has to begin with a sober assessment of the horrors of peace. Everybody now wishes, or at least says they wish, that we had not made ourselves complicit spectators in Rwanda. But what if it had been decided to take action? Only one member state of the U.N. Security Council would have had the capacity to act with speed to deploy pre-emptive force (and that would have been very necessary, given the weight of the French state, and the French veto, on the side of the genocidaires). It is a certainty that at some stage, American troops would have had to open fire on the "Hutu Power" mobs and militias, actually killing people and very probably getting killed in return. Body bags would have been involved. It is not an absolute certainty that all detained members of those militias would have been treated with unfailing tenderness. It is probable that some of the military contractors would have overcharged, and that some locals would have engaged in profiteering and even in tribal politics. It is impossible that any child of any member of the Clinton administration would have been an enlisted soldier. But we never had to suffer any of these wrenching experiences, so that we can continue to wish, in some parallel Utopian universe, that we had done something instead of nothing.
Or not exactly nothing. The United States ended up supporting the French military intervention in Rwanda, which was mounted in an attempt not to remove the genocidaires but to save them. Nonintervention does not mean that nothing happens. It means that something else happens. Our policy in Darfur has not just failed to rescue a stricken black African population: It has actually assisted the Sudanese Islamists in completing their policy of racist murder. Thank heaven that we are tough enough to bear the shame of this, and strong enough to forgive ourselves.
Related in Slate
In 2004 Lee Smith wondered if the Sudanese government would blow off a U.N. security council resolution calling for Sudan to "disarm and persecute" the janjaweed militia. No surprises here: They did. Click here for a Dispatch from Jennifer Abrahamson's two-month stay in Sudan setting up a public information/press office for the United Nations. Brendan I. Koerner explained the origins of the janjaweed militia. Click here for a slide show of pictures drawn by child refugees from the genocidal conflict in Sudan.
Christopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair. His most recent book is Thomas Jefferson: Author of America. His most recent collection of essays is titled Love, Poverty, and War.
Monday, November 07, 2005
http://www.aei.org/publications/pubID.23402,filter.all/pub_detail.asp
Here’s some news that the Washington Post relegated to their “blogs” pages: A Cheerier View of Iraq.
"Would you believe – an economic boom in Iraq despite the on-going insurgent attacks?
Well, you might believe it after you read an analysis by Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who contends that the reason you haven’t heard the economic good news is because opponents of the American involvement in Iraq want you to think there’s only bad news there.
Here’s Rubin’s case: Many Iraqis who couldn’t get jobs under Saddam Hussein because of their ethnicity, sectarian identity, or refusal to join the Baath party, are now working. The private sector economy is booming because Iraqis are investing in it, with some of the money coming from family members abroad. Thriving banks, restaurants, and furniture stores now occupy what were abandoned stores last year.
Further: In August, new business startups in Iraq exceeded 30,000. Individual Iraqis are better off financially than they have been for 20 years. According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, per capita income has doubled since the United States toppled the Saddam regime. There are more than 3.5 million cellular phone subscribers in Iraq, up from zero when Saddam ruled. Internet cafes are thriving in even small towns."
And so, on and on, according to Rubin, who has actually visited Iraq, unlike some of the harshest critics of the American involvement. His paper was dated November 1st.
"Would you believe – an economic boom in Iraq despite the on-going insurgent attacks?
Well, you might believe it after you read an analysis by Michael Rubin, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, who contends that the reason you haven’t heard the economic good news is because opponents of the American involvement in Iraq want you to think there’s only bad news there.
Here’s Rubin’s case: Many Iraqis who couldn’t get jobs under Saddam Hussein because of their ethnicity, sectarian identity, or refusal to join the Baath party, are now working. The private sector economy is booming because Iraqis are investing in it, with some of the money coming from family members abroad. Thriving banks, restaurants, and furniture stores now occupy what were abandoned stores last year.
Further: In August, new business startups in Iraq exceeded 30,000. Individual Iraqis are better off financially than they have been for 20 years. According to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, per capita income has doubled since the United States toppled the Saddam regime. There are more than 3.5 million cellular phone subscribers in Iraq, up from zero when Saddam ruled. Internet cafes are thriving in even small towns."
And so, on and on, according to Rubin, who has actually visited Iraq, unlike some of the harshest critics of the American involvement. His paper was dated November 1st.
Wow
Updated: Nov. 7, 2005, 11:42 AM ET
Two Panthers cheerleaders face charges
ESPN.com news services
Two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who allegedly were having sex with each other in a bathroom stall at a Tampa, Fla., nightclub were arrested and charged early Sunday following a run-in with patrons and police. According to a police report obtained by the CBS TV affiliate in Tampa and the Charlotte Observer, Angela Ellen Keathley and Renee Thomas were arrested following an incident at Banana Joe's, in Tampa's Channelside district, at 2:10 a.m. ET.
In the police report, witnesses claimed Thomas and Keathley were having sex with each other in a stall when other patrons grew angry that the two were taking so long in the bathroom. Another woman waiting to use the bathroom got into an argument with the two, and Thomas hit that person in the face, according to details of the report posted on TampaBay10.com, the CBS TV affiliate's Web site.
Keathley, who was escorted from the nightclub, was so drunk she could barely stand, the report said. Police described Keathley as rude and belligerent with police. When Thomas was arrested, she gave police the name of another Panthers cheerleader -- Kristen Lanier Owen, the Observer and TampaBay10.com reported. Thomas, who was charged with one count of battery, might face additional charges for lying to police, once they confirm her identity. Keathley was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing or opposing an officer.
Other Panthers cheerleaders bailed Thomas and Keathley out of Hillsborough County jail later Sunday morning, TampaBay10.com reported.
The cheerleaders made the trip to Tampa on their own -- the squad performs on the sideline only at home games. Panthers officials at Sunday afternoon's game said they were aware of the report, but declined further comment when contacted by the Observer.
According to the Panthers' official team Web site on NFL.com, Keathley is a registered nurse and second-year member of the TopCats. Thomas is listed as a student at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and first-year member of the cheerleading squad.
Two Panthers cheerleaders face charges
ESPN.com news services
Two Carolina Panthers cheerleaders who allegedly were having sex with each other in a bathroom stall at a Tampa, Fla., nightclub were arrested and charged early Sunday following a run-in with patrons and police. According to a police report obtained by the CBS TV affiliate in Tampa and the Charlotte Observer, Angela Ellen Keathley and Renee Thomas were arrested following an incident at Banana Joe's, in Tampa's Channelside district, at 2:10 a.m. ET.
In the police report, witnesses claimed Thomas and Keathley were having sex with each other in a stall when other patrons grew angry that the two were taking so long in the bathroom. Another woman waiting to use the bathroom got into an argument with the two, and Thomas hit that person in the face, according to details of the report posted on TampaBay10.com, the CBS TV affiliate's Web site.
Keathley, who was escorted from the nightclub, was so drunk she could barely stand, the report said. Police described Keathley as rude and belligerent with police. When Thomas was arrested, she gave police the name of another Panthers cheerleader -- Kristen Lanier Owen, the Observer and TampaBay10.com reported. Thomas, who was charged with one count of battery, might face additional charges for lying to police, once they confirm her identity. Keathley was charged with disorderly conduct and obstructing or opposing an officer.
Other Panthers cheerleaders bailed Thomas and Keathley out of Hillsborough County jail later Sunday morning, TampaBay10.com reported.
The cheerleaders made the trip to Tampa on their own -- the squad performs on the sideline only at home games. Panthers officials at Sunday afternoon's game said they were aware of the report, but declined further comment when contacted by the Observer.
According to the Panthers' official team Web site on NFL.com, Keathley is a registered nurse and second-year member of the TopCats. Thomas is listed as a student at the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and first-year member of the cheerleading squad.
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On Francisco Franco
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