Bloodlands podcast

Hear Timothy Snyder discussing his new book Bloodlands on the "unknown" Holocaust in the east.

For Afghan Wives, a Desperate, Fiery Way Out

HERAT, Afghanistan — Even the poorest families in Afghanistan have matches and cooking fuel. The combination usually sustains life. But it also can be the makings of a horrifying escape: from poverty, from forced marriages, from the abuse and despondency that can be the fate of Afghan women.

The night before she burned herself, Gul Zada took her children to her sister’s for a family party. All seemed well. Later it emerged that she had not brought a present, and a relative had chided her for it, said her son Juma Gul.

This small thing apparently broke her. Ms. Zada, who was 45, the mother of six children and who earned pitiably little cleaning houses, ended up with burns on nearly 60 percent of her body at the Herat burn hospital. Survival is difficult even at 40 percent.

READ ON: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/08/world/asia/08burn.html?_r=1&scp=1&sq=afghan%20burn%20&st=cse

Europol Report: All Terrorists are Muslims…Except the 99.6% that Aren’t

Europol publishes an annual report entitled EU Terrorism Situation and Trend Report.  On their official website, you can access the reports from 2007, 2008, and 2009. 

One terrorist attack was carried out in 2009 in all Europe by persons of Muslim heritage (I do not say ‘by a Muslim’ because terrorism is forbidden in Islamic law).

http://www.juancole.com/2010/10/on-juan-williams-firing-for-islamophobia-and-how-most-european-terrorism-is-by-european-separatists.html

Where Having It All Doesn’t Mean Having Equality

France ranks 46th in theWorld Economic Forum’s 2010 gender equality report, trailing the United States, most of Europe, but also Kazakhstan and Jamaica.

READ ON:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/12/world/europe/12iht-fffrance.html

Pakistan's Troubles Stem From Misunderstood Past

Ayesha Jalal, a professor at Tufts University, just finished a semester teaching history at a leading university in Lahore, Pakistan. Jalal was the author of a noted book that reinterpreted Pakistan's birth. She tells Steve Inskeep that Pakistan was founded to protect the political interests of Muslims on the Indian subcontinent -- and not necessarily as an explicitly Islamic state or a theocracy. Pakistani governments have deliberately confused this issue for many years, encouraging many of the religious conflicts the country faces today.

INSKEEP: What's an example of the difference between a piece of history and a piece of ideology and how that warps people's thinking today?

Ms. JALAL: Well, I think a very good example is the reasons for why Pakistan was created. The ideologues would argue that it was created for Pakistan to become an Islamic conservative bastion, whereas the history tells you otherwise. The history tells you that Pakistan emerged out of an attempt to win a large share of power for Indian Muslims in India.

Listen to podcast of interview: 7 min 46 sec

Understanding Pakistan, By Way Of Its Pop Idols

"Many Muslims in Pakistan practice variations of Sufism, a less rigid form of Islam that's very open to music and dance. Facing waning popularity in the late 1970s, then-dictator Muhammad Zia-ul Haq ushered a more extreme Islam into the law and culture of the country."

Listen to this short report (7 min 48 sec), and watch some Pakistani music videos...about "cool" Pakistan and how the "culture wars" are being fought in that very strategic country:


http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130384137

Games India Isn’t Ready to Play

October 2, 2010

By PANKAJ MISHRA

Mashobra, India

ON Friday afternoon, public spaces across north India were flooded with policemen and paramilitaries. Thousands of alleged “troublemakers” were arrested. The sending of bulk text messages from mobile phones was banned. These precautions had nothing to do with the opening on Sunday of the Commonwealth Games, the athletic competition among the nations of the former British Empire that so many Indians have hoped would be their country’s symbolic coming out as a world power.

Rather, the police were out in force because an Indian court had pronounced its verdict on the site in the town of Ayodhya that has been long claimed by Hindu nationalists as the birthplace of Lord Rama. The government did not want a repeat of the horrific mob violence that in 1992 had followed the destruction by Hindu nationalists of a 16th-century mosque standing on the land in question.

Shortly after the verdict, which split the disputed site unequally in favor of Hindus and to the detriment of Muslims, I went for a walk through the Himalayan village near my home. Even here, 600 miles from Ayodhya, people seemed to be playing it safe, the market partly closed, and shopkeepers clustered around television sets behind shutters.

Only the migrant laborers, who have come hundreds of miles from central India to the Himalayas, were still at work, men, women and even children carrying heavy stones on their heads at the construction projects that litter the hillsides.

Easily identified — the parents small and thin and dark, and the children with distended bellies and rust-brown hair that speak of chronic malnutrition — these migrant laborers have been a regular sight here for some years, building summer homes for the affluent of Delhi all day, and then huddling under tin shacks at night.

Read on:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/03/opinion/03mishra.html

Indian Court Divides Disputed Ayodhya Holy Site

By JIM YARDLEY

Kuni Takahashi for The New York Times

Hindu holy men awaiting a ruling Thursday on a site claimed by Hindus and by Muslims.

A long-awaited decision on control of India’s most disputed religious site splits the land into three portions to be divided among Hindus and Muslims.

NEW DELHI — In a case that spanned centuries of religious history and languished in the legal system for six decades, an Indian court issued a historic ruling Thursday on the ownership of the country’s most disputed religious site by effectively handing down a split decision: granting part of the land to Hindus and another part to Muslims.

read article:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/01/world/asia/01india.html?ref=asia

Death threats and a hotel siege for the Britons trapped in the Indian Mutiny 2007

They came in peace to commemorate the thousands who died in the Indian Mutiny 150 years ago. But when a British tour party arrived in the northern city of Lucknow - scene of one of the mutiny's most brutal battles - their  reception was far from peaceful. Chanting anti-British slogans, an angry mob pelted their tour bus with rubbish and dirty water before laying siege to the group's hotel. The building was last night barricaded by police after the visitors received death threats.

The party of around 40 Britons - many of them elderly and some of them descendants of those killed in 1857 - were unable to leave as scores of nationalist protesters shouted "English go home" and called them "descendants of savages"...

READ ON:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/article-23413861-death-threats-and-a-hotel-siege-for-the-britons-trapped-in-the-indian-mutiny-2007.do

Top Ways 9/11 Broke Islamic Law

Top Ways 9/11 Broke Islamic Law
On the ninth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, it is clear that al-Qaeda was a tiny fringe terrorist movement, not a globe-straddling threat to Western societies. The organization has been decisively disrupted and now lacks command and control. Its leader, Usama Bin Laden, has not been seen in a video since 2004, and is either dead or horribly disfigured. Its number 2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is dangerous only in the way that any other terrorist crank is, firing off crackpot messages to his dwindling band of followers from time to time. With the startling rise of anti-Muslim bigotry in the United States, fanned in large part by Republican Party fear mongering, it is worthwhile underlining the ways in which September 11 contravened Islamic values and Islamic law.
Read on...

Tennessee mosque fire 'was arson', investigators say

A fire that damaged construction equipment at the site of a Tennessee Islamic centre has been ruled arson.

Officials in Murfreesboro have offered a $20,000 (£13,000) reward for help finding the person they say doused a lorry in diesel and then ignited it.

The FBI said it had yet to determine whether the fire was a hate crime and would not say if it has any suspects.

Saturday's incident came amid growing anti-Muslim animosity and opposition to new mosque building across the US.

READ MORE: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-11185701#

Park 51 imam speaks

September 7, 2010
Building on Faith
NY Times OPED
By FEISAL ABDUL RAUF
AS my flight approached America last weekend, my mind circled back to the furor that has broken out over plans to build Cordoba House, a community center in Lower Manhattan.I have been away from home for two months, speaking abroad about cooperation among people from different religions. Every day, including the past two weeks spent representing my country on a State Department tour in the Middle East, I have been struck by how the controversy has riveted the attention of Americans, as well as nearly everyone I met in my travels.

We have all been awed by how inflamed and emotional the issue of the proposed community center has become. The level of attention reflects the degree to which people care about the very American values under debate: recognition of the rights of others, tolerance and freedom of worship.

Many people wondered why I did not speak out more, and sooner, about this project. I felt that it would not be right to comment from abroad. It would be better if I addressed these issues once I returned home to America, and after I could confer with leaders of other faiths who have been deliberating with us over this project. My life’s work has been focused on building bridges between religious groups and never has that been as important as it is now.

We are proceeding with the community center, Cordoba House. More important, we are doing so with the support of the downtown community, government at all levels and leaders from across the religious spectrum, who will be our partners. I am convinced that it is the right thing to do for many reasons.

Above all, the project will amplify the multifaith approach that the Cordoba Initiative has deployed in concrete ways for years. Our name, Cordoba, was inspired by the city in Spain where Muslims, Christians and Jews co-existed in the Middle Ages during a period of great cultural enrichment created by Muslims. Our initiative is intended to cultivate understanding among all religions and cultures. Read on: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/08/opinion/08mosque.html?_r=1&ref=opinion

Rape Victims in Congo Raid Now More Than 240

September 2, 2010

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/03/world/africa/03congo.html?_r=1&ref=world

By JOSH KRON

KAMPALA, Uganda — The number of rape victims from a four-day rebel attack in eastern Congo a month ago has risen to more than 240 and will likely go higher, aid officials said Thursday.

Giorgio Trombatore, a director of the aid group International Medical Corps, said investigators working in eastern Congo’s North Kivu Province had so far “counted 242 cases individually, one by one.”

On July 30, hundreds of members of Rwandan and Congolese rebel groups occupied villages in the Walikale region of North Kivu, assaulting their victims in groups of two to six.

Countering reports from the area that some victims were male infants, Mr. Trombatore said that all were female and that the youngest was 16 years old and the oldest 75.

Thousands of women, and hundreds of men, have been sexually assaulted by the various armed groups warring in eastern Congo.

Officials with the aid group have said that the rebels — members of the Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda and the Mai Mai — left the villages on Aug. 3, and that later that day a local administrator alerted aid organizations in the area to the mass rapes.

Rebels from the same groups were suspected of attacking workers with the International Medical Corps on Wednesday after the workers landed by helicopter in Walikale, forcing the aid workers to escape into the surrounding forest.

Mr. Trombatore said Thursday that all the aid workers had been rescued and were safe.

Since the United Nations first publicly reported the mass rapes on Aug. 22, questions have arisen over how much the United Nations knew about the attacks as they were under way.

United Nations officials have said the peacekeepers did not know about the rapes until Aug. 12.

But a leaked United Nations e-mail dated July 30 shows that officials there were aware that the rebels had taken over one of the villages and raped one woman within the first day of the attack. By Aug. 10, the United Nations was aware that at least 25 women had been raped, according to another United Nations bulletin, published online.

What do you want to learn from this course?

"BIG" QUESTIONS:

• Team 1: Why caused the wars, violence and mass murder of the 20th century? (a total of 8 people asked similar questions)
• Team 2: Why were the imperial powers so hungry for African land? 
• Team 3: What can we learn from the history of the 20th century to help the economy of today and the future? (5 people asked similar questions)
• Team 4: Why does the US feel responsible for policing the world?
• Team 5: Why did communism fall and capitalism conquer the world?

...also asked: What can we learn from 20th century history to help our world today?/what's similar today? (2 people)

 ...and some people asked the questions that I posed in the syllabus:

• What was the cause and nature of the west’s “new imperialist” expansion?
• What caused the catastrophic levels of violence that made the 20th century the bloodiest in human history?
• What caused people to embrace radical alternatives to the way their societies were organized? Why did these utopian experiments fail?
• What was the nature of the anti-colonial/independence movements of the twentieth century?
• Why do we now speak of “world civilization” instead of “western civilization”?

 

Stimulus WAS Right Policy Just Too Timid

Read the Financial Times' Martin Wolf's trenchant discussion of these fascinating charts

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/5799a774-b534-11df-9af8-00144feabdc0.html

Muslims in the Middle

NEW YORK TIMES 8-17-10
By WILLIAM DALRYMPLE

PRESIDENT OBAMA’S eloquent endorsement on Friday of a planned Islamic cultural center near the World Trade Center, followed by his apparent retreat the next day, was just one of many paradoxes at the heart of the increasingly impassioned controversy.

We have seen the Anti-Defamation League, an organization dedicated to ending “unjust and unfair discrimination,” seek to discriminate against American Muslims. We have seen Newt Gingrich depict the organization behind the center — the Cordoba Initiative, which is dedicated to “improving Muslim-West relations” and interfaith dialogue — as a “deliberately insulting” and triumphalist force attempting to built a monument to Muslim victory near the site of the twin towers.

Most laughably, we have seen politicians like Rick Lazio, a Republican candidate for New York governor, question whether Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf, the principal figure behind the project, might have links to “radical organizations.”

The problem with such claims goes far beyond the fate of a mosque in downtown Manhattan. They show a dangerously inadequate understanding of the many divisions, complexities and nuances within the Islamic world — a failure that hugely hampers Western efforts to fight violent Islamic extremism and to reconcile Americans with peaceful adherents of the world’s second-largest religion.

READ MORE

Remember Hans Blix?

Chilcot inquiry: too late, Hans Blix, too late
The weapons inspector has spoken out at the Chilcot inquiry. If only he had done so in 2003

• 
• • Sami Ramadani
  • The Guardian, Wednesday 28 July 2010
  •  larger | smaller

With its sedate pace and genteel drip, drip revelations, one could be forgiven for thinking of the Chilcot inquiry into the Iraq war as an academic exercise, delving into some distant historical event in an attempt to understand what happened. But to many Iraqis, the inquiry is something else entirely. It is an inconsequential charade, a classic case of fiddling while Baghdad burns.

Yesterday it was Hans Blix's turn to appear before the laid back and suitably emotionless inquisitors. The former chief UN weapons inspector revealed nothing we didn't know. He told Chilcot there was no justification for war, because his inspectors found no evidence of weapons of mass destruction; and he told them that he had needed a few more months to finish his task.

As an Iraqi living in Britain, and fearful for my compatriots back home, I remember waiting with bated breath for Blix to utter those undiluted words when he appeared before the UN security council in 2003, 11 days before the war of aggression was launched. Back then, he minced his words, providing enough ambiguity for Tony Blair and Jack Straw to push on with their plans to drag Britain into the US-led war.

Read rest of article

Sami Ramadani is a senior lecturer in sociology at London Metropolitan University

and was a political refugee from Saddam's regime

Obama, Hitler and wingnuts

Commentary: Obama, Hitler and wingnuts — Oh my!

Mike Hendricks | The Kansas City Star

last updated: July 21, 2010 01:55:15 PM

President Obama, Adolf Hitler and Chairman Mao. Three peas in a pod, right?

Some of the nuttier nutjobs in wingnut nation say just that on a billboard along U.S. 71 between Peculiar and Belton.

"In troubled times, the fearful and naive are always drawn to charismatic radicals," say the words beneath photos of Hitler, Mao and Obama.

All are labeled as representatives of various brands of socialism — national, Marxist and Democratic, respectively — and shown to have all called for "Change!"

If you visit certain websites, or listen to talk radio, then you know that this passes for profound logic in some circles.

After all, Mao ordered millions of his own people murdered. Hitler committed genocide and started a world war that left tens of millions of corpses.

Whereas Obama pushed through national health care, bailed out the auto industry and slapped new rules on Wall Street.

Lots of similarities.

Yes, well, most rational thinkers — including many wingnuts, I would imagine — see it for the obscene, idiotic notion that it is.

"Not only are comparisons such as this both misguided and malicious, but they trivialize, distort and desecrate the history and memory of the Holocaust," says Jean Zeldin, at the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in Overland Park. "It is time to stop invoking Nazi analogies in order to promote hatred and hostility and to further political agendas."

The billboard on U.S. 71 is sponsored by anonymous cowards who run a website named after the Revolutionary War hero known as the Swamp Fox: www.francismarion.biz.

To guard their identities, they insist on trading e-mails through a filter. Yet the geniuses also list a snail mail address in Cumming, Ga., if you want to send them money. A simple Nexis search matched that address with a name and phone number.

I left a message, but the guy never called back.

News broke recently of a similar sign with a similar slogan in Mason City, Iowa, only with Lenin in place of Mao. It became the subject of national notoriety because of the sponsor: a branch of the Tea Party.

After some elements of the national Tea Party movement condemned the sign, however, the sponsoring North Iowa Tea Party had the sign papered over with a public service ad.

Of the sign's critics, the leader of the north Iowa chapter said: "They were right from the standpoint that the image was not a positive reflection on the tea people."

"Not a positive reflection."

How genteel.

But why espouse loony-toon positions in the first place? A little more thought would spare the rest of us from all the brain garbage.

Death Comes for the Archbishop | The New York Review of Books

Death Comes for the Archbishop | The New York Review of Books
This past March marked the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination of the Catholic Archbishop of El Salvador by a right-wing death squad, an act that sent campesinos into the mountains to join the guerrillas and brought the simmering civil war to a boiling point.

Thanks to the funding of the military by US President Ronald Reagan to the tune of $6 billion-- a huge amount in a country the size of Vermont; over a million dollars a day-- the conflict would last for over a decade and claim the lives of 70,000 Salvadorenos.

Greek Debt Crisis: Death and Destruction in Athens

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/06/greek-debt-crisis-athens-greece

It began as a fiesta, a mass march in the sun against
the deflationary programme the Greek people are being
told can alone save their country. At 10 on Wednesday
morning, Klathmonos Square in Athens was filling with
protesters. A union official was making an interminable
speech (Greeks never use one word when 300 will do),
and music was blaring out of vans - those Chilean-style
revolutionary songs without which no demo is complete:
"The people, united, will never be defeated." Not
today, anyway.

People had said there would be no violence - or at
least if there was, it would be "ritual" violence: a
broken window here, a wrecked ATM there. One Greek
journalist had told me the protests so far had been
subdued - "equivalent to what would normally happen
here if the electricity board sacked a few people". He
said the public were resigned to the economic hardships
to come - salaries of state employees cut by 25%,
pensions to fall by 15%, unemployment likely to rise to
18% - and that they recognised the only alternative was
national bankruptcy; not just junk bonds but a junk
country.

A few hours later, three bank workers, one a woman who
was four months pregnant, lay dead in a burnedout bank
on Stadiou Avenue, the victims of anarchist firebombs.
Ritual violence this was not, and by Wednesday evening
Athens feels drained and lifeless. "This will make
people stop and think," teacher Anna Tsiokou tells me,
as we stand beside the police cordon on the edge of the
area where the firebombing had occurred. "The
demonstrations will have to stop for the moment. We
have legitimate grievances, but the anarchists are
using the crisis for their own ends."


READ ON:  

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/may/06/greek-debt-crisis-athens-greece

Debt contagion