ovo

BBC News, Danish Police Shoot Intruder at Cartoonist’s Home:

The man had entered Mr [Kurt] Westergaard’s house armed with a knife and axe and had shouted in broken English that he wanted to kill him. Mr Westergaard ran to a specially designed panic room where he raised the alarm.

KR News, Charity cartoon rejected over terror fears:

TV2’s morning lifestyle programme Go’morgen Danmark was the latest in a long line of those trying to help the victims of the Haitian earthquake. The show organised an auction through auctioneers, Lauritz.com, and asked well known politicians and personalities to donate personal items for the charity fundraiser. A signed copy of Bill Clinton’s book dedicated to the head of the Social Democrats, concert and sports events tickets and a porcelain doll owned by Pia Kjærsgaard, head of the Danish People’s Party, are already listed in the auction. However, when cartoonist Kurt Westergaard – forever to be associated with the Mohammed cartoons and terror threats – was asked to submit a new drawing for the auction, the auctioneers refused to accept it. According to Mette Jessen of Lauritz, the decision was taken because of the latest attempt on Westergaard’s life when an alleged assassin broke into his house on New Year’s Day. ‘We must recognise that the terror threat is still of such a character that we can’t predict the consequences of a sale. We value the safety of our employees quite highly, which is why an eventual risk assessment was used in our consideration,’ she said. Westergaard was disappointed in Lauritz’s decision, saying it was just another example of how his name creates fear. ‘The drawing was in no way controversial, but it seems my name is. I’m sorry for the fear it causes people. When even my hairdresser, who is Muslim, told me with sadness that she didn’t dare keep me on as a customer for fear of reprisals, then there’s reason to be sad about this development,’ he said.

VOA News, Death of Gay Activist Brings Turkey’s Attitude Toward Gays Into Focus:

For 26-year-old Ahmet Yildiz, the choice to live openly as a gay man in Turkey proved deadly. Prosecutors say his father, charged with allegedly killing his son in what is being dubbed as the first gay honor killing, traveled more than 900 kilometers from his hometown to shoot his son in an old neighborhood of Istanbul.

FOXNews.com, Saudi Teen Sentenced to 90 Lashes for Cell Phone in School:

Saudi Arabia is the world’s leading country in the use of torture-by-flogging, and religious police keep a close watch over public behavior.

RFI, Playwright Petrol Attack Handed to Terrorist Police:

The 45-year-old was attacked on Tuesday night outside the theatre in Paris where her play is showing. Two men insulted her in Arabic and poured petrol over her. They then threw a cigarette at her, which failed to ignite.

MetaFilter, Malaysian Churches Attacked Over “Allah”:

Malaysian Catholic newspaper Herald was recently involved in a major lawsuit against the Malaysian government, stating that their constitutional rights were violated when they were stripped of their license to publish in East Malaysian indigenous language Kadazandusun. The ruling was overturned, amidst support by state ministers and protests by the Government, the Islamic Opposition party, and Muslim activists – some of whom have spent the past week attacking churches and convents through firebombs, Molotov cocktails, paint, and bricks thrown at glass.

MetaFilter, The Women of Afghanistan:

87 percent are illiterate. 44 years is their average life expectancy. 70 to 80 percent face forced marriages.

Sam Harris, Liberals Have More to Fear than Cheney (circa 30 January 2008):

Liberals need to realize that there are people in the Muslim world far scarier than Dick Cheney.

NYPOST.com, Art Therapy for Terrorists:

“There is no criteria for evaluation,” John Horgan, a Department of Homeland Security consultant, told the New York Post.

Times Online, Iranian Dancer Afshin Ghaffarian Describes Ordeal at the Hands of Basij:

Ghaffarian is a dancer – an activity banned by Iran’s Islamic rulers and punishable by long prison terms. “If he had known that he would have beaten me even harder,” Ghaffarian said.

Robert Scheer, Bush’s Faustian Deal with the Taliban (22 May 2001 via archive.org):

Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously. That’s the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today.

All articles continue at links.  Part of a series that never ends… [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9][10] and etc.  “They’re making the last film… “

Yahoo News: Taliban blow up Pakistan girls school
Islamist militants opposed to co-education and subscribers to sharia law have destroyed hundreds of schools, mostly for girls, in northwest Pakistan in recent years.

The Nation: Woman sold in public auction in Pakistan – for $3,200
A 20-year-old girl was auctioned at village Badani Bhutto of Taluka Kashmore in consideration of Rs2,70,000 on Saturday. Azizan, daughter of late Allah Bux Bhutto, was divorced on the allegation of Karo-kari [roughly, adultery] some time back. She is stated to be mother of two children and was residing with her brother who held the open auction for her ‘sale’ at village Badani Bhutto.

BBC: Pakistan court orders ears and noses to be cut off
A Pakistani court has ordered that two men have their ears and noses cut off, as punishment for doing the same to a woman who refused to marry one of them.

Mail Online: Muslim police chef defeated in ‘bacon roll’ tribunal faces £75,000 legal bill
Mr Khoja, 62, lost his claim in May after a police employee told an employment tribunal how she saw Mr Khoja eat bacon rolls and sausages.

Mail Online: Islamic militants stone man to death for adultery in Somalia as villagers are forced to watch
Mohamed Ibrahim appeals to Islamic militants not to carry out the execution as he is buried in the ground as his villagers are forced to watch.

BBC: Uganda bans female genital mutilation
Anyone convicted of the practice, which involves cutting off a girl’s clitoris, will face 10 years in jail, or a life sentence if a victim dies.

Spiegel Online: Al-Qaida Kills Eight Times More Muslims Than Non-Muslims
Between 2004 and 2008, for example, al-Qaida claimed responsibility for 313 attacks, resulting in the deaths of 3,010 people. And even though these attacks include terrorist incidents in the West — in Madrid in 2004 and in London in 2005 — only 12 percent of those killed (371 deaths) were Westerners.

ABC News: Torture Tape Implicates UAE Royal Sheikh
A video tape smuggled out of the United Arab Emirates shows a member of the country’s royal family mercilessly torturing a man with whips, electric cattle prods and wooden planks with protruding nails. A man in a UAE police uniform is seen on the tape tying the victim’s arms and legs, and later holding him down as the Sheikh pours salt on the man’s wounds and then drives over him with his Mercedes SUV.

BBC: Swiss minaret ban ’security risk’
“Provocation risks triggering other provocation and risks inflaming extremism.”

Death By 1000 Papercuts: How Easy to Build a Christian Church in Muslim Countries?
These countries are the largest in the Muslim world.

New York Times: Muslim Prayers Fuel Spiritual Rebuilding Project by Ground Zero
“We want to push back against the extremists.”

All articles continue at links.  Part of a series that never ends… [1][2][3][4][5][6][7][8][9] and etc.  There are photographs of Mohamed Ibrahim being stoned to death at the above link.  Go ahead, take a look.  Islam is the religion of peace, and there is no compulsion under the religion of Islam.  You just need to level-up your cultural sensitivity to their sacred traditions.  Respect their diversity.  Sure, men get tortured and stoned to death and have parts of their faces cut off, all with the cooperation and enthusiastic participation of the Islamic government.  And yes, women have their genitals mutilated and are sold as slaves.  But just because these people are different doesn’t mean we should fear or hate them.  We need to walk a mile in their shoes before we can judge them.  For heaven’s sake don’t provoke them – provocation risks triggering other provocation and risks inflaming extremism.  See, it’s our fault!  It takes a signature from the President of Egypt to build a Christian church in Egypt.  No Christian churches are allowed in Saudi Arabia at all.  Turkey and Algeria forbid existing Christian churches to be repaired and often order that they be torn down.  Indonesia allows Christian churches to exist providing no worship services occur there on Sundays.  Pakistan Christians generally meet in private homes.  No wonder Muslims are angry that the Swiss have banned the construction of new mosques in their country.  Whether it’s eating pork or building places of worship, Islam is a ‘do as I say not as I do’ sort of superstition.

My opinion counts for little, but here it is.  I’m encouraged by the Muslims described in the last link, those pushing back against their fellow Muslims.  I’m for the free exercise of religion and I’m for secular government. Christianity survived secularization and Islam can survive it as well.  If it cannot or will not, Islam deserves to die out.  Does it seem impossible that a religion could die out, particularly a globe-spanning religion like Islam?  Then spend a little time walking around in the graveyard of the gods to get a little perspective.  Every religion dies out given time.  And a little bit of a shove.

Worshippers quit church after council noise ban ‘takes away their ability to praise God’:

Members of a congregation in north London have abandoned their church – because of a council noise ban. The Immanuel International Christian Centre was ordered to keep its amplified music and sermons quieter after a neighbour complained. But the church’s pastor Dunni Odetoyinbo claimed Waltham Forest council had only told them to keep quiet so as not to offend the Muslim community. The church also argued the council had ‘taken away its ability to praise God’, and that congregation numbers had dwindled from 100 to 30 because of the restrictions. Baha Uddin, who lives near the church, had complained he was unable to use his garden at weekends and his one-year-old daughter was regularly disturbed by the noise from services. He said: ‘It’s been a nightmare. I’ve not been able to use my garden or living room on a Sunday because of the church services. The amplified music, drums and the loud sermons made having a conversation impossible. The noise made me depressed.’ But other neighbours say the noise is not a problem. The church lodged an appeal, and appeared at Waltham Forest magistrates’ court on Tuesday. In court Mrs Odetoyinbo, 55, claimed a council officer had asked her ‘to keep the noise down so as not to offend the Muslim community’. But magistrates rejected the appeal, and ordered the church to pay £2,250 costs.It can now only play music for 20 minutes on a Sunday between 11.30am and 11.50pm. A council spokesman said: ‘All attempts at mediation have failed and we regrettably were forced to issue the church with a noise abatement notice.’

Article continues at link.  Previously at OVO, The Bells Bells Bells Bells Bells Bells Bells.  When you’ve got an invisible monster that lives in the sky on your side, giving you special dispensations that are unquestionable and eternal, you might get it in your head that anything you do in the service of that invisible monster that lives in the sky is justified – nay, compulsory.  That’s the sort of thinking that causes US Presidents to declare war [1] [2] [3] [4] and Saudi Arabian architects to hijack airplanes [1] [2] [3].  Perhaps compared to these evils, annoying a neighbor is a small thing.  Perhaps it is an unfair comparison all around.  But I will say that being a pest to your neighbor is not excused by superstition.  And every time a place of religion drags the State into their affairs, both the freedom to worship and the ability to have a secular / pluralistic government suffer.

Sibel Edmonds has a story to tell. She went to work as a Turkish and Farsi translator for the FBI five days after 9/11. Part of her job was to translate and transcribe recordings of conversations between suspected Turkish intelligence agents and their American contacts. She was fired from the FBI in April 2002 after she raised concerns that one of the translators in her section was a member of a Turkish organization that was under investigation for bribing senior government officials and members of Congress, drug trafficking, illegal weapons sales, money laundering, and nuclear proliferation. [...] John Ashcroft’s Justice Department confirmed Edmonds’s veracity in a backhanded way by twice invoking the dubious State Secrets Privilege so she could not tell what she knows. [...] But on Aug. 8, she was finally able to testify under oath in a court case filed in Ohio and agreed to an interview with The American Conservative based on that testimony.

“During my work with the FBI, one of the major operational files that I was transcribing and translating started in late 1996 and continued until 2002, when I left the Bureau. [...] The monitoring of the Turks picked up contacts with [Douglas] Feith, [Paul] Wolfowitz, and [Richard] Perle in the summer of 2001, four months before 9/11. They were discussing with the Turkish ambassador in Washington an arrangement whereby the U.S. would invade Iraq and divide the country. The UK would take the south, the rest would go to the U.S. They were negotiating what Turkey required in exchange for allowing an attack from Turkish soil. The Turks were very supportive, but wanted a three-part division of Iraq to include their own occupation of the Kurdish region. The three Defense Department officials said that would be more than they could agree to, but they continued daily communications to the ambassador and his defense attaché in an attempt to convince them to help. [...]

“So these conversations, between 1997 and 2001, had to do with a Central Asia operation that involved bin Laden. Not once did anybody use the word ‘al-Qaeda.’ It was always ‘mujahideen,’ always ‘bin Laden’ and, in fact, not ‘bin Laden’ but ‘bin Ladens’ plural. There were several bin Ladens who were going on private jets to Azerbaijan and Tajikistan. The Turkish ambassador in Azerbaijan worked with them.  There were bin Ladens, with the help of Pakistanis or Saudis, under our management. Marc Grossman was leading it, 100 percent, bringing people from East Turkestan into Kyrgyzstan, from Kyrgyzstan to Azerbaijan, from Azerbaijan some of them were being channeled to Chechnya, some of them were being channeled to Bosnia. From Turkey, they were putting all these bin Ladens on NATO planes. People and weapons went one way, drugs came back. (Was the U.S. government aware of this circular deal?) 100 percent. A lot of the drugs were going to Belgium with NATO planes. After that, they went to the UK, and a lot came to the U.S. via military planes to distribution centers in Chicago and Paterson, New Jersey. Turkish diplomats who would never be searched were coming with suitcases of heroin.”

Article continues.  More on Sibel Edmonds from her official website, Wikipedia, History Commons, CBS News, Let Sibel Edmonds Speak, and National Security Whistleblowers Coalition.

…and we couldn’t agree more. Via The Jawa Report.

Astronaut Frank Culbertson photographs ground zero on 9/11 while in the International Space Station.  “What a frightening sight this must have been. How many sci-fi shows and movies are there, where the crew of a spaceship watches helplessly as their planet is attacked?” – John in Canada at nasawatch.com.

Gareth Porter, Bush had no plan to catch Bin Laden: New evidence [Oct 1, 2008] from former United States officials reveals that Osama bin Laden and other al-Qaeda leaders were able to skip Afghanistan for Pakistan unimpeded in the first weeks after September 11, 2001, as the George W Bush administration failed to plan to block their retreat. Top administration officials instead gave priority to planning for war with Iraq, leaving the United States with not nearly enough troops or strategic airlift capacity to close the large number of possible exit routes through the Afghanistan-Pakistan border area where Bin Laden escaped in late 2001.

Bush Covered Up Saudi Involvement in 9/11: The former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee tells Salon that the White House has suppressed convincing evidence that the Saudi royal family supported at least two of the hijackers. As the Senate Intelligence Committee chairman during the aftermath of the Sept. 11 attacks and the run-up to the Iraq war, Sen. Bob Graham tried to expose what he came to believe were national security coverups and manipulations by the Bush administration. But he discovered that it was hard to reveal a coverup playing by the rules. Much of the evidence the Florida Democrat needed to buttress his arguments was being locked away, he found, under the veil of politically motivated classification. Gerald Posner, The CIA’s Destroyed Interrogation Tapes and the Saudi-Pakistani 9/11 Connection: U.S. intelligence established a so-called “fake flag” operation, in which the wounded Zubaydah was transferred to Afghanistan under the ruse that he had actually been turned over to the Saudis. The Saudis had him on a wanted list, and the Americans believed that Zubaydah, fearful of torture and death at the hands of the Saudis, would start talking when confronted by U.S. agents playing the role of Saudi intelligence officers. Instead, when confronted by his “Saudi” interrogators, Zubaydah showed no fear. Instead, according to the two U.S. intelligence sources that provided me the details, he seemed relieved. The man who had been reluctant to even confirm his identity to his U.S. captors, suddenly talked animatedly. He was happy to see them, he said, because he feared the Americans would kill him. He then asked his interrogators to call a senior member of the Saudi royal family. And Zubaydah provided a private home number and a cell phone number from memory. “He will tell you what to do,” Zubaydah assured them. That man was Prince Ahmed bin Salman bin Abdul-Aziz, one of King Fahd’s nephews, and the chairman of the largest Saudi publishing empire. Later, American investigators would determine that Prince Ahmed had been in the U.S. on 9/11.

Verbatim Quotes from Republicans when Clinton was Prez.: “Domestic terrorism is not a cause we have to fight or a project we need to fund. We are not interested in capturing bin Laden. Even though he has been offered to us. We are not the world’s policemen. It’s not our job to clean up other countries messes or arrest it’s bad guys.” Senior Senator Mitch McConnell (R).

Radley Balko, Six Years Later [2007] Bin Laden Still Free, U.S. Mired in Iraq: We have created in Iraq the exact type of scenario Bin Laden was hoping (but failed) to lure us into in Afghanistan [...] our only options are bad and worse.

Robert Scheer, Bush’s Faustian Deal With the Taliban: [Los Angeles Times May 22, 2001] Enslave your girls and women, harbor anti-U.S. terrorists, destroy every vestige of civilization in your homeland, and the Bush administration will embrace you. All that matters is that you line up as an ally in the drug war, the only international cause that this nation still takes seriously. That’s the message sent with the recent gift of $43 million to the Taliban rulers of Afghanistan, the most virulent anti-American violators of human rights in the world today. The gift, announced last Thursday by Secretary of State Colin Powell, in addition to other recent aid, makes the U.S. the main sponsor of the Taliban and rewards that “rogue regime” for declaring that opium growing is against the will of God. So, too, by the Taliban’s estimation, are most human activities, but it’s the ban on drugs that catches this administration’s attention. Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998.

In the 90s, the advent of the Internet age, many people, including myself, thought the Internet’s democratization of media would be vehicle for social progress. R.U. Sirius was correct that “consensus reality” would be demolished. But instead of a new enlightenment, we have a new dark age in which disinformation flows at will and even educated people can’t be bothered to check Snopes before hitting forward on the latest right wing chain e-mail. The thinking seemed to go: access to information outside the mainstream media would in itself cause the media establishment’s authority to crumble and foster a new age of critical thinking. “The people” would get a better sense of what was really going on in the world, and demand change. People, awash in unverified sources, would also become more critical thinkers. By 2002, in the wake of 9/11, and the rise of the “Warbloggers” it should have been clear that this simply wasn’t happening. [...]

There seems to be no point in speaking truth to power. Power does not care what is spoken to it. This should not be read as a reactionary rant. The yearning for a “golden age” of investigative journalism is a case of rosy retrospection. What to do then when the watchmen are evil, and the populace is mad? I have no answers. My only solace at this point is that every outbreak of insanity seems to die down eventually, even if society writ large learns nothing from them.

[Article continues. Highest recommendation for the works of Klint Finley. - Trevor Blake]

Large number of individuals, such as recovery and rescue workers, nearby residents and office workers, who experienced intense or prolonged exposure to the World Trade Center attack have reported new diagnoses of asthma or posttraumatic stress 5-6 years after the attack.

Intense, Prolonged Exposure To World Trade Center Attack Linked To New Health Problems Years Later

Project 2,996 is an online initiative to get people to learn about–and remember–the victim’s of 9/11.

Project 2,996: An Online Tribute the to 2,996 Victims of 9/11

When the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and flight 93 were attacked by terrorists in 2001, killing 2974 people from over 90 nations, engineers at a spaceflight robotics company a few blocks away from the Twin Towers decided to commemorate the loss of life – on Mars. Honeybee Robotics, a company building some of the instruments for the NASA rovers Spirit and Opportunity, obtained some metal wreckage that they fashioned into two cable shields and two spares (in case the launches failed) to protect wiring on each rover from rock impacts. With a US flag affixed to each, the shields are now in service on opposite sides of the Red Planet.

[Article continues at link. I think of this as a fitting FU to the Muslim world: hey, while you're busy trying to re-create the 14th Century, we're going to go ahead and explore other planets. You go have fun, okay? - Trevor Blake]