18 Dead, 60 Wounded in bombings
Sunni Mosque Targeted
Al-Zaman/ AFP reports that on Friday guerrilla violence left 18 Iraqis dead and 60 wounded. The first car bomb in the Dora section of southern Baghdad killed at least 11 and wounded 38, according to Iraqi medical sources. Guerrillas then detonated a car bomb in Dora outside the Iskan Mosque (Sunni) while the worshippers were filing out, which killed 7 and wounded 22, according to the Iraqi ministry of the interior. On Thursday, a bomb killed two US Marines at Fallujah.
Muqtada al-Sadr spoke in Damascus on Friday with cadres of Palestinian youths. His interview, carried by Reuters, is part of his continued attempt to remake himself as a political mover and shaker in Iraq. In his speech to the Palestinians, he called for US and British troops to leave Iraq.
1. Muslims should unite across the sectarian divide of Sunni and Shiite to protest the Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad.
2. But targeting Christians would be a mistake.
3. Iraq's Sunni Arab neighbors need have no fear of the rise of the Shiites to power in that country. "I am here to dispel fear Arab countries have of the Shi'ites."
4. The Sadr Movement bears a resemblance to the Hizbullah of Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine: ' "Our ideas are similar as far as standing to oppression and occupation and against the corruption that the entire West wants to spread in the region and in Islamic countries."
5. For stability to return to Iraq, US troops must leave. ' "What is causing instability to Iraq is the occupation," he said. "The exit of the occupier will be a victory for Iraq and not as it is said a victory for the terrorists." '
The French ambassador in Baghdad announced in a letter to Muqtada that he "understands Muslim rejection" of "the caricatures that inflict injuriy," and he acknowledged that they had been widely printed in Europe. He said, however, that they did not in any way represent the views of the French state.
posted by Juan Cole @ 2/10/2006 11:55:00 PM
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William Pfaff: long war as justified as war against accidental drowning in bathtubs???
Quote:
Yet even if you include the 9/11 casualties, the number of Americans killed by international terrorists since the late 1960s (which is when the State Department began counting them) is about the same as that killed by lightning - or by accident-causing deer, or by severe allergic reactions to peanuts.
"In almost all years, the total number of people worldwide who die at the hands of international terrorists is not much more than the number who drown in bathtubs in the United States" wrote John Mueller of Ohio State University in last autumn's issue of the authoritative American journal Terrorism and Political Violence.
As Mueller concedes, there is a definitional issue: Few insurgents in Iraq are internationals; most are homegrown. And if aspirant terrorists in London or Paris had nuclear bombs, the numbers would become rather different.
Nonetheless, a phenomenon that is scattered, limited and under control, and inevitably transient, has been conflated by Washington with something that is huge and very serious: the desperation among the Muslim masses that is directed indiscriminately against Western nations, which are held responsible for Islamic society's backwardness, poverty and exploitation.
Al Qaeda and individual international terrorists are the object of worldwide intelligence and police operations. They are a marginal phenomenon. The Bush administration's conflation of them with the social upheaval in their world is exploited to perpetuate changes in American society that provide a much more sinister threat to democracy than anything ever dreamed by Osama bin Laden.
The radical threat to the United States is at home.
Concerning your last paragraph :
The French ambassador in Baghdad announced in a letter to Muqtada that he "understands Muslim rejection" of "the caricatures that inflict injuriy," and he acknowledged that they had been widely printed in Europe. He said, however, that they did not in any way represent the views of the French state.
I find it well in line with the overall French reactions to the caricatures. In France, probably due to a long anticlerical tradition, at least two important newspapers have reproduced all the 12 danish caricatures of the Jylland's Posten. The first to do so was "France soir". Ironically, the owner of the journal is a Franco-Egyptian and he fired the chief redactor after that. This lead to several calls for the defense of free speach in the newspapers. Last thursday, Charlie Hebdo, a satyrical journal with a large base of readers dedicated its whole weekly issue to the subject. They went out of print in a glimpse and had to reprint a lot more issues. Charlie Hebdo has a long tradition of anticlericalism and of harsh political satyre and antimilitarism. I've been unable to get one issue in Swizterland, it was out of stock the very day it came out. So I don't know how they treated the subject.
Apart of two or three provocative attitudes of the same kind, the reaction in France has been very measured. Jacques Chirac immediately condemned these publications as provocation. He called every one to stay calm and the press to act responsively. The government also met with muslim organisations who issued apeasing calls as well. The Conseil français du culte musulman (CFCM) (an Association of Muslim Organisations) chose the legal path and will file multiple complaints against both France Soir and Charlie Hebdo. It's not yet sure whether they will also file complaints against other newspapers like "Le Monde" and "Liberation" who only reproduced some of the caricatures. They stated that they were only looking for a "symbolic condemnation" in order to discourage new provocations which could "reinforce a clash of civilizations". Some protests of angry Mulims took place, mostly at the exit of the friday prayers, but they didn't slide out of hand. Secular Arabs interviewed in the streets say they felt insulted by the caricatures as well, especially by the stigmatizing of all Muslims as terrorists.
Compared to the weeks long riots, which inflammed the suburbs at the end of last year, these protests were just a normal reaction. It prooves what many intellectuals said then : that the French suburbans riots had nothing to do with religion, that they were a social movement against discrimination, agaisnt economic and social exclusion, but that they were neither fomented by a religious movement, nor indicating a civilization clash, as US neocons would have liked to see them.
The issue of the complaint filed by the Muslim organizations isn't yet certain. However France has a good law ruling the right of free speach. The law of 1881 was modified many times especially in 1972 in order to include articles punishing anti-arab and xenophobic deeds and in 2006 in order to include articles punishing sexism and homophobia. In its actual version, the law on free press contain 11 articles (number 29th to 37th) defining the limits of free speach; they sum up to this : the public medias can neither defame, nor insult persons or groups of persons based on their racial or ethnic characters or on their culture. Even the mere reproduction of insulting statements can be punished; the punishment can go up to six month of jail and the payment of a fee as high as 22500 euros (aka approximately 28'000 US$) The whole text of the law can be read here and a clear explanation here (French text). I find this law to be exemplar, much better than the illimitated right to free speach seen in the US. The hate speach issued by nazism and fascism during the between war have left traces in European laws and it's a good thing : free speach shouldn't cover the right to incite to racism or to propagate racist or xenophobic way of thinking. It's a sign that these laws are only fighted by the extreme right in a very hypocrital way.
As a conclusion, it is interesting to note the reaction of the association "Reporters sans frontières" (Reporters without borders) which is a long standing international organization defending the right to free speach in the world and fighting agaisnt the imprisonement and murder of journalists. They organized a conference in Paris along with the Arab Commission for Human Rights
"in an effort to restart a dialogue over publication of cartoons of the prophet Mohammed and find a way out of the violence this has caused".(...)
"Fifteen speakers (including journalists, philosophers, writers, religious officials, a lawyer and a diplomat) called for talks and a calmer approach and urged an end to the violent reactions to the printing of the cartoons.
Several spoke about what publishing the cartoons meant while others said freedom of expression must go hand-in-hand with respect for religious beliefs."
Prof. Cole:
Henri Tincq, Le Monde's Religion columnist, has penned an admirable and thoughtful piece on the cartoon scandal. Link to original on my site (as well as English translation).
UN expert says bird flu now only 2 mutations away from deadly human form
The bird flu virus is only two mutations away from a form that can spread easily between people, sparking a pandemic in which millions could die, the UN bird flu chief said in an interview published in Portugal.
"Only two mutations are needed for it to become easily transmissible among humans," Dr David Nabarro, who heads the UN drive to contain the virus, told weekly newspaper Expresso.
"I wake up every morning thinking that today could be the day that I will see a report about a strange case of bird flu among humans," he said.
Possible 3rd bird flu death in southern Iraq
In Amarah, 180 miles southeast of Baghdad, health officials said 14-year-old Muhannad Radhi Zaouri died Sunday. His blood was being tested for bird flu, said Dr. Haider Abdul-Ridha, director of the communicable disease department at Amarah health department. Results are expected 17 February.
Migratory birds have carried the disease from East Asia to Turkey and paths followed by ducks and geese do run through Iraq, starting at a northern reservoir near the town where the girl who died came from, and stretching south along the Euphrates and Tigris rivers. Along the way, birds stop in Iraq's southern marshlands before heading toward Kuwait and South Africa.
There is a straight politics story about Iraq at Knight-Ritter this morning,
<< http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/13842795.htm >>
("Shiite coalition struggles to agree on a prime minister," Nancy A. Youssef, 11 Feb 05)
that raises a couple of questions:
[1] Does it really make much sense to be always looking for "reform" or "secularism"?
[2] Supposing that it does, can Ms. Youssef have nevertheless picked up the stick by the wrong end? Mightn't M. Abdel-Mahdi (a name which effectively means SCIRI-Badr-Hakim, I presume) be somewhat worse from that point of view than Dr. Jaafari?
The Kurds seem to prefer M. Abdel-Mahdi, true, but that might only mean that they are more sure that he'll leave Kurdistan strictly alone than they are with Dr. Jaafari or Muqtada. Leaving Kurdistan alone is an admirable policy idea, it seems to me, but it almost a foreign policy idea, really, and hardly amounts to "reform" or "secularism."
When it comes to imposing their values where they do intend to impose their values, how different are SCIRI and Da&wa and Muqtada and Fadila and whoever else is in the intramural U.I.A. race? Which faction would a well-informed non-Twelver prefer to be a dhimmi under, in terms of encountering minimum practical interference with daily life, as opposed to editorializing about "reform" and "secularism" in the abstract?
The Atlantic as revived on its web site a Lemon that Bernard Lewis laid in September 1990, titled "The Roots of Muslim Rage".
In this article, Lewis uses what has become the standard tool of clever neoconned analysis of Muslim, and more generally Third World, revulsion against American (read Western) policies. Lewis gives the usual 'much respect' to the faith of Islam, but then goes on to undermine the arguments that U.S. foreign policy is the cause of the problem.
(QUOTE)
But why the hostility in the first place? If we turn from the general to the specific, there is no lack of individual policies and actions, pursued and taken by individual Western governments, that have aroused the passionate anger of Middle Eastern and other Islamic peoples. Yet all too often, when these policies are abandoned and the problems resolved, there is only a local and temporary alleviation. The French have left Algeria, the British have left Egypt, the Western oil companies have left their oil wells, the westernizing Shah has left Iran -- yet the generalized resentment of the fundamentalists and other extremists against the West and its friends remains and grows and is not appeased.
(END QUOTE)
Well, this article was written in 1990, so it is easy to poke holes in it now, were it not for the fact that the neoconned followers of Lewis still follow this argument.
The end effect of this line of thinking is that the only remaining explanation for the irrational Muslim hatred of the West is due to their religion, or in politically correct language, their misinterpretation of their religion.
This is a farce. The French have continued to meddle in Algeria long after their military occupation ended - most importantly in rejecting the election of the Muslim parties and nudging the country into a civil war. Similarly, Egypt continues since Anwar Sadat to be an American-backed dictatorship, subsidized by the U.S. government to the tune of over $3 Billion per year. Western oil companies may have left their wells, but they still own them, by owning the royal families that run them.
The Shah made have left Iran, but U.S. hostilities have continued unabated, continuing a persisting state of paranoia among the revolutionaries who still smart from their experiences with the Savak.
To pretend that history ended with the end of the Cold War was a largely American luxury. For the rest of the world, including the Muslims, the oppression and exploitation has never ended. It is an ongoing state of war, and to call it a clash of religions is to wash one's bloody hands off of one's historical guilt.
As long as historians and pretend-historians continue to harp along the 1990 Lewis line, and blame the Troubles on Islam, we are doomed to perpetuating the very exploitation and oppression that form the real Roots of Muslim Rage.
French ambassador + puported sympathy = laughter
It looks like there is a direct correlation between the growth of Sadr's influence in UIA and the growing heat of neconservative Islamophobia.
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