It began with Saddam, say Iraqis Sunday,
30 January 2011 02:37
-thepeninsulaqatar--

BAGHDAD: Iraqis yesterday welcomed the revolt in Egypt that threatens to topple President Hosni Mubarak, with some claiming the tremors shaking Arab rulers had begun with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

“Saddam was their teacher, and all of these dictators are his little pupils,” declared Hussein Mohammed, taking a break from loading boxes of imported toys into a truck.

“The dictator (Mubarak) must leave — all dictators must go,” the 55-year-old added, noting that he stayed up until 4.00am listening to the radio for news from Cairo.

“From Morocco to Saudi Arabia, we Arabs want all dictators out.”

Other Iraqis remained glued to their television sets throughout the day, with electronics store owner Maher Minjal tuning four televisions to different Arabic news channels reporting events in Egypt.

“The fuse was lit by Iraq, because we became the first Arab country to achieve democracy and get an elected government,” said Minjal, 28, from his store in Baghdad’s commercial Karrada district.

“If the regime in Egypt falls, all other Arab regimes will fall, because Egypt is the biggest and most powerful country in the Arab world.” Anti-regime riots that raged yesterday for a fifth straight day in Egypt, inspired by the overthrow of Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali earlier this month, have sent shockwaves across the region.

At least one Iraqi political analyst agreed with the assessment that Iraq had begun a process that seemed to be spreading across the Middle East.

“It is absolutely true that (former US president George W) Bush was right when he said that democracy in Iraq would sweep through the Arab world,” Baghdad-based analyst Ihsan
Al Shammari said.

“In fact, Iraq was the first democratic regime in the region, but we are different from Egypt and Tunisia in that we were changed by foreign forces (the US-led coalition) and they are being changed by popular uprisings.

Iraq’s Al Mashriq newspaper pejoratively referred to Mubarak as a “Pharaoh,” and said the day of reckoning had come for a leader who had been a friend to the enemies of Arabs, which it said were Israel and the United States. “The American ally and the friend of Israel has been ruling Egypt since 1981, but the ground is shaking beneath the feet of the Pharaoh,” the Arabic-language newspaper said in an editoria. AFP

Violent Government Oppression Leads to Self-Immolation in Tunisia, Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Mauritia, and Algeria

--L.A.Times.com--

--HyperVocal.com--

--theStar.com--

--aljazeera.net--

Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old, set himself on fire in the provincial town of Sidi Bouzid. The man had been selling fruits and vegetables from a stand without a license when state police stopped him and confiscated his produce.

Commentators argue Bouazizi's act sparked the inital rounds of rioting in Tunisia. Within a week, protests had spread the 125 miles to the capital of Tunis and soon after President Ben Ali, who had ruled the country for 23 years, was forced out of power.

Bouazizi’s self-immolation does not stand alone Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Mauritania all saw similar acts of martyrdom. Two Saudi Arabian men committed the same acts, one a 60 year old actually died.

Abdou Abdel-Monaam Hamadah, a 48-year-old owner of a small restaurant from Qantara, an area close to the Suez Canal city of Ismailia east of Cairo, set himself on fire outside the parliament building Monday to protest the government’s policy preventing restaurant owners from buying cheap subsidized bread to resell to their patrons. According to the Associated Press, “He escaped with only light burns on his neck, face and legs after policemen guarding the building and motorists driving by at the time used fire extinguishers to quickly put out the blaze engulfing him.”

Countries Not In Favor of Kosovo Sovreignity and Thier Rational
(69 countries, including the United States and 22 of the EU’s 27 members, have recognised Kosovo....)
-Courtesy of The Economist-
7/29/10


on Orthodox Christian Solidarity
-Russia
-Romania
-Cyprus
-Greece

on Domestic Seccessionist Issues
-Russia
-China
-India
-Romania
-Slovakia
-Cyprus
-Spain

on Non-Aligned Nostalgia
-India
-Brazil
-Egypt
-Cuba
-India

on Geopolitical Concerns
-Russia
-China
-Brazil
-Greece
-Cuba

on Territorial Integrity True Believers
-China
-Brazil
-Romania
-Slovakia
-Cyprus
-Greece
-Spain
-Egypt
-Cuba
-India

Abraham born in Turkey (Ancient Eddessa, Messopotamia)
Moses born in Egypt
David born in Bethlehem, Palestine
Jesus Christ born Bethlehem, Palestine
John the Baptist born in a suburb of Jerusalem (Ein Kerem)

Rachels Tomb stands as the entrence to Bethlehem and is one of the current Holy Sites embroiled in controversy.

Abraham born in Turkey (Ancient Eddessa, Messopotamia)
Moses born in Egypt
David born in Bethlehem, Palestein
Jesus Christ born Bethlehem, Palestein

Rachels Tomb stands as the entrence to Bethlehem and is one of the current Holy Sites that stands at the center of the most recent controversy in the Middle East (including the Tomb of the Patriarchs)....

"Hurt no one so that no one may hurt you."

-Last Sermon, Prophet Muhammad


Ethics of reciprocity = the golden rule

A barometer of religious intolerance
--HAARTEZ.COM--
By Benjamin Balint


"Egypt resembles an iceberg," the late Coptic-Egyptian writer Louis Awad once wrote. "One-eighth is above sea level. Seven-eighths are submerged in the depths. One-eighth of our lives takes place in the light of the 20th century, seven-eighths in medieval darkness."

There is no surer measure of Egypt's transforming identity over the last half century than its treatment of its Coptic Christian minority, which comprises about 10 percent of the country's 80 million citizens. As Egypt becomes less Arab and more Islamic, removing itself ever farther from former president Gamal Abdel Nasser's brand of left-leaning secular nationalism (not to speak of the liberal cosmopolitanism that prevailed from the 1920s through the revolution of 1952), the latest signs from the banks of the Nile are anything but auspicious.

In November, a report by Christian Solidarity International and the Coptic Foundation for Human Rights documented 25 cases of alleged forced conversion to Islam. Last May, the Egyptian government pointlessly slaughtered thousands of pigs belonging to the Coptic Christian minority because of fears relating to the swine flu.
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As recently as January 15, at least 20 leading bloggers and democracy activists were arrested and held for one day by Egyptian authorities, reportedly charged with "illegal assembling and causing unrest." The group of Coptic Christian and Muslim activists had traveled to the southern Egyptian town of Nag Hammadi to pay their condolences to the families of six Coptic teenage worshipers gunned down as they left midnight mass on January 7, Coptic Christmas. This is the same town where a priceless collection of 46 fourth-century treatises ("The Gnostic Gospels"), written in Coptic - an idiom descended directly from the language of the pharaohs - was discovered in an earthenware jar in 1945.

Such arrests are not unprecedented. Kareem Amer has been held in Borg El Arab prison since November 2006, charged among other crimes with "incitement to hate Muslims" for writing about Muslim-Christian tensions in Alexandria and criticizing President Hosni Mubarak on his blog.

Although Egypt's constitution provides for equal rights without regard to religion, discrimination against its Christian community - through both acts of omission and commission - persists. Even after the killings last month sparked widespread riots, the government declined to address the underlying tensions.

"The Egyptian authorities should be focusing on the causes of the tragic shooting of six Coptic Christians," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. "Instead, they're arresting activists whose efforts to express their condolences are an important step toward healing sectarian fractures."

Both the violence and the official response are part of a pattern of escalating tensions between Muslims and Copts, who are increasingly marginalized, persecuted and vilified as outsiders. Indeed, January's violence has decades of tragic precedents, reaching back to June 1981, when 22 Coptic citizens were burned inside their homes during riots in the village of El-Zawia El-Hamra.

And yet Egyptian authorities have consistently refused to act. In 1994, Egyptian sociologist and rights activist Saad Eddin Ibrahim proposed an international conference in Cairo on minorities in the Middle East. But his insistence on including the treatment of Egypt's Copts on the agenda raised such protests in the government-controlled press that the conference was forced to move to Limassol, Cyprus.

Although no community can claim to be more native or authentically "Egyptian" than the Copts, whose culture dates back to antiquity, in moments of crisis, it seems, the country's Muslims instinctively turn on the Copts - even when the crisis has little to do with that Arabic-speaking Christian community. In 1952, for example, demonstrators against the British occupation of the Canal Zone in Suez massacred a number of Copts. Just before the outbreak of the Six-Day War in 1967, an ominous slogan could be heard in Cairo: "First the Saturday people, then the Sunday people."

Finally, during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when news arrived in Cairo that Israeli forces had crossed the canal, a rumor ascribed the Egyptian forces' failure to the treachery of a Coptic officer. To this day, every so often, the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's largest opposition Islamist movement, seeks to bar Copts from senior army, police and government positions, on the grounds that they represent a fifth column. (The Brotherhood, which won 20 percent of the 454 parliamentary seats in the last election in 2005, has just chosen a new, hard-line leader, Mohammed Badie.)

The latest sectarian violence, then, has deep roots. Intolerance of non-Muslim minorities is the best barometer - though not the only one - of a society increasingly conscious of its Muslim identity and aspirations, as Egypt is today. The role of religion in the country's identity is still too fluid to permit us to know what shape those aspirations will take, but we can by all means forecast that Egypt's Islamic revival today will be Israel's dilemma tomorrow.

Benjamin Balint, a writer living in Jerusalem, is a fellow at the Hudson Institute.

Zimbabwe: Cape to Cairo - Right to Know Under Attack
From Wikileaks
Financial Gazette (Harare): Zimbabwe: Cape to Cairo - Right to Know Under Attack
Zimbabwe:_Cape_to_Cairo_-_Right_to_Know_Under_Attack
Zimbabwe
September 7, 2007
By
Mavis Makuni

Current events indicate that newspaper editors are under siege from Cape to Cairo for defending the people's right to know in the face of state attempts to muzzle the media. In South Africa, the young editor of the Sunday Times, Mondli Makhanya, has stirred a hornet's nest by making a bold decision to expose scandalous incidents involving the country's health minister, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang.

At the other end of the continent, in Cairo, the editor of an independent daily newspaper is to be prosecuted for publishing reports on the state of the health of Egypt's 78-year president, Hosni Mubarak, who has been in power since 1981. In East Africa another editor, albeit of a foreign newspaper, is to be taken to court for reporting on the theft of US$2 billion from state coffers during the 24-year rule of Daniel Arap Moi.

The former Kenyan president's eldest son, Gideon Moi, is reported by the Sunday Times to have threatened to sue the British newspaper, The Guardian, which reported how a risk consultancy firm, Kroll, had exposed "a web of shell companies, hidden trusts and frontmen "used by the Moi dynasty to "funnel vast sums of money abroad". The Guardian reported that the stolen funds were used to buy opulent properties in New York, London and South Africa and that "hundreds of millions" were stashed in foreign bank accounts.

Reacting angrily to the report, Gideon Moi is quoted in the press as saying, "None of us has seen this so-called report but the allegations contained there are untrue and highly libelous. To accuse someone of corruption, which the report purports to do, at this time is very damaging and I intend to take action." The reference to the time of the year is an allusion to the general elections to be held in Kenya in December ahead of which Daniel Arap Moi has endorsed his successor, Mwai Kibaki, whose government has continued to be mired in rampant corruption. But despite Gideon Moi's rage against the British newspaper, he and his younger brother are reported to be worth a combined 930 million pounds sterling, an obscene level of wealth by the standard of any African country where the majority live below the poverty datum line.

Ibrahim Eissa, editor of the daily newspaper Al-Destur is reported to have offended Mubarak by publishing reports about the president's health. This followed persistent speculation in the country that Mubarak had been hospitalised and had travelled abroad for treatment. The editor, whose paper was once banned for five years, has had previous run-ins with the presidency. He is reported to have been convicted last year for insulting Mubarak in an article published in his, newspaper.

His current troubles will re-ignite debate on whether details about the health of Africa's long-serving but still mortal presidents should be a state secret to be kept away from the people they govern. At 78, Mubarak is not a young man and in addition to the natural and inevitable march of time, 26 years at the helm will also have taken their toll. It should not be a punishable offence to report on these realities.

The Sunday Times and its editor Mondli Makhaya were taken to court for publishing details of Tshabalala-Msimang's alcoholism and criminal record involving a theft case for which she had been convicted in Botswana while serving as a medical superintendent. Msimang-Tshabalala underwent surgery for a liver transplant a few months ago. Her liver needed to be replaced allegedly because it had been damaged by years of heavy drinking.

The Sunday Times claimed that under normal circumstances the 66-year old minister would not have qualified to get a donated organ but had used her influence to jump the queue ahead of more deserving cases. The paper believed that it was immoral for the minister to continue drinking after getting this new lease of life and that it was hypocritical for her to campaign against alcohol abuse in her official capacity as the steward of the nation's health when she could not practice what she preached.

Predictably, Makhanya was crucified by the administration of Thabo Mbeki,which accused him of conducting a vendetta against Tshabalala-Msimang and tarnishing the image of the government. Encouragingly, however, in a law suit instituted by the minister against Makhanya and the Sunday Times, the editor was vindicated. In an outcome hailed as a victory for the freedom of the press, High Court Judge Mahomed Jajbhay upheld the public's right to know and the paper's right to publish, although Tshabala-Msimang's lawyers had argued that the Sunday Times had obtained the information illegally.

"The information, although unlawfully obtained, went simply beyond being interesting to the public; there was in fact a pressing need for the public to be informed about the information contained in the medical records", said Jajbhay. "The publiction of the unlawfully obtained controversial information was capable of contributing to a debate in our democratic society relating to a politician in the exercise of her functions.

The Sunday Times lawyers had argued that there was debate in South Africa on whether or not Tshabalala-Msimang was fit for high office. There were many reasons for questioning the minister's fitness for office and ordinary South Africans were entitled to any information bearing on that aspect. The minister had publicly crusaded against alcohol abuse and pointed out its social and economic costs. "In order for this important message to resonate with the appropriate authority and persuasiveness, the first applicant (the minister) must both live her life consistently with the message and be seen to do so. Anything less would suggest both hypocrisy and seriously undermine the message..."

The judge upheld these arguments, declaring; "This is a case where the need for the truth is, in fact, overwhelming. Indeed in this matter the personality involved as well as her status establishes her newsworthiness." One of the bizarre aspects of the case was the "dog-eat-dog" reaction of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) to the controversy. Describing the press as "the enemy of the people", SABC chief executive officer, Dali Mpofu complained, "We cannot remain quiet when our mothers and democratically chosen leaders are stripped naked for the sole reason of selling newspapers."

The C.I.A. and later, the Reagan administration used the war in Afghanistan as a tool for the eventual collapse of the Soviet Empire. The effects of the Western powers meddling (primarily the U.S. and Britain) have continued to send aftershocks throughout the modern world. The network that the Reagan administration would ensure the creation of, remains largely intact to this day. Al-Qaeda, and its leader Osama Bin Laden are among a million individuals and organizations that owe much of their success to the love and support of the U.S. Government, especially the Reagan administration and the C.I.A during the entire decade of the 1980s on into the 1990s, and still to this very day. The following in an excerpt from a timeline constructed to track the majors points of "Charlie Wilsons War".


courtesy of historycommons.org
1985-1986: CIA Becomes Unhappy with Afghan Fighters, Begins Supporting Islamist Volunteers from Other Countries

The Central Intelligence Agency, which has been supporting indigenous Afghan groups fighting occupying Soviet forces, becomes unhappy with them due to infighting, and searches for alternative anti-Soviet allies. MSNBC will later comment: “[T]he CIA, concerned about the factionalism of Afghanistan made famous by Rudyard Kipling, found that Arab zealots who flocked to aid the Afghans were easier to ‘read’ than the rivalry-ridden natives. While the Arab volunteers might well prove troublesome later, the agency reasoned, they at least were one-dimensionally anti-Soviet for now. So [Osama] bin Laden, along with a small group of Islamic militants from Egypt, Pakistan, Lebanon, Syria and Palestinian refugee camps all over the Middle East, became the ‘reliable’ partners of the CIA in its war against Moscow.” The CIA does not usually deal with the Afghan Arabs directly, but through an intermediary, Pakistan’s ISI, which helps the Arabs through the Maktab al-Khidamat (MAK) run by Abdullah Azzam. [MSNBC, 8/24/1998] The agreement is sealed during a secret visit to Pakistan, where CIA Director William Casey commits the agency to support the ISI program of recruiting radical Muslims for the Afghan war from other Muslim countries around the world. In addition to the Gulf States, these include Turkey, the Philippines, and China. The ISI started their recruitment of radicals from other countries in 1982 (see 1982). This CIA cooperation is part of a joint CIA-ISI plan begun the year before to expand the “Jihad” beyond Afghanistan (see 1984-March 1985). [RASHID, 2001, PP. 128-129] Thousands of militant Arabs are trained under this program (see 1986-1992).