U.S. plan: a “moderate crescent” as a counterweight to the “fundamentalist crescent”

U.S. plan: a “moderate crescent” as a counterweight to the “fundamentalist crescent”

    Sunday, May 05, 2013   No comments

The Turkish Foreign Ministry today dismissed a British newspaper report suggesting a role for Turkey in a regional cooperation against the “fundamentalist crescent,” which consists of Iran, Iraq, Syria and Hezbollah.

“These are manipulative reports which have nothing to do with the reality,” a Turkish Foreign Ministry official told Hürriyet Daily News.

British daily the Sunday Times reported that Israel would agree to a joint effort with regional powers to counter Iran and the “fundamentalist crescent.”

Israel had been working toward a cooperative agreement in compliance with Turkey and three Arab states to implement an allied system of detection technologies to defend against Iranian ballistic projectiles, the Sunday Times reported.

read more >>

Despite stalled Arab Spring, Muslim nations grasp for democracy

Despite stalled Arab Spring, Muslim nations grasp for democracy

    Friday, May 03, 2013   No comments

Elections in Pakistan and Malaysia show step-by-step progress to reconcile Islam with secular values of elected government
By the Monitor's Editorial Board / May 3, 2013

Two years on, the Arab Spring has stalled. Only four countries in the Middle East – Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Yemen – have advanced from despotic rule toward democracy, even if slowly.

Yet among the world’s Muslim countries that are already democratic, a similar struggle continues, one to reconcile the world’s second largest religion with secular democracy. Two elections show how this struggle is faring:

On May 11, voters in Pakistan go to the polls in what could be a historic transition – the first democratic transfer of civilian power. Yet while this would signify how the military’s role has lessened in Pakistan, Muslim radicals who denounce democracy as “un-Islamic” have given the secular political parties a hard time – with bombs and guns. Hundreds of people have been killed during the campaign by the Taliban and other militants in an attempt to thwart the elections and create an Islamic state.

read more >>

Editorials Call for the Closure Of Guantánamo In New York Times, Washington Post And Guardian

Editorials Call for the Closure Of Guantánamo In New York Times, Washington Post And Guardian

    Friday, May 03, 2013   No comments

By Andy Worthington

As the prison-wide hunger strike in Guantánamo continues (sign the petition calling for its closure here!), nearly three months since the majority of the 166 prisoners still held began refusing food, it is abundantly clear that, after several years in which, frankly, almost everyone had forgotten about Guantánamo or had given up on it, the prison — and the remaining 166 prisoners — are now back in the news and showing no signs of being as easily dismissed as they were three years ago, when everyone went silent after President Obama’s promise to close the prison within a year fizzled out dismally.

The need to exert concerted pressure on the Obama administration is more important than ever, because, until the prisoners appealed to the world by putting their lives on the line, President Obama had been content to abandon them, and had been encouraged to do so by Congress, where lawmakers had blocked all his attempts to close the prison, and had ended up imposing restrictions, in the National Defense Authorization Acts passed at the end of 2011 and 2012, that made it almost impossible to release any prisoners...

__________

References: 

Muslim Bashing in the Wake of Boston Bombing

Muslim Bashing in the Wake of Boston Bombing

    Wednesday, May 01, 2013   No comments

When the FBI identified the two Boston Marathon bombing suspects as Tamerlan and Dzokhar Tsarnaev, the American Muslim community braced itself for another onslaught of anti-Islamic feeling—a caustic sentiment that has persisted in the country since 9/11.

In fact, the wave of suspicion and accusations had already begun. A Saudi student, injured in the blast, was tackled by another bystander and labeled a suspect by the New York Post. The hashtag #Muslims trended on Twitter, which was also the platform for one of the more incendiary comments from Fox News contributor Erik Rush, who, when prompted by another user if he was "already blaming Muslims," responded: "Yes, they're evil. Let's kill them all."

American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC), which issued a statement "expressing deep concern" regarding the negative statements and threats against Arab and Muslim Americans, demanded an apology. When Internet users noted a possible resemblance between one of the bombing suspects and Sunil Tripathi, a 22-year-old Brown University student missing since March 16 (he was cleared and his body subsequently found), news organizations picked up the story without comment from authorities and overwhelmed his already suffering family with interview requests.

read more >>

Partial Readings: Collapsing Factories and the “End Death Traps” Tour

Partial Readings: Collapsing Factories and the “End Death Traps” Tour

    Tuesday, April 30, 2013   No comments

As the death toll of Wednesday’s garment factory collapse in Savar, Bangladesh surpasses 320, the incident has become the most lethal disaster in garment industry history, one of the worst manufacturing disasters ever. The New York Times reports that more than one thousand of the Savar factory complex’s 2,500 workers have been injured, and hundreds remain trapped in the rubble. By comparison, the Triangle Shirtwaist fire of 1911, one of the most widely remembered disasters in industrial history, killed 146 and injured 71.

Like last week’s fertilizer plant blast in West, Texas, the collapse of Rana Plaza was  preventable. A bank and other commercial establishments on the ground floor were reportedly closed after workers complained of a visible crack in the building on Tuesday, but managers of the factories on the upper levels of the five-story complex refused to follow suit. About an hour into the workday on Wednesday, the building collapsed; three days later, volunteers are still pulling survivors and corpses out of the rubble.

The names of international brands whose clothes were being produced in the Savar factory complex are beginning to surface: a range of U.S., European, and Canadian companies, they include the Children’s Place, Benetton, Cato Fashions, Mango, Joe Fresh, and BM Casual. Ether Tex, one of the factories destroyed in the collapse, listed Walmart as one of its customers on its website, but it remains unclear whether the U.S. retail giant was sourcing clothes from the factory at the time of the collapse.

read more >>
 

The violence that ended Qaddafi still rules above elected leaders

The violence that ended Qaddafi still rules above elected leaders

    Tuesday, April 30, 2013   No comments

Gunmen demanding the sacking of former officials of the ousted Kadhafi regime surrounded the justice ministry on Tuesday, stepping up an action started at the foreign ministry, an official said.

"Several armed men in vehicles equipped with anti-aircraft guns surrounded the ministry of justice," spokesman Walid Ben Rabha told AFP.

"They asked the minister and staff present to leave their offices and close the ministry." An AFP photographer saw more than 20 pick-up trucks loaded with machine guns, anti-aircraft guns and rocket launchers and said they had blocked access to the building.

Dozens of gunmen making the same demand have kept the foreign ministry under siege since Sunday, paralysing its work.

The interior ministry and national television station have also been attacked.

On Monday, angry police officers firing their guns in the air stormed the interior ministry demanding higher wages.

Prime Minister Ali Zeidan has denounced the encircling of the foreign ministry and other such attacks.

read more >>

eager to get around term limits, Erdoğan eyes the presidency, explains "president is not a king"

eager to get around term limits, Erdoğan eyes the presidency, explains "president is not a king"

    Monday, April 29, 2013   No comments

Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdoğan today said that the president in a presidential system would not be a king, speaking at a meeting in Ankara’s Kızılcahamam neighborhood with members of his Justice and Development Party (AKP).

“The president in a presidential system is not a king. But some ignorant people are lying by attempting to represent the president as a king,” Erdoğan told the AKP representatives of district and provincial branches today, calling on them to intervene and persuade in the debates over the presidential system.

read more >>

CIA 'buys influence with bags of cash' left at office of Hamid Karzai

CIA 'buys influence with bags of cash' left at office of Hamid Karzai

    Monday, April 29, 2013   No comments

The CIA has delivered tens of millions of dollars to the office of Afghanistan's president during the past decade, according to advisers to Hamid Karzai.

Corruption

Bundled into suitcases, backpacks and plastic bags, the payments were designed to ensure that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) retained influence at the presidential palace.
But the payments may have instead fuelled corruption and ended up in the pockets of warlords.
"We called it 'ghost money'," said Khalil Roman, who served as Mr Karzai's deputy chief of staff from 2002 until 2005. "It came in secret, and it left in secret."
Afghan officials told the newspaper there was no evidence that Mr Karzai personally received any of the money. The cash was handled by his National Security Council, it added.
The payments are one of Afghanistan's worst kept secrets. Rumours have circulated for years and Mr Karzai even confirmed receiving American cash in 2010.

read more >>

Iraqi army losing hold on north to Sunni and Kurdish forces as troops desert

Iraqi army losing hold on north to Sunni and Kurdish forces as troops desert

    Monday, April 29, 2013   No comments

Iraq

Soldiers are deserting a beleaguered Iraqi army as it struggles to keep its hold on the northern half of Iraq in the face of escalating hostility from Sunni Arabs and Kurds who dominate in the region.

Around the oil city of Kirkuk Kurdish troops have advanced south to take over military positions abandoned by the army, while in Baghdad senior Iraqi politicians say that for the first time there is talk of partitioning the country.

The current crisis was sparked on 23 April when the Iraqi army attacked a sit-in protest in the Sunni Arab town of Hawijah, killing at least 50 people and injuring 110. Outraged Sunni Arab protesters have since stepped up their demonstrations against the Shia-led government. Demonstrators are increasingly protected by armed men, some of whom are accused of dragging five military intelligence soldiers in civilian clothes from a car that came near a protest in Ramadi and killing them.

read more >>

Syria nerve gas claims undermined by eyewitness accounts

Syria nerve gas claims undermined by eyewitness accounts

    Sunday, April 28, 2013   No comments

New questions have emerged over the source of the soil and other samples from Syria which, it is claimed, have tested positive for the nerve agent sarin, amid apparent inconsistencies between eyewitness accounts describing one of the attacks and textbook descriptions of the weapon.

As questions from arms control experts grow over evidence that the Assad regime has used chemical weapons on a limited scale on several occasions, one incident in particular has come under scrutiny.

While the French, UK and US governments have tried to avoid saying where the positive sarin samples came from, comments by officials have narrowed down the locations to Aleppo and Homs.

Last week the Obama administration suggested that Syrian government forces may have used the lethal nerve gas in two attacks. Opposition fighters have accused regime forces of firing chemical agents on at least four occasions since December, killing 31 people in the worst of the attacks.

A letter from the British government to the UN demanding an investigation said that it had seen "limited but persuasive evidence" of chemical attacks, citing incidents on 19 and 23 March in Aleppo and Damascus and an attack in Homs in December, suggesting strongly that samples were taken at these locations.

A US defence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to the Los Angeles Times, appeared to confirm that one of the samples studied by the US was collected in December – suggesting that it too originated in Homs

read more >>