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More on the jihadists



First off a looney tune from the US:

NEW YORK - The fire department's new Muslim chaplain abruptly resigned Friday after saying in a published interview that a broader conspiracy, not 19 al-Qaida hijackers, may have been responsible for the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. ...

Habib told Newsday in an interview published Friday that he was skeptical of the official version of the attack on the World Trade Center, which killed 343 firefighters.

"I've heard professionals say that nowhere ever in history did a steel building come down with fire alone," he told the newspaper.

"It takes two or three weeks to demolish a building like that. But it was pulled down in a couple of hours," he said. "Was it 19 hijackers who brought it down, or was it a conspiracy?"

The 30-year Guyana native joined the department as chaplain on Aug. 15 after the FDNY's Islamic Society recommended him for the part-time position, which pays $18,000 a year.

Scoppetta said Habib, who was
educated in Islamic law in Saudi Arabia and preaches at a New York mosque, had appeared qualified and passed a background check.

Even China feeling the Islamonazi pressure.
BEIJING — China urged local security agencies Thursday to "prepare for danger" and remain vigilant against terrorists in the predominantly Muslim northwestern region of Xinjiang....

Muslim Uighur militants in Xinjiang have fought for several decades to establish an independent nation that would be known as East Turkestan.

China, which has aggressively confronted the movement, said this month that 160 people had been killed in Xinjiang since the mid-1980s in 260 attacks blamed on terrorists....

About 60% of Xinjiang's population of 20 million is Muslim, who are considered an ethnic minority in predominantly Han China....

China released a leading Uighur figure, Rebiya Kadeer, from prison March 17 and exiled her to the U.S. following years of pressure by Washington. This occurred shortly before a visit by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. China has a history of releasing one or two high-profile activists before major international visits.

The overseas Uighur community is relatively fractured, but analysts say Kadeer is a particular object of Beijing's distrust because she has the stature to unify disparate groups under an international banner, in much the same way the Dalai Lama has done for Tibet.

"Her release appears to have introduced more cohesion to the community," said Ben Edwards, a researcher with the Uighur Human Rights Project in Washington, who said the mainstream movement is nonviolent.

"The Uighur people are Muslim, but there's no connection to the wider, broader [Islamic] jihad."...

In the post-Sept. 11 world, China has labeled many in the Uighur separatist movement as terrorists, part of a global trend by governments to deflect international criticism of internal crackdowns.

"There is no real definition of a terrorist in Chinese criminal law," said Anu Kultalahti, a London-based campaigner with Amnesty International. "We definitely know of people charged with crimes related to terrorism or employing evil forces who we consider prisoners of conscience."

Liu Wenzong, a member of the China Society for Human Rights Studies, said that although most people in Xinjiang were peaceful, a small minority had links to the Taliban in Afghanistan.

"We're talking about terrorists," he said.

Yet again the liberal government in Iran stands up for equal rights for all.

amr_bk.jpg

Amir is a 22-year-old gay Iranian who was arrested by Iran’s morality police in a massive Internet entrapment campaign targeting gays. He was beaten and tortured while in custody, threatened with death, and lashed 100 times. He escaped from Iran in August, and is now in Turkey, where he awaits the granting of asylum by a more gay-friendly country. ...

When asked what message he wants to send to the world about what’s happening in Iran, and what he thinks about his own future, Amir pauses, then says: “The situation of gays in Iran is dreadful. We have no rights at all. They would beat me up and tell me to confess to things I hadn’t done, and I would do it. The gays and lesbians in Iran are under unbelievable pressure — they need help, they need outside intervention. Things are really bad. Really bad. We are constantly harassed in public, walking down the street, going to the store, going home?. . . anywhere and anywhere, everyone, everyone! One of my dear friends, Nima, committed suicide a month ago in Shiraz. He just couldn’t take it anymore.

“I don’t know what’s going to happen to me. I’ve run out of money. I don’t know what to do. I just hope they don’t send me back to Iran. They’ll kill me there.”

IN the past 12 months, influential Islamist jihadist websites have carried an increased discussion on the ethics and strategy of using weapons of mass destruction as part of the global terror campaign. In the week when state and federal governments in Australia have announced tougher rules to monitor and restrict possible and suspected terrorists, we have to take this discussion very seriously.

The Western policy-makers who deal with this do so cautiously. Virtually nobody in authority is being alarmist. But it is the WMD, especially the nuclear, dimension that raises terrorism from the spectrum of gruesome criminality through sustained insurgency and up to genuine strategic threat.

In an opinion piece for The Wall Street Journal two weeks ago Prime Minister John Howard, in expressing bitter disappointment at the UN's failure to do anything serious about nuclear non-proliferation, noted that "al-Qa'ida has made no secret of its ambitions to acquire -- and to use -- WMD".

The authoritative discussion of this option among several key religious figures in the global jihadist network should give us serious pause. Former foreign minister Gareth Evans, now head of the International Crisis Group, while acknowledging the real dangers, was this week urging caution and restraint in our response to terrorism.

But his words on nuclear terrorism were sobering: "We know very well how limited our capacity is, and always will be, to deny access to terrorist groups to chemical and especially biological weapons. But the same is true of nuclear weapons."

He spoke of the "stockpiles of fissile material that litter the landscape of the former Soviet Russia, and after the exposure in Pakistan we know far more than we did about the global market for nuclear technology, materials and expertise, and all of it is alarming ... the level of technical sophistication required to make a nuclear explosive device is certainly above the backyard level but it is not beyond competent professionals ... and there is enough [highly enriched] uranium and plutonium lying around now to make some 240,000 such weapons. Much of it -- particularly in Russia -- is not just poorly but appallingly guarded."

London: A move to open a casino in Birmingham City Football Club's new stadium is being opposed by the Muslim community as gambling is forbidden in Islam.

The stadium is located in the middle of a neighbourhood mainly inhabited by the Muslim community. Three mosques are also located nearby.

Opponents of the casino within the community are appealing to Asian fans to boycott matches if the plans are taken forward, a report in Eastern Eye, a British Asian weekly, said.

Football fan Suheel Akhtar, 22, said: "I am disgusted. I have been a Birmingham fan nearly all my life, but I pray five times a day too, and if they build a casino [in the stadium], I will not spend a penny at the club or go and see any of the games. We will boycott the club." Blah blah blah, get over it. Look at it this way lots of poor white kafir will waste their money in that casino.

There are financial reasons for the club to go ahead with the casino. The club will not get 217 million pounds from American firm Las Vegas Sands Casino towards a new 55,000-seater stadium if they do not include a casino. But Muslim fans say the club should put the community's wishes first. - Guess that would be the Islamic community being put first?

More from Australia:
ASIO [Australian Security and Intelligence Organization] was last night investigating a claim that as early as 2002 there were 300 extremists in Australia willing to mount a terror attack.

The claim is understood to have been made by an Australian terror suspect who was jailed in the Middle East because of his links with the al-Qa'ida terror network.

The suspect is alleged to have boasted of the strength of al-Qa'ida's network in Australia during a telephone call made to an associate in Hamburg.

That conversation was recorded by German police.

The suspect is now back in Australia and is understood to be on an ASIO watchlist.

The development comes after The Australian revealed earlier this week that, in the wake of the July 7 London bombings, ASIO believes there are now as many as 800 people in Australia who could be inspired to carry out such an attack.

**Guess all that oil means the Saudi's can keep on crushing religious freedom
The United States has postponed punishing Saudi Arabia, its close ally and key oil supplier, for restricting religious freedom—the first time Washington has waived punishing a blacklisted country under a 1998 law targeting violators of religious rights. U.S. officials said on Friday the Bush administration had decided to delay imposing sanctions on Saudi Arabia for six months. The decision reflects the delicate balance the United States has sought to strike with Arab allies such as Saudi Arabia as it promotes expanding freedoms at the risk of irking governments needed to support its oil and terrorism policies.

In a rare official rebuke a year ago, Washington designated Saudi Arabia as one of only eight countries worldwide that could be sanctioned. The blacklisting in an annual report said religious freedom did not exist in the kingdom. With this year’s report due out next month, the Bush administration needed to decide on sanctioning Saudi Arabia and chose to give the kingdom a further six months to negotiate how it might improve its record. “We have not seen strong progress in the area of legal protection for religious freedom,” State Department spokesman Kurtis Cooper said. “(But) we welcome Saudi recognition of the need to make improvements and create a more tolerant society.”

With high oil prices affecting the U.S. economy and dragging on President George W. Bush’s popularity, Democrats have charged he has largely ignored Saudi Arabia’s rights record for fear of causing any backlash from the oil supplier. Prominent Saudis dismiss as politically motivated U.S. criticism of the country’s strict Wahhabi brand of Islam. In contrast to its decision on Saudi Arabia, the United States decided to sanction Eritrea by banning military exports to the Horn of Africa country, the officials said.

Vietnam, the third country added to the blacklist last year, has avoided sanctions after agreeing to improve its record, they added. The other countries the United States considers serious violators of religious freedom are North Korea, Myanmar, Sudan, Iran and China. The United States Commission on International Religious Freedom, an agency established by Congress to promote religious freedom, has recommended this year that three allies should be added to the blacklist: Pakistan, Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan.

**Oh this amused me, even though the BBC trys to fawn over muslims in the UK, they are still not happy. www.news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/4299182.stm/

The Muslim Council of Britain says it is to write to the BBC's Editorial Complaints Unit about an edition of the current affairs programme Panorama.

The announcement came after the editor of Panorama rejected an MCB objection that the programme was "deeply unfair".

Panorama had quoted one of its founders as saying the body was "in denial" about extreme views among its members.

The MCB said it was at the "forefront" of criticising extremism and it was "not satisfied" with the response.

In its original complaint, the MCB claimed editors "deliberately garbled" interviews with Muslims in the programme.

Panorama editor Mike Robinson has described the suggestion as an "unwarranted and wildly inaccurate attack" on the show.

"I have found there to be no truth in your claims that this programme was dishonestly presented, maliciously motivated or Islamophobic," he wrote to the MCB.
** Here is a radical idea, if you dont like our country then leave.


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Climbdown on equal rights - plus article from the BNP site


Unions have condemned a European Commission plan to shelve a draft directive granting temporary staff the same rights a permanent workers.

The draft Agency Workers Directive (AWD) would have ensured that temporary workers enjoying the same conditions as permanent staff.

The AWD is one of 68 draft directives earmarked by the European Commission for shelving in a bid to cut red tape.

But the TUC said the Commission's move was a "major setback for temps."

Today's announcement gives a green light to those unscrupulous employers who will continue to exploit agency workers.
Brendan Barber, TUC General Secretary

"For four years the agency workers directive has been blocked by various governments, including our own, and now it is destined to sit on a Brussels shelf for many more years to come," Brendan Barber, TUC general secretary said.

"Agency workers deserve a better deal...Today's announcement gives a green light to those unscrupulous employers who will continue to exploit agency workers."

But Gareth Osborne, managing director of the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, rebutted claims that temps are exploited.

"Temporary workers are sick of being patronised and portrayed as systematically undervalued and underpaid. The first hand accounts we have confirms that flexible working is increasingly valued," he said.

Legal wrangle

The Commission's imitative to cull 68 draft directives is being strongly backed by the UK government, which currently holds the EU presidency.

But the President of the European Parliament, Josep Borrell, said the parliament would consult lawyers to check whether the Commission had the power to withdraw all 68 pieces of legislation on its hit list.

He said it was unclear that they had the legal right to scrap proposals that member states had already discussed, and taken a common position on.

However, enhanced rights for temps may not disappear altogether from the EU agenda.

The Commission said it "reserved the right to reconsider the proposal (greater rights for temp workers) in light of future discussions."

Fewer rights

Under UK law, temporary workers have no right to redundancy pay, to claim unfair dismissal or to take maternity leave.

Unions also claim that temps often have great difficulty claiming sickness and holiday pay.

The UK is one of three EU countries where temps are paid less than staff for the same work, the TUC has claimed.

But the plans to grant temporary workers the same rights as permanent staff has been opposed by UK business on the grounds that it has the potential to push up costs and harm competitiveness.

Recently, the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) said that the UK had a successful labour market which would only be jeopardised by extra regulation such as the AWD.

Civil liberty – the indivisible right - from the BNP site
1st October 2005

Imagine a State ruled alternatively by several factions of the same governing party. Factions which work together to oppress and hamstring the opposition party. Imagine that the Powers That Be excluded members of the opposition party from many jobs, changed the electoral system to disadvantage opposition candidates, allowed government-sponsored thugs to close down its meetings and assault its campaign workers, passed laws to lock up opposition leaders for telling the truth about failures of key regime policies, and used media outlets with close links to the government to run an endless smear campaign against it, with journalists under orders never even to report on the opposition unless in such a way as to damage it in the eyes of the public.

Such a State, self-evidently, would be regarded by anyone who values liberty and democracy as in urgent need of reform. Liberal pundits would appear on the BBC to urge the British government to withhold aid until things were put right. If the country in question happened to be sitting on significant oil reserves, such behaviour might become the official causus belli for a joint US/British invasion to ‘restore democracy’.

Beyond the Pale BNP

But since the State involved is Britain, since the regime is Tony Blair’s and the out-of-power faction of the governing party is Michael Howard’s, and since the oppressed opposition is the British National Party, scarcely a word is said.

That the BNP suffers such harassment is a matter of simple record. That it is unique in its members being denied so many fundamental democratic and human rights may be established simply by contrasting their situation with that of members of Sinn Fein. Men and women who are known close associates of IRA bombers are allowed – in fact, encouraged, to join the police force in Northern Ireland, while police officers on the mainland are warned by their superiors that even voting BNP will lead to them being sacked.

All the facts above, bar perhaps the last one, are well known to the members of every single pro-civil liberty organisation in Britain, but with the exception of a tiny handful of out-of-step individuals among them, almost everyone seems happy with the situation.

It is self-evident that all fundamental liberties – such as freedom of speech and the right to participate in elections on a level playing field - must apply to everybody or, by definition, be absent for all. Except, of course, when it comes to the BNP which, as all right thinking people understand, is Beyond the Pale. Just as witches who danced with the devil were in Puritan England; medical reformers were who said that germs on unwashed doctors’ hands and not ‘ill humours’ were killing one in four new mothers in 18th century Britain; atheist MPs were in 19th century England, and suffragettes were in Britain before the First World War.

In each such example – and in the case of every other dissident group which has been bullied, imprisoned, tortured or murdered by every form of authority in History – there have been ‘good’ reasons, widely accepted as the received wisdom of the time, why the group in question ‘deserved’ to be so treated. Except, of course, in hindsight.

And so it is today with the British National Party. For every Guardian reader knows that the BNP is possessed of the Original Sin of Racism, that its members are all lumpen proletarian skinhead thugs (who have, unfortunately, the right to vote, but not to organise in a political party), and that its leaders seek to recreate Nazi Germany and establish a death camp on Clapham Common in which to exterminate all minorities.

Changed days

Now, the BNP of the 1980s and 90s clearly was in essence a fascist party, but even a casual reading of the party’s 2005 General Election Manifesto makes it clear that there has been a massive and irreversible shift in its aims and underlying ideology.

Among other things it proposes Citizens Initiative Referenda binding on government, seeks to spread the private ownership of the means of production and distribution throughout a defining proportion of the population, opposes ID cards and the surveillance state, and advocates the phased creation of a Swiss-style responsibly armed nation as the ultimate guarantee against imported or home-grown tyranny. Such a party may be all sorts of things, but it very clearly is not ‘fascist’.

As for ‘racism’, the modern BNP opposes mass immigration and multi-culturalism on the grounds that human biocultural diversity is being exterminated by global capitalism. It demands for every single people and culture on planet Earth the right to self-preservation which it seeks for its own. Such a position is clearly out of step with the extermination-through-assimilation model of multi-culturalism promoted by the dominant ideology of the USA, but it equally clearly has nothing to do with ‘hate’ or wishing to harm others.

Level playing field

But such arguments, at one absolutely vital level, are in danger of missing the point: Democratic and human rights are not something which are there to be granted – either by the State or by a liberal intellectual elite, or even by you and me as individuals – only to those whose World View and detailed policies we find ‘acceptable’.

The true test of whether such rights are taken seriously is precisely that they are granted as well – nay, particularly – to those whose views are held ‘by all right-thinking people’ to be unacceptable. Quite simply, either everybody is free, or nobody is. Democracy and human and civil rights are empty and hypocritical slogans if they are qualified and rationed. We are all free, or we are all actual or potential slaves.

This is not to say that incitement to violence and proposals from any group to use force to impose its will on the rest of the population are an acceptable part of democratic discourse, of course they are not. But they can be dealt with perfectly adequately by recourse to ancient Common Law provisions against such things, leaving the right to advocate the most outlandish and ‘unacceptable’ changes to society untrammelled, provided only that such right is exercised through peaceful debate and unfettered constitutional means.

There is, of course, nothing controversial about this argument. The only rather unusual thing is insisting that, when it comes to the idea that civil liberty is indivisible and universal, ‘everybody’ includes not just the Liberal Democrats, Communist Party and Sinn Fein, but also the British National Party.

Globalist agenda

For genuine, far-sighted, members of groups like Liberty and Amnesty – and of other political parties - this really shouldn’t be rocket science, for it is not just a matter of abstract principle, it is also increasingly a question of self-interest.

Leaving aside all the niceties of ideology and principle, the plain truth is that the entire world is now being afflicted by a giant corporate asset-grab of unprecedented proportions. Many multi-national companies now have more wealth and power than medium-sized nation states, and they are using that power to push through a globalist agenda which involves the conversion of vast areas of what used to be civic life and cultural and community cohesion into private profit centres.

Health, the penal system, education, council services (witness the ‘pilot scheme’ take-over on July 1st by German media giant Bertelmann’s of Yorkshire’s East Riding council services), the entire fabric of civil society is being looted in the West, just as debt-for-equity swaps have already seen the most valuable assets of Third World countries stolen by globalist corporations.

This massive transfer of wealth to global corporatism is reflected by a parallel decline in the power of democratically elected governments, and thus in the strength of democracy itself. Nor will this remain a matter of theory or even just falling turn-outs. As popular anger against History’s biggest ever smash and grab raid rises, so the political puppets of global capitalism will become ever more repressive of protests against things over which they have abdicated their power and sovereignty in favour of the corporate elite.

From the police provocations launched against the demonstrators at Seattle, through to the new ban on even one-man demonstrations within a kilometre (!) of the Westminster Parliament, there is an unbroken strand: Our Masters, in order better to serve their Masters and conceal from the public knowledge of what they are doing, are taking away our rights. Not just my rights, your rights.

Creeping totalitarianism

What is done today against the Beyond the Pale BNP will be done tomorrow against others. The extremist and exploitative nature of the globalist project are inevitably provoking resistance which its political puppets must suppress, but their liberal ideological origins incline them towards incremental totalitarianism rather than the overnight clampdown of the self-righteously anti-democratic tyrannies of the last century.

The problem for the left is that the only real power with which to oppose this newly rapacious post-1989 global capitalism is the power that comes from the moral high ground. Yet in seeking the moral high ground in resisting political repression and the denial of human rights, one cannot compromise on the fundamental principle of the universality of such rights.

To accept that the State, or private corporations, or indignant individuals, are entitled in any way to repress an individual or a group for Politically Incorrect views, is to abandon the moral right to oppose such repression when it is directed against persons of whom one approves.

Similarly, the establishment of a precedent for a certain type of denial of freedom to Group A makes it subsequently virtually impossible in practical terms to resist when the same thing is done to Group B.

The left in particular should have learned this as far back as the early 1980s, when they looked on with approval when British police forces took to illegally halting cars and coaches containing National Front members on their way to perfectly legal demonstrations. Had Arthur Scargill, Tony Benn and the National Council for Civil Liberties gone immediately to the defence of the fundamental principle of the right of people of all views and standpoints to demonstrate, then the new tactics perfected against the ‘unacceptable’ NF might have been stopped before they were rolled out a year later against their real target – striking miners.

Confusion of the left

Has this lesson been learned? It doesn’t look like it. In fact, even the liberal-left seem more lukewarm or confused about the issue of civil liberty today than ever before. Labour MPs who once fought tooth and nail for women’s rights are now getting ready to drive another nail into the coffin of free speech in order to reward the priests of the last great anti-female religion (which is to be protected by the threat of seven years in prison from scrutiny or criticism) for overcoming their revulsion at Blair’s illegal war and delivering a sizeable chunk of their community’s block vote to Labour in the last election.

Where are the liberals and the left? Demonstrating for the freedom to say that stoning the victims of rape to death for ‘adultery’ is medieval barbarism? No, lining up with the Mullahs who want to impose on Muslim women living in Britain a dress code which is more strict than that regarded as normal in most Islamic societies in history – a code which comes from the same mentality that insists that the stones should be larger than pebbles and big enough to cause serious injury to a woman buried up to her neck in sand, but not large enough so that the first two to smash into her head will kill her.

Where are the liberals and the left? Demonstrating for the absolute right of Brian Haw to embarrass Tony Blair with his one-man peace camp outside the supine House of Commons? No, because their archaic collectivist instincts mean that the rights of individuals – even those on their side – don’t really strike a chord with them.

Where are the liberals and the left? Demonstrating against the hounding of BNP members from their jobs? No, next in the queue to lose their own jobs and rights at the hands of the puppets of global capitalism who, despite their ‘left-wing’ party labels, will have no more time for those who oppose the exploitation inherent in the New World Order than the factory owners who dominated the 19th century parliament had for protesting mill hands.

The persecuted Pastor was right: “… And then they came for me, and there was no-one left to speak out for me.”
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