Sunday, 12 September 2010
Iran: women on the frontline of the fight for rights
Shiva Nazar Ahari is a prominent women's rights activist. Photograph: Observer
When Shahrzad Kariman finally saw her imprisoned daughter Shiva Nazar Ahari earlier this month, it was for a brief moment outside the Tehran courtroom where the 26-year-old human rights campaigner had been brought. "We could see her for a few minutes," Kariman told the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran last week. "Just enough to hug her. But we couldn't ask her how the court session went… We didn't know what the charges were prior to the court session."
The charges against Nazar Ahari are among the most serious that can be levelled in Iran: muharebeh (enmity against God), a crime, in theory punishable by death, originally intended to be used against armed gangs and pirates, not dissidents.
Nazar Ahari is also charged with assembly and collusion aiming to commit a crime, propagating against the regime and disrupting public order. But perhaps most dangerous among the allegations – strongly denied both by her family and her organisation, the Committee for Human Rights Reporters – is of "relations" with the banned Mojahedin e-Khalq group, which is accused by the Iranian regime of terrorist activities. Her family says that she deplores the organisation.
Arrested twice since the disputed Iranian elections in June 2009 and held in the notorious Evin prison, in north-west Tehran, Nazar Ahari has been kept largely incommunicado since December, when she was arrested with several other women activists on her way to the funeral of Grand Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri in the city of Qom. Also detained was Mahboubeh Abbasgholizadeh, another prominent women's rights activist and film-maker, who has since left Iran and was sentenced in absentia to two-and-a-half-years in jail and 30 lashes for her part in a 2007 protest.
For the 15 months since Iran's stolen elections, the faces of these women and others like them have been visible from Paris to New York, in London, Berlin, Sydney and the Hague...
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Peter Beaumont @'The Guardian'
Muslims in America increasingly alienated as hatred grows in Bible belt
An opponent of the proposed Muslim centre and mosque near the former World Trade Centre in New York. Photograph: Peter Foley/EPA
Safaa Fathy was as surprised to discover that she is at the heart of a plot against America as she was to hear that her small Tennessee town is a focus of hate in the Muslim world.
The diminutive fifty-something physiotherapist, who has lived in Murfreesboro for most of her adult life, happens to be on the board of her town's Islamic centre. Now she finds herself accused of being a front for Islamic Jihad, of planning to impose sharia law on her neighbours, and of threatening the very existence of Christianity in Tennessee.
"There is something around the whole United States, something is different. I was here since 1982. I have three kids here and I never had any trouble. My kids, they go to the girl scouts, they play basketball, they did all the normal activities. It just started this year. It's strange, because after 9/11 there was no problem," said Fathy, who was born in Egypt. "In the past in America other people were the target. We are the target now. We have trouble in California, we have trouble in New York, we have trouble in Florida. It's a shame because Murfreesboro is a very nice town to live in."
As the US prepares to mark the ninth anniversary of the al-Qaida assault on New York and the Pentagon, the country's Muslims say they are enduring a wave of hostility and suspicion from some of their fellow Americans that they rarely encountered in the years immediately following the 9/11 attacks.
The increasingly bitter dispute over plans to build an Islamic centre and mosque two blocks from Ground Zero in New York is part of it, fuelling a debate about whether Muslims in the US put their faith before their country. Opponents of the mosque plan to mark the anniversary with a rally in New York today led by a leading anti-Islamic activist, Pamela Geller, who has the support of prominent Republican politicians given to increasingly strident anti-Muslim rhetoric. Among those expected to speak is Geert Wilders, the virulently anti-Islamic Dutch political leader...
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Chris McGreal @'The Guardian'
HST on 9/11
It was just after dawn in Woody Creek, Colo., when the first plane hit the World Trade Center in New York City on Tuesday morning, and as usual I was writing about sports. But not for long. Football suddenly seemed irrelevant, compared to the scenes of destruction and utter devastation coming out of New York on TV. 
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day. The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster. And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners. They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying. We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy. OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators. The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.
Even ESPN was broadcasting war news. It was the worst disaster in the history of the United States, including Pearl Harbor, the San Francisco earthquake and probably the Battle of Antietam in 1862, when 23,000 were slaughtered in one day. The Battle of the World Trade Center lasted about 99 minutes and cost 20,000 lives in two hours (according to unofficial estimates as of midnight Tuesday). The final numbers, including those from the supposedly impregnable Pentagon, across the Potomac River from Washington, likely will be higher. Anything that kills 300 trained firefighters in two hours is a world-class disaster. And it was not even Bombs that caused this massive damage. No nuclear missiles were launched from any foreign soil, no enemy bombers flew over New York and Washington to rain death on innocent Americans. No. It was four commercial jetliners. They were the first flights of the day from American and United Airlines, piloted by skilled and loyal U.S. citizens, and there was nothing suspicious about them when they took off from Newark, N.J., and Dulles in D.C. and Logan in Boston on routine cross-country flights to the West Coast with fully-loaded fuel tanks -- which would soon explode on impact and utterly destroy the world-famous Twin Towers of downtown Manhattan's World Trade Center. Boom! Boom! Just like that. The towers are gone now, reduced to bloody rubble, along with all hopes for Peace in Our Time, in the United States or any other country. Make no mistake about it: We are At War now -- with somebody -- and we will stay At War with that mysterious Enemy for the rest of our lives. It will be a Religious War, a sort of Christian Jihad, fueled by religious hatred and led by merciless fanatics on both sides. It will be guerilla warfare on a global scale, with no front lines and no identifiable enemy. Osama bin Laden may be a primitive "figurehead" -- or even dead, for all we know -- but whoever put those All-American jet planes loaded with All-American fuel into the Twin Towers and the Pentagon did it with chilling precision and accuracy. The second one was a dead-on bullseye. Straight into the middle of the skyscraper. Nothing -- even George Bush's $350 billion "Star Wars" missile defense system -- could have prevented Tuesday's attack, and it cost next to nothing to pull off. Fewer than 20 unarmed Suicide soldiers from some apparently primitive country somewhere on the other side of the world took out the World Trade Center and half the Pentagon with three quick and costless strikes on one day. The efficiency of it was terrifying. We are going to punish somebody for this attack, but just who or what will be blown to smithereens for it is hard to say. Maybe Afghanistan, maybe Pakistan or Iraq, or possibly all three at once. Who knows? Not even the Generals in what remains of the Pentagon or the New York papers calling for WAR seem to know who did it or where to look for them. This is going to be a very expensive war, and Victory is not guaranteed -- for anyone, and certainly not for anyone as baffled as George W. Bush. All he knows is that his father started the war a long time ago, and that he, the goofy child-President, has been chosen by Fate and the global Oil industry to finish it Now. He will declare a National Security Emergency and clamp down Hard on Everybody, no matter where they live or why. If the guilty won't hold up their hands and confess, he and the Generals will ferret them out by force. Good luck. He is in for a profoundly difficult job -- armed as he is with no credible Military Intelligence, no witnesses and only the ghost of Bin Laden to blame for the tragedy. OK. It is 24 hours later now, and we are not getting much information about the Five Ws of this thing. The numbers out of the Pentagon are baffling, as if Military Censorship has already been imposed on the media. It is ominous. The only news on TV comes from weeping victims and ignorant speculators. The lid is on. Loose Lips Sink Ships. Don't say anything that might give aid to The Enemy.Saturday, 11 September 2010
Why Americans believe Obama is a Muslim
A study that examined the psychological effects of smear campaigns finds there’s more than ignorance that motivates Americans to believe U.S. President Barack Obama is a Muslim.
The research suggests people are most likely to accept such falsehoods, both consciously and unconsciously, when subtle clues remind them of ways in which Obama is different from them, whether because of race, social class, or other ideological differences.
The findings are published in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
These judgments are irrational, argues by Michigan State University psychologist Spee Kosloff. He also suggests they are fueled by an “irresponsible” media culture that allows political pundits and “talking heads” to perpetuate the lies.
“Careless or biased media outlets are largely responsible for the propagation of these falsehoods, which catch on like wildfire,” says Kosloff, visiting assistant professor of psychology. “And then social differences can motivate acceptance of these lies.”
A Pew Research Center poll in August 2010 found that 18 percent of Americans believe Obama is a Muslim—up from 11 percent in March 2009—even though he’s a practicing Christian. Kosloff notes that the poll was conducted before Obama’s recent comments supporting the right for Muslims to build a mosque near New York’s Ground Zero.
Kosloff and colleagues launched their study prior to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, as the candidates were being bombarded with smear campaigns. It’s the first comprehensive experimental study of the psychological factors that motivate Americans to believe the lies.
In four separate experiments (three before the election and one after), the researchers looked at both conscious and unconscious acceptance of political smears by mostly white, non-Muslim college students.
For the conscious trials, the participants were shown false blog reports arguing that Obama is a Muslim or a socialist or that John McCain is senile. The unconscious trials involved gauging how rapidly subjects could identify smear-relevant words such as “Muslim” or “turban” after Obama’s name was presented subliminally.
Among the results:
- On average, participants who supported McCain said there is a 56 percent likelihood Obama is a Muslim. But when they were asked to fill out a demographic card asking for their own race, the likelihood jumped to 77 percent. Kosloff says this shows that simply thinking about a social category that differentiated participants from Obama was enough to get them to believe the smear.
- Participants undecided about the candidates said there is a 43 percent chance McCain is senile—a number that increased to 73 percent when they simply listed their own age on a card.
- Undecided participants said there is a 25 percent chance Obama is a socialist—a number that jumped to 62 percent when they considered race. “Even though being a socialist has nothing to do with race,” Kosloff adds, “irrationally they tied the two together.”
Kosloff says the increase in belief that Obama is Muslim likely reflects a growing disenchantment with his presidency—a sense that people feel Obama is not on their side.
“When people are unsatisfied with the president—whether it’s the way he’s handling the economy, health care or Afghanistan—our research suggests that this only fuels their readiness to accept untrue rumors,” Kosloff says.
“As his job rating goes down, suggesting that people feel like he’s not ideologically on their side, we see an increase in this irrational belief that he’s a Muslim,” he adds. “Unfortunately, in America, many people dislike Muslims so they’ll label Obama as Muslim when they feel different from him.”
The study was done with researchers from the University of Arizona, the University of British Columbia, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.
Inside America's Mosques
The ninth anniversary of 9/11 is almost upon us, and the relationship between Muslims and non-Muslims in the United States is as fraught as ever. Witness Florida pastor Terry Jones, whose planned "International Burn a Koran Day" held the nation shocked and riveted for weeks until he finally agreed to cancel the event.
In this environment of heightened intolerance, people focus on symbols, and no symbol is more representative of Islam than the mosque. But most outsiders have no idea what actually goes on inside mosques. Some have let their imaginations -- and their mouths -- run wild in depicting these places of worship as nurseries of homegrown terrorist plots against America, as the recent controversy over the proposed Islamic center near Ground Zero in New York revealed.
But the conversation about mosques doesn't need to be so ugly. Long before the latest controversies erupted, I, along with a team of young American researchers, traveled throughout the country studying U.S. mosques for the book Journey into America: The Challenge of Islam. From fall 2008 until fall 2009 we visited over 75 cities and over 100 of the estimated 1,200 mosques in the United States, some of which are little more than a room or two. And we were reminded that Muslims in America are as diverse as Americans overall. There is no one pattern that can describe them all, and any generalities fail to cover the whole picture.
For one thing, only about a third of American Muslims come from the Middle East: The rest are made up mostly of African-Americans and South Asians. While these are the main categories, there are Muslims from all over the world in the United States. There are some mosques with a predominately Bosnian congregation, for example, while others are dominated by West Africans or Turks. There are also a small but growing number of white and Latino converts. And all these groups differ markedly in historical background, lifestyle, attitudes, and values. Muslim life is also affected by location. New York's Muslims remain traumatized by 9/11 and the hostility they've faced as a result. By contrast, West Coast Muslims seem much more confident and relaxed.
In addition to ethnic and regional differences, mosques are divided again on the basis of sect and interpretation, although we found they fit into five categories, which we defined as modernist, literalist, mystic, African-American, and contested. The following is a list of eight representative mosques -- including the one that hopes to become Park51, the Islamic center in downtown Manhattan -- case studies across the broad diversity of American Muslim culture...
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Akbar Ahmed @'Foreign Policy'
One girl, one guy, one tub
People enjoy a chocolate bath in a beauty salon called After the Rain, in Geneva, Switzerland
Myanmar election: An outrage or an opportunity?
The military junta in Myanmar recently announced that the country’s first election in 20 years will be held Nov. 7.
This is the country formerly known as Burma, that went to the polls in 1990 and voted overwhelmingly for the National League for Democracy (NLD), only to have the results thrown out by the junta.
This is the military junta that has kept Aung San Suu Kyi under house arrest for most of the past 20 years and made her one of today’s leading global symbols of the struggle for democracy and human rights.
This is the junta — led by Senior Gen. Than Shwe — that has presided over the world’s longest continuing civil war (since 1949), that brutally suppressed monk-led demonstrations (in 2007), that was slow in responding to the worst natural disaster in the country’s history (Cyclone Nargis in 2008), and that allowed the country to sink to the bottom rank of the world’s countries by most social and economic indicators.
And Than Shwe is the dictator who has been impervious to the sanctions imposed by the United States and other democratic countries, as well as to pleas from the United Nations to bring an end to decades of flagrant human rights abuses.
Why then is the junta holding an election now?...
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Lex Rieffel and David Steinberg @'Global Post'
The Robo Porn of Kathy McGinty
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The girl on the other end of the phone tells you “I’m all fucked up from huffing Scotch Guard,” “I might be having a miscarriage” and “Satan controls my robotic vagina.” Not exactly music to the ears of a horny as hell john looking to indulge in a spot of phone sex. But generally they carry on regardless, beating their meat to the beat, the hapless victims of this voyeuristic crank-call collection.
Originally released in 2001 as a CD-R and later bootlegged by an unscrupulous L.A. record label, Kathy McGinty (the brainchild of pranksters Derek Erdman and Julia Rickert) has finally been pressed as a CD, complete with new liner notes and six bonus tracks.
It documents calls made to a fake sex line, promising live interaction with Kathy McGinty, a nubile young nympho, but all that greets the would be sex seekers is a recorded voice triggered by a Yahama SU-10 sampler. The sheer ridiculousness and comic value of Kathy’s responses are equally matched by (a) the sheer incredulity of the callers and (b) their inability to admit the obvious, namely that they’ve been had. When Kathy seemingly orgasms into ecstatic oblivion at the slightest provocation (“Hello, is that Kathy?”) or starts conversing in tongues, a whoring hostage to the devil, the game should be up. But these guys are so desperate to get their rocks off that even the knowledge that their liaison is with a minor (“I’m 12 years old”) doesn’t prevent them from pumping the pork sword (“I’m not a child molester, but I’ll fuck you”).
The majority of callers are sexually aggressive creatures, declaring how they are going to fuck McGinty hard in the arse, etc. It is easy to imagine exactly the type of men they are and it’s difficult to have much sympathy for them, but there are a few exceptions. One caller takes a more romantic approach – when asked what he would like to do to Kathy he responds “I would kiss you on the forehead, put my hands through your hair and kiss the sides of your face.” Cue multiple McGinty orgasm frenzy. His poor little soul crushed.@'Seedy'
jayrosen_nyu The Times UK paywall is back up. According to AdAge's @natives, the Times people said it was down "for maintenance." Do we believe that?
Ted Koppel: Nine years after 9/11, let's stop fulfilling bin Laden's goals
The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, succeeded far beyond anything Osama bin Laden could possibly have envisioned. This is not just because they resulted in nearly 3,000 deaths, nor only because they struck at the heart of American financial and military power. Those outcomes were only the bait; it would remain for the United States to spring the trap.
The goal of any organized terrorist attack is to goad a vastly more powerful enemy into an excessive response. And over the past nine years, the United States has blundered into the 9/11 snare with one overreaction after another. Bin Laden deserves to be the object of our hostility, national anguish and contempt, and he deserves to be taken seriously as a canny tactician. But much of what he has achieved we have done, and continue to do, to ourselves. Bin Laden does not deserve that we, even inadvertently, fulfill so many of his unimagined dreams.
It did not have to be this way. The Bush administration's initial response was just about right. The calibrated combination of CIA operatives, special forces and air power broke the Taliban in Afghanistan and sent bin Laden and the remnants of al-Qaeda scurrying across the border into Pakistan. The American reaction was quick, powerful and effective -- a clear warning to any organization contemplating another terrorist attack against the United States. This is the point at which President George W. Bush should have declared "mission accomplished," with the caveat that unspecified U.S. agencies and branches of the military would continue the hunt for al-Qaeda's leader. The world would have understood, and most Americans would probably have been satisfied.
But the insidious thing about terrorism is that there is no such thing as absolute security. Each incident provokes the contemplation of something worse to come. The Bush administration convinced itself that the minds that conspired to turn passenger jets into ballistic missiles might discover the means to arm such "missiles" with chemical, biological or nuclear payloads. This became the existential nightmare that led, in short order, to a progression of unsubstantiated assumptions: that Saddam Hussein had developed weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear weapons; that there was a connection between the Iraqi leader and al-Qaeda.
Bin Laden had nothing to do with fostering these misconceptions. None of this had any real connection to 9/11. There was no group known as "al-Qaeda in Iraq" at that time. But the political climate of the moment overcame whatever flaccid opposition there was to invading Iraq, and the United States marched into a second theater of war, one that would prove far more intractable and painful and draining than its supporters had envisioned.
While President Obama has, only recently, declared America's combat role in Iraq over, he glossed over the likelihood that tens of thousands of U.S. troops will have to remain there, possibly for several years to come, because Iraq lacks the military capability to protect itself against external (read: Iranian) aggression. The ultimate irony is that Hussein, to keep his neighbors in check, allowed them and the rest of the world to believe that he might have weapons of mass destruction. He thereby brought about his own destruction, as well as the need now for U.S. forces to fill the void that he and his menacing presence once provided.
As for the 100,000 U.S. troops in or headed for Afghanistan, many of them will be there for years to come, too -- not because of America's commitment to a functioning democracy there; even less because of what would happen to Afghan girls and women if the Taliban were to regain control. It has to do with nuclear weapons. Pakistan has an arsenal of 60 to 100 nuclear warheads. Were any of those to fall into the hands of al-Qaeda's fundamentalist allies in Pakistan, there is no telling what the consequences might be.
Again, this dilemma is partly of our own making. America's war on terrorism is widely perceived throughout Pakistan as a war on Islam. A muscular Islamic fundamentalism is gaining ground there and threatening the stability of the government, upon which we depend to guarantee the security of those nuclear weapons. Since a robust U.S. military presence in Pakistan is untenable for the government in Islamabad, however, tens of thousands of U.S. troops are likely to remain parked next door in Afghanistan for some time.
Perhaps bin Laden foresaw some of these outcomes when he launched his 9/11 operation from Taliban-secured bases in Afghanistan. Since nations targeted by terrorist groups routinely abandon some of their cherished principles, he may also have foreseen something along the lines of Abu Ghraib, "black sites,"
extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it -- more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military so overstretched that one of the few growth industries in our battered economy is the firms that provide private contractors, for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence.
extraordinary rendition and even the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But in these and many other developments, bin Laden needed our unwitting collaboration, and we have provided it -- more than $1 trillion spent on two wars, more than 5,000 of our troops killed, tens of thousands of Iraqis and Afghans dead. Our military so overstretched that one of the few growth industries in our battered economy is the firms that provide private contractors, for everything from interrogation to security to the gathering of intelligence.
We have raced to Afghanistan and Iraq, and more recently to Yemen and Somalia; we have created a swollen national security apparatus; and we are so absorbed in our own fury and so oblivious to our enemy's intentions that we inflate the building of an Islamic center in Lower Manhattan into a national debate and watch, helpless, while a minister in Florida outrages even our friends in the Islamic world by threatening to burn copies of the Koran.
If bin Laden did not foresee all this, then he quickly came to understand it. In a 2004 video message, he boasted about leading America on the path to self-destruction. "All we have to do is send two mujaheddin . . . to raise a small piece of cloth on which is written 'al-Qaeda' in order to make the generals race there, to cause America to suffer human, economic and political losses."
Through the initial spending of a few hundred thousand dollars, training and then sacrificing 19 of his foot soldiers, bin Laden has watched his relatively tiny and all but anonymous organization of a few hundred zealots turn into the most recognized international franchise since McDonald's. Could any enemy of the United States have achieved more with less?
Could bin Laden, in his wildest imaginings, have hoped to provoke greater chaos? It is past time to reflect on what our enemy sought, and still seeks, to accomplish -- and how we have accommodated him.
Ted Koppel, who was managing editor of ABC's "Nightline" from 1980 to 2005, is a contributing analyst for BBC World News America.
Spaceboy - lucky you like yr veggies eh?
Bear in mind that Spaceboy will choose Brussell Sprouts as his vegetable-of-choice!!!
Fury in Austria at anti-mosque game
A far-right party in Austria has sparked outrage by launching an online video game which allows players to shoot down minarets and muezzins calling for prayer.
The game, called "Moschee Baba", or "Bye Bye Mosque", gives players 60 seconds to collect points by placing a target over cartoon mosques, minarets and Muslims and click a "Stop" sign.
It is being used by the Freedom Party (FPOe), which has a link to the game on its website, to encourage voters to elect Gerhard Kurzmann, the party's candidate in the picturesque region of Styria.
"Game Over. Styria is now full of minarets and mosques!" it says at the end of a session, before inviting players to vote for Kurzmann on September 26, when local elections are being held.
The website then invites viewers to take part in a survey which asks them whether the construction of minarets and mosques should be banned in Austria, and whether Muslims should sign a declaration in which they accept that the law takes precedence over the Quran.
According to the Austria Press Agency there are no mosques with minarets in Styria, where 1.6 per cent of the population is Muslim, and only four such buildings in the entire country.
'Religious hatred'
Anas Schakfeh, the leader of Austria's Islamic community, has described the game as "tasteless and incomprehensible".
"This is religious hatred and xenophobia beyond comparison," he told Austrian broadcaster ORF.
Austria's Social Democrats and Green Party have joined the Islamic community in condemning the video.
"The FPOe is targeting minarets that don't even exist," Werner Kogler, the Green candidate in Styria, said.
The game also appears to have divided the FPOe camp, with its deputy, Manfred Haimbuchner, quoted as saying the party should "seek attention with substance, not with constant provocations".
However Herbert Kickl, the party secretary, defended the game saying it did not involve any real shooting, but rather "the pushing of a stop-button to halt a bad political decision."
European debate
The Islamic community and the Green party filed complaints for incitement of hatred and degrading of a religion on Wednesday, which can be punished with prison sentences of up to two years.
Prosecutors in Graz, the capital of Styria, have launched an inquiry and will decide whether to take the game off the Internet.
Islamic buildings and dress have sparked debates in many European countries recently, with French and Belgian MPs voting to outlaw the niqab, and Swiss voters backing a ban on building minarets.
Austria's Freedom Party wants a special vote on banning mosques with minarets and Islamic face veils.
Heinz-Christian Strache, its leader, has said he wants to see anti-Muslim protests similar to those in New York over the building of a Muslim cultural centre near the World Trade Center site.
The debate isn’t just coming from the right. In Germany central banker Thilo Sarrazin, a Social Democrat, has provoked uproar for saying that Muslim immigrants undermine German society, refuse to assimilate, and sponge off the state. He has also said “all Jews share a particular gene” angering people across the German community.
The Freedom Party said its “Bye bye Mosque” game was in part in reaction to Sarrazin’s comments saying they would prefer to have “Sarrazin rather than muezzin,” in Austria. Freedom wants to “deal with a situation which has already long been widespread in Europe,” Kurzmann said. He said young people needed to be informed about the problem.
With its catchy slogans and youthful leader, the Freedom Party enjoys strong support from young people in Austria, polling 17.5 percent of the vote at a national level in 2008.
Saatchi and Saatchi and my part in their piss-up
To the Saatchi Gallery last night after a plaintive call from a Labour Saatchi person (oh yes, they exist) to say the Saatchi and Saatchi 40th anniversary bash was a bit of a Tory wipe out.
Hardly surprising, given its ‘Labour isn’t working’ role in helping Mrs T way back when and she and lots of her ministers were there – John Major, Ken Baker, Norman Lamont, John Wakeham among them – amid dozens of good-looking women from advertising clearly glad that ‘Mad Men’ was back on the screens.
In his speech, Maurice Saatchi was humble enough to say he owed his success in large part to the fact that Mrs Thatcher, now wheelchair-bound and rather frail-looking, if still with that unmistakeable hair, put her faith in the company he started with his brother Charles.
There were hundreds of people there, and it was too hot, but I had some very enjoyable ‘all our yesterdays’ chats with some of the politicians I used to cover as a journalist and then take on as a political campaigner.
Ken Baker seems to have aged the best. He was as irrepressibly upbeat and happy as ever, and gave me this piece of advice … ‘Never ever stop working’. I reminded him of a previous piece of advice he gave me, when Tony Blair hired me in 1994 … ‘Nobody can do that job for more than four years!’ He roared with laughter, said ‘you did well to ignore me, you sat at the TOP TABLE OF HISTORY and loved every minute.’ He waved away my protestations about how much I loved it.
Lots of them seemed to be reading, or have read, TB’s book, and were enjoying it. Lots were talking about Andy Coulson. His problem would seem to be a sense of disbelief (among politicians and journalists) that he had no idea the phone-hacking was taking place when he was editing the News of the World. Old heads now worry about whether David Cameron has ever sought to establish the truth himself, with an eyeball to eyeball chat with his communications director. Because if anything emerges to embarrass Coulson in any of the inquiries into all this, Cameron’s judgement will also become an issue. Interesting too how current Tory MPs were saying that the real issue was how widespread illegal practices may have been, and not just at the News of the World. Press regulation is definitely on the political agenda, and it could be Tory MPs pushing hardest for it.
Of the current Cabinet, I only saw Andrew Lansley, who said he was loving every minute of being Health Secretary. Good to see the NHS Direct campaign making progress incidentally. But not for the first time in a room full of political strategists, the most telling observation I heard was from Philip Gould.
He is as irrepressibly chirpy as Ken Baker. But I think he may be onto something when he says that between them the Tory Party and the media managed to persuade a lot of people that Britain had become a terrible place to live. It is not, it is a good place to live. But the cuts planned by the coalition government – George Osborne added a few more billion to them yesterday to make the BBC’s Nick Robinson feel good about driving up and down the A1 with a perspex box – will make it a much worse place to live for quite a lot of people who will suddenly realise they have lost things they valued.
That is the challenge Saatchi’s successors as Tory strategists should be thinking about. They do seem a bit sidetracked by Andy Coulson right now, but I think Philip has a point.
Correction to blogpost. Margaret Thatcher not in wheelchair at Saatchis' bash last night. I misread fact she was only one sitting
Friday, 10 September 2010
Conroy's net filter still alive and kicking (!?!)
Won't back down ... Communications Minister Stephen Conroy. Photo: Andrew Meares
The Communications Minister, Stephen Conroy, is ploughing ahead with his internet filter policy despite there being virtually no chance any enabling legislation will pass either house of Parliament.
Independent MP Rob Oakeshott, the Opposition and the Greens have all come out against the policy, leaving it effectively dead in the water.
The Greens communications spokesman, Scott Ludlam, has called on the government to end the facade and drop the internet censorship scheme once and for all, as it was wasting time and taxpayers' money.
University of Sydney Associate Professor Bjorn Landfeldt said, given the catastrophic election result after only one term in government, it was "remarkable" the government was "pushing the very issues that undermined their credibility, rather than focusing their energy on important societal issues".
"One may wonder exactly what underlies this relentless pursuit of a mirage, given that there is just about zero support outside the cabinet," said Landfeldt.
"Surely it is no longer a matter of believing that the policy would benefit the general public."
The government is preparing to introduce legislation forcing ISPs to block a blacklist of websites that have been "refused classification" (RC) by government bureaucrats.
After intense criticism of the policy, including that "refused classification" included innocuous and politically sensitive material, Senator Conroy announced just before the election that his policy would be delayed until a review of RC classification guidelines could be conducted by state and territory censorship ministers.
This effectively means any internet filtering legislation will be delayed until next year, by which time the Greens will hold the balance of power in the Senate. The Greens have already said they would oppose the legislation, as has the Opposition.
But before it gets to the Senate the legislation would need to pass the House of Representatives, meaning Labor would need the support of Greens MP Adam Bandt and the independents Andrew Wilkie, Rob Oakeshott, Tony Windsor and Bob Katter.
Wilkie, Windsor and Katter could not be reached for comment but a spokesman for Oakeshott said he was against the filter.
In fact, last year Oakeshott helped a teenage campaigner in his electorate with a petition arguing the filter should be scrapped.
"It is not the government's role to be a net nanny. It is the role of every single household," Oakeshott told the Port Macquarie News at the time.
Senator Ludlam said in a phone interview that he wanted the review of RC guidelines to still go ahead but the government should drop the internet filtering policy altogether.
"It [the RC review] was quite transparently a political stalling tactic but that didn't make it a bad idea," he said.
"[The filter] is just a complete waste of chamber time. It's a waste of public servants' time who for the next 10 months are going to be progressing a mandatory filter proposal that has no chance of passing either house of parliament now."
Senator Ludlam said Senator Conroy should "get past this fixation" with the filter and turn his attention to other looming issues such as net neutrality and the Attorney-General's data retention proposal. The data retention proposal is being pushed by the Australian Federal Police and could see all web browsing history of Australian internet users logged for law enforcement to access.
A wide range of experts on the internet and child protection have long argued that a mandatory filter would be ineffective as it was easy to bypass, would not capture even a small percentage of the nasty content on the web and would give parents a false sense of security.
The big ISPs, including Optus, Telstra and iPrimus, have already pledged to block child-abuse websites voluntarily. This narrower, voluntary approach has long been advocated by internet experts and brings Australia into line with other countries such as Britain.
The Opposition pledged to bring back free voluntary PC-based internet filters for families, which existed under the Howard government but were scrapped by Senator Conroy to make way for his mandatory ISP-level filter.
"Recent OECD reports tell us the investment and quality of our higher education system is falling behind other developed countries; with the ludicrous house prices Australians can no longer move out of home, etc," said Landfeldt.
"There is no shortage of important issues and challenges for the government to focus on."
Despite the intense opposition, Senator Conroy is pushing ahead with the filter and has revealed "a suite of transparency measures to accompany the policy and ensure people can have faith in the RC content list", a spokeswoman said.
"The government does not support Refused Classification material being available on the internet. This material includes child sexual abuse imagery, bestiality, sexual violence and detailed instruction in crime," she said.
Asher Moses @'SMH'
Liverpool fans won't be happy until American owners have gone for good
Liverpool's co-owners Tom Hicks, left, and George Gillett have succeeded in alienating the Anfield fans. Photograph: Phil Noble/Reuters
Until Tom Hicks and George Gillett are officially consigned to Liverpool history, there will be no dancing around the streets of Anfield at reports of their imminent demise. Imminent will not suffice for supporters more accustomed to refinancing deals than record signings since the Americans arrived in February 2007 with promises to put spades in the ground, to manage debt and to sit on the Kop once fans accepted them as true custodians of a rich tradition. There may not be the energy for the send-off they deserve when it is all over.
News that the Royal Bank of Scotland is preparing to cancel £237.4m worth of debt next month, thereby ending Hicks's and Gillett's involvement in Liverpool and costing the credit-crunched businessmen a fortune, raises hope among the club's support that the end is indeed nigh. Another uncertain period awaits while a buyer is found, but the Americans' track record of resisting pressure from the banks, the Middle East, fellow directors, a former manager and the financial opinions of prized footballers to remain in control ensures judgment on a state-owned Liverpool must be reserved.
Doubt over the future of Liverpool will not lessen the significance of the co-owners' exit, however, whenever that comes. Hicks and Gillett have been accused of a litany of failure by the numerous protest groups they have unwittingly created. Some of the charges – such as never putting their own money into the club – are imagined; most – the stadium, the debt, transfers, undermining Rafael Benítez and their own dysfunctionality – are real. Alienating a mass fanbase from their club would also be high on that list.
That Liverpudlians cannot identify with a fundraiser for George W Bush (Hicks) is no surprise, nor a fundamental reason for the anger today, but an interminable saga of financial misery and broken promises has dismantled the traditions they vowed to protect. It is not simply that they have handicapped Liverpool as the club that "existed to win trophies" by making a profit on player-trading for the past two years. It is that for many – and yes, this does sound trite – the fun has gone.
As the MP for Walton, Steve Rotheram, whose constituency covers Anfield, said this week when calling for greater supporter ownership at all levels of the game: "Look at what's happened at Anfield. The fans there do not feel engaged. The owners have seen the supporters as part of the problem instead of the solution." They still do, and the removal of Benítez this summer illustrates that also applies to management level.
Gérard Houllier's return to English football with Aston Villa provides a reminder of how little and everything has changed about Liverpool since the need for new investment prompted former chairman David Moores to accept the Americans' £5,000 per share offer. Houllier spent years bemoaning Liverpool's inability to compete financially with Manchester United and Chelsea (though Arsenal's achievements at that time always undermined his argument) and was sacked after an alarming dip in form, bad buys and with Liverpool fearing they could be cut adrift while losing the services of two disillusioned stars – Michael Owen and Steven Gerrard.
Replace Owen with Fernando Torres this summer and the parallels are clear yet, even though the calls for Houllier's removal far exceeded those for Benítez, Liverpool's support is now politicised like never before. Instead of bridging the gap, Hicks and Gillett have cut Liverpool adrift – from title contention, the Champions League and from the faithful. Hicks hoped to win the latter back by ceding to Benítez's demands on his last, powerful contract at Anfield, but he had no chance.
Offering Jürgen Klinsmann a European Cup-winning manager's job turned the tide of public opinion against the co-owners, but a bigger mistake was to redraw plans for a new 60,000-capacity stadium on Stanley Park within weeks of their takeover. It was pre-credit crunch, and planning permission and European funding was in place for a stadium that was estimated to cost £215m.
The American dream of bigger and better then got in the way. Hicks wanted his own architects to create a grander vision (or cash cow) for 72,000 spectators. Gillett objected but not forcefully enough, and their business relationship began to deteriorate just as the financial storm approached. Only a succession of short-term refinancing packages, under increasingly stringent conditions, have maintained their grip on Liverpool to this point, but at a cost beyond what they stand to lose should the RBS assume control.
"We didn't come here to milk the franchise or the club, we are here to try and build a winning tradition on what is already a winning tradition," said Gillett on the day he first set foot inside Anfield. "I don't think it is appropriate for me or Tom to try to convince the fans we understand the sport, the history or the traditions as well as they do. But respect is what we genuinely feel about the history and legacy of this franchise. I hope we can earn the respect of the fans. Give us a few years and then measure us."
The verdict was returned long ago. And they never did buy Snoogy-Doogy.
Andy Hunter @'The Guardian'
'More tea, pastor?' A tense meeting with the extremist igniting global outrage
In the end, Terry Jones saw reason. But just a few hours earlier, his mind had been very far from magnanimous gestures of conciliation.
Yesterday morning, not so long before he announced, to the relief of a watching world, that he would cancel his plan to burn the Koran, he was sitting in a Harley-Davidson T-shirt, trainers and shorts in his office, contemplating the speech that Barack Obama had been making about him on TV. That was not the only reason Mr Jones was distracted. The coffee in his church in the Gainesville woods wasn't made; and his website had mysteriously gone down.
With a reporter waiting, Jones Sr hasn't had time to see all of the Obama interview with ABC TV, but the bit when the President urges him to listen to "better angels" had made him laugh. Even then, he gave little sign that he would shortly be performing a remarkable volte-face. "I listen only to God," he says. "Angels don't communicate with us – God does. I don't want to be rude, but that sounds like the statement of someone who doesn't understand Christianity."
Tall and lanky with a drooping moustache, Mr Jones seemed both confident and uncertain at the same time. In his office, whatever he had decided about the burning, all the outward signs were still in place. After we talked, his son, Luke, took me to a side-room where the condemned Korans were heaped on a small table.
In fact, to hear Mr Jones tell the tale of his adventures in extremism is to hear the story of a man who was always in over his head. He began his anti-Islam onslaught a year ago, putting signs outside the church that read "Islam is of the Devil". The reaction, he confessed, was stronger than he had expected. And it wasn't great for his congregation, which, at about 50, is half what it was before he started.
That he has already ignited a different kind of fire – of anger and dismay – in every corner of the world has not left him unaffected, he said. He and his congregation were listening; and perhaps Mr Jones was giving just a hint of the decision that was to come. "We are weighing and praying and we are reconsidering," he said. The door to retreat was open, but it had to be God that told him to do it. "We feel for now that we have received a very clear message [from God] to do it," he offered. "That hasn't changed yet." But Mr Jones went on to recall the Old Testament story of God telling Abraham to sacrifice his son. Abraham accepts the order. "Only at the last second, God stops him."
Yet whatever his eventual climbdown, the furore precisely demonstrates, he would still say, what he has been arguing all along – that "there is so much fear connected to Islam. This is why the act of burning Korans has created this kind of reaction."
He may not have seen anything yet. What could have happened here on Saturday, a day when 90,000 fans of the Gators, the American football team of the University of Florida, are due in town, is anybody's guess. What may still happen in the Muslim world is more worrying still.
A nearby resident, Alan Morrow, 62, a former police officer, had spent yesterday putting orange tape across his driveway lest the promised burnings had triggered some kind of furious invasion. "This is America, folks," he said. "We have freedom of speech. But there are different ways to skin a cat and this just isn't right." Sam Gordon, 24, a chef, is blunter. "Everyone in this town that I have talked to thinks this shit is completely out of order," he said.
The climbdown followed a meeting between Mr Jones and Imam Muhammad Musri, of the Central Florida Islamic Society, during which he invited the pastor to join in a 9/11 commemoration instead of burning the Korans.
"We want him to hear other prominent faith leaders talking about how to learn from the tragedy that fell on us on 9/11," he said. "We are trying to find a way for him to be able to address his concerns about Islam without the negative repercussions that would follow a burning of Korans."
Meanwhile, the city managers had told Mr Jones he must pay for all the security costs while the fire department would have pounced with a fine because he had no permit to light a bonfire.
No one will ever no exactly what led Mr Jones to his decision. The extent of the possible fines might have weighed on his mind; yesterday he was insisting that God was his man. But, he added, "If I ignored Obama I would be as crazy as people say I am," he said. And are you crazy? "Well," he concluded, "I don't think I'm crazy."
David Usborne @'The Independent'
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