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Why ‘Islamophobia’ is less thinly veiled in Europe (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 23:54:19 +0000

London and Paris – Rooful Ali is an accountant who commutes, “suited and booted,” to his corporate office in London from Northamptonshire, England, where he grew up in a Bangladeshi family. His avocation is photography. But he also finds time to direct the first Europe-wide association of Muslim professionals.
The group includes marine biologists, lawyers, professors, astrophysicists, executives, doctors, artists, and political and civic figures in 10 countries – chosen for their accomplishments. They give inspirational talks and mentoring workshops for young people in the Muslim community.
Mr. Ali is part of a second generation of Muslims just starting to get traction in Europe. It is a generation that drives their kids to school, worries about office deadlines, loves sports, participates in the arts, and owns businesses. Ali and some of the 70 others in his professional network believe that Muslims can give something to European society by acting as role models within their own community.
Yet in the current political and social climate in Europe – where a larger and more visible Muslim presence is causing a backlash – they face strong head winds. Not only is mainstream Europe looking more askance at Muslims, but younger Muslims with higher expectations and hope for belonging are growing more restless.
“Much of the depiction of Muslims is without sufficient knowledge,” Ali says. “Iraq, Afghanistan, the Taliban – that's how we are seen. It's sad. We would like to showcase who we are in a good way.”
It is Europe, not the United States, where the West and Islam exist in closest daily proximity. Some 20 million to 30 million Muslims live here, making up about 4 percent of the population compared with less than 1 percent in America. Mosques, once an urban phenomenon, are found in far corners of the Continent. Muslims are more visible on European streets, and most are not professionals, but work in retail, agriculture, food service, and labor.
In the US, the controversy over the proposed Islamic center near ground zero has brought some of the most visible instances of public Islam-bashing, mostly on the right side of the political spectrum – a departure from the line taken by President Bush after 9/11 not to equate Islam with terrorism.
But in Europe a pushback against immigrants, many of whom are Muslim, has been under way for much longer. A postwar Europe long priding itself on cosmopolitan tolerance is facing a population seen as different – at a time of concern about the economy, jobs, and when mainstream Europe isn't quite sure about its security and its future.
“Values of national identity and patriotism are starting to take shape over an older argument in Europe about tolerance, plurality, freedom of expression,” says Edward Mortimer, vice president of the Salzburg Seminar in Austria, which helped launch the Muslim professionals network.
The past year has a brought a wide range of anti-Islamic measures. Switzerland passed a referendum to ban minarets on mosques. Belgium has prohibited the burqa, or full-length veil worn by Muslim women, and France is about to.
In June, voters in the Netherlands – whose second-largest city, Rotterdam, has a majority population of ethnic minorities – made the party of anti-Islam political figure Geert Wilders the third largest in Dutch politics. Mr. Wilders's platform calls for banning the Koran and new mosques, taxing head scarves, and ending immigration from Muslim countries. Wilders is now in negotiations to join the ruling coalition. He is also scheduled to appear on Sept. 11 alongside former US House Speaker Newt Gingrich at a ground zero commemoration in New York.
Such politics has engendered Muslim antipathy in parts of both the right and the left. Over the past five years, “Islamophobia” has become more mainstream and more comfortably settled. Social politeness and taboos on talking about Islam are eroding at a time when Europeans aren't exactly sure what they think about Islam.
The ground zero debate in Europe, for example, has brought a small geyser of anti-Muslim invective, even on websites like Le Monde's. They included an often articulate though sometimes churlish depiction of Islam as a single monolithic form of faith, inherently violent and extreme, and of Muslims as incapable of being moderate.
“Racism is the lowest form of human stupidity, but Islamophobia is the height of common sense,” is the motto of a Danish group called “Stop Islamization of Europe,” which somewhat typifies a broader sentiment.
An essay on a French leftist website, AgoraVox, spoke of shock that in the same week German authorities closed a radical Hamburg mosque, New York City authorities approved the Islamic center: “The Mayor, instigated by an imam who is said to be 'moderate,' plans to build a mosque extremely close to Ground Zero, where stood the Twin Towers that Islamist fanaticism reduced to rubble…. You rub your eyes and read again. No, it is not a hallucination … you look for the justification … but instead of understanding, you dive deeper into an impression of unreality.”
Ironically, the head of the Grand Mosque in Paris, Dalil Boubakeur, said he thought a “mosque at ground zero” was too provocative – though it was not clear if he knew the proposed siting was two blocks away. As Mohammad Shakir, communications director for several small Muslim charities in London, put it, “I've never seen a mosque with a basketball court before. Muslims need a place to pray if you build a Muslim community center. But it is a terrible misnomer to call this a 'mosque at ground zero.' ”
After 9/11, a small industry of literature, much of it produced in the US, predicted a coming “Eurabia” – a tsunami of Islam that will make Europe unrecognizable, where Muslim birthrates overwhelm older populations, mosques are as plentiful as McDonald's restaurants, and Islamic sharia law supplants European constitutions.
A German central banker, Thilo Sarrazin, has kicked up a firestorm with a pending new book attacking Turks and Muslims. “I don't want the country of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be largely Muslim, or that Turkish or Arabic will be spoken in large areas, that women will wear headscarves and the daily rhythm is set by the call of the muezzin. If I want to experience that, I can just take a vacation in the Orient,” are among Mr. Sarrazin's passages, which were challenged by German Chancellor Angela Merkel.
Daniel Luban, a doctoral candidate at the University of Chicago, offers in a recent paper that many of the core assumptions of “Islamophobia” in the US spring from Europe. “While the political operatives behind the anti-mosque campaign speak the language of nativism and American exceptionalism, their ideology is itself something of a European import. Most of the tropes of the American 'anti-jihadists,' as they call themselves, are taken from European models.”
Justin Vaïsse, an analyst at the Brookings Institution in Washington, argues that actual data about Muslim birthrates in Europe (which are declining as Muslims assimilate and have smaller families) and immigration (500,000 a year) belie the dire projections of the Continent becoming Eurabia.
“The paradox of this genre is that it dwells on the heated controversies and tensions taking place in Europe while at the same time claiming that Europeans are in denial of their problems,” says Mr. Vaïsse, coauthor of “Integrating Islam: Political and Religious Challenges in Contemporary France.” “And the emphasis on the anecdotal tends to obscure the fact that, from the fight over minarets in Switzerland to the debate over head scarves in France, current tensions are part of a normal and democratic process of adjustment, not the first signs of an impending catastrophe.”
Often absent are views of Muslims themselves. Much of the discussion aimed at Islam takes place as if the Muslims weren't in the room. Scant attention is paid to vast religious and cultural differences between groups. French Muslims tend to be from Arab and African states, British Muslims from South Asia, Dutch Muslims from Morocco and Indonesia, German Muslims from Turkey.
Muslims, interviewed at mosques, offices, and cafes in Paris and London, say they often don't recognize common depictions of themselves. They resent the fact that Islam is a subject of derision and reject the stereotype of Muslims as being one uniform, slightly sinister group.
Tufyal Choudhury, a law lecturer at Durham University in England and the primary author of an 11-city study on Muslims in Europe, notes that Muslim concerns are not about spreading the faith, but housing, education, and neighborhood safety. Young second-generation Muslims have high expectations but often feel excluded. “Their parents had less expectations and less disappointment,” he says.
A recent French government study found that job applicants with Arab Muslim names had less than half the chance of getting an interview than applicants with French names.
One Muslim, Said from Cameroon, interviewed at a Paris mosque before prayers, points out that Europe is a place of liberty for Muslims, many of whom have escaped repressive states. Some come to escape orthodox Islam while still being devout. More Muslim women find Europe a harbor to challenge older “cultural” models of Islam that restrict their freedoms. Muslims agree that some younger adherents get radicalized. But others are eager to integrate. They want to be European, or French, or Dutch. In university settings and among some Muslim moderates, frank reappraisals of the Koran are under way, which includes a tougher look at its calls for militancy.
Ahmet Mahamat is one who wants to integrate. A slender immigrant from Chad with luminous eyes, he has lived in Paris for 15 years. He is a filmmaker working on a documentary about the civil war in his home country. When he first arrived in France, he says he was impossibly idealistic. He still describes the streets of Paris rhapsodically. But in recent years he has felt targeted as a black and a Muslim. Muslims, he says, are now seen as a problem. Trust is low on both sides. “We hear it all the time: Terrorism is a shortcut that links to immigration,” he says. “Immigrants are linked to criminality or delinquency or fanaticism.”
As a filmmaker, Mr. Mahamat uses the Hollywood classic “Casablanca” to make his point. “At the end of 'Casablanca,' Humphrey Bogart certainly is the man that shot the German officer. But who do they round up? The usual suspects – probably local Muslims. The new obsession here with Islam is very strange, because our world doesn't lack problems. We've got global warming, poverty, famine, dictatorships … we don't have small issues. But we are focused on Islam. We need a usual suspect.”
He adds, “There is an African saying, 'that if you are with someone long enough, you can look in their eyes and eventually see yourself.' But now I feel this African saying is wrong. I look in the eyes of so many people and what I see does not correspond to who I am. They see another me.”

North Korea’s Kim Jong-il may go public with dynastic rule (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 13:29:31 +0000

Seoul, South Korea – North Korea’s leader Kim Jong-il is expected to convene the first high-level conference of the ruling Workers’ Party in about 40 years amid widespread speculation that the world will finally get the answer to one great question:
Will Kim's third son, Kim Jong-un, be confirmed as heir to power?
If so, he would be the third in a line that began when Kim Jong-ilâ€™s father, the late “Great Leader” Kim Il-sung, took over at the time of the founding of the Democratic Peopleâ€™s Republic of Korea in 1948.
There’s no guarantee, however, that Kim Jong-il, who rose to full power after Kim Il-sung’s death in 1994, will confirm the speculation. For that matter, it’s not even totally certain the conference will convene this weekend, as widely reported.
What is known is that, yes, posters have been seen in Pyongyang announcing that delegates are gathering for an important party conference. All the rest â€“ the notion that the party is reorganizing, that Kim Jong-un will appear, that he will accept a leading party position, is guesswork.
Guess who's missing from North Korea mediaThe fact that the conference is slated to convene at all, however, strikes analysts as critical for Kim Jong-il’s effort to pass the reins to his son. Still, analysts caution against jumping to conclusions for one basic reason: For all the speculation about Kim Jong-un as a rising star in North Korea, neither his name nor his photograph seem to have appeared in the North Korean media.
Nor is it even certain, as widely believed but not confirmed, that the son accompanied his father to northeastern China one week ago for a summit at which the elder Kim may or may not have introduced him to China’s President Hu Jintao.
“It’s important to recognize that Kim Jong-un’s name has never been mentioned once,” says L. Gordon Flake, executive director of the Mansfield Foundation in Washington. “The average North Korean has never heard of the son.”
Jumping to conclusionsUnder those circumstances, a mere allusion to Kim Jong-un’s presence at the conference will be news. And a photograph of him in a line-up of newly appointed party officials would be an event of global significance considering the reported fragile health of his father.
Given Kim Jong-un’s anonymity, Mr. Flake sees the party conference as intended simply to acquaint important people with the son’s existence as the potential next in line.
“We’re not talking about succession,” says Flake, a long-time specialist on Korean affairs. “We’re talking about the beginning of the process,” he says. “I would be equally surprised if they mentioned him or didn’t mention him at all.”
Flake is not even convinced that Kim Jong-il introduced Kim Jong-un to Hu Jintao or that the son accompanied his father on a five-day trip that also featured stops at sites where Kim Il-sung once lived and studied. “I would be very skeptical the North Koreans would trot out the son given the North Korean resistance to kowtowing to the Chinese,” he says. “This was a mission to make sure of Chinese support.”
Such considerations, however, hardly dispel the assumption that Kim Jong-un, who studied at a boarding school in Switzerland, was reputedly a fan of American basketball in his schooldays, and is believed to speak English and French as well as Korean, is on his way to the top.
He’s already reportedly gotten positions within the government and also within the defense establishment, the center of power, which his father controls as chairman of the national defense commission, and he’s reportedly accompanied his father on visits to farms and factories.
What about reports in the foreign media?Reports, however, have appeared in foreign media. At least one photograph has popped up in a Japanese newspaper said to show the younger Kim at his father’s side. Analysts say, however, the picture may well have been that of a young factory manager.
The best that Scott Snyder, director of the Center for US-Korea Policy at the Asian Foundation, can say is that the party conference is “clearly related to the establishment of an institutional basis for a successful political transition.” After all, says Mr. Snyder, “any coronation of that type will not be sustainable without institutional support from components of the system.”
Snyder wonders, however, how long Kim Jong-un can remain unnamed and unknown to North Koreans. “What’s so odd about this situation is they were making clear references to Kim Jong-il in the 1970s,” he says. The North Korean media in that period referred to him as “the party center” without naming him. Snyder says then the meaning was clear to North Koreans. Like father, like son? “This is obviously a shorter process,” he says.

Abbas agrees to fresh Israeli-Palestinian talks in Egypt, but has little support at home (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Thu, 02 Sep 2010 22:35:26 +0000

Ramallah, West Bank – When Israeli-Palestinian peace talks move beyond today's summit in Washington, Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas will face a tough balancing act as even his allies at home push back against US and Israeli pressures.
Mr. Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agreed today to meet again in two weeks, most likely in Egypt, and set up a framework for reaching a deal within a year.
Abbas, who in recent weeks has spoken of being under unbearable pressure, and his colleagues in the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) know that they have little alternative to going along with the United States and its Arab allies. After all, Abbas has staked his tenure on a negotiated peace with Israel, opposed a violent uprising, and allied himself with the West.
“Abbas has been frank and truthful… He never said he had two options,” says Mohanned Abdel Hammid, a political commentator for the Al Ayyam newspaper. “The balance of power in Palestine has always been in favor of the majority rule – which is Fatah.”
But skepticism toward Israeli-Palestinian negotiations is so widespread among Palestinians that even peace proponents in Abbas's own Fatah party and the umbrella PLO oppose the talks.
Unclear when Abbas's line of credit will run outDespite such reservations – fueled in part by doubts that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu means business – Abbas won a halfhearted blessing from enough political backers to start the talks.
Those allies have been convinced that it's not in the Palestinians' interest to defy an international community that is pushing for talks and allow Israel to portray themselves as obstructionists.
It's unclear, however, when that line of credit will run out.
“Abbas cannot avoid the invitation from Obama,” Nabil Amr, a member of the PLO's legislative body, said on the eve of the talks. “There are many factions in the PLO against these negotiations. He is in a difficult position.''
Opponents of the talks organized a demonstration Wednesday. But amid widespread Palestinian apathy, it drew only drew a few hundred protesters. The groups participating in the rally included longtime critics of talks with Israel, such as the Marxist Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine and the Democratic Front for the Liberation of Palestine, which is headquartered in Syria.
“Had 20,000 people showed up today, Abbas would withdraw from talks,” said Hani el Masri, a political commentator who spoke out against the talks at the rally. “But the opposition is still nascent…. The factions are fossilized and have distanced themselves from the people.''
Fatah more popular than HamasAbbas' Fatah party currently enjoys an advantage in public opinion over the most potent peace process opponent, Hamas. A June poll of Palestinians in both the West Bank and Gaza, conducted by a Ramallah-based survey group, found that Fatah enjoyed a 19 percentage point advantage over Hamas in support for the Palestinian legislature. Abbas leads Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh by a 16 percentage-point margin.
That said, if Israel were to resume expanding Jewish settlements in the West Bank after a 10-month settlement freeze expires Sept. 26, the tenuous approval within the party for Abbas' participation is likely to erode. Also at issue is the 500-mile-long security barrier that Israel is nearly finished erecting after a wave of suicide attackers from the West Bank killed more than 1,000 Israelis in the second intifada.
“You can't negotiate when they are building settlements and completing the wall,” says Kadoura Fares, a Fatah member who is a former Palestinian cabinet minister. “That injures the faith of the people in Abbas.”
Abbas's political fortunes within the PLO depend on his ability to win concessions and gestures from Israel and the international community, say analysts. Substantial progress toward a Palestinian state could also shore up support.
“If Abbas can prove that this was right, it can stop radicals. It is very important that these negotiations achieve something,” says Mohammed Dajani, a political science professor at Al Quds University. “Even if it narrows the gap, or paves the way for future negotiations, it will undermine radicals on both sides.”

The trickiest issue in Israeli-Palestinian peace talks (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 11:28:54 +0000

Jerusalem – As Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Palestinian leader Mahmoud Abbas enter direct peace talks on Thursday, an intensifying battle for Jerusalem has rendered the conflict’s trickiest issue even more intractable.
A key flashpoint in this battle is Sheikh Jarrah, a predominantly Arab neighborhood revered by religious Jews. While the number of new Jewish residents remains small, Palestinians and human rights activists see their expanding presence as fulfilling a larger plan.
Overall, some 2,000 Jewish residents have moved into strategic locations in every Palestinian neighborhood around the Old City, home to key holy sites.
Many Israeli Jews see the “redemption” of such areas as crucial to cementing Israel’s sovereignty over its “undivided and eternal capital” and preventing the kind of partition of Jerusalem that Israeli Defense Minister Ehud Barak suggested yesterday.
“It’s not that there is this one little [Jewish] settlement in Sheikh Jarrah; it’s part of this bigger strategy,” says Orly Noy of Ir Amim, a human rights group that seeks to make Jerusalem a city of two peoples. “Fifty residential units in Sheikh Jarrah are part of a ring of settlements that aim to foil any possibility of a Palestinian capital in East Jerusalem.”
The historyUnder a plan preliminarily approved by Israel’s Interior Ministry in March, several dozen Palestinian homes in Sheikh Jarrah would be demolished to make room for 200 Israeli housing units. Also being advanced by Jewish groups are plans for 20 units in the Shepherd Hotel and a conference center known as the Glassman Campus.
And for decades, Jewish families whose relatives fled Sheikh Jarrah amid ethnic violence leading up to Israel’s 1948 declaration of independence have sought to reclaim their property.
But their efforts have been complicated by the fact that after Jordan took over East Jerusalem in the 1948 Arab-Israeli war, it allowed the UN refugee agency to settle Palestinian refugees in Sheikh Jarrah who had fled their homes elsewhere in Israel amid the fighting.
After Israel captured East Jerusalem in the 1967 war against its Arab neighbors, it annexed the territory – an act that the international community has declared illegal – and applied Israeli law there. Using the Israeli legal system, Jewish groups have pushed for the eviction of Arab residents and won support from the Supreme Court.
Maher Hanoun worries about his homeIn one of the most high-profile cases, two of the original Palestinian refugee families – the Hanouns and the Ghawis – were evicted for a second time in August 2009. Israeli Jews who, citing Ottoman-era documents, convinced the court that they were the rightful owners of the properties, moved in while the families watched from a makeshift camp nearby.
Maher Hanoun has been looking forward to Sept. 2, when the families return to court. At issue is what they say was an attorney's forgery that resulted in the entire families being evicted rather than just the heads of the two households.
But he has been dreading the day his daughters start school this fall.
He hopes that when he comes to the part of the school application that asks for an address, he wonâ€™t have to write again: â€œUnder an olive tree.â€
“To lose your house means you lose security – you lose everything,” Mr. Hanoun says, ducking beneath the visor of his New York Yankees hat to hide tears. “My two daughters, they get so mad because we don’t have any address.”
He had tried to appeal to international leaders, plastering his house with a big sign that said, “Mr. Obama, please help if you can.”
“But I see you can't,” he says, recounting the day Israeli police came and tore it down before his eviction.
Arieh King worries about his homelandWhile Hanoun is worried about his home, Arieh King – one of the most prominent Jewish activists in Sheikh Jarrah – is concerned about homeland.
On a recent morning, he pulled his scooter up to a curb near Sheikh Jarrah and began a tour of the area, which he refers to by the historical Jewish names of Nahalat Shimon and Shimon HaTzedik.
Donning a soft-brimmed hat and wraparound sunglasses, he looks more like a safari guide than the founder and director of the Israel Land Fund, one of several groups spearheading the “redemption” of Jewish property in Jerusalem.
His sandaled feet pause in front of a massive black gate labeled only in French, “Tombeau des Rois.” The Tomb of the Kings is a sacred Jewish burial ground obtained by France in the late 1800s, though the exact circumstances of the transaction are fuzzy.
Mr. King says France’s custody of the site was conditional on keeping it holy, providing free access to Jews, and displaying signs – including in Hebrew – about the nature of the site.
“Today, nobody has access here,” he says, throwing his weight back against the imposing black gate that rattles under his force. “This is a symptom of what’s going on in East Jerusalem.
“Jerusalem is part of our body and it should be the heart of every Jew,” he adds, noting that devout Jews pray facing Jerusalem three times a day and see the city as the heart of a country that is their sole guarantee of survival as a people. “If you want to cut the heart of Jerusalem, you are wanting to kill Jews.”
Not a universally shared point of viewBut not all Israelis share King’s point of view. In fact, Sheikh Jarrah has become a rallying point for Israel’s beleaguered left wing. Every Friday since late 2009, Israeli protesters have met in the neighborhood – any easy walk from west Jerusalem – to make their disapproval of Israeli policies felt and to show solidarity with the families.
Hanoun says he and his family are buoyed by the weekly demonstrations, which they often attend.
“We’re staying close to let our message be heard around the world,” he says.
Dina Goldstein – a soft-spoken Israeli Jew who spent many nights last year sleeping on a spare mattress at the family’s home with other activists in a failed bid to prevent their eviction – says that while the affair has been a real trial for the Hanouns, their support for each other has been touching.
“They are such a gentle, loving, close family,” she said after an Aug. 6 protest marking one year since their eviction. “Despite this whole continuous nightmare, that’s the one thing that no one can take away from them.”

Lahore blasts deepen threat to foreign aid workers in Pakistan (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Wed, 01 Sep 2010 07:35:24 +0000

Lahore, Pakistan – A series of suicide bombings targeting Shiite religious processions in Lahore, Pakistan killed at least 25 people and injured up to 180 on Wednesday night, according to the city's administrative chief. It marks the first large-scale terror attack since flooding devastated Pakistan four weeks ago.
Though sectarian in nature, the attacks are likely to raise the level of threat felt by the hundreds of international aid workers who have come to Pakistan after the worst flooding in 80 years killed more than 1,600 people and left a fifth of the country under water at its peak.
“They will definitely be discouraged in continuing their activities in flooded areas, because those areas affected in the northwest were already vulnerable to militant activity,” says Abdul Basit, a security analyst at the Islamabad-based Pakistani Institute for Peace Studies. “Foreigners become an attractive target to militants as [such an attack] provides them a wider platform to send their message to the world.”
Lahore was once considered a “safe” city in Pakistan, but has become a major target for militant violence in the past two years. In May, a set of coordinated attacks against the minority Ahmadi Muslim community killed some 93 people, while at least 50 Sufi Muslims were killed when a suicide bomber attacked the city’s Data Darbar shrine in July. In a separate incident Wednesday, at least seven were injured in the port city of Karachi when militants opened fire on Shiite worshipers participating in the Yaum-e-Ali ritual, which thousands of police were assigned to protect.
An affiliate of a Punjabi militant group, Lashkar-e-Jhangvi al-Alami, claimed responsibility for the Lahore attacks, according to Mr. Basit. Though the attack was not aimed at foreigners, a deteriorating law-and-order situation will be “discouraging” to aid workers.
Lashkar-e-Jhangvi is one of a number of militant organizations, which was previously devoted to harming Pakistan’s minorities but has in recent years formed linkages with the Pakistani Taliban and set its sights on the government.
On top of that, the Pakistani Taliban’s spokesman Azam Tariq last week warned foreign aid workers that their presence in the country is “unacceptable.”
The first blast took place when the main procession had ended and worshipers were sitting down to break the Ramadan fasts, according to Sajjad Bhutta, the district coordination officer of Lahore.
Though witnesses reported seeing police assigned to protect the procession fleeing the scene, Mr. Bhutta said a second suicide bomber detonated at a police checkpoint.
Following the blasts, angry mobs began pelting police and emergency rescue vehicles with stones, and set fire to a police station. Police responded with tear gas. Lahore’s top administrative official, Khusro Pervez, later admitted to local media that a security lapse may have occurred.
The procession in Lahore was held to mark the death of the first Shiite Imam Ali bin Abi Talib in the 7th century.

Hamas targets Israeli-Palestinian talks by killing four Israelis (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 15:15:18 +0000

Tel Aviv – As Middle Eastern leaders gathered in Washington to inaugurate a new round of Israeli-Palestinian talks, Hamas gunmen killed four Israeli settlers in their car outside the West Bank city of Hebron.
The attack appeared to be an attempt to spark violence that could undermine the peace negotiations and was a stark reminder that the Islamist Hamas movement remains an important force in Palestinian politics, no matter how much either the Israelis or the Palestinian Authority's Mahmoud Abbas wish they would go away.
Analysts say that after more than a year of US diplomacy and an improvement in security in the West Bank, the summit in Washington won't be jeopardized by an isolated attack.
“The scale of it is not large enough and in terms of relations with America and the international community, the government of Israel is most likely to decide to continue,” says Meir Javedanfar, a Tel Aviv-based Middle East analyst. “A future attack against Hamas will be more justifiable for Israel if Netanyahu stays in Washington. To break off the talks because of such an attack would be giving Hamas and their backers in Iran a major victory.”
The attack came after Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Mr. Abbas had departed the region for the US talks.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak and Jordan's King Abdullah are also participating in the summit, which begins Wednesday night with a dinner hosted by President Obama.
Hamas takes responsibilityThe shooting took place near the entrance of the Israeli settlement of Kiryat Arba, which neighbors Hebron. According to the Haaretz news outlet, those killed – four adults, including a pregnant woman – were from Kiryat Arba and the nearby settlement of Beit Haggai.
Hebron, a longtime flashpoint because it's home to a shrine holy to Jews and Muslims, is known as a relatively poor and conservative city where militant Hamas cells are believed to operate.
The Islamist Hamas movement, which controls the Gaza Strip, has repeatedly condemned the US-backed Palestinian Authority for agreeing to talks – calling instead to renew an armed uprising against Israel. Hamas claimed responsibility and heralded Tuesday's shooting, the first fatal attack on an Israeli in the West Bank since a police officer was killed in June.
“Hamas praises the attack and regards it as a natural response to the crimes of the occupation,” Sami Abu-Zuhri, a Hamas spokesman in Gaza, was quoted by Reuters as saying. He added that the attack was proof “of a failure of security coordination” between Israel and the Palestinians.
That said, Palestinian security forces loyal to President Mahmoud Abbas have stepped up anti-militant activities throughout the West Bank in coordination with Israel. Increased Israeli-Palestinian security cooperation has led Israel to relax restrictions on Palestinian movement around the West Bank.
Attack on the peace talksState Department Spokesman PJ Crowley speculated the attack was aimed at the peace talks, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. Militants have timed attacks to coincide with peace summits in the past such as a terrorist bombing in Tel Aviv in February 2005, three weeks after a summit of Israeli and Palestinian leaders in Sharm el-Sheikh.
Israeli hard-liners said the attack was evidence that a peace deal is unrealistic and called on Prime Minister Netanyahu to boycott the summit. Education Minister Gideon Saar, a Netanyahu backer, said to abandon talks would be tantamount to rewarding the attacks, according to Haaretz.
Palestinian Authority media director Ghassan Khatib says Prime Minister Salam Fayyad is planning to issue a condemnation Tuesday night.
“I hope that the three parties involved make sure that they don't play into the hands of the attackers,” he says. “The attack and its timing aims at sabotaging the peace process so the response should be to redouble efforts.”

German banker comments raise concerns about new ‘intellectual racism’ (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:28:10 +0000

Paris – A German central banker, who stirred controversy last week with disparaging remarks about Muslims living in Germany, is now being pressured to resign following his comment yesterday – widely perceived as anti-Semitic – that “all Jews share a certain gene.”
Thilo Sarrazin, a member of the left-leaning Social Democrats, a former finance minister of Berlin and current board member of Germany’s Bundesbank, said a “Jewish gene” made Jews “different from other people” ahead of today’s launch of his new book, “Germany Does Away With Itself: How We are Risking the Future of our Nation.”
The book critiques immigration policy in Germany, a hot topic around Europe, and makes genetic arguments about intelligence linked to ethnicity, suggesting that immigrants are not as gifted as Germans and that the country is losing its identity, becoming “smaller and stupider.”
German Chancellor Angela Merkel weighed in yesterday saying the remarks were “utterly unacceptable” and that Mr. Sarrazin is likely to come before the Bundesbank board – though previous attempts to remove the banker from what is an independent body have failed. Last fall Sarrazin said the birthrate of Muslims threatened Germany’s future and that he wished that it was “Eastern European Jews” that were reproducing quickly since “their IQs are 15 percent higher than that of the German people.”
A new 'intellectual racism' in GermanyThe controversy comes amid a gradual mainstreaming of anti-Islamic feeling in Europe, including inflammatory depictions and often exaggerated projections about a continent on the verge of becoming a “Eurabia,” as the genre is often called, say analysts.
Kenin Kolat, head of the German Turkish Federation described Sarrazin as representing “the climax of a new intellectual racism that damages Germany’s reputation abroad.” Jewish leaders said Sarrazin’s views were a reprise of Nazi racial ideology, and that “Whoever tries to define Jews by their genetic makeup, even when it is superficially positive in tone, is in the grip of a race mania that Jews do not share,” according to Stephan Kramer, head of the Central Council of Jews in Germany.
Germany’s foreign and defense ministers also released condemnations of Sarrazin’s views. Bundesbank officials have said they can’t comment on what are “private matters” – though the Financial Times reports that Bundesbank chief Axel Weber, a frontrunner to take over the European Central Bank, is under pressure to discipline Sarrazin following Mr. Weber's return from a US Federal Reserve meeting in Jackson Hole, Wyoming.
Misunderstood? or racist?Yet a distance between official and popular sentiments in Germany were affirmed by such editorials in the Stuttgarter Nachrichten yesterday, suggesting Sarrazin “is only getting so much attention because he is saying what many people feel and experience every day.”
Sarrazin on Sunday argues he is misunderstood, “I am not a racist.” He said his attacks are not on Turks or Arabs but on “the culture of Islam.”
The pending book kicked up a firestorm last week as portions of it were serialized in newspapers, with passages such as this one: “I do not want the land of my grandchildren and great grandchildren to be predominantly Muslim, where Turkish and Arabic are spoken in broad sections of the country, where women wear a headscarf and where the daily rhythm of life is determined by the call of the muezzins.”
Germany's population of 80 million comprises 3 million people of Turkish descent, 700,000 of whom are German citizens. Sarrazin says that in 90 years Germany will have only half of the native population figures it had in 1965. German federal authorities have disputed his claims, saying that second and third generations of immigrants are already showing significantly reduced birth rates as they integrate and are faced with sustaining their families in a European economy. Brookings Institution expert Justin Vaisse argues similar declines with immigrant birth rate in France, which has an estimated five million persons originating in states with a Muslim majority.

Edgar Valdez Villarreal â suspected drug lord ‘La Barbie’â arrested in Mexico (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 22:19:27 +0000

Mexico City – Mexico officials announced late Monday that they captured Edgar Valdez Villarreal, or “La Barbie,” one of the country's most-wanted men. Authorities have described him as a powerful drug lord responsible for supplying the American market with cocaine.
The arrest handed Mexican President Felipe Calderón a badly needed victory just ahead of his annual state-of-the-union address Wednesday.
Mr. Valdez, who was born in Texas and nicknamed “La Barbie” for his fair complexion, was captured Monday outside Mexico City. He is the third major trafficking suspect to be taken down in the past eight months. The military killed Ignacio “Nacho” Coronel, a suspected leader in the Sinaloa Cartel, in a July operation in Jalisco. In December, Arturo Beltran Leyva, the founder of a group that Valdez is allegedly vying to control, was killed by Mexican marines.
The capture is already being touted by Calderón's administration as a major success. “The capture of Valdez Villarreal is a high-impact blow against organized crime,” national security spokesman Alejandro Poire said in an e-mailed statement Monday night.
Mr. Poire said the capture demonstrates that the federal government's public security office and its intelligence-gathering operations are capable. He said the search for the suspected drug lord was carried out across six Mexican states.
The government says that Valdez, 37, is a top player in the Beltran Leyva Cartel, and that his power has grown since the groupÂ´s founder Arturo Beltran Leyva was killed late last year. The group is suspected of being behind the growing violence in the central state of Mexico, bringing the types of beheadings and gangland violence to the capital region that were once confined to border towns hundreds of miles away.
Poire called Valdez a “highly dangerous criminal” who made connections with groups in Central and South America to smuggle drugs into the US, where he is also wanted. The US had offered $2 million for his capture, after an indictment alleged he had smuggled thousands of pounds of cocaine into the US.
The capture comes amid a string of recent setbacks for the CalderÃ³n administration, including the assassination of two mayors, a massacre of 72 migrants, and car bombs and continued attacks against journalists.
On Monday, 3,200 federal police were fired for alleged corruption and other offenses, another blow to an administration attempting to rebuild the federal police force and instill public trust in the institution.
But it is unclear whether the capture will quell violence or cause it to increase in the short-term. More than 28,000 people have been killed since Calderón took office nearly four years ago, in part, the government says, because pressure has caused drug gangs to splinter and fight one another.

Attack on China whistleblower shows risk of unveiling corruption, fraud (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:27:05 +0000

Beijing – A bungled attack on a whistleblower famous for his exposés of fraud and pseudoscience has drawn fresh attention to the vexed issues of academic dishonesty and popular gullibility in China.
Fang Zhouzi, a popular science writer and blogger, was assaulted by two men as he walked to his Beijing home Sunday evening; one sprayed a chemical in his face, the other beat him with a hammer. He was only slightly injured and was released from hospital later Sunday night.
“I’ve had threatening phone calls and e-mails before, but this was the first time I have been attacked,” Mr. Fang said in a telephone interview.
The anticorruption activist has been involved recently in a number of high profile cases, most notably questioning a claim by a former president of Microsoft China that he had earned his PhD from the prestigious California Institute of Technology.
Tang Jun, who had listed his degree as an achievement in a book recounting his success in business, later acknowledged that his PhD actually came from Pacific Western University in California. That institution was a diploma mill that sold academic credentials and required no classroom instruction, according to a 2004 report by the US Government Accountability Office.
In a number of recent blog posts, Fang also poured skepticism on celebrity Taoist sage Li Yi, who claims extraordinary feats of prowess and counts pop stars and business luminaries among his disciples. Mr. Li stepped down from his public positions Saturday, in the wake of accusations against him of rape and tax evasion.
Who attacked Fang?Fang’s lawyer, Peng Jian, said he thought the attack was most likely ordered by a private hospital in Zhengzhou, the capital of Henan Province, which specializes in a controversial operation on the nervous system to control urinary incontinence.
A Chinese journalist who had written an article raising doubts about the operation’s efficacy was assaulted last June. Fang, in a blog posted three weeks ago, cited an article in a US magazine criticizing the operation. A court in Zhengzhou is due later this month to hear a malpractice suit brought by Mr. Peng against the hospital on behalf of a group of patients claiming the operation did them more harm than good.
More to be done on fraud in ChinaLast year the Ministry of Education urged universities to weed out plagiarists from their faculties. This meant reporting plagiarists, denying them research funding, sacking them, and possibly suing them. The measures were designed to “keep the academic field clean,” an official said at the time.
New scandals this year however, including plagiarism accusations against an internationally respected political science scholar Wang Hui and the dismissal of a top professor of energy and power studies found guilty of over 30 cases of plagiarism, led the state-owned “China Daily” to editorialize last month that “it is by now evident that the nation needs better regulations to counter the practice in academia.”
“The government is not doing enough,” agrees Fang.
Academia is not the only field to be plagued by plagiarism, nor the only one reluctant to face up to it. Last January, Sang Yuzhu, the winner of China’s highest photography award, was stripped of his medal and his post in the Chinese Photographers’ Association when it was shown he had submitted other photographers’ work to the competition.
The CPA did not acknowledge the plagiarism, however. Officially he was accused only of “joint collaboration” with the two other photographers, in violation of competition rules.

World Cup legacy: more bids to get South Africans out of their cars (The Christian Science Monitor)

admin — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 03:41:33 +0000

Cape Town, South Africa – During this summer's World Cup, Somerset Road in Cape Town was transformed into a South African oddity: a road without cars.
They called it the Fan Walk, 1.6 miles of asphalt connecting a public soccer viewing area downtown with the newly constructed Green Point Stadium. The path was mobbed with people during the city's eight World Cup matches; a sea of fans, performers, and kids running wild. The street party was a big change for a city and country that has shied away from venturing beyond the comfort and security of the private automobile.
“The motorcar is central to everything we do,” says Dave Dewar, chair of City and Regional Planning at the University of Cape Town's School of Architecture and Planning. “There is no great urban tradition of walking.”
But the Fan Walk experience could change all that. Cape Town is now planning more pedestrian malls for major sporting events, and the Fan Walk was recently re-opened as part of a celebration for Nelson Mandela's 92nd birthday.
“You've got 30 years of car-based culture and planning,” says Andrew Boraine, chief executive of the Cape Town Partnership, which is trying to improve the central business district. “It's hard to transform a car-based culture into a society where people are confident about public space.”
Tourist-friendly Cape Town is not short on reasons to go out walking. But many still feel it's too dangerous.
“I think people are scared of public places, mainly because of safety issues,” says J.P. Smith, a Cape Town city councilor who's leading the charge to bring the Fan Walk back during other big events at the stadium. “The Fan Walk provided a very safe environment in which people could go out and mingle and socialize with other people and share a public environment without fear.”
The city was anticipating about 20,000 people a day during the Fan Walk's eight days of operation, but match days routinely saw more than 50,000 people on the street. When Cape Town hosted the World Cup quarterfinal between Germany and Argentina, city officials counted more than 153,000 people on the Fan Walk
“We're right outside the stadium, so we filled up with both locals and foreigners,” says David Raad, owner of Bravado, a bar located on the Fan Walk. He says business skyrocketed during match days.
Other businesses were similarly jammed, according to Mr. Raad. “On the Fan Walk itself, places were really pumped. But one road back, two roads back, you might as well have not been in town.”
For some, it's about more than just business. “Many South Africans, despite being more than 15 years into democracy, still do not have nearly as much contact with people from other backgrounds on a casual basis,” says Raad. He says creating these sorts of public interactions is crucial to helping the country overcome its not-so-distant past of racism.
“I think we are still artificially divided by all sorts of self-made barriers. And people, when they do get an opportunity to climb over some of those barriers, end up enjoying the experience.”