Religion sucks #8

Kidnapped Archbishop Found Dead in Iraq
BAGHDAD, March 13 -- The body of a senior Christian cleric was found Thursday in the northern city of Mosul, two weeks after gunmen abducted him there and killed three of his associates...

There are a lot of Iraqi Chaldeans in San Diego so this is probably a bummer for them. So, out of curiosity, I decided to do a Google search to see if any of the Muslim leadership had been treated this way in Iraq lately. Or anywhere.
Hmmmmmmmmmm.
No wait, here's one .Omigod, fool was preaching peace and non violence.

Iranians vote for new parliament
...Ahead of the vote, the Guardian Council, an unelected body of clerics and jurists, disqualified around 1,700 candidates, mostly reformists.

Those barred from running were judged "insufficiently loyal to Islam or the revolution"...

Finally, if you missed Scoobie Davis' priceless catch of a video of Sun Myung Moon's incoherent rant it's short, but stunning. Moon has power and influence in Washington and wow, just wow, you gotta see this guy to believe that someone would actually say what he said.

Oy.

Media coverage analyzed -- Islam and the West

From the News Dissector

...Countries covered

Twelve Muslim majority countries: Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Jordan, Lebanon, Malaysia, Morocco, Palestine Territories, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Turkey and United Arab Emirates.

Twelve non-Muslim majority countries: Brazil, Denmark, France, Germany, Israel, Italy, Namibia, Russia, South Africa, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States...

...KEY FINDINGS

1. Primacy of international politics: Coverage of Middle East conflicts dominated media coverage of Muslim-West relations.

2. Negative tone towards the “other”: While most coverage of Muslim-West issues contained no positive or negative judgements, media from Muslim majority countries were more likely to provide negative coverage of individuals and groups associated with Christianity and Judaism and with non-Muslim majority countries. Conversely, media from non-Muslim majority countries covered Muslim majority countries and Muslim protagonists more negatively, but to a lesser degree....

...Media from Muslim majority countries presented an especially negative tone in their coverage of non-Muslim actors...

(click on title link for the whole report, yeah I cherry-picked out of Danny's post, for my special Jew-hater Muslim trolls)

For something different: Artists Against the War.

Mid-East vow to curb sectarianism

Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah have agreed to work together to fight sectarian strife in the Middle East.

...'Common views'

Speaking in Tehran after the talks, Mr Ahmadinejad said: "We discussed the Palestinian and Iraq issues comprehensively. We have common views in this regard."

He also said that "plots carried out by the enemies in order to divide the world of Islam were discussed" and that the Saudis had joined Iran in condemning them, the AFP news agency reports...


You know, I really hope that ordinary people in the Middle East don't consider the (ordinary) American people the enemy.

Here's why I say that:

American Idol vs. American Elections
By Liz Egan
Tuesday, February 20th, 2007

Oh, and then there's these neat little glitches:

Brad Blog

Democracy ain't always all that and a bag of chips, especially a democracy that has to deal with lots of corporate influence.

Gee, I wonder why the women protest?

Married for a Minute
Is Iran's mullah-backed system of temporary marriage a godsend for the sexually frustrated—or religious prostitution?
— By Nadya Labi

"...Iranian feminists ardently oppose sigheh. In the summer of 2008, they were infuriated by President Ahmadinejad's attempts to push through a new "family protection" law that would have made it easier for men to contract temporary marriages...

...Only a man has the right to renew a sigheh when it expires—for another mehr—or to terminate it early. While women may have only one husband at a time, men may have four wives and are permitted unlimited temporary wives..."

I'm still reading The Devil We Know by Robert Baer. Not that I didn't know already, but ,Shia rather than Sunni Islam dominates Iran. Most fascinating to me, Baer refers to taqiya .


After reading The Ayatollah Begs to Differ by Hooman Majd and Treacherous Alliance by Trita Parsi I feel like I'm back at square one as far as Iran goes. It has gained more power and influence in the Middle East since our disastrous wars there, and I believe that it is stupid to refuse to talk to those who really have power in Iran.

Talking helps. The sanctions against Iran don't work. They just force dealings on the black market.

Beyond Sanctions: How to Solve the Iranian Riddle
By Trita Parsi Monday, Mar. 15, 2010

early evening news

The Moscow Times East vs. West in Central Asia
23 July 2008 Updated at 23 July 2008 0:13 Moscow Time.
By Adrian Pabst

In a little-noticed news story last week, U.S. lawmakers strongly condemned what they called China's brutal pre-Olympic crackdown in the far northwest Xinjiang region, which is populated by the Uyghurs, a mostly Muslim Turkic ethnic group...

...It is still unclear whether Monday's two bomb blasts in the southwestern Chinese city of Kunming, in which two people were killed, were in any way related to Islamic terrorism or separatist movements, but the attacks will undoubtedly fuel fear and suspicion with the Olympics just three weeks away...

...China, Russia and their Central Asian partners accuse the West of double standards and illegitimate interference. They say they are simply defending their territorial integrity against secessionist threats. They suspect the United States and others of orchestrating the Muslim minorities and supporting secessionism to strengthen the Western presence in Central Asia.

Both are right about each other, but wrong about Asian Islam. In fact, both the East and West pursue questionable goals and policies. Under the cloak of the "global war on terror," both sides intervene against Islamic extremists in order to advance their rival interests. In a region rich in minerals, oil and gas, the United States established military bases in Manas, just north of the Kyrgyz capital Bishkek and in Karshi-Khanabad, in southern Uzbekistan, not far from the Tajik border. These are both key locations in the fight against the Taliban and al-Qaida-related networks in nearby Afghanistan. China has undoubtedly exaggerated the terrorist threat in order to suppress political opposition and extend its sphere of influence in Central Asia...

Completely unrelated to the above article on how the muslims are stuck in the middle of an East West tug rope thingy, but of interest to me, because I love water--

posted July 22, 2008 4:13 pm
Tomgram: Elizabeth de la Vega, Those Hard Rains Are Gonna Fall

...In the end, when it came to an assessment of the current state of our national water policy,...

...hodge-podge.

Riverbend's alive

Just when I think that the violence in Iraq has robbed the world of a really good writer, and hopes for rebuilding a country she posts again.

(update---5:37 PM 1/2/2007 I linked the post, but I didn't read it, I'm reading it now and I stumble across this sentence: "Again, I can't help but ask myself why this was all done? "
and I think to myself: You and me both, baby, and many other people are wondering what the hell this planned chaos is actually supposed to gain anyone? And then there is the Saudi economy. Nice. My husband was spending a quarter of his income on gasoline to get to work so that some useless fucking (literally, here folks, those fuckers breed like rabbits) Saudi Prince could continue to be useless?

I just haven't felt like keeping up with the news, or posting. I don't know how to tie these stories together, but I can face the news now. Most of it came from ICH

Our Next Big Mess
By Ted Rall 12/28/06
The Central Asian republics of Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and--until now--Turkmenistan are all being ruled by the same former Communist Party bosses who ran them in Soviet times. Niyazov's death marks the beginning of the end for the post-Soviet authoritarian order and the beginning of a period of increasing instability, as foreign powers attempt to monopolize access to oil and natural gas resources and pipeline routes.

The oil companies and the Saudi Princes usually get their way, but I'll watch these two stories just to see if my cynicism is justified.

But, Hey wait a sec, I thought the next war would be Iran?
The neocon crazies, including Isralies are pushing the doofy American public.
And us stoopid Americans don't know about stuff like this.
Soooo, we have a history of pissing off people in the middle east

but we support our troops don't we?, no matter what?


But one last shot, cause that fucking mess in the middle east ain't all our fault:
Why can't Muslims take a joke?
By Spengler
I found this paragraph interesting:
Muslims rage at affronts to their faith because the modern world puts their faith at risk, precisely as modern Islamists contend. [3] That is not a Muslim problem as such, for all faith is challenged as traditional society gives ground to globalization. But Muslim countries, whose traditional life shows a literacy rate of only 60%, face a century of religious deracination. Christianity and Judaism barely have adapted to the modern world; the Islamists believe with good reason that Islam cannot co-exist with modernism and propose to shut it out altogether.

Forced marriage, abuse behind self-immolation by Afghan women

Forced marriage, abuse behind self-immolation (definition) by Afghan women
Kabul, Nov 15: Forced marriage and chronic abuse are among the key triggers for the growing cases of self-immolation among women in Afghanistan, a regional conference heard yesterday. The high rate of illiteracy -- with under 20 per cent of women said to be literate -- and an incompetent justice system also meant many women could not see their way out of problems and so took their own lives, the three-day meeting heard.The conference of about 400 people, including from other countries that have similar rates of suicide such as Bangladesh, Iran, India and Sri Lanka, was called to try to find ways to stop the phenomenon.

Islamic women an asset for humanity: president
TEHRAN, Nov. 28 (MNA) -- In the Islamic world there are many women scientists and scholars who are regarded as not only assets for Islam but assets for all humanity, President Mahmud Ahmadinejad said here on Tuesday.

Wow. Them are some extremes.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad writes a letter to the American people:

Ahmadinejad castigates US policies
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 29, 2006
0:10 MECCA TIME, 21:10 GMT

The Iranian president has in an open letter urged the American people to demand the withdrawal of US troops from Iraq and reject what he called the US government's "blind support" for Israel...

"Undoubtedly, the American people are not satisfied with this behaviour and they showed their discontent in the recent elections," Ahmadinejad wrote. (here's the whole letter)

Ummm, yeah.

Dear President Ahmadinejad,

This American woman is sorry that my stupid president pooped in your backyard, and you're right, he poops all over the world, including on us Americans, but it looks like you got some of your own dog poop to clean up, eh? And....umm.. here's a little clue for you and maybe you could pass it on to some other leaders in the Middle East? A large percentage of the American public has no fucking clue what a "Zionist" is. Um..yeah, and another thing. This shit ain't gonna happen in America. Why? Because American women won't have it. They're meaner.

(references from the Sibel Edmonds OpEd again...Since the 1950s Turkey has played a key role in channeling into Europe and the U.S. heroin produced in the "Golden Triangle" comprised of Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iran. These operations are run by mafia groups closely controlled by the MIT (Turkish Intelligence Agency) and the military...
... "Bad as it is with Iran, North Korea, and Libya having nuclear-weapons material, the worst part is that they could transfer it to a non-state group. That's the biggest concern, and the scariest thing about all this. There's nothing more important than stopping terrorist groups from getting nuclear weapons.")

And here is a bizarre example of the globalization of sexual exploitation:

Bulgarian man arrested in Iowa for trafficking prostitutes in France
Wednesday, Nov. 29, 2006

Submission, part 1

The film's title is a direct translation of the word "Islam". The film suggests the mistreatment of women born to Muslim families. The film was shown on the Dutch public broadcasting network (VPRO) on August 29, 2004. It portrays a Muslim woman as having been beaten and raped by a relative. The bodies are used in the film as a canvas for verses from the Qur'an.

Ain't it sad

That our citizens have to retain a lawyer to forward the goal of fair and legal elections?

Paul Lehto Retained By Election Integrity Advocates In San Diego
Breaking!
Guest blogged by Emily Levy of the California Election Protection Network and the CA-50 Action Committee
Attorney Paul Lehto, who specializes in cases involving election law, business fraud and consumer law, has been retained for work on the issues surrounding the illegal election conditions in San Diego County.
Lehto came to the attention of BRAD BLOG readers when he filed a lawsuit in Washington state against Sequoia Voting Systems Inc.
He has also appeared as a guest on The BRAD SHOW of April 23, 2005. To listen to that interview, click here.
More details will be posted when they become available.
(DISCLOSURE: Paul Lehto is also a legal advisor for VelvetRevolution.us, a Voting Rights and Election Reform organization co-founded by BRAD BLOG's Brad Friedman.)

And that the

U.S. Could Take Lessons from Mexican Voting Process
Published on Saturday, July 22, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
by Norman Stockwell


And that Americans are misinformed, disinformed and uninformed about the rest of the world, and, in particular, the Middle East
Jul. 21, 2006 - 1:46 PM
Amateur Hour
The Fog of Cable
Lawrence Pintak
Napa Valley, Calif. -- As someone who lives and breathes Middle East politics and media, I have had the bizarre -- and frustrating -- experience of watching the current conflict play out on U.S. cable television, and I am reminded once again why many Americans have such a limited -- and distorted -- view of the world.
I run a center for television and new media at The American University in Cairo, which puts me at the crossroads of journalism in the Arab world. For me, monitoring a crisis like this would normally mean the voracious consumption of Arab and U.S. media -- television, newspapers, Web sites and all the rest.
But for the first week of the war, I was on vacation in California with my family. That has meant catching glimpses of the conflict in bite-sized snatches on cable television between forays to Disneyland, trips to the beach and aquarium tours -- much, I suspect, like many other Americans this summer.
At times, the coverage has seemed as much a fantasy as Disney's Space Mountain, and the level of Middle East knowledge on the part of some television anchors only a few notches higher than that of the tattooed biker couple waiting in line for the Pirates of the Caribbean ride.
Take, for example, a CNN interview with an American high school student who had been visiting his father's relatives in Lebanon when the conflict broke out. With his tearful American mother in the studio, he was asked by phone whether he was frightened. No big deal, he replied, explaining that he was north of the Christian port of Jounieh, far from the fighting. Betraying her woeful ignorance of Lebanon's geography and politics, the anchor replied that he sounded like a typical "macho" young man who didn't want to worry his mother.
The anchor might have looked at a map before going on air.
Hype abounded. "This could be World War Three!" more than one reporter was heard to say. The same dramatic images were endlessly repeated, as if on a loop. Rumor was elevated to fact -- and the networks seemed proud of it. One CNN promo showed an unedited sequence in which a nameless photographer told Anderson Cooper, in northern Israel, that there was a rumor of rockets on the way. Cooper then turned to the camera and authoritatively reported, "The police say more rockets are coming."
So much for checking sources.
To be fair, there was also a fair share of solid, informed reporting. Yeoman's work has been done by Nic Robertson in Beirut, Matthew Chance in Gaza and Christiane Amanpour on the Israeli border, as well as CNN anchor and Beirut veteran Jim Clancy, NBC's Martin Fletcher on MSNBC and the handful of others who are based in, or spend significant time in, the region. The problem comes with those -- like Cooper -- who have parachuted into the Middle East with little grounding in the region, and the anchors back in the studios in London and the U.S. The errors of the uninitiated embeds in Iraq have been endlessly repeated.
One example: CBS refugee John Roberts, now CNN's senior correspondent, eruditely pointed to pro-Hezbollah demonstrations in Syria as evidence of a Sunni-Shiite split. The only weakness in that analysis is that Syria is a Sunni nation, so the demonstrations point to exactly the opposite -- Sunni-Shiite unity on the issue of Hezbollah's actions.
Over on Hardball, NBC correspondent Dawn Fratangelo's discussion of potential dangers to American evacuees quickly disintegrated into confused talk of Hezbollah rockets in northern Israel. That's the other direction, Dawn.
There was little effort to identify the politics of many of the pseudo-experts who were trotted into the studios. Right-wing Lebanese Christians and representatives of Israeli-backed think tanks -- both with axes to grind -- were offered up as independent analysts. Anchors and reporters, meanwhile, frequently wore their politics on their sleeve. When an American woman trapped in southern Lebanon decried Washington's failure to stop what she said was Israel's brutal killing of civilians, CNN anchor Tony Harris snapped back, "That's not the view over here," and cut her off, saying he didn't have time to debate the issue.
As is so often the case these days, celebrity reporters themselves frequently became the story. Anderson Cooper spent more time on-camera than the protagonists in the conflict, and MSNBC endlessly looped an outtake of Richard Engel repeatedly flubbing his on-camera standup as Israeli bombs fell behind him, much, I suspect, to his embarrassment. A failure to remain cool under fire is not something to be proud of.
NBC anchor Brian Williams made much of the fact that when he went on a helicopter flight with an Israeli officer to take a look at the fighting, "We got closer than we intended." Turns out that some shells landed in the distance. War is Hell, Brian.
Even more troubling was the fact that the Williams segment, along with reports by several other NBC correspondents, ran on Scarborough Country, an overtly politicized talk show, further blurring the line between news and opinion and muddying the waters of cable journalism.
Amid segments from such stalwart NBC correspondents as Martin Fletcher, there was Scarborough describing Hezbollah as an "Iran-backed terror group" and throwing former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak softballs like, "Why is it the more Israel is willing to give up to the Palestinians, the more your country comes under attack?" Meanwhile, conservative iconoclast Tucker Carlson, sans bowtie, has been out there "reporting" from the Israeli border, asking real NBC correspondents such leading questions as, "Do we have any idea whether this city was targeted by Hezbollah because of its Christian population?" (This isn't just about "good" Christians and "bad" Muslims, Tucker.)
There is plenty of room on cable television for politicized talk shows of all stripes. But in allowing -- or, rather, ordering -- its respected news correspondents to appear on such shows, the networks are trading credibility for ratings and cementing their transition from purveyors of news to citadels of infotainment.
Lost in the fog of hype and self-aggrandizement on the cable segments I saw was much of the subtle complexity of the conflict. Instead, it was too often reduced to the black-hat/white-hat characterization that has guided U.S. policy toward the region.
My view was one slice of the coverage. I did not see the main network evening newscasts or the morning shows. What I did was what so many Americans do these days -- I grazed cable news in fits and snatches. And I came up hungry.
Lawrence Pintak is the director of the Adham Center for Electronic Journalism at The American University in Cairo. A former CBS News Middle East correspondent, his most recent book is Reflections in a Bloodshot Lens: America, Islam & the War of Ideas. He can be reached at lpintak ~at~ aucegypt.edu.

Muslims say Western media hypocritical on cartoons

The western press never criticizes the precious Jews, right?
Brothers in arms - Israel's secret pact with Pretoria
"...Don Krausz, chairman of Johannesburg's Holocaust survivors association, arrived in South Africa a year after the war, having survived Hitler's camps at Ravensbrück and Sachsenhausen when much of his extended family did not. "The Nationalists had a strongly anti-semitic platform before 1948. The Afrikaans press was viciously anti-Jewish, much like Der Stürmer in Germany under Hitler. The Jew felt himself very much threatened by the Afrikaner. The Afrikaner supported Hitler," he says. "My wife comes from Potchefstroom [in what was then the Transvaal]. Every Jewish shop in that town was blown up by the Grey Shirts. In the communities that were predominantly Afrikaans, the Jews were absolutely victimised. Now the same crowd comes to power in 1948. The Jew was a very frightened person. There were cabinet ministers who openly supported the Nazis..."
(and yet)
...By the 1980s, Israel and South Africa echoed each other in justifying the domination of other peoples. Both said that their own peoples faced annihilation from external forces - in South Africa by black African governments and communism; in Israel, by Arab states and Islam. But each eventually faced popular uprisings - Soweto in 1976, the Palestinian intifada in 1987 - that were internal, spontaneous and radically altered the nature of the conflicts. "

But Hey, there was never any Nazi support in the Middle East, right?
bwwwaa haaaa haaaaa

Here is the insane leader of Iran's answer to the cartoon problem:
Iranian paper says it will hold contest for cartoons on the Holocaust

Hate to tell you Islamofascists this, but nobody's gonna care except maybe some whacked out militant Orthodox Jews, and most people who know about their ridiculous antics don't have time for them either. If you can read this you obviously have some grasp on the English language. Get your English dictionary and look up the word "secular". That would be us. It means separation of church and state, or in your case, separation of mosque and state. Then look up the word "obtuse", and try "arrogant" , "rigid" "intolerant". You see, you need to get your head around the fact that we don't obey Islamic law, and most of us don't need to understand it. I didn't even know that it was against Islamic law to make pictures of Mohammed the Prophet until last week. Religious extremism of any stripe sucks. To hell with anyone who wants to shove their religious bullshit down my throat, I'm not having it.