End of Issue #29 |

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Editorial and Rants
Proof all Muslims are savages and need to be killed.
Undercover on Planet Beeston
July 2, 2006 - From: www.timesonline.co.uk
The rich smell of Indian spices wafted along the road. Voices babbled in Urdu and Sylheti, a Bangladeshi dialect that my own family speak. Thick-bearded men in robes strolled the streets and youngsters wore their jeans rolled above the ankle after leaving the mosque, as Muslim custom requires.
I felt both at home and in a foreign land. This could almost be an Asian city, I thought, rather than Beeston, the suburb of Leeds where two of the July 7 bombers had lived.
I had come to gauge the mood of the community after the 7/7 attacks, which struck London a year ago this week. The world I knew as a British Muslim sprang from cosmopolitan roots, and I wanted to discover what the people of this more insular community really felt about the bombers and western culture.
I found myself both drawn to the warm embrace of the Muslim community that dominates Beeston, and shocked by the views it espoused in private.
Take, for example, Anhar Ghani, a community worker at the Hamara centre on Tempest Road that was frequented by Mohammad Sidique Khan, the leader of the bombers. Ghani became my first "friend" during six weeks of living in Beeston as an undercover Sunday Times reporter pretending to be a student, and at first he displayed a generosity of spirit hard to fault.
Like me, he is in his twenties and of Bangladeshi origin, and we warmed to each other immediately. We chatted in English and Bengali about his family -- he is married with one child -- and how to get a job and draw up a CV. Though Ghani normally dealt only with teenagers, he went out of his way to help. In his trendy jeans and trainers, he seemed like just another hopeful in modern multicultural Britain -- and I, a stranger in town, found him comforting.
But his kindness to me was coupled with a darker outlook on the wider world. I was shocked when one day at the Hamara centre he began explaining how the London bombers could be seen as martyrs.
"The western mind and the Muslim mind are two different psychologies," he said. "The Muslim mind will see that this life means nothing unless I sacrifice myself for Allah."
Inside I flinched, but outwardly I nodded with a look of sympathy. I did not want him to close up as much of the community had done after last summer's attacks. I wanted him to speak honestly.
"My life means nothing, you know," he continued. "I would give up this evil, two-seconds of a life." Earthly experience, I think he meant, was but a moment compared with paradise to come.
Later he went on to eulogise Abdullah Faisal, a firebrand Islamic cleric who was imprisoned in 2003 for inciting the murder of Jews. Faisal, said to have been a strong influence on the 7/7 bombers, has advocated the spreading of Islam "by the Kalashnikov" and declared that one aim of jihad is to "lessen the population of unbelievers".
To Ghani, the cleric was "one of the good ones" and he advised me where I might obtain recordings of his sermons.
As I looked at Ghani, a young man with much to live for, my shock turned to anger. How could he, so similar in many ways to myself, view the world through such different, bellicose eyes? How could he have become trapped in vicious dogma?
Though I would hardly be described as devout, I see myself as Muslim -- and have been increasingly mindful of it since 9/11. Yet I feel nothing like Ghani's disillusion and anger at the West. Where had our roads parted? What makes places such as Beeston breeding grounds of hate?
My parents brought me to Britain when I was two and settled not in a city, but in an Oxfordshire village. My father opened the only Indian restaurant there and I grew up in a rather English environment, though my parents were strict Muslims.
It was only when I was about 10 that we moved to Tower Hamlets in east London -- a culture clash that was almost as great as being a Bangladeshi transplanted to an English village.
In Oxfordshire I had been the only Asian in my school; in Tower Hamlets my school had barely any white faces. For the first time I learnt, from my new peers, to swear in Sylheti.
Thanks to my earlier experience, however, I was always open to the world outside this community; close by, too, were more prosperous areas of London with many different cultures vying for attention.
I rarely worried about my identity or how other people perceived me as a Muslim -- until the 9/11 attacks. Suddenly there was a war on terror and Muslims were under scrutiny as never before.
The effect, to my surprise, was to make me feel more Muslim, not less. I am sure the impact on young people growing up in Beeston, an area more deprived and isolated than Tower Hamlets, was even greater.
Beeston is a suburb of Victorian terraces that have been slowly unravelling since the decline of the textile and coal industries. Unemployment is about 8%, twice the level in Leeds overall, and 42% of residents are classed as "economically inactive".
Over the years Asian Muslims of Pakistani, Kashmiri and Bangladeshi origin have congregated in the area and now run many of the businesses and shops. They open and close with Muslim prayers throughout the day.
In the six weeks I spent there, the only person of non-Asian origin I spoke to was the caretaker at a bed and breakfast place -- and that was owned by Asians. I began to feel curiously detached from the Britain I had known, like a contestant in some weird reality show.
Social structures in Beeston revolve around certain community centres, shops and the mosques. Three principle mosques cater for different groups: the Hardy Street mosque is run by Kashmiri Muslims; the Stratford Street mosque is dominated by Pakistani Tablighi Jamaat Muslims, a missionary group; and the Bengali mosque on Tunstall Road is dominated by Bangladeshis.
The days were punctuated with mosque gatherings where people exchanged news and information. I found the sense of brotherhood very comforting: as we knelt and prayed, feet facing straight towards Mecca, our shoulders touched to squeeze out Satan who would fill in the gaps if they did not.
Unused to such literal rubbing of shoulders with new friends I felt a strange unity, even a growing intimacy. It was not hard to see how young men, ignorant of Britain's opportunities beyond Beeston, could find purpose in Islam.
Some worshippers attend more than one mosque, of course, and at least one of the London bombers, Khan, is known to have frequented all three. Ghani did not discourage me from attending the Stratford Street mosque, but he did warn me that the Tablighis can be a little "forceful" in their preaching.
This group has its centre 10 miles away at the Markaz mosque in Dewsbury, where thousands of worshippers arrive every evening from all over Yorkshire. It's an extraordinary sight: I had experienced nothing like it before in Britain.
You approach the Markaz mosque through an area packed with Asian shops. Men in robes throng the streets. Women are nowhere to be seen. Inside the building is one huge hall, plus two smaller halls where the sermons are translated into other languages.
Invited by Sabeer, a senior member of the Stratford Street mosque, I attended Marqaz several times. On one occasion after listening to a biyan, or sermon, Sabeer took me to the canteen. We sat cross-legged on the floor on sheets of white paper and were served by men with large buckets of lamb curry and rice. We ate with our hands, one great communal gathering sharing food.
Was I dreaming? Had I time-travelled? I had to keep reminding myself that this was Yorkshire, land of broad vowels, warm beer and Geof Boycott; but it felt like Pakistan, a country I know and the country that two of the bombers visited, apparently for training, before their attacks.
It was Eid ul-Adha, the festival celebrating the time God asked Abraham to sacrifice his son. Muslim custom is to dress in new clothes and visit friends and family at Eid, and I had bought myself a new pair of shoes and a top.
At the Bengali mosque in Beeston that morning the congregation was overflowing.
I felt odd being away from home during Eid, but people tend to be generous at this time and one man, whom I knew as Jabbar, invited me to his house after prayers.
Jabbar, clean shaven and in his thirties, ran a DIY shop on the Dewsbury Road. On the face of it Jabbar, who lived nearby with his young family, was one of those responsible, hard-working people who weave communities together. He insisted I stay for tea, and then rice and curry.
As I brought up 9/11, I was taken aback when he began to talk about a "western conspiracy against Muslims". I had been in London on the day of the 2001 attacks and like everyone else had watched in amazement and horror as the twin towers fell. I had never doubted that Osama Bin Laden had inspired the atrocity and that Islamic terrorists had perpetrated it.
Jabbar doubted it. He told me the 9/11 attacks were a conspiracy and that he had a DVD which proved it. So were the London bombings, he said.
I found myself in a ferment of mixed emotions. Here was a man who had shown great courtesy and kindness, yet believed the West was so corrupt it had staged terrorist attacks against itself. How could he be so deluded? Jabbar, however, was far from alone. One of the sternest advocates of conspiracy theory was Imran Bham, a shopkeeper running Idoo PC, a computer equipment shop.
"You don't get anywhere with the dirty kuffar (infidels)," he told me, claiming there was a widespread conspiracy against Muslims and that the 7/7 bombings were part of it. "These brothers never did it," he said. "And understand this. In order for America and Britain to go to Iraq they have to have reasons and sometimes, I'm afraid, if you haven't got a reason, you make up that reason."
He showed me pictures of the bomb blasts from the BBC on his computer, claiming ID documents must have been placed at the scene by officials because the blasts would have destroyed them.
He offered me £5 to go and buy a piece of beef, telling me to place the meat in the oven alongside my credit card, passport and other ID and then turn the temperature up. After half an hour at medium temperature, he said, the documents would melt but the beef would only be sweating. I could then draw my own conclusions.
Once again, I felt as if I had entered a strange bubble, a world where the reality I had known before had been suspended. Bham then asked me if I would ever blow myself up for Islam. I replied that the Koran says you should not harm innocent people.
"What Koran was that?" he countered. "Don't fool yourself by saying jihad is a struggle within, to get on with life, to motivate myself to get up for prayers and that sort of thing," he said. "That's not jihad. Who told you that?"
After six weeks I left Beeston quietly, slipping away to Leeds and back to London by train. As I travelled out of the Victorian streets towards Leeds city centre, I felt the claustrophobia lifting. It was relief to rejoin a wider, more diverse world.
I felt, too, guilt at having moved among the people of Beeston under a false guise. They had welcomed me; but they had also revealed an important facet of Muslim life in Britain today. While I was there an imam of the Bengali mosque, Hamid Ali, had praised the bombers, saying their actions would make non-Muslims "prick up their ears" and listen. I had learnt such sentiments are, one way or another, widespread in Beeston. Ghani, Bham, Jabbar and many others believe in some form of conspiracy against Muslims.
Even the seemingly sensible Sabeer insisted the western "enemy" was out to get him. "It's the way of the enemy really, the kuffar," he said. "I've always known it as divide and rule."
He's utterly wrong in seeing a conspiracy, in my view -- but he's right that there is division. The Muslims of Beeston and other such areas are retreating, not engaging.
"Look what we can do if we stick together," Sabeer had told me as we drove through an area completely dominated by Muslim shops, houses and schools. But look at the price isolation also exacts.
Sabeer's view was, I believe, a defensive reaction to a perceived threat. But it is also a stance coupled with an idea of a global Islamic "brotherhood" taking precedence over other communities.
Unless the cycle of Muslim suspicion and separation can be broken, the dangers will remain. Ghani and his friends will continue to feel that, as he claimed, the western mind and the Muslim mind are irreconcilable.
But for me this is a false dichotomy. Beeston brought home that I cannot separate what is Islamic about me from what is "western." I do not see myself through the prism of us versus them, good versus evil, Muslim versus kuffar.
I'd far rather embrace the things we share.
Proof all Mexicans are savages and need to be killed.
Immigration Costs Strain National Parks
June 18, 2006 - From: www.breitbart.com
By Jennifer Talhelm
Drug smugglers fleeing Mexican police crossed into this desert park and fatally shot a ranger four years ago, prompting officials to build a 30-mile vehicle barrier.
That steel-and-concrete wall stops most cars from speeding in from Mexico. But drug and human traffickers have switched to rural entryways into Arizona.
Thousands of people now cross on foot. They leave piles of trash, build fires, damage the park's famous cacti and create countless trails through the fragile desert vegetation.
Park workers spend most of their time backing up Border Patrol officers and dealing with border issues.
"This tears my heart out, seeing the impacts on this place," Organ Pipe superintendent Kathy Billings said as she surveyed a fresh track through coarse sand.
The problems are not just on the border. After the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the government added new homeland security responsibilities at national icons such as the Washington Monument, Independence Hall and Mount Rushmore.
Since 2001, the Park Service has received an additional $35 million in annual money for such duties. The government also provided $91 million in one-time dollars for icon parks and $18 million for Organ Pipe's barrier.
But superintendents say the costs are much higher. Rangers are pulled from other duties to help patrol. Managers at Organ Pipe, for example, spend about $100,000 a year from its maintenance budget to repair the vehicle barrier and an adjoining road.
"We'd like to see the Park Service reimbursed," said Blake Selzer of the National Parks Conservation Association, an advocacy group. "To truly address this issue, the amount of money is going to have to go up."
Homeland security, such as increased protections from illegal immigration, is a "a newly identified priority," said deputy Interior Secretary Lynn Scarlett.
Despite five years of public discussions and congressional hearings about new expenses, the Park Service could not provide The Associate Press with a detailed wish list of budget requests from the parks since Sept. 11, 2001. Nor could the agency provide an itemized tally of how such money has been spent on these new duties.
The only information available was the lump total provided to parks.
An agency spokesman said the details were kept by the individual parks or at the regional level and not in Washington.
"We have management controls and checks and balances with respect to funding of projects and operation expenses," spokesman David Barna said. "And we trust our employees to do the right thing."
Proof all Europeans are savages and need to be killed.
Anne Frank Diary Burning Sparks Outrage in Germany
July 7, 2006 - From: today.reuters.co.uk
By Dave Graham
BERLIN (Reuters) - The ceremonial burning of the diary of Holocaust victim Anne Frank by far-right extremists in eastern Germany was condemned by the German government on Friday amid calls to intensify efforts to stamp out neo-Nazi activity.
"This act was beneath contempt and could scarcely have been more primitive," the German Interior Ministry said in a statement to Reuters.
The ministry was reacting to an incident in which three men in the eastern state of Saxony-Anhalt used a copy of the diary of the Jewish teenager to re-enact the Nazis' infamous incineration of 'un-German' literature in 1933.
State prosecutors are investigating the men, who also burnt an American flag in front of a crowd estimated to have numbered more than a hundred, on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.
According to news reports, one of the men cast the diary into the flames and said: "I commit Anne Frank to the fire," borrowing words used by the Nazis in 1933.
"All of us in Saxony-Anhalt are put to shame by this," Wolfgang Boehmer, premier of Saxony-Anhalt, told the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung daily on Friday.
Boehmer said the state would act decisively to prevent a repeat of the incident, which occurred at a summer solstice celebration in late June in the village of Pretzien. Details of the episode have emerged over the past week.
Known as "Anne Frank: the Diary of a Young Girl" in English, the work chronicles the Frankfurt-born Jewish girl's period in hiding in the Nazi-occupied Netherlands, and became one of the world's most widely read books after it was published in 1947.
Juergen Falter, an expert on the far-right at the University of Mainz, said it was no accident the men targeted Anne Frank, who died aged 15 in Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in 1945, and Germany's chief post-war occupying power, the United States.
"The two (acts) go together: right-wing extremism is at the same time anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism," he said.
A number of attacks on foreigners have raised concerns that neo-Nazi violence could be increasing after far-right parties in two eastern states entered state parliaments in late 2004.
A spokesman for Saxony-Anhalt's interior ministry said the celebration was staged by the "Heimat Bund Ostelbien" -- a group which grew out of an earlier far-right organisation in the area.
"The example of Pretzien is particularly alarming as never before had (a far right group) been incorporated into village life and treated like a perfectly normal association," he said.
"The problem is more there are too few democrats in the East with the courage to stand up to it and prevent it."
Thomas Heppener, director of the Anne Frank centre in Berlin, said he was at a meeting in Pretzien when the men, all in their twenties, made no attempt to explain their actions.
"They told the village and the mayor they were sorry and that they hadn't wanted the village to be in the headlines. But that was it," he said. "There was no sign of remorse."
Where are all those people who say that we must follow the sophisticated French now?
France Passes Strict Immigration Laws, Begins Deporting
June 30, 2006 - From: www.sweetness-light.com
PARIS, June 30, 2006 (AFP) - The French parliament on Friday approved a divisive new immigration law which tilts the system in favour of qualified foreign workers and increases the restrictions on others.
The vote coincided with an escalating furore over threats by the government to deporting school-age children whose parents are illegal immigrants, which is expected to cumulate in a mass protest in Paris on Saturday.
The law, proposed by right-wing Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy, creates a new type of residence permit -- named a "skills and talents permit" -- for foreigners with qualifications which are judged to be important for the French economy and labour market.
At the same time it increases restrictions on migrants moving to France to join their families, as the vast majority currently do. Foreigners will be allowed into the country only if they can earn an income. The foreign spouses of French citizens will now have to wait longer for residence cards -- a move designed to combat convenience marriages. And migrants will be forced to sign an "integration contract" committing them to respect the French way of life.
The law also scraps regulations that previously allowed illegal immigrants to obtain French documents if they succeeded in living in the country for 10 years. Now their cases will be dealt with on an individual basis by the authorities. The law has prompted a strongly hostile reaction from the left-wing opposition, rights groups, the Catholic church and some African countries.
Critics say it risks creaming off the most talented people from countries where they are badly needed and will make life harder for ordinary migrants.
"Keeping the best and sending back the worst is not exactly Christian," said Cardinal Philippe Barbarin, Archbishop of Lyon. The government believes there are between 200,000 and 400,000 illegal immigrants in France and is planning 26,000 deportations this year, some on flights run jointly with Britain. On Friday police said a 28-year-old illegal Moroccan immigrant committed suicide in the detention centre where he was being held before being deported. His 18-year-old French girlfriend is pregnant.
As the immigration bill worked its way through parliament, a political row intensified over the fate of thousands of young illegal immigrants, who campaigners fear could be deported with their families once the school term ends in early July. Politicians from the left-wing opposition, media personalities and sports stars have been among thousands to sign a petition which promises to provide refuge for children threatened with expulsion after June 30, when a government moratorium expires. Former Socialist minister Jacques Lang has described the government's action as a "manhunt."
The children are from families who entered France illegally and who would normally be expelled along with their parents. Bu campaigners say that most of them know no other country and that deportation would be inhumane.
On Friday the lawyer appointed by Sarkozy to mediate in the dispute said there would be no immediate deportations of children. "Families have till August 13 to lodge a dossier. There will be no child hunt ... there will be no expulsions this summer," lawyer Arno Klarsfeld told Sud radio.
In mid-June Sarkozy -- whose father is Hungarian -- yielded to pressure from campaigners and agreed that some families might be allowed to stay in France "as an exceptional and humanitarian measure, in the interest of the children". Prefects -- state-appointed governors -- have been told to examine individual cases and grant temporary residence permits to families in accordance with certain criteria. But campaigning groups have condemned Sarkozy's concessions as window-dressing.
"We are convinced that the criteria for judging and treating individual cases will not only be arbitrary but also unjust if their fate is left in the hands of prefects," said SOS-Racisme. The Education Without Borders Network (RESF), which has organised the petition against the government, said recently: "For thousands of children and young adults, the end of term won't be the beginning of the summer holidays but rather the beginning of a nightmare."
On Friday the lawyer for a Turkish Kurd family with seven young children -- the youngest born in France -- said a deportation order had been issued against the family. And the mayor of the central city of Poitiers ordered the evacuation from an abandoned school of 42 illegal immigrants who have been on hunger strike since May 29. Doctors said the hunger strikers' health was danger.
Proof all Canadians are savages and need to be killed.
Bomb Plot Suspect Spent Seven Years at Concordia
July 10, 2006 - From: www.ctv.ca
Montreal's Concordia University has confirmed that the Lebanese man accused of masterminding a terrorist plot to bomb New York transit tunnels spent seven years earning a finance degree at the institution.
Meanwhile, new allegations are emerging about 31-year-old Assem Hammoud as American authorities try to trace his steps in the United States.
A federal official told The Associated Press that Hammoud is suspected of considering setting wildfires in California and using backpacks on New York subways to carry explosive devices, which would be used to attack the transit system.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said wildfires were "only part of their planning discussions. No steps were taken to carry it out.''
According to the wire agency, Hammoud travelled to California six years ago on a legitimate visa, where he is believed to have been visiting either family or friends.
However, The Lebanese Broadcasting Corp. reported Friday that Hammoud had travelled to New York and New Jersey on several occasions using a Canadian passport to survey possible targets.
American authorities say they have not ruled out the possibility Hammoud travelled to the United States using different names.
A source familiar with the case told CP that Hammoud is not a Canadian citizen, so if he used a Canadian passport, it was a fake.
"He is not Canadian, therefore he is not entitled to a Canadian passport," said the source, who asked not be to named. "He has no legal ties to Canada."
The source suggested Hammoud, who taught economics at the Lebanese International University in Beirut and has been detained there since April, may still have a girlfriend in Montreal.
Concordia University confirmed Sunday that Hammoud was an international student at the institution for seven years beginning in 1995.
He graduated with a bachelor's degree in commerce in 2002, with a major in finance and minor in international business, said university spokesperson Chris Mota.
Mota told CTV Montreal she knew little else about Hammoud's time at the institution.
"There is no one I have spoken to -- and I have spoken to people in a variety of different departments who may have heard of this person -- the name means absolutely nothing to anyone I have spoken to. I certainly have never heard his name before," Mota said.
When asked whether the university had been contacted as part of theinvestigation, she said, "not at this stage."
Other news reports suggest Hammoud was a secular Muslim who did not participate in activities geared to Islam.
"I don't recall his face or his name at all," Salam Elmenyawi, who regularly led Friday prayers on campus, told The Globe and Mail. "I don't believe he was an observant Muslim. If he was active among Muslims, I would remember him."
Plan of attack on Manhattan
U.S. officials revealed last week that eight al Qaeda-linked suspects, one of them reportedly a Canadian, were planning an attack on the tunnels that carry commuters under the Hudson River into Manhattan.
CP reported Friday that Canadian police questioned a man they suspected of active involvement in the terror plot and that he was released without arrest.
While Canadian authorities have been tightlipped about the possible local connection, authorities in Lebanon were more forthcoming, revealing they found evidence on Hammoud's personal computer in his university office.
"The information found in Hammoud's personal computer was very important because it contained maps and bombing plans that were being prepared," acting Interior Minister Ahmed Fatfat said in a local television interview on Saturday.
Although a Beirut TV station reported that Hammoud was recruited into Al Qaeda in 1994 while studying in Montreal, his family dismissed reports of his alleged links with extremism.
"His morale is high because he is confident he is innocent," his mother Nabila Qotob said. "Don't make up accusations. My son is innocent. What Al Qaeda? He never left his father's side. He loves life and fun."
Qotob asserted that her son couldn't have been a terrorist because he was having too much fun dating, drinking alcohol and driving his red convertible.
But some say his lavish lifestyle could mean just the opposite.
According to Lebanese officials, al Qaeda ordered Hammoud not to show any outward sing of religious devotion.
"Hammoud, by living a double life, by living a carefree liberal life, by drinking, by driving sports cars, was really living the al Qaeda life," said ABC News consultant Fawaz Gerges.
Another media report said Hammoud has two brothers, one who is studying in Canada and another who is working in the United Arab Emirates.

This blog entry was quickly changed... but not quickly enough.
