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23. juli 2005
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Dilpazier Aslam, Guardian trainee and member of extremist group Hizb ut-Tahrir, has been fired by the leftist newspaper. However, one anonymous "staff reporter", no doubt hiding his name in fear of being attacked by the rabid blogosphere, is extremely angry at his exposure and firing. The article is a good example of what passes for fact checking in the Guardian.
Rightwing bloggers from the US, where the Guardian has a large online following, were behind the targeting last week of a trainee Guardian journalist who wrote a comment piece which they did not care for about the London bombings.
The story is a demonstration of the way the 'blogosphere' can be used to mount obsessively personalised attacks at high speed.
Not only "rightwing" but even "from the US". To the Guardanistas, such terms are enough to discredit any criticism.
The anonymous "staff reporter" has found some of the strongest attacks on Aslam from blog fringes, hoping the readers will accept the guilt-by-association to discredit those who simply exposed an extremist in the newspaper staff. Would the staff writer object to the exposure if the trainee was, say, member of a neo-nazi party? Somehow I doubt it. Hizb ut-Tahrir may not be an overt terrorist organisation, maintaining some deniability on the use of violence, but it is openly anti-Semitic and its intent to destroy western civilisation is explicit.
The article get really ridiculous when its author asserts that Scott Burgess, who first exposed the extremist, was motivated by personal revenge for - wait for it - not receiving a job at the Guardian!
Scott Burgess, a blogger from New Orleans who recently moved to London, spends his time indoors
"Indoors" - oh the horrors. While Aslam and this anonymous staff writer have supposedly taken their laptops to the park.
posting repeated attacks on the Guardian for its stance on the environment, its columnists such as Polly Toynbee, and its recent intervention in the US presidential election campaign.
He pitched into Mr Aslam, who as it happened, beat him to the traineeship on the Guardian. Googling the 27-year-old Muslim's name, Mr Burgess picked up some articles the journalist had openly written in the past for Hizb ut-Tahrir websites and denounced him on his blogspot, The Daily Ablution, saying: "He is on record supporting a world-dominant Islamic state."
Another blogger, Laban Tall, wrote enthusiastically that Burgess' coup "has resounded across the blogging universe like a shockwave from a supernova".
He said: "I bet the Guardian wish they'd given him the job now, not Mr Aslam. Scott applied for the job in June 2004. Mr Aslam got it. They say revenge is a dish best eaten cold."
This is extremely rich. True, Scott "applied" for the traineeship in the Guardian last summer.
Regular readers may be interested to know that I am applying for this job. As I'll almost certainly be hired, readers are advised to quickly inform me of any competing employment opportunities they'd like me to consider.
If this didn't trigger the anonymous Guardian journalist's sarcasm detectors, there is plenty of further sentences in the comments that should provide a clue to anyone who isn't militantly dense. Oh wait, we're talking about a Guardian journalist who defends an extremist Islamist organisation. Never mind, then.
The whole article actually revolves around the ridiculous argument that Scott exposed Aslam to "settle the score" because he didn't get the job (which he knew that he would not get. As the employment of Aslam demonstrated, "diversity" in the Guardian means sassy extremists with various skin colours, not - ghasp - a right-leaning American who can write).
The episode was a striking illustration of the way that blogs and bloggers can heat up the temperature and seek to settle scores - as well as raise legitimate concerns about journalism and transparency - when something awful happens in the streets of London.
I guess we should be thankful for the inserted clause - after all the paper did fire him - but even more than the hiring of Aslam, this bitter screed demonstrates that a much-needed house-cleaning at the Guardian should go well beyond that one extremist.
And, mr or ms anonymous "staff reporter", when you write a smear article against a blogger using his full name, at least have the courage and common decency to put your own name to your article.
11:36:53 PM 
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The man shot by London police is named as Jean Charles de Menezes, a 27-year-old Brazilian who had lived in London for three years. He had no relation to terrorism.
An earlier Scotland Yard statement read: "We believe we now know the identity of the man shot at Stockwell Underground station by police on Friday 22nd July 2005, although he is still subject to formal identification.
"We are now satisfied that he was not connected with the incidents of Thursday 21st July 2005.
"For somebody to lose their life in such circumstances is a tragedy and one that the Metropolitan Police Service regrets."
Tragically, the only fatality of last Thursday's attempted bombing was a totally innocent man shot by the police. This was in many ways the worst possible outcome.
The police, including the officer who shot him, had supposedly misidentified the man as one of the four wanted bombers, and when the man ran onto an underground train, the police were probably convinced he was a suicide bomber about to blow up the people around him. Having to make a split-second decision, the police officer shot Menezes five times in the head, which is according to the police's new orders of engagement. This is a tragic development.
11:02:01 PM
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Matthew Brzezinski writes the story, never before told, about Arnold H. Weiss. He was a young Jewish orphanage boy who escaped pre-WWII Germany to the United States. He was recruited to the military intelligence, and in 1945 he returned to war-torn Germany to hunt down Nazi war criminals. He was the first allied soldier who saw Hitler's last will, demonstrating that the widespread rumours about the Führer's survival were false. Weiss also hunted down low-level members of the SS death squads, too low in rank to be of interest to backlogged war crimes tribunals, but yet personally responsible for the brutal murders of thousands.
Weiss and his superiors did more than flush the criminals' "Mein Kampf"s down the toilet, to put it like that. They simply handed the men, when their identity was determined, over to former concentration camp prisoners.
DPs, or displaced persons, were the survivors of death and POW camps -- Jews, Poles, Russians, Hungarians, refugees of virtually every nationality who either could not return home or no longer had any homes to return to. They numbered in the hundreds of thousands in Europe, and they were housed in huge temporary DP camps. Several such refugee camps, converted German Army barracks, were near Munich.
"We studied up a little on military law, and there was nothing on the books preventing us from delivering suspects for additional debriefing to the DPs," Weiss recalls. He says he's not sure where the idea originated, who first put it into motion, or how widespread it was. "Whoever first came up with this, I honestly don't know. I don't think they'd own up to it anyway."
While it was perfectly legal under military law to hand over suspects for further questioning to DPs, says Benjamin Ferencz, who was a lead U.S. prosecutor at the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunals in 1945 and 1947, knowingly delivering suspects for execution was not. And of course the DPs were not interested in extracting information.
What followed wasn't pretty.
It's a long story, but well worth reading.
9:08:34 PM
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LA Times: "Dozens of Chemicals Found in Most Americans' Bodies"
Gee? You think so? Indeed, most bodies contain chemicals like carbon, calcium, potassium, magnesium,... even a particularly nasty chemical called dihydrogen monoxide which is known to have killed thousands (and fooled many more).
I'd think there be thousands of chemicals in our bodies. Horrible!
It is an automatic assumption among many people that a material is more dangerous if it comes out of a laboratory or chemical factory as oppose to being produced "naturally" in, well, nature. While it is certainly possible that some of these "chemicals" can have negative side effects, hysterial headlines should at least wait until such chemicals are found in dangerous quantities.
5:03:43 AM
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Terrorist bombs have hit a popular tourist resort in Egypt.
As many as seven explosions struck the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheik on the southern tip of the Sinai Peninsula early Saturday, targeting several hotels and killing at least 25 people, witnesses and police said.
Saturday's explosions at 1:15 a.m., when many tourists would have been asleep, shook windows a mile away. Smoke and fire rose from Naama Bay, a main strip of beach hotels in the desert city popular with Israeli and European tourists, witnesses said.
A police official in Sharm el-Sheik said at least 25 were killed and 110 wounded in multiple explosions targeting the Ghazala Gardens and Movenpick hotels in Naama Bay and the Old Market area nearby. Other officials in Sharm said there may have been as many as seven blasts: three in Naama Bay and four in the market.
BBC update:
At least 45 people have been killed and more than 130 wounded in a string of explosions in the Egyptian Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh, police said.
The first explosion took place in the Old Market area, popular with tourists.
Other blasts followed in the nearby area of Naama Bay, which is packed with hotels. Witnesses said a four-star hotel was heavily damaged.
Britons, Dutch, Qataris, Kuwaitis and Egyptians were among the casualties, police sources said.
Police sources said initial reports suggested there had been at least four and possibly seven car bombs.
Simultaneous car bombs bear all the hallmarks of al-Qaeda affiliated terrorist groups, who have hit the area before. Last October, 34 were killed in terrorist attacks in eastern Sinai.
It has been a major objective of the terrorists to hit at Egypt's important tourist industry for more than a decade. The most deadly attack still in Egypt (and that record may hold even today's atrocity) was a massacre by gunmen of more than 60 people, most of them tourists, in Luxor in 1997. It is well known that much of what later became al-Qaeda grew out of Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood (which has later moderated its aims and methods). The assumed number two in al-Qaeda, Ayman al-Zawahiri, is an Egyptian physician who merged his Egyptian Islamic Jihad with Bin Laden's group. Obviously, they still have a dangerous presence in Egypt.
Update: The death toll is now at "at least 88" people, making it the most deadly terrorist attack in Egypt. Some 200 more were injured. Just senseless carnage.
4:42:11 AM
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Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, often accused of failing to crack down on terrorism, has recently urged a jihad on Islamists and now require all the country's religious schools, madrasas, to be registered. He has also had over 200 suspected militants arrested.
The Islamists are not pleased, of course, and on Friday, when millions attend services in mosques across the country, they urged their supporters out in the streets to protest.
As a show of force, it fell pathetically flat.
Up to 700 Islamists, most of them teenagers or in their 20s, chanted anti-Musharraf and anti-U.S. slogans at Islamabad's Lal or Red Mosque, which was raided by security forces searching for militants on Tuesday.
Some shouted slogans in support of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and Afghanistan's fundamentalist Taliban government, which was overthrown by U.S.-led forces after the al Qaeda attacks on U.S. cities on Sept. 11, 2001.
The protesters pelted a police post with stones, destroyed lamp posts and set fire to a police motorcycle.
Similar rallies were held in the cities of Karachi, Lahore, Quetta and Peshawar. Many of the protesters were students from Islamic schools, or madrasas, some of which are accused of being breeding grounds for militancy.
It appears that Pakistanis have little taste for Talibanism in their own country after all.
PS: Musharraf also used the opportunity to hit back at Britain:
"We certainly have a problem here [with Islamic militancy] which we are trying to address, but may I say that England also has a problem which needs to be addressed.
"There are the extremist organisations in Britain such as Hizb ut-Tahrir and Al-Muhajiroun which operate with impunity. They also give sermons of hate and violence."
He dismissed the idea that the London bombers could have been indoctrinated during their short visits to Pakistan. "Three out of the four are accused to be from Pakistan, the fourth is from Jamaica. If the aspersion is that they got indoctrinated in Pakistan, where did the Jamaican get indoctrinated?
"Three are from Pakistani parentage. But they have been born, educated and bred in the UK. There is a lot to be done in Pakistan, but may I suggest there is a lot to be done in England also."
The worst thing is that on this, he is unfortunately right.
1:29:15 AM
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I'm pretty obsessed with statistics about who is reading my blog, and of course I'm keeping tabs on what Google searches lead people here.
My article about Hitler's aryan sex doll is still a hot favourite. Imagine that. Norwegian skier and nude model Invild Engesland is also attracting hits all the time. She's very popular in Finland, another skiing nation. Last I heard she had some health problems, alas.
But, I have to admit I am more happy when people come here to read debunking of 9/11 conspiracy theories, or a reader inquiring 'will india and china be next superpower?' It is a bit more satisfying, I think, to obtain readership through a written article than some risque google-friendly subject matter. But hey, I take what I get.
Somebody who was already here, using the "google me" button at the right, did a careful exploration of several articles that mentioned "french". Yeah, quite a bit of reading material there.
1:02:23 AM
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© Copyright 2005 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 30.07.2005; 02:58:44.
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