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25. mars 2006
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The BBC's Caroline Wyatt reports from Paris, where not even revolutions are what they used to be.
A delicious sense of people power has gripped the French and most of all, the students I mingled with a few days ago as they marched arm in arm through the boulevards of Paris, shouting their anger with the government.
To the barricades, they went, these revolutionaries, to fight for their rights - to pensions, mortgages and a steady job.
Such odd revolutionaries. No heartfelt cry to change the world, but a plea for everything to stay the same.
For France to remain in its glorious past: a time of full employment and jobs for life - a paternalistic state to take care of them from cradle to grave.
A reactionary revolution, a protest against economic realities.
France definately needs to break this mob rule and become a nation ruled by law and democratic institutions. I bet the aristocratic Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is not the man to do that. The way his rival Nicholas Sarkozy has used the issue for positioning for the presidential election indicates he isn't, either.
5:59:39 PM 
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A Pentagon report says that Russia supplied Saddam Hussein with detailed information about US military tactics in the build-up to the 2003 war.
Iraqi documents captured by U.S. forces in 2003 say Russian intelligence had sources inside the American military that enabled it to feed information about U.S. troop movements and battle plans to Saddam Hussein.
The unclassified report does not assess the value or accuracy of the information Saddam got or offer details on Russia's information pipeline. It cites captured Iraqi documents that say the Russians had "sources inside the American Central Command" and that intelligence was passed to Saddam through the Russian ambassador in Baghdad.
These accusations are not new, but as far as I know, there has not been any solid evidence before now.
Russia did not limit itself to political opposition; it clearly wanted the west to be inflicted with the maximum number of casualties in the war.
PS: This evidence ties in pretty well with a year-old article of mine: Reviving the cold war - Russia sees beyond the war on terror.
10:35:30 AM
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David Kennedy Houck writes in The Middle East Quarterly about Muslim groups proceeding to establish closed sharia communities in the United States.
First in Europe and now in the United States, Muslim groups have petitioned to establish enclaves in which they can uphold and enforce greater compliance to Islamic law. While the U.S. Constitution enshrines the right to religious freedom and the prohibition against a state religion, when it comes to the rights of religious enclaves to impose communal rules, the dividing line is more nebulous. Can U.S. enclaves, homeowner associations, and other groups enforce Islamic law?
Such questions are no longer theoretical. While Muslim organizations first established enclaves in Europe,[1] the trend is now crossing the Atlantic. Some Islamist community leaders in the United States are challenging the principles of assimilation and equality once central to the civil rights movement, seeking instead to live according to a separate but equal philosophy. The Gwynnoaks Muslim Residential Development group, for example, has established an informal enclave in Baltimore because, according to John Yahya Cason, director of the Islamic Education and Community Development Initiative, a Baltimore-based Muslim advocacy group, "there was no community in the U.S. that showed the totality of the essential components of Muslim social, economic, and political structure."[2]
Baltimore is not alone. In August 2004, a local planning commission in Little Rock, Arkansas, granted The Islamic Center for Human Excellence authorization to build an internal Islamic enclave to include a mosque, a school, and twenty-two homes.[3] While the imam, Aquil Hamidullah, says his goal is to create "a clean community, free of alcohol, drugs, and free of gangs,"[4] the implications for U.S. jurisprudence of this and other internal enclaves are greater: while the Little Rock enclave might prevent the sale of alcohol, can it punish possession and in what manner? Can it force all women, be they residents or visitors, to don Islamic hijab (headscarf)? Such enclaves raise the fundamental questions of when, how, and to what extent religious practice may supersede the U.S. Constitution.
Troubling.
Link via IArarat.
2:49:45 AM
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© Copyright 2006 Jan Haugland.
Last update: 01.04.2006; 13:23:21.
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