Is Muhammad Movie a Contrived Fraud?

Bizarre story behind film that supposedly sparked middle east unrest
Paul Joseph Watson
Infowars.com
Thursday, September 13, 2012
http://www.infowars.com/is-muhammad-movie-a-contrived-fraud

An anti-Muslim film that has been blamed for the attacks on U.S. embassies in Egypt, Libya and Yemen is likely a contrived fraud designed to stir up unrest in the Middle East while shielding the true reasons behind the murder of Ambassador Chris Stevens.

A trailer for the film, entitled The Innocence of Muslims, has been on You Tube for over two months. Despite the alleged film maker’s claim that the movie was funded by rich Jewish donors to the tune of $5 million dollars, it has all the quality of a low budget film school project. The trailer has now been banned in several middle eastern countries, including Egypt and Afghanistan.

Indeed, the full film itself may not even exist, a doubt that has also been shared about the existence of its shadowy director Sam Bacile, who told the Associated Press this week that he was a 56-year-old “Israeli Jew” who lives in California, despite telling actors on set that he is Egyptian, while others have claimed he is an American.

Bacile claims he made the film to illustrate how “Islam is a cancer, period.”

However, numerous authorities have failed in attempting to locate a ‘Sam Bacile’ residing in California. Bacile is likely a pseudonym for the only real person who has been positively connected with the movie – Nakoula Basseley Nakoula, a 55-year-old Coptic Christian living in California who was convicted for federal bank fraud in 2010.

The movie itself – or the 14 minutes of it which have been released – is also highly suspect. Actors involved in filming were told “they were appearing in a film about the life of a generic Egyptian 2,000 years ago.” Following the attack on the U.S. Consulate in Benghazi, all 80 cast members put out a joint statement stating that they were misled by the producer.

“The entire cast and crew are extremely upset and feel taken advantage of by the producer. We are 100% not behind this film and were grossly misled about its intent and purpose,” the statement says. “We are shocked by the drastic re-writes of the script and lies that were told to all involved. We are deeply saddened by the tragedies that have occurred.”

The film has been purposely dubbed and edited to elicit maximum outrage from Muslims. The Prophet Muhammad is depicted as a pedophile, a homosexual, a religious phony, a philanderer, a womanizer and a bloodthirsty dictator.

During dialogue, the actors words have been crudely dubbed to include references to Muhammad that were not in the original script.

As Cindy Lee Garcia, an actress involved in the movie, told Gawker, “In the script and during the shooting, nothing indicated the controversial nature of the final product. Muhammed wasn’t even called Muhammed; he was “Master George.”

“The words Muhammed were dubbed over in post-production, as were essentially all other offensive references to Islam and Muhammed,” writes Adrian Chen.

For example, at 9:03 in the trailer, the words “Is your Muhammed a child molester?” are heard, yet the actress’ voice has been dubbed as her lips do not form the word “Muhammed”.

As the Christian Science Monitor summarizes, the film looks like, “it could have been ginned up by someone sitting a basement with cheap dubbing software.”

Everything about the movie suggests it was a contrived fraud to artificially manufacture unrest in the middle east at a time where speculation that the U.S. and Israel are about to launch military interventions in Iran and Syria is rife.

The amateurish nature of the film may be a ruse to deflect suspicion away from its true purpose and the real identities of its creators.

“Those sniffing the air properly smell some sort of intelligence/influence operation in the whole situation,” writes Daniel McAdams, comparing the film to Kony 2012. “A purposely bad cover for what happened in Benghazi yesterday? A badly done attempted cover for what happened yesterday? Arabs — even Muslim Brotherhood — looking to score points by blaming “wealthy Jews” for making the film? A power struggle between Islamist factions in Egypt? Israelis attempting to make it look like Arabs made a crudely anti-Semitic cover story for a crude film?”

What’s known for sure is the fact that the establishment media has seized upon the movie as an excuse to explain away the attacks on the embassies in Cairo and Benghazi as just another instance of extremist Muslims getting riled up over nothing in particular.

Subsequent reports confirmed that the attacks were coordinated well in advance of the release of the Arabic version of the trailer this week and had nothing to do with the film, but the media immediately ran with that narrative.

This conveniently disguises the true narrative behind the attacks, which is the fact that the United States and other NATO powers are seeing their chickens come home to roost having armed and empowered Al-Qaeda affiliated Islamic extremists in pursuit of regime change, most notably in Libya where the removal of Gaddafi was achieved via NATO’s support for the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group – which is listed as a terrorist organization by the State Department and was responsible for killing U.S. troops in Iraq.

Given that these same militants are now being used by Gulf states and NATO powers in a bid to topple President Bashar Al-Assad in Syria, their connection to the embassy attacks must be downplayed. This was evident when NATO stooge Ali Aujali, Libya’s Ambassador to Washington, ludicrously claimed that Gaddafi loyalists were responsible for killing Ambassador Stevens.

With embassies in Yemen, Tunisia and other countries now coming under siege, the mass media’s promotion of what would otherwise have been an obscure, ineffectual and downright laughable 14 minute You Tube trailer has now created a crisis that threatens the stability of the entire region.

The bizarre circumstances behind The Innocence of Muslims, its shadowy creators and the deliberate attempt to manipulate the film to offend Muslims clearly suggests that the whole farce was a contrived set-up to inflame tensions in order to justify an acceleration of U.S., Israeli and NATO aggression across the Middle East and North Africa.

Paul Joseph Watson is the editor and writer for Prison Planet.com. He is the author of Order Out Of Chaos. Watson is also a regular fill-in host for The Alex Jones Show and Infowars Nightly News.

Peter King: The Anti-Muslim McCarthy

From Firedoglake.com:
Representative Peter King (R-NY), chairman of the House Homeland Security Committee, will hold his third anti-Muslim hearing this morning. Or, as he frames it, his “third Muslim radicalization hearing.”

This third hearing titled, “Al Shabaab: Recruitment and Radicalization within the Muslim American Community and the Threat to the Homeland,” explicitly targets Somali Americans in this country especially those in the Midwest in Minnesota and Ohio. Rep. King is convinced that they are susceptible to recruitment, radicalization and training from this organization that allegedly has ties to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP).

If this hearing were to be conducted in any other setting, like some place not on Capitol Hill, this would have the potential to be a riveting hearing. The Nation’s Jeremy Scahill recently reported on CIA secret prison sites in Somalia. He mentioned Al Shabaab and how they didn’t used to be such a force in the region. It sure seems like US support for renditions and torture in the region might be giving Al Shabaab a boost in its ability to recruit and conduct operations. But, don’t expect any representatives from the CIA or any task force in the region to testify on how operations might be radicalizing Muslims.

If this hearing wasn’t being held by Rep. Peter King, who appears to be this generation’s Joseph McCarthy, someone with the FBI might be asked to come before the committee and testify on entrapment schemes that are being engineered in Muslim communities. Somali-born teenager Mohamed Osman Mohamud, accused of trying to detonate a bomb in Portland, Oregon, at a Christmas tree lighting ceremony, was set up by FBI agents in a sting operation to commit the attack. This sort of thing can’t possibly help efforts to curb whatever sort of radicalization might be happening in this country

Live Blogging Rep. Peter King’s Third ‘Muslim Radicalization’ Hearing
Kevin Gosztola
Wednesday July 27, 2011
http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2011/07/27/live-blogging-rep-peter-kings-third-muslim-radicalization-hearing/

Muslim McCarthyism

From FlagerLive.com:
New York Congressman Peter King’s so-called homeland security hearing on Muslim radicalization should surprise no one. We’ve been at war with Islam abroad for 10 years. It’s amazing it’s taken this long for the xenophobia and hate-mongering to be elevated to heroic status on Capitol Hill, where even the fringe the notion of Barack Obama as a Muslim fifth columnist still has currency. It’s all part of a long American tradition, rich in blood and bile.

This is a country partly built on the genocidal eradication of the Indian, on the enslavement of blacks for 300 years and the terrorizing and demonizing of blacks for another hundred. At the turn of the last century it was the “Yellow Peril” that led Congress to ban Asian immigration. In the 1920s, at a time when Jews were openly barred from colleges, clubs, restaurants and neighborhoods, Henry Ford was devoting page after page of his Michigan newspaper to battling what he perceived as the threat of Jewish radicalization in America, and dreaming of the day when the country would be cleansed of them. That was just warm-up for the mass hysteria of the 1950s when it was feared that Soviet communists, who had trouble keeping a light bulb functioning properly in Russia, would overrun the United States thanks to a few well-placed “infiltrators.” The Soviet threat has become the Muslim threat.

And to keep the bigots along the Mexican border happy, there’s always the “Brown Peril” to worry about, and goon brigades such as the “Minutemen Project” to meet brown skins with brown shirts. So Peter King, if anything, is a cliché, an elected, and therefore presumably more respectable reflection of our national prejudices. But the difference between him and, say, that radical nut Terry Jones, the Gainesville preacher who warms his religious bigotry to the fire of burning Korans, is just a different address.

If there is a “radicalization” problem in the United States, Muslims have better take a number. They’re vastly outnumbered. The odd attack with a Muslim at the trigger can’t be denied. We are a diverse country. But bullet for bullet, it’s safe to say that Muslims are more law-abiding than their more Christian brothers, at least stat wise.

“In an 11-day period this January,” the Southern Poverty Law Center reports, “a neo-Nazi was arrested headed for the Arizona border with a dozen homemade grenades; a terrorist bomb attack on a Martin Luther King Jr. Day parade in Spokane, Wash., was averted after police dismantled a sophisticated anti-personnel weapon; and a man who officials said had a long history of antigovernment activities was arrested outside a packed mosque in Dearborn, Mich., and charged with possessing explosives with unlawful intent.” The same Dearborn where Henry Ford once spewed his anti-Semitism. “That’s in addition, the same month, to the shooting of U.S. Rep. Gabrielle Giffords in Arizona, an attack that left six dead and may have had a political dimension...”

Peter King’s Muslim McCarthyism
Pierre Tristam
March 11, 2011
http://flaglerlive.com/19048/pt-king-muslim

From Shas to Hamas: The group behind the ‘South Park’ controversy

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5866.shtml

From Shas to Hamas: The group behind the ‘South Park’ controversy
By Maidhc Ó Cathail
Online Journal Contributing Writer
May 12, 2010

Muslims just can’t seem to take a joke. Or at least that’s what some would have you believe.

Like the contrived Danish cartoon controversy, the much-hyped Times Square car bomb incident provided an ideal opportunity for those who seek to make Islam look bad in the eyes of the world.

Before the arrest of Faisal “The Fizzler” Shahzad tied this latest botched terror plot to the Pakistani Taliban, some initial news reports suggested that it might have been the work of an Islamist group with a poor sense of humor -- and an even poorer sense of direction. The fact that the fertilizer-laden SUV was parked “about one block from” Viacom headquarters led the Washington Post’s pro-Israel staff writers Jerry Markon and Anne Kornblut to speculate that it may have been retribution for a satire on the Prophet Mohammed shown on one of Viacom’s TV networks.

After Comedy Central aired an episode of the satirical cartoon South Park in April that depicted the prophet in a bear costume, its creators received veiled death threats from a New York-based group called Revolution Muslim. The threats were issued on the group’s Web site by Zachary Adam Chesser, who now goes by the name Abu Talhah al-Amrikee.

Within days of the posting on the obscure Web site, Joshua Rhett Miller of FoxNews.com did a story on it, in which he interviewed Chesser. “They’re going to be basically on a list in the back of the minds of a large number of Muslims,” the recent convert told Fox. “It’s just the reality.”

A few days later, Miller did a profile of Chesser, in which he described the 20-year-old as “the boy next door” with a “dark side.” Quoting an anonymous high school classmate, Miller informed Fox readers that Chesser -- prior to his career as a humorless fundamentalist Muslim -- was a “loner . . . who frequently drew pictures of Satanic figures in his notebooks.”

The hype over South Park was not the first time, however, that Rupert Murdoch’s stridently pro-Israel media had publicized Revolution Muslim’s provocations.

On March 26, 2008, FoxNews.com trumpeted the group’s puerile puppet show mocking the 2002 beheading of a Jewish American journalist in Pakistan. “I could care less about Daniel Pearl,” group founder Yousef al-Khattab said in an interview with Fox. “I’m happy to see that he’s gone.”

In an Oct. 13, 2009, piece, Joshua Rhett Miller drew attention to a post by al-Khattab which asked Allah to murder the Jews and urged Muslims to “throw liquid drain cleaner in their faces.” In yet another interview with Miller, al-Khattab claimed that these outlandish statements reflected the “prayer of every true Muslim.”

On Nov. 8, 2009, Fox reported on Revolution Muslim’s tribute to Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, the U.S. Army psychiatrist charged with the murder of 13 people at Fort Hood, Texas. This time it was another one of Murdoch’s newspapers, the New York Post, which interviewed al-Khattab after he wrote, “An officer and a gentleman was injured while partaking in a pre-emptive attack. Get well soon Major Nidal. We love you.”

In one of his articles, Joshua Rhett Miller mentioned, almost in passing, that the provocative al-Khattab is “an American-born Jew formerly known as Joseph Cohen who converted to Islam after attending an Orthodox rabbinical school.” An insignificant detail?

The implausible story of Cohen’s implausible conversion was first told, it seems, in a most interesting venue: Israel’s leading right-wing English newspaper. Cohen, who moved with his wife and family from Brooklyn to Israel in 1998, was one of three people interviewed for a Nov. 25, 2005, Jerusalem Post feature on the spread of Islam among Israeli immigrants titled, perhaps ironically, “True Believers.”

While living in Netivot -- the only town in Israel without a public high school due to the extreme influence there of the ultra-Orthodox Haredim -- Cohen said he became disillusioned with Israeli secularism. “At that time I met this person on the Internet, a sheikh from UAE [United Arab Emirates], whom I met later on, and we started chatting and talking on the ’net,” Cohen told the Jerusalem Post. After two years of “theological dialogue” in a Jewish chatroom with the persuasive sheikh, Cohen was transformed from being a supporter of Shas -- the ultra-racist political party of Mizrahi Haredi Jews -- to a “sudden admirer of al-Qaeda and Hamas.”

Seemingly unable to interest “weak” Palestinian Muslims in his newly acquired brand of “pure” Islam, Cohen returned to New York to launch his online jihad for “the creation of an Islamic caliphate which will rule the world.”

Having not so long ago believed that Jews had a God-given right to Palestine, Cohen is now saying that Muslims should rule the world. The zeal of the converted? Perhaps.

But it also conveniently confirms the Islamophobic propaganda of the likes of Daniel Pipes who try to scare Americans into fighting Israel’s wars with dire warnings that the Muslims are coming.

Maidhc Ó Cathail is a widely published writer based in Japan.

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, jihadist or patsy?

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_5264.shtml

Major Nidal Malik Hasan, jihadist or patsy?
By Jerry Mazza
Online Journal Associate Editor
Nov 13, 2009

The story as it unwinds seems too scripted to be true. That Army psychiatrist and Major Nidal M. Hasan went on a rampage at Fort Hood with two guns blazing, a .357 Magnum and a semi-automatic pistol with laser target-finder, after shouting the Arabic phrase ‘Allah Akbar’ (God is Greatest) as he opened fire, and will live (so far) to talk about it, though an Army-appointed lawyer says he will never get a fair trial.

Hasan coincidentally received his masters in chemistry at Virginia Tech, famous for the infamous Seung-Hui Cho, the campus killer gunman credited on April 19, 2007, with the deadliest shooting rampage in modern history. Seung-Hui’s sister curiously works for a State Department office that oversees billions of dollars in American aid for Iraq. See the link to Citizens for Legitimate Government on him and his ‘Missing Records.’ It’s more of the script, the association of Hasan with Seung-Hui.

Consider, too, that in 2007, Major Hasan, who received his medical degree in psychiatry from Walter Reed Hospital, spoke there, warning of threats within the ranks of Muslim Soldiers in a 50-slide Power-Point presentation, titled The Koranic World View As it Relates to Muslims in the U.S. Military. “He stood before his supervisors and about 25 other mental health staff members and lectured on Islam, suicide bombers and threats the military could encounter from Muslims conflicted about fighting in the Muslim countries of Iraq and Afghanistan,” reports the Nov. 10 Washington Post, which includes Hasan’s entire presentation.

Hasan went so far as to say, “It’s getting harder and harder for Muslims in the service to morally justify being in a military that seems constantly engaged against fellow Muslims.” How and why these words didn’t get his military superiors to question him seems beyond understanding, unless that, too, was part of the script. Could it be that they felt he was speaking the truth? But there was a more than veiled threat in the presentation, which you’ll see if you read it.

In fact, Hasan entered Walter Reed in 2003 and spent six years as an intern, resident and fellow. He was transferred to Fort Hood as a psychiatrist in July 2009 and was to leave soon for Afghanistan and had asked on numerous occasions not to be deployed. He even offered the U.S. government its money back for his Walter Reed education, every dollar of it. He did not want to fight fellow Muslims. Yet no one raised an eye? This is a U.S. Army major speaking, not some slacker from the sticks trying to dodge combat.

Of course, aside from his glaringly strong (if not correct) feelings against the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars, his supervisors found him quite competent counseling wounded PTSD soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan. In the NY Times’ Details Emerge about Fort Hood suspect’s history, “Col. Kimberly Kesling, deputy commander of clinical services at Darnall Army Medical Center at Fort Hood, said she had known Hasan.

“‘You wouldn’t think that someone who works in your facility and provided excellent care for his patients, which he did, could do something like this,’ Kesling said. She described him as ‘a quiet man who wouldn’t seek the limelight’ and said she was shocked when she heard he was the suspect in the shootings.’” One can only imagine the tales he heard, which would only bolster his philosophical antipathy to the War on Terror, which he considered and claims to be a war on Islam, with which any number of Americans would agree.

This is all vaguely reminiscent of supposed communist-sympathizer Lee Harvey Oswald and his feelings for Cuba, which purportedly drove him towards a similar “lone gunman” assassination of President Kennedy, which today is amply questioned by millions of Americans who believe it involved the CIA, the Mob, the Defense Industry, and George H.W. Bush, Sr., among a number of the usual suspects.

Yet, an ABC News headline from Nov. 9 screams Officials: U.S. Army Told of Hasan Efforts to Contact al Qaeda: Army Major in Fort Hood Massacre Used ‘Electronic Means’ (the computer) to Connect with Terrorists: “U.S. intelligence agencies were aware months ago that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan was attempting to make contact with an individual associated with al Qaeda, two American officials briefed on classified material in the case told ABC News. According to the officials, the Army was informed of Hasan’s contact, but it is unclear what, if anything, the Army did in response.”

Why is it unclear, or is it just being withheld, or is there nothing of consequence to report, or is it a sheer lie?

This is coming from ABC News, which on every anniversary of JFK’s assassination, runs a “last word” piece on how it was committed by a lone gunman, Lee Harvey Oswald, the network being a long-standing CIA front. And here, they have automatically established that the fabled ‘Al Qaeda,’ created, funded, and branded by the CIA, was in contact with Major Hasan. So, what did they do about it? Nothing! Read the balance of the article for the indignant ire of the politicians, so reminiscent of all the leads to the CIA and other presences in the JFK assassination, whose inquiry was led by Allan Dulles, the CIA head Kennedy fired in “1961 over Operation Northwoods, a proposed covert CIA operation aimed at gaining popular support for a war against Cuba by framing Cuba for stage real or simulated attacks on American citizens.”

Of course, echoing ABC News is the New York Times with U.S. Knew of Suspect’s Tie to Radical Cleric. Aha, even more ties on the path to jihad, even more foreknowledge: “Intelligence agencies intercepted communications last year and this year between the military psychiatrist accused of shooting to death 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex., and a radical cleric in Yemen known for his incendiary anti-American teachings [itals mine].” And what did they do about it?

“But the federal authorities dropped an inquiry into the matter after deciding that the messages from the psychiatrist, Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, did not suggest any threat of violence and concluding that no further action was warranted, government officials said Monday.” Oh, then why mention it in the first place? It goes on . . .

“Major Hasan’s 10 to 20 messages to Anwar al-Awlaki, once a spiritual leader at a mosque in suburban Virginia where Major Hasan worshiped, indicate that the troubled [now he’s nuts] military psychiatrist came to the attention of the authorities long before last Thursday’s shooting rampage at Fort Hood, but that the authorities left him in his post.” Why? Why? Why? Unless it’s all sheer BS.

Is this not reminiscent of 9/11 and the continued incompetence before, during and after it of various intelligence and government agencies, not to mention NORAD, the Pentagon, the executive branch? And nary a soul was fired after the terrible event.

All they could do was blame 19 head-shots of Muslims pulled out of a file by FBI Director Robert Mueller, who wouldn’t claim with complete surety their authenticity. And then the next step was declaring the War on Terror and preemptively, illegally, attacking Afghanistan, supposedly in search of (the Muslim goat) Osama bin Laden, who supposedly engineered it. Several years after 9/11, he was taken off the FBI’s Most Wanted list for the crime for lack of evidence to prove he was responsible for it. And then there was Iraq, claiming this time (the Muslim goat) Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and was about to use them any second, which was subsequently proven totally false.

So now Hasan is buried in Al Qaeda next to a radical cleric with strong anti-American teachings. Paydirt! The news networks have created a grid-like spider-web that holds its fly morsel, Hasan, to shame Islam. Does this not buttress the whole sagging “conspiracy theory” of the administration, particularly as more and more books, DVDs, architects, engineers, military men, pilots speak out against the flaws in the administration’s “9/11 conspiracy theory?” Does this not hit us over the head again with “a Muslim did it, remember 9/11?” Why was the intelligence at Fort Hood, the FBI, and CIA asleep at the wheel -- perhaps part of the script?

It also comes out in the same Times story linked above, “In 2000 and 2001, Mr. Awlaki [the radical cleric] served as an imam at two mosques in the United States frequented by three future Sept. 11 hijackers. Khalid al-Midhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi attended the Rabat mosque in San Diego, where Mr. Awlaki later admitted meeting Mr. Hazmi several times but ‘claimed not to remember any specifics of what they discussed,’ according to the report of the national Sept. 11 commission.” Uh huh, uh huh, we’re building to something here and . . .

“Both Mr. Hazmi and another hijacker, Hani Hanjour, later attended the Dar al Hijrah mosque in Falls Church, Va., after Mr. Awlaki had moved there in early 2001. The Sept. 11 commission report expressed ‘suspicion’ about the coincidence, but said its investigators were unable to find Mr. Awlaki to question him.” Yes, but . . .

“Major Hasan attended the same Virginia mosque, but it is not known whether they met there.” Hasan attended the same mosque, but it’s not known if he and Hani, the idiot who couldn’t fly a Cessna, met there. But nevertheless we take from this, if you’re political I.Q. isn’t below 40, the implication that Hasan was connected to the hijackers, because he’s a “nut killer terrorist,” too.

Yet who left him to do his killing but the very people in charge of his career. Or maybe someone in the backroom said, “Hands off Hasan. We have other plans for him. He’s in the bigger picture.” Ah, so much like Oswald, or David Chapman who shot John Lennon. Chapman then calmly sat down on the sidewalk after he did it, waiting for the police to come and take him. His handler, the doorman Jose Perdomo, went gone for the day, saying bye-bye to Chapman, as this Manchurian patsy went off to life imprisonment. And not in a mental hospital, but in a straight-up prison, which he “chose” to do, uh huh, uh huh.

And yet there’s more. Hasan supposedly wasn’t a lone gunman. No, he had three accomplices they say, one dead, and two in custody. Sort of makes sense. I mean to kill 13 people and wound 29 in a matter of minutes, supposedly thrusting a hundred rounds of ammo into the clips of his two pistols, Hasan would have to be John Wayne plus Superman. It would ruin the whole movie. But who are the accomplices? Well, there’s an account from CNN of the capture of one of them on a golf course two and a half miles away as 30 to 40 sirening cars full of MPs came to get him. Here is the short piece . . .

“(CNN) -- A senior officer who was playing golf Thursday near Fort Hood, Texas, told CNN he witnessed the arrest of one of the two surviving suspects of the shooting at the Army installation.

“Shortly after the shooting, the officer said, military police told him to clear the course and he saw other MPs surround the building that held the golf carts, he said.

The senior officer said he ducked into a nearby house for cover as 30 to 40 cars carrying MPs approached.

“He said he saw a soldier in battle-dress uniform, his hands in the air. The MPs ordered him to lie on the ground and open his uniform, presumably to ensure he was not carrying explosives, the senior officer said.” Presumably, they found no bomb.

“He said an MP told him that authorities considered the man to be a suspect in the shootings after having overheard the man say he was with the shooter. The man was surrounded for 25 to 30 minutes, until a convoy of vehicles arrived, led by a Ford Crown Victoria and carrying men in suits, and he was taken away, the senior officer said.” Sirening up to a suspect in 40 cars, wow, that’s stealth for you. And who was the man? And where is he now?

But they probably caught a few other suspects as well. I wonder if they’re all Muslims. And speaking of that, how do we jibe Hasan’s violent nature with Reuters’ article U.S. Army gunman’s act “impossible” – grandfather, who by the way lives on the West Bank in Palestine, where the Hasan family came from via Jordan to America.

“AL-BIREH, West Bank, Nov 7 (Reuters) - The grandfather of a U.S. Army psychiatrist accused of shooting dead 13 people and wounding 30 others at a base in Texas said on Saturday he found it impossible to believe his grandson had committed the act.

“’He is a doctor and loves the U.S.’ Ismail Mustafa Hamad told Reuters in an interview at his home in the Palestinian town of al-Bireh. ‘America made him what he is.’” Now, there’s a certain, deep irony to that statement.

The article concludes ”Hasan, who had spent years counseling wounded soldiers, many of whom had lost limbs fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan, last visited him in the occupied West Bank some 10 years ago. Hamad said he had since visited his grandson in the United States. Hamad appeared to rule out a political motive.” Didn’t the poor old man know everything is political everywhere in this universe?

And so it goes, the contradictions, the lies, the suspected truth of what this orchestrated event means, and how it will bolster, supercharge resentment against Muslims once again and perpetuate our wars against their nations. And the folks who hold the puppet strings, will we be seeing them, hearing from them, or just listening to their news releases? Conflicting, accusatory, guilt in the highest from association, etc. All I can say is, “Good night, America, and good luck.”

Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer living in New York City. Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net. His new book, “State Of Shock: Poems from 9/11 on” is available at www.jerrymazza.com, Amazon or Barnesandnoble.com.

Saviors and Survivors

From Amazon.com:

Saviors and Survivors: Darfur, Politics, and the War on Terror (Hardcover)
by Mahmood Mamdani
List Price: $26.95

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
Book Description

From the author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim comes an important book, unlike any other, that looks at the crisis in Darfur within the context of the history of Sudan and examines the world’s response to that crisis.

In Saviors and Survivors, Mahmood Mamdani explains how the conflict in Darfur began as a civil war (1987—89) between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the south, triggered by a severe drought that had expanded the Sahara Desert by more than sixty miles in forty years; how British colonial officials had artificially tribalized Darfur, dividing its population into “native” and “settler” tribes and creating homelands for the former at the expense of the latter; how the war intensified in the 1990s when the Sudanese government tried unsuccessfully to address the problem by creating homelands for tribes without any. The involvement of opposition parties gave rise in 2003 to two rebel movements, leading to a brutal insurgency and a horrific counterinsurgency–but not to genocide, as the West has declared.

Mamdani also explains how the Cold War exacerbated the twenty-year civil war in neighboring Chad, creating a confrontation between Libya’s Muammar al-Qaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) that spilled over into Darfur and militarized the fighting. By 2003, the war involved national, regional, and global forces, including the powerful Western lobby, who now saw it as part of the War on Terror and called for a military invasion dressed up as “humanitarian intervention.”

Incisive and authoritative, Saviors and Survivors will radically alter our understanding of the crisis in Darfur.

Saviors and Survivors invites the reader to rethink the lesson of Rwanda in light of Darfur. It is a warning to those who would act first and understand later.

Part One discusses the nature of Save Darfur advocacy. Like the War on Terror from which it has borrowed its assumptions and coordinates, Save Darfur has turned into a lavishly funded and massive ad campaign spreading and sustaining a lethal illusion, consistently exaggerating the level of mortality and racializing the reasons for it. Why has Save Darfur not lost credibility even though its information is increasingly divorced from reality? A part of the answer lies in its ability to turn activism around Darfur into a domestic "feel good" issue while obscuring the context of the violence in Darfur.

Part Two of the book explains this context, starting with correcting the widely-held assumption that Arab tribes of Sudan are settlers from the Middle East, when they actually comprise local tribes that adopted the Arabic language and identity in the course of forming local states. The book locates the roots of the current conflict in colonialism, ecology, and the Cold War: colonialism introduced into Darfur a system of local discrimination based on tribal identity; an ongoing ecological crisis has led to the expansion of the Sahara by a hundred kilometers in four decades, igniting a conflict between nomadic and peasant tribes over fertile land in the mountains of the south; and, finally, the Cold War confrontation in Chad between Gaddafi (with Soviet support) and the Reagan administration (allied with France and Israel) spilled over into Darfur and militarized the conflict.

Part Three explains the Darfur crisis. Rather than a willful attempt by the government to eliminate particular groups--genocide--the present phase of the conflict stems from a land-based ecological confrontation at the local level and a struggle for power at the central level, exacerbated by the ongoing War on Terror. The urgent need today is not to punish those responsible for the mass killings of 2003-04 but to arrive at a political solution that will reform the land system in Darfur and political power in Sudan.

From Publishers Weekly

Mamdani (Good Muslim, Bad Muslim) continues to challenge political and intellectual orthodoxies in his latest book, a bold, near brilliant re-examination of the conflict in Darfur. While acknowledging the horrendous violence committed in the region, Mamdani contends that Darfur is not the site of genocide but rather a site where the language of genocide has been used as an instrument. The author believes that the war on terror provided an international political context in which the perpetrators of violence in Darfur could be categorized as Arabs seeking to eradicate black Africans in the region. Challenging these racial distinctions, Mamdani traces the history of Sudan and the origins of the current conflict back past the 10th century to demonstrate how the divide between Arab and non-Arab ethnic groups is political rather than racial in nature. The author persuasively argues that the conflict in Darfur is a political problem, with a historical basis, requiring a political solution—facilitated not by the U.N. or a global community but rather by the African Union and other African states. The book's introductory and closing chapters are essential reading for those interested in the topic.

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

If the nations of the world waited too long to react to the genocide in Rwanda, they have been too hasty in reacting to declarations of genocide in Darfur, according to Mamdani, scholar and author of Good Muslim, Bad Muslim (2004). Exploring the moral dilemma of not wanting to be “good Germans” who ignore evil, Mamdani argues for the need to investigate and gain the knowledge necessary to bring about real and lasting peace in the region. He begins with a historical analysis of Sudan and the Darfur region, focusing on traditions, tribes, race, and locality and how assumptions from earlier eras continue to influence current geopolitical viewpoints. He also examines how the cold war and the current war on terror have affected Western viewpoints on the ethnic divisions and politics within Sudan, arguing that the seeming conflict between native and settler tribes is far more complex and requires an approach similar to the South African model of reconciliation after atrocity to bring about lasting peace. By providing broader context, Mamdani brings fresh perspective to conflict in this troubled region. --Vanessa Bush

Reviews

“Mamdani traces the path to the Darfur tragedy through its historical and colonial roots to the current situation, where drought and desertification have led to conflict over land among local tribes, rebellion, and finally to the brutal involvement of the forces of the state and to the efforts of the United Nations and others to help the victims and stop the violence. His radical reevaluation of the Darfur problem is a major contribution to understanding and, it is to be hoped, to ending a shocking human disaster.”
–Sir Brian Urquhart, former Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations

“An incisive and challenging analysis. Framing both Darfur’s war and the ‘Save Darfur’ movement within the paradigm of the West’s historic colonial encounter with Africa, Mahmood Mamdani challenges the reader to reconsider whether Darfur’s crisis is ‘genocide’ warranting foreign military intervention.”
–Alex de Waal, Fellow at Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government and author of War in Darfur

“Mahmood Mamdani has turned his fearless independence of mind on Darfur, Sudan, and the so-called ‘War on Terror,’ producing a book that is as passionate and well-informed as it is intelligent and (for those used only to surface orthodoxies) challenging.”
–Conor Gearty, Director of the Centre for the Study of Human Rights at the London School of Economics

“A brilliantly argued and profoundly challenging critique of liberal support for humanitarian intervention in Darfur. Beyond this, Mamdani sets forth an alternative approach to such catastrophic situations. This book should be required reading for the Obama foreign policy team.”
–Richard Falk, United Nations Special Rapporteur and Professor Emeritus, Princeton University

“A bold, near brilliant re-examination of the conflict in Darfur . . . Essential reading for those interested in the topic.”
–Publishers Weekly

“A necessary contribution to the literature surrounding both humanitarian aid and African geopolitics.”
–Kirkus Reviews

“By providing broader context, Mamdani brings fresh perspective to conflict in this troubled region.”
–Booklist

About the Author

Mahmood Mamdani is Herbert Lehman Professor of Government and a member of the departments of anthropology; political science; and Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures (MEALAC) at the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. His previous books include Good Muslim, Bad Muslim; Citizen and Subject; and When Victims Become Killers. Originally from Uganda, he now divides his time between Kampala and New York, where he lives with his wife and son.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
INTRODUCTION

The Save Darfur movement claims to have learned from Rwanda. But what is the lesson of Rwanda? For many of those mobilized to save Darfur, the lesson is to rescue before it is too late, to act before seeking to understand. Though it is never explicitly stated, Rwanda is recalled as a time when we thought we needed to know more; we waited to find out, to learn the difference between Tutsi and Hutu, and why one was killing the other, but it was too late. Needing to know turned into an excuse for doing nothing. What is new about Darfur, human rights interventionists will tell you, is the realization that sometimes we must respond ethically and not wait. That time is when genocide is occurring.

But how do we know it is genocide? Because we are told it is. This is why the battle for naming turns out to be all- important: Once Darfur is named as the site of genocide, people recognize something they have already seen elsewhere and conclude that what they know is enough to call for action. They need to know no more in order to act. But killing is not what defines genocide. Killing happens in war, in insurgency and counterinsurgency. It is killing with intent to eliminate an entire group—a race, for example—that is genocide.

Those who prioritize knowing over doing assume that genocide is the name of a consequence, and not its context or cause. But how do we decipher “intent” except by focusing on both context and consequence? The connection between the two is the only clue to naming an action. We shall see that the violence in Darfur was driven by two issues: one local, the other national. The local grievance focused on land and had a double background; its deep background was a colonial legacy of parceling Darfur between tribes, with some given homelands and others not; its immediate background was a four-decades-long process of drought and desertification that exacerbated the conflict between tribes with land and thosewithout.The national contextwas a rebellion that brought the state into an ongoing civil (tribal) war.

The conflict in Darfur began as a localized civil war (1987–89) and turned into a rebellion (beginning in 2003). That Darfur was the site of genocide was the view of one side in the civil war—the tribes with land whosought to keep out landless or land-poor tribes fleeing the advancing drought and desert. As early as the 1989 reconciliation conference in Darfur, that side was already using the language of “genocide”—and indeed “holocaust.” But that charge was made against the coalition of tribes they fought, and not against the government of Sudan. In spite of this important difference, that language has come to inform the view of those who blew the whistle—genocide—at theU.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 2004 and was translated into a unanimous resolution of both houses of theU.S.Congress that year.

Observers noted the exceptional brutality with which both sides fought the civil war. This derived in part from the zero-sum nature of the conflict: the land conflict was about group survival. If the stakes were already high, the lethal means to wage this bitter conflict were provided by external powers. In the opening phase, these deadly weapons came from adversaries in the Cold War over Chad: Colonel Muammar al-Quaddafi of Libya and the anti-Libyan triad (Reaganite America, France, and Israel); with the onset of rebellion, the government of Sudan stepped in to wage a brutal counterinsurgency, just as the managers of the War on Terror set about framing the government as genocidaire while shielding the insurgents in the name of justice.

There have been two international reports on the post-2003 violence in Darfur. The first was by the U.N. Commission on Darfur (2005) and the second from the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (2008). Neither paid attention to the land question that has fueled the two-decades-long civil war in Darfur. Instead, they focused on those who had contributed to further militarizing the conflict. But even that focus was partial, limited to the government of Sudan; it was silent about the role of regional and international powers in exacerbating and militarizing the conflict over the Cold War and the subsequent War on Terror.

The U.N. Commission concluded “that the Government of Sudan has not pursued a policy of genocide,” for the element of “genocidal intent” was missing. It derived the government’s lack of genocidal intent from the context of the violence: “it would seem that those who planned and organized attacks on villages pursued the intent to drive the victims from their homes, primarily for purposes of counter-insurgency warfare.”1 In contrast, when the prosecutor of the International Criminal Court charged the president of Sudan, Omar Hasan Ahmad al-Bashir, with genocide, he focused on the consequences of the violence, not its context.

Let us compare deaths related to violence in two places: Darfur and Iraq. The Darfur insurgency began in 2003, the same year as the United States invaded Iraq. I discuss estimates of the number of “excess deaths” (that is, deaths beyond what would ordinarily be expected) in Darfur in chapter 1, but, briefly, the estimates for the period during which the violence was horrendous (2003–4) range from 70,000 to 400,000. Compare this with three available estimates of excess deaths in Iraq following the U.S. invasion in 2003.* The lowest comprehensive estimate, from the Iraqi Health Ministry survey, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, is of 400,000 Iraqi deaths, of which 151,000 are said to be “violent deaths.” A middling estimate is from the British medical journal The Lancet: an estimated 654,965 excess deaths, of which 601,027 are said to be violent. The highest estimate comes from a survey by Opinion Research Business, an independent polling agency located in London: 1,033,000 violent deaths as a result of the conflict. The first two estimates cover the period from the 2003 invasion to June 2006. The third survey extends to August 2007.2

Not only are the figures for Iraq far higher than those for Darfur, ranging from a low of 400,000 to a high of 1,033,000, but the proportion of violent deaths in relation to the total excess mortality is also far higher in Iraq than in Darfur: 38 percent to nearly 92 percent in Iraq, but 20 to 30 percent in Darfur. So why do we call the killing in Darfur genocide but not that in Iraq? Is it because, despite the wide disparity in the number of excess deaths, whether violence- related or violent, victims and perpetrators belong to different races in Darfur but not in Iraq? That is what many assume, but the facts do not bear this out.

Those who blew the whistle on Darfur in 2004 have continued to argue, for almost four years, that the violence in Darfur is racially motivated, perpetrated by “light- skinned Arabs” on “black Africans.” In the chapters that follow, I suggest that this kind of framing of the violence continues the error that came out of the colonial tradition of racializing the peoples of Sudan.

This book invites the reader to rethink Rwanda in light of Darfur. Rather than a call to act in the face of moral certainty, it is an argument against those who substitute moral certainty for knowledge, and who feel virtuous even when acting on the basis of total ignorance.

Indeed, the lesson of Darfur is a warning to those who would act first and understand later. Only those possessed of disproportionate power can afford to assume that knowing is irrelevant, thereby caring little about the consequences of their actions. Not only is this mind-set the driving force behind the War on Terror, it also provides the selfindulgent motto of the human rights interventionist recruited into the ranks of the terror warriors. This feel-good imperative can be summed up as follows: as long as I feel good, nothing else matters. It is this shared mind-set that has turned the movement to Save Darfur into the humanitarian face of the War on Terror.

In contrast to those who suggest that we act the minute the whistle blows, I suggest that, even before the whistle blows, we ceaselessly try to know the world in which we live—and act. Even if we must act on imperfect knowledge, we must never act as if knowing is no longer relevant.

Save Darfur activists combine a contemptuous attitude toward knowing with an imperative to act. Trying hard not to be “good Germans,” they employ techniques of protest politics against their own government—and now the government of China—and turn a deaf ear to experts who they claim only complicate the story with so many details as to miss the main point. Instead, they rely on the evidence of their eyes and avoid any discussion of context. But by letting pictures and interviews do the talking, they have opened an entire movement to “the CNN effect.” If “good Germans” were taught to trust their leaders first and ask questions later, the good souls mobilized to save Darfur are taught to trust pictures above all else and ask questions later. Above all, they strip Darfur—and the violence in Darfur—of context.

Product Details

Hardcover: 416 pages
Publisher: Pantheon (March 17, 2009)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0307377237
ISBN-13: 978-0307377234

Sophisticated Attacks, but by Whom?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/world/asia/28group.html

November 28, 2008
Sophisticated Attacks, but by Whom?
By ALAN COWELL and SOUAD MEKHENNET

PARIS — A day after the terror attacks in Mumbai that killed over 100 people, one question remained as impenetrable as the smoke that still billowed from two of the city’s landmark hotels: who carried out the attacks?

The Indian authorities say they captured some of the attackers, so some answers may emerge soon. But for now, their identities remain a mystery. Surviving witnesses recalled the gunmen as masked young men in unremarkable T-shirts and jeans, some heavily armed, wearing backpacks filled with weapons. The only claim of responsibility came from a group that may not even exist.

The assaults represented a marked departure in scope and ambition from other recent terrorist attacks in India, which have singled out local people rather than foreigners and hit single rather than multiple targets.

The Mumbai assault, by contrast, was seemed directed at foreigners, involved hostage taking and was aimed at multiple and highly symbolic targets.

Prime Minister Manmohan Singh of India said the attacks probably had “external linkages,” reflecting calculations among Indian officials that the level of planning, preparation and coordination could not have been achieved without help from experienced terrorists. But some security experts insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims, with a domestic agenda.

The e-mail message taking responsibility that was sent to Indian media outlets on Wednesday night said the attackers were from a group called Deccan Mujahedeen. Deccan is a neighborhood of the Indian city of Hyderabad. The word also describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahedeen is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters.

But security experts drew a blank on any such organization. Sajjan Gohel, a security expert in London, called it a “front name” and said the group was “nonexistent.”

An Indian security official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to be identified said the name suggested ties to a group called Indian Mujahedeen, which has been implicated in a string of bombing attacks in India killing about 200 people this year alone.

On Sept. 15, an e-mail message published in Indian newspapers and said to have been sent by representatives of Indian Mujahedeen threatened potential “deadly attacks” in Mumbai. The message warned counterterrorism officials in the city that “you are already on our hit-list and this time very, very seriously.”

Several high-ranking law enforcement officials, including the chief of the antiterrorism squad and a commissioner of police, were, indeed, reported killed in the attacks in Mumbai.

With relations long strained between India and Pakistan, particularly over the disputed territory of Kashmir, suspicions turned toward Al Qaeda or Pakistani militants. The Indian security official said the attackers likely had ties to Lashkar-e-Taiba, a guerrilla group run by Pakistani intelligence in the conflict with India in the disputed territory of Kashmir. On Thursday, the group denied involved in the Mumbai attacks. India also blamed Lashkar-e-Taiba for a suicide assault on its Parliament by gunmen in December 2001 that led to a perilous military standoff with Pakistan.

The Indian official also suggested the foot-soldiers in the attack might have emerged from an outlawed militant group of Islamic students. Photographs from security cameras showed some youthful attackers carrying assault rifles and smiling as they began the operation.

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she pointed to India’s domestic problems, and long tensions between Hindus, who make up about 80 percent of India’s population of 1.13 billion, and Muslims, who make up 13.4 percent.

“There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India,” Ms. Fair said. “The economic disparities are startling and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India.

“The public political face of India says, ‘Our Muslims have not been radicalized,’ she said. “But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that’s not true. India’s Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.”

“Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda,” she said. “But this is a domestic issue. This is not India’s 9/11.”

Alan Cowell reported from Paris, and Souad Mekhennet from Frankfurt. Mark McDonald contributed reporting from Hong Kong, and Salman Masood from Islamabad, Pakistan.

Experts doubt Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks

http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/11/27/asia/28group.php

Experts doubt Qaeda link in Mumbai attacks
By Mark McDonald
Thursday, November 27, 2008

HONG KONG: The men came wearing black hoods, firing automatic weapons and throwing grenades, taking hostages, attacking two hotels, a cinema, a café, a train station and other popular and undefended "soft targets."

An e-mail message to Indian media outlets that claimed responsibility for the bloody attacks in Mumbai on Wednesday night said the militants were from the Deccan Mujahideen.

Global terrorism experts said Thursday they had never heard of the group. And based on its tactics, they said, it was probably not a cell or group linked to Al Qaeda.

"It's even unclear whether it's a real group or not," said Bruce Hoffman, a professor at the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University and the author of the book "Inside Terrorism." "It could be a cover name for another group, or a name adopted just for this particular incident."

Christine Fair, senior political scientist and a South Asia expert at the RAND Corporation, was careful to say that the identity of the terrorists could not yet be known. But she insisted the style of the attacks and the targets in Mumbai suggested that the militants were likely to be Indian Muslims - and not linked to Al Qaeda or the violent South Asian terrorist group Lashkar-e-Taiba.

"There's absolutely nothing Al Qaeda-like about it," she said of the attack. "Did you see any suicide bombers? And there are no fingerprints of Lashkar. They don't do hostage taking, and they don't do grenades."

Hoffman agreed that the assault was "not exactly Al Qaeda's modus operandi, which is suicide attacks."

But he said the timed attacks, which he called "tactical, sophisticated and coordinated," perhaps pointed to a broader organization behind the perpetrators. Fair also noted that the fact the group had not proclaimed its ideology in a manifesto was "not at all unusual."

"You don't see these types of terrorist operations very often, if at all," Hoffman said. "These aren't just a bunch of radical guys coming together to cause mayhem.

"This takes a different skill set. It doesn't take much skill to make a bomb. This is not just pressing a button as a suicide bomber and dying. You don't learn this over the Internet."

The word Deccan describes the middle and south of India, which is dominated by the Deccan Plateau. Mujahideen, of course, is the commonly used Arabic word for holy fighters. The very name - if it is a real group - suggests a domestic islamist agenda.

"It's maybe not so much a group as a cell that will take on a name for a specific operation," said Fair. "In India you hear these unusual names."

Fair did not agree that the attacks on Wednesday necessarily required deep planning and training.

"This wasn't something that required a logistical mastermind," she said. "These were not hardened targets. A huge train station with zero security. Two hotels with no security, both owned by Indians. Leopold's Café. How hard is it, really? It's not rocket science."

Fair believes the attacks could be "yet another manifestation of domestic terrorism" that has its genesis in a longstanding institutional discrimination against Muslims.

"There are a lot of very, very angry Muslims in India," she said, "The economic disparities are startling, and India has been very slow to publicly embrace its rising Muslim problem. You cannot put lipstick on this pig. This is a major domestic political challenge for India."

The CIA puts the population of India at 1.15 billion, with Hindus making up about 80 percent of the total and Muslims 13.4 percent.

Fair said one incident - "a watershed event" - that continues to anger Muslims were the riots that swept nearby Gujarat State in 2002. The violence killed between 1,000 and 2,000 people, most of them Muslims.

"The public political face of India says, 'Our Muslims have not been radicalized.' But the Indian intelligence apparatus knows that's not true. India's Muslim communities are being sucked into the global landscape of Islamist jihad.

"Indians will have a strong incentive to link this to Al Qaeda. 'Al Qaeda's in your toilet!' But this is a domestic issue. This is not India's 9/11."

For Hoffman, who has studied terrorism for more than 30 years, the Mumbai attacks are "alarming on a number of levels."

"It's not often that things in terrorism alarm me. So much is a repeat of what we see almost every day, like suicide bombings. There's no real innovation in terrorism, which is why 9/11 was so terrifying, because it was so innovative and heinously clever.

"But these attacks show how a handful of men, basically using weapons off the shelf, can paralyze a city and frustrate highly trained security forces. These attacks were calculated to spread alarm and anxiety - to put it quite frankly, to unhinge things - and that's exactly what they've done."

Deepak Chopra on Mumbai

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michelle-haimoff/deepak-chopra-on-mumbai-t_b_146837.html

Michelle Haimoff
November 27, 2008
Deepak Chopra on Mumbai: Too Controversial for CNN?

Read More: Auto Industry, Big Oil, Cars, Chevrolet, Cnn, Deepak Chopra, Deepak Chopra Cnn, Deepak Chopra Mumbai, India, Larry King, Mumbai, Mumbai Attacks, Mumbai Deaths, Mumbai Hotel Shootings, Mumbai Terrorist Attacks, Oil, Oil Industry, Saudi Arabia, Terrorism, War On Terror, Politics News

A CNN journalist interviewed Deepak Chopra last night about his take on the Mumbai attacks and how to prevent similar attacks in the future, but it looked like producers cut Chopra off when he started to get too controversial.

Chopra: What we have seen in Mumbai has been brewing for a long time, and the war on terrorism and the attack on Iraq compounded the situation. What we call "collateral damage" and going after the wrong people actually turns moderates into extremists, and that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster in Bombay. Now the worst thing that could happen is there's a backlash on the Muslims from the fundamental Hindus in India, which then will perpetuate the problem. Inflammation will create more inflammation.

CNN: Let me jump in on that because you're presuming something very important, which is that it's Muslims who have carried out these attacks and, in some cases, with Washington in their sights.

Chopra: Ultimately the message is always toward Washington because it's also the perception that Washington, in their way, directly or indirectly funds both sides of the war on terror. They fund our side, then our petrol dollars going to Saudi Arabia through Pakistan and ultimately these terrorist groups, which are very organized. You know Jonathan, it takes a lot of money to do this. It takes a lot of organization to do this. Where's the money coming from, you know? The money is coming from the vested interests. I'm not talking about conspiracy theories, but what happens is, our policies, our foreign policies, actually perpetuate this problem. Because, you know, 25% of the world's population is Muslim and they're the fastest growing segment of the population of the world. The more we alienate the Muslim population, the more the moderates are likely to become extremists.

CNN: I hope you're - you've - (CNN edits out the rest and inserts him concluding the interview saying "Indian physician and philosopher Deepak Chopra.")

I don't know why CNN wrapped the Chopra interview so hastily, but perhaps it was because the network had a Chevrolet ad to run. Chevrolet. Which is a manufacturer of automobiles. Which are propelled by gasoline. Which comes from oil rich countries like Saudi Arabia. Which fund Islamic fundamentalists. Which do things like attack hotels in India.

As Thomas L. Friedman has been saying for years, "the price of oil and the pace of freedom are inversely correlated." When oil prices are high, anti-democratic regimes become richer and more powerful, terrorists get funding and the world is unsafe. When oil prices are low, the "petroauthoritarian regimes [have] to open themselves to foreign investment and educate and empower their people more in order to earn income." When there is no demand for oil at all, there is simply no money with which to fund terrorists.

I hope that CNN producers didn't edit the end of the Chopra interview in deference to their car company advertisers. Chopra touched on similar topics with Larry King earlier in the day, so perhaps cutting the interview off was just a formatting decision. I'm going to pretend that it's that. Because if I thought that a news network in a democratic country was censoring the connection between oil dependence and terrorism for fear of upsetting advertisers I wouldn't be able to sleep at night.

Tancredo's remarks promote anti-Americanism

http://onlinejournal.com/artman/publish/article_2302.shtml

Tancredo's remarks promote anti-Americanism
By Ahmad Al-Akhras, Ph.D.
Online Journal Contributing Writer
Aug 15, 2007

It was shocking to hear presidential candidate Rep. Tom Tancredo (R-Col.) call for the bombing of Muslim holy sites as a deterrent to terrorist attacks on our nation and that is part of his “presidential anti-terror package.” When reported overseas, such bigoted words can contribute to anti-Americanism, endangering Americans.

Recently, Tancredo told an audience, "If it is up to me, we are going to explain that an attack on this homeland of that nature would be followed by an attack on the holy sites in Mecca and Medina." The congressman, two years ago, engaged in similar rhetoric during a radio interview in Florida.

Already, Pakistani leader General Pervez Musharraf, a U.S. ally, has pulled out of a Bush administration supported grand assembly of Pakistani and Afghan tribal leaders, in part due the impact in Pakistan of Tancredo’s comments (along with those of Democratic candidate Sen. Barak Obama). This grand assembly was to be a tool to help build support against the Taliban.

Here at home, personalities more stable than Tancredo's saw the dangerous potential of his words immediately.

State Department spokesman Sean McCormack told reporters, " . . . the official position of the United States government is that those remarks are just outrageous.” Another spokesperson at State characterized Tancredo’s proposal as “absolutely crazy.”

During a Republican presidential debate in Iowa over the weekend, former Wisconsin Governor Tommy Thompson said, "I sincerely believe that bombing religious artifacts and religious holy sites would do nothing but unify 1 billion Muslims against us."

After the debate, former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee said the idea is "appalling." Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA) also said, "I wouldn't follow that."

Neil Steinberg of The Chicago Sun-Times was right on the money when he said "Threatening to attack holy cities is what terrorists, not Americans, do."

America's relationship with Muslims and the Islamic world must be a central piece of any future administration's policy.

Sending a message to our Muslim allies in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere that their holy city is a priority target will certainly chill their desire to aid us.

Tancredo’s words will be added to the speeches of the hate mongers as they work to convince influential minds that America hates Islam.

If Rep. Tancredo wants cheap press he should not seek it at the expense of his fellow citizen’s security.

Congressman Tancredo must retract and apologize for these remarks. If not, fellow Americans should let him face a room of empty chairs whenever he seeks to campaign in their states.

Neither Islam nor Muslims are the enemy. The real enemy is ignorance.

Ahmad Al-Akhras is the Vice Chair of the Council on American-Islamic Relations. He resides in Columbus, Ohio and can be reached at ahmad@alakhras.org.

Bush like Hitler, says first Muslim in Congress

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2007/07/14/wbush114.xml

Bush like Hitler, says first Muslim in Congress
By Toby Harnden in Washington
15/07/2007

Keith Ellison, a convert to Islam, has cultivated a moderate image since being elected last November

America's first Muslim congressman has provoked outrage by apparently comparing President George W Bush to Adolf Hitler and hinting that he might have been responsible for the September 11 attacks.

Addressing a gathering of atheists in his home state of Minnesota, Keith Ellison, a Democrat, compared the 9/11 atrocities to the destruction of the Reichstag, the German parliament, in 1933. This was probably burned down by the Nazis in order to justify Hitler's later seizure of emergency powers.

"It's almost like the Reichstag fire, kind of reminds me of that," Mr Ellison said. "After the Reichstag was burned, they blamed the Communists for it, and it put the leader [Hitler] of that country in a position where he could basically have authority to do whatever he wanted."

To applause from his audience of 300 members of Atheists for Human Rights, Mr Ellison said he would not accuse the Bush administration of planning 9/11 because "you know, that's how they put you in the nut-ball box - dismiss you".

advertisementVice-President Dick Cheney's stance of refusing to answer some questions from Congress was "the very definition of totalitarianism, authoritarianism and dictatorship", he added.

Mr Ellison also raised eyebrows by telling his audience: "You'll always find this Muslim standing up for your right to be atheists all you want."

A convert to Islam who was previously linked to the extremist Nation of Islam, Mr Ellison, 42, has cultivated a moderate image since being elected last November, concentrating on issues such as health and education.

He is an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq. But he angered his own anti-war supporters by voting for a budget bill that aims to end the war over the next 18 months. His followers want an immediate withdrawal of US troops from Iraq.

After his speech was reported, Mr Ellison said he accepted that Osama bin Laden was responsible for 9/11. But his demagogic comments threaten to plunge him in controversy.

Mark Drake, of the Republican party in Minnesota, said: "To compare the democratically elected leader of the United States of America to Hitler is an absolute moral outrage which trivialises the horrors of Nazi Germany."