Incisive-View

Defend Your Freedom
by M.Hussein


Almost every day we hear new stories in the papers about so-called ‘security measures’ being taken by our government in an attempt to combat terrorism and crime. What we should realise is that these measures, far from effectively tackling terrorism, do nothing but infringe on our civil liberties and our rights to privacy. A small compromise is understandable and maybe even expected; but not when it gets to a point where everyone is under strict surveillance and treated like a suspect. The British nation is walking slowly towards a totalitarian state where all aspects of our public and private life i.e. what we buy, what we eat, what we say and where we go; all are known and regulated by the authorities.

We only need to look at our counterparts in America to get a glimpse of what could further happen here on UK shores: Already millions of people in the U.S have had their telephone conversations monitored by the government without any knowledge of the courts (something our current government has the powers to do under the RIPA act of 2000); a blacklist of names flagged by computer systems ensures that it is almost impossible for certain people to travel freely using air transport around the country – there have even been cases where pensioners have found their way on to this list simply for being outspoken against the war; bank transactions are being monitored by the state; foreign nationals are having to give up their biometrics in order to enter the country… the list is almost endless.

Far from being a situation where “if you have done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear”, the reality is one of an insecure government - remember the frequent and atrocious false positives and flawed “intelligence"? - Jean Charles De Menezes, Forrest Gate, Birmingham Six etc. Yet, the government is seeking ever more expansive and intrusive powers, playing up the general public's artificially heightened fears (the Heathrow airport scare, the "liquid bomb" scare etc); the government, as of 2000's Anti-Terrorism Act, already had the requisite legislation (indeed according to many experts far more than necessary for combating the problem).

To judge the provisions of these powers we need to be aware of how the word “terrorism” is being realigned - Sir Ian Blair, live on UK television stated “I don’t think people should distinguish crime and terrorism too easily”; the U.S patriot act and the UK terrorism act also similarly define terrorism to include general domestic crime; in effect this means that anti-terrorism legislation can be used against anyone suspected of any crime i.e. denial of access to lawyers, detention without trial etc.

A study produced by a group of academics called the Surveillance Studies Network recently was presented to the 28th International Data Protection and Privacy Commissioners' Conference in London. It predicts that by 2016, shoppers could be scanned as they enter stores, curfew restrictions could be imposed as part of daily life, schools could bring in cards allowing parents to monitor what their children eat, and jobs may be refused to applicants who are seen as a health risk. Is this a society which you would wish to live in?

Consider some of the measures which are in operation or are in consideration:

1. Oystercards, these systematically collect information and track movements of commuters which is then stored in a large data warehouse. The police have already made numerous requests for information from these databases, of which these requests are increasing at a dramatic rate every month. Although the scheme seems to be entirely voluntary, people that choose not to use it are being heavily penalised through excessively higher fares.

2. The information sharing index, to be put on trial next year stores information of all children in England and Wales. While it does store limited information, the prospect of it being expanded using the implemented infrastructure is something which is more than viable.

3. We already in the UK have the highest density of CCTV cameras in the world, police and councils are now considering monitoring conversations in the street using high-powered microphones attached to CCTV cameras. The reason given behind this is to record aggressive exchanges before they become violent. How much longer till such technologies are implemented within our very homes?

4. Biometric ID cards coming in to use in the next few years - further monitoring of every aspect of our lives.

5. The NHS spine database currently being developed and to be put in trial would be the biggest database in the word, holding medical information on about 50 million patients in the UK. Not only unsafe, but fears have also been voiced about the number of people being able to view the data. This includes third party companies, and government.

6. Implementing microchips on individuals to track ones movement – already being trialled in America, this has been discussed and presents a major breach of our civil liberties.

What can you do?

This is far from a short one-off campaign. We need to pressure the media to highlight and publicly debate these violations of our civil liberties, we need to write to our MP’s asking them to not fall silent to these measures, and we must also show more support for civil liberties groups such as Liberty who have a proven track record for fighting for your rights and defending your freedom.

You can use www.writetothem.com to lobby your MP. Below is a sample letter you can use a basis for your own letter. We, as always, suggest that you personalise and change this to the best of your ability to ensure it has the greatest effect.

Dear [Your MP’s Name],

I am writing to voice my concern at the ever increasing measures being taken by our government in the name of combating crime and terrorism. Rather than doing such, these measures inflict upon the civil rights and privacy of every individual - leading to the situation where instead of being treated as citizens we are all being treated as suspects.

As your constituent, I urge you to act and put pressure on our government and not compromise and sacrifice our civil liberties in tackling the terrorist threat. However, think of real and effective ways of tackling the issue, starting with a change in our foreign policy.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Yours Sincerely,

[Your Name]

There is also currently a petition on this subject on the official Downing Street website. Please sign it and forward it to your friends and family:

http://petitions.pm.gov.uk/No-more-fear/

Have a read of this article from the Independent - very incisive and above all balanced. A job well done by Robert Fisk.

Saddam to the gallows. It was an easy equation. Who could be more deserving of that last walk to the scaffold - that crack of the neck at the end of a rope - than the Beast of Baghdad, the Hitler of the Tigris, the man who murdered untold hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis while spraying chemical weapons over his enemies? Our masters will tell us in a few hours that it is a "great day" for Iraqis and will hope that the Muslim world will forget that his death sentence was signed - by the Iraqi "government", but on behalf of the Americans - on the very eve of the Eid al-Adha, the Feast of the Sacrifice, the moment of greatest forgiveness in the Arab world.

But history will record that the Arabs and other Muslims and, indeed, many millions in the West, will ask another question this weekend, a question that will not be posed in other Western newspapers because it is not the narrative laid down for us by our presidents and prime ministers - what about the other guilty men?

No, Tony Blair is not Saddam. We don't gas our enemies. George W Bush is not Saddam. He didn't invade Iran or Kuwait. He only invaded Iraq. But hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians are dead - and thousands of Western troops are dead - because Messrs Bush and Blair and the Spanish Prime Minister and the Italian Prime Minister and the Australian Prime Minister went to war in 2003 on a potage of lies and mendacity and, given the weapons we used, with great brutality.

In the aftermath of the international crimes against humanity of 2001 we have tortured, we have murdered, we have brutalised and killed the innocent - we have even added our shame at Abu Ghraib to Saddam's shame at Abu Ghraib - and yet we are supposed to forget these terrible crimes as we applaud the swinging corpse of the dictator we created.

Who encouraged Saddam to invade Iran in 1980, which was the greatest war crime he has committed for it led to the deaths of a million and a half souls? And who sold him the components for the chemical weapons with which he drenched Iran and the Kurds? We did. No wonder the Americans, who controlled Saddam's weird trial, forbad any mention of this, his most obscene atrocity, in the charges against him. Could he not have been handed over to the Iranians for sentencing for this massive war crime? Of course not. Because that would also expose our culpability.

And the mass killings we perpetrated in 2003 with our depleted uranium shells and our "bunker buster" bombs and our phosphorous, the murderous post-invasion sieges of Fallujah and Najaf, the hell-disaster of anarchy we unleashed on the Iraqi population in the aftermath of our "victory" - our "mission accomplished" - who will be found guilty of this? Such expiation as we might expect will come, no doubt, in the self-serving memoirs of Blair and Bush, written in comfortable and wealthy retirement.

Hours before Saddam's death sentence, his family - his first wife, Sajida, and Saddam's daughter and their other relatives - had given up hope.

"Whatever could be done has been done - we can only wait for time to take its course," one of them said last night. But Saddam knew, and had already announced his own "martyrdom": he was still the president of Iraq and he would die for Iraq. All condemned men face a decision: to die with a last, grovelling plea for mercy or to die with whatever dignity they can wrap around themselves in their last hours on earth. His last trial appearance - that wan smile that spread over the mass-murderer's face - showed us which path Saddam intended to walk to the noose.

I have catalogued his monstrous crimes over the years. I have talked to the Kurdish survivors of Halabja and the Shia who rose up against the dictator at our request in 1991 and who were betrayed by us - and whose comrades, in their tens of thousands, along with their wives, were hanged like thrushes by Saddam's executioners.

I have walked round the execution chamber of Abu Ghraib - only months, it later transpired, after we had been using the same prison for a few tortures and killings of our own - and I have watched Iraqis pull thousands of their dead relatives from the mass graves of Hilla. One of them has a newly-inserted artificial hip and a medical identification number on his arm. He had been taken directly from hospital to his place of execution. Like Donald Rumsfeld, I have even shaken the dictator's soft, damp hand. Yet the old war criminal finished his days in power writing romantic novels.

It was my colleague, Tom Friedman - now a messianic columnist for The New York Times - who perfectly caught Saddam's character just before the 2003 invasion: Saddam was, he wrote, "part Don Corleone, part Donald Duck". And, in this unique definition, Friedman caught the horror of all dictators; their sadistic attraction and the grotesque, unbelievable nature of their barbarity.

But that is not how the Arab world will see him. At first, those who suffered from Saddam's cruelty will welcome his execution. Hundreds wanted to pull the hangman's lever. So will many other Kurds and Shia outside Iraq welcome his end. But they - and millions of other Muslims - will remember how he was informed of his death sentence at the dawn of the Eid al-Adha feast, which recalls the would-be sacrifice by Abraham, of his son, a commemoration which even the ghastly Saddam cynically used to celebrate by releasing prisoners from his jails. "Handed over to the Iraqi authorities," he may have been before his death. But his execution will go down - correctly - as an American affair and time will add its false but lasting gloss to all this - that the West destroyed an Arab leader who no longer obeyed his orders from Washington, that, for all his wrongdoing (and this will be the terrible get-out for Arab historians, this shaving away of his crimes) Saddam died a "martyr" to the will of the new "Crusaders".

When he was captured in November of 2003, the insurgency against American troops increased in ferocity. After his death, it will redouble in intensity again. Freed from the remotest possibility of Saddam's return by his execution, the West's enemies in Iraq have no reason to fear the return of his Baathist regime. Osama bin Laden will certainly rejoice, along with Bush and Blair. And there's a thought. So many crimes avenged.

But we will have got away with it.

If you missed it, here it is for you to see:

Was forwarded this moving song by a friend, thought I'd post it up on here.





The lyrics:

Look into my eyes
Tell me what you see
You don’t see a damn thing
‘cause you can’t relate to me
You’re blinded by our differences
My life makes no sense to you
I’m the persecuted one
You’re the red, white and blue
Each day you wake in tranquility
No fears to cross your eyes
Each day I wake in gratitude
Thanking God He let me rise
You worry about your education
And the bills you have to pay
I worry about my vulnerable life
And if I’ll survive another day
Your biggest fear is getting a ticket
As you cruise your Cadillac
My fear is that the tank that has just left
Will turn around and come back

Yet, do you know the truth of where your money goes?
Do you let your media deceive your mind?
Is this a truth nobody, nobody, nobody knows
Has our world gone all blind?
Ooohh, let’s not cry tonight, I promise you one day it’s through
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters,
Ooohh, shine a light for every soul that ain’t with us no more
Ohh my brothers, Ohh my sisters,
…
See I’ve known terror for quite some time
57 years so cruel
Terror breathes the air I breathe
It’s the checkpoint on my way to school
Terror is the robbery of my land
And the torture of my mother
The imprisonment of my innocent father
The bullet in my baby brother
The bulldozers and the tanks
The gases and the guns
The bombs that fall outside my door
All due to your funds
You blame me for defending myself
Against the ways of my enemies
I’m terrorized in my own land
And I’m the terrorist?
…
America, do you realize that the taxes that you pay
Feed the forces that traumatize my every living day
So if I won’t be here tomorrow
It’s written in my fate
May the future bring a brighter day
The end of our wait

By Karen Armstrong

249 pages. HarperCollins/Atlas Books. $21.95.
Reader's opinions

Since then Muhammad has been defined by his detractors: who have called him a terrorist, a lunatic and most colorfully — by the Rev. Jerry Vines, former president of the Southern Baptist Convention— a “demon-possessed pedophile.” Even Pope Benedict XVI, whatever his intention, created an uproar by unearthing a remark from a 14th-century emperor who cited Muhammad’s contributions to religion as “only evil and inhuman.” Is this the prophet of the world’s 1.3 billion Muslims?

It may be time then to put down the biographies of John Adams and Ronald Reagan and devote a little attention to Muhammad. But beware. Several new biographies picture Muhammad through the lens of a suicide bomber, and ultimately these books reveal more about suicide bombers than Muhammad.

To glimpse how the vast majority of the world’s Muslims understand their prophet and their faith, Karen Armstrong’s short biography is a good place to start. The volume is part of a series called “Eminent Lives”: small profiles of big-name subjects by big-name authors.

Ms. Armstrong, best known for “A History of God,” is a scholar and a former nun with a genius for presenting religions as products of temporal forces — like geography, culture and economics — without minimizing the workings of transcendent spiritual forces.

She profiles Muhammad as both a mystic touched by God on a mountaintop and a canny political and social reformer. He preached loyalty to God rather than tribe; reconciliation rather than retaliation; care for orphans and the poor; and in many ways, empowerment of women, which will be a surprise to some. The Koran gave women property rights and freed orphans from the obligation to marry their guardians: radical changes at a time when women were traded like camels.

Ms. Armstrong writes: “His life was a tireless campaign against greed, injustice and arrogance. He realized that Arabia was at a turning point and that the old way of thinking would no longer suffice, so he wore himself out in the creative effort to evolve an entirely new solution.” In a nod to her subtitle, “A Prophet for Our Time,” she argues that as of Sept. 11, 2001, we have entered a new historical era that requires an equally thorough re-evaluation.

This notion that we have entered a new era was one of the reasons that Ms. Armstrong decided to revisit a subject she had already covered in 1992 with “Muhammad: A Biography of the Prophet.”

Muhammad (570-632) was born in a nouveau riche Mecca. Unlike most Arabs, the Meccans were not nomads but traders and financiers who profited from the caravans that stopped in Mecca for water from its underground spring. The site was holy to the Bedouin because it housed the Kabah, a cube-shaped granite building that was tended by Muhammad’s tribe, the Quraysh.

Muhammad was orphaned as a child and taken in by relatives, but his fortunes changed at the age of 25 when he married Khadija, an older widow who hired him to manage her caravans. At 40 Muhammad declared he had been seized by a terrifying force and commanded by God to recite scripture.

Khadija was his first convert. At first he shared his revelations with a small group of friends and family members, who became his disciples, “convinced that he was the long-awaited Arab prophet.” As Muhammad, who was illiterate, recited new passages, believers wrote them down: a compilation that became the Koran.

The Meccans were offended by Muhammad’s preaching that the ideal was submission. (Islam means submission.) He taught that the proper way to pray was to bow, forehead to the earth, “a posture that would be repugnant to the haughty Quraysh,” Ms. Armstrong notes. Muhammad also insisted that the Meccans abandon the worship of their three stone goddesses, because there was only one God, Allah.

Muhammad and his followers were exiled to Medina, 250 miles north of Mecca. He did not conquer Medina so much as form alliances and win converts. But there were epic battles with the Quraysh and other tribes, and Muhammad was a fighter and tactician.

“Muhammad was not a pacifist,” Ms. Armstrong writes. “He believed that warfare was sometimes inevitable and even necessary.”

This is why some passages in the Koran are rules for warfare. Terrorist groups cite these selectively — or contort or violate them. The Koran says not to take aim at civilians; some terrorist groups declare all Israelis to be combatants because Israelis are required to perform military service.

Ms. Armstrong declines to stand in judgment of events that have scandalized other biographers; as when Muhammad falls for the wife of his adopted adult son and takes her as his fifth wife. Ms. Armstrong writes: “This story has shocked some of Muhammad’s Western critics who are used to more ascetic, Christian heroes, but the Muslim sources seem to find nothing untoward in this demonstration of their prophet’s virility. Nor are they disturbed that Muhammad had more than four wives: why should God not give his prophet a few privileges?”

Muhammad ultimately took back Mecca and reclaimed the Kabah, still the destination for the Muslim pilgrimage. Ms. Armstrong argues that he prevailed by compassion, wisdom and steadfast submission to God. This is the power of his story and the reason that more parents around the world name their children Muhammad than any other name.

New York Times

Borat portrays himself in the movie as an anti-semitic, misogynistic and a racist who openly hates gypsies and jokes about rape & incest.

Cohen himself is an observant Jew and in 1989 first acted (in Neil Simon's play Biloxi Blues) with the Jewish Zionist youth movement group "Habonim Dror." If he is a zionist than his underlying ambition is to see the destruction of Palestine and many other Muslim countries for the vision of the “greater Israel”. So bearing that in mind, although we completely condemn his anti-Semitic remarks as all Muslims should, we question his objectives.

It shouldn’t take one by surprise that Cohen, a man who spends his holidays in Israel, would portray anti-Semitism as a primitive medieval adventure. Borat is set to present anti-Semitism as a backward reactionary tendency. By doing so Baron Cohen and his team are there to deflect criticism of global Zionism in general and of Israel in particular. This is indeed a clever non-violent legitimate political agenda.

If you look carefully at the Borat movie poster you will see Sacha Cohen smiling, with his thumb up and wearing a ring. Now look carefully at the ring and you will see ALLAH embossed on the side of the ring and on the other side engraving of the Kaaba (the house of god for Muslims in Mecca). What possible connection does this have to the movie and to the message of Borat? Therefore we would suggest that subconsciously he is implying that his immoral behaviour is connected to Islam. This is the ring that Malcolm X wore after returning from Hajj. This is a clear mockery of the name of ALLAH.