Pakistan: Enraged Muslim mob of thousands burns Christian homes over blasphemy accusation »

Pakistan’s blasphemy laws are routinely used to persecute Christians. The world “human rights” community, however, takes no notice. To do so would be “Islamophobic.” More on this story. “Alleged blasphemy: Mob burns scores of Christian homes in Lahore,” by Rana Tanveer for the Express Tribune, March 9 (thanks to Lookmann):

LAHORE: A highly-charged mob of thousands burnt more than 40 Christian houses in Badami Bagh area of Lahore on Saturday to “take revenge of the blasphemy” allegedly committed by a Christian two days earlier.
Express News had earlier reported that around 100 houses were burnt by the mob.

Eyewitnesses said that the mob broke into the houses, looted them and burnt the remaining belongings on the roads.

SSP Operations Suhail Sukhera and the SHO of Badami Bagh were also reportedly injured when the mob pelted a police party with stones.

Punjab Law Minister Rana Sanaullah told Express News that he saw no reason for the mob’s violence especially after the person accused of blasphemy had been arrested on Friday. He added that cases have been registered against those responsible for Saturday’s vandalism and that they will be prosecuted.

Sanaullah added that all those whose property had been damaged will be compensated within five days.

Shahi Imran, who had filed the blasphemy FIR, told The Express Tribune that he was not responsible for the incident and he had left the area when the mob arrived to burn the houses. He maintained that the accused should be taught a lesson but the other Christian families should not be harmed.

SSP Sukhera, when contacted, denied that the houses were set on fire and said that the police personnel was present in the area.

President Asif Ali Zardari took notice of the incident and sought a report from authorities, reported Radio Pakistan.

On Friday, a mob of almost 3,000 people forced the Christian community to flee for their lives, leaving behind their houses and possessions unprotected….

Savan was arrested and shifted to an undisclosed location.

After two years, Millat Facebook is on the verge of collapse. By Rana Tanveer

Anti-western anger may bring out street power, but, at least in Pakistan, does not appear to be commercially viable. MillatFacebook, meant to be a religio-nationalistic alternative to the global social network Facebook, is in dire financial straits and is seeking donations to pay its server hosting bills.

In an e-mail sent out to its users on December 10, MillatFacebook appealed for donations to pay its servers, which it says are based in the United States. Yet the e-mail was riddled with factual errors and highly suspect claims, casting doubts on the integrity and intellectual capacity of its owners.

The website, for instance, insists on calling itself “the only Facebook rival”, ignoring the existence of a wide range of social networks such as Google Plus, LinkedIn, and others. The e-mail starts off with a person introducing themselves only as “S.O.A.” and then launching into a poorly worded e-mail appealing for funds. In the e-mail, the company claims to be spending thousands of dollars on its web hosting, and then says that it is looking to raise $581 from its users in order to defray those costs.

“As you can imagine, cost of running a social network is never easy and very costly. Current month we are facing a shortfall of 581USD (sic) in server payments. (We are paying 1000s of USD in server payments ourselves and now need your helping hand to meet this shortfall). We are asking for a contribution from you that will help us towards our goal of keeping this Peaceful Social Network run forever and defeat blasphemer facebook. inshaALLAH, Aameen. Any amount that you can contribute would be greatly appreciated,” said the e-mail.

The claim that the website requires thousands of dollars in web-hosting costs seems dubious. According to websitetrafficspy.com, a leading source of internet traffic information, millatfacebook.com attracts an average of two users a day. With traffic that low, it seems unlikely that MillatFacebook would need to buy expensive web hosting facilities.

The website is asking its donors to give money through credit card payments on its homepage, but Chief Operating Officer Umar Zaheer Meer admitted to The Express Tribune that the fundraising drive was not going well. He claimed that donors were reluctant to give money via credit cards owing to “cyber laws” which he did not specify.

According to Meer, MillatFacebook has over 476,000 members, though he did not specify how many were active. When it was launched, MillatFacebook claimed that it would not have any paid advertising, though it now has ads and still seems to be struggling to pay its bills. By contrast, the Silicon Valley-based Facebook has over one billion active users as of October 2012 and had annual revenues exceeding $3.7 billion in 2011. According to a recent report, more than eight million Pakistanis use Facebook.

The website was launched in May 25, 2011, six days after the Lahore High Court issued an order banning Facebook, after one of the website’s users created a competition called “Everyone Drawn Muhammad [PBUH] Day”. Muhammad Azhar Siddique, the man who filed the petition that resulted in that temporary ban, convinced Omer Zaheer Meer, now CEO of MillatFacebook, to start the website. The hope was that the ban on Facebook would be permanent, forcing many Pakistanis to look for an alternative.

The website was launched at a ceremony at the Lahore High Court Bar Association and was billed as the alternative to Facebook. Yet, unluckily for the founders, access to Facebook was restored on May 30, 2010, snuffing out any chance the website may have had to catch on amongst Pakistani internet users.

The Meers appear to despise Facebook, yet have designed MillatFacebook to look almost exactly like their supposed rival. Users of both websites, however, say that MillatFacebook is a far less functional website, with one user going so far as to say that “the quality of user experience is so abysmal that it does not merit the humble title, ‘Facebook clone’.”

MillatFacebook is not even the first social network targeting Muslims. Naseeb.com, also based in Lahore, was launched in 2003 and precedes even Facebook.

Published in The Express Tribune, January 2^nd, 2013.

The Indian Parliament is closing without passing the toughest child labour law in its history. Worse, the bill is supported by the majority of MPs, but was sitting there for weeks, because they felt it was not a ‘priority’!

India is the world’s child labour capital — kids as young as five are sold to traffickers and forced to work as modern-day slaves, abused and beaten. The historic new bill would ban outright any child labour under 14 and provide stipends for poor families to keep their children in school. But MPs have let it fall off their agenda, and Indian child rights groups say they badly need our help, now, to ramp up the public pressure.

If the Avaaz community comes together, we can create a wave of attention to the bill, and push MPs to vote. Sign this urgent petition and forward it widely — when we reach 1 million we’ll deliver our message to the Parliament with former child workers:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/india_child_labour_g1/?bjPzTbb&v=20394

A staggering 215 million children work in mines, quarries, and factories around the world. All nations have signed an agreement to put the eradication of child labour at the heart of their national education plans. But, India is home to the largest child labour force in the world. If the new law passes, it would ban all child labour for under 14-year-olds and all harmful work for under 18s. The law even has provisions to ensure it doesn’t hurt the poorest families — enshrining the right to free education and proposing stipends to compensate any losses.

Critics say the real problem isn’t the law, it’s bad enforcement. And it’s true that in the last three years in India less than 10% of the 450,000 reports of child labour were prosecuted under the existing, weak, law. But the new law packs some serious punch. The police will no longer have to wait for a court order to act. All forms of commercial child labour under 14 will be criminalised, and instead of meaningless fines or short prison sentences, the criminals will face tough penalties.

While the majority of MPs say they’ll support the bill, there’s no political urgency to bring it to a vote. But each day they delay, more children are forced into a life of sweatshop misery. It’s up to us to push them over the edge. Sign the petition to India’s MPs now, and share widely:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/india_child_labour_g1/?bjPzTbb&v=20394

The Avaaz community has campaigned to protect the children and the most vulnerable, time and time again. Just weeks ago, 1.2 million of us got together to help pass the most comprehensive education plan in Pakistan. How we treat our children is a reflection on our moral compass — and it´s time to take firm steps against their abuse. Let’s join together to speak out for the future of India’s suffering children.

India is stalling the toughest child labour law in its history… because politicians say it’s not a ‘priority’! But the majority of MPs support it and all they need is a massive public push to bring it to a vote. Let´s raise our voices for India´s children. Sign now:

MORE INFORMATION:

India proposes ban on child labor (Washington Post)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/india-proposes-ban-on-child-labor/2012/08/29/ef9d802a-f1f2-11e1-a612-3cfc842a6d89_story.html

Getting ready for the new law against child labour (The Hindu)
http://www.thehindu.com/opinion/op-ed/article3878212.ece

Over 60 million child laborers in India (India Tribune)
http://www.indiatribune.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2884:over-60-million-child-laborers-in-india

35 child workers rescued from Delhi factories (Business Line)
http://www.thehindubusinessline.com/industry-and-economy/economy/35-child-workers-rescued-from-delhi-factories/article1694550.ece

End Child Labour and Educational Disadvantage - report and film
http://educationenvoy.org/

A Comparative Study of Electrical Outlets

Top row: United Kingdom ; India/Pakistan/South Africa ; Israel ; Denmark

Middle row: China/Australia ; France ; Germany/South Korea ; Russia

Bottom row: Italy ; Canada/United States/Mexico ; Japan ; Switzerland/Brazil

Radical Islam

Was ISLAM spread By The Sword ? »

Interesting on-going discussion in the LinkedIn history group, on Islam vis-a-vis other cultures, both in the past and in the present.

The American nuclear-prevention policy toward North-Korea and Pakistan was characterized as “too early, too early – oops – too late

“

—	Arie Levite, non-resident senior associate in the non-proliferation program at the Carnegie Endowment (David Makovsky,“The Silent Strike: How Israel bombed a Syrian nuclear installation and kept it secret,” The New Yorker, September 17, 2012, p. 34)

Canada closes embassy in Iran, gives Iranian diplomats in Canada 5 days to leave. By Associated Press

TORONTO — Canada shut its embassy in Tehran on Friday, severed diplomatic relations and ordered Iranian diplomats to leave, accusing the Islamic Republic of being the most significant threat to world peace.

The surprise action reinforces the Conservative government’s close ties with Tehran’s arch foe Israel but also removes some of Washington’s eyes and ears inside the Iranian capital.

It comes as Iran’s talks with world powers over its nuclear program have stalled and Israel is weighing the option of a military strike to prevent it from developing atomic weapons. Iran insists its nuclear program is for peaceful objectives only.

The move also underscores the widening gaps between Western countries’ attempts to isolate and punish Iran and Tehran’s efforts to forge closer ties with energy-hungry Asian trading partners such as India and Pakistan to counter Western sanctions. Iran’s recent push to bolster and redefine its links with Asia makes the break with Canada a less serious blow to Tehran than it would have been years ago.

Read on…

Jesus Christ to be banned from text messages in Pakistan »

The World According to Gordon Duff. By Peter B. Collins

Gordon Duff, senior editor at Veterans Today, offers a sweeping view of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the WikiLeaks saga, and the events of 9/11. Duff, a Marine veteran of Viet Nam, claims intelligence sources worldwide, especially in Pakistan. He asserts that most events called “terrorism” are false flag events, that Israel’s Mossad is in control of much of the disinformation in circulation today, that bin Laden has been dead for years, that all top officials of the Federal Reserve are dual citizens with “Israeli passports in their dresser drawers next to the marijuana”, that North Korea’s submarines and the nuke they tested came from Israel, and that the WikiLeaks leaks were orchestrated in Tel Aviv. He also has a very different view of Pakistan’s ISI and the insurgents lumped together as the “Taliban”. Duff is an amiable man whose rambling narrative is loaded with information that can’t be proved or disproved by those of us without security clearances, yet his worldview is fascinating and very different from corporate media reports and “conventional wisdom”. Your humble host encourages you to listen with an open mind and adequate skepticism, and decide for yourself.

Big Ben turning into London’s version of the Leaning Tower of Pisa. By Martin Fricker

Big Ben and The Leaning Tower of Pisa (pics: Reuters)

BIG Ben is turning into our own Leaning Tower of Pisa, a worrying survey has confirmed.

The much-loved landmark’s tilt has become so pronounced it is noticed by passers-by and tourists.

The Palace of Westminster’s clock tower has not been perfectly vertical for years because of shifting ground conditions and tunnelling for Tube lines.

Now engineers say it will one day topple over if the lean is left unchecked. Big Ben is the nickname of the tower’s largest bell but the public generally use it as the name of the whole clock, built in 1853.

The peak of the 315ft tower is 18 inches off where it would be if vertical – a 0.26 degree tilt to the north west.

That is one sixteenth of the Pisa tower’s lean.

But a survey for London Underground and the Parliamentary Estates Department found the rate of movement accelerated in recent years.

It has caused cracks to appear in walls inside the House of Commons.

Prof John Burland, of Imperial College London, said: “I have heard tourists saying, ‘I don’t think it is really vertical’. They are quite right. The tilt is now just about visible. If it started greater acceleration we would have to do something in a few years.”

The clock moved an eighth of an inch from the perpendicular between November 2002 and August 2003. Since then the tilt has increased 0.04 of a degree each year. At that rate it would crash into Portcullis House, used as MPs’ offices – in 5,000 years.

The Palestinian wonderland. By Asaf Romirowsky

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found are a great way to understand the Palestinian narrative. Specifically, Carroll uses time and space as the plot device while drawing on chess imagery, mirror themes, opposites and time running backwards. As such, it provides the perfect “logic” to the irrational Palestinian worldview and interpretation of history as they attempt to achieve statehood through unilateral declaration of independence at the United Nations this month.

This is the same historical read that has convinced Palestinians that it is Israel and the West that created the Arab-Palestinian refugees, rather their own Arab leaders who did indeed put them in this state intentionally. Today, the perfidy of Palestinian society lies in its division, dysfunctionality, and complete denial of the reality it lives in.

The historical truth is that the notion of an independent, sovereign Palestinian state existing alongside Israel has never been part of the Palestinian worldview. The Palestinians have also always rejected the notion of a single bi-national state.

Palestinian society has never seen Jewish sovereignty or Israel’s existence as a “right.” The only right in the Palestinians’ narrative of the conflict is their own connection to the land. They do, however, see Israel as a temporary military fact. But believe there will come a day, the narrative goes, when they will be able to defeat the Israelis. Their recent appeal to the UN is a new and cynical turn that should not mask the history of rejectionism.

In November 1947, United Nations General Assembly Resolution 181 recommended the creation of separate Jewish and Arab states. Palestinian representatives and Arab states rejected this recommendation and consequently launched a war against the Jewish community. A close look at the General Assembly’s final tally in 1947 highlights this rejectionism when 33 countries voted for partition, 13 against and 10 abstained. The countries that rejected co-existence with the Jews and blocked Arab-Palestinian statehood overwhelmingly came from the Arab/Muslim world: Afghanistan, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey and Yemen.

Talk is cheap

The reality is that a unilateral statehood bid is yet another Palestinian halo of “normalcy” that undermines every accepted model for peace even according to UN standards. Unilateralism was never accepted as the modus operandi, but rather, mutually agreed upon concessions by the parties as illustrated by UN Security Council resolutions 242, 338, the Oslo Accords and the Roadmap for Peace.

Talk is cheap. Land and lives are precious. If the Palestinians genuinely want to talk about statehood they need to come to terms with accepting and recognizing Israel and first get their own territories under control, stop firing rockets at Israeli towns, and start creating a decent civil society.

Pragmatically, the larger issue of Palestinian statehood raises a basic question - do Palestinians really want a state and are they prepared to take responsibility for their own people under such a rubric? In accordance with reality of Through the Looking-Glass, where time and space can be turned around, the answer would be yes, but at the expense of Israel’s creation to begin with.

Asaf Romirowsky is a Philadelphia-based Middle East analyst and an adjunct scholar at the Middle East Forum

Chinese Police Carry Crossbows

The crossbow revolutionized warfare in the 4th century, but it became obsolete when militaries around the world discovered that gunpowder could do the same job a lot better. As a result, the crossbow became a novelty item, purchased only by weapons enthusiasts or hunters who ran out of exciting ways kill stuff.

But after collecting dust for centuries, China recently picked up the crossbow once again and handed it to their police officers.

“Your tags are expired.”

In cities around China, every level of law enforcement is rediscovering the advantages of a crossbow, from traffic cops to special units. In Xinjiang, riot police carry crossbows instead of beanbag guns and smoke bombs because China has no interest in messing around with nonlethal crowd deterrents when terrifying, medieval battle weapons are just as effective.

“What’s up now?”

Before anyone tsk-tsks the Chinese government for shooting at crowds with crossbows, you should know that these aren’t the usual burning-cars-and-looting riots we’re used to seeing. Granted, China has a bad history with breaking up mobs, but in this case the use of violence is warranted; China has a pretty significant terror problem on the borders of Pakistan. The East Turkestan Islamic Movement is spilling across the border and introducing China to suicide bombing and improvised explosives. The primary advantage of using crossbows instead of guns against these attacks is that they allow police to shoot and kill anyone carrying an explosive while lessening the risk of detonation. So after thousands of years, the crossbow is coming out of retirement as a means to stop brand new bombs. As an added bonus, China is also fully prepared now for a full-scale vampire attack.

Potential Price of a Joke, and reaction

August 18, 2011

New York (NTN24 Wires) - A Muslim militant has urged American followers to assassinate U.S. talk show host David Letterman, saying his tongue deserves to be cut out, a U.S. intelligence monitoring group said on Wednesday.

The SITE intelligence group said the death threat was posted on a website used by militants after the writer became upset by a joke Letterman made about the death of a leading member of al Qaeda killed in an airstrike in Pakistan.

The militant called on Muslims in the United States to “cut the tongue of this lowly Jew and shut it forever,” according to SITE’s translation of the website message. The popular late-night television host is not Jewish.

The writer was angered after watching a show in which Letterman drew his finger across his neck while talking about the June death of senior al-Qaeda figure Ilyas Kashmiri.

The message was posted on the website Shumukh al-Islam. SITE analyst Adam Raisman told Entertainment Weekly that the website is “a clearing house for al-Qaeda material” and draws supporters of the group headed by the late Osama bin Laden.

Executives at broadcaster CBS and a spokesman for Letterman on Wednesday declined to comment on the threat.

David Letterman’s Reaction:

David Letterman Jokes About Jihadist Threat To Him

“We have great audiences night in and night out, but tonight
especially, it means a lot to me. Tonight, you people are more, to
me, honestly, more than an audience — you’re more like a human shield.”

“I’m so sorry, I’m a little late coming out. Backstage I was talking
to the guy from CBS. We were going through the CBS life-insurance
policy to see if I was covered for jihad.”

“You’re not going to believe what happened. A guy, a radical
extremist, threatened to cut my tongue out. I wish I had a nickel for
every time a guy has threatened that. I think the first time was
during the Academy Awards.”

“I have a fatwa on me. And they say the guy that issued the fatwa is
an Internet jihadist. Internet jihadist! And I said, ‘Well, heck,
who says Obama isn’t creating jobs?’ “

“And so now, State Department authorities are looking into this.
They’re not taking this lightly. They’re looking into it. They’re
questioning, they’re interrogating, there’s an electronic trail —
but everybody knows it’s Leno.”

Getting Bin Laden. By Nicholas Schmidle

What happened that night in Abbottabad.

No American was yet inside the residential part of the compound. The operatives had barely been on target for a minute, and the mission was already veering off course. Photoillustration by John Ritter.

Shortly after eleven o’clock on the night of May 1st, two MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters lifted off from Jalalabad Air Field, in eastern Afghanistan, and embarked on a covert mission into Pakistan to kill Osama bin Laden. Inside the aircraft were twenty-three Navy SEALs from Team Six, which is officially known as the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU. A Pakistani-American translator, whom I will call Ahmed, and a dog named Cairo—a Belgian Malinois—were also aboard. It was a moonless evening, and the helicopters’ pilots, wearing night-vision goggles, flew without lights over mountains that straddle the border with Pakistan. Radio communications were kept to a minimum, and an eerie calm settled inside the aircraft.

Read ⇒ more