Colonial West Humiliating Iran :Blix

Colonial West Humiliating Iran :Blix
IslamOnline.net & News Agencies

"People have their own pride whether you like them or don't," Blix said. WASHINGTON — The West's neo-colonial approach in dealing with Iran is humiliating and unfruitful and Tehran should be given reasonable incentives to halt its nuclear program, international nuclear expert Hans Blix has said.
"One feature, which is now key and peculiarly not very much debated ... is the demand -- first of the Europeans and then of the US and also of the (UN) Security Council -- that first Iran must suspend enrichment," the former UN weapons inspector was quoted as saying by Agence France Presse (AFP).
"This is, in a way, like telling a child, 'now first you behave and thereafter you'll be given your rewards'. And this I think is humiliating," he told a conference on international security in Washington on Monday, February 26.
Blix said Tehran feared for its safety, with US troops waging wars in neighboring Iraq and Afghanistan.
He warned that the West's insolence would only lead to more intransigence.
"Why did the Iraqis behave as they did in the 1990s (and) send away the UNSCOM inspectors and close the door to them?" Blix asked, referring to the UN Special Commission mandated to inspect Iraqi weapons after the 1991 Gulf War.
"Yet I can see that the humiliation, the fury, was such that they said, 'To hell with it'," added the head of UNSCOM.
"People have their own pride whether you like them or don't."
Six UN Security Council members have agreed on Monday on further moves to make Iran comply with demands to end its uranium enrichment.
In December, a UN resolution barred the transfer of technology and sensitive nuclear materials to Iran.
The US and its allies accuse Iran of seeking to develop nuclear weapons, but Tehran refutes the charge insisting that its program is for peaceful civilian use.
Double-standards
Blix, currently the head of the Stockholm-based Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission, maintained that instead of military threats, Iran should be offered reasonable incentives.
''I don't think military threats are useful," he said.
"They will scare a number of people in Iran, yes. But at the same time, I think they are also very dangerous."
The US has been upping the ante against Tehran recently, restoring to the same aggressive rhetoric that preceded the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003.
US president George Bush has beefed up the US military presence in the Gulf to its highest level since the Iraq war.
Award-winning American investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has revealed that the Pentagon recently formed a special group to plan an attack against Iran that can be implemented, upon orders from the president, within 24 hours.
He believes the Bush administration is intent on striking Iran and would do that with or without the UN authorization as was the case with Iraq in 2003.
Blix contrasted the situation with the six-party negotiations on North Korea's nuclear program, during which Pyongyang was given a list of incentives.
He noted that in the case of Iran, the West has taken a completely different approach.
"We haven't heard anything about offers concerning guarantees for security in case they will go along with a renunciation of enrichment."
The international nuclear expert noted that the Europeans put a lot of carrots on the table without much American support.
"It's the United States that can deliver assurances about security. It's the US that can deliver recognition or normalization of relations.
"'The first incentive, I think, is to sit down with them in a direct talk rather than saying to them 'you do this, thereafter we will sit down at a table and tell you what you get for it," said Blix.
"That's getting away from a humiliating neo-colonial attitude to a more normal (one)."

mali PM resigns after feud with president

mali PM resigns after feud with president
29 Oct 2007 17:51:22 GMT29 Oct 2007 17:51:22 GMT ## for search indexer, do not remove-->
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By Ahmed Mohamed
BAIDOA, Somalia, Oct 29 (Reuters) - Somali Prime Minister Ali Mohamed Gedi resigned on Monday after a long feud with the president that frustrated Western backers and split the government while it faced an Islamist insurgency.
With no sure candidate to replace him, it remained unclear whether Gedi's departure would unify the interim government or set it down a new path of disarray.
"Today, I want to state that I am going to resign, that I am leaving the government," Gedi told parliament in the south-central trading town of Baidoa.
"I wasn't forced to resign, it comes from me. I will be here with you as a legislator."
His remarks brought applause from legislators who for weeks have been poised for what would amount to a no-confidence vote in Gedi pushed by President Abdullahi Yusuf.
"With respect to the situation the country is undergoing, the humanitarian catastrophe facing us and the longstanding deadlock among us, I welcome the resignation," Yusuf told parliament.
In Washington, State Department spokesman Sean McCormack said the United States understood Gedi's resignation was made "in the spirit of continued dialogue and national reconciliation among all Somali stakeholders."
"We call on the Transitional Federal Government to use this opportunity to engage with key Somali stakeholders, particularly those in Mogadishu, in a consultative process leading to the appointment of a new prime minister," he said in a statement.
Gedi's cabinet has been dissolved and discussions were under way as to who would sit as interim prime minister while a permanent replacement is found.
ACCIDENTAL POLITICIAN
Gedi's resignation came as shells struck the capital Mogadishu for a third day, in the worst fighting in weeks between Islamist rebels and allied Ethiopian-Somali troops.
The Yusuf-Gedi rift had hindered progress by the government, the 14th attempt at installing central rule in Somalia since dictator Mohamed Siad Barre's ouster sunk the Horn of Africa country into anarchy in 1991.
Gedi tried to fight Yusuf's latest attempt to oust him by appealing for support from his powerful Hawiye clan in Mogadishu but he never got their full backing. Many Hawiye complain he was not their choice for the clan's top government position.
Yusuf hails from the rival Darod clan, and as such the prime minister had to be a Hawiye under a power-sharing agreement reached at talks in Kenya that gave birth to the government.
Those factors, diplomats and analysts say, made it difficult for the government to return to Hawiye-run Mogadishu until the Ethiopian military helped them over the New Year, only to be met by a Hawiye-backed Islamist insurgency.
That rebellion has challenged a government that has struggled to keep itself together in the best of times, while citizens of Mogadishu have fled the fighting by the thousands.
A veterinary surgeon by trade, Gedi rose from obscurity three years ago to become prime minister at the end of Somalia's peace talks in Kenya. Although he and Yusuf have shared Addis Ababa's support since they came to power in late 2004, the two have been at odds almost from the start.
They began to work together earlier this year until the rift widened again when they backed separate parties interested in Somalia's oil potential.
(Additional reporting by Bryson Hull in Nairobi)
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Somali PM resigns after feud with president
Source: Reuters ");
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Source: Reuters (35 minutes ago)
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US/Uganda: Bush, Museveni Should Talk Human Rights
Source: Human Rights Watch ");
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Source: Human Rights Watch (14 minutes ago)
Source: Human Rights Watch

SOMALIA: Prime minister quits; violence rocks Mogadishu
Source: IRIN ");
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Source: IRIN (2 hours ago)
Source: IRIN

Ethiopia denies plot to attack Eritrea
Source: Reuters ");
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Source: Reuters (3 hours ago)
Source: Reuters

Somali pirates hijack Japanese tanker
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Source: Reuters (6 hours ago)
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CWS appeal: Somalia (Mogadishu) Humanitarian Assistance
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Source: CWS (14 days ago)
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ACT Appeal: Response to Mogadishu Displacements, Somalia
Source: ACT - Switzerland ");
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A resident flees from clashes between Ethiopian troops and Islamist-led rebels in Mogadishu, October 29, 2007. Somalia's prime minister Ali Mohamed Gedi resigned on Monday after a long feud with the president that frustrated Western backers and split the government while it faced Islamist insurgency. REUTERS/Feisal Omar (SOMALIA)
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On Propagands and Islamophopia

By Abukar Arman
October 22, 2007
From Online Journal


The daunting reality facing people of conscience is the seemingly impossible task of controlling propaganda in a free society, and how the protected freedom of the perpetrators increases the vulnerability of their potential victims.

In the past few years, while many good things happened to Muslims in America, dark clouds continue to gather over them as a result of relentless propaganda by certain special interest groups. All one has to do is to randomly listen to talk show radio on the AM dial and hear the overtly expressed hate that hundreds of thousands or perhaps millions in America internalize every day and night. And this, needless to say, makes the backlash of any terrorist attack in the US soil a nightmare scenario for all Muslims.

'But, these are words,' the proponents of status quo argue. 'It is not that they are throwing Molotov cocktail bombs in their homes' they insist in order to minimize the power of words.

Perhaps the most powerful skill possessed by human beings (though not all) is the ability to assemble letters and turn them into words, then cultivate these words into dynamic ideas that shape perceptions, condition attitudes, and change minds. And, like all other skills, this too can be used positively or negatively.

Throughout history, words inspired actions that freed generations from the iron fists of despotism. By the same token, words demonized human beings by labeling their thoughts wicked and their lives contemptible, thus justifying policies of repression and oppression against them.

"We constantly speak of human beings in ways which implicitly deny their humanity - in words which reduce them to being mere representatives of a class, mere symbolic representations of some principle. Bourgeois, Bolshevik, Fascist, Communist... ," said Aldous Huxley in a 1936 speech delivered at the Albert Hall, London. "Not one of these words describes the concrete reality of the men and women to whom it is applied... Most people would hesitate to torture or kill a human being like themselves. But when that human being is spoken of as though he were not a human being, but as the representative of some wicked principle, we lose our scruples," Huxley added.

And history tends to repeat itself so long as we don't use lessons of our past experiences to avert recreating another dreadful chapter. Yesterday it was the Jews; today, it is the Muslims enduring a brutal barrage of demonizing disinformation that some compare to the pre World War II atmosphere.

In this age of Reality TV where the real, the unreal, and the surreal are deeply entangled, few have the ability to decipher the disinformation or propaganda for what it truly is. Few would question: Is stereotyping a major religion in its entirety ethical or even prudent? Is there any historical or a current trend supporting the so-called 'Islamo-fascism' propagated by certain vociferous political and religious provocateurs?

(And assuming their charges were correct) The question that begs an answer is, why are the millions of Muslims in the U.S. not wreaking 'fascistic' havoc? More importantly, why do these provocateurs and their Grand Wizards such as Robert Spencer, David Horowitz, Televangelist Pat Robertson, Daniel Pipes, and Steve Emerson, and the cottage industry of fear, outfits such as FrontPage Magazine, JihadWatch, and LittleGreen Footballs keep ranting and raving hate speech that indiscriminately offends Muslims and only gives more fuel to the radical elements?

Hate speech is described as words uttered, recorded, written, pictured, or communicated in any other means (softly or loudly) that are "intended to degrade, intimidate, or incite violence or prejudicial action against a person or a group of people based on their race, gender, age, ethnicity, nationality, religion...".

However, as a result of the heinous aggression of 9/11 and the subsequent fear industry, a number of people became desensitized to the dangers of the slithering Islamophobia and its mirrored image, anti-Americanism.

In his radio program on WLW-AM, owned by Clear Channel, host Bill Cunningham had this message for his listeners: "The great war of this generation's time is the war against Islamic fascists... They do not live for life, they live for death. Only through death can they believe they can be with those 72 virgins in heaven and have sex with children for eternity, which is the goal of that religion." And, confident on how frightened into silence Muslims in the US are, when he was asked whether or not he was concerned how his remarks might've offended Muslims, he said he did not get any calls protesting his remarks. So, "I moved on to the Bengals," Cunningham said.

And in the political spectrum, early this summer, while being critical of how in their first two debates the democratic presidential candidates avoided connecting terrorism with Islam, the now frontrunner republican candidate, Rudy Giuliani, had this to say: "During their two debates they never mentioned the word Islamic terrorist, Islamic extremist, Islamic fascist, terrorist, whatever combination of those words you want to use, (the) words never came up... Maybe it's politically incorrect to say that. I don't know. I can't imagine who you insult if you say Islamic terrorist. You don't insult anyone who is Islamic who isn't a terrorist."

Now imagine if media routinely described the widely reported sexual abuses committed by individual members of the Catholic clergy as 'Catholic-pedophiliac culture' and blamed everything on Roman Catholicism or the church doctrine. Or, imagine the Zionist brutal oppression of the Palestinian people being routinely referred to as Zio-Nazism or being blamed on Judaism and the teachings of the Torah!

Recently, however, realists such as General John Abizaid who came to terms that in no way is the venomous rhetoric employed by the propagandists in US' best interest started to speak out.

"Adding the word Islamic extremism, or qualifying it to Sunni Islamic extremism ... all make it very, very difficult because the battle of words is meaningful, especially in the Middle East to people," said the former Commander of the U.S. Central Command.

It is crucial to "figure out how we don't turn this into Samuel Huntington's Battle of Civilizations and we work toward an area where we respect mainstream Islam. There's nothing Islamic about Bin Laden's philosophy, there's nothing Islamic about suicide bombing. I believe that these are huge difficulties that we need to overcome, this notion of Christianity versus Islam. It's not that, it doesn't need to be that," he added.

In its true essence, propaganda is different than other forms of communication as it consciously employs half-truths, falsehoods and misleading information to manipulate feelings and attitudes. Propaganda mainly targets the emotion, because emotions stir the targeted subject into a frenzy of impulsive actions.

Hitler clearly understood this. In his infamous Mein Kampf, he wrote: for propaganda to be more effective it "must be aimed at the emotions and only to a very limited degree at the so-called intellect. We must avoid excessive intellectual demands on our public. The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous,"

And while it is often projected as 'factual' or 'historical', propaganda has little or no connection with truth or history. "Historical truth may be discovered by a professor of history. We, however, are serving historical necessity. It is not the task of art to be objectively true. The sole aim of propaganda is success," wrote Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels.

Accordingly, both facts and history are treated as ever-morphing blocs of information and accounts whose sole purpose is to be conveniently exploited by those who control their access - subjective media, repressive regimes, think tanks, etc.

Today, these gate-keeping entities subjectively frame the debate through relentless disinformation. They box all Muslims with a point of view together - they label some with the dreaded T-word, and frighten the others into utter silence or into an uncomfortable position of having to prove one's "moderate" inclinations all the time.

The propagandists confidently count on their ferocious "noise machine" made of primarily a network of pseudo-media and loyal bloggers with the capacity to repeat any lie long enough to turn it into the prevailing 'truth'.

Recently, a local interfaith body - the Interfaith Association of Central Ohio - that this author is connected with - announced its plan to host an educational forum called "Many Voices of Islam." Its purpose was to provide Muslims a unique opportunity to define themselves and openly share their various spiritual perspectives. The machine waged a hysterical campaign... accusing the association of lack of patriotism, supporting Hamas, and on exposing the country to greater danger.

Ironically, and perhaps while counting on the herd mentality of the frightened masses, this same propaganda machine promotes David Horowitz's spread-the-hate campaign called "the Islamo-fascism Awareness Week" coming to a university campus near you.

Horowitz and his affiliates' hateful mission was first unveiled in George Washington University when students promoting that event plastered provocative fliers all over the university; the most despicable among them being a poster bearing the image of a Muslim man with Islamic attire that read "Hate Muslims? So Do We!"

Meanwhile (and however symbolic), a silver-lining emerged behind the dark clouds hanging over the Muslims in America. Last week, New York's Empire State Building was lit up in green to honor the Muslim holiday Eid-al-Fitr, marking the end of the fasting month of Ramadan.

-----------------------
Abukar Arman is a freelance writer living in Ohio.

The Naked Conspiracy of TFG Supporters

By Abukar Sanei

07/13/2007

This piece is just a response to an article entitled "The Naked Hypocrisy of TFG Bashers," which was published in mid June this year. Of course, there are TFG bashers, and any Somali patriot has to countervail the TFG, but I am not sure if a patriot person is hypocrite for just his bash against the group of traitors called TFG. The question that we need to ask before we criticize the TFG bashers is, why do they bash the TFG? Well, the main reasons that the Diaspora community has been demonstrating against the TFG was the Ethiopian occupation on their country. On the other hand, the main cause of the suicide attempts that we, unfortunately, hear from the insurgency groups is the invasion of the Ethiopian forces in Somalia. In addition, this TFG and the Ethiopian forces have slaughtered the Mogadishu based civilians, demolished their houses and forced them to live under trees. And most recently, this TFG, and the Ethiopian mercenaries have illegally dared to confiscate the house of former President, Dr. Abdiqasim Salad Hassan. In short, these are the main reasons that we have TFG bashers, but let's go in detail on each one of these reasons that stimulate all the anger against the so-called TFG.

As Somalis recently celebrated for the forty seven anniversary of their independence from the European colonizers, the sovereignty of the country once again was jeopardized by the TFG. This was the greatest conspiracy that the TFG has committed against "its" people and "country", and created its rivals, or bashers, if you will. After Ethiopians occupied Somalia, TFG itself divided into two groups: One supporting the invasion, which is a plain treason against Somalia, and another group, which is led by the Speaker, Sharif Hassan. This is the group that clearly opposed the illegal invasion of Somalia and demanded an unconditional withdrawal of the Ethiopian forces from Somalia. The visionary leader from the ICU, Sheikh Sharif Sheikh Ahmed, has joined this group as the group eventually settled in Asmara, the capital city of Eritrea. However, since the invasion began, what we know is that there is a group of insurgents from the remnants of ICU and nationalist individuals who are fighting against the illegal invasion of Ethiopians on Somalia.

The slaughtering of Mogadishu civilians is another conspiracy that pushes people to bash the TFG. The recent war between the invaders and insurgent groups was described as the worst fight ever happened in Somalia after the ousting of the Barre regime in 1991. In this war, civilians were targeted, health care facilities were bombarded, houses were demolished and properties were looted by the so-called TFG soldiers. Moreover, the civilian casualties of the indiscriminated war on Mogadishu were estimated four hundred. However, the Ethiopians and their followers in Somalia tried to undermine their war crimes against Mogadishu population, but Human Rights groups declared that war crimes were committed in Somalia. If that is what happened to the hopeless Somalis in Mogadishu, any support of those crimes is really an act of treason against Somalia.

Dr. Abdiqasim has recently become another target for the occupiers and the so-called TFG. This was the same mistake that some militias from the ICU committed against Ali Mahdi before they were kicked out by the Ethiopian forces at the end of 2006. However, as a former Somali president, Dr, Abdiqasim should have been respected, but unfortunately, his home was confiscated, as some of his personal properties are still missing even though there was an apology from the so-called TFG. This act of mistreating a former president does not only hurt Mr. Salad Hassan, but it is an act of demeaning of any Somali individual. This illegal confiscating has given Mr. Salad the courage of speaking up against the occupiers and its agents as he is now part of those who demand the withdrawal of the Ethiopian forces from Somalia.

These are some of the reasons why we have TFG bashers, and they may have a solid point for their bash against the so-called TFG. For instance, the attitudes of those who loathe the TFG may be changed if their concerns are met. One of the main concerns that they have is the occupation of the Ethiopians on Somalia. The foreign interference of the issues of Somalia was the main cause of the chaos of the last seventeen years. Moreover, Ethiopia was the main source for the warlords, who are now "leading" the country, in order to keep their fighting and hostility against each other. In fact, that was the game that Ethiopia has been playing for the last seventeen years in order to reach its regional goals as it's now the only ruler of Somalia.

Therefore, as long as the Ethiopian occupation on Somalia continues, hatred and bash against the so-called TFG will continue! As long as there is a civilian slaughtering, there will be TFG bashers. As long as this TFG imitates the Ethiopian regime of Addis Ababa to silence the opposition figures and media, there will be TFG bashers! As long as there is an illegal confiscating of private houses, there will be TFG bashers!

hordhac

blog anii ojeedada loo aasaasay waxaytahay in maamulihiiso oo ku soo bandhiigo aragtidiisaa uuna lawadaago qorayaasha kala duwan arimaha laxiidhiidha: siyaasada ,dhaqaalaha ,dhaqan iyo bulshada .