Rampurple & N10452: Sharing Minds

Christmas Tree for Our Martyrs

December 24, 2006 mid-afternoon

Here are pics of the Christmas trees put in Down Town Beirut for the martyrs of the political assasination from Kamal Jumblatt till Pierre Gemayel.

May they all rest in peace:

Sheikh Bashir Gemayel

Sheikh Pierre Gemayel

Posted by N10452 |

11 Comments »

iKuwait says
RIP to all….and from the bottom of my heart i say I LOVE YOU BEIRUT.

December 24th, 2006 | #
Aqeel Hussein says
The snow has already settled on the mountains further north, but the Christians of the Iraqi city of Mosul are scared to put festive decorations outside their homes this year. Their ancestors settled here in the 1st century AD, yet as teacher Jamal Fadi has discovered, some of their Muslim neighbours want this Christmas to be their last.

Death threat: This letter was delivered with two bullets

“A letter was delivered to my door with two bullets placed on top of it,” said Mr Fadi, 32, standing watchfully in the neat garden of his two-storey villa. “It said: ‘Leave, crusaders, or we will cut your heads off.’ They want us to go from Mosul completely.”

After months as a nervous bystander to the spiralling civil war between Sunni and Shia Muslims, Iraq’s Christian minority now faces the spectre of sectarian violence coming to their traditional home city. They fear that al Qaeda-backed zealots within the Sunni community, which forms the bulk of Mosul’s one million population, want to end nearly 1,500 years of co-existence with an onslaught of ethnic cleansing.

Residents say that the campaign, which they claim has intensified in recent weeks, is prompted by Sunni fears of a complete Shia takeover of Baghdad in coming years. In response, Mosul would be turned into a northern capital for a Sunni-dominated enclave, which would include Saddam Hussein’s home town of Tikrit and stretch south to the anti-American towns of Fallujah and Ramadi.

The fact that no such blueprint has been endorsed by the Iraqi government is of little comfort to Christians. The plan’s architects, they fear, are capable of enforcing it themselves through threats and indoctrination alone. For proof, they say, look no further than playgrounds, where Christian and Sunni Muslim children have played together for decades.

advertisement”Our children are told by other pupils that they are ‘f***ing spies’ who have brought the Christian occupation to Iraq,” said Father Shamoun Butris, a Christian minister in Mosul. “It is not true, but makes no -difference.”

Iraq’s Christian community is made up of Eastern Rite Chaldean Catholics and Assyrian Orthodox Christians, and numbered around one million, or five per cent of the population, before the US-led invasion. Traditionally well-educated, they won respect in a Muslim land by specialising in teaching, academia and medicine, which earned them protected status under Saddam Hussein. Since his fall, those blessings have turned to curses. Their well-paid jobs have made them targets for kidnappers, while their grasp of English has fuelled suspicions that they work as translators for the US Army. In the past three years, 200,000 have fled abroad.

So far, save for a few brief but bloody car-bombings against Christian churches, they have at least escaped the mass pogroms of the kind being meted out to each other by Sunnis and Shias. Now, however, they sense the start of a systematic campaign. Anxiety has been fuelled by reports in Mosul of Christian women being told to stop wearing Western clothes.

Muslim leaders deny such claims. Yet the more hard-line clerics make clear that they no longer see Christians as part of Mosul’s future. “We want an Islamic society, and the Christians should leave because they follow the occupiers’ religion,” said Saad al Jibouri, from the Sunni Al Rahma mosque. “We did not force them to leave, nor did we kill any of them.”

With talk now growing of partitioning Iraq into federal states for Sunni, Shias and Kurds, some Iraqi Christians want their own, autonomous zone in an area west of Mosul. But the plan has little chance of success with the Iraqi government, and with about half of their number still resident 250 miles away in Baghdad, it has limited support among Christians themselves.

Despite feeling vulnerable, many Christians are reluctant to complain. Canon Andrew White, a British clergyman based in the Green Zone who administers to a 1,000-strong congregation at St George’s Anglican Church in Baghdad, said: “Christians keep stressing to me that they do not want to over-emphasise what they are going through for fear of it escalating. But things are bad.”

For some in Mosul, there is bewilderment at why the West – with its powerful Christian figures in George W Bush, Tony Blair and Pope Benedict XVI – cannot help. Among them is Firaz Adis, 51, who will pass this Christmas without his son Ricot, kidnapped from Mosul University four months ago. “I paid a ransom of $10,000 but they killed my son anyway,” he sobbed. “They said ‘This will keep happening as long as you are agents of the occupiers’. I ask all the Christians in the world: ‘Please help us’.”

December 25th, 2006 | #
Victor David Hansen says
Victor Davis Hanson
December 23, 2006

Read any newspaper or turn on any news broadcast and you’re bound to encounter stories of Islamic radicals fighting, killing and threatening each other — and just about everyone else.
• In Somalia, jihadists, with the support of al Qaeda, have clashed with troops loyal to the country’s internationally recognized interim government and now threaten neighboring Ethiopia with all-out war.
• Nearby in Darfur, Muslim militiamen called janjaweed wage genocide against black Christian and animist villagers — apparently with the Sudanese government’s consent.
• Shi’ite and Sunni militias, each claiming to represent true Islam, keep slaughtering each other in Iraq.
• Hezbollah (”Party of God”) seeks to destroy democracy in Lebanon by provoking Israel, which it is sworn to eliminate.
• On the West Bank, Hamas and Fatah have taken time out from their attacks on Israel to murder each other and innocent bystanders.
• The Iranian Shi’ite theocracy — when not hosting Holocaust deniers or sending terrorists into Iraq — issues serial pledges to finish off Israel.
• Pakistan’s shaky leadership pleads it can neither target Osama bin Laden nor stop Taliban jihadists hiding in its remote regions from streaming back into Afghanistan.
• In Europe, opera producers, novelists, cartoonists and filmmakers are increasingly circumspect out of fear of death threats from Islamists.
While each conflict is unique and rooted in its own history, the common thread — radical Islam — is obvious. It’s thus worth asking why this violent, intolerant strain of Islam has taken hold in so many unstable places — and at this particular time.
The ascent of radical Islam is, perhaps, the natural culmination of a century’s worth of failed political systems in Muslim countries that were driven by morally bankrupt ideologies, led by cruel dictators, or both.
In the 1930s, German-style fascism appealed to Arabs in Palestine and Egypt. Soviet-style communism had sympathetic governments in Afghanistan, Algeria and Yemen. Ba’athism took hold in Syria and Iraq. The secular Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser promised a new pan-Arabism that would do away with colonial borders that divided the “the Arab nation.” Then there is the more pragmatic authoritarianism that survives in Moammar Gadhafi’s Libya or in the petrol-monarchies in the Gulf.

Radical Islam may be as totalitarian and as morally bankrupt as any of these past or mostly defunct “isms,” but its current appeal isn’t hard to figure out. Unlike fascism or communism, radical Islam is locally grown and not plagued by charges of foreign contamination. Indeed, Islamists claim to wage jihad against the modernism and globalization of the outside, mostly Westernized world. Such a message resonates in stagnant, impoverished Muslim countries.
Of course, while the people of the region may be poor, the Islamist movement isn’t. Huge oil profits filter throughout the Muslim world, allowing Islamists to act on their rhetoric. In today’s world, militias can easily acquire everything from shoulder-held anti-aircraft missiles to rocket-propelled grenades. With such weapons on their own turf, Islamists can nullify billion-dollar Western jets and tanks.
There is still another reason for the rise of Islamists: They sense a new hesitation in the West. We appear to them paralyzed over oil prices and supplies and fears of terrorism. And so they have also waged a brilliant propaganda war, adopting the role of victims of Western colonialism, imperialism and racism. In turn, much of the world seems to tolerate their ruthlessness in stifling freedom, oppressing women and killing nonbelievers.
So how, aside from killing jihadist terrorists, can we defend ourselves against the insidious spread of radical Islam? Here are a few starting suggestions:
(1) Bluntly identify radical Islam as fascistic — without worrying whether some Muslims take offense when we will talk honestly about the extremists in their midst.
(2) At the same time, keep encouraging consensual governments in the Middle East and beyond that could offer people security and prosperity, while distancing ourselves from illegitimate dictators, especially in Syria and Iran, that promote terrorists.
(3) Establish that no more autocracies in the Middle East and Asia will be allowed to get the bomb.
(4) Seek energy independence that would collapse the world price of oil, curbing petrodollar subsidies for terrorists and our own appeasement of their benefactors.
(5) Appreciate the history and traditions of a unique Western civilization to remind the world that we have nothing to apologize for but rather much good to offer to others.
(6) Finally, keep confident in a war in which our will and morale are every bit as important as our overwhelming military strength. The jihadists claim we are weak spiritually, but our past global ideological enemies — Nazism, fascism, militarism and communism — all failed. And so will they

December 25th, 2006 | #
JP says
George Hawi is missing from the Maytr list.

December 25th, 2006 | #
sonia says
How sad,Aqeel hussein.

December 25th, 2006 | #
N10452 says
JP,
I posted them a bit in a hurry, there is George Hawi and Renee Mouawad too, i will update the post later on tonight.

December 26th, 2006 | #
Vijay Dutt says
Low on funds and struggling against rival group Fatah in Palestine, the Hamas has sought alliance with Lashkar-e-Taiba (LeT) and Hizb-ul-Mujahideen, two Pakistan-based groups involved in terrorist activities in India, according to an Italian newspaper report. Hamas is a militant group that won the Palestinian Authority’s general elections early this year and is infamous for its terrorist activities aimed at Israel.

According to Corriere della Sera, a widely read Italian paper, Hamas has befriended LeT and Hizb, both close to Al-Qaeda. The report said the ties were forged during the visit of a Palestinian minister, a Hamas member, to Pakistan this summer. The report has caused a flutter among intelligence and security agencies here because if true, it will mean a major threat to all countries fighting the war against terrorism.

The report said the Palestinian minister, apart from his official engagements, had two separate meetings —one with Hizb-ul-Mujahideen’s Syed Salahuddin and another LeT’s Hafez Said. The report said the two, possibly with the help of the Pakistani intelligence, offered to the Hamas representative a briefcase containing $2 million. The paper quoted “Islamabad sources” saying this. The money was to be used to sustain the Hamas movement in Palestine (like running schools, hospitals) and to deal with economic emergency the government was facing. Another alarming aspect of the report was that the Palestinian minister was also exploring the possibility of strengthening “military relation” between the Hamas army and the Pakistan-based militants.

The paper alleged that an agreement was reached, based on three points. One that Hizb-ul-Mujahideen and LeT will have the possibility of going to West Asia (Syria and Lebanon) to learn new terror techniques from Arab Mujahideens; second, Palestinian “elements” will seek refuge in the centres managed by the Pakistani outfits in the Waziristan area and third, there could be exchange of information relating to the use of explosives and the methods to smuggle them, Ajai Sahni, executive director at the Delhi-based Institute for Conflict Management, said there had been sporadic dialogue among Islamic terror outfits in the past. “The LeT has been talking to these people

December 28th, 2006 | #
MarxistFromLebanon says
I find it wrong to trade with the martyrs’ names for political reasons. Specially it does not tell the background of the situation of the pre-2005 deceased: mainly Kamal Junblatt and Bashir Gemayel. Both parties were against each other with seperate platform, any one read 1984?

December 29th, 2006 | #
Liliane says
I have to agree with MFL on this one.

December 29th, 2006 | #
N10452 says
Marxist,
Regardless of their political stances, all were opposed to the Syrian hegemony and were assasinated by the Syrian regime.

I am against trading martyrs’ names in general as well, but that doesnt imply those who have Christmas trees are not joined by the same cause.

December 30th, 2006 | #
Deb Debka says
Many of the foreign elements fighting on the side of the Islamic Courts militia were sent to Somalia by Christian-ruled Eritrea to harass its rival Christian power, Ethiopia.

The Eritreans are joined by fighters from pro-Western Muslim nations of the Middle East to help a jihadist militia with strong links to al Qaeda to displace the pro-Western, internationally recognized Somali government.

Some military experts see this sectarian mishmash as a dress rehearsal for the big show should the very powers supporting the Islamist Courts in Somali decide to intervene in Iraq to restore Sunni Arabs to power and cleanse Baghdad of Shiite rule and Iranian influence.

In five days, Ethiopian-backed government forces secured Burhakaba, 160 km west of Mogadishu, the strategically important towns on the Ethiopian border of Beledweyne and Bandiradley, and Dinsoor in central Somalia. They are also in control of Baidoa, to which the government was driven by the Islamist advance on Mogadishu.

The full-scale Ethiopian push this week was preceded by a small vanguard of special forces which have been operating in Somalia for the past six months.

Present there now is an Ethiopian armored division of 15,000 men with 120 tanks, mobile cannons and air force jets. From Monday, air strikes were carried out against Islamic bases across Somalia. The United Islamic Courts Militia’s fighters are reported to be in disordered retreat to the capital.

According to our military sources, they consist of thousands of Christian and Muslim Eritreans, Syrians, Libyans and Yemenis. Saudi Arabia and Egypt are supplying the UIC’s leader Sheik Hassan Dahir Aweys and “defense minister” Sheik Sharif Ahmed with funding and logistical assistance. It is rumored in Mogadishu that Egyptian intelligence officers are advising them on how to contend with Ethiopian armed forces.

How the Somali venture will turn out in the long term is hard to predict.

Even if Ethiopia’s military preponderance wins the day, the Islamists may resort to Iraq-style guerrilla warfare and progressively gather popular Somali support among coreligionists and non-Muslims to oust the Christian interloper.

The origins of the conflict hark back to rivalries in the Horn of Africa, which are complicated by broader Muslim Arab resentment of Christian rule in the region.

The Horn’ two predominantly Christian nations, Ethiopia with a population of 73 million and tiny Eritrea with 4.5 million - who are half-and-half Christian and Muslim, are at daggers drawn. Ethiopian prime minister Meles Zenawi and Eritrean president Isaias Afworky are third cousins and sworn enemies.

Their enmity has led them into four major confrontations in four years.

Afworky never accepted Eritrea’s defeat in 2004 at the end of its long war with Ethiopia. He ignited the Somali conflict as part of a grand plan to overcome his military inferiority by guile and subversion. The Eritrean ruler is well regarded by Ethiopia’s largest ethnic tribe, the Oromo, which form 40% of the population. To stir up the Oromo’s secessionist aspirations, the Eritreans established the Oromo Liberation Front-OLF, which Afworky eggs on to fight the Addis Ababa government from a base in the Eritrean capital of Asmara.

Then, five months ago, Afworky persuaded a large group of high-ranking Ethiopian military commanders, members of the Oromo tribe, to defect to Eritrea. He took their advice on ways to topple his third cousin in Addis Ababa and launched three fronts:

1. He laid on a supply of Eritrean arms, funds, logistical assistance and intelligence to the Oromo Liberation Front.

2. He furnished the same assistance to the Ogaden National Liberation Front. This group represents the 1.5 million Muslim tribesmen who inhabit the 200,000-square-kilometer desert region. Ogaden wound up as “Italian Somaliland under Ethiopian Control” (a reminder of the Italian colonizers driven out in World War II), after wars between Somalia and Ethiopia which continued from the 1970s.

Ethiopia prizes Ogaden as the corridor to its only outlet to the sea at the big port of Djibouti, which sits astride the point where the Indian Ocean converges with the Gulf of Aden, the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea.

The struggle for control of the strategic Ogaden is never-ending and beats strongly in Ethiopia’s backing for the Somali government against the Islamic Courts militias.

The IUC aspires to establish a Muslim Greater Somalia extending into Ethiopia and Kenya. Addis Ababa’s Christian rulers fear that if the IUC gains power in Somalia and wins control over the Muslim tribes of Ogaden through the militant National Liberation Front, the militia will have the power to sever Ethiopia from its desert corridor to the coast, and establish al Qaeda in bases on the border of Christian Ethiopia.

Afworky backs a third group, the Ethiopian People’s Patriotic Front – EPPF, which wages guerrilla warfare against what it calls the “dictatorial, repressive regime of Meles Zenawi in Addis Ababa.” This small group operates in the north in the Emien Gondar and Amhara regions.

All three groups have been primed by the Eritrean president to rise up against his cousin’s regime in Addis Ababa when the Ethiopian army is fully engaged in Somalia. Their mission is to cut his supply lines and force his armed forces to withdraw from Somalia in order to put down their uprisings and save his regime.

Afworky is gambling heavily on this plan. Asked if he is not afraid of a Somali Islamist victory bringing al Qaeda to his own doorstep, he replies unhesitatingly that American and French military forces are deployed between Eritrea’s borders and Somalia for the very purpose of combating al Qaeda’s penetration of the Horn of Africa.

And what has led the canny Saudi king Abdullah, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and Libyan ruler Muammar Qaddafi along with Syria and Yemen to dip their hands in the Somali cauldron and back the radical Islamic Courts revolutionaries? Their involvement in the Horn of Africa harks back to old enmities between the Muslim nations of the region and Christian Ethiopia, which also controls the sources of the Nile. However, their willingness - even after 9/11 and five years into the global war on terror in Afghanistan, Iraq, Europe and Asia - to range behind the Somali Islamists and let them establish a new al Qaeda stronghold, is not good news for Washington. It could be an advance signal of their intentions to step into the Iraq conflict if the fate of the Sunni Arab minority is at stake

December 31st, 2006 | #