Osama bin Laden, Climate Expert
Jan 31, 2010 News & Events
Alan Caruba
Canada Free Press
January 30, 2010
To the world’s experts on climate change, let us now add the name of Osama bin Laden to those of Al Gore; UN Secretary General Ban ki-Moon; the Chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Rajendra Pachauri; numerous heads of state over the years; House Speaker Nancy Pelosi; members of Congress still trying to pass Cap-and-Trade legislation; and the odious IPCC scientists who apparently colluded to foist false data on the public in order to further the fraud of global warming.
This is, of course, a short list given the vast number of people who attended the recent UN Conference on Climate Change in Copenhagen. It reportedly cost the taxpayers over a million dollars for the U.S. delegation and that does not include the cost of the President’s attendance. In his State of the Union speech, Obama received a chorus of laughter when he spoke of the “overwhelming evidence” of climate change.
Bin Laden is getting increasingly desperate in his appeals to the world’s Muslims and, in a recent audiotape, “he blamed the Western industrialized nations for hunger, desertification, and floods across the globe,” according to a report by the Associated Press.
Bin Laden’s real complaint, however, has always been that he cannot replace the Saudi royal family and control that nation’s oil and the revenues that flow from it. One of the many sons of a prominent Saudi family, bin Laden went off to aid the Afghans in their fight against the Soviet Union and, ironically, it was covert American weapons aid that made their victory possible.
He could have settled for being a hero of that conflict, but like so many egomaniacs, he decided to fight the crusades over again and all subsequent Western influence in the Middle East in the name of Islam.
A succession of terrorist attacks flowed from that decision. U.S. embassies in Africa were bombed, an American warship was attacked in Yemen, and the most spectacular attack was, of course, the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C. A fourth plane was brought down by its passengers.
Americans seem to have forgotten that George W. Bush responded forcefully to 9/11 and to the threat of Saddam Hussein to the entire Middle East. This is in contrast to President Obama’s futile efforts to get the Iranian ayatollahs to cooperate. Dictators are not famous for being nice.
As the AP report noted, bin Laden has mentioned climate change and global warming in past messages, but his latest on January 29 was the first to focus on it as a major theme along with the need to destroy the American economy. With regard to the latter, he seems to be getting a lot of help from President Obama who has tripled U.S. debt during the past year.
The significance of his latest audiotape seems to be a belated effort to piggyback the global warming issue at the same time it is crashing and burning worldwide due to revelations that the data on which it was based was deliberately falsified.
Claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting were false and this was made known to the IPCC Chairman Pachauri two months before the Copenhagen conference, but he managed to wait until after the conference to publicly correct the IPCC report.
Bin Laden’s bad timing suggests that his campaign is losing support. It is almost comical that he would try to enlist the support of global warming diehards in his quest to overthrow the Great Satan, America, and the Little Satan, Israel, but there is nothing comical about his continued threat to the nation and the world.
The silence of Al Gore as the planet has cooled since 1998 suggests that even he knows that his self-enrichment plan is coming to an end. Only President Obama seems or pretends to be oblivious to the idiocy of cutting “greenhouse gas emissions” in the name of a planet that is not warming.
In this quest, Obama has now been joined by Osama.
Tags: America, Bin Laden, Climate change, global warming, war on terror
Immortal Technique on Obama, 9/11 Truth & Corporate America
Nov 13, 2009 News & Events
The U.S. government uses foreign wars to distract people’s attention from internal problems. That’s according to rapper and political activist ‘Immortal Technique’. In an exclusive interview with RT’s Marina Portnaya he says America’s bad decisions are covered up with lame excuses.
Tags: 9/11, America, Corporate, obama, war on terror
US split: Collapse of ’shattered union’ to begin with Texas?
Nov 10, 2009 News & Events, Videos
Russian economist and academic Igor Panarin says that there is a strong possibility that the United States will break into six pieces by June 2010, which he says will be the result of a second economic crisis in late November. After Texas Governor Rick Perry mentioned the possibility of his state seceding from the union, Americans started to take Panarin’s predictions much more seriously and now the video game ‘Shattered Union’ is being developed into a major Hollywood motion picture.
Tags: 2010, 9/11, Alabama, America, Argentina, Arizona, Arkansas, Atlantic America, Barack Obama, Brazil, California, Carolina, china, Collapse, economic collapse, economic crisis, economic decline, economic meltdown, economic recession, European Union, financial crisis, financial meltdown, Florida, Forecast, Georgia, global recession, Hawaii, Idaho, Igor Panarin, Japan, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mississippi, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, obama, Oklahoma, Oregon, predictions, Project 2012, Robert Gates, Shattered Union, Tennessee, terrorism, Texas, The Crash of America, United Kingdom, United States, US collapse, US dollars, US population, USA, Utah, Video, Videos, war, war on terror, Washington, Wyoming
U.S. Attacks Iran Via CIA-Funded Jundullah Terror Group
Oct 20, 2009 News & Events
Bankrolling and arming Al-Qaeda offshoot part of 2007 White House directive to destabilize Iranian government
Paul Joseph Watson
Prison Planet.com
Monday, October 19, 2009
The U.S. government effectively attacked Iran yesterday after its proxy terror group Jundullah launched a suicide bomb attack against the Iranian Revolutionary Guard at their headquarters in Pishin, near the border with Pakistan.
Leaders of the Al-Qaeda affiliated Sunni terrorist group Jundullah have claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing in Iran that killed over 40 people yesterday. The group is funded and trained by the CIA and is being used to destabilize the government of Iran, according to reports out of the London Telegraph and ABC News.
In the aftermath of the attack, which killed at least five commanders of the Iranian Revolutionary Guard along with scores of others, media reports have swung between Iranian accusations of US and British involvement and blanket denials on behalf of the U.S. State Department.
However, the fact that Jundullah, who have since claimed responsibility for the attack and named the bomber as Abdol Vahed Mohammadi Saravani, are openly financed and run by the CIA and Mossad is not up for debate, it has been widely reported for years.
“President George W Bush has given the CIA approval to launch covert “black” operations to achieve regime change in Iran, intelligence sources have revealed. Mr Bush has signed an official document endorsing CIA plans for a propaganda and disinformation campaign intended to destabilize, and eventually topple, the theocratic rule of the mullahs,” reported the London Telegraph in May 2007.
Part of that destabilization campaign involved the the CIA “Giving arms-length support, supplying money and weapons, to an Iranian militant group, Jundullah, which has conducted raids into Iran from bases in Pakistan,” stated the report.
Jundullah is a Sunni Al-Qaeda offshoot organization that was formerly headed by alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. The fact that it is being directly supported by the U.S. government under both Bush and now Obama destroys the whole legitimacy of the “war on terror” in an instant.
The group has been blamed for a number of bombings inside Iran aimed at destabilizing Ahmadinejad’s government and is also active in Pakistan, having been fingered for its involvement in attacks on police stations and car bombings at the Pakistan-US Cultural Center in 2004.
The group also produces propaganda tapes and literature for al-Qaeda’s media wing, As-Sahab, which is in turn closely affiliated with the military-industrial complex front IntelCenter, the group that makes available Al-Qaeda videos to the western media.
In May 2008, ABC News reported on how Pakistan was threatening to turn over six members of Jundullah to Iran after they were taken into custody by Pakistani authorities.
“U.S. officials tell ABC News U.S. intelligence officers frequently meet and advise Jundullah leaders, and current and former intelligence officers are working to prevent the men from being sent to Iran,” reported ABC news, highlighting again the close relationship between the terror group and the CIA.
In July 2009, a Jundullah member admitted before a court in Zahedan Iran that the group was a proxy for the U.S. and Israel.
Abdolhamid Rigi, a senior member of the group and the brother of the group’s leader Abdolmalek Rigi, who was one of the six members of the organization extradited by Pakistan, told the court that Jundullah was being trained and financed by “the US and Zionists”. He also said that the group had been ordered by America and Israel to step up their attacks in Iran.
Jundullah is not the only anti-Iranian terror group that US government has been accused of funding in an attempt to pressure the Iranian government.
Multiple credible individuals including US intelligence whistleblowers and former military personnel have asserted that the U.S. is conducting covert military operations inside Iran using guerilla groups to carry out attacks on Iranian Revolution Guard units.
It is widely suspected that the well known right-wing terrorist organization known as Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK), once run by Saddam Hussein’s dreaded intelligence services, is now working exclusively for the CIA’s Directorate of Operations and carrying out remote bombings in Iran.
After a bombing inside Iran in March 2007, the London Telegraph also reported on how a high ranking CIA official has blown the whistle on the fact that America is secretly funding terrorist groups in Iran in an attempt to pile pressure on the Islamic regime to give up its nuclear program.
A story entitled, US funds terror groups to sow chaos in Iran, reveals how funding for the attacks carried out by the terrorist groups “comes directly from the CIA’s classified budget,” a fact that is now “no great secret”, according to a former high-ranking CIA official in Washington who spoke anonymously to The Sunday Telegraph.
Former US state department counter-terrorism agent Fred Burton backed the claim, telling the newspaper, “The latest attacks inside Iran fall in line with US efforts to supply and train Iran’s ethnic minorities to destabilise the Iranian regime.”
John Pike, the head of the influential Global Security think tank in Washington, said: “The activities of the ethnic groups have hotted up over the last two years and it would be a scandal if that was not at least in part the result of CIA activity.”
The timing of the bombing that targeted Iranian Revolutionary Guard members yesterday was clearly orchestrated to coincide with talks between representatives from Iran, Russia, France, the U.S. and the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna today concerning Iran’s nuclear intentions.
Tags: 9/11, afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, America, Barack Obama, cia, IAEA, iran, Iranian Revolutionary Guard, israel, Jundullah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Middle East, Mossad, Pakistan, Pishin, Project 2012, suicide bomb attack, Terror, terrorism, U.S, United States, USA, war on terror
‘Iran will blow up the heart of Israel’ if attacked
Oct 10, 2009 News & Events
Iran will “blow up the heart of Israel” if the United States or the Jewish state attacked it first, a top official with Iran’s most powerful military force, the Revolutionary Guard, warned Friday.
Cleric Mojtaba Zolnour, who is the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s representative in the Guard, said that if a US or Israeli missile lands in Iran, Iranian missiles will hit Israel in retaliation.
“Should a single American or Zionist missile land in our country, before the dust settles, Iranian missiles will blow up the heart of Israel,” Zolnour was quoted as saying by the state IRNA news agency.
In March, Iran’s deputy army chief made similar remarks, warning that his country will eliminate Israel if it attacks the Islamic republic.
US Guards Hosted Naked Gay Parties At Afghan Embassy(warning Graphical Photos)
Sep 4, 2009 News & Events, afghan war
Contractors at the US embassy in Afghanistan lived in “Lord of the Flies” conditions and hosted alchohol-fuelled parties where some stripped naked and performed lewd acts, it has been claimed.
The State Department has launched an inquiry into the allegations against the private security guards that could lead to the termination of the company’s $189 million contract, a department spokesman said.
The Project on Government Oversight, which conducted an investigation into the behaviour, said that security was threatened by incidents such as prostitutes being brought into the quarters where the guards live.
“We expect to see prompt and effective action taken as a result of these investigations,” the spokesman, Ian Kelly, told reporters.
Other possible actions include rebidding the contract or replacing individual guards and supervisors employed by the contractor, ArmorGroup North America, he said.
The State Department inspector general is leading the investigation of ArmorGroup. US officials in Kabul also are conducting a review, Mr Kelly said.
The company employs 450 guards to ensure security at the embassy where nearly 1,000 US diplomats, staff and Afghan nationals work.
The Project on Government Oversight wrote a 10-page letter to Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton that details the results of its investigation of the guard force.
Wackenhut Services, ArmorGroup North America’s parent company, has not commented on the claims.
Its findings are based on interviews with ArmorGroup guards, documents, photographs and e-mails that it said depict a “Lord of the Flies” environment.
The 1954 William Golding novel describes a group of schoolboys who are stranded on a desert island and descend into lives of savage chaos.
Tags: Afghan Embassy, afghanistan, Al-Qaeda, America, Naked Gay Parties, pics, pictures, taliban, Taxpayers, terrorism, United States, US Guards, US taxpayers, USA, Video, Videos
The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation
Aug 31, 2009 Islam, News & Events
The contemporary religious revival is a complex business. In the same period that Muslim societies, in their weakness, seem to have re-embraced Islam, America, in its strength, has re-embraced Christianity. Western Europe remains avowedly secular. Despite the contradictions within the West, mainstream Orientalism holds that all cultures are developing towards the universal (or, more specifically, globalised) model of secular modernity and the market. The Muslim world experiences backwardness to the extent that it resists secularisation.
“The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation”, a subtle and erudite book by former Iraqi minister Ali A Allawi, challenges this thesis. Surveying the Muslims’ social, economic and moral failures, and the terror espoused by certain Islamist groups, Allawi suggests the problem might not be too much Islam, but too little.
He argues that privatised religion cannot work in Islam, a civilisational framework which rests on the tripod of private ritual, public ethics and individual spiritual striving. The three must feed into and balance each other, but the current ‘revival’ operates only in the field of religiosity, focusing on naked symbols and rules, proclaiming the superiority of Islam while adopting wholesale, and indiscriminately, the technology, economics and cultural products of the West. It emphasises the Sharia as a set of fixed punishments rather than as a framework of legislative principles. (Allawi perhaps doesn’t explain the distinction thoroughly enough). For the revivalists, the public sphere is too often reduced to the state, and their political project is simply to seize control of repressive state apparatuses.
The result is a discomforting disjunction between inner and outer worlds, symbolised by contradictory Muslim landscapes: home interiors spotlessly clean, while the streets outside are strangled by plastic bags. For Allawi the courtesy, hospitality and warmth still met with in the Muslim world are the mere remnants of Islamic civilisation, and the religious revival may be its last gasp.
So what happened? Allawi doesn’t romanticise the Islamic past, yet he rejects the Arabocentric myth of continual decline since the Mongol destruction of the Abbasid empire. A dynamism and internal coherence – and a universalism which allowed Ibn Batuta, trained in Tangiers, to find work as a judge in the Maldives – lasted until the European penetration. Then the first response to Western imperialism came on Islam’s own terms, from leaders such as Chechnya’s Imam Shamil or the Algerian Abd el-Qadir, whose legitimacy derived from their ethical Sufism as much as from their championing of law. Abd el-Qadir waged jihad against the French, and also saved thousands of Christians from the mob in his Damascene exile.
After military defeat the Sufi orders degenerated (Allawi concedes they were in many cases already mired in superstition), were co-opted by imperial powers and encouraged to ignore the problematic public realm. As a result, the tariqat became irrelevant, and the Muslims lost the heart of their tradition. Sadly, the process continues today, as illustrated by New Labour’s romance with the tame and supposedly Sufi-oriented Quilliam Foundation, whose spokesmen opine on “the racist Arab psyche” and teach, for instance, that rejecting Zionism on principle is a sign of Islamic extremism – news to the anti-Zionist Christians and Marxists of the Arab world.
Almost everywhere, Allawi maintains, Islam experienced a traumatic rupture rather than an evolution into modernity. Colonial powers and then westernised ruling classes dismantled the institutions of Islam, from seminaries to the Caliphate. The work ethic disappeared with the guilds connected to urban Sufi orders, leaving a corrupt marketplace and a culture of backstabbing. Islam’s collapse in confidence has been so severe that elites in north Africa and Pakistan no longer speak the same language as the masses. Kemalist Turkey not only substituted more ‘modern’ Roman letters for Arabic script, but even criminalised reading Osmanli Turkish (contrast this with the self-consciously modern and Western state of Israel, which re-established Hebrew script).
Allawi holds up Japan’s Meiji Restoration as a modernising response to external challenges, but on the basis of Japan’s own cultural framework, and wishes the Muslims had managed something similar. He points out that where Islam did evolve towards modernity in countries beyond Western control, the results were encouraging. During the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906 – 09, for example, Najaf-based ayatollahs promoted “the liberty of the general public from arbitrary and unaccountable government by force,” and described freedom as “a rational process and one of the pillars of the Islamic faith.”
Despite the existence of Islamic concepts allowing for democracy (shura), freedom of speech (naseeha and ra’i), and social justice (’adl), voices such as those from Najaf have been exceptions to the rule of defeat and stagnation.
In one of its most engaging sections, the book focuses on Islam’s urban crisis. The colonial separation of ‘old’ and ‘new’ cities epitomised the civilisational rupture, and post-colonial regimes have committed even greater vandalism. The Wahhabi House of Saud has demolished 95% of historical buildings in the sacred cities of Mecca and Medina for fear of idolatry, and to make way for the true idols of the time: consumer outlets and gated accomodation. Meanwhile Gulf city-states are characterised by “rampant commercialism, brand worship, gigantism, strict class segregation and a calendar of ‘festivals’ and ‘events’ designed by marketers.”
The economic news is worse still. For all the oil wealth and untrammelled capitalism, the member countries of the OIC account for 22% of global population yet generate only 6% of world GDP. An Islamic alms tax (zakat) of 2.5% on the sovereign wealth funds of Gulf countries would produce an annual $75 billion wealth transfer to the poorest Muslim states, but this isn’t on the agenda. Key Islamic values like justice, fairness and education have been ignored, and an illusory counter-movement to the collapse has been led, in the Sunni world, by Wahhabism. This puritanical reform movement is painfully literalist, unimaginative, and viciously sectarian. As anti-intellectual as it is anti-mystical, it rejects the flexibility of the traditional schools of law. Its influence has been projected far beyond the central Arabian desert by oil money and the ungodly Saudi-US alliance. The result is a schizophrenic response to the West – passivity and collaboration on the one hand, nihilistic terrorism on the other.
Unlike those (such as Hazel Blears) who assume all visions of a potential Islamic superstate can be equated with Ayman al-Zawahiri’s, Allawi suggests that “it is the absence of any formal and substantial Islamic political presence at the global level that contributes to instability and disorder.” Chinese-Confucian and Indian-Hindu civilisations have, more or less, territorial contiguity. The West is represented by two powers – the EU and the US – and by institutions from NATO to the World Bank. But since the loss of its multi-national empires, Islam is splintered between weak states lacking popular legitimacy and very often governed by client regimes. Muslim countries become adjuncts of the established civilisational blocks, Morocco to Europe, for instance, or Malaysia to China, and no serious power is capable or willing to defend suffering Muslims internationally. It is noteworthy that the only Muslim voice to have condemned China’s oppression of Uighur Muslims is al-Qa’ida.
Allawi could be criticised for skirting too close to Huntington’s ‘clash of civilisations’ thesis. His constant application of the “Judaeo-Christian” epithet to the West is slightly annoying – surely the West is Hellenistic too, and for that matter Islamic, through Spain and the scientific heritage. But he avoids the fallacy of absolutely discrete cultures, and it is refreshing to read a Muslim participating in a ‘civilisational’ discourse which has usually targetted Muslims.
The book’s insistence on the role of the divine in public life will be controversial in the West, but not in most of the Muslim world. 79% of Pakistanis, 70% of Moroccans and even 43% of Turks consider themselves to be Muslims before citizens of their respective nation states. Again, Allawi’s argument is not theological but civilisational: he calls for a culture confidently aware of its core values and able to act upon them.
“The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation” offers a comprehensive sweep of Muslim world issues, from banking to human rights and the role of Muslim migrants. It introduces some remarkable but little known Islamic thinkers such as Muhammad Asad (born Leopold Weiss), Pakistan’s first ambassador to the UN, Iranian dissident Abd el-Karim Soroush, and the Sudanese Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, who understood those sections of the Quran revealed at Mecca to be of universal spiritual relevance, but the Medinan verses to be limited to the Prophet’s specific moment. In its rich and diverse portrayal of Muslim thought, the book is a corrective to the simplistic orientalism of the Bernard Lewis school.
Allawi tries hard to find positive signs. He praises the anti-sectarian Amman Message, the work of architect Hassan Fathy, and the current resurgence in Sufism even in the Wahhabi heartland. He mourns missed opportunities such as Mahathir Muhammad’s proposed gold-based currency for intra-Islamic trade, and stresses these ideas are still there for the taking. But ultimately, the book is more a lament than a programme for renewal. Waiting for the renewal, the Muslims suffer with Libyan novelist Ahmad al-Faqih, who wrote, “A time has passed and another time is not coming.”
This was published in Prospect Magazine.
Zaid Hamid on ARY News with Dr. Danish
Jul 13, 2009 Brasstacks, Zaid Hamid, pakistan politics
Zaid Hamid on ARY News with Dr. Danish Part 1
Zaid Hamid on ARY News with Dr. Danish Part 2
Zaid Hamid on ARY News with Dr. Danish Part 3
Zaid Hamid on ARY News with Dr. Danish Part 4
Tags: America, Brasstacks, israel, obama, Pakistan, USA, war on terror, Zaid Hamid
