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In comments made last week, U.S Secretary of State Condolezza Rice stated her aim to gather support from Arab nations in an effort to counter Iran’s “nefarious influence” in Iraq.  Rice, who is scheduled to attend a conference on Iraq in Kuwait next Tuesday, said she would push for more Arab support of Iraq in terms of financing and an increase of Sunni participation in the country’s politics:

“What they need to do is confirm and work for Iraq’s Arab identity,” she said. “That in and of itself will begin to shield (Iraq) from influences of Iran that are nefarious influences,” Rice said at a news conference.

She also said Iraq’s Arab neighbors could help encourage the Sunni minority to participate more fully in the political process in Iraq and to offer Baghdad much-needed debt relief, which has been slow in coming. 

In response, the Iranian Foreign Ministry has accused the Secretary of “Iranophobia”:

“Regarding Rice’s statements, these statements are not something new. American officials follow the policy of Iranophobia,” Foreign Ministry spokesman Mohammad Ali Hosseini told reporters in a weekly news conference.

“We see the developments in Iraq today are the outcome of the U.S. administration’s illogical policies. The American officials want to externalise the problems they are facing inside Iraq,” he said, adding U.S. policies in Iraq had failed.

 

Larger than the Mall of the Emirates, which boasts an indoor ski slope and a 500-room luxury hotel, the Dubai Mall is set to be opened by the end of this year. It’s part of the Downtown Burj Dubai project whose centerpiece will be Burj Dubai, which officially overtook Taiwan’s Tapei last June as the world’s tallest building. I suppose building one of the world’s largest malls to accompany the tallest building only makes sense.

(Khaleej Times Online) With a total site area in excess of 12.1 million sq ft, the showpiece mall sets a new dimension with its various construction components truly epic in proportion and scale. The structural steel used in mall, which will be bigger than the Mall of Emirates, is double that deployed for the Eiffel Tower (7,300 tonnes), and the stone and tile works of 1.2 million sq ft already laid are approximately 18 times the size of a football field measuring 69,000 sq ft. The net leasable floor area will be equivalent to the size of 50 football fields put together, developers said.

Maybe the Sandmonkey’s theory is right.

As outcry over the yet to be released film “Fitna” rages on, Egypt has taken a prominent position among the films detractors, threatening to impose what would have been the first concrete castigatory measure taken against the Netherlands. Organizers of Cairo’s international children’s film festival, issued a statement indicating their intent to ban any entries from both Dutch and Danish film makers. The latter nation earned its ban, according to reports, because of the continuing cartoon saga which has come to be emblematic of wasted time and the weakening sensitivity of a religious identity. No Danish films have been entered into the contest, making the ban little more than symbolic.

The ban, however, was lifted by the festival following what its organizers called an “apology” by the Dutch Prime Minister during a recent press conference:

“After the apology of the (Dutch) cabinet … the committee agreed in less than a minute to take the film back into the festival,” Naem al-Baz of the Cairo International Film Festival for Children told AFP.

The “apology” in reference turns out to be no such thing.  In a press conference over the weekend, Prime Minister Balkenede sought to distance himself and his cabinet from the film, sighting his concerns about the safety of Dutch “citizens, soldiers, and companies” in the aftermath of the movie’s release:

“It is our responsibility to make clear to everyone that the views and actions of this one elected representative are not those of the government,” Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende told reporters last week. “We defend the core values of freedom and respect. We guarantee freedom of expression and of religion, for Muslims as for everyone else.”

Meanwhile, NATO has also issued a statement of concern over the potential impact the movie may have on its’ troops.

Due to “blasphemous content, videos and documents.” The decision was made by an inter-ministerial comittee (Pakistani Telecommunications Authority) under direct authority from the government.  The blasphemy in question comes in the form of a trailer for Geert Wilders’ new movie “Fitna”, although some have said that the movie has no official trailer.  Others have protested the re-publishing of last year’s Mohammed cartoons:

An inter-ministerial committee has decided to block YouTube because it contained “blasphemous content, videos and documents,” a government official told AFP.

“The site will remain blocked till further orders,” he said.

Other officials said the site had been blocked because it contained controversial sketches of the Prophet Mohammed which were republished by Danish newspapers earlier this month.

One major service provider, Micronet, said in an email to subscribers that the Pakistan Telecommunications Authority had directed all ISPs to block access to YouTube “for containing blasphemous web content/movies.”

“Meanwhile Internet users can write to YouTube.com to remove the objectionable web content/movies because this removal would enable the authorities to order un-blocking of this website,” the email said. (emphasis mine)

Read more

Dutch MP Geert Wilders, head of the PVV (Party for Freedom), has angered many self-interested religious leaders and foreign state officials with a movie critical of Islam, weeks before it has even been released. If you don’t know about this yet read up on it now, because the likelihood of an international wave of riots “protests”, a la last years’ cartoons, could very well be on the horizon:

“It is regrettable that European lawmakers and politicians use gratuitous methods to gain electoral votes by attacking the sacred values and religions of others,” foreign ministry spokesman Hossam Zaki said in a statement.

Dutch far-right deputy Geert Wilders has said he will be airing on television in the Netherlands in March a controversial anti-Islam film called “Fitna” (Ordeal), which accuses the Quran of inciting people to murder.

Such politicians, Zaki said in reference to Wilders, “focus their hatred on Islam” and plan to broadcast a film undermining Islamic symbols.

These acts “feed hatred against Muslims and encourage extremism and confrontation instead of opting for dialogue based on mutual respect,” Zaki said.

This month Egypt banned the sale of four European newspapers for reprinting the Prophet pictures and summoned the ambassador of Denmark.

Now, I don’t think this movie will be of any intellectual value. And I have similar sentiments towards the man behind the film, but at the end of the day it’s one movie that will broadcast on Dutch television. Why is the Egyptian foreign ministry speaking out about this, before the movie has even been aired?

Mr. Zaki is partially correct in his statement about actions which feed hatred against Muslims and encourage extremism, albeit not for the acts his statements were made against. The reaction to every single anti-Islamic or Middle Eastern sentiment expressed in Europe by Arab (and Persian) government officials, as if to imply that people of that continent should censor themselves so as to never offend Muslims, has played a large role in fanning the flames of the reactionary “protests” we see around the world. Hopefully the Dutch government will do the right thing once the movie is released and respond firmly in support of free speech to any of the patronizing formal protests which will undoubtedly be hurled their way.

Proving that I really am an absolute technical novice in the field of blogging, I discovered today that I had quite a few comments that were in que for moderation.  I never knew my comments were moderated,  or anyone else’s on this site, so if you’ve been wondering why your comments never show up on the posts, blame it all on me.  My apologies, and I sincerely regret the missed opportunity to discuss some of these posts further in the comments section with some of you.  Now that I’ve figured out the whole commenting deal on this blog, I hope you all will continue read and discuss some of these posts. 

The past few weeks have kind’ve been slow for me in terms of blogging, I know.  But to those wondering, I haven’t quit or gone on hiatus.  I’m trying to balance a few things out here in the real world so I can spend more time writing in the virtual one. 

I also figured that I’d use this chance to share this book with you by Saad Eddin Ibrahim: Egypt, Islam and Democracy.  It’s a collection of essays written over the past 20 years, including his groundbreaking sociological study of Islamic militants in Egyptian prisons.  I read that particular essay while I was still at AUC, but I only recently finished the rest of the book.  I highly recommend this to anyone interested in reading an informed sociopolitical analysis of one of the Middle East’s most interesting countries.

A court in the Amsterdam ruled that a Muslim woman in Diemen who had her welfare payments blocked because her burqa prevented her from gaining employment, will now receive over a years worth of payments. Meaning she wears this garment that makes her unidentifiable to society and gets paid for it. Not only that, but she actually rejected a fourth job as a telemarketer (which should be a dream job for her, no physical interaction with society) because of her religious beliefs.

Consider this your ridiculous item of the day:

A court in Amsterdam ordered the Diemen district authorities to pay more than a year’s worth of blocked welfare payments as well as the woman’s legal fees.

A judge said that the authorities’ decision to stop payments in April last year was “very heavy” and criticized them for failing to take Islamic customs into account.

The burqa is one of the most conservative Islamic garments for women, covering the entire body as well as the eyes, which are hidden beneath a thick mesh. It is common in Afghanistan and was mandatory under the Taliban.

Three employers had refused to hire the woman due to her preference for the garment. The woman had rejected a fourth job as a telephone marketer because it involved a lottery business, saying that gambling was forbidden under Islam.

An Egyptian engineer, charged with selling classified information to Israeli intelligence with the aim of harming national security, stunned a courtroom Tuesday by openly praising Israel’s achievements in science and technology:

Mohammed Sayed Saber, 35, a nuclear engineer with Egypt’s atomic agency, has been charged with stealing secret documents and giving them to Mossad, the Israeli intelligence agency, in exchange for $17,000 and with the aim to harm Egyptian national security, the prosecutor said. An upbeat Saber appeared before the judge in a white prison jumpsuit at the start of his trial Tuesday, smiling and flashing a victory sign to media crammed into a dusty Cairo courtroom.

”I don’t hide my admiration of Israel … It has reached a very high technological and scientific level,” Saber said in court. ”To seek to benefit from Israel scientific expertise, is not shameful or wrong … They are a very organized and pragmatic society with definite goals, unlike chaotic societies.” ”I don’t have animosity toward the Israeli people, why should I? The fact that we had wars against Israel doesn’t mean that we remain enemies forever,” added Saber, who has never visited the Jewish state.

The hearings were adjourned till June 9. Saber, who faces up to 25 years in jail on espionage charges, did not enter a plea Tuesday.

Saber’s pro-Israeli speech was so unusual that Judge Mohammed Reda Shwakat, presiding over the three-judge panel at south Cairo state security court, called him from the defendant’s cage to the bench where he then questioned him for almost four hours in the presence of three defense lawyers.

Al-Qaeda’s number two in command, the Egyptian born Ayman Al-Zawahiri, has released a new audio tape poking fun at U.S “failures” in Iraq. The tape goes on for over an hour and a half, proving this ugly terrorist has a lot of free time, enough so even to crack a joke at President Bush’s expense, alluding to the Green Zone bombing which killed two Iraqi MP’s:

“And lest Bush worry, I congratulate him on the success of his security plan, and I invite him on the occasion for a glass of juice, but in the cafeteria of the Iraqi parliament in the middle of the Green Zone,” al-Zawahri said.

Ba dam tshhhh. When is this guy going to be killed?

It seems to be a charge leveled against many these days, and a simple search of “Islam” over at Google News shows these 3 stories on the first page of the search:

-Iran arrests student editor over insulting Islam

-41 Christians arrested for blasphemy against Islam in Indonesia

-Azeris jailed for ‘insulting Islam’

This is an excerpt from the last article:

The court ruled that their article ‘Europe and us’ was insulting to Islam and Muslims for saying that European societies were more successful than Muslim ones because Christian teachings were based on peace and tolerance while Islamic values, based on the teachings and actions of Muhammad, were not.

And naturally to prove that their tolerance matches that of European societies, the journalists were jailed for 3 years.

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