Rudy bro. The Prophet SAWs was reported as saying that the best among men are those who treat their wives best. A well treated wife means a good home, a good home means good kids, it all begins with hubby, your attitude toward women and your language does not befit someone who shares her life with you. Think about your own sister, how would you like that she is treated? Breakfast in bed! Nur Daahia sis Yes she expressed her concernsto her husband many times, but, as ususal, each time he apologises ( wuu sasabaa) and all is well until he is at it again, somehow I get the feeling that he is not taking her for serious, other than that, the brother is one very fine human being, Al Kamaalu lillaah. Nur

Muj. Red Sea How to prepare for Ramadan? A Very Good Question. Best way to prepare is to work with the end in mind. What would you want to get out of Ramadan? The answer of this question can lead you to what you have to do to get ready for Ramadan. Because, with the end objective in your mind, your activities in Ramadan will align with your priorities during the same period. So, the higher your objectives, the more time slots you set aside for the preparation of Ramadan. The Preparations for Ramadan do not include stockpiling Sambusa bags and truck load of exotic foods like they do it in the Gulf countries, where supermarkets sell 6 times more food in Ramadan alone that of any other month. Instead, its the planning of your time ahead, so that all of your dunyaa commitments in the month Ramadan are minimized to allow for ample time for worship and Quraan, as Ramadan is the month of Quraan. Nur

Dahia sis Taking someone for granted is the first crack on the wall of a household, this Halimo's concern, compaably benign to your example, is indeed an alarming whistle to maintain an othewise existing good relationship. Pleasing an existing wife is far more cheaper than risking a divorce and the emotional and financial cost of her replacement. This particulat person works full time too, she does not wait around the phone, but she does not get calls neither at work nor at home, and when she calls and leaves a message, he is forgetful always. What is more valueable than family? Nur

Saying NO to the Hunters of Goliath By Gilad Atzmon 08/13/07 "ICH " -- - The Israelis tend to personalise conflicts. Yet, by doing this, they are neither original nor innovative. They in fact follow a Biblical lesson. Within the Judaic worldview, history and ethics are often reduced into a banal single binary opposition principle. For instance, the deadly battle between the ‘righteous’ David and the ‘evil’ Goliath personalises the struggle between the ‘good’ Israelites and the ‘bad’ Philistines. Though the Biblical specific tale could be understood in a mere literary terms, the similarities to the Israelite of our time are rather concerning. In Israel, there is a direct express path that leads from the ‘role of the assassin’ to the Government seat. Time after time our contemporary Israelite supplicate their highly decorated assassins to become their kings, to lead their army and then to integrate into the cabinet. This obviously happened to Sharon, Barak, Mofaz, Halutz, Dichter and many more. However, Israelis are not alone here. The tendency to personalise and concretise history is rather common amongst Jews. In the eyes of many Jews the Third Reich is reduced into Hitler and Goebbels. Anti-Semitism is often reduced into Wagner, Marx, Weininger and so on. On the face of it, personification indeed simplifies the surrounding reality, the course of history and its interpretation. Once Hitler is gone, the Third Reich may be gone as well, once Wagner is banned, the same may happen to anti-Semitism. This tendency to personalise conflicts, ideologies and worldviews follows an infantile perception: that which you no longer see may cease to exist. It fits as well with the Biblical “an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth” paradigm. Yet, it is nothing but a pattern of self-deception. It misleadingly associates the abstract with some banal concretisation. It saves its followers from any intellectual engagement with ideology, criticism or self-reflection. Clearly, the Zionist interpretation is engaged with nothing more than the concrete symptom, with the simplest manifestation of the animosity that surrounds it rather than with the core of the problem itself. Hitler was indeed defeated, Jews are now more than welcome in Germany and in Europe, yet, the Jewish state and the sons of Israel are at least as unpopular in the Middle East as their grandparents were in Europe just six decades ago. Seemingly, it is the personification of WW2 and the Holocaust that blinded the Israelis and their supporters from internalising the real meaning of the conditions and the events that led towards their destruction in the first place. Would the Zionists understand the real meaning of their Holocaust, the contemporary Israelite may be able to prevent the destruction that may be awaiting them in the future. Similarly, Wagner may be banned in Israel, yet, the conditions that led Marx, Weininger and Wagner to say what they had to say remain unchanged. As it seems, more and more people in wider circles are now reacting critically, politically and ideologically to Israel, Zionism, Jewish tribalism and the atrocious inhuman policies that are implied by Jewish nationalism and its political and cultural offshoots. But let’s face it, it isn’t just the Israelis who personalise conflicts. Thanks to the Neocons and their tremendous current influence within the Anglo-American political realm, we are all subject to some oversimplification and personalisation of almost every Western conflict. Seemingly, every current Western war has a ‘face’ attached to it. The ‘war against terror’ has the bearded face of Osama Bin Laden. The alleged ‘liberation of the Iraqi people’ had Saddam Hussein’s face on top of the ‘hit list’. Within the Neocon’s Zionised war, every ideological conflict becomes a personal ‘targeted assassination’ plot. May I remind us all that before Neocons launched their pretty successful attempt to Zionise America and Britain, these two countries were engaged in proper impersonalised ideological wars and political conflicts. Britain and the USA fought courageously against Third Reich Germany (rather than just against Hitler). They coldly clashed with ‘The Reds’ as well (rather than with just Stalin). Clearly, this isn’t the case anymore. Within a world shaped by Neocons, the political system is reduced into a simplistic Biblical Goliath chase. We the righteous, the Davids, pursue the Goliaths: Saddam, Bin Laden, Assad, and Ahmadinejad. However, by now we should all know how futile this philosophy is. As much as Israel failed to defeat Palestinian resistance by killing every noticeable emerging Palestinian leader, as much as Israel failed to defeat the Hezbollah by aiming at its leadership, America and Britain are doomed to fail in their current murderous Zionised battles. Saddam is dead and yet, Iraq and its oil fields are still far beyond reach. Bin Laden never shows his face in public and yet the war against terror has yet to achieve a thing. I want to believe that the emerging defeat of Israel and its supporting lobbies will be appropriately grasped by the Western public. We must say NO to Zionised tactics, we must say NO to Zionist agents, we must say NO to the hunters of Goliath. Anatomy of a Colossal Defeat One year after the humiliating Israeli defeat in Lebanon I found myself reviewing the Israeli fiasco through the eyes of two renowned Israeli military analysts, Yoav Limor and Ofer Shelah. In a recent book named ‘Captives Of Lebanon’ the two have managed to assemble a very detailed journal of the chain of events that led to the war, the war itself and the endless lists of Israeli operational, tactical and strategic failures. However, Limor and Shelah do not stop just with the Army and its commanders, they skilfully convey an image of a society that has lost its way, a society that has gradually become detached from its own reality and from its surrounding environment. A society that is facing total moral collapse, led by an egotistic, self-centred leadership, both politically and militarily. Israel’s military defeat last year in Lebanon took the world by surprise. It initially shocked Bush’s Administration as well as Tony Blair who were both very quick and keen to give Israel a green light to destroy Lebanon’s Shia leadership, not to mention obliterating Lebanon’s civilian infrastructure. Bush and Blair weren’t the only ones who came in for a shock, it also stunned the Arab world. Arab leaders are not used to the defeat of the Israeli Army. Moderate Arab leaders found themselves following the TV images in which a single Muslim cleric was teaching Israelis what defiance was all about. Seemingly, Sheik Hassan Nasrallah and an insignificant number of warriors, proved to be the first Arabs to defeat the Israeli Army on the ground. Their victory left Israel in shatters. The Israeli power of deterrence disappeared completely. It became a subject for historical research. The IDF Supreme Command was shocked as well: a month after the war, General Udi Adam, the IDF Chief Commander of the northern front, had resigned. It didn’t take too long for Dan Halutz, the IDF Chief of Staff, to follow his lead. Amir Peretz, the Minister of Defence, was ousted by former PM Ehud Barak. It is rather clear that the Israelis are fully aware of the scale of their defeat in Lebanon. Yet, it seems as if the Israelis do not know how to amend the damage. They are truly in love with their ‘good life’, they are captivated by the image of technology and wealth. Though I am not so sure whether the book is going to be translated into other languages (it is in Hebrew), I would classify this book as a ‘must read’ for anyone who is interested in the affairs of this region. The book is a glimpse into Israeli society in what seems to be its final dysfunctional yet destructive state. I am convinced that those Americans who have been moronically sponsoring the Israeli death apparatus for almost four decades, those who still believe that Israel is a ‘regional super power’ better read this journal of Israeli military cowardice and general political malfunctioning. Though the book wouldn’t say it, the message is rather clear. Israel operates as a megalomaniac violent Jewish ghetto motivated by some bizarre murderous zeal flooded with American lethal technology. As Limor and Shelah reveal, in spite of the fact that the conflict on the ground took place on a very narrow strip of land (the Israeli border on the south and Litani River on the north), the Israeli artillery had managed to shoot over 170,000 shells. In comparison, in the 1973 war while fighting against two strong state armies over two very large fronts, the Israelis had launched only 53,000 shells. The figures relating to the Air Force are even more striking. Though less than a few concrete targets were available for the IDF intelligence, the IAF (Israeli Air Force) had launched as many as 17,550 combat missions, this translates into 520 missions a day, almost as many as in the 1973 war (605 a day). Yet, in 1973 the IAF was fighting two well-equipped air forces, it was engaged in a fair amount of air-to-air combat and a relentless struggle against the latest Soviet ground-to-air missiles. None of that happened in the Second Lebanon War. The IAF was engaged solely in hammering the Lebanese soil. It literally threw and launched everything it had in its disposal, presenting a merciless method that in places (southern Beirut for instance), had a similar effect to the infamous 1940s Anglo-American carpet bombardment. Why did the Israelis react so harshly to a local border incident? Why did Israeli politicians and military chiefs lose their ability to employ strategic and tactical considerations? Why did they all fail to define achievable military goals, something that would give their war a time frame, shape and justification? In short, why did the Israelis lose their way? This is indeed a crucial question. Though Limor and Shelah refrain from asking these questions, their book manages to provide some answers. I will try to summarise some of their points. The Military Let’s start with the Army. The Israeli Army has undergone a serious transition in the last four decades. In the years that followed the rapid 1967 invasion, it was ground officers and tank brigadiers in particular who were promoted to lead the Army. Post 1967 Israel believed in Blitzkrieg, an offensive onslaught that simultaneously puts into action some large ground forces together with close air support. After the 1973 war, following the limited success of ground forces and tank divisions, this trend has changed. Gradually, it was the veterans of the Israeli special units who had been promoted to high command positions. Probably the most famous among those veterans was Ehud Barak, the highly decorated commando officer who ended his military career as the IDF Chief of Staff. It was Barak who as Chief of Staff appointed his ex subordinates for high positions in the Israeli Supreme Command. Ground officers were pushed aside. This transformation within the Israeli Army had two motivations behind it: first, the intelligence assumption that not a single Arab state would consider a total war against Israel in the near future; and second, since the first Intifada and the general rise of Palestinian civil resistance, the Israeli army found itself engaged in more and more policing operations. Within such a shift there was not much need for massive ground training. Tank and artillery brigades seemed to be useless and even irrelevant to the newly emerging defence needs of the Jewish state. Large units of combatant soldiers were diverted into policing tasks in the West Bank and Gaza. Within the changing scenario, it was initially Israeli special units and security chiefs who took the lead in what the Israelis perceived as their ‘war against terror’. Consequently, more and more Israeli commando veterans found their way to the IDF high command and later straight into the highly militarised Israeli political life. But things didn’t stop just there; it didn’t take long before Israeli special units failed to provide the solutions to what seemed to be a constantly growing Palestinian civil resistance. Sending the salt of the Jewish earth into Gaza in the wee hours proved to be too dangerous. It must be told that as much as Israelis love to see their young boys terrorising Palestinians, they cannot stand seeing their beloved Rambos being ambushed and killed. It was just a question of time before the Air Force was left to deal with Palestinian defiance. Capitalising on some advanced American technologies, Israel let its F-16s and Apache helicopter gunships launch guided missiles against Palestinian civilian and military targets. The philosophy was rather simple: the IAF was there to maintain the Palestinians in a state of a constant awe. As it happened, in the last decade, the IAF has become the leading force in the war against Palestine, the Palestinian people and their imminent Islamic leadership. The IAF was quick to develop a tactic that was soon named ‘targeted assassination’. According to the new Israeli military doctrine, all that was needed was some intelligence on the ground, which would be followed by a single Israeli jet launching an American guided missile in highly populated Gaza. The achievements were rather clear. In many cases targeted Palestinians were assassinated, in very many cases they found their death alongside innocent civilian bystanders who were unlucky enough to be in the proximity. These unfortunate people were in the wrong place at the very wrong time. In many other cases the pilots just missed or were misled by intelligence. As a result, many Palestinian civilians, old people, women and children found their death. Clearly, no one in Israel could care less. When Dan Halutz, still the IAF commander, was asked how it feels to drop a bomb that kills fourteen Palestinian civilians, his answer was short and simple. ‘It feels like a light bounce on your left wing’. Halutz, the cold-blooded officer, the man who ordered the murder of so many Palestinians, was the right man in the right place, it didn’t take long before he was asked to take the lead of the Israeli Army. As time went by, the Israeli government refrained from endangering young Israeli soldiers. The Israeli ‘war against terror’ has become very safe warfare on the verge of a computer game. Sheik Yassin, Dr. Rantisi and many other civilians fell victim to this form of murderous tactic. Apparently, Israeli military leadership has been overwhelmed with the success of their new killing method. The people of Israel had a new God, namely ‘technological superiority’. The last Israeli wave of generals, many of them pilots and special units’ veterans, got accustomed to the belief that Israel may maintain its regional supreme power by capitalising on its technological superiority and overwhelming firepower. As Limor and Shelah reveal in their book, in the last decade Israeli soldiers literarily stopped training of any form of large tactical operations. With the IAF chasing the enemies of Israel in their bedrooms, who needs tanks and artillery? Young Israeli tank drivers were redeployed soon after their initial and minimal training into elementary guard tasks in the occupied territories. In practice not only were those soldiers foreign to their original military tasks in tanks and artillery, they were not familiar at all with any form of large operational tactical manoeuvres. In other words, as far as the Israeli army is concerned, it lost its readiness to war. So The Palestinians Actually Won Many analysts regard the Palestinian resistance as a militarily futile struggle. At the end of the day, not much harm can be inflicted by a bunch of kids throwing stones. Reading Limor and Shelah may imply that in reality, the Palestinian struggle was actually far from being futile. In fact, it was precisely Palestinian civil resistance that has managed to exhaust the Israeli army. It was the Palestinian resistance that led the Israeli army into a state of paralysis. It was the Palestinian resistance that stretched the IDF manpower to its limit and stopped the Israeli army from training towards the ‘next war’. It was the Palestinians who turned the Israeli soldiers and their commanders into a bunch of cowards who prefer to win wars while sitting in front of computer monitors moving joysticks. It was actually the Palestinians who devastatingly dismantled the IDF readiness for war. It is very much as Sheik Hassan Nasrallah has been suggesting in one of his most declamatory speeches. Israel was indeed ‘hiding behind technological superiority just to cover its cowardice and incomprehension of what the living in the Middle East may entail’[2]. The Israeli army has become used to smashing Palestinian civilians in their homes, to murdering their emerging leadership, to terrorising pregnant women in roadblocks, to shelling young kids in their school classes, so this was indeed very easy. Yet, when the IDF was asked to engage some tiny groups of lightly trained paramilitary enthusiasts, it collapsed shamefully. It collapsed in spite of its technological superiority; it was defeated in spite of its overwhelming firepower, in spite of Bush’s and Blair’s disgraceful support. The Israeli Army collapsed because it was incompetent, it was not ready to fight, it did not know how to fight and most concerning for the Israelis, it didn’t even realise what it was fighting for. Soon after the conflict in Lebanon developed into a total war (at least in the eyes of the Israelis) it became clear to most Israeli generals that the IDF doesn’t have the means to address the rain of Hezbollah Katyusha rockets. If the initial Israeli goal was to stop the Katyusha rockets and to bring home the two captured Israeli reserves, these goals proved to be beyond reach. The Israeli commander soon learned that without proper and quality intelligence, their superior firepower and technology lost any relevance. As funny as it may sound, in a matter of a few days the Israeli leadership adopted some post-structuralist vocabulary. Rather than providing the people of Israel with a simple straightforward ‘victory’ they all started to communicate in terms of a ‘narrative of victory’. Days from the launch of the Israeli campaign the Israeli military began to talk in terms of ‘an Image of victory’ rather than ‘victory’ per se. Shimon Peres started to use the term ‘perception’ of a victory. Yet, even ‘perception’ and ‘image’ of a victory proved to be far beyond reach. The Only Democracy in the Middle East As useless as the Israeli army proved to be, the Israeli government wasn’t any better. Ehud Olmert, the PM, the man who was voted to ‘disengage’ from Palestinian territories, had very little understanding of military affairs. If this is not enough, Amir Peretz, the Labour leader, the man whom Olmert appointed to be his Minister of Defence, lacked any significant knowledge in defence matters as well. For the first time in its history, Israel was led by two professional politicians who had no military background. On the face of it, one may expect that such a dramatic shift would curve the Israeli hawkish tendency within the military and political realm. In practice, the opposite happened. Both Peretz and Olmert found themselves dragged and manipulated into a large-scale conflict by the bloodthirsty Chief of Staff. Considering their inexperience and the short time that they had been holding office, neither Olmert nor Peretz could come up with some creative alternative solutions that might avoid conflict yet would achieve something more. Rather than holding the Army back and giving diplomacy a chance, they both let Halutz lead the country towards unnecessary escalation. Without understanding the full picture, the Israeli government ended up promising Halutz the necessary time and support to achieve goals that were beyond reach to start with. But the truth must be said. Olmert and Peretz were not alone in their cabinet. In fact, they were surrounded by military analysts, intelligence experts, ex-generals and security services veterans. Olmert had in his government Reserved General Shaul Mofaz, the ex Chief of Staff, a man who spent the late phase of his military career fighting the Hezbollah. Avi Dichter, a Security Services veteran was there to comment on the IDF operative suggestions. They had in the government Benjamin Ben Eliezer as well, a reserve Brigadier who had been an expert on Lebanese issues for the last three decades. Shimon Peres was himself a Prime Minister and a Defence Minister in the past. Reservist General Ami Ayalon, and ex-IDF General as well as a former Chief of the Internal Security Services offered his help to Amir Peretz. Yet, none of these experts managed to form a decision-making body, none of the above managed to moderate the military enthusiasm of Halutz, Olmert and Peretz. Like a leaf in the wind, the Israeli government was manipulated by the Generals and later by the public opinion that turned dramatically against the leadership and its inadequate achievement. As time went by, with military failure becoming public knowledge, the more desperately Olmert, Peretz and Halutz tried to change the course of the war just to save their future careers. Though they realised that the chances of achieving a victory were melting down by the hour, they were determined to present the public something that would look like a victory or even simply as an achievement. This is apparently what political survival in the Israeli democracy means for real, you have to present something that may look like a victory. To call it a name, Peretz, Halutz and Olmert ordered the Army to cause some real devastation, assuming that this would gratify the Israeli voter. The IAF and the artillery command reacted instantly, some heavy barrages of cluster bombs, missiles and shells rained over southern Lebanon. In the last 48 hours leading to the ceasefire, Israel emptied it entire stock of weaponry. According to Shelah and Limor, Israel’s ammunition stocks reached the ‘red light’ position. In order to save the political careers of Olmert and Peretz, the IDF launched more and more pointless risky operations with very limited tactical value. These operations failed one after the other without achieving a single thing. Yet they exposed the IDF’s weaknesses. They revealed an Army and a political leadership in a state of a panic. Towards the final hours of the war, some isolated patches of Israeli special units were stranded and starved along the southern Lebanese front with no access to water and food. A few units of Hezbollah warriors had managed to encircle top Israeli commandos. Seemingly, no one in Israel dared to risk logistic convoys into the battlefield. Food and ammunition that was dropped from cargo airplanes fell into the hands of the Hezbollah. In some areas, the wounded IDF commandos were lying on the ground, waiting many hours for rescue units. The defeat was total. The humiliation was colossal. Not only was the ‘Israeli Defence Army’ unable to defend Israel anymore, it even failed in defending itself. Limor and Shelah expose many more interesting issues: Brigadiers who failed to fight alongside their soldiers, instead they preferred to run the battle from secluded bunkers inside Israel. Helicopter gunships were not allowed to enter Lebanese air space just to avoid the risk of being shot down, as a result, Israeli commandos were left to fight Hezbollah on equal terms (lacking air support). A Lieutenant Colonel who refused to lead his soldiers into Lebanon admitted being deficient in operative tactical knowledge. Reservist soldiers were heading towards the front with hardly any of their combatant gear because of some severe shortage in the army emergency stockrooms. Some of those reservists ended up spending their own money so that they could buy the necessary gear. More details regarding Dan Halutz’s 12 July stock exchange affair. Apparently, the Chief of Staff, General Halutz phoned up the bank and ordered them to sell his investment portfolio soon after he learned about the clashes in the north. All this happened just before he himself ordered a further escalation. Seemingly, the Israeli army is ‘all over the place’, it is under trained, it is heavy, it is messy, and its leaders are corrupted to the bone. The Israeli political leadership isn’t any better. Though Peretz is no longer at the Ministry of Defence, Olmert, Mofaz, Dichter and now Barak - all qualified mass murderers - are still cabinet members. Considering the state of its army, Israel may have to consider a swift change of direction, it cannot fight anymore. It lacks the endurance. But seemingly this is not going to happen. As it seems, in the next Israeli election we are probably going to see the eloquent yet belligerent Benjamin Netanyahu fighting the belligerent yet far less eloquent Ehud Barak. For years we tended to believe that Israel would not be defeated in the battlefield. Learning in detail the events of the last war allows us to consider that this may not be the case. The Jewish state has already been defeated in battle and this may happen again sooner than we think.

Fighting the Democrats’ Complicity with Bush By Francis A. Boyle 08/10/07 "ICH' -- -- Despite the massive, overwhelming repudiation of the Iraq war and the Bush Jr. administration by the American people in the November 2006 national elections conjoined with their consequent installation of a Congress controlled by the Democratic Party with a mandate to terminate the Iraq war, since its ascent to power in January 2007 the Democrats in Congress have taken no effective steps to stop, impede, or thwart the Bush Jr. administration’s wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, or anywhere else, including their long-standing threatened war against Iran. To the contrary, the new Democrat-controlled Congress decisively facilitated these serial Nuremberg crimes against peace on May 24, 2007 by enacting a $95 billion supplemental appropriation to fund war operations through September 30, 2007. In the spring of 2007 all the Congressional Democrats had to do was nothing. They could have sat upon the supplemental appropriation request for war operations by the Bush Jr. administration and thus failed to enact it into law. At that point, the money for war operations would have gradually run out, and the Bush Jr. administration would have been forced to have gradually withdrawn U.S. armed forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Instead of so doing, the Congressional Democrats knowingly prolonged these wars of aggression and thus in the process became aiders and abettors to these Nuremberg crimes against peace. Under the terms of the United States Constitution, the President cannot spend a dime unless the money has somehow been appropriated by the United States Congress. Article 1, Section 9, Clause 7 of the United States Constitution expressly provides: “No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law…” Furthermore, Article 1, Section 8, Clause 12 of the Constitution also provides that “Congress shall have power . . . To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years . . . ” America’s Founders and Framers deliberately strove to keep America’s prospective military establishment on a financial short-leash tightly held by the hands of Congress precisely because of their well-founded fear that a standing army would constitute a dire threat to the continued existence of the Republic based upon their recent experience confronting and defeating King George III’s standing army. As the American July 4, 1776 Declaration of Independence stated their objections in part: “[H]e has kept among us, in Times of Peace, Standing Armies, without the consent of our Legislatures. He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power . . . For quartering large Bodies of Armed Troops among us…” Congress must use its constitutional power of the purse to terminate the Bush Jr. administration’s wars of aggression immediately. Those Congressional incumbents of either political party who refuse to do so must be replaced by men and women of good faith and good will of any or no political party who will do their constitutional duty to terminate ongoing Nuremberg crimes against peace. To the contrary, the current leadership of the Democratic Party (though, to be sure, not all Democrats), let alone most of the Republicans, have been complicit with all the atrocities that the Bush Jr. administration has inflicted upon international law, international organizations, human rights, the United States Constitution, civil rights, civil liberties, Afghanistan, Iraq, Somalia, and elsewhere since September 11, 2001. Further confirmation of this proposition can be found in the fact that when the self-described Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan went on July 23, 2007 with 200 protesters to speak with Democratic Congressman John Conyers — Chair of the House Judiciary Committee that has supervisory jurisdiction over bills of impeachment — about starting impeachment proceedings against President Bush Jr., at the end of an hour Congressman Conyers ordered her and 45 others arrested for disorderly conduct when they refused to leave his office. In other words, one of the leaders of the Democratic Party arrested one of the leaders of the American Peace Movement for insisting that he and his congressional colleagues perform their constitutionally-mandated duties. Nothing could be more symptomatic of the constitutional, moral, and political bankruptcy of the so-called two-party system of politics in the United States of America: Republicans versus Democrats, Tweedle Dum versus Tweedle Dee. Since the Democrats’ Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Nancy Pelosi had already ruled arbitrarily that President Bush’s impeachment was “off the table,” Peace Mom Cindy Sheehan announced her intention to run against Pelosi in the 2008 national elections. Once again Mrs. Sheehan’s instincts, principles, judgment, and strategy are directly on target. The American people must oppose, defeat, and replace all members of the United States Congress of any political party who will not impeach President Bush and Vice President Cheney in order to terminate their needlessly — inflicted death and destruction in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia as soon as possible. The so-called leaderships of both political parties have left the American people with no alternative. Even more urgently, the Neo-Conservative cabal known as the Bush Jr. administration are still threatening, planning, preparing, and conspiring to attack Iran, which could very well set-off World War III. Just recently they added nuclear-armed Pakistan to their publicly proclaimed list of targets. Meanwhile, the Bush Jr. administration’s “surge” of 30,000 troops into Iraq announced in January of 2007 has marched on to its inexorable bloodbath for the Iraqi people and U.S. armed forces. There is more than enough circumstantial evidence to conclude that the underlying strategy of the Bush Jr. administration is nothing more than to postpone their inevitable defeat in Iraq until after their departure from office in January 2009 no matter what the cost in lives to Iraqis and Americans. But the world cannot wait until January of 2009 for America to start to end these wars and their related war crimes, as well as to prevent more threatened wars, especially against Iran or Pakistan, which could prove catastrophic for humankind. The United States Congress must immediately and simultaneously proceed to exercise both its constitutional power of the purse and its constitutional power of impeachment toward that end. That is the bilateral strategy which the U.S. Congress pursued a generation ago in order to terminate the Nixon administration’s criminal wars of aggression against Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. That must be the bilateral strategy by which the U.S. Congress today terminates the Bush Jr. administration’s criminal wars of aggression against Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, and otherwise perhaps soon Iran or Pakistan. Despite Pelosi’s disingenuous protestations to the contrary, the Nixon/Vietnam precedent proves that Congressional impeachment and cutting-off funds for wars are mutually reinforcing strategies. They might even win the 2008 U.S. Presidential and Congressional elections for those who embrace them. Francis A. Boyle, Professor of Law, University of Illinois, is author of Foundations of World Order, Duke University Press, The Criminality of Nuclear Deterrence, and Palestine, Palestinians and International Law, by Clarity Press. He can be reached at: FBOYLE@LAW.UIUC.EDU

Brother Biixi, Salaams You write: "Nur Brother, Let's start. As I see... ICU is product of USC." Answer: That may be correct brother, the way you see things depends on where you stand on Aqeedah issues on one hand, and the very nature of those you are looking at ( The ICU) on the other. The first dependecy is about you, the second dependency is about the object (ICU). So let us first begin to explore the latter. Like a football team aquired by a wealthy investor like eNuri Capital aquisitions, there is no doubt that the present formation of the Islamic courts includes recycled old guards from the USC, just like their opponenents (TFG) have within their ranks receycled elements from SSDF, while the SNM ave grown apart to create their own breakaway Republic in the North. THE SNM, USC and SSDF, However, as time progressed have polarized, each clan following a different path, initially SNM and SSDF took conrol of their respective regions, while USC stronghold Central Somalia fell in anarchy and out of any control, which caused the movement to fade away to spawn splinters along subclan allegiances, looking to Addis Ababa for suppport, while the leadership of the remnants of the SNM and the SSDF also cemented loyalties with Addis Ababa to survive. But one thing was common for all of them: All of them were driven by greed, not faith nor desire for good governance , Democracy nor secularism. The North and the Northeast have thus created stable regional governance blessed by the big brother on their shoulder (Not Raqeeb and catiid, But Bush and Meles). While the Anarchy in the south was cleverly maintained by the same client nation of Ethiopia, arming all the warlords to maintain the anarchy, rape, murder for hire, and the rampant lawlessness that followed. At the peak of this anarchy, each splinter clan group created its own little court to mete out justice to their own, since no outsider was allowed to do so, and thus, miniature courts were created in many tribal areas. The Anarchy in the South has its sponsors and care takers ( beyound the scope of this thread), but the net result was the USA -CIA Sponsored Murder-For-Hire business which endordsed the hunting down of all independent religious scholars and their summary executions in the name of war on terror, thus awakening the dormant activism of the common man to take ownership of a problem he was oblivius to before. Suddenly, the clan structure underwent a radical transformation, a mini revolt has changed the clan leaderships topology from the warlords at the top, to the leadership of the Islamic scholars of each clan and their assumption of clan affairs, which forced the warlords to show their true colors and sponsors. The irony began when the thugs that held Mogadishu hostage for 16 years, with the worst criminal record were blessed by the USA as allies and friends of the free world in the war aginst "terror", (Which appeared to the common somali person like using an oven heat to cool a simeringly hot room) the Warlords first assignment: Capturing three non Somali men accused of the Nairobi Embassy bombings. But to capture or to kill these three men, like sifting through tons of sand to get an ounce of gold, a lot of innocent men and women where wasted, killed and sacrificed, or so we were consoled by the caring USA. It was during the commition of these crimes by the USA, Ethiopia and the Warlords in the South that the miniature tribal Islamic courts transformed to become the United Islamic Courts.( Please refer to eNuri article on SOL Islam pages "Paradigm Shift" ) Now, the southern residents set aside their tribal differences and united their efforts to root out the criminal warlord elements, the warlords being armed and supported by the Proxy government of Ethiopia serving the "interets" (or is it?) of the USA in the region which is beyound the declared "war on terror" and more of an economic expedition to shake the tree that will drop the Crude Oil fruits. Subsequently, the Islamic Courts routed the warlords, took control of the entire south in a short time, and established law and order, in a glaring example of good governance, opened the airport and the shipping port for the first time in 16 years, scared away pirates, and returned homes seized by warlords to their rightful owners in far away Puntland and Somaliland as well as for the oppressed looma ooyaan minorities from other regions. The arrival of the courts made everyone happy except for the USA, Ethiopia and their local boys. The ICU Message: 1. Uniting of Somalia under Sharia Law 2. Justice , Law and Order as first priority 3. Establishment of an independent NON FOREIGN CLIENT GOVERNMENT. 4. Servig the Public. Now, who has a problem with the above? The survival of the Islamic Courts depended on the harsh reality of accepting slavery to other than Allah, which others willingly accepted, a phoney government that sits on the lap of its national enemy, allowing it to desecrate its national fiber and faith, by giving it full control of all of Somalia. The Courts opted to disappear and melt away gracefully instead of living in disgrace. Today the courts live deep in the hearts of all decent Somalis all over the world, And reappear they will inshAllah, evil can fool the fools, but those who serve Allah alone, will never serve evil. Its a contradiction. So, either America and Ethiopia stand for the GOOD, and the Islamic Courts stood for EVIL, OR something is terribly wrong. The second part is about Islam. Biixi bro. I am sure that you agree that Islam erases all sins, so if a warlord embraces Islam, and accepts the Sharia (even if he is using it), as Muslims we can not judge him differently ( we can be cautious). So if any element from the warlords join the Courts movement, they must have accepted to live by the Islamic doctrine of the Courts, Because Allah forgives his servants who have committed crimes. Other warlord criminals were forgiven by thier mentors, The USA and Ethiopia, so if they obey them, they will not be prosecuted for the crimes against humanity that they have committed, and continue to commit in their service, which explains why they are so loyal to them. On the other hand, the warlord Government is clearly agianst the establishment of Sharia as the law of the land, their main purpose for existense is not to serve teh Somali people, but to serve their masters,( by bribing their tribal leaders for a support). So Brother Biixi, how are the Islamic Courts Union and the Warlords the same? Nur [ August 12, 2007, 09:42 AM: Message edited by: Nur ]

Walaal Jimcaale Camal walba si nalooga aqbalo wuxuu u baahan yahau labo shardi: 1. Inuu Allah dartii Khaalis u yahay 2. In lagu sameeyo hab waafaqsan Sunnada Rasuulka SAWS , ama aan ka hor imaaneyn. Qodobka hore, wuxuu leeyahay dhowr xaaladood. 1. Camal markii ughu horreysay Allah wajigiisa oo khaalis ah aan u sameynay, haddana nafta ay jecleysatay in dadku ogaadaan mar dambe. 2. Camal markii ughu horreysay Allah wajigiisa oo khaalis ah aan u sameynay, laakin marna ay nafta jecleysan in qof bani adam ah uu ogaado. Ducada wexey ka saabsan tahay xaaladda hore oy naftu jecleysato in dadku ogaadaan camalka fiican si xharaf ay uga hesho dadka, taasoo burburineysa niyadii hore oo khaaliska aheyd. Haseyeeshee, shaki kuma jiro in Cibaadada Allah laga helo nicmado badan ooy ugu horreysa laabta oo kuu dagganaata, iyo farxad. Sidaa darteed haddaan Allah ku caabudno niyad khaalis ah, haddana aan ka filano inuu noogu nicmeeyo camalkaas fiican , is ma diiddana. Wallahu aclam. Nur

Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo danbi walba oon galay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , Farad walba oon ka tagay Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , Qof walboon dulmiyay Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , Qof walboo oo wanaagsanoon jaray. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, daalim walboo aan la saaxibay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , qof walboo i waaniyay oon hagraday. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , been walboon sheegay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , xaq walbon lunshay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , baadil walboon raacay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , waqti walboon ka faaideysan. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, sir walboon faafiyey. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, ballan walboon ka baxay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , qof isku kay halleynayay oon ka haabsaamay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , qof walboon xantay, am xantiisa oon dhageystay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , indhaheyga wax walboo xaaran ah oy daawadeen. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, xumaan walboon falay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , malo xun oon qof fiican ka rumesyatay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , waano walboon diiday inaan ku waano qaato. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, deyn ama xaq la igu leeyahay oon bixinin. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, cilmi ama Quraan aan illoobay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, wax walboon Alah ka ballan qaaday, haddana aan fulin waayey. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, cibaado ama camal walboon wajiga Allah ku raadinayay, hadana dan kale ay iiga soo gashay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, dambi walba oon ku galay maalinka cad, ama mugdiga habeenka, anigoo kaligey aha ama ayadoo dad aan la joogo, sir ama waxaan u bareeray. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , nicmad walba oo Allah iigu nicmeeyay oon u kaalmeystay inaan Allah ku caasiyo. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , maal walboon xaaraan ku soo helay. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , cilma walboo la i weydiistay on qariyey. Allah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo , cilmi walboon ku camal falin. Alah ayaan ka baryaa inuu iga cafiyo, bidco walboon raacay anoo og ama moog. Allaha ka abaal mariyo qofkii fidiya istighfaarkan. Qore: Lama Yaqaan 2007 eNuri Softwaano Somali Service. ------------------------------------------------- Kuwa iga da weyn waa iga ajar badan yihiin, kuwa igay da yarna waa iga dambi yaryihiin. [ August 09, 2007, 10:03 AM: Message edited by: Nur ]

Nomad wallaal Boggan waxaan u mar kale u furay si loo kala faa'iideysto oo qof waliba ka hadlo dareenikiisa/dareenkeeda ku saabsan waxa uu iimaanka ku koro ama ku nusqaamo. Tani waa is xasuusin, hadaba qofkii doona, waddo Rabbigiisa/Rabbigeeda gaadhsiisa ( Waddooyinka Lagu Nabad Galo, Subul al salaam), ha maro. Nur

In Freedom's Name By Monica Benderman 08/02/07 "ICH" --- - Reyam is fourteen years old. Her name means “white gazelles”. She’s a beautiful girl who loves to draw and chat with her friends. She’s bright, and works hard on her lessons. It’s three in the morning in Georgia, and the computer monitor and two candles cast the only light in the room as Reyam and I chat on the internet. She hopes she does well on her test in school. She would love to have a puppy, and her instant message icon changes weekly to fit the current teenage trends. The miracle of technology, Reyam is teaching me Arabic using microphones, instant messages and something I’m still getting used to called an IMvironment. Reyam is in Baghdad. She “buzzes” my computer and I hear her talking – she is gentle, intelligent and caring, her parents should be proud. She tells me she hears bombings and it makes her scared. She tells me she sometimes wants to hide under her bed and she thinks she might cry. She tells me she tries so hard not to cry. She doesn’t want to cry, “I am an Iraqi, and I must be brave.” Her generator loses power and our connection is ended for the night. Freedom? It’s five in the morning. In a parking lot opposite an abandoned Winn-Dixie store sits an old red pick-up with more rust than paint and a rope holding the hood down. The driver’s door is open and sticking out are a pair of slippered feet. The man they belong to is trying to sleep. Everything he owns is piled into the bed of the truck. He once called himself ‘Honest Abe’, and is the spitting image of our sixteenth president. For years he traveled to schools around the country sharing his love for history in a one-act play he had written, dressed in the black hat and tails of his namesake. Now accused of stealing money from the people he worked for over the past five years, he has been arrested and released. He had worked for room and board and for reasons known to him, his social security was meager. He cared more about teaching children our country’s history than saving money for his retirement. His hands and feet are blistered with open wounds; a skin disease no one seems able to diagnose. Not wanting the burden of having to care for him, the city has decided to let him live in the parking lot until his court date. A police officer has said that it would be best if the man simply died. Freedom? In Iraq, the United States military is “surging” to strengthen the security of a country whose borders had once been secure, now decimated from an invasion by the United States military. Some people in the United States actually still believe our soldiers are over there fighting for our freedom. Thousands of Iraqis become refugees from their homeland every day. Thousands more have died in the four years this fiasco has continued on. This is for freedom? I sit and think about my friends in Iraq, the Iraqi people we talk with, the soldiers who tell us what they face and how they believe; and I take a look around this United States, my home. Freedom. Let me tell you something about freedom. Freedom does not rely on history. Freedom does not rely on endless lectures on where our culture has been and where it is going. Freedom does not rely on young men and women signing their lives away for an enlistment bonus serving as nothing more than a glittery facade to keep innocents from knowing they’re about to become slaves. Freedom does not rely on wars being fought on foreign soil so we don’t have to face our enemies at home. Freedom does not rely on the work of past generations, so that this generation can remain idle in their responsibility, consumed by achieving the pretense of success. Freedom does not rely on others fighting our battles while we profess moral support for their actions from living rooms and computer monitors where our words are posted using pseudonyms so our government cannot track our actions. Freedom. It is August. At the end of the month the final brigades designated as part of the “surge” for security in Iraq are scheduled to deploy from Fort Stewart. Soldiers don’t hide their feelings much any more. In grocery stores, gas stations and local businesses, more and more soldiers are willing to express their displeasure at the continued deployments with no definitive end. Some soldiers are returning for their fourth deployment in four years. Freedom. I will hear from those who tell me soldiers volunteered to serve, they get what they deserve. Others will tell me soldiers can stop fighting at any time. Still more will write and remind me that our soldiers are fighting for our freedom, and we should honor them by supporting them and allowing them to continue their work. In Georgia this weekend, residents are gearing up for “tax free shopping.” Parking lots of shopping malls will be full of vehicles bearing faded out ribbons with barely legible words. “I Support the Troops.” Freedom. Two years ago tonight I received a phone call at three in the morning. It was my husband calling from the County Jail. He was being taken in the night to an airport in nearby Savannah to fly three thousand miles away to serve the sentence imposed by a military judge who oversaw the kangaroo court-martial his commanders fabricated and manipulated. No one in the command bothered to tell me what they had up their sleeve, but the past two years were a sentence from hell, as much for waiting for the promises of “support” to materialize from those who claimed to have the best interests of soldiers in mind as for the reasons he was put in prison to begin with. Freedom. A ten year veteran who served a combat tour in Iraq, Kevin had seen the reality of what he had been asked to do, and took action to stand against it. Kevin was proud to serve, he was proud of what he gave this country. He trusted people when they said they would stand with him as he fought against actions that violated his commitment to serve with honor. He believes in the Constitution and his oath to defend its laws, enough that he refused to give in to the threats and intimidation of his command even if it were to avoid spending time in prison for his beliefs. It was midnight last night as I witnessed a scene played out repeatedly at our house in the year since he was released from prison; anger and frustration from facing the reality that the country he believed in and gave so much to really does not care, regardless of what a soldier fights for. Freedom. We learn more daily about the depth of the surveillance program that threatens the freedoms of people in the United States. The Patriot Act becomes more invasive with every renewal. People complain about their liberties being taken away as they continue to laud the efforts of our soldiers in Iraq keeping us free. Freedom is earned. Freedom is fought for, not with guns, but by standing strong for the values and principles which define the laws of our Constitution. Freedom takes work. Freedom takes commitment. Freedom means taking a realistic look at ourselves, our goals and our actions; knowing we are living our truth, but not at the expense of another’s freedom. Freedom requires courage and diligence. Freedom requires action from all, not just a few. We have freely allowed the homeland of millions of innocent Iraqis to be destroyed. We have freely allowed a war to continue for over four years, creating a spending deficit which will take generations to overcome, putting lives in turmoil, and dividing our nation. We are freely allowing our freedoms to be taken away. It is midnight in Georgia. In the distance is the sound of artillery rounds pounding from the training grounds of Fort Stewart. We hear them nightly now as the final brigades of the latest surge make final preparations to deploy. “I am an American, I must be brave,” though what I see from my country is enough to make a person cry. Monica is the wife of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a ten-year Army veteran who served a combat tour in Iraq and a year in prison for his public protest of war and the destruction it causes to civilians and to American military personnel.

Anarchy is back! Now What is next? Nur

MP quits family values party after scandal with prostitute By Richard Owen Tuesday July 31 2007 Cosimo Mele (50), a parliamentary deputy for Italy's Christian Democratic UDC party, resigned from the party after colleagues complained that his behaviour was incompatible with the Centre Right's espousal of family values. The timing of the dismissal was particularly sensitive as the party has been at the forefront of a campaign to oblige all parliamentarians to take a voluntary drugs test. This is due to take place tomorrow. Mr Mele, whose wife is about to give birth to their fourth child, said that he felt proud to have risked exposure by calling the emergency services when the girl began hyperventilating and experiencing delirium and hallucinations. "At least I avoided the worst - for her," he said. Mr Mele, who comes from Brindisi, in staunchly Catholic southern Italy, claimed he had not realised that the girl was a prostitute. During a recess in an evening vote in the lower house, he had gone for dinner with friends at a fashionable restaurant near the French Embassy on Piazza Farnese, and struck up a "sympathetic rapport" with a woman in her late 20s to whom he was introduced. The MP said he had been flattered by her interest. "I am not exactly the kind of man women seek out with a lantern," he told Il Messaggero, the Rome daily. He said that "one thing led to another" and they ended up in bed in a suite at the Hotel Flora on Via Veneto, which features in Fellini's 1960 classic film 'La Dolce Vita'. Asked if he had paid the girl for sex, Mr Mele replied: "Not exactly. I spontaneously gave her a present." He admitted the present had been cash, "though not excessive". He denied reports that he had taken part in a threesome, saying that although there had been another woman present she had only chatted to the first woman in the suite's sitting room while he lay in bed watching TV. "I think I fell asleep while they were talking," he said. "Perhaps that was when they took drugs." Mr Mele said the prostitute became ill towards dawn. "I phoned the reception and then called for medical assistance. She didn't want me to, but I felt it was the right thing to do." He admitted that he had supported a Bill going through parliament, calling for tougher measures against drugs offences, but denied he had taken drugs himself. "I made a mistake, and I assume full responsibility," he said. He said he would tell his wife everything today at their home at Ostuni, and ask for her forgiveness. He refused to resign as a deputy, because he was "a respectable man" with virtues and weaknesses. (© The Times, London) - Richard Owen

"I love him and he loves me, but once he is out of the door to work or on the road for business, I am out of his mind, he never calls, nor returns my calls, otherwise, he is an ideal husband at home, very loving and caring but, strangely, once I am out of his sight, I am also out of his mind, Brother Nur, I am thinking of divorce, seriously after 4 years of marriage, I am worried that I may not find another husband like him, I mean when he is with me at home, but his thoutlessness is tilting our relationship, what should I do ..... cryin" That was a phone call I received from a distressed family friend, and increasingly these days , many wives are facing new realities of the Nomadic lifestyle in which many Somali husbands are deeply involved in business or politics to the point of totalliy forgeting that they have a family back home once they leave home for work. For once, dear brother, put yourself in your wife"s shoes, you may have many aspects of business life that excite you, but she may have only you in her life, specially if she has no children, can you imagine how bored she can be? , to call her and assure her that you care, can alleviate a lotta pain your wife may be going through, worse yet, in a moment of weakness, Satan may well suggest to her an idea or two. Everytime your wife goes out for shopping and sees couple's hand in hand, she will think about you , while the only time you hold her hand is when you are stopping her from shopping, and if you are too busy to the point that you never spend time with her outside of the house, she may just grow frustrated and opt to never go out for her needs to avoid comparing herself and you to happy couples she sees, which further fuels her anxiety. Empathy, is indeed a great virtue, to be able to feel what others are feeling, specially about what you do to them, or what you fail to do for them, what you say, or what you fail to express to them. Nur 2007 eNuri Social Work Where a kind word, wins a heart!

Bixi bro. Wonderful, Yes, this is something i would like to talk about, so why dont you tell us the answer to these questions, since you have claimed that they are not a Muslim movement. Also, in parallel, please clarify how individuals in the Anarchist warlord government who have senselessly committed attrocious crimes agains humanity in the past 16 years can be classified as "Muslims just like the ICU Movement", specially those who openly oppose any application of Sharia Law in Somalia, who openly take Ethiopia as their allies and protectors to commit the crimes we all know about, of rape and murder of civilians in all of the regions. InshaAllah in my capacity, as Moderator of Islam page, I will answer my own questions above, the definition of Islam. Because If we agree on the fundementsl tenets of Islam, it will be self evident to see who is conforming to its standards and who is out of its fold. That way, you as a person who seems to know facts on the ground about this movement and their adversaries Warlord Anarchist Government, will enlighten us about your area of expertise, and likewise, I will explain Islam questions, at the end, we will discover the true nature of the ICU if indeed your initial claims were justified. I hope that we become objective and brotherly without any preconceived prejudice against anyone or group to be fair ( No Clan Based Accusations Please, Just the facts that can be documented). Jazaakallah kheiran. Nur

If the following Referendum was held in Somalia today on the following points. 1. Do you believe that majority will vote YES 2. Vote NO 3. Equally divided ------------------------------------------------------ The Mock Rferendum: 1. Do You Accept that Allah owns Somalia and the World? 2. Do You believe Allah is the Only uncontested Sovereign who rules the world and Somalia? 3. Do You believe that Allah should regulate our personal as well as political and economical lives? 4. Do you believe Allah is Just? If Yes, Do You Accept His Judgements? 5. Do you believe Allah's Sharia Law is superior to man made secular laws? 6. Do you believe working toward the application of the Sharia in Somalia is a sacred duty? 7. Do you believe that living under Sharia law is more secure than living under a secular law? 8. Do you believe that civil servants (president, MP etc) should pledge loyalty to Allah, by upholding His Sharia law? 9. Do you believe that violating the Sharia Law or replacing it with secular or tribal Xeer is Halaal? 10. Do you accept that Sharia is valid all the time? Nur

Viking bro Its called the Media Curtain. Americans have a choice of ABC, CBS and NBC, and FOX for news, Republican and Democratic parties for politics, who have all supported and contiune to support the unjust war in Iraq, the nation needs to find a soul, none of the news media nor the political parties are serving the interest of the nation. Nur

I am dedicating this discussion thread to Brother Biixi, a fellow Nomad on SOL islam page, prompted by a confusion on the "ISLAM-NESS" of the ICU and other political groups in Somalia. When it comes to deciding if a group's movement is truly Islamic, or if its members are Muslims but their Movement is not Islamic, we need to go back to basic definitions of what islam is, so that we know for certain what movement can be said to be Islamic, or non islamic. Brother Bixi disagrees that the ICU is an Islamic movement, to him, all the political movements and warlords including the ICU are the same thing, he dislikes them all, he probably is waiting for the genuine Islamic movement to liberate our people from the evil of politicians and warlords who have controlled the death and devastation of our country for the past 16 years. Brother Biixi made two statements: 1. ICU is not an Islamic movement 2. ICU members are Muslims like members of the warlords known as the TFG. Now, the debate is open to answer: A. What makes a person Muslim? B. What makes a Movement a Muslim? C. What makes a Nation a Muslim nation? The answer to these questions will help clarify the confusion inshAllah. Nur

Nomads Sanad baa ka soo wareegay qoraalkan markii ugu dambeysay oo laga wada sheekeystay, run ahaantii waan dareensanahay in dad badan ay akhristaan, laakin waxaan jeclaan lahaa in la is weydaarsado aragtida ku saabsan mowduucan iyo kuwa kale oon ku soo dhajiyo sabbuuradaan SOL. Ogow, in su'aalahaaga ama taladaada laga wada faa'iideysanayo. Nur

The Invisible Government In a speech in Chicago, John Pilger describes how propaganda has become such a potent force in our lives and, in the words of one of its founders, represents 'an invisible government'. By John Pilger 07/20/07 "ICH" -- - -The title of this talk is Freedom Next Time, which is the title of my book, and the book is meant as an antidote to the propaganda that is so often disguised as journalism. So I thought I would talk today about journalism, about war by journalism, propaganda, and silence, and how that silence might be broken. Edward Bernays, the so-called father of public relations, wrote about an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country. He was referring to journalism, the media. That was almost 80 years ago, not long after corporate journalism was invented. It is a history few journalist talk about or know about, and it began with the arrival of corporate advertising. As the new corporations began taking over the press, something called "professional journalism" was invented. To attract big advertisers, the new corporate press had to appear respectable, pillars of the establishment—objective, impartial, balanced. The first schools of journalism were set up, and a mythology of liberal neutrality was spun around the professional journalist. The right to freedom of expression was associated with the new media and with the great corporations, and the whole thing was, as Robert McChesney put it so well, "entirely bogus". For what the public did not know was that in order to be professional, journalists had to ensure that news and opinion were dominated by official sources, and that has not changed. Go through the New York Times on any day, and check the sources of the main political stories—domestic and foreign—you'll find they're dominated by government and other established interests. That is the essence of professional journalism. I am not suggesting that independent journalism was or is excluded, but it is more likely to be an honorable exception. Think of the role Judith Miller played in the New York Times in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Yes, her work became a scandal, but only after it played a powerful role in promoting an invasion based on lies. Yet, Miller's parroting of official sources and vested interests was not all that different from the work of many famous Times reporters, such as the celebrated W.H. Lawrence, who helped cover up the true effects of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima in August, 1945. "No Radioactivity in Hiroshima Ruin," was the headline on his report, and it was false. Consider how the power of this invisible government has grown. In 1983 the principle global media was owned by 50 corporations, most of them American. In 2002 this had fallen to just 9 corporations. Today it is probably about 5. Rupert Murdoch has predicted that there will be just three global media giants, and his company will be one of them. This concentration of power is not exclusive of course to the United States. The BBC has announced it is expanding its broadcasts to the United States, because it believes Americans want principled, objective, neutral journalism for which the BBC is famous. They have launched BBC America. You may have seen the advertising. The BBC began in 1922, just before the corporate press began in America. Its founder was Lord John Reith, who believed that impartiality and objectivity were the essence of professionalism. In the same year the British establishment was under siege. The unions had called a general strike and the Tories were terrified that a revolution was on the way. The new BBC came to their rescue. In high secrecy, Lord Reith wrote anti-union speeches for the Tory Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and broadcast them to the nation, while refusing to allow the labor leaders to put their side until the strike was over. So, a pattern was set. Impartiality was a principle certainly: a principle to be suspended whenever the establishment was under threat. And that principle has been upheld ever since. Take the invasion of Iraq. There are two studies of the BBC's reporting. One shows that the BBC gave just 2 percent of its coverage of Iraq to antiwar dissent—2 percent. That is less than the antiwar coverage of ABC, NBC, and CBS. A second study by the University of Wales shows that in the buildup to the invasion, 90 percent of the BBC's references to weapons of mass destruction suggested that Saddam Hussein actually possessed them, and that by clear implication Bush and Blair were right. We now know that the BBC and other British media were used by the British secret intelligence service MI-6. In what they called Operation Mass Appeal, MI-6 agents planted stories about Saddam's weapons of mass destruction, such as weapons hidden in his palaces and in secret underground bunkers. All of these stories were fake. But that's not the point. The point is that the work of MI-6 was unnecessary, because professional journalism on its own would have produced the same result. Listen to the BBC's man in Washington, Matt Frei, shortly after the invasion. "There is not doubt," he told viewers in the UK and all over the world, "That the desire to bring good, to bring American values to the rest of the world, and especially now in the Middle East, is especially tied up with American military power." In 2005 the same reporter lauded the architect of the invasion, Paul Wolfowitz, as someone who "believes passionately in the power of democracy and grassroots development." That was before the little incident at the World Bank. None of this is unusual. BBC news routinely describes the invasion as a miscalculation. Not Illegal, not unprovoked, not based on lies, but a miscalculation. The words "mistake" and "blunder" are common BBC news currency, along with "failure"—which at least suggests that if the deliberate, calculated, unprovoked, illegal assault on defenseless Iraq had succeeded, that would have been just fine. Whenever I hear these words I remember Edward Herman's marvelous essay about normalizing the unthinkable. For that's what media clichéd language does and is designed to do—it normalizes the unthinkable; of the degradation of war, of severed limbs, of maimed children, all of which I've seen. One of my favorite stories about the Cold War concerns a group of Russian journalists who were touring the United States. On the final day of their visit, they were asked by the host for their impressions. "I have to tell you," said the spokesman, "that we were astonished to find after reading all the newspapers and watching TV day after day that all the opinions on all the vital issues are the same. To get that result in our country we send journalists to the gulag. We even tear out their fingernails. Here you don't have to do any of that. What is the secret?" What is the secret? It is a question seldom asked in newsrooms, in media colleges, in journalism journals, and yet the answer to that question is critical to the lives of millions of people. On August 24 last year the New York Times declared this in an editorial: "If we had known then what we know now the invasion if Iraq would have been stopped by a popular outcry." This amazing admission was saying, in effect, that journalists had betrayed the public by not doing their job and by accepting and amplifying and echoing the lies of Bush and his gang, instead of challenging them and exposing them. What the Times didn't say was that had that paper and the rest of the media exposed the lies, up to a million people might be alive today. That's the belief now of a number of senior establishment journalists. Few of them—they've spoken to me about it—few of them will say it in public. Ironically, I began to understand how censorship worked in so-called free societies when I reported from totalitarian societies. During the 1970s I filmed secretly in Czechoslovakia, then a Stalinist dictatorship. I interviewed members of the dissident group Charter 77, including the novelist Zdener Urbanek, and this is what he told me. "In dictatorships we are more fortunate that you in the West in one respect. We believe nothing of what we read in the newspapers and nothing of what we watch on television, because we know its propaganda and lies. I like you in the West. We've learned to look behind the propaganda and to read between the lines, and like you, we know that the real truth is always subversive." Vandana Shiva has called this subjugated knowledge. The great Irish muckraker Claud Cockburn got it right when he wrote, "Never believe anything until it's officially denied." One of the oldest clichés of war is that truth is the first casualty. No it's not. Journalism is the first casualty. When the Vietnam War was over, the magazine Encounter published an article by Robert Elegant, a distinguished correspondent who had covered the war. "For the first time in modern history," he wrote, the outcome of a war was determined not on the battlefield, but on the printed page, and above all on the television screen." He held journalists responsible for losing the war by opposing it in their reporting. Robert Elegant's view became the received wisdom in Washington and it still is. In Iraq the Pentagon invented the embedded journalist because it believed that critical reporting had lost Vietnam. The very opposite was true. On my first day as a young reporter in Saigon, I called at the bureaus of the main newspapers and TV companies. I noticed that some of them had a pinboard on the wall on which were gruesome photographs, mostly of bodies of Vietnamese and of American soldiers holding up severed ears and testicles. In one office was a photograph of a man being tortured; above the torturers head was a stick-on comic balloon with the words, "that'll teach you to talk to the press." None of these pictures were ever published or even put on the wire. I asked why. I was told that the public would never accept them. Anyway, to publish them would not be objective or impartial. At first, I accepted the apparent logic of this. I too had grown up on stories of the good war against Germany and Japan, that ethical bath that cleansed the Anglo-American world of all evil. But the longer I stayed in Vietnam, the more I realized that our atrocities were not isolated, nor were they aberrations, but the war itself was an atrocity. That was the big story, and it was seldom news. Yes, the tactics and effectiveness of the military were questioned by some very fine reporters. But the word "invasion" was never used. The anodyne word used was "involved." America was involved in Vietnam. The fiction of a well-intentioned, blundering giant, stuck in an Asian quagmire, was repeated incessantly. It was left to whistleblowers back home to tell the subversive truth, those like Daniel Ellsberg and Seymour Hersh, with his scoop of the My-Lai massacre. There were 649 reporters in Vietnam on March 16, 1968—the day that the My-Lai massacre happened—and not one of them reported it. In both Vietnam and Iraq, deliberate policies and strategies have bordered on genocide. In Vietnam, the forced dispossession of millions of people and the creation of free fire zones; In Iraq, an American-enforced embargo that ran through the 1990s like a medieval siege, and killed, according to the United Nations Children's fund, half a million children under the age of five. In both Vietnam and Iraq, banned weapons were used against civilians as deliberate experiments. Agent Orange changed the genetic and environmental order in Vietnam. The military called this Operation Hades. When Congress found out, it was renamed the friendlier Operation Ranch Hand, and nothing change. That's pretty much how Congress has reacted to the war in Iraq. The Democrats have damned it, rebranded it, and extended it. The Hollywood movies that followed the Vietnam War were an extension of the journalism, of normalizing the unthinkable. Yes, some of the movies were critical of the military's tactics, but all of them were careful to concentrate on the angst of the invaders. The first of these movies is now considered a classic. It's The Deerhunter, whose message was that America had suffered, America was stricken, American boys had done their best against oriental barbarians. The message was all the more pernicious, because the Deerhunter was brilliantly made and acted. I have to admit it's the only movie that has made me shout out loud in a Cinema in protest. Oliver Stone's acclaimed movie Platoon was said to be antiwar, and it did show glimpses of the Vietnamese as human beings, but it also promoted above all the American invader as victim. I wasn't going to mention The Green Berets when I set down to write this, until I read the other day that John Wayne was the most influential movie who ever lived. I a saw the Green Berets starring John Wayne on a Saturday night in 1968 in Montgomery Alabama. (I was down there to interview the then-infamous governor George Wallace). I had just come back from Vietnam, and I couldn't believe how absurd this movie was. So I laughed out loud, and I laughed and laughed. And it wasn't long before the atmosphere around me grew very cold. My companion, who had been a Freedom Rider in the South, said, "Let's get the hell out of here and run like hell." We were chased all the way back to our hotel, but I doubt if any of our pursuers were aware that John Wayne, their hero, had lied so he wouldn't have to fight in World War II. And yet the phony role model of Wayne sent thousands of Americans to their deaths in Vietnam, with the notable exceptions of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. Last year, in his acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the playwright Harold Pinter made an epoch speech. He asked why, and I quote him, "The systematic brutality, the widespread atrocities, the ruthless suppression of independent thought in Stalinist Russia were well know in the West, while American state crimes were merely superficially recorded, left alone, documented." And yet across the world the extinction and suffering of countless human beings could be attributed to rampant American power. "But," said Pinter, "You wouldn't know it. It never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn't happening. It didn't matter. It was of no interest." Pinter's words were more than the surreal. The BBC ignored the speech of Britain's most famous dramatist. I've made a number of documentaries about Cambodia. The first was Year Zero: the Silent Death of Cambodia. It describes the American bombing that provided the catalyst for the rise of Pol Pot. What Nixon and Kissinger had started, Pol Pot completed—CIA files alone leave no doubt of that. I offered Year Zero to PBS and took it to Washington. The PBS executives who saw it were shocked. They whispered among themselves. They asked me to wait outside. One of them finally emerged and said, "John, we admire your film. But we are disturbed that it says the United States prepared the way for Pol Pot." I said, "Do you dispute the evidence?" I had quoted a number of CIA documents. "Oh, no," he replied. "But we've decided to call in a journalistic adjudicator." Now the term "journalist adjudicator" might have been invented by George Orwell. In fact they managed to find one of only three journalists who had been invited to Cambodia by Pol Pot. And of course he turned his thumbs down on the film, and I never heard from PBS again. Year Zero was broadcast in some 60 countries and became one of the most watched documentaries in the world. It was never shown in the United States. Of the five films I have made on Cambodia, one of them was shown by WNET, the PBS station in New York. I believe it was shown at about one in the morning. On the basis of this single showing, when most people are asleep, it was awarded an Emmy. What marvelous irony. It was worthy of a prize but not an audience. Harold Pinter's subversive truth, I believe, was that he made the connection between imperialism and fascism, and described a battle for history that's almost never reported. This is the great silence of the media age. And this is the secret heart of propaganda today. A propaganda so vast in scope that I'm always astonished that so many Americans know and understand as much as they do. We are talking about a system, of course, not personalities. And yet, a great many people today think that the problem is George W. Bush and his gang. And yes, the Bush gang are extreme. But my experience is that they are no more than an extreme version of what has gone on before. In my lifetime, more wars have been started by liberal Democrats than by Republicans. Ignoring this truth is a guarantee that the propaganda system and the war-making system will continue. We've had a branch of the Democratic party running Britain for the last 10 years. Blair, apparently a liberal, has taken Britain to war more times than any prime minister in the modern era. Yes, his current pal is George Bush, but his first love was Bill Clinton, the most violent president of the late 20th century. Blair's successor, Gordon Brown is also a devotee of Clinton and Bush. The other day, Brown said, "The days of Britain having to apologize for the British Empire are over. We should celebrate." Like Blair, like Clinton, like Bush, Brown believes in the liberal truth that the battle for history has been won; that the millions who died in British-imposed famines in British imperial India will be forgotten—like the millions who have died in the American Empire will be forgotten. And like Blair, his successor is confident that professional journalism is on his side. For most journalists, whether they realize it or not, are groomed to be tribunes of an ideology that regards itself as non-ideological, that presents itself as the natural center, the very fulcrum of modern life. This may very well be the most powerful and dangerous ideology we have ever known because it is open-ended. This is liberalism. I'm not denying the virtues of liberalism—far from it. We are all beneficiaries of them. But if we deny its dangers, its open-ended project, and the all-consuming power of its propaganda, then we deny our right to true democracy, because liberalism and true democracy are not the same. Liberalism began as a preserve of the elite in the 19th century, and true democracy is never handed down by elites. It is always fought for and struggled for. A senior member of the antiwar coalition, United For Peace and Justice, said recently, and I quote her, "The Democrats are using the politics of reality." Her liberal historical reference point was Vietnam. She said that President Johnson began withdrawing troops from Vietnam after a Democratic Congress began to vote against the war. That's not what happened. The troops were withdrawn from Vietnam after four long years. And during that time the United States killed more people in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos with bombs than were killed in all the preceding years. And that's what's happening in Iraq. The bombing has doubled since last year, and this is not being reported. And who began this bombing? Bill Clinton began it. During the 1990s Clinton rained bombs on Iraq in what were euphemistically called the "no fly zones." At the same time he imposed a medieval siege called economic sanctions, killing as I've mentioned, perhaps a million people, including a documented 500,000 children. Almost none of this carnage was reported in the so-called mainstream media. Last year a study published by the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health found that since the invasion of Iraq 655, 000 Iraqis had died as a direct result of the invasion. Official documents show that the Blair government knew this figure to be credible. In February, Les Roberts, the author of the report, said the figure was equal to the figure for deaths in the Fordham University study of the Rwandan genocide. The media response to Robert's shocking revelation was silence. What may well be the greatest episode of organized killing for a generation, in Harold Pinter's words, "Did not happen. It didn't matter." Many people who regard themselves on the left supported Bush's attack on Afghanistan. That the CIA had supported Osama Bin Laden was ignored, that the Clinton administration had secretly backed the Taliban, even giving them high-level briefings at the CIA, is virtually unknown in the United States. The Taliban were secret partners with the oil giant Unocal in building an oil pipeline across Afghanistan. And when a Clinton official was reminded that the Taliban persecuted women, he said, "We can live with that." There is compelling evidence that Bush decided to attack the Taliban not as a result of 9-11, but two months earlier, in July of 2001. This is virtually unknown in the United States—publicly. Like the scale of civilian casualties in Afghanistan. To my knowledge only one mainstream reporter, Jonathan Steele of the Guardian in London, has investigated civilian casualties in Afghanistan, and his estimate is 20,000 dead civilians, and that was three years ago. The enduring tragedy of Palestine is due in great part to the silence and compliance of the so-called liberal left. Hamas is described repeatedly as sworn to the destruction of Israel. The New York Times, the Associated Press, the Boston Globe—take your pick. They all use this line as a standard disclaimer, and it is false. That Hamas has called for a ten-year ceasefire is almost never reported. Even more important, that Hamas has undergone an historic ideological shift in the last few years, which amounts to a recognition of what it calls the reality of Israel, is virtually unknown; and that Israel is sworn to the destruction of Palestine is unspeakable. There is a pioneering study by Glasgow University on the reporting of Palestine. They interviewed young people who watch TV news in Britain. More than 90 percent thought the illegal settlers were Palestinian. The more they watched, the less they knew—Danny Schecter's famous phrase. The current most dangerous silence is over nuclear weapons and the return of the Cold War. The Russians understand clearly that the so-called American defense shield in Eastern Europe is designed to subjugate and humiliate them. Yet the front pages here talk about Putin starting a new Cold War, and there is silence about the development of an entirely new American nuclear system called Reliable Weapons Replacement (RRW), which is designed to blur the distinction between conventional war and nuclear war—a long-held ambition. In the meantime, Iran is being softened up, with the liberal media playing almost the same role it played before the Iraq invasion. And as for the Democrats, look at how Barak Obama has become the voice of the Council on Foreign Relations, one of the propaganda organs of the old liberal Washington establishment. Obama writes that while he wants the troops home, "We must not rule out military force against long-standing adversaries such as Iran and Syria." Listen to this from the liberal Obama: "At moment of great peril in the past century our leaders ensured that America, by deed and by example, led and lifted the world, that we stood and fought for the freedom sought by billions of people beyond their borders." That is the nub of the propaganda, the brainwashing if you like, that seeps into the lives of every American, and many of us who are not Americans. From right to left, secular to God-fearing, what so few people know is that in the last half century, United States adminstrations have overthrown 50 governments—many of them democracies. In the process, thirty countries have been attacked and bombed, with the loss of countless lives. Bush bashing is all very well—and is justified—but the moment we begin to accept the siren call of the Democrat's drivel about standing up and fighting for freedom sought by billions, the battle for history is lost, and we ourselves are silenced. So what should we do? That question often asked in meetings I have addressed, even meetings as informed as those in this conference, is itself interesting. It's my experience that people in the so-called third world rarely ask the question, because they know what to do. And some have paid with their freedom and their lives, but they knew what to do. It's a question that many on the democratic left—small "d"—have yet to answer. Real information, subversive information, remains the most potent power of all—and I believe that we must not fall into the trap of believing that the media speaks for the public. That wasn't true in Stalinist Czechoslovakia and it isn't true of the United States. In all the years I've been a journalist, I've never know public consciousness to have risen as fast as it's rising today. Yes, its direction and shape is unclear, partly because people are now deeply suspicious of political alternatives, and because the Democratic Party has succeeded in seducing and dividing the electoral left. And yet this growing critical public awareness is all the more remarkable when you consider the sheer scale of indoctrination, the mythology of a superior way of life, and the current manufactured state of fear. Why did the New York Times come clean in that editorial last year? Not because it opposes Bush's wars—look at the coverage of Iran. That editorial was a rare acknowledgement that the public was beginning to see the concealed role of the media, and that people were beginning to read between the lines. If Iran is attacked, the reaction and the upheaval cannot be predicted. The national security and homeland security presidential directive gives Bush power over all facets of government in an emergency. It is not unlikely the constitution will be suspended—the laws to round of hundreds of thousands of so-called terrorists and enemy combatants are already on the books. I believe that these dangers are understood by the public, who have come along way since 9-11, and a long way since the propaganda that linked Saddam Hussein to al-Qaeda. That's why they voted for the Democrats last November, only to be betrayed. But they need truth, and journalists ought to be agents of truth, not the courtiers of power. I believe a fifth estate is possible, the product of a people's movement, that monitors, deconstructs, and counters the corporate media. In every university, in every media college, in every news room, teachers of journalism, journalists themselves need to ask themselves about the part they now play in the bloodshed in the name of a bogus objectivity. Such a movement within the media could herald a perestroika of a kind that we have never known. This is all possible. Silences can be broken. In Britain the National Union of Journalists has undergone a radical change, and has called for a boycott of Israel. The web site Medialens.org has single-handedly called the BBC to account. In the United States wonderfully free rebellious spirits populate the web—I can't mention them all here—from Tom Feeley's International Clearing House, to Mike Albert's ZNet, to Counterpunch online, and the splendid work of FAIR. The best reporting of Iraq appears on the web—Dahr Jamail's courageous journalism; and citizen reporters like Joe Wilding, who reported the siege of Fallujah from inside the city. In Venezuela, Greg Wilpert's investigations turned back much of the virulent propaganda now aimed at Hugo Chávez. Make no mistake, it's the threat of freedom of speech for the majority in Venezuela that lies behind the campaign in the west on behalf of the corrupt RCTV. The challenge for the rest of us is to lift this subjugated knowledge from out of the underground and take it to ordinary people. We need to make haste. Liberal Democracy is moving toward a form of corporate dictatorship. This is an historic shift, and the media must not be allowed to be its façade, but itself made into a popular, burning issue, and subjected to direct action. That great whistleblower Tom Paine warned that if the majority of the people were denied the truth and the ideas of truth, it was time to storm what he called the Bastille of words. That time is now. Speech delivered at the Chicago Socialism 2007 Conference on Saturday June 16 2007

More Blood For Oil Forget about all that stuff about Ethiopia having a 'tacit' o.k. from Washington to invade Somalia. The decision was made at the White House and the attack had military support from the Pentagon. The governments are too much in sync and the Ethiopians too dependent on the U.S. to think otherwise. And, it didn't just suddenly happen. Ethiopian troops, trained and equipped by the U.S. began infiltrating into Somali territory last summer as part of a plan that began to evolve the previous June when the Union of Islamic Courts (UIC) took control of the government. In November, the head of the U.S. Central Command, General John Abizaid (until last week he ran the U.S. military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq) was in Addis Ababa. After that, Ghanaian journalist Cameron Duodu has written, Ethiopia 'moved from proving the Somali government with 'military advice' to open armed intervention.' And not without help. U.S Supplied satellite surveillance data aided in the bombardment of the Somali capital, Mogadishu and pinpointing the location of UIC forces resulting, in the words of New York Times reporter Jeffrey Gettleman, in 'a string of back-to- back military loses in which more than 1,000 fighters, mostly teenage boys, were quickly mowed down by the better-trained and equipped Ethiopian-backed forces.' As with the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the immediate question is why was this proxy attack undertaken, in clear violation of international law and the UN Charter? And again, there is the official line, the excuse and the underlying impetus. The official line from Addis Ababa is that it was a defensive act in the face of a threat of attack from Somalia. There's nothing to support the claim and a lot of evidence to the contrary. As far as the Bush Administration is concerned, it was a chance to strike back at 'Islamists' as part of the on-going 'war on terror.' For progressive observers in the region and much of the media outside the U.S., the conflict smells of petroleum. 'As with Iraq in 2003, the United States has cast this as a war to curtail terrorism, but its real goal is to obtain a direct foothold in a highly strategic region by establishing a client regime there.,' wrote Salim Lone, spokesperson for the United Nation mission in Iraq in 2003, and now a columnist for The Daily Nation in Kenya. 'The Horn of Africa is newly oil-rich, and lies just miles from Saudi Arabia, overlooking the daily passage of large numbers of oil tankers and warships through the Red Sea.' In a television interview broadcast on the day of the full-fledged Ethiopian assault, Marine General James Jones (who ironically, like Abizaid, recently lost his position), then-Nato's military commander and head of the US military's European army, expressed his concern that the size of the U.S. army in Europe had 'perhaps gone too low.' Jones went on to tell the CSpan interviewer the US needed troops in Europe partly so that they could be quickly deployed in trouble-spots in Africa and elsewhere. 'I think the emergence of Africa as a strategic reality is inevitable and we're going to need forward-based troops, special operations, marines, soldiers, airmen and sailors to be in the right proportion,' said Jones. 'Pentagon to train sharper eye on Africa,' read the headline over a January 5 report by Richard Whittle in the Christian Science Monitor. 'Strife, oil, and Al Qaeda are leading the US to create a new Africa Command.' 'Africa, long beset by war, famine, disease, and ethnic tensions, has generally taken a backseat in Pentagon planning - but US officials say that is about to change,' wrote Whittle, who went on to report that one of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's last acts before being dismissed from that position was to convince President Bush to create a new Africa military Africa command, something the White House is expected to announce later this year. The creation of the new body, he quoted one expert as saying, reflects the Administration concern about 'Al Qaeda's known presence in Africa,' China's developing relations with the continent with regards to oil supplies and the fact that 'Islamists took over Somalia last June and ruled until this week, when Ethiopian troops drove them out of power.' Currently, the US gets about 10 percent of its oil from Africa, but, the Monitor story said but 'some experts say it may need to rely on the continent for as much as 25 percent by 2010.' Reportedly, nearly two-thirds of Somalia's oil fields were allocated to the U.S. oil companies Conoco, Amoco, Chevron and Phillips before Somalia's pro-U.S. President Mohamed Siad Barre was overthrown in January, 1991. Lt. Cmdr. Joe Carpenter, a Pentagon spokesman, said the division for African military operations "causes some difficulty in trying to ... execute a more streamlined and comprehensive strategy when it comes to Africa." According to the plan, the Central Command will retain responsibility for the Horn of Africa for about 18 months while the Africa Command gets set up. The Pentagon's present Horn of Africa joint task force, headquartered in Djibouti, includes about 1,500 troops. African countries won't see much difference in the US military presence on the ground under the new command, Herman Cohen, assistant secretary of State for African affairs under the first President Bush, is quoted as saying. "They're already getting a lot of attention from the US military.' The Defense Intelligence Agency "has built up its offices throughout Africa in US embassies. Right after the cold war, they reduced a lot, but they've built back up." "When the Cold War ended, so too did the interest of the USA in Africa...for a while. Particularly following September 11, 2001, the interest of the Bush administration in Africa increased several fold,' says Bill Fletcher, Jr., visiting professor at Brooklyn College-CUNY, former president of TransAfrica Forum. 'Their interest was, first, in direct relationship to the amount of oil in the ground. Second, it was in relationship to a country's attitude toward the so- called "war against terrorism." Irrespective of the character of a regime, if they were prepared to provide the USA with oil and/or support the war against terrorism, the USA would turn a blind eye toward any practices going on.' "The second piece of this puzzle, however, is that the new interest in Africa was accompanied by a new military approach toward Africa,' says Fletcher. 'This included both the development of the so-called Trans Sahel project, which supposedly concerns training countries to fight terrorism, as well as the deployment of military bases and personnel to Africa. Specifically, and beginning around the time of the initiation of the Iraq war, US military planners began discussing relocating US forces from Europe into Africa, and specifically into the Gulf of Guinea region, a region rich in oil reserves. "It is clear, once again, that in all of this, the character of any regime is secondary to the regime's compliance with the interests of the Bush administration and their economic/strategic priorities. The net effect of this could be the introduction of US military personnel into extremely complicated internal struggles not only in the Gulf of Guinea region, but in other locations, e.g., Somalia, allegedly in the interest of fighting terrorism and protecting strategic oil reserves." Describing the Trans Sahel project, which covers a swath of North Africa, Foreign Policy in Focus commentator Conn Hallinan wrote recently, 'The Bush Administration claims the target of this program, called the Trans-Sahara Counter-Terrorism Initiative is the growing presence of al-Qaeda influenced organizations in the region. Critics, however, charge that the enterprise has more to do with oil than with Osama bin Laden, and that stepped up military aid to Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia will most likely end up being used against internal opposition groups in those countries, not 'terrorists' hiding out in the desert.' An apt example of how the charge of terrorism becomes cover for suppression of local democratic or leftist dissent is Nigeria. A major focus of U.S. oil interest is in that country and the Gulf of Guinea region. There, activists reflecting popular demand for retaining more oil revenues for local development and an end to environmental chaos, have been labeled 'terrorist' and are being brutally suppressed by a U.S. trained and equipped military. Southern Africa scholar George Wright observes that the development of military ties to government and 'rebel' groups in Africa, in pursuit of U.S. geo-strategic objectives, is long standing but has accelerating over recent years. Between 1990 and 2000, military arrangements were concluded between governments or opposition groups in 39 countries on the continent. These involved weapons supplies, military training, shared intelligence and surveillance. The aim, he says, has always been to secure neo-colonial relations with African countries. However, since 9/11, Wright says, the process has been accelerated and taken on an increasingly militarist character 'under the guise of fighting terrorism.' Fighting proxy war is credible as long as there is a chance of holding sway but history has repeatedly demonstrated when that doesn't work out, the end is often direct involvement. That explains why the 2007 U.S. military sets funding for Special Forces to increase by 15 percent. According to the 2005 Quadrennial Defense Review, these Special Forces 'will have the capacity to operate in dozens of countries simultaneously - relying on a combination of direct (visible) and indirect (clandestine) approaches.' The Ethiopian government has said it does not have the resources for an extended stay in Somalia even though the projection is that it will take many months to 'stabilize' the situation in the invaded country. As of this writing, the Bush Administration was having difficulty raising troops from nearby cooperative states to take over the job. Only Uganda seemed a sure bet. Assistant U.S. Secretary of State for Africa, Ms Jendayi Frazer, told journalists: "Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni promised U.S. President George Bush in a recent phone call that he could supply between 1,000-2,000 troops to protect Somalia's transitional government and train its troops. We hope to have the Ugandans deployed before the end of January.' Shortly after the invasion, Frazer told reporters there had been no request for U.S. troops or military assistance so far, but she did not rule out that it could be requested and supplied later if necessary. Later came quickly. On Sunday, U.S. AC-130 gunships began bombarding sites within Somalia and Hawkeye reconnaissance planes took to the air pinpointing locations for attacks by jet aircraft. Although the announced purpose of the bombing was alleged al-Qaeda personnel, media reports indicated the target were 'Islamic fighters', meaning troops of the UIC government. "The US has sided with one Somali faction against another, this could be the beginning of a new civil war ... I fear once again they have gone for a quick fix based on false information, one 'highly respected regional analyst' told the Times of London. 'If they pull it off, however, it could be a turning point. The stakes are very high indeed, now. I fear they are repeating the mistakes of the past, not only in Somalia but in Afghanistan and Iraq and will end up creating a new insurgency which could destabilize this entire region.' BC Editorial Board member Carl Bloice is a writer in San Francisco, a member of the National Coordinating Committee of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism and formerly worked for a healthcare union. by Carl Bloise, Black Commentator January 16, 2007

Biixi brother Help me please: You are saying the Islamic Courts Union was NOT an Islamic movement, but the definition of what makes any organization or a movement an Islamic Movement is BESIDES the point of this discussion? I am lost here brother,........ if The ICU being an Islamic Movement or NOT was not the POINT , then was the point? Nur

me Waxaad qortay: "Adduunyo ka kabo li'id, aakhirana u salaad li'id. " isnt that sad? May Allah help us, Dadkeenna waa ka taallaa! Nur

Brother Bixx You write: "but my original statement stands ICU was not an Islamic movement the only Islamic thing about it was their muslinimo claim." OK, in that case, could you kindly tell us what makes a genuine Islamic movement in your standard? give us examples of your vision, I promise if you convince me that I will work for you. Nur

eNuri Predictions: As predicted in this old thread ( 2001, two months after 9/11), Colin Powell, a wise man, was against the madness of the Neocons all along, and he paid the price of his dissent, he had to resign. The following news, has proven true the eNuri Satirical piece written six years ago. ------------------------------------------------------ Powell tried to talk Bush out of war By Sarah Baxter 07/10/07 "The Sunday Times" --07/08/07 - Washington -- THE former American secretary of state Colin Powell has revealed that he spent 2½ hours vainly trying to persuade President George W Bush not to invade Iraq and believes today’s conflict cannot be resolved by US forces. “I tried to avoid this war,” Powell said at the Aspen Ideas Festival in Colorado. “I took him through the consequences of going into an Arab country and becoming the occupiers.” Powell has become increasingly outspoken about the level of violence in Iraq, which he believes is in a state of civil war. “The civil war will ultimately be resolved by a test of arms,” he said. “It’s not going to be pretty to watch, but I don’t know any way to avoid it. It is happening now.” He added: “It is not a civil war that can be put down or solved by the armed forces of the United States.” All the military could do, Powell suggested, was put “a heavier lid on this pot of boiling sectarian stew”. The signs are that the views of Powell and other critics of the war are finally being heard in the Pentagon, if not yet in the White House. Robert Gates, the defence secretary, is drawing up plans to reduce troop levels in Iraq in anticipation that General David Petraeus, the commander in Iraq, will not be able to deliver an upbeat progress report in September on the American troop surge. “It should come as no secret to anyone that there are discussions about what is a postsurge strategy,” said Tony Fratto, deputy White House press secretary, last week. The surge’s lack of demonstrable success is creating fissures in the Republican party as well as putting enormous pressure on the Democratic presidential candidates to favour a rapid pull-out, which Gates fears could leave Iraq in chaos.

Bixi bro. You mean that the only positive thing you can mention about the Courts is that they were Muslims? Like everybody else? you mean same Muslim-ness like that of the TFG? Nur