Zeyad: The New Government

Zeyad is back at Healing Iraq and he's got plenty of complaints about the new government:

The Kurd and Sunni brats want to create a Council of Elders with executive powers to oversee the government and parliament, probably to guarantee their own shares. Have they not read the constitution? Do they not understand Democracy? Do they not realize that it is our Allah-given, Sistani-endorsed, Iran-protected right to run this country the way we see fit? To hell with those newcomers who pester us about shares exceeding their electoral constituencies.

By the way, it is good governmental practice to label anyone we don't like as a Ba'athist, a former regime official, a supporter of the insurgency or terrorism. Call our friends in the good ole Deba'athification Commission to bar a few winners from entering parliament, because we have suddenly discovered their past now; never mind that they were members of last year's parliament. It also doesn't really matter that our own slate contains former Ba'athists, they have all repented their past sins, and his Excellency Grand Ayatollah Sistani himself has given them his blessings. Who are you to question that? ...

Read the rest at the link.

Iraq

Ays: No Fan of Jafari

Following a referrer thru Sitemeter, I stopped by Iraq at a Glance. Ays hasn't posted since December (we miss you! come back!) but his last post is troubling:

AlJa’fari is clearly taking control of most of the departments and suppressing others rights by different professional ways.. I see him the most cunning man in the scene now, much more dangerous than Saddam, the one who will set the fire among different sects in the Iraqi society and lead Iraq to the civil war.

I don't know where is the US from all of this mess and chaos, I can not believe that US lifted her hand (or can not control anymore? Since Alja’fari is getting stronger).

Anyway, I completely lost the ambition and hope about a secular Iraq where you can express your feelings and thoughts freely especially the religion, but it seems for the coming three centuries the Islamic acts of beheading in the name of God for fundamentalists in Sunnis, and the sadist whipping as a punishment (till death) for Shia will improve and continue enthusiastically. And might go further to cutting hands and keeping women inside the houses, who knows what is inside the dirty sick minds of the Islamic politicians..God damn them all.
No need to speak about the Iranian style celebrations on monthly basis since there are tens of anniversaries in Shia’s calendar..we are going to see much more wheels with their black and white kinds on heads..I hate that.. I hate it.

What about the rights of Christians in Iraq? They constitute 5 percent of Iraq population..what about the other religions? Don’t they have rights? Or shall they convert to Islam?
What about secular Muslims?
What if someone wants to convert and embrace the religion he believes in? or be an atheist?

We got out of Saddam’s prison and got in a new one with a ‘democratic’ door..
Dreams will never come true as long as Islam is ruling countries and fundamentalists are leading them.
Iraq is far away from being free.

I'll be watching for more Iraqi opinion on Jafari.


Iraq
Jafari

Morning Report:: February 13, 2006

Jafari named Iraqi PM. Sabah: 'United Iraqi Alliance has passed a significant milestone as it succeeded in nominating Dr. Ibrahim al-Ja'ferri as prime minister by voting when Dr. Adil Abdul Mehdi won 63 votes in less than Jaferri with only one seat of the alliance who gave Ja'ferri 64 seats.Following this step there should be convention of the House of Deputies and achieving transaction by forming presidency post and speaker of the parliament let alone nominating the ministers via hard compromise so as to be acceptable from others.People waiting for the news would be happy for hearing the last news as they wait for presenting services to them by the political class.The political class would burden legislation and implementing all of laws that were approved by the parliament to get rid of disruption of nearly half a century and make the government free of every thing save people's services. Ja'ferri would hold such burden as a challenge basing on legible representation of people.' Iraq the Model: 'Earlier observations on the conditions within the UIA predicted that each of the two candidates had ~55 secured votes leaving approximately 20 votes undecided. Those remaining 20 votes represent the Fadheela Party that until Friday had its own candidate. Jafari had the support of the two wings of the Da'wa Party as well as that of the Sadrists while AbdulMahdi had the support of the SCIRI and the independents within the UIA. Knowing that Jafari and AbdulMahdi got 64 and 63 votes respectively indicates a division among the members Fadheela Party over whom to support after their candidate withdrew his nomination and apparently the votes of Fadheela were split equally between Jafari and AbdulMahdi. There is a theory that the UIA decided to make Jafari win in a compromise to avoid an internal conflict over the chairmanship of the UIA because the charter of the UIA states that chairmanship of the bloc and that of the cabinet cannot be granted to the same party, which means al-Hakeem wouldn't be able to keep his position as head of the bloc if AbdulMahdi was chosen for heading the government. It is unclear how other parliamentary blocs are going to react to the results of this voting. Both the Kurdish alliance and the Accord Front expressed publicly more than once that they would prefer AbdulMahdi over Jafari. The Accord Front now is part of a larger bloc that has 80 seats in the parliament after they allied with the Iraqi list and the Dialogue Front and it is believed that the latter two share the same attitude towards Jafari and AbdulMahdi. Even though Jafari won the vote inside the UIA, he still needs to win support of the parliament by 50%+1 of the 275 votes. The Kurds and the United Congress for National Work (the Sunni+Allawi) collectively have 133 votes and if joined by the Kurdistan Islamic Union who has 5 votes they will have a total of 138 votes which is 50% of the parliament seats which means that their votes are essential for the cabinet to be approved. Choosing Jafari will most likely complicate the process of forming the government and longer negotiations will be needed if the UIA wants to convince the others to accept and support Jafari's cabinet. It's worth mentioning that the Accord Front at an earlier time asked the UIA to let them take part in the voting since they (the UIA) will eventually have to get the support of other blocs for their candidate. But the UIA refused this suggestion.' Debka: 'Our sources in Baghdad report Hamas leaders are making a point of being received and recognized by an Arab government backed to the hilt and sustained by the US government and army. DEBKAfile’s counter-terror sources note: An invitation from the democratically-elected government in Baghdad to a democratically-elected Palestinian (terrorist) party would place the Washington in a cleft stick, after having initiated both elections.' (Sabah, ITM, Debka)
news
February 13, 2006
Iraq

Michael Totten is back from Iraq ...

... and blogging from Lebanon. Here's his latest post:

I just spent two weeks in Northern Iraq and have arrived back in Lebanon safely. Sorry for misleading everyone about my travel schedule. For those of you who forgot...a few weeks ago I said I was beginning my Iraq trip today.

At least one organization on the U.S. terrorist watch list already monitors my Web site, and a Lebanese friend of mine convinced me that it would be smart not to advertise to the entire planet when I would be in that country. That’s why hardly any new material has been posted on this Web site lately.

Once I arrived in Iraqi Kurdistan and spent a little time there, it didn’t seem like the ruse was actually necessary. I kept it up anyway, though, because I had almost no time to write in any case ...

Go to Michael J. Totten's homepage for the full story, and watch for new posts.
Middle East
Iraq
Lebanon

Morning Report: February 10, 2006

Iranian solidarity demo in DC. Via Doctor Zin, the International Confederation of Free Trade Unions calls for solidarity with the striking bus drivers in Tehran, Iran: 'ICFTU Department of Trade Union Rights joined the global labor movement in calling for the release of more than 500 Iranian bus drivers and invited members of the Iranian-American community in Washington DC to join the AFL-CIO, the Solidarity Center and the DC Metro Labor Council in a solidarity demonstration with striking bus drivers in Iran, February 15, 2006.' (Doctor Zin)

Journalists as citizens. Armed Liberal at Winds of Change has a fascinating post on the roles of journalists, citizens, and those (like Michael Yon) who cross over the boundaries. (Winds of Change)

Southeast Asian officials: terrorist backed out of West Coast plot. Sean Young at AP, via Yahoo, reports: 'A Malaysian recruited by al-Qaida to pilot a plane in a second wave of Sept. 11-style attacks on the United States pulled out after observing the carnage of the 2001 assaults, Southeast Asian officials said Friday. ... The plan never appeared close to the stage where it could be put into execution. Scores of arrests in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks severely curtailed al-Qaida and its Southeast Asian affiliate, Jemaah Islamiyah.' Full article at the link. (AP)

news
February 11, 2006
terrorism

New to Blogroll: Just Some Poor Schmuck

Often read but never heretofore cited, Just Some Poor Schmuck makes a debut on the Dreams Into Lightning blogroll. Here's JSPS (alias John Dunshee) on the subject of, wait for it, cartoons:

Most make the point that riot and murder is not the normal response to a cartoon, even if you find them offensive. Many people found the recent Tom Toles cartoon in the Washington Post offensive. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff with all their soldiers, planes, ships and missiles did not flatten the Post building. They wrote a letter.

Some of the cartoonists seem to have decided that writing a letter expressing your displeasure is exactly the same as burning an embassy.

Others take the position that it was irresponsible for the Danish cartoonists to draw the cartoons and for the newspapers to publish them. A strange position for editorial cartoonists whose work is always offensive to someone. At least if they're any good it is.

Go pay JSPS a visit.

Amir Taheri: Sherk

Amir Taheri has a tremendously illuminating piece on the controversy over ... well, you know. Insert applicable Technorati tags here. Just read it. Here's a snip:

There is no Quranic injunction against images, whether of Muhammad or anyone else. When it spread into the Levant, Islam came into contact with a version of Christianity that was militantly iconoclastic. As a result some Muslim theologians, at a time when Islam still had an organic theology, issued "fatwas" against any depiction of the Godhead. That position was further buttressed by the fact that Islam acknowledges the Jewish Ten Commandments -- which include a ban on depicting God -- as part of its heritage. The issue has never been decided one way or another, and the claim that a ban on images is "an absolute principle of Islam" is purely political. Islam has only one absolute principle: the Oneness of God. Trying to invent other absolutes is, from the point of view of Islamic theology, nothing but sherk, i.e., the bestowal on the Many of the attributes of the One.

The claim that the ban on depicting Muhammad and other prophets is an absolute principle of Islam is also refuted by history. Many portraits of Muhammad have been drawn by Muslim artists, often commissioned by Muslim rulers. There is no space here to provide an exhaustive list, but these are some of the most famous: ...

RTWT. Don't miss what he says about Islam and humor, and the prinicple of "limits and proportions". And remember what Omar said, "we here in the Middle East have tonnes of jokes about Allah, the prophets and the angels that are way more offensive, funny and obscene than those poorly-made cartoons, yet no one ever got shot for telling one of those jokes or at least we had never seen rallies and protests against those infidel joke-tellers."

Islam
Mohammed
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Cinnamon Stillwell on Danish Cartoons - and More

Cinnamon Stillwell (originally of ChronWatch fame, now writing from the belly of the beast) has an outstanding column on the Denmark cartoon affair. Go to the link to read it, but here's a splendid quote:

How did this double standard arise? The answer is multiculturalism. Not the multiculturalism of different cultures living side by side, but the ideology that renders all cultures equal and therefore none worthy of condemnation. Such moral equivalence allows for the most backward traditions to flourish, even when they are destructive to the society as a whole. When democratic societies find themselves dominated by intolerant cultures to which they have given sanctuary, everyone's freedom is put at risk.

Multiculturalism also has the effect of erasing any unifying culture or nationality in favor of a collection of balkanized groups with nothing in common. ...

Go read it all.
Denmark
cartoons
Cinnamon Stillwell

BBC Admits Misinforming Public

Can you stand one more post on those damn cartoons? I know, I'm sick of this business already, too. But look, it's The Belmont Club we're talking here.

So to begin with, the BBC admitted (scroll to bottom) that it was "caught out" by a picture of a pig alleged to be one of the cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed, and "for a time showed film of this in Gaza ..."

In Gaza?!?

Now here's Wretchard:

This is going to rank right up there with the fake Koran-flushing story which got people killed in Afghanistan. No one has a right to expect perfection from the media. Like intelligence agencies, which they resemble in some respects, the media sometimes gets things wrong. But I'd argue that some publications have a dangerous tendency to believe stories like "right-wing Danish publication portrays Mohammed as pig" because they want to believe it. This phenomenon is called bias and bias is dangerous not because it predisposes one to a wrong set of opinions but to the wrong set of facts.

Ironically, if the BBC had published the cartoons it would inevitably have discovered that the pig picture was not part of the Jyllands-Posten cartoon set. But instead of presenting the dry facts it substituted hearsay and for days the world was inflamed over a set of images described only at second-hand; wrongly described at that and imagining the worst about what were actually a very mild set of drawings. This violent debate occurred precisely because organizations like the BBC, whose job it was to present the facts, failed signally in their duty.

Emphasis in original. Go read the rest at the link.

Let's blogroll!

From the ranks of the LiberalHawks, east and west, comes tonight's roundup.

Judith at Kesher Talk reports that nothing will get in the way of the Church of England doing its duty by voting for divestment from Israel:

As appears now to be par for the course in such decisions, no time was made for Anglicans for Israel, the new and influential pro-Israel lobby group, to debate the issue. [There is, by the way, a very interesting interview by Tovia Singer on Israel National Radio with the founder of Anglicans for Israel, Simon McIlwaine, on the website on the upper right hand side of the page.]

Judith's links:
Anglicans for Israel
Shalom Lappin at Normblog, on the AUT boycott of Israeli universities

Jason Holliston at Columbia Gorge Dispatch has got his hands pretty full these days, but he's made time to put together a very good roundup of links on the cartoon business. Go visit the post, and don't forget to bookmark Columbia Gorge Dispatch.

ShrinkWrapped sees little reason to be complacent about the Iran situation, despite some optimistic assessments:

While some observers have suggested we may have as long as 5-10 years before Iran has a deliverable nuclear bomb, their threat to immediately begin enrichment suggests that they will have a dangerous amount of fissionables well before then; further, it is hard to have any confidence that they do not already have a nuke or two (perhaps from the AQ Khan and/or North Korean bazaar.) Certainly the Iranian behavior suggest that the leadership is either supremely confident, extraordinarily foolhardy, or some combination of the two leavened with an apocalyptic vision.

Shrink's conclusion:

My speculation is that the Administration knows that much of Saddam's WMD ended up in the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, home of Hezbollah, and in the dessert in Syria. The race is on to attain regime change in Syria before the Israelis (or Americans) feel compelled to act. Finding proof of WMD in Iraq, moved to Syria prior to the invasion of Iraq, will force the West vs. Iran/Syria confrontation to ratchet upwards which is why the administration is not eager to translate all the documents found in Baghdad. The Democrats have no interest in the papers either since they have staked their party's position on "Bush lied" and the post-war intel could blow that meme to shreds along with the last vestiges of authority of the Democratic left.

Patrick Lasswell at Meaningful Distinction thinks the old slogan "Global War On Terror" is a bit clunky. He's got one that's short and to the point ... with an illustration to match.

Fausta has a roundup of "How Muslim Clerics Stirred the Arab World Against Denmark".

Meanwhile, far-flung Portlanders bring their reports. We've already mentioned Michael Totten's dispatch from Lebanon, but here's that link again. Michael's closing thoughts:

I strongly suggest the civilized people of Lebanon, Muslim and Christian alike, stage a counter-demonstration downtown where flags are not burned and where buildings are not set on fire.

And finally, Sean LaFreniere is in, of all places, Denmark. On the Mohammed cartoon mess he says this:

One cartoon shows a man with a bomb in his turban, but given the fact that an explosive device has been detonated in the name of Islam daily for three years in Iraq (and for decades in Israeli pizza shops, in French cafes, and German discos) I don't think the cartoon is surprising.

The Muslim community in Denmark promptly erupted and demanded that the Prime Minister explain why he did not have the paper shut down and its editors arrested.

Perhaps they do not realize that when they escaped oppression in their home countries they left that kind of fascism behind as well?

And this:

We should keep in mind that the publication of this Danish newspaper is for domestic consumption in a country that is not Muslim and does not follow Islamic laws (although some Muslim immigrants do live here). They did not send copies to the Middle East in order to make people angry (and they responded politely to the domestic Muslim population). Rather, it was a legitimate editorial discussion of a domestic issue that only tangentially touched on Islam - namely typical Protestant censorship of difficult issues.

Additionally we should remember that the controversy actually erupted two months after publication, when the Prime Minister refused to discipline the paper or to apologize for its actions (as he noted he does not authorize its publication). This was seen in the Middle East as a sign of official support for the cartoons and an intentional offense by the Danish government against Muslims, since in the Middle East there is no freedom of speech or independent press.

In the end the newspaper, and other European governments, did apologize or make conciliatory gestures, and the United States government called the cartoons irresponsible. Today there are many Danes who would like to discuss this controversy but will not out of fear. However, the Danish PM continues to defend their freedoms and rights, now Denmark really "has a dog in the fight".

Be sure to follow Sean's homepage for the latest from Denmark ... with lots of great photographs!
Denmark
cartoons
riots
Lebanon

Michael Totten: Good Press for Lebanon Goes Down the Tubes

Michael Totten has some first-hand observations about Lebanon:

I will say, however, that I am extremely dismayed by the despicable behavior of the Lebanese mob that rampaged in one of Beirut's finest neighborhoods over a freakin' cartoon published months ago in a Danish newspaper.

My mother took one look at that Achrafieh neighborhood and said "This could be San Franscisco" when she visited me in November.

"Don't be fooled by that," I told her. At the time I worried my response might have been unfair to Lebanon, but apparently that wasn't the case. It should be noted, however, that the people who live in that neighborhood had nothing to do with this. Most of today's mobsters don't even live in the city at all. They appear to be poorly educated reactionaries bussed in from Tripoli and Hezbollahland.

Beirut, once again, looks like yet another Middle Eastern Fallujah. It isn't, but the photos...these are not pretty to look at. All the good press I have been giving this country for the past year was destroyed today by goons who would surely be happier living in Saudi or Syria.

Read it all at the post, and don't forget to bookmark Michael J. Totten's Middle East Journal.


cartoons
riots
Lebanon

Those cartoons, etc.

It should be blindingly obvious to all concerned, at this point, that all the craziness about the Mohammed cartoons has nothing to do with cartoons and everything to do with the regimes in Syria and Iran trying desperately to get out of the richly deserved ass-kicking they know is coming their way. Personally I think we will be at war with both Iran and Syria before the end of March. I guess we'll have to wait and find out if I'm right or wrong.