The controversy over Dutch politician Geert Wilders’ film on Islam, Fitna, is not hard to understand. It’s a crude, embarrassingly racist compilation of the most extreme Islamic statements and anti-Semitic rants. The clear attempt is to argue that all Muslims share the al-Qaeda view of the world and want to kill all non-Muslims. Please. It’s…
Showing all posts tagged al-Qaeda
Our kind of arms dealer
One side of a sordid story: One of the world’s most notorious arms dealers, suspected of supplying weapons to the Taliban and Al Qaeda and of pouring huge arms shipments into Africa’s civil wars with his own private air fleet, was arrested by Thai authorities in a hotel here Thursday. His capture was prompted by…
Osama meets track and field
Let the Olympic Games in Beijing begin (with a generous helping of “sugared Osama Bin Laden-shaped candies”):
How to torture, the American way
A new analysis by NBC News reveals that more than a quarter of all footnotes in the 9/11 Commission Report refer to controversial interrogation techniques. Ie. torture. Welcome to America.
The rise of fanatacism
Al-Qaeda is now fully esconced in Lebanon, according to leading Middle Eastern writer Nir Rosen. The Iraq war is spreading like a cancer.
Bomb those Ayrabs (they’ll all the same anyway)
American journalist Jeffrey Goldberg – a man who strongly advocated the war in Iraq, published numerous dodgy articles connecting Saddam to al-Qaeda and argued the US would succeed there in no time – has now published this telling remark: Nor were neoconservative ideologues—who had the most-elaborate visions of a liberal, democratic Iraq—interested in the Kurdish…
Be bloody afraid
Does the thought that elements at the highest echelons of the US administration have sold nuclear technology to Pakistan, Turkey and Israel, all under the noses of the powers that be, cause alarm? Read on.
The Taliban on the march
A compelling essay in this week’s New York Times magazine about the jihadi threat inside Pakistan. Writer Nicholas Schmidle skillfully teases out the seemingly endless factions within the movement and the numerous reasons why Washington’s backing of President Pervez Musharraf has been a disaster for the region and the world.
The real Bhutto
Robert Fisk, The Independent, December 29: Weird, isn’t it, how swiftly the narrative is laid down for us. Benazir Bhutto, the courageous leader of the Pakistan People’s Party, is assassinated in Rawalpindi – attached to the very capital of Islamabad wherein ex-General Pervez Musharraf lives – and we are told by George Bush that her…