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Recent Commentsby Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 20:06
An Atheist Muslim's Perspective on the 'Root Causes' of Islamist Jihadism and the Politics of Islamophobia
Posted: 05/03/2013 10:09 pm The ambassador answered us that [their right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
The above passage is not a reference to a declaration by al Qaeda or some Iranianfatwa. They are the words of Thomas Jefferson, then the U.S. ambassador to France, reporting to Secretary of State John Jay a conversation he'd had with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, Tripoli's envoy to London, in 1786 -- more than two and a quarter centuries ago. That is before al Qaeda and the Taliban, before the creation of Israel or the Arab-Israeli conflict, before Khomeini, before Saudi Arabia, before drones, before most Americans even knew what jihad or Islam was, and, most importantly, well before the United States had engaged in a single military incursion overseas or even had an established foreign policy. At the time, thousands of American and European trade ships entering the Mediterranean had been targeted by pirates from the Muslim Barbary states (modern-day North Africa). More than a million Westerners had been kidnapped, imprisoned and enslaved. Tripoli was the nexus for these operations. Jefferson's attempts to negotiate resulted in deadlock, and he was told simply that the kidnapping and enslavement of the infidels would continue, tersely articulated by Adja in the exchange paraphrased above. Adja's position wasn't a random one-off. This conflict continued for years, seminally resulting in the Treaty of Tripoli, signed into law by President John Adams in 1797. Article 11 of the document, a direct product of the United States' first-ever overseas conflict, contained these famous words, cementing America's fundamental commitment to secularism: As the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion; as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen; and, as the said States never entered into any war, or act of hostility against any Mahometan nation, it is declared by the parties, that no pretext, arising from religious opinions, shall ever produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.
Yes, the establishment of secularism in America back in the 18th century was largely related to a conflict with Islamist jihadism. So where did Abdul Rahman Adja's bin Laden-esque words come from? They couldn't have been a response to American imperialism (the start of the conflict precedes the presidency of George Washington), U.S. foreign policy, globalization, AIPAC or Islamophobia. Yet his words are virtually identical to those spouted ad nauseum by jihadists today who justify their bellicosity as a reaction to these U.S.-centric factors, which were nonexistent in Adja's time. How do we make sense of this? Well, the common denominator here just happens to be the elephant in the room. In the aftermath of the Boston Marathon bombings and the foiled al Qaeda-backed plot in Toronto, the "anything but jihad" brigade is out in full force again. If the perpetrators of such attacks say they were influenced by politics, nationalism, money, video games or hip-hop, we take their answers at face value. But when they repeatedly and consistently cite their religious beliefs as their central motivation, we back off, stroke our chins and suspect that there has to be something deeper at play, a "root cause." The taboo against criticizing religion is still so astonishingly pervasive that centuries of hard lessons haven't yet opened our eyes to what has been apparent all along: It is often religion itself, not the "distortion," "hijacking," "misrepresentation" or "politicization" of religion, that is the root cause. The recent attack on "new atheists" like Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris and the late Christopher Hitchens by Nathan Lean and Murtaza Hussain have been endorsed by renowned liberal writers like Glenn Greenwald, who has also recently joined a chorus of denialists convinced that jihad and religious fervor had nothing to do with the Tsarnaev brothers' motive, despite an abundance of evidence to the contrary. (HuffPost Live recently had a great segment holding Murtaza Hussain accountable for his claims.) In a way, these attacks on Dawkins et al. are a good thing. Typically, resorting to ad hominem attacks and/or labeling the opposing side "bigoted" is a last resort, when the opponent is unable to generate a substantive counterargument. This phenomenon can be wholly represented by loaded terms like "Islamophobia." As an atheist Muslim (I'm not a believer, but I love Eid, the feasts of Ramadan and my Muslim family and friends), I could be jailed or executed in my country of birth, the country I grew up in and a host of other Muslim countries around the world for writing this very piece. Obviously, this is an unsettling, scary feeling for me. You may describe that fear as a very literal form of "Islamophobia." But is that the same thing as anti-Muslim bigotry? No. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/an-atheist-muslims-perspective-
see article at top... by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 19:15
In honor of May 1, Brad DeLong reposted a very interesting 2009 talk he delivered on"Understanding Karl Marx" that offers a number of criticisms of Marx that I would have enthusiastically endorsed in 2009 but which look weaker four years later. In particular, DeLong says that Marx the political activist was too pessimistic about the idea that the ruling class would agree to make economic growth pareto optimal within the context of a market economy: [T]hat even though the ruling class could appease the working class by using the state to redistribute and share the fruits of economic growth it would never do so. They would be trapped by their own ideological legitimations--they really do believe that it is in some sense “unjust” for a factor of production to earn more than its marginal product. Hence social democracy would inevitably collapse before an ideologically-based right-wing assault, income inequality would rise, and the system would collapse or be overthrown. The Wall Street Journal editorial page works day and night 365 days a year to make Marx’s prediction come true. But I think this, too, is wrong. To me that unquestionably looked wrong as of 2009. But in the interim, those Wall Street Journal editorial page tendencies have grown much stronger. You see a rising tide of Rand-inflected moralism about market outcomes and a reduced emphasis on Friedman-style pragmatism. You also see a sharply reduced emphasis on belief in any kind of macroeconomic stabilization policy, in favor of a "let them eat cake slash move to North Dakota" moralism about unemployment. Last but by no means least, it really has become the conventional wisdom among American elites that the appropriate policy response to fiscal imbalance in a time of high and rising income inequality is to restore balance by reducing the scope and generosity of social insurance programs. http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/01/may_day_
Thank god for Julia's NIDS in Australia... and like her I am an atheist... Read article at top...
by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 19:00
But the two men struck up a partnership. Vos would be temporarily hired as a lobbyist for the NRA, helping LaPierre press the gun lobby’s agenda on Capitol Hill. And when Vos formed the company Blue Sky Productions, which would become involved in importing tens of millions of dollars of military rifles, LaPierre signed on as his partner, state and federal records show. Together, the two friends would play an instrumental role in the early growth of America’s civilian market for military-style weapons. The legislative changes that LaPierre supported as the NRA’s chief lobbyist in the mid-1980s opened the door to the import of military-surplus weapons, which effectively had been banned for two decades. The legislation helped make a new, more powerful class of firearms more readily available to civilian gun owners and begin to shift the profile of American gun ownership. The arms deal put together by Vos’s company — a $58 million venture to import 50-year-old American-made M-1 rifles from South Korea back to the United States — proved so lucrative that other gun merchants immediately tried to follow its lead. Other importers would seek to bring in more military weapons, not just American but also foreign-made arms such as Russian Kalashnikovs and Israeli Uzis, and new business associations sprang up to represent their interests in Washington. The Blue Sky deal may have helped whet the appetite of American consumers for more and more military-style weapons. Before long, American manufacturers stepped up domestic production of such firearms, including semiautomatic assault rifles and high-capacity pistols, to meet the burgeoning demand. Some in the gun industry say this transformation was inevitable, regardless of the Blue Sky deal, as technology evolved. Just as cellphones became lighter and more powerful, they say, so did firearms. But Josh Sugarmann of the Washington-based Violence Policy Center says the 200,000 rifles imported by Blue Sky were “basically the first of the military weapons marketed to the civilian population. If you were going to draw an ‘assault weapons timeline,’ it would start with the M-1 and eventually end up where we are today.”
See image at top...
by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 18:16
THE Great Barrier Reef is set to be named as a World Heritage Site in danger by UNESCO next month. A long-awaited assessment of the reef by UNESCO and the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), released on Friday evening, says decisive action must be taken to avoid a listing in June. The report claims the federal and Queensland governments have failed to improve water quality or halt coastal developments that could impact the reef. Only one annual water quality report card has been published, in 2011, which covered 2009. A second report card was due in early 2012, but it's yet to be delivered. The report also says there's been no clear commitment by the either federal or Queensland governments to limit port developments near the reef. Instead about 43 proposals are under assessment. "The above-mentioned issues represent a potential danger to the outstanding universal value of the property," the report said. "The World Heritage Centre and IUCN ... recommend that the committee consider the Great Barrier Reef for inscription on the list of World Heritage in Danger ... in absence of a firm and demonstrable commitment on these priority issues." Prime Minister Julia Gillard said the Federal Government was committed to keeping the reef a great heritage area for the world. ''In the last couple of weeks I announced a $200 million reef rescue commitment,'' she told reporters in Melbourne. ''We are very committed and we'll continue to pursue those kind of commitments in the future.'' But Greens Senator Larissa Waters called on Liberal and Labor to support a Senate bill which would adopt the World Heritage Committee's recommendations as law
Reed article at top... by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 18:05
http://www.independentaustralia.net/2013/life/satire/the-disability-care-game/
And should you wonder about the article in the Friday merde-och Terrorgraph about Craig Thomson and the obviously Photoshop-ed picture (see toon at top), it now only appears in a RUSSIAN website... I can't find it at news.com.au... I'll keep looking... by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 17:20
I have already mentioned the lord at: (nearly) all in the family... Here is a refresher about some of his crap...
Good Lord!. I thought that Lord Monckton of Brenchley had a tendency to be moronic when talking about global warming but, after having watched the debate with Tim Lambert, I have come to believe Lord Monckton is a fraud and he knows it. He parades as a knowledgeable count (easy to make a Freudian slip on this one) expert — a "mathematician", who in all fairness appeared to be confused about statistics 101... He just blabbed nonsense con brio. One of his grandiose argument relates to an event that happened 750 million years ago when the earth started to freeze — a big ice age that nearly covered the entire earth with ice according to the geological record. The process was fairly complex but in a nutshell, the good Lord has not even bothered to understand why this event happened and how it sorted itself out. Tim Lambert had no idea about that particular event thus did not know what to say, leaving the awful Lord smug as a pork pie with tomato sauce oozing from the top.
read more: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/8985
by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 17:04
Here is the first one on the list of these dangerous spruikers (first one, mostly because I already have mentioned her on this site)... --------------------- Is Nova a nut-case, did she flip a screw loose sometimes after having got her PhD, or did she suck so much at microbiology that she decided to con people and make money from rich denialists by claiming she knew what she was talking about in regard to global warming?...
read more: http://www.yourdemocracy.net.au/drupal/node/19279#comment-24016 by Gus Leonisky on Sat, 2013-05-04 07:37
"Wow wow wow!" is probably your first thought. "Wait a second, can that thing carry a camera," should be your second. Because the answer is yes, eventually more advanced versions of the RoboBee could become the world's tiniest drone. Its creators say they imagine these little guys will do all kinds of things, from monitoring environmental conditions to helping out with search and rescue missions. "What a charitable little drone!" is what researchers want you to think. Because for all of the Earth-helping and lost child-saving revolutionary technology like this can do, there are probably twice as many military applications for them. Otherwise, why would DARPA be investing so much in micro robotics programs? As early as 1992, everybody's favorite source for funding futuristic research projects expressed interest in tiny bug bots. That year, DARPA hosted a workshop called "Future Technology-Driven Revolutions In Military Operations." The resulting publication two years later said very clearly that the "development of insect-size flying and crawling systems capable of a wide variety of battlefield sensor missions" was identified as a "promising program area." Fast forward just a couple of years and DARPA started throwing real money at the idea. Some $35 million went into pursuing the development of so-called micro air vehicles (MAVs). At that point in time, the Pentagon (probably correctly) believed that some sort of remote-controlled fly-thing with a camera mount could work as a scout and save some soldiers' lives. Things really spun out of control from that point on. The military's unmanned aerial vehicle AKA drone program has become a big deal. Since the turn of the century, the disparate branches of the military have all incorporated the use of drones for their own ends. The Army uses them to killing terrorists (and some civilians too) on the battlefield. The Navy's now designing a super drone that can automatically take off and land on an aircraft carrier. The Air Force built its own "bumblebee-sized" drone nearly five years ago. They even made a video about how they could drop a swarm of these mini-drones, using "microsensors and microprocessor technology to navigate and track targets through complicated terrain, such as urban areas." by Gus Leonisky on Fri, 2013-05-03 20:20
http://www.abc.net.au/iview/#/view/33049
See also double cross... especially in regard to "intelligence" mentioned in this desert war series and of course watch for stories of soldiers used as pawns, fighting battles for the generals, on behalf of warriors... In the war on Iraq, the intelligence was so deliberately skewed and manipulated as to have war with an enemy who had no real defence, it was a disgrace to soldiers who fought the likes of Rommel — and of course the war on Iraq was a war crime. by Gus Leonisky on Fri, 2013-05-03 18:37
The New South Wales Deputy Premier insists James Packer's plan for a new six-star hotel and casino at Barangaroo is not a done deal, despite the billionaire businessman unveiling potential designs for the project. Three international architects have created competing designs for the hotel skyscraper, which would include an exclusive gaming room. The New South Wales Government appointed an independent panel led by former Future Fund chairman David Murray to weigh up Mr Packer's plan against a rival bid from The Star casino, owned by Echo Entertainment, which aims to lure high-roller tourism to the city. Only one proposal will be given the green light to proceed to the next stage of assessment. Echo Entertainment's agreement limits NSW to only one casino license until 2019. Deputy Premier Andrew Stoner says no decision has been made. "James Packer is a confident businessman, he's putting everything into this proposal and he's got to take his best shot at it," Mr Stoner said. http://www.abc.net.au/news/2013-05-03/packer-casino-27no-done-deal27/4668808 Wouldn't it be cruel for the deal of one of the poor oppressed billionaires to fall through the cracks of Barangaroo... Even odds the deal is on... or in horse racing lingo: it's a cert... Is it not?... No "decision" has been made... Let's say here that as a casino goes for exclusive rich folks, one can see a LOT OF HOTEL ROOMS... It looks more like a HUGE hotel with a SMALL gambling annexe... I suppose the croupiers would be housed in-house in-style too... Note that the land on which this GIANT phallus would stand is PUBLIC LAND FOR RECREATION... See toon at top...
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