“For the moment, there does not seem to be much prospect of a moderate Islam in the Muslim world. This is partly because in the prevailing atmosphere the expression of moderate ideas can be dangerous—even life-threatening. Radical groups like al Qaeda and the Taliban, the likes of which in earlier times were at most minor and marginal, have acquired a powerful and even a dominant position.”
“Huge numbers of migrant domestic workers, mostly from Asia and Africa, are employed throughout the region. Some 1.5m work in Saudi Arabia, 660,000 in Kuwait and 200,000 in Lebanon. Many work very long hours and receive little food, no time off and pay that is a fraction of any minimum wage, if it materialises at all. Human Rights Watch (HRW), a New York-based group, says at least one domestic worker died every week in Lebanon between January 2007 and August 2008. Almost half were suicides and many were as a result of falling from high buildings, often while trying to escape their employers. Mistreatment is so widespread that the Philippines, Ethiopia and Nepal no longer let their citizens go to Lebanon to work as maids, though such bans have had little effect.” (thanks Khelil)
“An Ethiopian soldier serving at an Air Force base in southern Israel petitioned the High Court of Justice Thursday over racial slurs hurled at him by a senior officer. The soldier asked the court to order IDF officials to explain why disciplinary action was not being taken against a major whom he claims called him an “annoying nigg*r.”" (thanks Olivia)
AP says more Democrats are reluctant to allow taxes to rise on the rich.
It is a matter of despair to me that the constituents of these Democrats don’t put their feet down on this issue. Allowing tax rates on the rich to go back to Reagan-era levels will not derail the economic recovery. What, are they going to cut back on their yacht-buying? Some heiresses seem to be sending the extra money they save on paying taxes down to Colombia for coke, which doesn’t exactly help the US economy.
And, you can’t be for fiscal discipline or for a balanced budget and also be in favor of lower taxes on the super-wealthy. This analysis made the rounds in the blogosphere, but it is worth reprinting the conclusion of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.
The fact is that the Bush tax cuts for the super-wealthy are the main reason for the large size of our current budget deficits, and if the cuts weren’t abolished, they would go on bankrupting government into the distant future.
A tax cut on the rich is a way of stealing from the middle class.
Their chart is eloquent. Is it that the public doesn’t know how to read it?
The tax cuts dwarf the wars and make TARP and the stimulus packages look minuscule as a source of the federal budget deficit.
So, voters, put some steel in the spines of the Democrats.
Not exactly the conclusions reached at WINEP. Via WarInContext, this from MERIP
“… But by its own reckoning, the attack has resurrected Hamas as a political player in the West Bank. In its attacks on settlers on two consecutive nights in different parts of the West Bank, Hamas demonstrated its reach despite a three-year, US-backed PA military campaign and exposed the fallacy of the PA’s claims to have established security control in the West Bank. “It’s not muqawama (resistance) against Israel,” says ‘Adnan Dumayri, a Fatah Revolutionary Council member and PA security force general. “It’s muqawama against Abbas.” It also enabled the Islamists to catch seeping popular disaffection across the political spectrum toward a process of negotiations that appeared to Palestinians to be leading into a blind alley of continued Israeli control. Should Abbas fail to negotiate a halt to settlement growth, Hamas in its armed attacks against settlers would emerge from its three-year political wasteland to offer Palestinians an alternative.
In contrast to the international media, where the attack was roundly condemned, in Palestine the attack earned plaudits not only from Hamas’ core constituency, but also from a broad swathe of Fatah and secular activists, including some senior actors, disillusioned by 19 years of negotiations based on an ever flimsier framework. Unlike the Annapolis process or the “road map,” the twin Bush administration initiatives that the Obama administration chose to ditch, the current negotiations lack any terms of reference or agreed-upon script. Palestinians ask why Abbas agreed to meet Netanyahu given that none of the Arab targets required to turn proximity talks into direct ones were reached prior to the Obama administration’s announcement of the meeting. When American elder statesman George Mitchell presented the parties with 16 identical questions on the core issues requiring yes or no answers, Israel responded to each with a question of its own. In his August 31 press briefing before the White House meeting, Mitchell again declined to specify if Israel had agreed even to extend its (partially honored) settlement freeze past the September 26 expiration date…”
“… Gamal Mubarak thus faces a dilemma: if he breaks away from his current supporters to cultivate the support of the old guard, for example by cooling his enthusiasm for the neo-liberal economic course, he is in danger of turning the powerful business elite against him (as well as going against his own instincts). On the other hand, if he retains his current supporters, the resistance of the old guard and possibly the military against his presidential ambitions could intensify. The old guard and the military could push for a transitional successor to President Mubarak—for example the powerful and Omar Suleiman (a favorite of Washington!), who apparently enjoys some popularity due to the perception that he is not corrupt—but whether this person would vacate the position for Gamal in the future would be far from certain….”
Comparative view of the United States and Old Testament world, approximate scale, 900 miles to 1 inch (in the original map which is only 3 3/4 inches across)
The Christian fascination with the Holy Land as a window into interpretation of the Bible has a long and indeed fascinating history of its own. Here I continue the thread on Jesse Lyman Hurlbutt’s A Bible Atlas (New York: Rand McNally & company, 1947, first published in 1882). I love the irony of the map above. Long before the political map devolved into Blue States vs. Red States, here is the Old Testament squarely in an expanded Bible Belt.
Here is Hurlbutt’s summary of the physical space defined as the Old Testament world:
The Old Testament world embraces the seas and lands between 30° and 54° east longitude, or from the mouth of the Nile to the head of the Persian Gulf; and between 27° and 40° north latitude, from the parallel south of Mt. Sinai to the north of Mount Ararat. The total extent of territory is about 1,400 miles from east to west and 900 miles from north to south, aggregating 1,260,000 square miles. If the space occupied by the Mediterranean Sea and other large bodies of water is deducted from this, the land will include about 1,110,000 square miles, or one-third of the extent of the United States, excluding Alaska. Unlike the United States, however, nearly two-thirds of this area is a vast and uninhabitable desert, so that the portion actually occupied by man is less than an eighth of that included int he American Union.
I wonder what Sarah Palin would think about Hurlbutt excluding Alaska, but at least it was not a state yet and some still referred to it as Seward’s folly.
To be continued …
Three explosions hit Shiite processions in the old city of Lahore around 7 pm Wednesday, killing at least 35 persons and wounding about 250. The first explosion appears to have been a pre-set bomb, which went off near to the Karbala Gamay Shiite shrine. Two suicide bombers subsequently struck near Bhati Chowk. The attacks occurred near to the Datta Ganj Bakhsh Sufi shrine, which was bombed last summer.
Although the local police had set up checkpoints and taken basic security measures, the crowd blamed them for having allowed the bombings, and attacked them. They burned police cars and mobbed the nearest police station. Police had to fire in the air to disperse the angry crowds, which they only succeeded in doing around 8:30 pm. The 35,000 Shiites were commemorating the assassination of Imam Ali, who they consider to be the successor of the Prophet Muhammad, in 661. Ali’s shrine is in Najaf, Iraq.
Dawn reports that some in the crowd blamed Punjab chief minister Shahbaz Sharif and his party, the Pakistan Muslim League (N), for simply not caring what happened to Shiites. (The Muslim League is not a particularly fundamentalist party, though some of its members have those tendencies, but it has a bias toward conservative Sunnism, and party leader Nawaz Sharif had been in exile for many years in Saudi Arabia, the government and Wahhabi state religion of which is viewed by common Shiites as hostile to them). Lahore Shiites are divided politically, but a lot of ordinary Shiites would be supporters of the ruling Pakistan People’s Party; its de facto leader, President Asaf Ali Zardari, is himself a secular Shiite.
An Urdu newspaper reported that an organization called Lashkar-i Jhangvi al-Alami took responsibility for the bombings, though Lahore police said they had heard nothing about such a claim. The background and recent activities of Lashkar-i Jhangvi is given by the South Asia Terrorism Project. It is a small offshoot of the Army of the Companions of the Prophet (Sipah-i Sahaba). The anti-Shiite animus of these groups derives originally from the social conditions of the Jhang Siyal, where powerful Sufi Shiite landlords hold sway, and where lower middle class Sunnis feel oppressed by them. But over time the Lashkar-i Jhangvi has developed a presence elsewhere in the country, including in Karachi, where it is also accused of attacks on Shiites. It is one of a number of small terrorist organizations that have shadowy relationships with one another and which some observers call the ‘Punjabi Taliban,’ though I think that phrase generates more heat than light. They aren’t exactly like the Pashtun Taliban, and they are far smaller and more marginal in Punjabi society than the Taliban are in Pashtun.
The massive attack on Shiites in Karachi last winter, and then the targeting in Lahore since spring of an Ahmadi Mosque, of a Sufi shrine, and now of a Shiite procession, suggests a coordinated and concerted attempt by an organization of bigoted Sunni activists influenced by Saudi Wahhabism to impose a narrow Sunni fundamentalist vision on diverse Pakistani society.
The sectarian strife comes on top of continued extensive violence in the country’s northwest, where government sources claim that air strikes on suspected terrorist safe houses in Khyber district left 60 dead. Local sources confirm the strikes but say that as many as 20 of the 60 were innocent civilians, including children. Indeed, the strike on the Shiite mosque in Lahore may well be a reprisal for Pakistani Government crackdowns on the Pakistani Taliban.
And, of course, these incidents continue to be overshadowed for most Pakistanis by the Great Deluge that put a fifth of their country under water and threatens disease outbreaks, and lower economic growth and productivity.
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