1-Aug-14: Compromise and its price

The serious message underlying Antonio Branco's wry point is hammered home by the video we posted at "30-Jul-14: The ordinariness of utter evil".

29-May-14: Keeping people safe within reason often leads to uncomfortable questions...

Image Source: Calgary Herald

More on the Papal security strategy here. And on Israel's here.

12-Jun-13: As Islamist numbers grow, Europe's future is unlikely to ever again be what it was

The cartoons irritated their sensibilities: Salafist Islamists rioting in Solingen, Germany, May 2012 [Image Source]

Germany's domestic intelligence agency, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (in German, the BfV), yesterday issued its annual report on domestic extremism. Der Spiegel says it shows

a surge in support for Islamists and growth in the number of influential neo-Nazi music groups... 

It says Germany's largest Islamist organization, the Milli Görüs, and Hezbollah Germany, now count on some 42,550 members. Last year's tally was 38,080.

Members and supporters of the German Salafist movement saw the sharpest overall rise. Germany's Interior Minister Hans-Peter Friedrich, in issuing a banning order against three German Salafist organizations, said in March that:

"Salafism, as represented in the associations that were banned today, is incompatible with our free democratic order. The groups aim to change our society in an aggressive, belligerent way so that democracy would be replaced by a Salafist system, and the rule of law replaced by Sharia law."

Salafism, originating in Saudi Arabia and highly influential there, holds that democracy must be destroyed and replaced with an Islamic form of government. While Salafists represent only a small part of Germany's 4.3 million Moslems, they have clout and know how to use it. They launched a very public campaign called Project READ! in April 2012, in which 25 million copies of the Koran were handed to every household in Germany, Austria and Switzerland for free... 

The campaign to place a Koran in every German household is being spearheaded by a Rhineland-based Salafist, Ibrahim Abou-Nagie, a Palestinian hate preacher who leads a radical Islamic group called "The True Religion" [Die Wahre Religion]. In September 2011, German public prosecutors launched an investigation into Abou-Nagie after he called for violence against non-believers in videos posted on the Internet. In his sermons, Abou-Nagie glamorizes Islamic martyrdom and says that Islamic Sharia law is above the German Constitution. He also says that music should be prohibited, homosexuals should be executed, and adulterers should be stoned... In May 2012... more than 500 Salafists attacked German police with bottles, clubs, stones and other weapons in the city of Bonn, to protest cartoons they said were "offensive". ["Germany vs. Radical Islamists", Soeren Kern - March 15, 2013]

For their well-heeled Saudi Arabian backers/funders/leaders, the cost of the high-profile stunt was probably mere sauerkraut. But the significance of the German Salafists' ability to operate freely and attract media attention while delivering a resonating message of hatred and calling for the overthrow of democratic government and conventional law and order has implications that the German authorities have noticed. 

Extremist neo-Nazi music bands also do well, without giving away books. Today's Germany has 182 of them, but the report says they "held significantly fewer concerts than in the previous year" which probably indicates something.

29-Dec-10: Five questions prompted by a cartoon, several riots and a thwarted massacre

Moslems react to Danish cartoons - London, 2006 (Daily Mail UK)

Quoted in today's New York Times, the prime minister of Denmark says today's events "must not lead us to change our open society and our values, especially democracy and free speech.”

Today's events, you ask? We think they show how the tentacles extend deep into the Scandinavian heartland:

• Five men were arrested today in the suburbs of Copenhagen and in Stockholm on suspicion of plotting an attack on the offices of a newspaper in the Danish capital. 
• Their plan, simply stated, was to "kill as many people as possible". This, according to the head of the Danish security service.
• There's little doubt they had the means. Found in their apartment were "at least one machine gun with a silencer, live ammunition and plastic strips that can be used as handcuffs" according to the Danish authorities.
• The plan was to replicate the Mumbai massacre of 2008 that resulted in the murders of 163 people, acording to th police.
• The Copenhagen massacre was to happen on or before New Year’s Day - this coming weekend. 
• This would be yet another act of revenge for the publishing of certain cartoons in the Danish newspaper in 2005... and by far not the first such act. Two Danish diplomatic missions were torched, a boycott of Danish goods was carried out in several countries, and a large number of violent protests took places in cities around the world among other reactions at the time. Then in 2009, two men from Chicago were arrested in a plot to attack employees of the newspaper. In January 2010, a Somalian man equipped with an ax and a knife was apprehended before he was able to enter the home of a cartoonist in the Danish town of Aarhus. And in September this year, Danish police arrested a man following the explosion at a Copenhagen hotel of a letter bomb that officials said was most likely intended for the same newspaper.
• Security forces had been tracking this group for months and say there may still be further arrests.
• Three of the men arrested hold Swedish citizenship.
• A fourth, aged 26 and living in Copenhagen on a residency permit had been admitted to Denmark in 2000 as an asylum seeker from Iraq when (by our calculation) he must have been 16.
• All five are Moslems, which is by no means incidental to the story. To think otherwise is to be impossibly politically correct. (Nearly 4% of Danes are Moslems. No one suggests that all, most or many are terrorists.) They were part of “a militant Islamist group with links to international terrorist networks”, the chief of Danish security is quoted as saying.
• "A serious terror crime in Denmark has been thwarted through an efficient and close cooperation" between the security forces says this report.

In light of the above, we have some questions.

1. If this was an act of terror, as everyone - including the headline writers and the police - is saying, why are these Moslem men, all of them members of a so-called militant Islamist group acting in the name of their religion, not called terrorists in today's newspaper reports? [It happens that we blogged about this question just yesterday: 28-Dec-10: How the militants, fighters, insurgents and freedom fighters turn into terrorists] Terrorists is precisely what they are, assuming the charges prove to be true.
2. As the plot here involved religiously inspired acts of violent hatred, is the religious leadership of the institutions to which the five men were connected being asked to explain itself?
3. Should it bother us that one of the plotters (at least) was there because he had gotten political asylum ten years ago? And should we be troubled that, having imbibed the best that Scandinavia can offer, he responded by preparing to massacre his neighbours?
4. Is the essence of this frightening story really the struggle to defend free speech and liberal values, as the Danish prime minister said today? Or (which we believe) is it actually about the enormous life-and-death risks of hosting a militant minority within a democracy-minded, mild-mannered and liberal majority society while growing to understand (slowly, ever so slowly) that the hate-based values being incubated in their midst are not growing more moderate but rather are becoming sharper, more brazen, more toxic and more deadly with time?
5. Reuters reported today that Syria was actively involved four years ago (when the cartoons story was still fresh) in encouraging attacks on European embassies in Damascus, according to a senior U.S. diplomat quoted in leaked cables. The embassies of Denmark and Norway were both burned down in those Syrian "protests". Reuters reports that the instructions for the riots came directly from Syrian Prime Minister Naji al-Otari, who directed mosque preachers to deliver "hard-hitting" sermons at weekly prayers. In the face of unrelenting violence, is anyone looking into what Scandinavian imams are preaching to their flocks? Or does it not matter?

14-Sep-06: Manipulating the Media: Frank Exposure, Courtesy of Reuters

How honest, accurate and untainted by ignorance, malice or influence are the news media that tell us what's happening in the world?

Imagine a headline that said: "Zionists Urged to Buy Influence in World Media". Think that might get some attention?

Would a report that quoted a major Jewish leader saying "Jewish tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-semitic attitudes around the world" get reported? Would it be discussed on talk-radio, the Guardian's op-ed page, Malaysia's cartoon pages? Would it be a major story on ABC, BBC, CBC, CNN, Al-Jazeerah?

Now let's stop the speculating. Here's a true story -- only it's about Moslems, about Islamic power and about an authentic, formal, organized bloc of 57 nations that act in unison to control nearly one-third of the votes in the United Nations General Assembly.

Below is the actual, unedited form of yesterday's story as published by Reuters. After you've read through the text, please also read the comments we've added at the end.

Muslims urged to buy influence in world mediaWed Sep 13, 2006 2:12 PM BST

RIYADH (Reuters) - Muslim tycoons should buy stakes in global media outlets to help change anti-Muslim attitudes around the world, ministers from Islamic countries heard at a conference in Saudi Arabia on Wednesday.

Information ministers and officials meeting under the auspices of the 57-nation Organisation of the Islamic Conference (OIC), the world's largest Islamic body, said Islam faced vilification after the September 11 attacks, when 19 Arabs killed nearly 3,000 people in U.S. cities in 2001.

"Muslim investors must invest in the large media institutions of the world, which generally make considerable profits, so that they have the ability to affect their policies via their administrative boards," OIC chief Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu told the gathering in the Saudi city of Jeddah.

"This would benefit in terms of correcting the image of Islam worldwide," he said, calling on Muslim countries to set up more channels in widely-spoken foreign languages.

Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp., the Rupert Murdoch-run group behind the Fox News Channel. The U.S. channel is generally seen as right-wing and no friend of Arab or Muslim interests.

Washington's response to September 11, invading Afghanistan and Iraq and tightening civil freedoms at home as part of a wider "war on terror", has created a widespread feeling among Muslims worldwide that their religion is under attack.

A row earlier this year over Danish cartoons that depicted the Prophet Mohammed deepened the sense of a divide between Islamic culture and the West.

"The fierce attack on Islam in the five years since the September 11 attacks has forced us into a defensive position on our faith and understanding of our tolerant religion," Egyptian Information Minister Anas el-Feki said in a speech.

"Now more than ever we need a new Islamic media message that reaches all parts of the world," Feki said, citing Israel's recent 34-day war in Lebanon as one issue where Muslims needed to make their views and influence felt.

To this, we'd like to add several comments.

1. About the OIC's Role

We've spoken publicly in the recent past about the Organization of the Islamic Conference (also referred to as the Organization of Islamic Countries.) Apart from hosting the conference described above, the OIC's actions are the main reason why the United Nations has failed, after years of inside efforts, to adopt a convention against terrorism. You can see the background to this in Arnold Roth's speech to the 3rd International Congress of Victims of Terror, reprinted here. The OIC's ability to frustrate all attempts to comprehensively outlaw terrorism constitute a remarkably under-reported, largely-unknown and shameful story.

2. About the Influencers

The way Reuters chooses to describe the influence of Alwaleed bin Talal is odd, to say the least. It says:

"Muslim stakes in Western media are minimal. Billionaire Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal owns 5.46 percent of media conglomerate News Corp..."

And that's it. No other investments, no other investors. So how minimal is minimal?

Alwaleed bin Talal is surely worthy of a touch more attention than Reuters gives him. In addition to being a member of the Saudi royal family, a nephew of King Abdullah and the the richest Arab in the world with estimated net worth of US $20 billion, he is ranked by Forbes as the world's eighth richest person. Wikipedia says: "He has been nicknamed by Time magazine as the Arabian Warren Buffett."

This comment itself is an interesting observation since Alwaleed also holds a vast stake in that same Time magazine, a holding worth a billion dollars or more. This gives him a voice in the affairs of CNN, Time and a long list of other media properties.

His 5% holding in News Corp gives him a stake in the world's largest publisher of news in the English language: 175 papers, plus TV stations, magazines, radio, book publishers and film production studios. He's also invested in the dominant Italian media conglomerate Mediaset, in the Asia-and-Europe-wide TV network SKY and in many other media properties. In addition, a $9 billion stake in Citicorp gives Alwaleed some modest degree of influence in other parts of the global business landscape.

A man who understands what money can buy, Alwaleed donated $20 million each to Georgetown and Harvard Universities in 2005. This was the second largest donation that Georgetown has ever received. Its Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (CMCU) is now renamed the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding.

3. How Effective is This Sort of Investment?

Middle East Online quotes Prince Alwaleed himself boasting of its effect:

During last month's street protests in France, the US television network Fox... ran a banner saying Muslim riots. [Alwaleed says:] "I picked up the phone and called Murdoch . . . (and told him) these are not Muslim riots, these are riots out of poverty. Within 30 minutes, the title was changed from Muslim riots to civil riots."

The Prince is quoted in a Washington Times column explaining that his largesse as aimed at "bridging the understanding between East and West... for peace and tolerance." The columnist, Diana West, observes:

Funny how that bridge goes only one way. We won't ever, for example, see a Saudi prince (or anyone else) plunk down cold cash to expand -- or even establish -- Christian studies in Saudi Arabia, where exercising freedom of a non-Islamic religion is a crime.

We should point out, that in some circles, Alwaleed's holdings are themselves shrouded with question marks. As The Economist said in a penetrating and very readable analysis from 1999: "Anyone who seeks to present Prince Alwaleed as the face of the new Saudi Arabia needs to explain the mystery that lies at the heart of his empire."

Perhaps it's this shroud of uncertainty that renders Reuters so modest in its claims about his influence and that of other Arab and Moslem potentates.

4. About a "New Islamic Media Message That Reaches All Parts of the World"

This isn't the place to repeat what antisemites have said all the way down history: that the Jews control the banks, the media, the movies, the water supply and the rest. The haters will keep saying what haters say, and the rest of us will try to avoid being drawn into an ignorance-laden, prejudiced and pointless debate.

People who want to have influence and advance their private agendas have always had the means available to do this by wealth, by economic power, by war. Alwaleed is no exception and he's not alone in his ambitions, though perhaps exceptionally well-placed to achieve it. But we're dealing here with a different, threatening and more dangerous situation - one that's characterized by a barely-disguised degree of collaboration, co-operation and lofty self-justification.

Alwaleed is not the only player in the creation of a "new Islamic message". The conference that sparked this report is, after all, a global international conference of governments and their ministers. Not just some governments, but governments that have nearly a third of the United Nations in their control. And as we observed above, control is the right word since the fact is they do act in a united, co-ordinated way.

That's one of the reasons the OIC exists.

Ignoring the slightly tortured English of their website, the OIC's secretary-general Ihsanoglu says their efforts are about international co-ordination. He "expressed certainty of the possibility of achieving success and professionalism in joint Islamic information action based on human capabilities and high-level professional capacities of the Islamic world which have proved their merit and competence in the various Islamic media such as TV channels, radio stations, newspapers and websites."

Meanwhile the Saudi Undersecretary for Culture and Information, Dr. Abdullah Al-Jasser, this week "drew attention to the fact that the Islamic world faces today formidable challenges and biased world media actions that have enormously prejudiced Islam and Muslims through news, information and programme manipulations. This urgently necessitates the quick access of Islamic States to the global information society, not only by possessing and utilizing technologies, but also by upgrading content."

The word jihad doesn't appear in the press releases but its spirit seems to be there. As a group speaking with a single voice, the Islamic nations say they're grievously provoked and they absolutely have to fight back. And they see the media as a critical battlefield.

If you're searching for signs of critical self-examination by these states and their reps, don't be too hopeful. When it comes to the overwhelmingly Islamic character of global terrorism, something that troubles most of the world, don't waste your time searching for analysis on the OIC website. It's evidently not a problem of theirs. On the contrary, their pre-occupation as a global group is with rebuffing suggestions of an Islamic connection to terror (the link is to an OIC speech by Malaysia's former prime minister who addressed this theme repeatedly). The terrorism problem is mainly a problem of perceptions in the West, they say, with Islamic states and Moslems among its principal victims. The solution therefore is in changing those Western perceptions.

Are there Arab and Moslem victims of Moslem terror? Of course - vast numbers of them; we know some personally. Does this mean that Islam is unrelated to global terror and its cancerous spread in the past decade? Of course not. Islam is at the very heart of the cancer. It's impossible to comprehend terror without looking closely at the role Moslems play in its growth.

The organized Islamic governments, all 56 of them, are hardly hiding their intentions, leaving the rest of us to wonder how much of an impact their Islamic war against Western perceptions is now, and will be, reflected in the news reporting, analysis and pictures that get to our pages and screens.

21-Jul-06: Lies, larger lies and cartoons

Spooner cartoon in Friday's Melbourne Age 

It's been some decades since Israeli society right across its broad, noisy, fractious spectrum has been as united about something as this war. From our living rooms and bomb shelters, we residents of Jerusalem, Tel-Aviv, Haifa, Sderot, Nahariyah and Tsfat needed very little commentary and no political analysis to understand what Hassan Nasrallah meant when he said "We are the ones who are choosing the time and the place" for Hezbollah's attacks on Israeli towns, settlements and homes.

Nor were any of us especially surprised to hear, read and see the context-less news reportage, the total focus on Israel's actions instead of on the unprovoked series of calculated attacks against it. The painting and re-painting of familiar, old stereotypes: powerful Israel, disproportionate Israel, victim-free Israel. It's there in enormous doses, and no place seems to be free of it.

The cartoon above appears in Friday's Melbourne Age. (We're originally from Melbourne.)

To many it will be hard to see what's wrong with it. But the way it's wrong, the tremendous wrongness of it, goes to the very essence of the distorted narrative that has brought so much misery to this region over decades. Perhaps getting it right was simply too challenging for Spooner, the cartoonist. After all, how do you include 13,000 deeply entrenched missiles in your drawing? What kind of visual abstraction is needed to show Israel sitting quietly on its side of the Lebanon border for six years, watching jihadist leaders prepare for war, day in, day out? If you have never been inside an Israeli bomb-shelter, how do you communicate visually the fear that comes with 1,000+ missile firings? And how do you portray voracious military powers like Iran and Syria gleefully pulling the strings from the distance, financing and supplying the front line war?

The human price paid by Israelis in this ongoing war has always been tightly linked to distortions, half-truths and outright lies communicated by the mainstream media. It ought to be perfectly clear that you can be dishonest with your images no less than with your words.