Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 2 November 2007

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Iraqi Resistance Report for events of Friday, 2 November 2007

Translated and/or compiled by Muhammad Abu Nasr, member, editorial board, the Free Arab Voice. http://www.freearabvoice.org

• Resistance batters US al-Habbaniyah base with ferocious heavy mortar assault.
• Resistance bomb sends US Humvee up in flames in Baghdad’s al-Khadra’ district Friday night.
• Resistance group reports destroying US vehicle in Baghdad, killing all aboard.
• US helicopter gun ship attacks residences in southern Baghdad Friday evening, killing 10, including women and children.
• Sectarian murder spree continues: five more bodies of murder victims found dumped around Baghdad.
• US admits death of American soldier in Salah ad-Din Province Wednesday.
• Three US fliers killed in Black Hawk helicopter crash near Balad Friday afternoon.
• Resistance bomb kills US soldier in Samarra’.
• Large numbers of Resistance men battle puppet army patrols in al-Mawsil.
• Polish occupation soldier killed in bomb attack in ad-Diwaniyah.

http://www.albasrah.net/pages/mod.php?mod=art&lapage=../en_articles_2007/1107/iraqiresistancereport_021107.htm
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Faulty Intel Source “Curve Ball” Revealed – Iraqi weapons ‘expert’ unmasked as a fraud

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In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Faulty Intel Source “Curve Ball” Revealed – Iraqi weapons ‘expert’ unmasked as a fraud

60 Minutes: Iraqi’s Fabricated Story Of Biological Weapons Aided U.S. Arguments For Invasion

By Draggan Mihailovich

© MMVII, CBS Interactive Inc. All Rights Reserved.

Nov. 1, 2007

(CBS) 60 Minutes has identified the man whose fabricated story of Iraqi biological weapons drove the U.S. argument for invading Iraq. It has also obtained video of “Curve Ball,” as he was known in intelligence circles, and discovered he was not only a liar, but also a thief and a poor student instead of the chemical engineering whiz he claimed to be.

60 Minutes correspondent Bob Simon’s two-year investigation will be broadcast this Sunday, Nov. 4, at 7 p.m. ET/PT.

Curve Ball is an Iraqi defector named Rafid Ahmed Alwan, who arrived at a German refugee center in 1999. To bolster his asylum case and increase his importance, he told officials he was a star chemical engineer who had been in charge of a facility at Djerf al Nadaf that was making mobile biological weapons.

60 Minutes has learned that Alwan’s university records indicate he did study chemical engineering but earned nearly all low marks, mostly 50s. Simon’s investigation also uncovered an arrest warrant for theft from the Babel television production company in Baghdad where he once worked.

Also appearing in Sunday’s segment is video that 60 Minutes obtained of Alwan at a Baghdad wedding in 1993.

He eventually wound up in the care of German intelligence officials to whom he continued to spin his tale of biological weapons. His plan succeeded partially because he had worked briefly at the plant outside Baghdad and his descriptions of it were mostly accurate. He embellished his account by saying 12 workers had been killed by biological agents in an accident at the plant.

More than a hundred summaries of his debriefings were sent to the CIA, which then became a pillar – along with the now-disproved Iraqi quest for uranium for nuclear weapons – for the U.S. decision to bomb and then invade Iraq. The CIA-director George Tenet gave Alwan’s information to Secretary of State Colin Powell to use at the U.N. in his speech justifying military action against Iraq.

Tenet gave the information to Powell despite a letter – a copy of which 60 Minutes obtained – addressed to him by the head of German intelligence stating that Alwan appeared to be believable, but there was no evidence to verify his story.

Alwan was caught when CIA interrogators were finally allowed to question him and confronted him with evidence that his story could not be as he described it. Weapons inspectors had examined the plant at Djerf al Nadaf before the fall of Baghdad and found no evidence of biological agents.

In the end, however, Alwan got what he wanted. He is believed to be in Germany, free and probably living under an assumed name.

Why did he do it?

“It was a guy trying to get his green card essentially, in Germany, and playing the system for what it was worth,” says Drumheller. “It just shows … the law of unintended consequences,” he tells Simon.

The full story in :
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2007/11/01/60minutes/main3440577.shtml

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Muslim students respond to Islamo-Fascism Week

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Muslim students respond to Islamo-Fascism Week

By Jane Mee Wong

Northwest Asian Weekly

nwasianweekly.com

Photo by Jan Mee Wong

Students at the University of Washington protest against Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week events held on campus. Students were especially upset by the presence of Michael Medved, a conservative talk-show host who has said that Islam is a “primitive” religion.

Nov. 3, 2007

Organized on the premise of discussions concerning Islamic fundamentalism’s ties to human right abuses and terrorism, Islamo-Fascism Awareness Week was held across 100 campuses in the country last week, including the University of Washington.

In conjunction with the national drive organized by David Horowitz, a neoconservative political activist, the UW College Republicans invited conservative radio talk-show host Michael Medved to speak at UW on Oct 23. Medved is well known for igniting controversy. He created an uproar when, on his radio program, he pointed out “an inherent problem in Islam” as the reason for the violence in the Muslim world. Medved claimed that “a core foundational difference between Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, if you will, even Hinduism and Islam” is that Islam is “a primitive religion.”

As might be expected, then, his speaking engagement at UW produced more than 600 signatures from faculty, students and community members opposing his anti-Islam message.

Supporters of Medved’s views, the UW College Republicans, hosted a movie entitled “Suicide Killers” on Oct. 22. The documentary, produced by French filmmaker Pierre Rehov, focuses on the Palestinian conflict and portrays Muslims as suicide bombers and victims of a violent psychosis. The film also attributes the violence of the Palestinians to the restrictions that Islamic society places between male and female members of society. “The AK-47 is a phallic symbol,” claims the film.

“The translation in the movie was all wrong,” an Arab-speaking Palestinian international student protested after the film. “(The film) mistranslated the Arabic word for (Israeli) ‘military tanks’ into ‘civilian buses.’” He added, “What it means for Palestinians to shoot at invading tanks is very different from them attacking civilian buses.”

At the end of the one-and-a-half-hour film, the visibly agitated audience waited for a question and answer session. However, the College Republican representative told the audience to instead return the next day for the talk with Medved.

“Refusing to debate the film after they (the College Republicans) promised dialogue is indicative of the fact that they cannot defend this white supremacist tripe. They are cowards,” said Khalil El Bathy, a community member present at the event.

The following evening, “We want dialogue, bring out Medved!” was one of the chants heard outside Kane Hall 220, the venue of Medved’s rescheduled talk. Having protested outside the building against his talk, the crowd of about 100, made up predominantly of Muslims and people of color, had arrived at the venue only to find it full. The continual calls for Medved to address the crowd met with no avail. “Medved intended for us (Muslims) not to be here. His lecture was meant for his supporters. There is no dialogue,” said Werda Osman, a UW student.

The crowd outside of Kane 220 was nonetheless “amazing,” according to Osman. “This is not just about Islam. Oppressed people everywhere will come together no matter what,” she said.

As a response to the Islamo-Fascism events, the Muslim Students Association organized a campus event on Oct. 29. The “Ask a Muslim” panel consisted of four speakers and answered a variety of questions from the 30-odd-member audience.

The questions ranged from what the “ummah,” or Muslim community, represents, to how Muslims in the United States can stand in international solidarity with Muslims worldwide, to how Christians can struggle together with Muslims against white supremacy in the United States.

Hala Dillsi, one of the event’s organizers, said, “When people think about Islam, they think its people ‘over there,’ or simply about Osama (Bin Laden). We want to show that the Muslim community here is dynamic and is made up of many different people and ideas.”

The question of whether Muslim women are oppressed because they wear the hijab, the traditional covering for the hair and neck, dominated the discussion. Panel speaker Ammah Eqeiq, a Palestinian international graduate student, claimed, “For me, I am discouraged from wearing the hijab in the U.S. for security reasons.” Pulling her headscarf back down onto her neck, Eqeiq made the point that she can “pass as a liberated, free woman” if she didn’t put on her hijab. However, for her, “not being able to wear the hijab is oppression.”

“The hijab is an external symbol for my internal commitment to God,” said Dillsi. She asked, “Why are people always so concerned about women wearing the hijab? Is it because they like to control women, whether they wear the hijab or not?”

The full story in :
http://www.nwasianweekly.com/200726045/muslim220072645.htm

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Combating Muslim Extremism – a generational, often self-generating war

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

Combating Muslim Extremism – a generational, often self-generating war

by JUAN COLE

[from the November 19, 2007 issue]

All the major Republican presidential candidates have bought into George W. Bush’s rhetoric of a central struggle against Muslim extremism and have thus committed themselves to a generational, often self-generating war. By foregrounding this issue, they have ensured that it will be pivotal to the 2008 presidential race. The Democratic candidates have mostly been timid in critiquing Bush’s “war on terror” or pointing out its dangers to the Republic, a failing that they must redress if they are to blunt their rivals’ fearmongering.

Republican front-runner Rudy Giuliani in his recent Foreign Affairs article complains that the United States has been on the “defensive” in the war on “radical Islamic fascism” and says with maddening vagueness that it must find ways of going “on the offensive.” He promises that “this war will be long.” Giuliani is being advised on such matters by Representative Peter King, who has complained that “unfortunately we have too many mosques in this country”; by Daniel Pipes, who has questioned the wisdom of allowing American Muslims to vote; and by Norman Podhoretz, author of World War IV: The Long Struggle Against Islamofascism. Combining the word “Islam” with a European term like “fascism” is profoundly offensive; a subtext of anti-Muslim bigotry pervades Giuliani’s campaign, a sop to the Christian and Zionist right.

Advocates of the “war on terror” fantasize about the Muslim world as a Soviet Union-type challenge to the United States. In fact, the dozens of countries with majority Muslim populations are mostly strong allies of the United States. One, Turkey, is a NATO ally, and six (Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain, Kuwait and Pakistan) are non-NATO allies. Only fourteen countries have this status, so Muslim states make up nearly half. The United States counts many other friends in the region, having significant frictions only with Sudan, Syria and Iran, and those are mixed pictures (Syria and Sudan helped against Al Qaeda, and Iran sought a strategic alliance with the United States against Saddam Hussein in early 2003).

Worse, the hypocritical Bush Administration has ties to Muslim terror groups. The US military, beholden to Iraqi Kurds for support, permits several thousand fighters of the PKK terrorist organization, which bombs people in Turkey, to make safe harbor in Iraqi Kurdistan. The Bush Administration has used against Tehran the expatriate Iranian Mujahedeen-e-Khalq terror network, on which Saddam Hussein bestowed a base in Iraq. Democrats have mysteriously declined to denounce these unsavory alliances.

Very few Muslims are either violent or fundamentalist; most are traditionalist, mystic, modernist or secularist. Murder rates in the Muslim world are remarkably low. About 10 to 15 percent of Muslims throughout the world, or 130 million to 215 million, generally support a fundamentalist point of view, including the implementation of Islamic law as the law of the state. But they are not typically violent, and the United States has managed to ally with some of them, as with the Shiite fundamentalist Dawa Party of Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki. The fundamentalists are atypical. In a 2006 Pew poll, majorities in Egypt, Jordan and Indonesia were optimistic that democracy would work in their countries.

Because of its support for or acquiescence to Israel’s creeping erasure of the Palestinian nation and for Israel’s attack on Lebanon in 2006, and because of Washington’s own brutal war in Iraq, the United States is poorly positioned to win hearts and minds in the Muslim world. In the last year of Bill Clinton’s presidency, some 75 percent of the population of Indonesia (the world’s largest Muslim country) had a favorable view of the United States. By the time Bush had invaded two Muslim countries, in 2003, America’s favorability rating there had fallen to 15 percent. It recovered a bit after US magnanimity during the tsunami but then fell back to less than half the pre-Bush level. In Turkey, the favorability rating has fallen from 52 to 12 percent in the same period (all polling figures from the Global Attitudes Project of the Pew Charitable Trust).

The full story in :
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20071119/cole

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A funny list of dumb laws in the United States – Alaska

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

A funny list of dumb laws in the United States – Alaska

• A law in Fairbanks does not allow moose to have sex on city streets.
• Even though it is legal to hunt a bear, it is illegal to wake a bear and take a picture for photo opportunities.
• Fairbanks: It is considered an offense to feed alcoholic beverages to a moose.
• In Alaska it is illegal to whisper in someone’s ear while they are moose hunting.
• It is considered an offense to push a live moose out of a moving airplane.
• Kangaroos are not allowed in barber shops at any time.
• Moose may not be viewed from an airplane.
• State policy states that emergencies are held to a minimum and rarely found to exist.
• While it is legal to shoot bears, waking a sleeping bear for the purpose of taking a photograph is prohibited.

source:
http://www.bored.com/crazylaws/index.htm

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November 2, 1917: A day that will live in Infamy, 90 Years ago, the Balfour Declaration was issued

bismi-lLahi-rRahmani-rRahiem
In the Name of Allah, the Compassionate, the Merciful

=== News Update ===

November 2, 1917: A day that will live in Infamy

90 Years ago, the Balfour Declaration was issued

———- Forwarded message ———-
From: Mazin Qumsiyeh <qumsi001@hotmail.com>
Date: Nov 3, 2007

November 2, 1917: A day that will live in Infamy
90 Years ago, the Balfour Declaration was issued.

Excerpt on the Balfour declaration from the book “Sharing the Land of Canaan: Human Rights and the Israeli Palestinian Struggle” by Mazin Qumsiyeh and a brief follow-up comment on its relevance to today’s events (wars on Iraq and soon on Iran):

The events leading up to the support of Britain and France for Zionist aspirations have received little historical discussion. In examining historical documents of powerful nations like France and Britain, we find these nations issuing declarations to support the Zionist aspirations. This came in France first with a letter sent from Jules Cambon, Secretary General of the French Foreign Ministry to Nahum Sokolow (at the time head of the political wing of the World Zionist Organization based in London) dated June 4, 1917:

“You were kind enough to inform me of your project regarding the expansion of the Jewish colonization of Palestine. You expressed to me that, if the circumstances were allowing for that, and if on another hand, the independency of the holy sites was guaranteed, it would then be a work of justice and retribution for the allied forces to help the renaissance of the Jewish nationality on the land from which the Jewish people was exiled so many centuries ago.

Some five months later, on November 2, 1917, the British Foreign Secretary Arthur James Balfour conveyed to Lord Rothschild a similar declaration of sympathy with Zionist aspirations. It stated that:

“His Majesty’s Government view with favor the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people, and will use their best endeavors to facilitate the achievement of this object, it being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine, or the rights and political status enjoyed by Jews in any other country. “

Palestinians and others in the Arab world were immediately alarmed. This declaration was issued when Britain had no jurisdiction over the area, and was done without consultation of the inhabitants of the land that was to become a “national home for the Jewish people.” The declaration also wanted to protect “rights and political status” of Jews who choose not to immigrate to Palestine. However, the native Palestinians are simply referred to as non-Jews and their political rights are not mentioned but only their “civic and religious rights”. Lord Balfour wrote in a private memorandum sent to Lord Curzon, his successor at the Foreign Office (Curzon initially opposed Zionism) on 11 August 1919:

“For in Palestine we do not propose to go through the form of consulting the wishes of the present inhabitants … The four great powers are committed to Zionism and Zionism, be it right or wrong, good or bad, is rooted in age-long tradition, in present needs, in future hopes, of far profounder import than the desires and prejudices of the 700,000 Arabs who now inhabit that ancient land” [8]

The Jules and Balfour declarations are two documents that demonstrate the support made to the Zionist supranational entity that facilitated giving them control over a land that neither of the two governments had control of at the time. Some British authors have provided explanations of this support based on a quid pro quo for Weizman’s contribution to the British war efforts through such efforts as the development of better chemicals for explosives. Some argued that it was related to Britain’s simple domestic situation with many Zionists both in the government and among the electorate. It could also be argued that Britain and France now had more reason had to benefit from a revival of their early 1840s desires to settle European Jews in Palestine as a way of a structural remodeling of Middle East geopolitics. Undermining the Ottoman Empire, which was now allied with Germany, provides only partial explanation and a poor one at best.

The British had also made a promise of independence to the Arabs if they aided them in opposing the Ottoman Empire. This was one of many “promises” but it was the one that was to over-ride all others as concrete actions were to reveal in just a short period of time. It important to note that these governments declared their public support for Zionism, even while simultaneously making private assurances to Arabs. The British and French public support was later joined by the Americans.

The full story in www.montrealmuslimnews.net

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