For some time now, the Shiite terror organizationHezbollah has been involved in drug trafficking. American officials have long known of ties between Hezbollah, Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, ties that earn it hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
In August 2008, for example, U.S. and Colombian investigators dismantled an international cocaine smuggling and money-laundering ring made up of members of a Colombian drug cartel and Lebanese members of Hezbollah.
Previously, the DEA had also targeted a Hezbollah drug trafficking ring in the Tri-Border region of Argentina, Brazil and Paraguay.
According to Michael Braun, former administrator and chief of operations at the US Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), Hezbollah relies on “the same criminal weapons smugglers, document traffickers and transportation experts as the drug cartels.
U.S. counterterrorism officials have been keeping a close eye on links between Hezbollah and the drug cartels, worried that al-Qaeda could also make use of the drug trafficking routes between the U.S. and Mexico to send its operatives across the border to carry out terror attacks on American soil.
If this weren’t enough cause for concern, a weekend report in the German magazine Der Spiegel has established a clear link between Hezbollah, the European drug trade and the illegal transfer of funds from Germany directly to that terror group’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
The report says that German police have arrested four Lebanese Nationals (all members of the same family) at Frankfort Airport who were found to be carrying millions of dollars in their carry-on-bags. Later, two other relatives were subsequently arrested, and under questioning admitted that they had sent money back to Lebanon to Hezbollah’s leadership. German police suspect that the two had trained in Hezbollah training camps in Lebanon.
Although the link with South American drug cartels has long been known, this is the first time that a direct Hezbollah link with the European drug trade has been demonstrated, although one has been suspected for quite some time due to increased cultivation of drugs in Lebanon. In fact, a 2009 United Nations report by that organization’s Office on Drugs and Crime says that:
[Lebanese] farmers in the Bekaa Valley (once the center of the Middle East’s largest hashish industry), appear to be resuming cannabis cultivation, as well as other drugs.
This is a disturbing development.
During the Lebanese civil war, the drug trade generated nearly $500 million a year in revenue, which was about 15% of Lebanon’s economy at the time. That money was a huge source of revenue for Hezbollah and other militias, also bringing enormous benefit to Syria and Iran, the primary providers of weaponry to Hezbollah.
German police suspect the Lebanese militant group, Hezbollah, of using drug trafficking in Europe to fund part of its activities, German magazine Der Spiegel reported on Saturday.
According to the report published on the magazine's website, German police arrested two Lebanese citizens living in Germany last October after they transferred large sums of money to a family in Lebanon with connections to Hezbollah's leadership, including the Shiite group's Secretary General, Hassan Nasrallah.
Suspicion was first raised in May 2008, when police found 8.7 million Euros in the bags of four Lebanese men at the airport in Frankfurt.
Police searched the men's apartment in Speyer, Germany, and found an additional half a million Euros.
According to the report, police suspected the men were selling cocaine in Europe and sending the profits back to Lebanon.
The report added that the two suspects went through training at a Hezbollah camp. The suspects deny the charges against them.
Germany's first Islamic bank, a unit of Kuveyt Turk Bank of Turkey, is to open its doors in early 2010 in the southern city of Mannheim, an executive confirmed Tuesday.
Under Islamic banking principles, interest on loans is forbidden and money cannot be lent to enterprises that flout Sharia law. Instead, borrowers must offer collateral and lenders receive a share of business profits.
The unit will open by March at the latest in Mannheim, a factory city with a large ethnic Turkish population, Istanbul-based Kuveyt Turk Bank said. It would seek a full local banking licence for Germany later.
An area newspaper, Rhein Neckar Zeitung, broke the news. The bank executive, who asked not to be named, said Kuveyt Turk Bank intended to establish further branches in Germany, then in other European nations. 9...)
The Central Council of Muslims, an Islamic group, says its data show three quarters of them feel a strong bond to Islamic tradition and at least one fifth are interested in Islamic-approved investing.
The council said it was only a matter of time before German banks also realized there was a domestic retail market for Islamic banking investments, which are usually certified by Islamic scholars who review how they work to ensure they conform with Sharia.
Iran's regime has struck back at the resurgent opposition, arresting more than 1500 people and confiscating the corpse of opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi's nephew after violent protests rocked cities across the Islamic republic.
The government moved to shore up its position a day after its security forces killed at least 15 protesters and wounded scores more in the worst clashes since the disputed presidential election in June.
The opposition said 1500 people had been arrested nationwide since the violence flared, including 1110 in Tehran and 400 in the central city of Isfahan.
The brutality on the Shia holiday of Ashura was condemned around the world.
The US administration cast aside its reticence and denounced the crackdown.
US President Barack Obama condemned the Tehran regime's "iron fist of brutality" and the "violent and unjust suppression of innocent Iranian citizens".
"What is taking place within Iran is . . . about the Iranian people and their aspirations for justice," he added.
During the turmoil after Iran's controversial presidential elections in June, Mr Obama - then in the midst of a diplomatic outreach to Iran - was criticised for his relative silence on the protests.
France deplored the "arbitrary arrests and violence carried out against ordinary protester". Germany, Italy, Austria, Britain, Canada and Norway issued similar statements. Even Russia, one of Iran's main trading partners, called for restraint.
Those killed included the opposition leader's nephew, Seyed Ali Mousavi, who was shot in the chest. Tehran was rife with speculation that he had been assassinated to send a message to his uncle, and the government moved rapidly to prevent his death becoming another rallying point for the opposition.
Security forces ringed the hospital where his body was taken and used teargas to disperse protesters outside. It later emerged they had removed his body and taken it to an undisclosed location.
"My brother's body was taken away from the hospital and we cannot find it," Seyed Reza Mousavi, his brother, told the reformist website Parlemannews. "Nobody accepts responsibility for taking away the body . . . We cannot have a funeral before we find the body."
Iranian authorities said they were holding the bodies of five slain anti-government protesters, including the nephew of the opposition leader, in what appeared to be an attempt to prevent activists from using their funerals as a platform for more demonstrations.
The violence came just days before a year-end deadline imposed by the Obama administration for Tehran to show good faith in its negotiations with the West over its nuclear program, or face new sanctions. Senior US officials said the Obama administration recogniseds that it was now at a "pivot point" in its strategy on Iran.
Tehran's crackdown on protests may be fanning fresh anger at the regime in Iran.
But a significant weakening of public support for President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad could be a mixed blessing for US and Western officials now trying to determine how the domestic unrest could affect negotiations with Iran.
A weakened regime could be less inclined to make concessions over its nuclear program, a source of pride for many Iranians, they say.
Sanctions, meanwhile, could help shore up Mr Ahmadinejad's support by whipping up nationalistic anger at foreign meddling.
This is the first time, I think, in which German authorities prosecuted somebody for ordering an honor murder, and not only for carrying it out. This is an important step in fighting such murders. The son, the actual murderer, will be out of jail before he's 30, which is probably why he was the one chosen to do it.
A German court imprisoned a Kurdish man, 50, for life on Tuesday for ordering the "honour killing" of his own daughter after being told she had lost her virginity.
A son and an Azeri friend lured the 20-year-old woman, Gulsum, to a lonely country road near the Dutch border, throttled her with a rope and clubbed her to death, inflicting horrific injuries to her face.
German authorities have vowed to stamp out the archaic custom among some Kurds, Turks and other ethnic groups of families murdering their own members who offend "family honour" through sexual relationships. Social workers had earlier tried to protect Gulsum.
The state court at Kleve sentenced Gulsum's brother, 20, to nine and a half years in youth prison, just short of the maximum youth sentence of 10 years. He and the victim were two out of three triplets. He had confessed to the killing after he was arrested.
His helper, 37, was jailed for seven and a half years.
Judges said they were convinced the only motive to murder Gulsum had been that she was no longer a virgin and had secretly undergone an abortion.
They said they were also convinced the father of 10, who denied the murder, had ordered his son to kill the sister.
One of Germany’s most senior Catholic leaders, Cardinal Joachim Meisner, criticized on Sunday what he described as restrictions on Christians in Islamic nations.
In an interview with Deutschlandfunk radio, Meisner, who is archbishop of Cologne, charged that this led to “an aversion against Muslims” among Germans.
The often outspoken cleric said he had been campaigning for the past two years for the Church of St Paul in Tarsus, Turkey to be permanently opened for worship by any Christian.
The Turkish government which treats the early medieval church at Paul’s birthplace as a museum granted access to Christian groups from mid 2008 to mid 2009 to use it, but restrictions are back in force.
“It’s a battle that is pointless. And then you get the feeling, this just is not right. And that is one of the reasons for all this aversion towards our Muslim fellow citizens,” Meisner said.
Despite the term (“aversion) which I think is somewhat over the edge (looks as if Europeans had something personal against Muslims), he is right in pointing out the problem: the extreme differences (and absolutely unjustified ones) between the situation of Muslims in Europe and that of non-Muslims in Islamic countries.
Does anybody besides me remember the remilitarization of the Rhineland?
Or that that unopposed action was followed by the Austrian Anschluss? Or the Obersalzberg conference that brought forth “Peace in Our Time” for Sir Neville Chamberlain?
Or the occupation of the Sudetenland followed closely by the conquest of all Czechoslovakia? And that fateful day, September 1, 1939, when World War Two started in Europe with the invasion of Poland?
Obviously not. Perhaps it is fitting that the radio station I am listening to is broadcasting Brahms German Requiem.
If you go back and read the accounts of the times on the German side you find out that Hitler would have retreated at the first sign of opposition.
He know that his Wehrmacht was still hollow. Had the French mobilized we might have postponed if not ended World War Two before it started.
Has Iran “remilitarized the Rhineland”?
Only time will tell. But you can be sure that if Iraq does not take strong action Iran will seize another oil well. Eventually they will seize the entire field if they do it one well at a time or all at once.
Will the Iraqis mobilize and take the well back?
There are rumors that Iraq has ordered home the families of its security personnel in Damascus.
Debka is reporting that the Obama Administration has gotten Israel to postpone by another six months any military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.
Can you say “Peace in Our Time”? Except we haven’t even gone to Obertehran and had a conference with the Hitler of our time or his puppet master.
Sir Winston Churchill chronicled the rise of Nazi Germany in his The Gathering Storm.
The British were slow to believe what Sir Winston was saying during the rise of Hitler.
Are we being slow to believe what Iran’s neighbors are saying about Iran’s rise under the Ayatollahs?I pray we are not chronicling the events prior to the next World War.
Following similar requests in Germany and Belgium, a Swedish mosque is now talking about broadcasting a call to prayer.
There are already mosques in Europe with a muezzin call: most only for Friday afternoon prayers, though some do have a muezzin call five times a day.
Though the sudden flurry of stories about mosques making such requests might be due to increased media attention, it does seem like it's a trend, a sort of Muslim response to the minaret ban referendum.
In Switzerland, in any case, as part of the push against the referendum, President Hans-Rudolf Merz promised that the muezzin call will not soundin Switzerland. While various polls show that some European countries support the right of Muslims to minarets, I doubt the same holds true for the muezzin.
According to the news report, the mosque is starting by requesting permission for a Friday call to prayer, but hopes that in the future they'll be able to have one every day.
The mosque Fittja near Stockholm wants to introduce a call to prayer outdoors before the Friday prayers. This is the first time in Sweden that an Islamic association is asking for such permission.
Today the call to prayer before every prayer is done inside the mosque. But in the future the Islamic association of Botkyrka wants the Friday prayers to start with a call to prayer from the minaret of the mosque.
"For us Muslims it's important to call to prayer, it's a big part of our culture," says Ismail Okur, chairman of the Islamic association of Botkyrka.
In Albysjön in Fittja there is one of several mosques in the Stockholm area. When the ABC show visited the mosque during midday prayers, there were about 30 people there who came to pray. But on Fridays, up to 1,000 people come to Friday prayers.
Nusret Bucic, a worshipper at the mosque, says that if they won't get permission, they'll accept it. "We can't complain about people, but must comply with the Swedish rules. But naturally it would be good with a proper call to prayer."
In a recent Sifo survey conducted for SVT, 51% of the people in the Stockholm area said they thought minarets should be allowed. 23% thought they should be banned, and 25% had no opinion.
"I think they should adapt to the culture to which they come, and therefore I don't think a call to prayer outside is very good," says Birgit Lorvik, a local resident.
Once the request is formally submitted it would be dealt with by the municipality, a process which could take a long time.
There may be a consequence to a couple of important events. 1. The large scale refusal of Muslim immigrants to integrate into western traditions and values, and perhaps a lack of volume on the part of those who have, and the Swiss referendum of late, which ban the building of new minarets.
Itself a sort of goofy law as constitutional amendments go, but one which certainly showed the rest of Europe that some sort of fight against Islamic cultural imperialism is possible.
While the law against the minaret is clearly a totem, (pun fully intended) the sentiment is real. I could not help but notice that in all the straw polls done around Europe immediately after the Swiss Referendum, all the nations polled came out much more strongly than Switzerland in favor of a similar ban. This makes me wonder if the Swiss vote had not been tampered with in some way to give a result more likely to allow the minarets.
After all, it was 57% against in Switzerland, a country famous for its tolerance and all the straw polls showed something more like 80% and more in favour of a similar ban in Germany, France, Spain and so on. Here is a short interview with a man who is a mayor of a small town in Northern France.
In October 2005 President George W. Bush used the term “Islamic fascist” for the first time to describe the Muslim barbarians at war with the West.
He denounced them as movements that have a “violent and political vision”, and call for “the establishment... of a totalitarian empire that denies all political and religious freedom.”
The Muslim groups which today seek to bring about a global totalitarian empire are not only fascists, but can trace their origins to Nazism and its genocidal ambitions.
The ideology of the Islamists whose ranks today include not only al-Qaeda but also Hamas and Hezbollah -- originated with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood finds not just its roots, but much of its symbolism, terminology, and common cause deep within the origins of Nazism.
Hassan al-Banna (1906 - 1949) was born into the family of a poor watchmaker in southern Egypt. As a child, he was attracted to the extremist aspects of Islam, which were hostile to Western secularism and to its system of rights, particularly women's rights.
While still in his teens, the young al-Banna and friends (they referred to each other as ‘brethren’) met frequently to discuss the situation in the Middle East, to argue about the ills of Arab society, and to lament the decline of Islam. Their angst was in large part a reaction to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of the Muslim Caliphate, the British occupation of Egypt, and the resulting exposure of Arab society to Western values.
In order to strike back against these evils, al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood in 1928. Among the perspectives he drew on to address these issues were the anti-capitalist doctrines of European Marxism and especially fascism.
The group expanded during the 1930’s as Al-Banna would describe, in inflammatory speeches, the horrors of hell expected for heretics, and consequently, the need for Muslims to return to their purest religious roots, re-establish the Caliphate, and resume the great and final holy war, or jihad, against the non-Muslim world.
The first big step on the path to the international jihad came during “The Great Arab Revolt” of 1936-9, when one of the most famous of the Muslim Brotherhood’s leaders, the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti (Supreme Muslim religious leader) of Jerusalem, incited his followers to a three-year war against the Jews in Palestine and the British who administered the Mandate.
By the end of the 1930’s there were more than a half million active members registered, in more than two thousand branches across the Arab world.
It was during this time that the Muslim Brotherhood found a soul mate in Nazi Germany. The Reich offered great power connections to the movement, but the relationship brokered by the Brotherhood was more than a marriage of convenience. Long before the war, al-Banna had developed an Islamic religious ideology which previewed Hitler’s Nazism. Both movements sought world conquest and domination.
Both were explicitly anti-nationalist in the sense that they believed in the liquidation of the nation-state in favor of a trans-national unifying community: in Islam the umma (community of all believers); and in Nazism the herrenvolk (master race). Both worshipped the unifying totalitarian figure of the Caliph or Führer.
And both rabidly hated the Jews and sought their destruction.
As the Brotherhood’s political and military alliance with Nazi Germany developed, these parallels facilitated practical interactions created a full-blown alliance, with formal state visits, de facto ambassadors, and overt as well as sub rosa joint ventures.
Al-Banna’s followers easily transplanted into the Arab world a newly Nazified form of traditional Muslim Jew-hatred, with Arab translations of Mein Kampf (translated into Arabic as “My Jihad”) and other Nazi anti-Semitic works, including Der Sturmer hate-cartoons, adapted to portray the Jew as the demonic enemy of Allah.
The single best known and most active Nazi sympathizer in the Muslim Brotherhood was not al-Banna himself, but the Hajj Amin al-Husseini, Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and one-time President of the Supreme Muslim Council of Palestine. As one commentator has noted, to understand the Hajj’s influence on the Middle East in the 1930s and 40s is to understand the ongoing genocidal program of the Arab terrorist organizations warring against the Jews of Israel today.
Al-Husseini used his office as a powerful bully pulpit from which to preach anti-Jewish, anti-Zionist, and (turning on his patrons) anti-British vitriol. He was directly involved in the organization of the 1929 riots which destroyed the 3000-year-old Jewish community of Hebron. And he was quick to see that he had a natural ally in Hitler and in the rising star of Nazi Germany.
As early as the spring of 1933, he assured the German consul in Jerusalem that “the Muslims inside and outside Palestine welcome the new regime of Germany and hope for the extension of the fascist, anti-democratic governmental system to other countries.”
Nearly three quarters of Germans fear the spread of Islam, according to a survey released on Friday.
A poll by Infratest dimap for public broadcaster ARD showed a third [36%] of those asked expressed great concern that Islam was growing too quickly in Germany.
Thirty-nine percent were still worried about Islam’s impact on society, but to a lesser degree. Only 22 percent said they had no problem with the religion.
A separate survey for daily Berliner Morgenpost and broadcaster RBB showed, however, that a majority in the German capital did not support banning the construction of mosques with minarets as Switzerland did following a recent referendum on the issue.
This interview with Turkish-German lawyer, Seyran Ates, first appeared in the land of the fjords, the land of oil, the home of the political correctniks who choose and bestow the Nobel Peace Prize.
Bruce (who currently has a piece featured on Pajamas) is the one who translates my work into Norwegian. Two far-sighted women, Rita Karlsen and Helge Storhaug, publish Human Rights Service as an online journal in both English and Norwegian.
I first “met” Seyran Ates when I was researching my book about Islamic gender apartheid and its penetration of the West. Thus, I quoted her twice in The Death of Feminism. I recently met Seyran for the first time in person in Rome at the G8 conference; I wrote about it for PJM here. We bonded. But, we really met when Seyran came to stay with me in New York City.
Seyran Ates' latest book: "Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution"
This past week, my home and my life were graced by a very heroic houseguest. I am talking about Seyran Ates, the Turkish-German lawyer, author, and freedom fighter who flew to New York City to spend six days with me, to talk, laugh, dream, strategize, hang out, hide out.
Yes, hide out.
Seyran’s fourth book Islam braucht eine sexuelle Revolution has just appeared in Germany. Its title: “Islam Needs a Sexual Revolution” has, apparently, led to more than the usual number of death threats. Seyran temporarily cancelled her tour to promote the book and came to visit me instead.
Seyran is no stranger to serious trouble.
In 1984, as a 21 year-old law student, Seyran was working at a Women’s Center in Berlin where mainly Turkish and Kurdish girls and women came for counseling. Seyran was sitting with her client, a fifteen year old battered Turkish Muslim girl. All around them, other women were giving and receiving advice, shelter, legal services. A quiet man quietly entered. Politely, but firmly, one of the women said: “Sir, there are no men allowed here.”
Expressionless, the man in the trench coat assured her that “What I have to do will take no time at all.”
Quickly, smoothly, he shot and killed the fifteen year old. He also pumped three bullets into Seyran’s neck and shoulder; she was not expected to live since the shooter had punctured a major artery. Against all odds Seyran recovered but her rehabilitation would take six years.
The shooter calmly walked out of the Women’s Center.
Yes, he was finally found and jailed for six months but no, he was never convicted. Although six Turkish and non-Turkish women identified him, the police made so many procedural errors that the judge felt there was enough reasonable doubt and could not convict him.
In Seyran’s expert opinion, the problem was that the victims were women—and Turkish women at that. It was a Turkish-on-Turkish, Muslim-on-Muslim crime—perhaps the fate of Turkish-German women was not yet seen as a priority on the multi-culti German agenda.
A lesser mortal might have given up. Seyran, however, completed law school. She went on to specialize in defending battered, mainly Muslim immigrant girls and women, including those who are the intended targets of honor killing.
However, Seyran was a rebel long before this incident. When she was 18 years old, she ran away from home. She could no longer bear being “treated as her father’s and elder brother’s slave and servant.” She wrote a book about it but under a pseudonym. She titled it: Wo gehören wir hin? (Where Do We Belong?) and it was a cri de coeur about immigrant identity. When I asked her how she found the strength to do this, she told me this:
“My parents, who were farmers, first came to Berlin in 1968 as guest workers. Berlin was undergoing a political and sexual revolution. I have no idea what they made of it all. Anyway, I arrived here in 1969 when I was six years old. I was the only Turkish girl in school. Everyone spoke German. Me too. I became completely integrated. There were no separate or parallel facilities, no parallel universe to impede my integration.”
Seyran wanted the same freedoms that German girls and women had. Now, in retrospect, she realizes that, as the only daughter, her mother really needed her help. (Seyran has reconciled completely with her family. In fact, they all live together in the same building in different apartments and support Seyran’s decision to be a single mother.)
Here, in the West, a non-Muslim divorce lawyer who represents a non-Muslim battered woman client might well be sued by her client’s ex-husband; she might have to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars to defend herself. I know many American women lawyers who have faced this. But a lawyer like Seyran risks her life, faces death, each day she defends a battered Muslim woman, each time she helps her flee from an intended honor killing.
So many heroic Muslim and ex-Muslim feminists and dissidents have received death threats. Some write under pseudonyms, live in exile, often require bodyguards and/or serious police protection.
Here, I am thinking about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Magdi Allam, Lubna Hussein (the brave, trouser-wearing journalist who just fled Sudan), Ibn Warraq, Irshad Manji, Taslima Nasrin, Asra Nomani, Wafa Sultan. Those of us who share their views and who write about them in the West, are usually called “racist Islamophobes.”
Various responses to the Swiss decision to ban minarets.
Italy "Switzerland is sending us a clear signal: yes to church towers, no to minarets," says Italian minister Roberto Calderoli of Lega Nord. "In the popular referendum the Swiss balanced respect for freedom of religion with the need to stop the politics and propaganda linked to Islam."
Riccardo De Corato of the PdL party says that the minaret ban should be a lesson for Italy's Left.
Netherlands Geert Wilders congratulated Switzerland and said: What is possible in Switzerland should be possible here too." He says his party will call on the cabinet to make such a referendum possible in the Netherlands, and if not, the PVV will propose such a law.
Belgium Filip Dewinter of the Belgian Vlaams Belang says: Just like Wilhelm Tell, the Swiss are a symbol for the resistance of many Europeans against foreign domination. The Islam, with its minarets and mosques, doesn't belong in Europe.
"Common sense has again gained on politically correct thinking. Despite decades of multicultural indoctrination the tenability of the Swiss hasn't been broken yet (..) Islam indeed doesn't belong in Europe. In contrast to the political authorities which embrace Islam and collaborate with it, a majority of Europeans wants to call a sound stop to the advancing Islam."
He will propose a bill in the Flemish parliament to stop the building of mosques and minarets in Flanders.
Germany Head of the Turkish Community in Germany (TGD) Kenan Kolat told Berlin daily Berliner Zeitung that the decision was "very regrettable," adding that basic rights such as religious freedom should not be allowed to come to popular vote.
"A minaret belongs to a mosque," Kolat said.
But Wolfgang Bosbach, a conservative Christian Democrat heading the parliamentary committee on interior policy, said that the vote should be taken seriously. He told daily Hamburger Abendblatt on Monday that the vote reflects a widely held fear of Islam within German society – though he said German laws provided enough solutions for practical decisions about minaret construction.
"But there are spectacular plans for large structures, such as in Cologne's Ehrenfeld district or in Duisburg-Marxloh, for which there is a lot of resistance simply because of the size," he told the paper.
Bosbach added that is "possible that some of these large buildings were planned to signal how strong Islam has become in Germany."
Denmark Pia Kjærsgaard of the Danish People's Party proposed in parliament to bring up the issue as a popular referendum. A third of the parliament members can decide to send a bill to a decision by popular referendum.
Karsten Lauritzen of the Liberal Party rejects the idea: "We don't legislate in parliament on particular buildings. And then there are some who will think it's limiting freedom of religion. I don't say that it is, but that it's an element in the issue." Lauritzen also said that this isn't an issue for a popular referendum. Denmark has a democracy with politician to make decision and if the people are unsatisfied with the decisions, they can vote for different politicians.
Sweden Sweden has criticised the outcome of a Swiss referendum approving the ban of minarets in the country. Speaking to Swedish Radio news, Swedish Foreign Minister Carl Bildt called the vote an evidence of prejudices among the Swiss population.
The clear no to the building of further minarets in Switzerland could indicate some kind of fear towards Muslims, Bildt added. But the vote is likely to send negative signals on all levels, the Foreign Minister predicted.
Russia and China, countries which have heretofore supported Iran's nuclear program, have joined up with the United States, Britain, France, and Germany in preparing a resolution critical of it.
The resolution to be presented at the next International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) meeting, is meant to confront Iran's approach to global concerns about their nuclear program.
It will likely call on Iran to be more transparent in the building and use of nuclear reactors, and to desist from enriching uranium, in accordance with the orders of the UN Security Council.
Under a new UN plan, Iran would not enrich its own uranium, but rather export it to Russia and France, where it would be made into fuel rods (which can not be turned into weapons-grade material) and returned to Iran. This would deplete Iran of its uranium stockpile and decrease the ability of the nation to build a nuclear warhead.
Iran has rejected the plan. It insists that the uranium exchange take place on its own soil.
Iran says it distrusts the West, believing countries will not hold up their end of an agreement or provide Iran with technology.
On its end, the United States and European countries accuse Iran of lying about its enrichment of uranium for military purposes. Reportedly, Iran currently has enough low-enriched uranium for up to two nuclear weapons.
BERLIN (AP) A German government official says the nation will send an observer to the upcoming trial in New York of the professed mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and four accused henchmen.
Justice Ministry spokeswoman Katharina Jahntz on Saturday confirmed a report in Der Spiegel that a German observer would attend the trial to ensure that no evidence provided by Germany would be used to apply the death penalty.
U.S. authorities announced last week that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would be tried by a New York court. No date has been set.
Three of the four suicide pilots who carried out the attacks had lived and studied in the northern German city of Hamburg.
Germany, like the rest of Europe, except for Belarus, does not execute criminals.
TEHRAN: An Iranian former deputy defence minister who has been missing for nearly three years was abducted by Israeli agents and was now being held in Israel, several Iranian news websites reported yesterday.
Ali Reza Asgari, a retired general who served in Iran's Revolutionary Guard, disappeared while on a private trip to Turkey in December, 2006. In March of this year, a former German Defence Ministry official said Mr Asgari had defected and was providing information to the West on Iran's nuclear program. Iranian officials and Mr Asgari's family have claimed that he was abducted.
One of yesterday's web reports, on a site called Alef, said German and British intelligence services assisted Israeli agents in abducting Mr Asgari and taking him to Israel.
The site, www.alef.ir, is close to a conservative Iranian law-maker.
"On the basis of a two-year investigation carried out by concerned bodies, Asgari was abducted by foreign intelligence services and is being held in a Zionist prison," the site reported, apparently referring to an Iranian intelligence probe into the matter.
"Asgari was abducted with the co-operation of Mossad as well as German and British intelligence services and was finally taken to Israel," the news report said.
Israel's Foreign Ministry refused to comment.
Hans Ruehle, a former chief of the planning staff of the German Defence Ministry, wrote in a Swiss newspaper in March that Mr Asgari told the West that Iran was financing North Korean steps to transform Syria into a nuclear weapons power, leading to an Israeli air-strike that targeted a site in Syria on September 6, 2007.
The US claims the site was a nearly finished nuclear reactor, but Syria denies that and says the facility was an unused military installation. Mr Ruehle said Mr Asgari, who was instrumental in establishing the Hezbollah militant group in Lebanon, "changed sides" and provided information to the West on Iran's own nuclear program.
The US and its European allies, as well as Israel, suspect Iran is intent on using a civilian nuclear program as a cover for developing nuclear weapons. Iranian officials have said Mr Asgari was not linked to Iran's nuclear program, but Western media reports have said he has co-operated with US intelligence and is considered a "high value" defector. Mr Asgari arrived in Turkey on December 7, 2006, and disappeared on December 9.
BERLIN — Authorities have identified a 27-year-old German convert to Islam as an Al Qaeda associate suspected of traveling to Afghanistan and planning to attack German targets.
The report could fuel concerns about European converts being recruited by Islamist terrorist groups for attacks.
The Federal Criminal Police Office confirmed a Spiegel Online report Sunday that it had posted notices across Afghanistan warning that the Kazakhstan-born ethnic German, identified as Jan Sch., may plan attacks on German military or civilian institutions in Afghanistan.
The German-language posters included a description of the suspect and his picture. They were put up at German military bases and civilian institutions, security check points, embassies and the international airport, according to Spiegel.
Jan Sch., who is also known as Hamza, has only recently traveled to the border region between Afghanistan and Pakistan, Spiegel reported. He left Germany in 2004 to study Arabic in Saudi Arabia. However, he was seen in his hometown of Saarbruecken several times after his departure from Germany.
According to the report, Jan Sch. allegedly is an acquaintance of Fritz Gelowicz, a member of an alleged radical Islamic terrorist cell whose plot to attack U.S. targets in Germany was foiled by authorities in 2007.
Spiegel also wrote that the criminal office warns of several other German extremists who supposedly have traveled to Afghanistan in recent months.
Jan Sch. "is said to be one of the intellectuals of the German Islamist radical scene, who is often asked for advice. This makes him a possible leader in the eyes of the terrorism investigators," Spiegel Online wrote.
The family of the “veil martyr” – an Egyptian woman stabbed to death in a Dresden court room in July – is suing a judge and court president for failing to protect her, a public prosecutor confirmed on Saturday.
Senior Dresden public prosecutor Christian Avenarius said that a lawyer for the dead woman’s husband had begun legal action six weeks ago.
Last week, Alex Wiens, 28, was sentenced to life imprisonment for stabbing to death Marwa El-Sherbini in a Dresden court room. According to a Cairo newspaper report, Sherbini’s family is accusing the judge who was presiding over the court, and the court’s president, of failing to arrange proper security, thereby making them accessories to her death.
Despite knowledge of Wiens’ “criminal intent” there had been no special security arranged, one of the family’s lawyers said.
The family is also in discussion with the state of Saxony over compensation, the lawyer said.
A man who stabbed a pregnant Egyptian woman to death in a German courtroom in front of her husband and three-year-old son has been sentenced to the maximum penalty of life in jail.
Alex Wiens, 28, stabbed Marwa al-Sherbini, who was wearing a hijab, at least 16 times on July 1, in the same courthouse in the eastern city of Dresden where the trial took place.
The case of Wiens, who has admitted holding anti-Islamic and xenophobic views, shocked Germany and incensed the Muslim world, sparking protests from Egypt to Iran.
Prosecutors said the attack was motivated by "a pronounced hatred of non-Europeans and Muslims".
Elwy Ali Okaz, al-Sherbini's husband, who was stabbed as he tried to protect his wife during the attack, was then shot in the leg by police who apparently took him for the attacker.
Egyptian media quickly dubbed al-Sherbini a martyr and there were huge protests against the murder in several Muslim countries.
Nadim Baba, Al Jazeera's correspondent reporting from Dresden, said the perception of Islamaphobia in Germany was unlikely to go away despite the stiff sentence.
"We've heard calls from people in Egypt for the death penalty, and to be fair to the Egyptian authorities ... they've been at pains to explain to their public that the death penalty doesn't exist in Europe and that what was handed down today was in fact the harshest sentence possible under German law," he said.
"The judges went out of their way to stress that because this was an exceptionally brutal case, after 15 years the killer will be reassessed before there's any chance of him being let out, which is an exceptional measure."
Ramzy Ezzeldin Ramzy, the Egyptian ambassador to Germany, welcomed the verdict, saying:"Justice has been honoured."
"Getting the maximum possible sentence, I think that itself says a lot," he said.
In his closing arguments on Monday, prosecutor Frank Heinrich said there was no doubt of Wiens' reasons.
"It's clear that his motive was hatred for Muslims," Heinrich told the panel of judges.
"Like a maniacal, cold-blooded killer, he started stabbing the woman and her husband, who was trying to protect her."
Al-Sherbini and the defendant met in August 2008, when she asked him to clear a playground swing where he sat smoking a cigarette so Mustafa, her son, could use it.
He refused, calling al-Sherbini an "Islamist", a "terrorist" and a "whore". She pressed charges for defamation and he was fined $1,170.
An appeal against the conviction brought them together again in July.
The defendant allegedly plunged an 18cm kitchen knife into the chest, back and arm of al-Sherbini, 31, three months pregnant at the time with her second child.
Wiens, who arrived in Germany from Perm in the Urals in 2003, reportedly struggled with bouts of depression.
Germany has the second-largest Muslim population in western Europe after France and some groups criticised the German government for taking several days to condemn the murder.
A MAN accused of killing a pregnant Egyptian woman in a frenzied anti-Islamic attack goes on trial in Germany today in a case that inflamed tempers throughout the Muslim world.
Prosecutors say the defendant, identified according to German legal practice only as Alex W, stabbed Marwa al-Sherbini at least 16 times in three minutes on July 1, in the same courthouse where his three-week trial will be held.
Some 200 police officers will guard the proceedings this time in the eastern city of Dresden, as German media reported Internet death threats against the defendant, who will appear in court behind bulletproof glass.
The 28-year-old Russian-born German allegedly plunged an 18cm kitchen knife into the chest, back and arm of Sherbini, 31, who was three months pregnant at the time with her second child.
She bled to death at the scene in the presence of her three-year-old son Mustafa, in what prosecutors say in the charge sheet was a killing motivated by "a pronounced hatred of non-Europeans and Muslims''.
Egyptian media quickly dubbed her "the veil martyr''.
The accused is also charged with attempting to kill her husband, Elwy Okaz, who tried to come to her aid.
Court psychiatric experts say they found no evidence of diminished responsibility.
The Egyptian Government yesterday demanded the maximum sentence for Alex W, which is life in prison under German law - the penalty prosecutors are seeking.
Sherbini's family will appear in Dresden as co-plaintiffs, represented by lawyers hired by Cairo, the foreign ministry said, adding that it was "confident in the German justice system's impartiality''.
The shocking attack, and a slow reaction by the German media and political class, left the country open to accusations of neglectful handling of hate crimes against Muslims.
Berlin moved to deflect criticism, with Chancellor Angela Merkel expressing her condolences to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on the sidelines of the Group of Eight summit later that month.
Thousands rallied in Dresden in Sherbini's memory.
"Many people in and outside Germany are looking to Dresden and hoping to see this murder punished,'' said Nabil Yacoub of the Dresden Immigrants Council.
The case triggered anti-German protests in Egypt and Iran and sparked fears of an escalation on the scale of the bloody riots touched off by the publication in Europe of caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed in 2005.
Sherbini and Alex W met in August 2008, when she asked him to clear a playground swing where he sat smoking a cigarette so Mustafa could use it.
He refused, calling Sherbini an "Islamist'', a "terrorist'' and a "whore''.
She pressed charges for defamation and he was fined $US780 ($846).
His appeal against the conviction brought them together again in July.
After Sherbini testified and left the witness stand, he allegedly pulled the knife he had smuggled into the courtroom and stabbed her and then Okaz, who was shot in the leg by a confused guard who apparently took him for the attacker.
Sherbini worked as a pharmacist while her husband was a geneticist working on his doctorate in Dresden.
Alex W, who arrived in Germany from Perm in the Urals in 2003, was on the dole and reportedly struggled with bouts of depression.
Yesterday, the Dresden Culture and Educational Centre, which now bears Sherbini's name, held a memorial in her honour calling for "respectful treatment of differing social groups''.
Note: majority of users who have posting privileges on MASH blog are not MASH members.
Comments are slightly moderated. MASH does not necessarily endorse every opinion posted on this blog.
For some time now, the Shiite terror organization Hezbollah has been involved in drug trafficking. American officials have long known of ties between Hezbollah, Colombian and Mexican drug cartels, ties that earn it hundreds of millions of dollars per year.
Posts
