Hari's Place

The Madrassa Myth

By Peter Bergen
Schwartz Fellow
and Swati Pandey
Research Associate

The New York Times
June 14, 2005

It is one of the widespread assumptions of the war on
terrorism that the Muslim religious schools known as
madrassas, catering to families that are often poor,
are graduating students who become terrorists. Last
year, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell denounced
madrassas in Pakistan and several other countries as
breeding grounds for "fundamentalists and terrorists."
A year earlier, Secretary of Defense Donald H.
Rumsfeld had queried in a leaked memorandum, "Are we
capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more
terrorists every day than the madrassas and the
radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying
against us?"

While madrassas may breed fundamentalists who have
learned to recite the Koran in Arabic by rote, such
schools do not teach the technical or linguistic
skills necessary to be an effective terrorist. Indeed,
there is little or no evidence that madrassas produce
terrorists capable of attacking the West. And as a
matter of national security, the United States doesn't
need to worry about Muslim fundamentalists with whom
we may disagree, but about terrorists who want to
attack us.

We examined the educational backgrounds of 75
terrorists behind some of the most significant recent
terrorist attacks against Westerners. We found that a
majority of them are college-educated, often in
technical subjects like engineering. In the four
attacks for which the most complete information about
the perpetrators' educational levels is available -
the World Trade Center bombing in 1993, the attacks on
the American embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998,
the 9/11 attacks, and the Bali bombings in 2002 - 53
percent of the terrorists had either attended college
or had received a college degree. As a point of
reference, only 52 percent of Americans have been to
college. The terrorists in our study thus appear, on
average, to be as well educated as many Americans.

The 1993 World Trade Center attack involved 12 men,
all of whom had a college education. The 9/11 pilots,
as well as the secondary planners identified by the
9/11 commission, all attended Western universities, a
prestigious and elite endeavor for anyone from the
Middle East. Indeed, the lead 9/11 pilot, Mohamed
Atta, had a degree from a German university in, of all
things, urban preservation, while the operational
planner of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, studied
engineering in North Carolina. We also found that
two-thirds of the 25 hijackers and planners involved
in 9/11 had attended college. Of the 75 terrorists we
investigated, only nine had attended madrassas, and
all of those played a role in one attack - the Bali
bombing. Even in this instance, however, five
college-educated "masterminds" - including two
university lecturers - helped to shape the Bali plot.

Like the view that poverty drives terrorism - a notion
that countless studies have debunked - the idea that
madrassas are incubating the next generation of
terrorists offers the soothing illusion that
desperate, ignorant automatons are attacking us rather
than college graduates, as is often the case. In fact,
two of the terrorists in our study had doctorates from
Western universities, and two others were working
toward their Ph.D.

A World Bank-financed study that was published in
April raises further doubts about the influence of
madrassas in Pakistan, the country where the schools
were thought to be the most influential and the most
virulently anti-American. Contrary to the numbers
cited in the report of the 9/11 commission, and to a
blizzard of newspaper reports that 10 percent of
Pakistani students study in madrassas, the study's
authors found that fewer than 1 percent do so. If
correct, this estimate would suggest that there are
far more American children being home-schooled than
Pakistani boys attending madrassas.

While madrassas are an important issue in education
and development in the Muslim world, they are not and
should not be considered a threat to the United
States. The tens of millions of dollars spent every
year by the United States through the State
Department, the Middle East Partnership Initiative,
and the Agency for International Development to
improve education and literacy in the Middle East and
South Asia should be applauded as the development aid
it is and not as the counterterrorism effort it cannot
be.
Copyright: 2005 The New York Times

Comment: A largely bourgeois endeavour

by William Dalrymple

Guardian Unlimited - Wednesday July 20, 2005

Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld were not known for
their close agreement on matters of foreign policy,
but one thing that they were united upon was the
threat posed by Pakistan's madrasas. In 2002, Rumsfeld
posed the question: "Are we capturing, killing or
deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day
than the madrasas ... are recruiting, training and
deploying against us?" A year later, Powell described
madrasas as a breeding ground "for fundamentalists and
terrorists".

Since the revelation this week that no less than three
of the suicide bombers visited Pakistan in the year
preceding the attack, the British press has been quick
to follow the US line: last weekend the Sunday
Telegraph was helpfully translating the Arabic word
madrasa as terrorist "training school" (it actually
means merely "place of education"), while yesterday's
Daily Mirror confidently asserted over a double-page
spread that three of the bombers had all enrolled at
Pakistani "terror schools".

In fact, it is still uncertain whether the three
visited any madrasa in Pakistan - intelligence sources
have yet to confirm this. More important, the link
between madrasas and international terrorism is far
from clearcut, and new research has poured cold water
on the much-repeated theory of madrasas being little
more than al-Qaida training schools.

It is true that there were good reasons for people
jumping to the assumption of the madrasas'
culpability. The terrifyingly ultra-conservative
Taliban regime was unquestionably the product of
Pakistan's madrasas. Many madrasas are indeed
fundamentalist in their approach to the scriptures and
many subscribe to the most hardline strains of Islamic
thought. It is also true that some madrasas can be
directly linked to Islamist radicalism and
occasionally to outright civil violence. It is
estimated that as many as 15% of Pakistan's madrasas
preach violent jihad, while a few have even been known
to provide covert military training.

But it is now becoming very clear that producing
cannon-fodder for the Taliban and graduating local
sectarian thugs is not at all the same as producing
the kind of technically literate al-Qaida terrorist
who carried out the horrifyingly sophisticated attacks
on the World Trade Centre. Indeed, there is an
important and fundamental distinction to be made
between most madrasa graduates - who tend to be pious
villagers from impoverished economic backgrounds,
possessing little technical sophistication - and the
sort of middle-class, politically literate, global
Salafi jihadis who plan al-Qaida operations around the
world. Most of these turn out to have secular
scientific or technical backgrounds and very few
actually turn out to be madrasa graduates.

The men who planned and carried out the Islamist
attacks on America were confused, but highly educated,
middle-class professionals. Mohammed Atta was a town
planning expert; Ayman al-Zawahiri, Bin Laden's chief
of staff, is a paediatric surgeon; Omar Sheikh, the
kidnapper of Daniel Pearl, is the product of the same
British public school that produced the film-maker
Peter Greenaway.

Peter Bergen of Johns Hopkins University recently
published the conclusions of his in-depth study of 75
Islamist terrorists who had carried out four major
anti-western attacks. According to Bergen, "53% of the
terrorists had either attended college or had received
a college degree. As a point of reference, only 52% of
Americans have been to college." Against this
background, the backgrounds of the British bombers
should not come as a surprise.

The French authority on Islamists, Gilles Kepel, has
arrived at a similar conclusion. The new breed of
global jihadis, he writes, are not the urban poor of
the third world - as Tony Blair still claims - so much
as "the privileged children of an unlikely marriage
between Wahhabism and Silicon Valley". Islamic
terrorism, like its Christian predecessor, remains a
largely bourgeois endeavour.

It is true that there are exceptions to this thesis.
There are several examples of radical madrasa
graduates who have become involved with al-Qaida.
Maulana Masood Azhar, for example, leader of the
banned Islamist group Jaish-e-Muhammad, originally
studied in the ultra-militant Binori Town madrasa in
Karachi.

By and large, however, madrasa students simply do not
have the technical expertise or conceptual imagination
necessary to carry out the sort of attacks we have
seen al-Qaida pull off in the past few years. Their
focus, in other words, is not on opposing the west -
the central concern of the Salafi jihadis - so much as
fostering what they see as proper Islamic behaviour at
home.

All this highlights how depressingly unsophisticated
the debate about the British bombers is in this
country. Again and again we are told that terrorism is
associated with poverty and the basic, Qur'anic
education provided by madrasas. We are told that the
men who carry out this work are evil madmen with whom
no debate is possible and who, according to Frank
Field on last week's Question Time, "aim to wipe us
out". All links with Iraq and Afghanistan are
vehemently denied.

In actual fact, al-Qaida operatives tend to be highly
educated and their aims clearly and explicitly
political. Bin Laden, in his numerous communiques, has
always been completely clear about this. In his first
public statement, "A declaration of war against the
Americans", issued in 1996, he announced he was
fighting US foreign policy in the Middle East and, in
particular, American support for the House of Saud and
the state of Israel. His aim, he stated, is to unleash
a clash of civilisations between Islam and the
"Zionist crusaders" of the west, and so provoke an
American backlash strong enough to radicalise the
Muslim world and topple pro-western governments.

Bush has fulfilled Bin Laden's every hope. Through the
invasion of secular Ba'athist Iraq, the abuses in Abu
Ghraib, the mass murders in Falluja, America - with
Britain's obedient assistance - has turned Iraq into a
jihadist playground while alienating all moderate
Muslim opinion in the Islamic heartlands and,
crucially, in the west. Of course, we must condemn the
horrific atrocities these men cause; but condemnation
is not enough. Unless we attempt to understand the
jihadis, read their statements and honestly analyse
what has led these men to blow themselves up, we can
never defeat them or even begin to drain the swamp of
the grievances in which they continue to flourish.

Crummy book - Cool cover

An Apology

I have been informed that someone has been using this blog address to disseminate hate material. I have a strong hunch who it was (one of my neighbours, a bit of a retard actually), and I have taken steps to ensure that he no longer has access to this site. Rather than make any mealy-mouthed excuses, I offer my abject apologies to the injured parties and I promise that if anything like this happens again I will delete the entire blog (actually, the Squid will do it but the result will be the same). Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

Site of the Century - best blog on the web!

Rick Mercer's Blog

Absolutely hilarious - especially the photo of Ralph and the boys.

Ever keen to encourage progress, your humble blogmeister would like to highlight this item adapted from the Christian Post:

Evolution is a Friend of Creation, says Evangelical Professor

Richard Colling, a biologist/evangelical, is swinging a new voice in the creation/evolution debate: Darwin's theory of evolution is compatible and complementary to the theory of intelligent design. Colling, who received a Ph.D in microbiology and chairs the biology department at Olivet Nazarene University in Bourbonnais, recorded his new symbiotic theory in his book, Random Designer: Created from Chaos to Connect with Creator.

Colling's central claim is that both the origin of life from a primordial goo of nonliving chemicals, and the evolution of species according to the processes of random mutation and natural selection are fully compatible with the available scientific evidence and also contemporary religious beliefs. "Denying science makes us look stupid," he was quoted as describing conservative Christians. ''People should not feel they have to deny reality in order to experience their faith."

Colling's book comes nearly 80 years after the evolution/creation debate took center stage during the infamous Scopes Monkey trial, when a self-proclaimed atheist and a zealous evangelical preacher battled in a contest between evolution and Christianity. Although the verdict was made in favor of the Christian conservative, the media's representation of evangelicals as dull country bumpkins generally turned public opinion against the validity of creationism. In recent years, Christian conservatives turned to the "intelligent design theory" as a counterpart to evolution. Intelligent design declares the complexity of the world could not have come into being by random mistakes of nature. Colling's theory asserts both evolution and intelligent design are true and complementary.

"It pains me to suggest that my religious brothers are telling falsehoods when they say evolutionary theory is in crisis, and claim that there is widespread skepticism about it among scientists. Such statements are blatantly untrue,'' he argues in his book. ''Evolution has stood the test of time and considerable scrutiny." Meanwhile, he says he believes in the biblical account of creation and opposes a godless interpretation of the evolutionary hypothesis. These two theories are harmonized in a separate theory called "random designer." In this theory, Collings says evolution is a process used by the designer to accomplish his goals. "What the designer designed is the random-design process,'' or Darwinian evolution, Colling said. ''God devised these natural laws, and uses evolution to accomplish his goals.''

All hail the Omniscient Oxymoron!

From simianuprising.com

The rising Jamaico-Conservative threat
- or -
Stephen Harper is a big jerk.

by Jeremy Clarke @ 2:20 pm

In Canada a federal election is on the horizon, and
the prospects are looking decidedly bad. The Liberals
(big “L”) are down because they did some bad things
and everyone is angry. Our two right-wing parties (the
ALLIANCE and the PROGRESSSIVE CONSERVATIVES,
completely whack and just bad respectively) have
joined power-rings to make the mysteriously even MORE
right-wing CONSERVATIVE (big “C”) party.
See, normally the liberals win a lot, do something
bad, and the tories (prog. cons.) take over for a few
years before the liberals take it back. Not ideal but
reasonable, and the PC has always shown restraint and
at least remained Canadian in shape and direction.
But the New Right does not guarantee even that. They
want to make Canada the quainter United-States,
boasting policies that even the previous leader of the
Progessive Conservatives, Joe Clarke, has said
constitute a “scary vision of canada”.

I of course will be voting for the NDP (New Democratic
Party, the Left), who have mysteriously and amazingly
chosen a friend of mine as the representative for my
riding (of course, the Liberals will win here,
guaranteed, but the thought is still nice). The NDP
will not win the government though, despite their
niceness, largely because they have done seemingly
reckless things when they'’ve taken control of
provinces.

So we are left with the Liberals, normally dead center
of the question (for Canada. They would of course
constitute revolutionaries were they 200km to the
south) but lately a bit right, and the Conservatives,
terrifyingly right and threatening to have far too
much power because of the general anger towards the
economically philandering Liberals. A scary thing.
All this to get to the real point, being that for my
current employment I have been calling people in the
Carribbean, asking for them by name, and trying to
make them do a survey, and yesterday I talked to
someone in Jamaica who'’s name was Stephen Harper,
which is the same as the name of the leader of the
Conservatives, and he was a big freakin’ jerk.
Which of course is unquestionable proof that people
named Stephen Harper, internationally and
pan-continentially, are big freakin’ jerks.

And I hate them.

- Some honourable gentlemen: Hear, hear!

Editor's note: If the brain-dead hordes of Canaduh ever actually elect that twat Harper, his first action will be to make Niagara Falls flow south, as his predecessor claimed it does on national TV. Whether this will involve re-routing the Niagara River (and presumably relocating Lakes Erie and Ontario), repealing the laws of gravity or simply changing the directions on maps of Canada (i.e. via the Modified Moronic Projection) has yet to be determined by the Conservative® brain trust.

These days everyone has learned to be on the lookout for bearded weirdo extremists like Osama, but there still seems to be some credulity at the fact that the fire-breathing warriors of Allah® can also live among us - and even drink and whore around and eat pork chops with us - as "clean skins" ready to rain down fire and terror when the order comes down. Well, dear reader, like all organized religions,Islam© has an ancient and refined tradition of savage hypocrisy when it comes to dealing with its enemies.

From Rotten.com:

Secret Agents of Islam

When Ramzi Yousef was captured and brought to trial,
many people were surprised to hear about his
lifestyle.
Yousef was an inveterate womanizer. He drank, he went
to all-night discos, he took scuba diving vacations.
He was not known to pray much (outside of prison), nor
to observe Islamic holidays.

Nevertheless, he presented himself -- in court and in
life -- as a warrior for Islam. He took money from
strict Muslim fundamentalists, and he worked to help
advance their aims. He wrote poems about his love for
God. In 1997 and 1998, Osama bin Laden praised him in
interviews as a man devoted to protecting the Muslim
community.

He also warned that Yousef was not unique.

"[I]f the American government is serious about
avoiding the explosions inside the U.S., then let it
stop provoking the feelings of 1,250 million Muslims,"
bin Laden warned, four years before the September 11
attack. "Those hundreds of thousands who have been
killed or displaced in Iraq, Palestine, Lebanon, do
have brothers and relatives. They would make of Ramzi
Yousef a symbol and a teacher. The U.S. will drive
them to transfer the battle into the United States."

This was not idle talk, it was the open declaration of
a war which had already been underway for nearly a
decade. When bin Laden spoke those words to CNN's
Peter Arnett in 1997, al Qaeda had already moved
dozens of sleeper agents inside the United States --
dozens at minimum.

Like Ramzi Yousef, these men were enigmas. Some
devoutly followed the strictures of Islam. Others
seemed to flaunt them. Yousef's explosive genius might
have been unique, but his status as an infiltrator of
Western society was not.

al Qaeda's No. 3 official Khalid Shaikh Mohammed was a
well-known womanizer. Khalid Shaikh, Yousef and other
accomplices frequented seedy clubs in Manila's
red-light district, such as the Manila Bay Club and
Sir Williams Karaoke, according to CNN reporter Maria
Ressa, writing in Seeds of Terror. Later, in Florida
and Massachusetts, several of the September 11
hijackers even patronized strip clubs and prostitutes.

Western observers were quick to point out the seeming
hypocrisy -- killing in the name of Islam, while
failing to follow Islamic traditions and laws. When
the topic was raised, however, it was usually as a
propaganda tool, a rhetorical device to diminish the
terrorists by deriding them as perverts, hypocrites
and bad Muslims.

But it's more complicated than that.

al Qaeda operatives routinely take on deep cover roles
in order to infiltrate an enemy's society. This isn't
simply a pragmatic decision to disregard the tenets of
Islam in order to accomplish a goal. Rather, it's a
specific, traditional practice, justified through an
elaborate theological framework.

The approach was first employed in the 11th century,
by the Assassins, a notorious cult of Islamic
extremists. Today, the practice is continued by a
similar sect, known as Al Takfir Wal Hijra, which
represents a key faction in the top leadership of al
Qaeda.

There are numerous similarities between the Assassins
and the Takfiri -- including operational structure,
strategy and theology. But the sects are separated by
a centuries-long chasm of deep sectarian conflict.

But, then and now, these men shared a common vocation
-- secret agents for an extreme vision of Islam.

They were -- and are -- the ultimate infiltrators,
unbound by moral restraint. These men are not subject
to any meaningful cultural repercussions for their
acts. Nor are they subject to an inner moral conflict.
The are amoral machines by design, licensed to kill.
al Qaeda's Assassins

The modern Sunni Islamic sect known as Al Takfir Wal
Hijira is a nearly perfect ideological vehicle for
terrorism.

The Arabic name translates roughly as "anathema and
exile" or "excommunication and emigration." A
theologically extreme extension of fundamentalist
Islamic doctrines, Takfir is dedicated to restoring
the Caliphate, the Islamic political empire that once
spanned the Near and Middle East.

Takfir differs from establishment fundamentalists
(such as Saudi Arabian Wahabbism) in two major
respects. First, Takfiri cultists practice an extreme
form of assimilation. And second, they openly embrace
of violent, evangelistic jihad.

An essential part of Takfiri religious practice is the
infiltration of enemy societies, usually meaning
Western society. Like the Assassins before them,
Takfiri members are permitted to take any measure
necessary to assimilate, a stipulation which amounts
to a blanket exemption from virtually every aspect of
Islamic law.

To outsiders, Takfiri can appear to be entirely
secular, frequently engaging in sexual activity and
drinking alcohol in order to hide their religious
beliefs. This behavior has been seen repeatedly among
key al Qaeda operatives such as Yousef and Khalid
Shaikh (who have not previously been identified as
Takfiri).

The other element that distinguishes Takfir from
simple fundamentalism is the sect's violence --
specifically its obligation to violent jihad.

Even among extremely rigid Islamist movements such as
Wahabbism, jihad can be read to include any number of
nonviolent activities. But Takfiris believe that
violent struggle is essential to jihad.

Going further still, the sect believes violence may
justly be directed toward any non-Muslim, or even
toward observant Muslims whose activities are
perceived as undercutting the establishment of Islamic
governments.

Targets can include governments that actively oppose
Takfir efforts, those perceived to be collaborators,
competing sects whose beliefs are considered
heretical, and innocent bystanders (Muslim or not)
whose deaths advance the cult's political purpose.

"(O)nce you're in, you never get out," said Roland
Jacquard, an expert on Islamic terrorism, in a 2001
interview with Time Magazine. "The Takfir rely on
brainwashing and an extreme regime of discipline to
weed out the weak links and ensure loyalty and
obedience from those taken as members."

Attacked From An Egyptian Base
Ayman Al-Zawahiri, Osama bin Laden's
second-in-command, is believed to be a member of the
Takfir sect. Zawahiri founded Egyptian Islamic Jihad
(EIJ), an organization that in many ways authored the
philosophy of jihad that now drives al Qaeda. EIJ
helped assassinate Anwar Sadat in 1981.

Starting in the late 1980s, Zawahiri sent a group of
terrorist sleeper agents to the United States. The
first wave consisted of at least a half dozen agents,
but it's likely the total number was significantly
higher.

Made up mostly of Egyptian nationals, the group
emigrated to the U.S. over the the course of several
years, forming a sleeper cell that would wreak great
damage before finally being exposed.

On their arrival, the first-wave infiltrators did not
turn immediately to plotting attacks. Instead, they
started building an infrastructure, networks through
which they would provide crucial financial and
logistical support to plots on U.S. soil and abroad.

Members of this Egyptian clique were linked through
the al-Kifah mosque, in Brooklyn, a conduit for funds
and personnel tied to al Qaeda and the jihad against
the Soviet Union in Afghanistan.

From Brooklyn, the sleepers recruited foreign
nationals, U.S. citizens and even American war
veterans to join their ranks.

No one in this first wave of infiltrators fit any sort
of predictable profile for an Islamic fundamentalist
at the time, although some did portray themselves as
devout Muslims.

The first wave assimilated almost effortlessly into
U.S. society. Mahmud Abouhalima joined the NRA. One
member, Ali Mohammed, even joined the U.S. Army,
rising to the rank of sergeant in the Special Forces.
Later, Mohammed would train Osama bin Laden's personal
bodyguards in the Sudan.

Another member of this EIJ sleeper cell, El Sayyid
Nosair, assassinated right-wing Rabbi Meir Kahane in
1990. Nosair was not only acquitted of the murder,
which took place in front of a room full of witnesses,
but authorities didn't detect the larger conspiracy
behind his act until years later.

Several cell members assisted Ramzi Yousef in bombing
the World Trade Center in February 1993. Other cell
operatives, including some recruited on U.S. soil,
attempted to bomb New York City landmarks in the
spring of that year. Both plots were directly tied to
al Qaeda. bin Laden is believed to have helped finance
the attacks, and he may have had a role in directing
them as well.

Dozens of terrorist operatives and collaborators were
exposed when the FBI finally broke the cell, with the
help of another Egyptian national, an informant named
Emad Salem. Even faced with hundreds of hours of
testimony, and thousands of pages of documents, the
United States failed to realize the depth of the
infiltration or its meaning.

While many members of that first wave of infiltrators
have since been convicted of terrorism and related
crimes, some members of the cell are still at large --
some evading arrest altogether, others cutting
top-secret plea bargains in exchange for testimony.

Q Prime
It's fair to ask what Takfir Wal Hijra and Egyptian
Islamic Jihad have to do with al Qaeda. There are two
ways to usefully answer that question, one simplistic,
the other holistic.

On a simplistic level, al Qaeda and Takfir and EIJ
share key members and funding mechanisms. These can be
drawn on a chart or listed. They are concrete
connections, if not simple.

On a holistic level, the issue becomes more
complicated. There is a broad public debate about the
organization of al Qaeda. Many terrorism experts have
touched on this by defining a difference between "al
Qaeda, the movement" (seemingly independent terror
groups sharing al Qaeda's ideology) and the "corporate
al Qaeda" (a cohesive operational group led by Osama
bin Laden).

As it is commonly understood, "corporate al Qaeda" is
too rigid and limited to illustrate the real reach of
the corresponding terror network. al Qaeda "the
movement" implies the absence of a command-and-control
relationship between AQ and a group like EIJ.

When most people use the term "al Qaeda," they're
talking about the broad international conspiracy
focused on attacking the U.S. with a specific set of
tactics and under the theological umbrella of Osama
bin Laden. Think of this grouping as "QPrime," an
inner circle command-and-control structure which
effectively coordinates terrorist activity across many
ethnic and organizational lines.

QPrime is essentially a real network that most closely
matches the popular understanding of al Qaeda. Osama
bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri are just two members
of QPrime, part of the network's inner leadership
circle. When people talk about al Qaeda, they're
usually talking about the network, QPrime, which
includes components such as EIJ and the Takfiri cult.
All references to al Qaeda in this series of articles
are inclusive of the broad QPrime network.

Coming To America

The first wave of al Qaeda assassins represented a
conspiracy of shocking scale. A component of al Qaeda
for most meaningful purposes, the Egyptian Islamic
Jihad cell in New York City had operatives within
several mosques and Islamic centers around the
country, even within the U.S. Army.

EIJ's sleeper agents were stationed in at least seven
states, including Arizona, Illinois, California, New
York, Virginia, Texas and Florida, according to trial
evidence and testimony in terrorist prosecutions from
1995 to the present.

Before the attacks of September 11, most Americans --
even within the U.S. intelligence community -- would
have dismissed as paranoid nonsense the very notion
that hundreds of Islamic extremists could be living
undercover in places such as Arizona, Oklahoma and
Kansas.

After September 11, Americans were instead asking:
"How did this happen?"

The answer to that question begins 900 years in the
past, when the Assassins raised the act of religious
violence to an art form.

Liberal Democrat MEP Baroness Nicholson has suggested
the London bombings - now attributed to a cadre of
British-born Pakistan-trained suicide bombers - amount
to a "civil war."

Where have we heard this one before?

Time once again to update an old classic.....

The (New) English Civil War

with apologies to The Clash

When Mohammed comes marching home again,
hurrah, alla
He'€™s coming by bus or undergound,
hurrah, alla
A woman'€™s eye will shed a tear
To see those faces so beaten in fear
And it was just a€˜round the corner
in the English Civil War

It was still at the stage of clubs and fists,
hurrah, alla
When that big red bus got blown to bits,
hurrah, alla
Your face was blue in the light of the screen
As you watched the smoke and animal screams
And the silent army came marching in
right under your nose!

All right

There you are, ha, ha, I told you so,
hurrah, alla
Says everybody that we know,
hurrah, alla
But who hid a radio under the stairs?
Who got his orders unawares?
As the silent army came marching in
right under your nose!

Yeah, yeah, yeah

When Mohammed comes marching home again,
hurrah, alla
Trained by the best in Pakistan,
hurrah, alla
The sun is shining and the kids are shouting loud
But you gotta know it'€™s shining
through a crack in the cloud
'cause the shadow keeps spreading as
Mohammed comes marching home...

Circumcision may offer Africa AIDS hope
Procedure linked to much lower rate of new HIV
infections
- Sabin Russell, Chronicle Medical Writer
Wednesday, July 6, 2005

French and South African AIDS researchers have called
an early halt to a study of adult male circumcision to
reduce HIV infection after initial results reportedly
showed that men who had the procedure dramatically
lowered their risk of contracting the virus.

The study's preliminary results, disclosed Tuesday by
the Wall Street Journal, showed that circumcision
reduced the risk of contracting HIV by 70 percent -- a
level of protection far better than the 30 percent
risk reduction set as a target for an AIDS vaccine.

According to the newspaper account, the study under
way in Orange Farm township, South Africa, was stopped
because the results were so favorable. It was deemed
unethical to continue the trial after an early peek at
data showed that the uncircumcised men were so much
more likely to become infected.

All of the men in the study had been followed for a
year, and half the men had been followed for the full
21 months called for in the original study design,
according to the Wall Street Journal, which obtained a
draft copy of the study.

Begun in August 2002, the experiment is one of three
closely watched clinical trials in Africa to determine
whether there is scientific merit to nearly three
dozen less rigorously controlled studies showing that
circumcised men were much less likely to become
HIV-positive.

The hope is that, lacking a vaccine, the nearly 5
million new HIV infections occurring each year could
be slowed by circumcision, the surgical removal of the
foreskin -- a simple, low-cost and permanent medical
intervention that is a common but controversial
cultural practice in much of the world. In Africa,
about 70 percent of men are circumcised at birth or
during rite-of-passage ceremonies in early puberty.

Medical anthropologists began noticing as early as
1989 that the highest rates of HIV infection in Africa
were occurring in regions of the continent where the
predominant tribal or religious cultures did not
practice circumcision. Adult HIV infection rates above
30 percent are found in Zimbabwe, Botswana, Swaziland
and eastern South Africa, where circumcision is not
practiced; yet HIV infection rates remain below 5
percent in West Africa and other parts of the
continent where circumcision is commonplace.

Laboratory studies have found that the foreskin is
rich in white blood cells, which are favored targets
of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. So the theory is
that men who are uncircumcised are much more likely to
contract the virus during sex with an infected woman,
and that the epidemic spreads when these newly
infected men have sex with other women within their
network of sexual partners.

The lead investigators of the study, Dr. Bertran
Auvert of the University of Paris and Adrian Puren of
South Africa's National Institute for Communicable
Diseases, are not talking. The results were expected
to be discussed at an AIDS conference in Rio de
Janeiro in three weeks. But word about the findings
has been circulating among researchers searching for
ways to slow the epidemic.

"I would be thrilled if it works, but we will also
need the results of other trials,'' said Johns Hopkins
University epidemiologist Ronald Gray, who is
conducting, in Uganda, one of two other controlled
clinical trials of male circumcision.

Gray's trial, which has completed enrollment of 5,000
men in the Rakai district of Uganda, is not scheduled
to end until 2007.

A third trial, under way in Kisumu, Kenya, is still
enrolling its quota of 2,700 volunteers and is also
expected to be completed in 2007, according to the
National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases,
which is sponsoring it.

All three trials were designed to compare the HIV
infection rates of two groups of HIV-negative men,
one-half of whom would agree to be circumcised, the
other to be offered only counseling on AIDS
prevention. The studies were designed to show whether
or not circumcision provided a statistically
significant protective effect of at least 50 percent.

The South African study -- if the results are
confirmed -- suggests that the level of protection
afforded is even higher.

Although the apparent protective effect of
circumcision has been noted for more than 20 years,
doubts linger as to whether circumcision itself is
protective, or whether the lower risk may be the
result of cultural practices among those who
circumcise. HIV rates are low in Muslim communities,
for example, which practice male circumcision but also
engage in ritual washing before sex and frown on
promiscuity.

'nuff said!

July 10, 2005
India and Pakistan's Code of Dishonor
By SALMAN RUSHDIE

IN honor-and-shame cultures like those of India and
Pakistan, male honor resides in the sexual probity of
women, and the "shaming" of women dishonors all men.
So it is that five men of Pakistan's powerful Mastoi
tribe were disgracefully acquitted of raping a
villager named Mukhtar Mai three years ago. Theirs was
an "honor rape," intended to punish a relative of Ms.
Mukhtar for having been seen with a Matsoi woman. The
acquittals have now been suspended by the Pakistan
Supreme Court, and there is finally a chance that this
courageous woman may gain some measure of redress for
her violation.

Pakistan, however, has little to be proud of. The
Human Rights Commission of Pakistan says that there
were 320 reported rapes in the first nine months of
last year, and 350 reported gang rapes in the same
period. The number of unreported rapes is believed to
be much larger. The victim pressed charges in only
one-third of the reported cases, and a mere 39 arrests
were made. The use of rape in tribal disputes has
become, one might say, normal. And the belief that a
raped woman's best recourse is to kill herself remains
widespread and deeply ingrained.

For every Mukhtar Mai there are dozens of such
suicides. Nor is courage any guarantee of getting
justice, as the case of Shazia Khalid shows. Dr.
Khalid was raped last year in the province of
Baluchistan by security personnel at the hospital
where she worked. A Pakistani tribunal failed to
convict anyone of the crime.

Dr. Khalid says that she was subsequently "threatened
so many times" that she was forced to flee Pakistan.
"I was hounded out," she says, expressing
dissatisfaction that the government neither brought
her attackers to justice nor protected her from the
threats that followed.

That is the same government, led by President Pervez
Musharraf, that confiscated Mukhtar Mai's passport
because it feared she would go abroad and say things
that would bring Pakistan into disrepute; and it is
the same government that has allied with the West in
the war on terrorism, but seems quite prepared to
allow a war of sexual terror to be waged against its
female citizens.

Now comes even worse news. Whatever Pakistan can do,
India, it seems, can trump. The so-called Imrana case,
in which a Muslim woman from a village in northern
India says she was raped by her father-in-law, has
brought forth a ruling from the powerful Islamist
seminary Darul-Uloom ordering her to leave her husband
because as a result of the rape she has become "haram"
(unclean) for him. "It does not matter," a Deobandi
cleric has stated, "if it was consensual or forced."

Darul-Uloom, in the village of Deoband 90 miles north
of Delhi, is the birthplace of the ultra-conservative
Deobandi cult, in whose madrassas the Taliban were
trained. It teaches the most fundamentalist, narrow,
puritan, rigid, oppressive version of Islam that
exists anywhere in the world today. In one fatwa it
suggested that Jews were responsible for the 9/11
attacks. Not only the Taliban but also the assassins
of The Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl were
followers of Deobandi teachings.

Darul-Uloom's rigid interpretations of Shariah law are
notorious, and immensely influential - so much so that
the victim, Imrana, a woman under unimaginable
pressure, has said she will abide by the seminary's
decision in spite of the widespread outcry in India
against it. An innocent woman, she will leave her
husband because of his father's crime.

Why does a mere seminary have the power to issue such
judgments? The answer lies in the strange anomaly that
is the Muslim personal law system - a parallel legal
system for Indian Muslims, which leaves women like
Imrana at the mercy of the mullahs. Such is the
historical confusion on this vexed subject that anyone
who suggests that a democratic country should have a
single, unified legal system is accused of being
anti-Muslim and in favor of the hardline Hindu
nationalists.

In the 1980's, a divorced woman named Shah Bano was
granted "maintenance money" by the Indian Supreme
Court. But there is no alimony under Islamic law, so
orthodox Indian Islamists like those at Darul-Uloom
protested that this ruling infringed the Muslim
Personal Law, and they founded the All-India Muslim
Law Board to mount protests. The government caved in,
passing a bill denying alimony to divorced Muslim
women. Ever since Shah Bano, Indian politicians have
not dared to challenge the power of Islamist clerical
grandees.

In the Imrana case, the All-India Muslim Law Board has
unsurprisingly backed the Darul-Uloom decision, though
many other Muslim and non-Muslim organizations and
individuals have denounced it. Shockingly, the chief
minister of Uttar Pradesh, Mulayam Singh Yadav, has
also backed the Darul-Uloom fatwa. "The decision of
the Muslim religious leaders in the Imrana case must
have been taken after a lot of thought," he told
reporters in Lucknow. "The religious leaders are all
very learned and they understand the Muslim community
and its sentiments."

This is a craven statement. The "culture" of rape that
exists in India and Pakistan arises from profound
social anomalies, its origins lying in the unchanging
harshness of a moral code based on the concepts of
honor and shame. Thanks to that code's ruthlessness,
raped women will go on hanging themselves in the woods
and walking into rivers to drown themselves. It will
take generations to change that. Meanwhile, the law
must do what it can.

In Pakistan, the Supreme Court has taken one small but
significant step in the matter of Mukhtar Mai; now it
is for the police and politicians to start pursuing
rapists instead of hounding their victims. As for
India, at the risk of being called a communalist, I
must agree that any country that claims to be a
modern, secular democracy must secularize and unify
its legal system, and take power over women's lives
away, once and for all, from medievalist institutions
like Darul-Uloom.

Salman Rushdie is the author of "The Satanic Verses"
and the forthcoming "Shalimar the Clown."

Let All Voices Be Heard

Dear Hari, Another Take on the London Bombs: http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=9212 Mahatma Groucho

Be the first to know! http://www.Aljazeera.com

Those who have been following this blog since its
inception (God® only knows why) may notice some
changes today. They have arisen because your humble
blogmeister has personally taken over control from his
deputy/nephew, affectionately known by one and all as
"the Squid" (for reasons best left unbroadcast). Not
that Squiddy wasn't doing a good job - I am eternally
grateful for his work in setting things up and
fiddling with the HTML templates and all the other
bothersome trifles a gentleman does not sully his
hands with. Some of his contributions were, however,
rather jejune for the atmosphere we want to create
here, and to those who were offended by his ephemera
all I can say is that youth must be served
(preferrably with a nice chianti, as Hannibal Lecter
would add). What remains are the posts sent during my
unintentionally prolonged stay in Britain, where a
misunderstanding at Heathrow over the significance of
my "Bible Gun Camp" ball cap resulted in a stint as
guest of HRH Elizabeth II until the authorities
determined that their suspected Al Qaeda
operative was merely a jaded G8-protester (arsed if
I'll walk 8km to ogle a gaggle of dried-out dybbuks
and be pepper-sprayed by uniformed thugs who should
have been back home protecting London). I have also
remedied some unintentional confusion regarding my
identity. The Squid seems to have gotten the
impression I wanted this blog to be anonymous, but as
my post from yesterday states, its main purpose - as
with all blogs - is ego gratification, which is not
the sort of thing that can be successfully
accomplished behind a veil of secrecy. I make no
claims to be the only HariBalzac on the web, or even
the first one - but I do have sufficient seniority to
be the original on Yahoo Canada, which is the closest
to a public e-mail address you will ever get here,
reader dear. So in closing, just let me once again
say thanks to the Squid, and I'll take 'er from here,
kid.

- haribalzac

It has come to our attention that certain confused
souls have formed the opinion that this blog was
created to parody, chastise or otherwise bullyrag them
personally. This laughable conclusion is based upon
the ludicrous assumption that your humble blogmeister is
capable of meaningfully acknowledging the existence of anyone other than his own self. While, like unicorns, we agree that creatures with such mystical abilities may exist somewhere, it is common knowledge that none can survive in the rarefied atmosphere of cyberspace, where the primum mobile is summarized by the garbled words of the great Zaphod Beeblebrox: If there's anything bigger than my ego around here, I want it shot and stuffed pronto!

To resolutely hammer this point home, we offer our devotees the following ditty, sung to the similarly-titled original by Simon (Carly, not Paul).

You're So Lame

You stagger onto the Internet
like a landlubber onto a yacht,
With one hand holding your pants up
and your honker dripping with snot.
You've got one eye on the newsfeed
as your ass settles into its spot.
And in your dreams all the world is your oyster
It's all your oyster, and....

You're so lame, you probably think
this blog is about you
You're so lame, I'll bet you think
this blog is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

You started several years ago
when the Web was still quite naive,
And you still think those who know bugger all
are those we should believe,
You don't go past the corner store,
but thanks to MNBC
You know everyone and
why they're a jerkoff,
why they're a jerkoff, and

You're so lame, you probably think
this blog is about you
You're so lame, I'll bet you think
this blog is about you
Don't you? Don't you?

Well you've been kicked out of
every chatroom from Hogtown to Timbuctu,
'Cause even the lamers who plague cyberspace
can't stand the sight of you.
So you've made your own wee talking shop
where every voice rings true,
Because all the posts come from
one lazy douchebag,
one lazy douchebag, and

You're so lame, you probably think
this blog is about you,
You're so lame, I'll bet you think
this blog is about you,
Don't you? Don't you?

Well it's not - so get over it.

Hi Hari,

Stopped by The Landover Baptist Website you
suggested (even though they don't allow unsaved
people to view their site or come within a 10-mile radius
of their 150-thousand acre, 27.5 billion dollar, Christian
campus in Freehold, Iowa).

Liked the books, but I was most impressed by a sermon by their Pastor, the Very Reverend Deacon Fred, which was delivered to the Godless in a march on Washington, DC:

http://www.landoverbaptist.org/sermons/GMOW.html

Yours ever in Christ© -
the Mahatma Groucho

Site of the Week: Landover Baptist

www.landoverbaptist.org

For all right-thinking folk.

Don't miss the summer reading for kids section, featuring the Creation Science for Tots Classics: The Talking Snake Theory
- and -
Donkeys Can Talk, People Can Fly and a Man Named Jesus Lives In the Sky!

Trudeau Has A Go At Bloggers

Actually, Garry - real men prefer Eukanuba

Study ties strokes to Alzheimer's

2005-05-31 -

By Lisa Fitterman - Toronto Star - Most Alzheimer's
cases are inextricably linked with "silent" strokes,
which have no immediately noticeable side effects,
according to a groundbreaking study by a neurology
professor at the University of Western Ontario.

The strokes appeared to trigger full-blown Alzheimer's
and other forms of dementia, Dr. Vladimir Hachinski
says in a paper to be presented at a conference in
Italy next week.

His findings are based partly on a model developed by
his researchers, in which a protein that causes
Alzheimer's disease was injected into the brains of
rats.

While the rats exhibited some behavioural changes,
those changes were greatly magnified when strokes were
induced into their brains' cores.

Strokes are caused when the flow of blood to the brain
is interrupted, resulting in long-term damage ranging
from partial paralysis to speech impairment.
Alzheimer's, meanwhile, is a progressive disease
leading to loss of memory and cognitive function.

Hachinski based his work on a U.S. study of the brains
of hundreds of dead nuns.

That study showed 57 per cent of those with
Alzheimer's lesions had had some difficulty
functioning in everyday life, but if the nuns had
suffered a stroke in the outer part of their brains,
that percentage increased to 75 per cent.

If the strokes occurred in the brain's core, it soared
to 93 per cent.

In other words, some people have a predisposition to
Alzheimer's, but may never know it, while stroke seems
to be a trigger in other cases.

"There is an evil synergy here. And doctors have to
break down the barriers and have a common approach to
diagnosis and treatment," said Hachinski, who is
president of the International Society for Vascular,
Behavioural and Cognitive Disorders and also edits the
academic journal Stroke.

"That's the whole point.

"We think that early control of stroke risk factors,
such as high blood pressure, cholesterol levels,
smoking and obesity, may actually help preserve the
brain."

Hachinski's research was funded in part by the
Canadian Stroke Network, which brings together
scientists, charities, governments, health
professionals and pharmaceutical companies in order to
increase knowledge of stroke prevention, treatment and
rehabilitation.

A study by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research
found that one-third of elderly Canadians have had a
stroke or some kind of cognitive impairment.

Each year, more than 50,000 Canadians have a stroke,
and more than 300,000 Canadians are living with the
consequences of stroke, making it a leading cause of
adult disability.

Douglas Kearn, 65, an Alzheimer's patient living in
east Riverdale, said he thinks it's perfectly possible
that mini-strokes could have triggered his dementia,
but it's to no avail. "Frankly, I think that medicine
has a lot to learn, especially with the baby-boom
generation now reaching a point where they're facing
it themselves," he said. "That should push them."

Don't bet on it Doug - who's going to waste time trying to help somebody who won't even remember to say thank you!

__________________________________________________